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Chapter 803: 803

Chapter 803: Attack Me

Zhang Heng heard the quarrel outside, and he immediately recognized Commodus’s voice . So he walked out of the house .

“Your Majesty . ”

“Your Majesty?” The slave girl was taken aback . “Wait . Are you really…”

“No one in Rome dared to pretend to be the emperor . ” Commodus waved his hand for his guards beside him to step aside . And Zhang Heng also asked the slave girl to go back to the house first .

“Your majesty, why did you come to visit me at such a late hour?”

This was a good question . Not even Commodus knew why he wanted to see Zhang Heng so much .

After watching the bullfighting show in the afternoon, he was unable to calm himself for a very long time . Zhang Heng’s heroic figure, standing behind the bison, kept cropping up in his mind . Other than that, he had just received bad news . It seemed some from the Senate weren’t very happy with him . Some greeted him with a smile when they saw him, but were in fact, colluding against him in private, scheming something malicious . Feeling a little irritated, Commodus left the palace and walked here .

Of course, he would not tell these things to an outsider . Commodus was about to congratulate Zhang Heng for his great achievements in the previous gladiatorial performances . But before he could speak, Zhang Heng continued, “Your Majesty seems to be having some trouble . ”

“How did you know? Do you know how to read minds?” Commodus asked in surprise .

Zhang Heng did not answer the question . Instead, he turned around and walked back to his house . After a while, he took out two training swords, throwing one to Commodus .

“Huh?” Commodus grabbed the wooden sword, somewhat surprised .

“Attack me,” said Zhang Heng, the other wooden sword in his hand .

“Uh, I don’t know how to fight . ” Commodus was anxious, and he immediately wanted to return the wooden sword to Zhang Heng as if he had picked up hot iron .

“You are the one who led the army . You should have practiced how to fight . ”

“Of course!” Commodus seemed quite proud of it . “A qualified emperor needs to learn how to lead his soldiers in battle . Although I don’t need to go on the battlefield to fight most of the time, I’m confident enough to say that my combat skills are actually quite good . I can take down two ordinary soldiers alone . Although my father complimented me about it, I am still nowhere as good as you . ”

“That’s fine . ” Zhang Heng then put on a defensive posture . “I don’t know what troubles you, but I think I can help you forget your troubles temporarily . ”

“No, no,” Commodus waved his hand, “I can’t; I’m the emperor . I shouldn’t do this kind of thing . If someone else sees it…”

“There is no one else here . As long as I don’t tell others, no one will know . Come on, a fight with me shouldn’t be harder than going to Dior’s house for dinner, right?”

Commodus laughed . “Haha! Senator Dior is the most powerful person in the Senate . If I want my reign to be stable, I will need his support . However, I don’t like him at all . This old fox wants to take more power from me . But this is how politics works, doesn’t it? What’s the matter? Did I not put on a good show that night? How did you see through my acting? By the way, I remember that rumors were swirling around that you were a prince or general of the Han Empire . Is this true?”

“Those sorts of things are not important anymore . Now, I am only a slave in the city of Rome,” Zhang Heng said .

“Okay . ” Commodus finally made up his mind . He held the wooden sword in his hand . “Then, let’s fight for a while . Let me first tell you something . I still have a lot of things to do, and I can’t stay here for too long . ”

…

Commodus did not expect that he would spar with Zhang Heng for an hour .

It was a fact that he could not beat Zhang Heng . This fight could not be considered a gladiatorial battle . Instead, it was like a gladiatorial lesson . Commodus never thought it was as dull as the sword training he had gone through before . On the contrary, he felt a force pushing him, motivating him to learn more from Zhang Heng, and it made him forget the passage of time . During the fight, Zhang Heng deliberately controlled his strength, using only a little more than Commodus .

Since Commodus felt that he was close to claiming the victory, he kept trying to figure a way to beat Zhang Heng . He would constantly reflect on his wrong moves and how he could make further improvements . When he finally figured out his mistake and reaped the satisfaction, there would be a new challenge waiting for him .

It was a pity that Commodus would never get to play “Sekiro Died Twice . ” Otherwise, he would find out that the difficulty of the challenge he was encountering highly coincided with its difficulty curve . Not only that, Zhang Heng, a person who understood history quite well, knew that Commodus liked to fight . One of the main reasons why Commodus gave up on himself and decided to go all out to become a gladiator was because of Lucilla’s betrayal . Still, his love for gladiators had been in him since he was a child . It was hard trying to hide something like this . Even Dior could see it last night, let alone Zhang Heng .

When Commodus dropped the wooden sword in his hand and collapsed on the ground due to exhaustion, he realized that the time had flown by . And as Zhang Heng said before, most of his worries had indeed disappeared, replaced by a sense of satisfaction after he discovered his improvements .

“This is my first time finding out how interesting it is to be in competition!” Commodus gasped .

Commodus, however, did not know about the grueling process a slave had to go through before he became a real gladiator . Most gladiators in the schools were slaves, and they had to risk their lives when they performed a fight . Then, they would be eliminated if they did not perform well during the training . The unfortunate ones would be sent to mines . All of them had to try really hard to survive, so no one could genuinely enjoy gladiatorial teaching like Commodus would .

Zhang Heng did not say a single thing . He could see that Commodus was in the mood and wanted to utter nothing that would ruin the atmosphere . At the same time, Zhang Heng gradually figured out Commodus’s temperament during the time that he spent with him .

History might have remembered him as a tyrant, but Zhang Heng noticed that the twenty-year-old Commodus displayed no traits of harming the country and the people . On the contrary, the current Commodus was working hard to become a good emperor . Having a father that excelled in ruling the empire, he had been living all this while under his old man’s shadow . No matter what happened, the first thing that would cross his mind was what his father would have done .

In an attempt to keep the vow he made when his father died, his goal was to become a qualified leader and continue the glory of Rome . However, he did not know how to do it . Aurelius did train him well, but at that time, he was still under his father’s wing . Hence, everything had gone by smoothly . However, once Aurelius died, Commodus realized that the political situation there was far more complicated than he thought upon his return to Rome from the front lines .

He needed to deal with pressure and probing from all the parties alone, and the worst part was that his sister was now his only family left in this world . The latter, unfortunately, seemed to have no interest in helping him . His mother was gone before his father died . In other words, there was no one to advise him on how he should deal with the political situation here . It was the reason why Commodus always hesitated when he made a decision . Sometimes, he would even doubt himself .

Zhang Heng now understood why the Balance Blade had to kill Altrus .

Under this circumstance, the advisors and friends around Commodus had a great influence on him . Zhang Heng did not believe in the oracle at all . Obviously, some people thought that Altrus’ influence on Commodus was too significant . That was why they wanted to hire Balance Blade to get rid of him .

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