When I left the slave quarters with my new master, the older one’s power being the most frightening thing I had ever felt, I enjoyed some humor. I was a slave and I had to follow whatever instructions I was given…but my new master didn’t speak troll and I didn’t speak his language. I was enjoying stymying some of his efforts, he had to use gestures and pantomime to get me to follow instructions. Once I understood his command I had to follow it, but some instructions are difficult to explain. “Into the carriage” is easy, “no, that’s my side to sit!” a bit more difficult.

My internal laughter left quickly when the older man, his grey hair well combed and styled, reached into his pocket and removed a collar which in no way should have fit in the small pocket he pulled it from. This collar was made from some dark metal with tiny pits, it’s outer surface was rough like cast iron while the inner surface was smooth and had a gentle silvery blue luster. The odd gem in the center of the collar was embedded directly into the metal and was held in position with a cage made of more of the silvery blue metal.

When he reached forward grasping my chin with his hands, old and weathered but housing strength that was far more than I could resist, I froze up. The grip he had said clearly that this old man was able to kill me with but the casual strength of his hands let alone his magic. When the collar snapped closed I could feel the metal squirming and tightening down. When the mage let go of my chin I quickly examined the edge of the collar finding it bonded directly to my skin the odd metal flexing as my neck moved. While playing with my new necklace I felt my original slave collar snap and fall off in pieces.

I almost smiled to be free of the hated collar, the pain caused when I tried to get it off was bad but Trolls don’t fear pain, it’s unpleasant but nothing like I thought the pain was supposed to be. The fire that it later caused was an entirely different experience, it hurt far after the injury was over and would not end.

With an intense stare in his grey eyes, I was given my new instructions, “There, now you can understand us and follow instructions. Protect Rendrick. Follow his instructions. Help him grow in power. Grow in power yourself,” said the older man.

Even maintaining eye contact was difficult, it was like looking a tiger in the eye without the cage providing bravery. The truly horrible thing about the slave collar was that while I wanted to be free, it was only because it was one of my strongest responses to slavery that I could even try and resist the commands. My normal instinct would be to protect others in most situations, this was so reinforced by the collar that the idea of not protecting Rendrick barely entered my mind.

The carriage soon dropped us off at a lovely manor, the drive up to the main building was lined with flowers and bushes, the central courtyard had a large water feature. When we arrived four men and a maid exited the main door and started to remove boxes and other supplies from the roof of the carriage. My exit, followed by the younger mage, caused a bit of a stir, my mostly naked state leaving the maid blushing and upset.

Turning to me the younger man smiled and gestured me to my new ‘home’, “Follow Wendel, he will direct you to a bath and a room to rest in. We will start early with new clothing. Food will be sent up.”

Then, with a look of concern and I would say trepidation asked me, “You…do you know what a bath is?”

All I did was nod. I doubted this collar would be easy to get out of, but being underestimated as an idiot or primitive could only be in my favor. Rendrick just nodded with a pained smile and gestured me forward as if he was herding a shy animal. If he hadn’t enslaved me it would have been almost endearing.

The unloaded carriage quickly left carrying the older mage, something that calmed my nerves. Being near that mage was like standing next to a high voltage wire, what little hair was on my green arms stood on end, every primitive instinct I had said I needed to run and hide.

The one thought I kept having over the next few weeks was ‘this seems familiar’. My life under my new ‘master’ fell into a pattern I was well familiar with; training. If it wasn’t for the slave collar I wouldn’t even be particularly annoyed with my position. I knew I wouldn’t be able to stay with the Trolls, I had a modern mind and mindset, they lived in conditions so primitive that even Amazonian tribesmen would consider it pathetic. They existed in a world pre-stone age and it was unlikely I would be able to talk them out of their ways.

The first day we didn’t train, it was spent getting basic cotton clothing for me. With my extra long arms, slightly shorter legs and odd shoulders, none of the standard clothing would fit me. The maid was apparently skilled with tailoring and put together multiple sets of cotton shirts and pants with drawstrings. While the clothing was not particularly stylish, it was far nicer than anything I had before this.

My new slave condition allowed me a place in society and as far as I could understand, a valued one. I was being trained with shields and one-handed blunt weapons, the mace I was given was so large that for a normal man it would easily be a two-handed weapon. I was given a huge weighted practice mace padded and sized to match the metal weapon. I was leveling up with one-handed blunt weapons quickly but my shield skill was raising far slower. I guessed that the difference was that there was some kind of synergy with my two-handed blunt skill, unlike with my shield skill, but that was mostly a guess.

My days of training were far more relaxed than I thought they would be. I expected to be worked near to exhaustion each day, my magically enforced slavery being something I couldn’t fight, in most cases I couldn’t even consider fighting it. Instead, my days were mostly spent in practice forms with many rest breaks for food and drink, I worked far harder under Whisper then I did under Rendrick’s Man-at-Arms, Telor.

