Phase
Nallore
Andreyich
Izurich
Fish of Oblivion
Kuro
Birdboy
Crimson Flame
The third bed in the dorm was occupied, yes, but it was not being slept within. Three in the morning was an unreasonable hour by any metric, but by no metric was I a reasonable man, nor was I a pursuing a reasonable goal. As a prospective Huntsman, part of my life was going to involve such unreasonable hours of wakefulness and alertness as now. Fortunately for me, I had a certain knack for 3:00 AM, hand had that knack for years now.
I opened one eye to peer upon the laptop that sat at my desk, shut and charging up from eighteen percent battery.
I want the Crossbow back. Get rid of that terrible, unreliable, objectively useless thing you have the audacity to model as a FAMAS, Epic Games. And fix your netcode!
................
I never said that this experience and facility were sourced from good habits, but they would serve all the same.
I closed my eye again, and breathed deeply as Jericho returned to the room and rummaged through his stash in the floor.
"What are we in for?" I asked idly, adopting a lotus position rather than seiza. To begin with, actually sitting felt much more natural on the springy mattress surface than the knees did— and though you could make the parallel of a samurai contemplating the battle ahead...
"Heavy." came the absent, distracted grunt from our newly settled in captain, who could have only been digging up Atlesian armaments that suited that word to the utmost. While I wasn't ready to admit their TVs were worth overlooking those in Shiroyama just yet, I had to acknowledge that he'd have easily the heaviest firepower of the team.
Though those ancestral parallels were far from lost on me, I was first trying a different, more relaxed method. I was certainly heading into a tense situation, and almost definitely combat— this being a drug bust and all— and ruminating on it in such a way that increased tension could fray my nerves more than a late night ever would. That was the issue last time out, during the longest night of my life. If I acted as though I was set to go into hell, into a chaotic battlefield against a foe that stood upon their own turf, I was sure to get sucked into a spiral that only spikes of adrenaline had pulled me out of.
That being the case, I needed to learn from the experience rather than talk about it.
So.
Let's take a second and cross-examine.
Two men throw a punch at the same time. One throws with every muscle in his arm taut and tense, the other loose until the very end, at the point of impact. The first man will, every time, be the one spitting out teeth. Why is that?
Because relaxation doesn't set energy systems against eachother. The upper arm is governed by two major muscle groups, biceps and triceps. These are placed in direct opposition to one another, and the same can be said of their functions. One extends and the other contracts every time you move your elbow joint. Attempting to punch with both tensed up means both systems are at war with eachother, stiffening your arm up.
It slows you down. It exhausts you quicker. It speaks to trying to get by on muscle rather than skill, because it inherently breaks down form and uses energy that is better spent upstairs. A breakdown of training, an inability or refusal to rely upon it.
It's the first lesson anyone striking learns.
And it's applicable to a lot more than simple pugilistic form. Last week I was the metaphorical tensed punch until those instances of combat, where my mind took a back seat to the moment. Those states of flow where concerns, cowardice, and conscious thought faded to reveal simple action and reaction. Understanding of situations and flowing to fit them. Adaptation before an unending spiral of consideration.
Trust in what I could do. Understanding that I had a set of skills that could bring me to that stage with enough of a chance of survival that it was worth the risk inherent within. Trusting those skills to be enough to keep me safe. Was it possible they weren't? Yes, but that is an understood risk that I signed up for, and my own inaction would have risked everyone.
So even if I did come up short on the gamble, it would be better me than they.
This must have been a hurdle Dad had to cross, too. And unlike my blessed array of safety nets like Aura, my regenerative Semblance, and seven other similarly powerful people at my side, he only had a gun and a vest.
He trusted his training to handle whatever his wits simply couldn't in reasonable time.
And now it was my time to see if I could do the same in a live situation. Just like the ones he'd been spending 20 years walking into.
"Heavy, huh?"
Though I had to say, after four thousand characters of talk about reaching a flow state or zen where I allowed skill and hard-ingrained training to dominate split second action sequences, I was definitely going into this with a new one.
Crow's Beak. Half warhammer, half shotgun, and all told a polearm whose weight and balance I was only beginning to piece together. I'd had some experience in the past with the Bo Staff, Yari, and Naginata, so I wasn't entirely clueless, but no matter how much stock I placed in the theory of convergent evolution within fighting styles, the weighty head of this literal Bec de Corbin hadn't entirely been demystified. I was using the Thursday combat class as something of a testing ground, and it was hard lesson after hard lesson about what I could and couldn't quite yet pull off. I felt like I was starting to get there by the end, but if not...
Well.
I guessed if I got in trouble because of it, I'd really be eating crow.
