and when your bones can't take no more, just remember what you're here for. Who: The korporal & his squire. What: "You'd need a letter, right? Try to knock me down in a spar and you'll get it." Where: Hellwyrm training yards. When:Hereabouts. Rating: PG. Status: Complete.
The practice sword felt far heavier than it was. Storm gave it a quick swing, as though to remind himself that he was capable of carrying it. He stilled afterwards, lowering the weapon with a nervous exhale. His eyes scanned his surroundings. Littering the yard, fallen leaves looked golden in the sunlight. He tried to focus on their color rather than their frail, spindly veins, or the way their blades so easily crumbled underfoot. And if he shivered, he told himself it was from the breeze.
The heavy footsteps of holy knights echoed around him, so consistent and rhythmic as to be, he was certain, Hellwyrm’s heartbeat. But it was a new footfall, surer than the others, that had the squire raising his eyes. Storm regarded the korporal’s approaching figure with equal parts excitement and trepidation. When Rictor Cassul arrived in the outdoors yard at a nonchalant saunter, it was without ceremony, as if this were the same as any one of their innumerable sparring sessions.
There were other factors at stake in this particular fight, however.
“All right, then?” Ric asked, taking one last bite out of his apple (the remains of his lunch) and tossing it into the nearby bushes with a casual underarm swing. He wiped his hand on his trousers and absently patted the sheath by his side, as if checking that his sword was still there, and then assessed the squire waiting in front of him.
The boy looked a little queasy. That was to be expected. But, to his credit, he did not balk or falter. Stance sure and expression grim, Storm held his sword aloft.
“Yes, Sir,” he said. “At your word.”
Rictor seemed to weigh the pros and cons of discussing the matter further, but he’d never been much for beating around the bush. So he smoothly withdrew the gunblade and settled into a fighting stance, light on the balls of his feet, his balance easily shifting.
“Begin,” the Korporal said, and immediately launched himself into the attack. The holy knight was aggressive; he tended to leap first and it showed, the metal of their swords meeting and ringing, a probing test of the squire’s strength and ability to withstand repeated blows.
And this was the one aspect in which Storm might have been called remarkable. He weathered the attack well, parrying the korporal’s blade with stoic surety, as though the boy had grown roots sunken deep into the stone beneath them. The goal, however, was the offensive. The advice given him by Sir Paget and Zacheus ran through his mind. Blocking a heavy blow to his flank, Storm attempted to catch his mentor off-guard, sword swinging for Rictor’s elbow. The squire’s movement was surprisingly quick, but Ric segued back to the defensive, batting the sword aside.
But it was a narrow thing—it seemed Storm had indeed been practicing in the interim between their last spar—and so Rictor found himself concentrating more, delving fully into the moment, all of his attention narrowing onto the ebb and flow of their fight and the sweet sound of metal singing through the air.
Storm tried again, and finally managed a hit against the korporal’s elbow; pain scored through the man and he felt his arm weaken, but he shook it off and took a step backwards. Storm followed; Rictor tried to tangle the boy’s feet with a low blow to his knees, but Paget’s lessons kept true and the squire did not falter.
Rictor raised an eyebrow.
“Better,” he said, the single word squeezed out of him between blows.
The boy nodded stiffly, careful not to break his focus even as the compliment swelled within him like a balloon. With a sharp inhale, Storm stepped back, then lunged forward once more. The cut delivered to the korporal’s right flank was purposeful, calculated, Zacheus’s voice ringing in the squire’s ears as loudly as the steel. The blow landed true, slipping right past Rictor’s defenses; it was an old weakness of his, one known only to those who’d seen him fight for years, his side left gaping and exposed while he dedicated himself to the offensive.
The stinging pain in his side knocked him backwards, surprise rocking Rictor on his heels. He teetered—
But caught his balance at the last second, sword now sliding to the side and covering the vulnerability that he usually neglected. No remarks, no commentary this time: Ric fell back into the rhythm, his balance corrected.
Storm backpedaled in an attempt to reassess his course of action. But the korporal gave him no quarter, striding onward with a powerful series of blows. It was all the boy could do to react quickly enough to parry them, his feet less sure as he attempted to divide his attention between spar and strategy. Going with his gut, Storm tried a hasty, desperate sweep at the man’s knees. Were this a real fight, were the boy stronger, were his knight less trained, it might have severed the man’s leg at the knee, a crippling injury to end the fight in a single blow.
But driven by desperation, rushed as it was, Rictor batted it aside. His next movements were a flurry: he stepped in past Storm’s guard and the handles of their swords tangled until it was ripped out of Storm’s hands with a clean yank, metal clattering to the floor. And then the flat side of the claymore smacked the squire on the shoulder, driving him to the floor with breath heaving.
The Korporal stood above him—he was also heaving from exertion and strain, however, the spar having left its mark in the bruising pain in Rictor’s side and other nicks he’d picked up along the way. He looked down at the squire in silent assessment, spooling back through the turns and twists of the fight.
He reached out a hand. And Storm took it, even as he understood what it meant. Knight helped squire to his feet, the boy rising with his head respectfully bowed. While he had hoped very much to train with Sir Shaw (a holy knight bearing a greatsword; was that not his own dream?), it was falling short of his mentor’s expectations that twisted in his side like a knife. Certainly this test had been some measure of his worth; the implications of failure were not lost on him.
He ought to have expected it of himself, considering.
“I…” Storm began, unsure of what to say. “I thank you for the opportunity, Sir.”
“It was a good attempt.”
Rictor’s breath was coming back to him, lungs slowly filling with air, his heartbeat evening. But even as they started to separate, the holy knight sheathing his claymore and Storm moving to pick up his own fallen weapon from the mat in palpable dejection…
The korporal cleared his throat, breaking the silence. “So,” he said. “Send the papers over, then. You know where I live.”
The boy looked up then, eyes wide. It took a skipped-beat moment for Storm to understand, features lighting up in a wide, boyish smile.