“It’s okay, it’s okay. You’re exaggerating with ‘stupidly strong.’ I’m only bones. You’ll be fine.” Blood paused. “Well, probably.”
“P-P-P-P-Probably?!”
Blood’s laughter was loud. “Just don’t get hit, then. What’s the big deal?”
“Stop, stop, stop!”
He advanced on me with the soft branch. “Oh, yeah, you can use magic, if you want. I bet you’ve got something, right? Something Old Gus taught you? Fireballs, lightning bolts... Go on! I can take it!”
Blood was still moving toward me as he spoke. He was already pretty close. Despite saying I could use magic, he had no intention of giving me the chance.
“Ah, you’re so unfair!”
“Fwahaha! There’s no mercy in battle, Willie, my boy!”
As Blood closed in, I shouted the first thing that came into my head. “Acceleratio!” It was a combat Word I’d learned from Gus.
“Oho,” Blood said, impressed.
I felt my entire body quicken, and sprung backward like a shot, kicking up dirt as I put distance between us.
He was watching me with interest, and I wasn’t about to waste that chance. I yelled the Words I’d been holding back as a trump card. “Currere Oleum!”
Instantly, a thick layer of grease covered the grass under Blood’s feet. He cried out, and his feet slipped from under him.
I’d made the grease out of mana, and it would disappear again after just a little while, but it was more than suitable for making someone slip! And while I had the upper hand...
“Cadere Araneum!” I dropped a sticky, spiderweb-like net on him that I’d made out of Words.
“Ah—Hey!” The web clung to him. He fought on the ground to get it off, but the more he fought, the more entangled his bones became.
You could seriously injure yourself if you messed up with fire or lightning magic, but failing at grease or web magic wouldn’t cause any catastrophes. If magic couldn’t be reliably reproduced, then I just had to make the best of it and use it intelligently. Just like Gus said, there was no need for flashy magic. Small amounts of magic, used sensibly and precisely, did the job.
I shuffled forward slowly, so the grease wouldn’t take my legs out, too. After getting close enough, I let out a single energetic shout as I slammed him with the branch. It made a dry thwack as wood hit bone.
“Gwagh! Damn it, I yield!”
“Yessss!” I pumped both fists and yelled with delight. It was a shutout victory I’d never expected.
◆
“Pretty good,” Blood said, impressed. The web and the grease had since disappeared. “Did that come from Old Gus?”
“Yeah,” I answered.
He laughed, his will-o’-the-wisps flickering. “Seriously, you’ve really got it! I feel like I understand why Gus calls you a genius.”
I looked at him, confused.
“I mean... I expected you to play with fire. Go for big flashy fire or lightning magic, you know? Most young sorcerers do.”
“Eh... That stuff’s not for me. Gus says it’s dangerous.” I agreed with him, too, especially when a mistake could lead to me blowing myself up. Risky power that you can’t control isn’t power. It’s just a hazard. Maybe my previous life’s memories also influenced me here.
“It’s great to see you’re taking it in. A flaming arrow or something would’ve been no trouble for me, anyway. I could’ve just dodged it and closed in on you.”
“Y-You could?”
“You bet I could. If I really wasn’t kidding around, I could even deal with that web-grease combo,” Blood said casually. “Not that it’d be easy.”
I couldn’t even imagine how he’d go about that. “Um, how?”
“As the web fell towards me, I’d forcibly wind it around the stick in my hands, and then I’d just have to run through and out of the grease area, focusing hard on keeping my balance.”
One heck of a direct solution. “Wait, you were going easy on me?”
“Of course I was. You’re a kid. If you lose all the time, you’ll start thinking you don’t have a chance, and that sucks all the fight out of you. It’s important to get familiar with winning. And don’t get me wrong, I was fighting serious, just not giving it everything. When an adult like me can’t handle an attack from a kid without going all out, if you ask me, that’s basically a loss right there.”
