Unwillingly Summoned: Chapter 13 – Ill-Considered Words

Thud.

James found himself staring up at the blue sky, trying to catch his breath, and wishing that his chest would stop hurting. Unfortunately, being kicked in said chest repeatedly by Seiran was not helping that pain. Given that she probably wasn’t planning to stop anytime soon, he was just going to have to learn to live with the intermittent transition between a dull and sharp ache. Speaking of the blonde-haired she-devil, the woman leaned over enough to interrupt his line of sight with the sky. He did not think the new view was an improvement. She gave him a bright smile.

“You’re not quitting, are you?”

He glared up at her.

“No, I’m not quitting. But seeing as how you’ve knocked me over at least twenty or thirty times by kicking me, I do think that a short break might be in order.”

She shook her head in disappointment.

“Dungeon monsters aren’t going to give you a break to rest up,” she said in sagely voice.

“Doesn’t that make you the dungeon monster in this exercise?” he asked her. “I’m not sure it’s the best look on you.”

She opened her mouth, closed it, and scowled at him.

“Fine,” she muttered. “Ten minutes.”

James exhaled in relief. For the first few minutes, he just stayed sprawled out on the ground. He suspected that people were probably gawking at him. They might even be quietly mocking him, but he did not care because he didn’t have to move for at least six or seven more minutes. He was willing to acknowledge that Seiran was almost certainly going easy on him. If she wanted to really hurt him, he suspected that she could have. Even so, that knowledge did very little to remove the literal and metaphoric sting of being repeatedly sent to his back. He supposed that there was a lesson in that. He’d let his little feat of strength against Chrosan give him a false sense of his own competence. James might be able to meet the young man head-on in a contest of brute force, but he was no match for the speed and flexibility of Seiran.

After a couple more minutes, he sat up and rubbed at the spot on his chest that hurt. It wasn’t even that she kept kicking him, it was that she kept kicking him in the exact same spot. He suspected that she was silently trying to teach him a lesson about protecting that area of his body, but there was only so much protecting he could do when she outclassed him so thoroughly on the speed front. He had tried keeping his distance, but that proved almost wholly useless. She kept finding ways to close the distance. The longer it went on, the more he thought that this whole adventurer thing really might not be the choice for him. He felt like he’d be nothing but a liability to these more experienced adventurers. None of them had said anything like that to him. If anything, they seemed perfectly content with his so-called progress.

Yet, he couldn’t help but think that they were just going through the motions on some level. After that build up with the hard sell to join their team, he wondered if maybe they felt like they needed to put in at least a token effort before telling him they’d changed their minds. That would explain why’d they taken him to this training field. He wasn’t sure who owned it. He supposed it might have belonged to the Adventurer’s Guild. There were men and women practicing all over the field who decked out in a truly staggering variety of armor. While he saw plenty of swords, there was little uniformity in their makes. Instead, everyone seemed to have weapons that played to their own idiosyncrasies. Fast fighters seemed to favor slender swords. Either that or they defaulted to shorter, lighter blades like his own short swords or the daggers that Seiran used.

Slower fighters seemed to favor larger, heavier blades. Yet, even with those swords, there didn’t seem to be a standard. Some were mammoth, double-edged bohemeths like the one that Captain Compensation had been toting back in the castle. Others were single-edge, curved blades that bore a vague resemblance to samurai swords if those swords were ever made in four-foot lengths. Then again, it was possible that they had been made in those lengths and he just didn’t know about it. It wasn’t like he was some kind of expert on sword types. Of course, he also had to recognize that ideas like slower and faster were relative. Most of the adventurers he saw were wielding even those massive swords with superhuman strength and speed. The faster fighters were just doing it with more superhuman speed. It was a little demoralizing to realize just how far behind the curve he actually was compared to most of those people.

He briefly wondered if Maggie had gone through the same thing. That thought threatened to send him into an emotional doom spiral, so he pushed it away. He couldn’t worry about what Maggie was going through. Not when he had plenty of his own problems to deal with at the moment. Keenly aware that Seiran would soon decide it was time to kick him again, he realized that he had to seize the opportunity to get some water to drink. He hadn’t known what they were planning when they convinced him to come with them for a few “experiments,” so he hadn’t thought to bring any kind of provisions with him. Fortunately, there were people around handing out water to anyone who asked for it. James flagged down one of those sainted water-hander-outers, who came over and handed him a plain wooden cup.

James was experienced enough with physical training that he resisted the urge to gulp the water. He’d seen more than one person get overeager with their water, just to make a run for the bathroom to puke it right back up. He took measured sips. The water itself was nothing special, but it did soothe a dryness in his throat he hadn’t even realized was there. Seiran was nice enough to let him finish the water before she gestured at him to join her. He walked over to where she was standing. There were numerous rings set up in the field. They weren’t like the rectangular boxing rings that he’d first imagined when she’d said rings. These were just areas in the field that were set off by a liter ring of what look like paver stones set even with the dirt. A nitpicky part of him wanted to complain about it, but he couldn’t see any value in that. It wasn’t like it would hurt any less if there were ropes around the edges.

“Feeling better?” asked Seiran.

James frowned at her. There had been something in her voice that was a little off. He couldn’t quite put a finger on it, but it unsettled him a little. Still, there was no getting around it.

“Yeah. I caught my breath,” he said.

At those words, he almost unconsciously rubbing at the spot on his chest were there was sure to be a magnificent bruise by the next morning.

“In that case, get them out,” ordered Seiran.

James dutifully drew the two short swords. He wasn’t sure why she kept having him do that. Maybe she’s trying to trigger some kind of sword skill, he thought. That’s how things work in these worlds, right? He was a little baffled when she didn’t draw her daggers. She’d been using them since they arrived at the training field. Not that she seemed to need them to beat him. He thought back about their bouts that day and thought that maybe had been doing a bit better at blocking and dodging her attacks the last few times. He shook off those thoughts. He needed to focus on what was going to happen next, not what happened before. He started to raise the swords into a defensive position.

Thud.

James found himself looking up at the sky again. Still blue, he mentally noted. His chest was right back to hurting at least as much as before. Worse, he hadn’t even seen that kick coming. There was zero chance that he could have blocked it. He shifted position a little and grimaced as his nervous system let him know that it was not happy with these repeated traumas to his sternum. He decided that last kick had definitely been harder. Seiran leaned into his line of sight with a flat expression.

“Did you really have to hit me that hard?” he asked in a tired voice.

“You called me a monster,” she answered with zero sympathy.

He wanted to be angry with her but, well, she had a point. That had probably been a stupid thing to say.