“Wait, wait, wait,” she’d said, interrupting him halfway. “You’re doing it all wrong.”
“How so?” he’d asked, rising from his combat crouch.
“You looking like you’re snapping punches out at the air.”
“Well, that’s because I am snapping punches out at the air.”
“But you shouldn’t be. You need to envision your foes. There are four of them. Each direction you move into represents your engaging and destroying one after the other. But it’s not enough to just visualize your immediate foe. You need to move with an awareness of the other three. Picture them closing in, imagine their expressions, feel their killing intent. Make the fight real. Destroy them, each in turn, so that when you finish, you feel the same primal satisfaction of having survived a real fight. Then, and only then, will you have mastered the Form.”
Scorio had raked his fingers through his sweat-soaked hair. “You’re saying I have to feel like I genuinely killed people to master this Form.”
“Precisely. Your focus must be absolute. Your immersion. Think of it as…” She cast around, looking for the right metaphor. “Think of it as a portable Gauntlet.”
He’d not tried to hide his skepticism. “Portable Gauntlet.”
“Are the foes in the Gauntlet real? No, I don’t want you to get metaphysical.”
“I wasn’t about to.”
“They’re not though, are they?” She’d raised a challenging eyebrow. “They reset each time you enter. They’re illusory opponents you get to train against. The Forms are the same. Portable, invisible Gauntlets. If you execute a Form with the same intensity and seriousness that you take on a Gauntlet run, that’s when you’ll master it.”
Scorio frowned. “So that’s why they were developed? To compensate for not having access to the Gauntlet like we now do?”
“Kind of. Not really. But yes. Also because you can perform a perfect Form without dying horrifically. Now. Again. From the beginning. And this time I want to see murder in your eyes.”
She’d retreated to sit on the shattered shard of rock, and he’d returned to his baseline. Taken a deep, controlled breath, and held it as he’d raised his chin, staring through the blasted practice ground and out into a realm of his own imagining.
He stood there till he was able to imagine four foes approaching him, two on either side, two more just ahead. Ghostly, limned by the same stark light which illuminated the statues in the Gauntlet’s second chamber. The assassin and the archer ahead, the axman on his left, the pig-headed brute on his right.
Only when he could see them with crystal clarity, only when he felt his skin prickle and his gut tighten did he slide rapidly to the left, snapping his arm up to block the downward swing of the axman’s first attack, forearm cracking into the haft just below the blade.
He drove the axman back, step by choreographed step, and when an opening appeared, he slammed his fist forward, a crushing blow that would have shattered the man’s sternum.
The silvery image in his imagination faded away like mist before the sun-wire’s amber burn, and over the ridges of his shivering knuckles he saw Naomi watching him, her expression pensive, her brow furrowed.
She gave him a slow nod of approval, and he whipped around to engage the next attacker.
But his favorite time, to his surprise, became his dusk runs. When he would tighten his sandals and set out for a long, leisurely run through the ruins, alternating the routes, leaving at the tail end of Second Clay so that the rising streamers of mist would coalesce into funnel clouds around the sun-wire. Running alone, his body weary and his spirit satisfied, the sound of his footsteps echoing off the buildings, picking routes that avoided dangerous areas, running as the sun-wire dimmed and darkened and the clouds would cool sufficiently to release their spiraling curtains of rain which raked over Bastion in winding curtains, gentle and warm.
Those moments, as the rain first began to fall and soaked his robes to his body, washing away the dust and dirt and dried blood, were like medicine for his spirit. His thoughts would still, his will would relax, and he’d simply inhabit his body, moving easily, his pace carrying him all the way around the perimeter to his starting spot, the ruins made ethereal and beautiful by the rain.
He’d run four laps, and when he ended up at his chamber, he’d sit on the windowsill cross-legged and devour his evening meal. He’d watch the last of the rain peter out as he spooned the gruel into his mouth, feeding the furnace that was his appetite, watching the ruins come alive at night, until at last, satiated and exhausted, he’d step over to his blanket stretched out over the stone floor and lay down. To sleep deeply, dreamlessly, profoundly, his body healing, his spirit mending, till First Clay awoke him to another day of training.
Naomi and he visited the old Academy twice more before the end of the Eighthday. Scorio attempted five more runs all told, and each time, Naomi accompanied him and stood aside after destroying her statue, watching and advising him on his approach.
On his fifth run, she moved forward slowly till the first statue activated, demolished it, then retreated to the back of the hall, using her claws and tail to anchor herself high up in the corner.
“Now you,” she said.
Scorio took a deep breath and steadied his nerves. He’d defeated his foe two out of the last four times, but both had resulted in him being so grievously wounded that he’d not bothered challenging the flying cube room; sitting instead to bleed out as the Nightmare Lady had gone on ahead.
Now he stared at the remaining eleven statues. He’d fought all of them but two. Had projected so much anger and frustration onto them all that they’d come to have personalities in his mind; the sneering archer, the laconic spearman, the brutish axman, the vicious assassin.
“Center yourself,” said the Nightmare Lady from behind and above. “You need to master yourself if you want to master your foe.”
Before, such words might have irritated Scorio, sounded flippant or shallow. But after working hard at his First Form, after spending so many hours meditating and manipulating Coal, they were instead a truth he wrestled with. A path he’d failed to walk.
Another deep breath and he shook out his hands. Shrugging his shoulders, he hopped up and down on the balls of his feet, then with a whoomph ignited his Igneous Heart.
Calm, focused, he walked forward. Stared straight ahead, focused on the fuzzy darkness at the end of the room, and allowed his senses to open, his mind to relax, thoughts to drift.
Past the first couple of statues.
He passed the assassin and she stirred, stepping down neatly off her pedestal, blades whispering up, their stone edges improbably sharp.
Scorio reacted immediately, wheeling about and then swaying back once, twice as the assassin slashed at his face with her dagger.
She was wickedly fast, but when she brought her sword up and around to decapitate him, Scorio ducked under it and moved behind her, grabbing hold of the folds of her cloak and using her momentum to haul her right off her feet and throw her headfirst into the statue of the axman beside her plinth.
The assassin crashed into the other statue, which shattered about her, crashing down and toppling as she recovered, shoving herself back up.
But Scorio was upon her, having snatched up a large chunk of rock in one fist which he brought crashing down upon her head.
Her face snapped to the side, but still, she surged up and into him, the force lifting him off his feet and sending him sprawling back onto the floor.
Scorio rolled aside as she fell upon where he’d been laying, her sword point sinking an inch into the rock. He scrambled up, saw her dagger lost amongst the wreckage of the other statue, and dove for it.
She wheeled, fluid and precise, and brought her blade scything down, nearly shearing off his left foot.