I had to admit he had a point. No adult could brag about beating a child in a contest of physical strength, and if they had to summon all their power to get there, for all intents and purposes, that’d be a defeat in more ways than one.
“Will, listen. Old Gus is a Grand Sorcerer. They used to exalt him. Called him the Wandering Sage. He slew monsters, he stopped floods, and he rediscovered a number of the old Words personally.”
“Huh...”
I’d heard him called a Grand Sorcerer a few times already, but I hadn’t fully appreciated how incredible he was.
“That method you were using, of focusing on manipulating the situation on the battlefield and impeding your opponent, instead of blasting them with firepower? That’s one of the answers Gus arrived at—the end result of years and years of trial and error. He may be a grumpy old man, but in terms of what he’s capable of, he’s the best of the best. Make sure you remember what he teaches you. He deserves that much.”
“Yeah. Don’t worry. I respect him, you know?”
“All right, then,” he nodded.
“Um, you were a really great warrior too, right, Blood?”
“Sure was. I don’t wanna brag, but they used to call me the War Ogre.” Despite saying he didn’t want to brag, he clearly loved to tell me about it. That was very Blood. “Mary had a title, too. She was called Mater’s Daughter. Actually, there was a period where the three of... uh.”
“What?”
“It’s just, if I start talking about that, it’s gonna lead someplace heavy.”
I could imagine that. Why was my earliest memory of this life here, in this ruined city’s temple, cut off from human society? Especially given that they’d apparently once been tremendously big names, why were these three living here as the undead? These questions had always plagued me, and it was probably fair to suspect that the current situation wasn’t the outcome of a happy ending. Mary and Blood would sometimes let something slip, but they would never speak about it at any greater length.
“Will you tell me someday?”
“You bet. Just like I promised—when you’re a bit bigger. And all in the right order.” Blood stretched lightly, and took hold of the branch again.
“Right, let’s go again! This time, no magic!”
“Whaaaaa?!”
Blood was upon me before I could even protest. I swiped my branch at him in panic, but he dodged it effortlessly, and the pliant branch he was holding swished towards my face. I shut my eyes reflexively.
“Are you stupid?! Don’t shut your eyes!” The tree branch slapped me across the forehead.
“Ow!” I crouched down, clutching my forehead. The branch was flexible and curved like a whip. Even when he wasn’t putting much power into it, when it hit you at a reasonable speed, it was still quite painful.
“And crouching down in pain? Even worse. Now look what happens.”
He scratched the tops of my feet and pushed me over. If this was an actual battle, I’d have been kicked around like a soccer ball. My organs might even have ruptured.
“Even if you get punched right in the face, don’t close your eyes. Replace your reflexes with training. In a contest like this, where a single instant can make the difference between winning and losing, only an amateur would take his own sight away. So when you get hit, put up with it and move in.”
“M-Move in, even when I’m hurt?” Wouldn’t you normally back off and ready yourself for another try? That was what I figured, at least.
“Will, if you step back after taking a hit, what’s your opponent gonna think?”
“I don’t know.
..”
“I just got a great hit in! And he’s wincing and stepping back! It’s working! I’ve got the upper hand! Now’s my chance to finish him off! Right?”
Ah...
“Of course he’s gonna press you even harder, trying to finish things then and there. Meanwhile, you’re injured, and at a disadvantage when it comes to defending or running. Trying to avoid a bad situation just ended up progressively making things worse. That’s called not thinking things through... hm? Why are you looking at me funny?”
While avoiding risk and keeping your distance, the situation slowly deteriorates into something that can’t be salvaged. I was more than familiar with that concept.
“So... you go forward, and then what?”
“That’s easy,” Blood laughed. “You rush headlong in there and attack like crazy.”
It was an aggressive, brute force approach.
“You’re dead if you step back anyway, so you go for broke. You keep your attacks coming, and bury your sword or spear or fist, whatever you’ve got, in there over and over. The other guy’s thinking ‘I landed a great hit! I’ve won!’ He’s gonna be taken by surprise. If you wail on him right away, you can get in a good hit or two of your own. Then, sure you’re injured, but you’re level again at worst. You might even turn it all around and win on the spot.”