Eventually, Telor showed me what I had been doing wrong with my shield work. Once I realized that you had to angle the shield not just trust in thick arm bones and brute strength to overcome a strike, but instead use the angle and direction to your own advantage, my skill quickly rose.

It was during one of these training matches where I spent the time only blocking as he worked hard to strike at me from different angles that I realized why my training was so slow. First, was something I should have considered from the start, I was a troll and I was nearly tireless, Telor was human and couldn’t maintain strong and deadly strikes constantly hour after hour. Second, was the delivery on the third day by Meelon the maid, a new suit of padded armor.

I had never seen armor like this, it was a soft leather long sleeve tunic and pants with what appeared to be rolled cloth sewn onto the outer surface in vertical strips. It looked like someone had rolled up towels and attached them to a hippies jacket. The look was silly but the protection was serious. I would imagine that stabbing a knife through or hacking a sword into it would be difficult and with a bit of cloth, needle, and thread it should be possible to repair it easily. Visions of my armor covered in mismatched fabrics, patches of stripes, plaid, and polka-dots swam through my head and the image nearly made me miss a strike from Telor.

After the addition of my new padded armor, the training kicked up a notch. Telor was now going out of his way to strike at me instead of just letting me practice blocking. He was fine with me counter attacking with my padded mace, not that I was even able to hit the man. While white-haired and wrinkled, he moved like a man half his age. His constant banter while fighting was about war campaigns and full of advice on movements and fighting. It was like swinging at a hyperactive five-year-old car salesman who tries to pressure you through pure gab, all while he tries to brain you with a stick.

“So we were marching through the valley - dumb ass thought it would speed us up, we were looking for an ambush and he wanted to go faster? While taking the low ground? - so we are marching along and arrows just come flying over the hill! Raise that arm! It’s a shield, not a cod-piece! So after ten or so men start blowing blood bubbles we turn and charge the hill, not much more we could do, attacking uphill into archer fire sucks. Would have died if they had a mage, but then again we would have died if we had the high ground if they had a mage anyways so that’s not saying much.”

With a casual shrug, while still chattering on, Telor slapped my shield hard to the right, using my miss aligned shield to tangle up my right arm’s swing then proceeded to test out the padding of my new armor with a few well-placed blows.

“You have two legs you know; move, move, move! The only time you stand and fight is if you need to keep them bottled up and off your mage. Otherwise get in there and frighten them. Shove them around, don’t just stand back and swing at them. Shove that shield through their ranks. I’m just one man, you outweigh me, put me on my ass!”

Of course, the moment I tried to drive forward and shove him on his ass using my shield I found myself jabbed in the throat with his practice mace and then slammed over the head as I reflexively grasped at my neck.

With a nasty chuckle, Telor continued, “You heal fast, you need to work on those reflex flinch and protection movements. That or just don’t get hit in those places. A good kick to the boys tends to make any man flinch though. Work on it.”

I had learned with Whisper early on that the training doesn’t stop until he had decided it was over, and Telor was the same way. So when thirty minutes later a large crash of wood and metal happened behind me at the edge of the training arena I never even glanced over. I watched Telor’s whole body flinch as he suppressed the movement to strike at me. He had been waiting for that crash in order to provide a lesson in situational awareness, or as he called it ‘Pay fucking attention!’

It was another thirty minutes of being smacked around before Telor called a halt to our practice and pointed me towards the crate of distraction which had almost earned me a beating. With a smirk, he gestured for me to open up the wooden box. Inside was chainmail, steel plate, a very oddly shaped stylized helm that would fit and emphasize the large jaw structure my troll heritage gave me, combined with leather straps to belt all of the metal on my frame.

Wearing plate armor had been exactly what I had thought I would be using, given that broken bones not punctures and cuts were my bigest concern, but now I realized I would be getting exactly what I had been expecting, I just hadn’t known how armor worked. I was thinking of this as a game, plate armor being worn right on the character, but real plate armor has padding and chain mail and a whole host of other things involved, far more than I had been familiar with.

“Ok, pull off that cheap armor, let’s get you into the chain mail first, we will work our way up to the full gear soon enough,” Telor said as he started throwing bits and pieces at me, “You should have enough strength to use it even without a few breakthroughs under your belt. The first few layers of the dungeon will just need you to get in the way of the dangerous stuff, not actually fight it. The master will kill that trash off quick enough.”

I wasn’t sure what ‘breakthroughs’ were but I had a feeling it was like leveling up in a game, though given the number of times I had been wrong about the differences between a game and real life I was not holding out much hope.

“Well, strip and move it grunt!”

So began the next phase of my training, the heavy armor skill, and my new burning hate for Telor.