[hider=oops]"Ichi...ni...san...Eins! Ichi...ni...san...Zwei! Ichi...ni...san...Drei!" 
In the courtyard, the 'cultured' barbarian did his training. At the moment his exercise was a barrel of water (50 gallon barrel, 5 lbs per gallon, 250 lbs of water) tied off by a rope and thrown over a hangman's post with a saddle to keep the wood from sawing the rope through. As the brute pulled down on the rope, the barrel went up, now anyone can tell you that pulleys make things easier but the roughest of estimates can say you can get five to twenty times the lift with just one loop depending on the circumstance. He was getting about five to one at the moment, so even one handed this was more effort than his sword at fifty pounds to pull against. But the purpose was training and conditioning, not body building.

Unlike the others of his kind, he tried to not bulk up but rather to tone his body instead the way one folds and twists steel to make it stronger instead of just adding more slabs of metal to make it bigger. He had learned this trick while taking on the ten other fighters when he faced a woman two heads lower than him, but she managed to match his strength blow for blow until he finally beat her weapon instead of her. Others thought him touched with the way he did these odd exercises as he seemed to show no gain for his efforts, but none of them knew him a decade ago when he started.[/hider]