The inside of the cave was a far cry from the empty and open space she had expected. Plenty of small but orderly houses lined the walls of the cave, leaving a narrow corridor in the middle. They had perfectly flat roofs, and Hanna thought they seemed oddly strange for a couple of seconds before it hit her. They were made of concrete. The realization made her pulse quicken. Not because she had some weird fetish for building materials, but because it was the first thing she had seen since waking up in the valley that didn’t look like a cosplayers wet dream. Either these Vikings were forced to use concrete pretty fucking sparingly, or this was built by someone else. Hanna was betting on the later.

By the far end of the corridor was a concrete wall, with holes large enough to poke rifles through, reminding her of some world war two fortifications. Birgitta seemed used to the view, as she led them further in without missing a beat. The corridor looped around the wall to the right, until they passed under what was undoubtedly the rusted frame of a long gone, massive door. The corridor winded it’s way onward, until the smell of fire and the muffled sounds of cutlery against porcelain told Hanna that they were drawing close to their destination. Eventually they passed what was apparently the final corner and stepped out into what appeared to be a cosy little mess hall.

An open fire was burning in a proper fireplace, and a large table were close enough to it that it could warm anyone dining there. The walls of the room had several wooden doors, and unlike the rest of the cave so far, everything looked fresh and cared for. Sitting at the table was a huge man. From the looks of it, he had carefully positioned himself to make the most of the heat from the fire. He studied them curiously, spoon in hand, leaning on his elbows. His large frame made the cutlery seem like a play-set. He looked like he must have a pretty hard time squeezing through some of the narrower parts that they had passed on the way over. Or he was much smaller when he first got here, Hanna mused.

Birgitta walked over to him and leaned on the table. They talked for a while and the man looked back and forth between Hanna and Birgitta. Hanna felt a growing sense of dread as the conversation went on. It didn’t help that she couldn’t hear what they were saying. Eventually the man resolutely stood on his feet and made his way over to her, with Birgitta on his heels. Hanna couldn’t help but swallow as he stood before her, he was much more that a head taller than her, and she had to crane her neck just to see his eyes. She tried consoling herself. If they really wanted to hurt her, it seemed unnecessarily roundabout to bring her all the way here. They could just as well have kept her in the village.

The man studied her, not saying a word. Hanna considered braking the ice but decided against it. The man had an angry look in his eyes. A gruff unintelligible sound left his lips before he abruptly made his way past her, ripping one of the doors open before promptly slamming it shut. Apparently, he hadn’t liked whatever Birgitta had told him.

“Don’t mind that surly old oaf”, said Birgitta. “He’s slow to trust, but he’ll come around eventually”. She paused, pondering something. “Maybe”.

Birgitta rearranged the chair by the fire and made herself comfortable, feet crossed on the table. She magically produced a dagger and begun cleaning her nails with it as she studied Hanna. “So, miss trouble maker. What secrets are you hiding?” She said with a playful look, occasionally checking her progress with the dagger.

Hanna’s throat was dry, and she swallowed uncomfortably. It felt like she was in some mix between an exam and an interrogation. “What do you mean?”

Birgitta twirled the dagger like a student would twirls his pen, searching for the right words. “I might not be as bad as the oaf, but I wasn’t born yesterday girl. And those spindly noodles that you use for arms sure as hell shouldn’t be packing the kind of punch that you showed earlier. Heck, I’m surprised they don’t fall off on their own.”

Hanna scratched her arm, self-conscious and unsure how to answer her. Seeing as she had been blurting out details left and right since she got to the village, it seemed silly to suddenly stop now. “Uh yeah, not sure what to say really. Ever since I woke up in the valley, I’ve noticed some changes”.

“Such as?” Birgitta asked, waving her dagger in a circular motion, urging her to continue.

