40 - Basic Defense Training

Support training done, Start of defense, Danna is the instructor

"Hey" Jade stopped walking, forcing us all to stop behind her. Turned around, looked dead serious to us and kept talking "Listen, do not underestimate the defense training ok?" I know we start training with the new teacher today, but… why is she so serious?

"I mean… seriously. The training is in the order that it is for a good reason ok? Take every second of it seriously." This type of warning is completely out of character for Jade. "If you die too early it will reflect badly on me. So... Take. It. Seriously. " That's more like her, I'm unsure of what I expected her reasoning to be.

She resumed her walking, soon we entered the gymnasium, a couple of teams were already there. Jade left us on our own and went straight to where the other two instructors were waiting.

"Hello" Honda, a nice girl from the other team greeted us first. During the past three weeks of extensive contact with the others everyone was on friendly terms. I would go so far as to say that even Bria, as dense and brute as she appeared to be, was successful in making good friends with a few people.

Melvin, this stupid host of mine, was not nearly as anti-social as Bria, she basically got to talk with everyone, even if just a little. "Hi Honda! How are you?" Honda was one of the few that did talk a lot.

"I'm good! And super excited for the new training."

"Yeah, me too. I did not dislike support, but it's definitely not what I'm aiming to be"

"RIGHT?! I know! Super cool but… not my thing either. I can see Dinorah being a supporter tho"

"Hey, don't decide for me... " Dinorah was unwilling added in chat

"But you are so good with mana!"

"That… that's nothing." Her eyes met Maya's, she got a look of reverence while looking at the prodigy companion "I'm not good enough"

"That's not true, you could be an excellent support Dinorah" Maya was a gentle person.

The friendly chat continued until all the teams were gathered. Then Leah addressed us before the new teacher could.

"We finished the basic support classes yesterday, everyone did good. Congratulations! Starting today you will learn from Danna. Ask questions if there is anything you do not understand. Do not fall behind. Defense and healing are the two things that will keep you alive, and do training especially hard on this."

Another warning. I'm starting to get reaaaaaaly worried about this. Not a good signal and not a coincidence that we already received two warnings about the defense training. Shit… This will be bad.

Leah got down and passed the spotlight to Danna, the main instructor for the next few weeks. If I remember correctly, her introduction was super short and she was silent most of the time.

"Hi. Let's start with a demonstration" She made a sign with her hands and Emma, the bow master moved. She transformed her hand into a small bow, smaller than one might imagine. She aimed in the direction of Danna then placed her hands on the string, pulled and at the same time, a brilliant arrow surged in place. She fired.

Danna did not move at the action, even with the projectile flying directly at her head, she just stood there, waiting for the arrow. It all happened really fast. The arrow that would have pierced and killed any of the students witnessing this, just bounced off the Tank like it was made of paper then vanished into small particles before it could get to the floor.

The archer pulled her string several more times, each time the arrow was precisely aimed at her target, each time the arrow bounced off and vaporised itself. It did not matter where the arrow was aimed, head, legs, chest, arms. It bounced and did no damage. At some point Danna even gave her back as a target for the arrows, and still, they just bounced back and vanished.

After a whole 2 minutes of this and about 30 arrows being fired, she raised her hand and Emma stopped the attack. "That's what you will learn." She started the lecture right away, not losing a single second.

Just like Leah, Danna focused the first day mainly on the theory. Explaining surprisingly detailed information, I did not expect her to talk so much or to be so good at teaching. I'm sorry to have ever doubted her capacity as a teacher just based on her short introduction and silent behaviour during the last weeks…

Defense, as everything else here, was based on mana control. Except it was pretty different from the healing process. Healing required inner mana control while defense needed the manifestation of mana outside the body, similar to how we created the weapons.

Inner and outer mana felt very different from one another, the control was not the same, the strength was peculiar to each and the results incomparable. Not the same at all, yet somehow similar.

The ultimate goal for defense was to create a thin invisible mana shield around the entire body, it would serve as a detection zone for attacks, then strengthen it as you detect the attack, only on the point of the attack and with only the necessary force it would need to defend it. That was of course, in theory. It was extremely hard to do the entire process. The entire process of detecting an attack and sending more mana to defend takes no more than a couple milliseconds. I'm not sure one brain can process that much information and act upon it in that little time.

We would need to train enough for it to become almost an automatic reflex. I'm guessing it would be similar to the withdrawal reflex the human body has. That thing where the body automatically withdraws a limb from a painful stimulus before the brain even knows what happened.

The training started with a basic mana manifestation the size of a hand. We were required to form pairs to test the strength of the mini-shield. One would manifest it and the other poke it with increased force until it shattered. Melvin got paired up with her friend Honda since both teams had an odd number of people.

Honda was the first to create the shield. She was good and the shield survived 11 relatively strong pokes right on the first try. Melvin was not so talented in mana manipulation and her shield sustained 5 pokes before collapsing.

They kept switching the attacker and the defender, by the fourth day, both of their shields could sustain multiple punches with full force of the other. It was then that Danna addressed the class one more time, it was time to increase the difficulty.

