Afterwards, Zelsys immediately asked for directions to the aforementioned indoor gym, with Ozmir happily giving them and noting that it was specifically geared towards resistance training with a smaller area for striking targets, as truly high-grade targets were simply too large and heavy to get indoors.

“There’s also uh, an unfinished project that was supposed to show that modern technology is compatible with our doctrine, kind of a modern version of moving automaton dummies. It was supposed to be this big fighting ring that makes illusionary opponents out of congealed Fog so you can train a particular move or fighting style, but it never got finished. You may want to look into having it completed someday, we still have the plans,” added Ozmir.

So it was that to the indoor gym they went, and it was indeed as sprawling as implied, being one of the first rooms to the right after they reached the basement. It contained dozens of the same benches and machines, with a similarly great number of weights - equipment sufficient for a sect’s worth of people.

Zel and Zef looked around for a while… And decided training outside was preferable, considering the weather. This gym would work in bad weather and the winter. On their way out they stopped by the library and took out a few books on the basics of hand-to-hand combat, printed on pulp stock and bound in paperback. Hundreds of copies of one particular book were stacked into columns inside a box by the library entrance.

HOW TO HIT AND GET HIT;

Or the basics of hand to hand combat

Upon skimming its contents, the book’s contemporary nature couldn’t have been more obvious, being the only one to use plain wordings and actively avoid mysticism. It even had the Hanging Feudalist Printing Company logo on the back.

“The sect really must’ve been in the early stages of modernizing,” Zel thought.

For an hour or so, it was almost routine. They did their warmups, with Zef remarking that, counterintuitively, the combination of the dress and corset was less restricting than the pants and shirt combo she often preferred for outings.

From the most basic workouts, they moved onto more specific exercise, Zef taking to practicing close-in knife and gun fighting against dummies whilst Zel repeatedly struck a target block with her left hand to feel out whether the bone had fully mended yet. The pain was still there, but it was dull, hollow, much closer to the shock pain of punching something hard with her right hand.

Hours passed, Zelsys trying to solidify a foundational punching technique that worked for her. She checked the book just in case, and it really did only cover the absolute basics, mostly being jabs, straight punches, hooks, and haymakers. A straight punch and a right hook didn’t quite work, not as a specialized technique… No, it was missing something. Rotational force, to help translate the force of the entire body.

It would be most ideal to perform this punch with the elbows horizontally roughly at waist height, with the palm of the hand facing upwards. Then, with an inward rotation of the arm, step forward, and pivot of the waist in the direction of the arm being used, a metaphorical directed explosion of kinetic force would be released.

She quickly reached the conclusion that she could generate more force with a particular motion that imparted a lot of torque onto the punch, the motion also being well suited to feinting into an elbow even after she’d committed to the strike. This would be the first punch she taught, as it was easy to do and allowed one to get more power for the same effort. For even more force, either foot could be incorporated as a pivoting point to throw the entire body mass into the punch, with the ideal being the opposite foot to the hand being used. In this way, the implication of the punch could also be used to feint into a kick instead, or even combine a kick with the punch.

Zelsys repeated the individual motions, visualizing the bodily movements involved in the move, first considering how it would be best performed by a normal person, then factoring Fog-breathing and Storm Engine into the equation. With a minor adaptation, she could use the technique’s principles with her cleaver to create a high-impact thrusting attack, but that was a matter for another day.

These were brawling basics, things that came naturally and that she did without thinking, but breaking them down to how it was actually done and WHY it worked was the hard part. Naming it… Naming it, too, would come later.

“Maybe something to do with stabbing due to the forward thrusting focus? Spear? Stinger?” she wondered as she performed the punch in full, her fist leaving a shallow impression in the cold-iron block. A normal straight punch with the same amount of effort also left an impression, but a barely-visible one.

Alas, this was her ambition, and she couldn’t just spend every waking hour training for Ubul.

When Zel felt satisfied with having taken this single step and returned to simply exerting herself and conditioning the bones of her forearms by repeatedly striking a target block, Zef eventually mentioned the idea of sparring, citing that a dummy just didn’t work well against a primarily defensive style like her knife-and-gun style.

The gunwoman even went out of her way to load Pentacle with tiny powder charges and waxen bullets, commenting that, “I’m sure you’d be fine if I used normal bullets, reduced the charge, and took care to not aim at your face, but I’d rather not risk shooting your eye out. Somehow I doubt you could pull it back together even with that necrobeast bullshit.... Alright, all loaded up.”

Zel had considered pulling out of storage the wooden paddle she used while sparring with Makhus, but instead chose instead to just thickly wrap her knuckles in bandages to add a bit of padding.

Thus they took to sparring, progressively ramping up to a half-step short of a real fight. Zelsys quickly learned that even with a small load and wax bullets, Pentacle still stung like a hornet, and in turn, Zefaris learned that even when she pulled her punches Zel hit like a freighter.