“Well, I’m stronger obviously but also…” Hanna pondered for a bit. She hadn’t really thought about it before, at least not in a systematic way. More in a huh-that’s-odd kind of way. But if she were to catalogue it, she definitely recovered from her liquor faster. And maybe she was wrong, but she had felt sure that she was injured by both the pig-otter and Muddy’s stabby version of a hello. It was sort of believable if the stress of the moment made her imagine her wound to be worse than it was, but it was twice now that she had felt pain unlike anything before the valley yet had no wound to show for it. She’d be a fool if she didn’t suspect some kind of advanced healing, at least given the radical and equally inexplicable change in her strength. She told Birgitta as much. The older woman looked unimpressed by her improved liver, but her eyes took on a dangerous sheen when she heard about the healing, and the smile that played in the corner of her mouth told Hanna that she was going to regret her honesty.

Not that she had to wait very long. She had barely stopped talking before she heard the sound of a dagger embedding itself in the wood behind her. A second later and her senses caught up with her surprise. Her right biceps was burning, and as she reflexively covered it with her hand she noticed that she was bleeding. “What the fuck?” She screamed at the woman, who was already halfway over to the knife she had thrown.

Birgitta seemed far from empathetic. “Oh, stop your whining”, she said. “Either you were right, and then it’s no harm done.” She paused and pried the knife out from the wood. “Or you were wrong, and then it serves you right for being a liar”

Hanna was preparing a retort to that but was interrupted as Birgitta pulled her hand from the wound.

“Well, well, well”, said the grizzled old woman, sounding genuinely surprised. “Would you look at that?”

Hanna pulled the woman’s hand away so that she could see properly, her heart racing as she imagined the outcome. She really shouldn’t be so surprized since she had sort of toyed with the possibility for a while now, but her head still felt dizzy when she gazed upon her arm. The wound was completely healed, the only evidence of it ever happening was the blood that surrounded it.

Fuck me, she thought. I’m Wolverine.

What followed after that could be called some intense couple of days, but that would be an understatement bordering on dishonesty. It wasn’t straight out torture, but it was far worse than anything Hanna had experienced in the army or otherwise.

Not that she was regretting the experience, at least not in hindsight. It sure sucked at the time, but it turned out she was placing some unnecessary mental limitations on herself. Who would have guessed that all it took to overcome them was mental exhaustion and some tried-and-true fear of dying?

It was funny how “I probably won’t die from some injury” could differ so vastly from “She probably won’t die from some injury”, depending on inclination and perspective. Hanna shuddered at the memory. Birgitta had put all Hollywood-imagined drill sergeants to shame, but it had eventually been worth it. Now they had a pretty good grasp on her capabilities, and she knew for a fact that there was no way she would have gone as far on her own.

Her stamina was basically the way she remembered it: normal for a fit girl barely in her twenties. Nothing to sneeze at, but then again nothing to write home about either.

It was hard to judge her strength, mainly due to a problem that she hadn’t expected. If she was pushing something upwards, or pulling against something, she was sure she could perform on the level of some strong-man contestant. But she was just too damned light! Whenever she wasn’t brazing against something, she was directly limited by the fifty or so kilos that she judged her current scrawny build weighed. Try as she might, if the object she was trying to move weighed more than her, she was the one who ended up moving. It’s obvious when you think about it, simple physics really, but it was an annoying limiter that she hadn’t expected. She had never been very buff, but before the valley she had been carrying a fair bit more meat, and she had weighed in around seventy. She was working hard to get back to her former shape, but it was proving difficult due to the last part of their… evaluation.

Ever since the initial cut that exposed her healing, Hanna was sure Birgitta would eventually want to explore the limits to that. Maybe because she was sensing her fears, or because she was a kinder person than she seemed, but Birgitta had made sure to take it slow with the less savoury parts of their session. An unexpected bruise here, a small cut there, it was as if the examination naturally resulted in a few smaller blemishes. But by the second day it had escalated in such a linear fashion that Hanna had caught on to Birgitta’s schemes, subtle as they were. When she corned her and outright asked if she was hurting her on purpose, it immediately came back to bite her.