When you take a painful hit, move in. Step forward and give back what you were given.
“Even if he staves off your attacks, you’ll put doubt in his mind. ‘I thought I landed a good hit, but... did he not feel it? Did I just make him angry? Maybe that attack isn’t going to work on him?’ And if you can get him thinking stuff like that...” I felt like a grin had spread across Blood’s skull. “He will back away from you. Switch to defense. Give you breathing room.”
You may be at a disadvantage, but your opponent won’t know that. Don’t be afraid of risk. Take that step into an uncertain future. Snatch the initiative away from the opponent.
“Your instincts when attacking are good, but you get cold feet too easily. We’re gonna have to work on that. Just remember,” Blood flexed his arm. “Get ripped, and you can solve pretty much everything by force.”
All I could see was bone. “Very funny, Blood.”
My comment seemed to shock him, and he looked a bit depressed.
◆
A few months went by. The weather got progressively hotter, and we started having days in a row of scorching sun.
Gus’s lessons meandered from magic and myths to arithmetic, book-keeping, and economics, and sometimes even to law and civil engineering. Blood’s lessons, however, were always extremely straightforward.
“First off, you need to build muscle and stamina. They’re more important than anything else.”
Blood bent his arm, as if to draw attention to his biceps. Of course, there was no muscle there, only his naked humerus.
“Don’t I need to learn technique? You know, moves and stuff?”
“Useless without muscle.”
Instantly dismissed. Was it really like that? I found it difficult to accept such a blunt statement. Perhaps it was the influence of all the manga I’d read in my previous life, where the little guy beat people bigger than himself a surprising amount of the time.
Blood seemed to sense I wasn’t convinced.
“Hmm... Okay, then, Will. Could you knock me over without using magic?” He assumed a firm stance. The sight of that nearly two-meter-tall man of bone in a stable crouch felt incredibly powerful. There was no way a kid of eight years (give or take) could have done anything.
“No.”
“Didn’t think so. Our builds are completely different. You can’t overcome that without a weapon, even with a master’s techniques. Differences in build, weight, muscle—all these translate directly into power. Sure, having a move or two up your sleeve gives you a chance to turn things around. That’s why everyone makes a big deal out of them. We all love to root for the underdog. But you don’t wanna bank on that.”
Before I knew it, he had closed the distance on me, and with a nimble flick of the foot, he took my legs out from under me. Just before kissing the grass, I reflexively curled up my body and impacted the ground, breaking my fall with a technique Blood had drilled into me.
He’d sometimes test my falls like this by taking me by surprise. If it wasn’t good enough, I’d be put through endless practice again, and spend the next few hours rolling on the grass.
“Okay, great job. Well, uh, this is what reality is like, most of the time. The big guy always has the upper hand. Being big is that much of an advantage, and a strength. Though, I guess, you can’t always say that, not when weapons and magic get involved.”
Blood explained that wielding a particularly deadly weapon helped to reduce the importance of physique. Certainly, if an adult and a child were to fight either bare handed, with knives, or with guns, the guns would come closest to leveling the playing field.
“Still, that doesn’t change the fact that physique and muscle are important. You need to work out a lot, eat large meals, and get bigger.”
“Yeah.”
Obviously, for your workout to turn into muscle, you have to eat more calories than you burn. If it doesn’t turn into muscle, all the exhaustion of the workout counts for nothing. Blood always called that a waste. In my previous life, I’d had an unbalanced diet. I ate very little, at irregular times. This time, I wanted to eat regular meals, and I wanted to eat a lot.
“So, about muscle. What’s great about muscle is it’s good in any situation. Let’s say you’ve got... I dunno... someone light on their feet, who can throw real sharp, accurate punches.”
I imagined a boxer.
