Ch 25

I spent most of the first two days laying around in the room that the smart goblin had brought me to, I was really going to have to learn his name. After the better part of two days of eating and resting I was feeling much better despite my wounds not having fully healed, at the very least I could not stand to be bedridden any longer. With this decision in mind I stood up and made my way towards the door that had been indicated to me at the beginning of the previous day. It was already towards evening and so I was not certain if the trainers would still be willing to work today or if there was anything I could learn in my injured state but I was determined to learn anything I could while I had the opportunity.

When I opened the door, I saw a rather large room that was easily large enough for two dozen people to exercise without being crowded. There were five or six people lounging around the room, but nobody seemed to be doing much of anything. As I entered every head turned to look at me. “Are you here to train?” said one diminutive woman who was wearing dark colored leather pants and similarly made bustier that did little to make her slender frame more womanly. She had adopted a beaming smile as soon as she said this and proceeded to come forward displaying a personality that was at odds with her dark attire. “My name is Lilly and I am one of the trainers here. I can teach you about using daggers, tumbling & acrobatics, throwing weapons, and if you are lucky, I might teach you a little about picking locks too,” she said with a slightly exaggerated wink. She then went on to say, “Each of us has a different specialty that we can teach you and its pretty rare for us to have anyone new to play with so don’t hesitate to come and ask us for help anytime ok? Anyways, you came to learn right? Are you gonna let your big sis here teach you a few things?”

I was rather shocked at this sudden display of friendliness and desire to help, she must truly be bored with nothing to do all day since almost nobody made it through their ten days and then of those that did most of them were housed and fed by their masters because the cheap gruel cost less than the ten coppers a day for food and housing here, even if the training was included in the cost. I also found it a little bit funny that this small woman who I had never met before was already calling herself my ‘big sis’ and couldn’t help but chuckle a little at which she pouted and said “What’s so funny?!” to which I replied “I’m sorry, Its just that its already late and I wasn’t sure anyone would even still be here and yet here you are just begging to be helpful.” As soon as I had gotten it out, I started chocking with laughter, tears pricking my eyes. It was just too much, the situation itself was only moderately funny but after the last several days of life or death fighting and before that weeks of deprecation and debasement I was finally cracking a bit and could not help but to laugh and laugh and laugh until Lilly had begun to look at me a bit disgusted.

After a while I was once again able to get myself back under control and I apologized to Lilly once more before asking her what the others could teach me. “Humph,” she said, “ask them yourself, I can’t be bothered with you if you don’t want to learn from me.” And with that she turned and stalked away across the room to a target that was set up where she began furiously throwing daggers as if the target had offended her. Scary, I would have to be more careful not to make her mad in the future. Looking around I decided to try to find someone who could teach me something that did not require me to do too much physically right away, after all I still had a hole in my side, not counting the deep scratches on my arm and face. I saw a man sitting at a desk reading studiously from a book while wearing robes and a pointed hat. Perfect, I headed towards him.

When I got close to him, I spoke first since he seemed to be absorbed in his reading. “Hello, I am called Dung. What is it that you train in sir?” I decided to be cautious and err on the side of being overly polite to someone who was dressed like a wizard from the fantasy stories of my original world. Upon hearing me speak he looked up at me with a stern look as if he disliked being disturbed. “I am Grelf the mage, I bet you were hoping that I could teach you how to throw fireballs to burn your enemies or something right?” His tone of voice was stern to match his facial expression as he said this. “Um yeah, something like that, although to be honest anything that you could teach me that could make me stronger or help me survive would be great.” He looked at me for a moment and then gave a deep sigh and began speaking as if by rote. “Because you are a slave it is forbidden for me to teach you most magicks that you could use to revolt or cause trouble outside of the arena. Also, I am forbidden from teaching you how to use or create magickal items because even if the spell to make, alter, place, or remove a slave collar is extremely advanced magick and guarded jealously by the Slavers Guild and the mages that work for them it would not be good to give slaves even a slight possibility of escape no matter how slim.”

I looked at him for a long moment trying to process what he had just told me. “So, no fireballs or lightning then?” I asked him in a half teasing voice trying to get something from him. He only responded with a stern “No.” after which he once again fell into silence as if the conversation were taxing him greatly. “So, what can you teach me then?” I asked with a slight tinge of frustration in my voice, “You must be able to teach me something otherwise you wouldn’t be here as a trainer, right?” At this he seemed to take on a bit of a defeated look before saying “I can teach you only a couple of things, I can teach you how to magickally toughen your body, how to magickally speed your body up, and how to magickally enhance your natural regenerative abilities. These are the only abilities I am allowed to teach you. Also, don’t get any ideas trying to figure out how to tamper with your collar once you can do a bit of magick, direct magick and enchanting magick are too fundamentally different for you to get to the one from the other.”

Now it was my turn to go silent for a moment contemplating the options that were in front of me. I likely wouldn’t have enough time to learn more than one, if I even had enough time to fully learn that before my master came for his winnings. I had to pick carefully because this would drastically effect my ability to survive the abuse I would likely get from my master after he found out that I had spent some of his winnings by staying alive and staying here as well as the likelihood that he would bring me back to fight in the arena again in the future and those I would be facing would be of higher caliber than those I had face during my first nine fights, probably even stronger than the fighter I faced in my tenth fight as well. Two of the abilities would increase my ability to survive directly by either taking less damage or by healing faster but the third could possibly prevent me from taking damage altogether if I was fast enough to avoid the hits. Damn! Such a hard decision.