The world whirled around me as Rethi hammered his fists into my skull. The sickening, jarring blows knocked my onto my ass and into the muddy earth. I groaned in pain and disorientation.

Mayer had strictly forbidden me from hitting back against Rethi for the time being, I was simply becoming too strong physically to reasonably control my strength in fights as vicious at they were getting. It had been maybe a week since we began the training, and already Rethi was destroying me in sheer ability. Of course, if I were to actually hit back I would wipe the floor with him, but he would tear me up with scratches and bites even if I did want to.

I sighed, laying in the mud for a moment while the vicious scratches and lacerations healed on me. I mentally checked my stats while I naturally healed the damage.

[Might: 53]

[Mind: 36]

[Agility: 42]

Honestly, I had learned to keep tally of my stats in my head as the achievements hit. I hated bringing up the stupid stat screen, in all of it’s simplified ridiculousness, but I needed to make sure I wasn’t too far off with my own tally sometimes. Big numbers though.

I lifted myself off the ground with a grunt and got back into a fighting stance. The stupid stat screen always managed to get me angry enough to keep going.

Rethi came towards me like lightning bolt. I dodged easily and cleanly. This repeated until Rethi caught me out on one dodge, and then I would resort to blocking his attacks, then he was get a hold of me and start tearing me up till I go down.

This was how it went, over and over again for hours. Rethi was a very dedicated boy, especially when it came to fighting with me.

It would, however, be remiss of me to not mention that I wasn’t playing by the same ruleset that he was.

He was playing the game of ‘whatever it takes to win.’ I was playing by the rules of the Sharah, and only the Sharah.

For example, once Rethi manages to hit me once while I am using exclusively Sharah movements to dodge, I then immediately switch to using exclusively Sharah moves to block his attacks.

This way it doesn’t take an hour for Rethi to bring me down, and I get to understand the Sharah more in more situations. Another benefit to doing so?

Learning the language of the Sharah.

The movements I use are curated ‘words’ that I believe are most effectively and making ‘sentences’ that denote dodging or blocking. This is mainly done with footwork, but Mayer has been displaying more upper body movement upon my insistence. I think that he only really wanted me to learn the Sharah for its foot movements technique, until I stumbled upon the ‘language’ of it.

The arm movements have added more words, and better ways to express myself through the language, but I still felt like a toddler who was mashing words together in desperate hopes to find a sentence that described what I wanted.

The only thing that I had going for me in this regard was that my body would tell me when I screwed up a ‘word’ or got a ‘sentence’ horribly wrong. The Sharah toed the line in what the body was truly physically capable of. Not in a muscular sense, or else I’d simply overpower it and out-stamina it with my seemingly endless supply, but more in the sense that it toed the line of physical impossibility. If you made a step wrong, it wasn’t too uncommon to have to use another ‘word’ to offset the mistake in the previous ‘word’, thus creating a ‘sentence’ that didn’t make sense and would fail.

Don’t worry, it’s as confusing to practice as it is to try to understand. Mayer seems to understand the idea of the whole thing and agrees with my methods in trying to train it, but he cannot hear it the way that I do. Rethi, however, is able to.

Rethi has a spectacularly sharp mind when it came to fighting and movement, and so the Sharah seemed somewhat within his wheelhouse. He didn’t have the same comprehension of it that I did but was quickly able to tell when I did something that ‘sounded’ bad.

Unfortunately, he didn’t seem to have much interest in uncovering the Sharah like I do. He is interested in the shifting of it, but I think he sees the Sharah in the same way that Mayer does, a means to an end, rather than a path to follow.

My ability to shift, admittedly, hadn’t increased by all that much since I first was able to use my kinetic blast.

I had found the first word to the ‘sentence’ and found that I could give it emphasis with my hammer, but other than that, I was awaiting the second word that I could use.

Rethi began stabbing at my eyes and ears with his fingers, and his finger did manage to get into one of my ears, followed by the familiar pain of having my eardrum destroyed.

I raised my hand in surrender, and Rethi stopped. I didn’t surrender often because there was always valuable information to be picked up from every part of training as vicious and hardcore as this, but I wanted to rest my mind for a while.

Rethi tailed me silently, his eyes on the trickle of blood leaking from my ear. I could feel his hesitation, his mind whirring before coming to a halt and his mouth spitting out a question.

“Does it still hurt, Master Max?” I slumped down in the shade of a slightly taller bush that we had been using to store water and clothes. I raised my eyebrow as I pressed my fingers to my ear, feeling no pain, and began to scrub at the side of my face and neck when the blood trickled to.

“No, the eardrum has healed already. Why?” Rethi laughed and scratched his head, his unkempt hair rustling has he did so.

“I mean, when I hurt you and stuff.” I gave him a flat look and he stammered on, “I poke your eye out and rip it out of your head, and not ten minutes later you have a new eyeball in your head. Sometimes you don’t even make noise when you get hurt, and most times you make noises that could be the sort of grunt you do when you get out of a chair or sit up on a bed.” I laughed and nodded.

“You’re right, but no. I do still feel pain. In fact, I believe my sensitivity to the pain has only really increased. I know all the shapes, colours and tastes of it now, thanks to you and Mayer,” Rethi gave a wry grin, “What has actually changed, is more how I deal with it.”

I looked up to the sky and found it was starting to get later in the day. After a moment of thought, I laid back my shirtless body being graced by the cool embrace of the vibrant green grass.