"Now that everyone has the feeling for the shield strength we will work on the detection" We would need to focus on extending a very thin weak shield over the entire body, starting with the head.

No pair up with someone else for the first day of the new training, we would need to concentrate to make a 'detection zone' over the head. It was harder than I gave credit for, especially for Melvin that did not have an exceptional talent for fine mana control. My host only succeeded in covering the entire head by the end of the day.

The training was the same for the second day, but we were asked to extend the shield from the head to the body the maximum that we could. Melvin was able to cover head and chest by the end of the second day.

Third day we were back in training with pairs. One would be blindfolded and deploy the thin shield that only served as a pseudo-detection device, and the other would slowly invade the space of the shield, trying to touch part of the other's body. The one deploying the shield should be able to detect the movement and stop it before touching the body. The request for today was to stop the attack with the hands, the objective was to improve the detection, not yet try to stop using the shield itself.

For every successful try, the attacker would increase the speed of the touch. Melvin paired up with Honda again and both trained together, switching every 10 minutes or so who would attack and who would defend. They had a great improvement.

The next day we started training how to stop the touch with the shield itself. It was a lot harder than only detecting movement inside the mana zone. A LOT HARDER. So much so that full 5 days were dedicated for this part of the training only.

First we kept with light touches, once that part was ok we increased the strength instead of the speed. After 2 light punches were the base attack for training. More times than I care to count Melvin failed to defend with the shield and took the punch directly into the face.

5 days into the new regime they were able to detect and defend the full force of one punch with the extended shield. The speed was still a bit slow for a real-life situation, no fight would be this boring, but it was training, they were improving and working on the speed. During the last few days they improved greatly, including the extension of the detection zone, even Melving was able to cover up to her knees now.

"For today you will train with both people of the pair wearing a blindfold. Instead of alternating between an attacker and a defender, you will be doing both simultaneously. It's not yet a mock-battle, you will only stand in front of the other and throw random punches" We did as asked and again, this was harder than expected. The divided attention to move the body AND maintain the detection zone for protection was absurdly hard.

They started slow, sometimes both missing the direction where the other stood, others using too much force and speed and knocking the other down. The need to teach healing first came to light. Bruises were healed fast and the blinded child fight continued for the entire day. An obvious improvement in their ability could be noticed for today. By the end they were even talking while punching each other. What a weird relationship.

The next day however, things started to get really painful. The teachers would call one person each and straight up start attacking them. No warnings, no light punches, no friendly talking. The rotation was random, and while one was not getting your ass kicked they would be focusing on healing themselves.

The instructors had no calms about hurting the students here, some left with broken bones, bleeding, passed out. Melvin did not faint a single time, she was really resilient, but that only increased the time she was being beaten up. I was not mentally prepared for this, up until now this had been fun training, only now I'm starting to see why both Leah and Jade warned us to take every minute of defense training seriously.

This hurt a lot, but the boost in their ability to defend was unquestionable. In just a day all the students improved what I thought would be the progress of an entire week if the training continued the way it was until yesterday. The improvement was not only in the defense aspect but also in healing. Since they had to constantly heal themselves to keep alive, they were improving incredibly fast, of course, that only served to increase the speed in which they could go back to training and be trashed around by the mentors.

Melvin slept like a rock that day. Not only her, all the others were dead tired too. They usually stayed a bit longer in the bath talking about their day, but not today. I could see the tiredness in their faces, even Mayara and Brianna were beaten up.

They were a lot stronger and resilient than the rest, they also had improved a lot more in their defense than all the others, but not to the point where they could stand a teacher. They were still leagues away in terms of strength, skill and experience. The fact that they were better only increased their load of attacks. The distance between us and them was only increasing with each passing day and each training. They were assigned harder tasks and were expected to train more. And, they did. It was hard to tell they were from the same generation as the rest of us, both of them, especially Mayara, were almost too good to be with us.

"We will repeat yesterday's training regime" Today was another day of painful fights. No, I'm sorry, I cannot call that a fight. Though they did allow the students to defend with their hands, move and counterattack, but with the exception of Maya, none could move much with the constant stream of punches being thrown at us. It is wrong to call this a fight, mock battle or anything of the sorts, it was more light the teachers using us as punch bags.

Of course the punching bag training did not stop. For the rest of 'defense' training, we were being beaten up. Progress came with the pain, but… well, no one died, but two girls stayed out of commission for a couple of days. The instructors were not holding back in hurting us.

By the end of the three weeks of defense training the students were almost masters of self-healing. I mean, not master masters, but we were a lot better. An injury that took us about 30 minutes to heal would now be healed in less than 10 minutes. One could safely say that the healing abilities of everyone here improved three fold at least.

Defense itself improved even more than healing. I would say that ever since the beating began, we were 10 times better at defending ourselves. Melvin was even able to move a little and defend a bit with her own hands. Not yet to the point where she was able launch an effective counterattack, but she improved a lot nonetheless.

Danna's training came to an end and all 37 students survived all 3 weeks. The feat did not repeat itself for the next training.