“No”, she had simply said, before she slashed her deeply in the arm and threw a sheeted dagger on the ground in front of her. “We are obviously knife-fighting”. Before Hanna had time to complain further, she had been too preoccupied to do anything other than trying to defend herself. By the tenth time or so that she had been stabbed, she barely registered the pain, to high on adrenaline to notice. Birgitta had gotten more and more bold with the wounds she had been inflicting, until Hanna had finally snapped, screaming for her to stop. Birgitta seemed to have been touched by the desperation in her voice, because she immediately ceased with her attempt at amputating the tip of the girl’s little-finger.

Thinking back at it, Hanna was struck by how horrible it all sounded, as if she had been abused. It really hadn’t felt that bad at the time. Something in the way that Birgitta had moved, and in the way that she had maintained eye-contact, had given her a strong, comforting feeling that they could stop whenever. Just not without Hanna explicitly begging for it. Or not, maybe she had just been too jumped up on adrenaline to think straight, and Birgitta was truly a sadistic asshole, eager to inflict pain. Either way, Hanna was sure that she was stuck with the woman in the foreseeable future, so she was sticking with the first explanation for her own sanity’s sake. But as soon as she got the hang of this mediaeval-styled fighting, or got her hands on a proper rifle, she was going to dish out some serious amounts of pay-back.

Anyways, it was clear that her healing came with a price: she burned through calories like crazy. The bigger the wound, the more she had to eat. It made sense really, it was not like she healed magically, her body had to use something as material to patch up her wounds. They hadn’t tested her healing too extensively, so she wasn’t sure what her limit was, but when it came to cuts she was pretty much like jelly. Hanna felt like one of those people in light-novels, who died and reincarnated as slimes or whatever. Not that she complained, given the medieval setting and her track record so far, it seemed like an ability that would come in handy more than once.

She was currently sitting in a room she had gotten as her own. It was the third day since she had gotten to the bunker, and she was bored out of her mind. She still wasn’t sure if this was just some elaborate charade meant to keep her away from the village, or if they were actually here for training. It could well be a bit of both, but the fact that her door was locked felt like a bad omen.

She had happily thrown herself on the bed when it was offered by Birgitta, physically and mentally exhausted from their crazy training. Sleep had hit her probably before she even touched the bed, and it wasn’t until she woke up that she found out that her door was locked. She had screamed and banged at the door at first, but that had gotten old pretty fast. Not quite feeling in the mood for the whole prisoner-workout that seemed like her second option, she was pretty much just sitting there, trying not to think about how slowly time was passing.

A period of sleep and an eternity later, Hanna was awoken by the sound of the door unlocking. Squinting her eyes against the sudden influx of light, she could just about make out the silhouette of Birgitta.

“Sorry about locking you up. I had people to talk to and decisions to make, and I couldn’t really have you leaving until I had made them”, she said as she offered Hanna a hand.

As Hanna groggily made her way out into the room with the fireplace, she was surprised to find it filled with a motley crew. Some stared at her impassively, a few gave her nods as greetings. They were all new faces, except for the big surly guy from earlier. He barely looked at her, standing with his arms crossed over his chest, like a teenager that absolutely had to voice his displeasure at every turn. Hanna gave him the friendlies smile she could muster, before turning towards her captor/mentor.

“What’s up with the crowd?” She asked

Birgitta didn’t seem to care about her question. “We weren’t quite sure of what to make off you until now, that’s why we pulled you away from the village”, she said.

No shit, thought Hanna. “But know you’re sure I’m to be trusted, just two days of stabbing later?” She asked.

Birgitta scoffed at that. “No girl, I said nothing about trust. Now we know that you are useful. Trust will come later.” She made a pause as she gauged Hanna’s reaction. When no retort came she continued, making a sweeping gesture towards the crowd. “Until then, welcome to the Regulars”.