Fortuna Verto

36-Combat Training

Lyun and Axln quickly found themselves pushed to absolute exhaustion under the strict pressure of Mheridz's regime. Even within the first official moments of the evening according to the clock, the girls struggled to keep up the intensity of their training, to push forward despite the odds.

At least, to Lyun, that's what it looked like Axln was doing. Sure, they were both mutually exhausted, but Axln had actually been doing surprisingly well. Training had included a lot of mobility exercises in the ashen waste, several sudden obstacle courses along with outright stamina laps. It was plenty of endurance work, but it was all stuff Axln could at least handling better than Lyun was. Sure, for much of such, she had simply started to blame her elven traits and the stamina that is lacking in the process, though she was starting to worry if some of the blame might have been that she had grown used to having more stamina instead. Maybe some of that was also Axln's advantage, Conduits ran out of breath far easier than humans did too, this would be more than Kori could have achieved before lightheadedness would have taken over. From there, Mheridz exercised their ability to execute their gift too though, turning the whole thing into reflex training specific to their abilities, tossing a sequence of small spheres that would sparkle with a random color. Powder the red ones with dust and the green ones with frost. Very quickly the red ones were stopped in their passage with a pile of dust, some of them were also coated in frost. A bunch of the green ones didn't get frosted over until much later in their passage. This was like something elves were supposed to be good at, an idea that frustrated her even more.

She had quickly learned though that Axln was also making use of that circlet she wore, the same one which gave her amazing vision. Cheater. However, even after stopping such and starting to make some mistakes of her own.. Axln was still doing better than Lyun. At a point, she could just feel the ideas in her head, red-red-green-red.. long before the orbs had lit up at all. Axln was pooling suggestions again, which only made Lyun feel even more uncomfortable. She didn't want help like that, she wanted to be able to do things for herself. At the very least, it did hint that some of Axln's advantage was that she was somehow deducing which colors the orbs would have before they lit up at all. Axln was a genius, and this just wasn't fair. When would any of this be designed for her, stuff she could take advantage of. Cybernetics made things unfair too, all she had was her version of the same power gear and.. her legs. Wait, how exactly did Axln out endure her cybernetic running ability again? In this case, it wouldn't be until much later before Lyun would figure out that Axln had simply been drifting along using some of the functions of the same mentioned power gear that Lyun still didn't understand. Running was a lot easier when you're mostly just sliding around.

Target practice would come next, their first opportunity to learn how to actually use an Arbalestae. This would at least be something Lyun was really good with, actually making use of proper instruments. Her choice was a very small and simple version that committed to the light elemental. Even better, being basically light emission, it was practically a beam weapon like the other world, just with a more continuous effect. She drew her weapon and took to a stable posture, taking aim with the best of her ability way faster than Axln. Taking the first moving target for herself, she lanced a beam through the air around her small moving target.. never hitting it once. By the fourth try, they found she had managed to barely graze the small moving target, a slight improvement at least. Axln then took her turn, drawing her much heftier weapon and bracing it to her cybernetic shoulder. Axln's would be a dark elemental which would then have a similar style of impact if not for its different style of projection. Taking aim, she unleashed a wave of shadow that surged forward, totally missed the target, and threw her in a spiral upon her back.

"Okay, not at all what I would have thought a dark weapon to feel like." "Dark elements aren't as immaterial as light, you need to account for the substance of shadow." "Sometimes, all of this elemental stuff just makes no sense at all." "Okay, look at it this way, the shadows contain substances that pull with unseen forces, which was giving you most of the kick there. You might find it easier to compensate when you consider that dark elements also account for a variety of physical forces, such as gravity." "Gravity huh? That sounds pretty cool. Can I try that one more time?" Axln prepared her weapon again while Mheridz prepared another target. Taking aim once again, Axln took a deep breath as Mheridz let the target fly. Yet another shadow burst forwards from the shot.. a shot that detonated in mid air, rapidly pulling the target right through it. In the process, Axln still managed to spin to the ground again, but this time she wasn't alone. Lyun had seen Axln pull this trick enough to know exactly what had occurred, Axln had revised the function of the instrument so that it would detonate with a gravity bomb, vacuuming everything near it in a substantial implosion. This.. this was not fair, not at all.