“He winds up in a slow, draggy grappling situation. How useful are that fighter’s techniques gonna be?”
Even at close range, he could probably punch a little at his opponent’s sides, but it’d probably do significantly less damage. I remembered that in boxing, there was an actual technique like that, called the clinch.
“Okay, now let’s say that instead you’ve got a guy who’s good in a grapple. He’s got throwing techniques and choking techniques. But his opponent’s got quick feet, and cleverly keeps his distance, and keeps darting in and punching him. How useful are those techniques gonna be?”
“Hmm...” The techniques didn’t seem much help in that situation, either.
“There’s plenty of situations where you won’t be able to use your techniques to their full potential. But ‘having strong muscles’ is gonna be useful in pretty much all situations. It’s almost never gonna work against you. If you’re in a tiring grapple, muscle’s gonna let you pin down your opponent. If you’re trying to keep your distance, it’s gonna give power to your punches. Same thing if you’ve got a weapon. If you have good muscle strength, you can swing it easily, again and again, and you can keep your opponent’s weapon pressed back.
“Your techniques and moves, on the other hand, I’m not saying they’re useless, but they’re not gonna do anything for you outside the specific situations you can use them in. Same thing with weapon skills. You’re not necessarily always gonna be carrying your favorite weapon—but your muscles, they’re not gonna leave you, not so long as you keep up your training.”
His analysis was very realistic, and what he was trying to tell me was simple. Muscle strength and physique were the basic parameters, and moves and techniques were nothing more than a bonus, added on top if and only if the situation permitted it.
“So it should be clear which one’s more important to do first. First the muscle, then later the moves. Got it?”
“Yeah, got it. You’ve really thought all this through. I didn’t expect that...”
“You thought I was an idiot, didn’t you? Come on over here. Blood’s got a present for you.”
I let out a fake scream and ran off, and Blood chased after me, laughing. Even when we played around like this, it was an opportunity for Blood to help me train my body and te
ach me all kinds of things.
Like how to throw stones. Not barehanded, like skipping stones over water. Something more useful in a battle situation.
Down the hill, on the opposite side to the city, past a field with rows of gravestones, was a dense forest. Blood and I were moving through it in a low crouch, each of us holding a long rope that we’d made by braiding together many long blades of grass. At one end of the rope was a finger-sized loop to prevent it from slipping, and in the middle, we had woven a pouch just big enough to fit a ping pong ball.
It was a weapon called a sling. I remembered from my previous life that it had been used by people like the Old Testament’s David and the Irish hero Cú Chulainn. It existed in Japan, too, where it was called the inji-uchi.
There was a good-sized gathering of wild birds near the edge of the forest.
I put my middle finger into the rope’s loop, found a suitable-looking stone, and put it into the pouch. Then I lightly pressed the other end of the rope between my index finger and my thumb. After swinging the sling around a couple times to build up speed, I released my fingers with precise timing, freeing the stone held in the pouch. While the rope stayed attached to me thanks to the loop around my finger, the stone whipped through the air, straight toward the bevy of quail pecking at something just outside the forest. It hit one directly in the side. An instant later, there was a tremendous flapping of wings, and the birds all flew off at once.
“Okay! Great job! Check it!” Blood called out.
I glanced over at him to see him launch his own stone into the middle of the escaping flock. One of them dropped from the sky. I ran the ten meters to the quail I had taken down while wondering how I was ever going to get that good.
The quail was twitching; there was still life in it. It was struggling unsuccessfully to get away from me, and I thought its wing might have been broken. It looked so pitiful that, for a moment, I couldn’t help but feel sorry for it...
“Will, don’t let it suffer! Break its damned neck already!”
Spurred on by his voice, I held the quail down with the thick cloth I’d prepared. I could feel it fighting through the cloth. After stopping it from resisting with its beak and claws, I applied full pressure. I felt the horrible physicality of its neck breaking, and the quail went instantly and completely limp.
The Boy in the City of the Dead Page 5