Chapter Twenty-Six - Proof of Competency

I created a Save as soon as I entered the gym.

This wasn't the same training area that I'd used when I was an E-ranker for Luna Corp. That had been... actually, it hadn't been a bad gym at all. Luna Corp was stingy and cheap on a lot of stuff, but the training wasn't that terrible. I think we just didn't get enough paid training time.

This gym didn't seem all that different. If anything, there was less equipment out, it was just more robust-looking.

Eldur who was leading me in half-turned to glance back at me. "Your record mentioned some familiarity with martial arts?"

"I'm a blue belt in Jiu Jitsu," I said.

"Hmm, that's something to build off of," he replied. "You'll be practicing with Terry today. She's about your weight class and she's a woman. Don't underestimate her."

"Sure," I said. I wasn't sure if I ought to be offended or not by the gender bias but, well, he wasn't wrong.

The average man had significantly more muscle than the average woman. D-rankers made that difference even more stark, if anything. The guide I had did mention, in black-on-white, that women had a direct advantage over men when it came to magic.

Was that a jab at women being more emotional? Or was that just... the truth?

I'd have to untangle that at a later date, because Terry walked over, then bounced on the spot a few times at the far end of one of the mats. "Hey hey! C'mon, get geared up, we're gonna fight!"

Eldur gestured ahead, and I thanked him before jogging over to put on some padding. I was already in my Luna Corp issue gym clothes. Boxing shorts and sports bra under a loose T with the corp logo on the front.

The gear rack had padded gloves to slip into, and a padded helmet as well as mouth-guards in these little sealed plastic baggies.

Once I was ready, I stepped up towards Terry, working the guard around so that I wouldn't spit too much while talking. "How are we doing this?" I asked.

Terry blinked, then grinned. "You'll try to punch me, and I'mma beat the snot outta you."

"Really?" I asked.

"Yeah!" Terry said. "I'm Squad B's front-liner, you know!"

"You are?" I asked. Terry was... kind of scrawny looking. She didn't have an ounce of fat on her, very obvious to tell when she had her shirt rolled up to expose her stomach. But she also lacked any clearly defined musculature. She was skin and bones.

Terry grinned, then pointed a finger to the side. There was a crack-boom and a white line seared itself across my vision.

"God dammit, Terry!" Sol shouted from further in the gym.

Terry had fired a thin beam of... electricity? It had certainly been lightning-bright. There were these robot-looking doll things further in the gym, and one of them was sporting a black, cigarette-burn like smudge that was leaking a thin bit of smoke. Right between the eyes, too.

"Damn," I said.

"Mhm! And I can do that twenty-six more times," Terry said proudly.

"She hit twenty-seven consecutive spells last month and then fainted," Sol called out. "Miss... newcomer." he had obviously forgotten my name, which was fine. It happened. "Beat her up for us, would you?"

"Hey!" Terry whined.

"Alright, I'll see what I can do. I'm afraid that my magic's not as, ah, refined."

"No magic," Eldur said. "And that goes double for you, Terry. Don't blow up the gym equipment, please."

"Sorry!" Terry said. She smacked her gloved fists together. "No magic! Not even outer stuff."

"Outer stuff?" I asked.

Terry stared, then laughed. "Outer elemental stuff. Makes you faster and stronger and stuff."

"And stuff," I repeated. Something to look into later, I supposed.

Then we got into the fighting. Terry might have actually been physically weaker than me, and it didn't matter one whit. She was faster and had better technique, something which was obvious the first time she dipped under my guard and laid a three-punch combo into my ribs and sent me sprawling onto my ass.

"Ow," I said as I greeted the ceiling.

"Again?" Terry asked.

What followed was a half-hour of Terry smacking me around, only to pause after a while to start giving me pointers. She showed me how to better block the move she'd used, bringing my arms up and elbows further in, then she ran me through some exercises. She was actually a pretty okay teacher.

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Natalie was outright better, but Natalie did physical training as a job, whereas Terry here was just passing on what she knew.

Eldur eventually moved on to train himself, only occasionally looking our way.

At around noon, the training ended, and he approached me to give me a quick breakdown. "I'm afraid to say that I don't know if you're ready," he said.

"For the portal delve?" I asked.

He nodded. "You have some basics down, but you move at E-ranker speeds. In a portal, even an E-rank portal, that might be too slow, and I don't want to put the team at risk. We'll see again in a couple of weeks, maybe? If you've just broken into D-rank then you'll improve fairly rapidly."

That made perfect sense.

So I Reloaded and tried again.

This time I knew how to block Terry's first attack, and then I moved in with a bit more aggression only to find Terry spinning around and her fist was coming and...

And I woke up on the floor, Dharti leaning over me. "Ah, you're awake then?"

Darn. I Reloaded.

This time I went a little slower, testing Terry's speed, moving in a more reactionary way instead of going aggressive on her. Eldur nodded along from the edge of the mats, so I might have been doing well, but Terry's speed eventually overwhelmed me.

So I Reloaded.

I didn't expect to actually be able to beat Terry. She was... frankly, she was a step ahead of that fire girl, Mizu. Faster. I didn't spot any single martial art in the way Terry moved. There was some boxing there, in the way she punched and kept her guard up, but some of her footwork was bizarre. A smattering of techniques from different schools?

That tracked. Terry seemed very flighty, and I somehow doubted she'd stick to one martial art for the years it would take to perfect it. She seemed more likely to jump from one to the other, picking up tricks here and there.

So I danced backwards through the fight, slowly picking up on her patterns.

Two quick Reloads later, and I finally had her. She ran through this one quick pattern that I barely ducked past. A lunge with her knee into a hook from the bottom right. The sort of move designed to force an opponent to move into the spot she was aiming for.

When she launched that same move a second time in the same fight, I ducked left, then swung as hard of a left hook as I could.

My gloved fist met her jaw with a crack crack, and then Terry was ten feet back in a blink, rubbing her face. "Owie!" she complained.

She didn't go easy on me after that, but I managed to not get knocked out, even if she got a few good licks in. Afterwards we shifted to more of a teaching and repetition approach, with Terry showing me some of the same tricks she'd shown in previous loops, but I was okay with that.

This time, Eldur didn't come and tell me that I wasn't in the next raid. I think he approved of my more careful fighting style, and I supposed that made sense.

He didn't want or need an aggressive newbie to babysit. He needed someone careful and calculating who wouldn't leap into trouble.

With that came lunch, and then after lunch a very boring lecture from a regular Luna Corp employee about communication protocols and how to use some of the gear we were given within a portal. Then there was a basic firearms course.

I did tell them that I knew how, and they reasonably decided to not believe me until proven otherwise. Luna Corp HQ had a tiny firing range in the basement, and I got to plink away at some targets, go through some quick reload practice, and generally proved that I was familiar with the standard Myalis Arms Feline9, chambered in plain 9mm.

I remembered using a gun exactly like this for months. It did nothing against C-ranked and above monsters, and even some D-rankers would shrug it off, but it was reliable, had a decent 21-round magazine, and had a heap of customization options.

I'd be getting my own the next day, apparently, and I was scheduled for further weapons training to pick up something a bit bigger.

I could live with that.

When five o'clock rolled around, I was excited to get back home and train some magic a little more.

***