“Rethi, I’m not sure that I’ve been the best employer to you in these past few weeks.” Rethi immediately opened his mouth to protest, but I waved the words away.

“I’ve found myself in a tough spot, Rethi. That means that my focus it going to be all over the place, most likely for a very long time, maybe forever. However, right now I have time and I feel like I’m not using it as wisely as I really should be.” I said, staring off at the sun that was slowly being occluded by our orbiting planet in our shared sky. I turned to him after a moment, finding his face with a slight furrowed brow.

“I don’t think that’s fair, Master Max. You are a Champion. I don’t mean that because you are one, that you’re not tied by the same rules as everyone else, but more that you are suddenly in a worlds wide game for survival of the fittest.” I nodded gently.

“Maybe.” I ran a hand over my face, feeling a sort of exhaustion that could only be found in stress. The small boy grinned at me.

“Master Max, a war is coming, and you are preparing yourself for it. I am just a kid of fourteen years, when it all comes down to it. I wouldn’t be able to face what is coming, not yet, but you can.” The boy looked up at the sun, the sun hanging in the sky by but a thread.

“As far as I see it, Master Max. You have my interests at heart. You have this world’s interest at heart. I don’t know what your plans are, but I’m sure that it will be something that I can wholeheartedly follow.” Rethi turned his face to me, his face steel, absolute.

“And I will follow.” The boy stood and brushed his pants off, slowly walking away.

I was a little shocked to hear those words. In that moment, I saw the absolute will that Rethi had behind those words, and it was both endearing and absolutely mortifying. Endearing in that I know I have someone who believes in me and what I can accomplish, but absolutely mortifying in reality of the belief he has in me. I am just a guy. I’m not special. I can kind-of-sort-of read minds, but other than that I am totally useless in the face of a collision of my world’s best and brightest.

I could never compete with Einstein in physics, not even remotely close. There was almost surely some seven-year-old with a better grasp of physics than I do. It was just that, but with everyone that was a Champion.

It came to me as a freezing cold stab to the gut.

Mayer once spoke of the power of empathic shifting; that I would be able to use it to convince a room of some of the most powerful people in the world to achieve my own goals.

It was becoming more and more obvious to me, as I my mind began to whir, that I was going to have to do just that. As my mind hit maximum speed, I felt a familiar concoction of calm and pondering that was Mayer’s eternal emotional state.

“Mayer, let’s talk as we fight.” I yelled, while standing from my position. Mayer’s ever precise form was striking against the glaring sun, its red anger on the horizon for being forced away in favour for its sibling.

Mayer whipped forward, and I punched into his attack, knowing that it wasn’t possible to dodge or block his attack effectively enough.

“What do you wish to talk about?” The man’s deep but gentle voice rumbled as My fist hit his shoulder like a pebble hitting a boulder, and he broke my shoulder bone. I cracked out with my leg, meeting his lifted leg’s shin and likely fracturing my own shinbone.

“I’m going to need to convince Champions to join in with my idea of protecting the world from those that wish to go home.” Mayer grunted and threw and punch into my stomach that made me reflexively keel over, and he then slammed an elbow into my back, while I took weak shots at his legs and stomach.

“Indeed. You’re unlikely to ever to be strong enough to do this alone, and not vicious enough to do so either.” He shot a knee into my face, breaking many facial bones.

It took over a minute of pummelling before I was able to talk again.

“I need to know what happened last time to do that. I need an idea of what will happen in the future.”

Mayer nodded while I punched and kicked at him and he simply brushed them away with his blocks.

“It took over 2 years to get the war into the public eye, but by then the Champions had all created their own camps, all defined by their almost complete lack of regard for the people their actions affected. They introduced technologies that destroyed kingdoms and economies and waged campaigns that sucked the life from the earth and destroyed the population of nations. You need to find a way to avoid that.”

I coughed at a foot was rocketed into my chest, breaking basically everything there and probably puncturing a lung.

“I think I need to find those that don’t care to go home.” My fist flew at Mayer’s face.

“Good choice, those that wish to go home are the hardest people to convince of your goals.” He caught my hand and crushed all the bones in my fingers and pulled harshly, ripping my arm out of its socket.

“I think I may have to amass an army created of those that don’t care to go home and use their skills to create an opposing force to the ‘go-home’ groups that will inevitably form. Only one can go home, after all.” Mayer nodded.

“You need to somehow keep those Champions that ally with you in check. You will need a powerful inner circle who are able to police those that misbehave in your camp. To find such people will be nigh impossible.” I grunted in pain as he slammed a foot into my pelvis, shattering it.

“Maybe so, but I think a true neutral party would be a good place to start. I have a feeling that a science-y type would be best. I can’t imagine many of them have much interest in going home, but they are probably most likely to play both sides of the war. I need to get one of them on my side, at least. They will be absolutely invaluable, even in comparison to an extremely strong warrior type.”

“Good thinking. You are already making headway on your ideas. But be warned, that you do not truly have long till the war comes into fruition. It will only be cloak and dagger wars for so long, and with you amassing a team, it will only be a catalyst for a faster moving war.”

I laughed a pained laugh, prompting an eyebrow raise from Mayer.

“Seems like I need to speed up my training then.” I grinned; my teeth covered with blood.

Mayer laughed and came at me, double time.