The bag stubbornly resisted my attempts to pummel it into submission. The padding deforming around my fists as I circled and punched.

“Good, keep your hands up,” Hadrian encouraged. After an hour of practice my body was glistening with sweat, I was not normally one for intense physical activity, in this realm at least, but I found the idea of being ripped appart by the God Emperor knew what concentrated my mind.

“She appears thirty seven percent more focused than yesterday,” Lazarus commented, having joined us at some point during the training session. 

 

“Bio signs suggest increased endorphin production as well as serotonin and dopamine secretion which combined with decreased cortisol suggests…” 

 

“Enough Lazarus,” Hadrian put in quickly before the Skitarii came to the right conclusion. Lazarus made a clicking noise and cocked his head towards Hadrian but fell silent.

“Limited muscle mass renders close combat an option of last resort,” he said instead. I paused in my assault on the Chaos tainted punching bag, breathing heavily.

“Not to worry, I plan on keeping the two of you between me and anything I might need to punch,” I assured him. With the best will in the world, two days wasn’t going to make me a combatant. Lazarus reached down and selected a training sword from the weapon rack, a bundle of wooden dowels weighted to mimic a standard naval cutlass.

“Try to defend yourself,” he instructed and then darted forward. I yelped and knocked his blade aside, backpedaling to avoid his follow up.

 

“Concentrate on your feet,” he instructed. The punching bag smacked into him from behind and knocked him off balance, its forty pound mass glistening with frost. I tapped him on the shoulder with the blade before he could regain his feet.

“A trick, in a fair fight you would have been killed,” he observed.

“Not alot of incentive for me to fight fairly I suppose,” I returned. He made a proforma salute and attacked again. I split myself into a half dozen copies of myself, the illusions all menacing him with their blades. It was convincing enough that he could have felt their touch, but he backed away, fending off thrusts and cuts as they came. A light in his cowl changed and he focused on the real me, lunging forward to tap my chest with the point of his blade. My doppelgangers all scowled with disappointment and then faded.

 

“Clever of you to invest the illusions with body temperature, however each of them was uniform without the normal variations induced by layering of fat and tissue,” he informed me.

“Well I can’t say I’ve had any complaints before,” I huffed, setting the sword down and taking up one of the water canteens, gulping greedily.