Explorer of Edregon

"Show of hands… How many of you are standing here right now because you want to grow stronger?" Alka asked, slowly walking down the line of Earthers standing ramrod straight before her. Her glowing eyes were able to take in every tiny detail in her field of vision, which meant she had no problems picking out the way people stiffened when they thought she glanced at them, or how they relaxed when she seemed to turn away.

In response to her question, a good third of the thirty-two Earthers who had volunteered to undergo her little experiment raised their hands, continuing to stare straight ahead. Alka understood from what Vin had told her that this was a rather normal sign of subservience on his world, but she still found it a bit strange.

On her world, a Slayer would be ridiculed if they stared at only a single spot rather than constantly monitoring their surroundings.

Just one more thing she was going to have to teach them.

"Hands down," she ordered, continuing her leisurely stroll between the rows. "How many of you want to be a Slayer because you think it sounds 'cool,' or you want to stand out compared to the other combat classes? Don't worry, be honest."

This time, nearly half of the Earthers raised their hands, and Alka was happy at the fact that she didn't have physical eyes to accidentally roll. It wasn't necessarily a problem, but it was a higher portion of her volunteers than she would have liked.

"Hands down," she said again. "And how many of you are here because you've seen how terrifying monsters can be, and you want to protect others from their wrath?"

Thankfully, the last of the people she was waiting on all raised their hands, and she nodded her respect, motioning for them to let their hands fall as well.

"All of those reasons are valid for wanting to become a Slayer," she told them, returning to the front of their ranks and making sure she could be seen by the entire crowd. "In fact, any reason is valid for wanting to become a Slayer. Now becoming one, on the other hand, that's going to be up to you.

"Slayers exist for one reason, and one reason only!" she shouted, causing a few of the people standing closest to her to flinch as her artificial voice boomed out over the small crowd. "We take the hard fights that the other warriors aren't capable of taking. Now, do you think that makes us better than a town guard who only spends a fraction of their time fighting, or that we deserve more than the random caravan mercenary who spends most of their time navigating?" she asked, waiting to see if anyone would be dumb enough to answer.

Thankfully, that wasn't the case, and she continued, happy at the very least she wouldn't have to smack any sense into anyone.

"No! Other combat classes serve dual purposes! Town guards keep the peace and make sure the town is running smoothly. Caravan mercenaries keep goods flowing between settlements and watch over travelers as they move from one place to another. Slayers… are different. We do one thing, and one thing only."

She paused, her eyes flaring with light as she mentally grinned.

"We kill monsters. And we never stop."

"I don't care if your legs are burning, keep going until I tell you to stop!" Alka shouted, watching the thirty-two panting trainees as they desperately tried to continue running in tight circles around individual trees. To begin their training, she'd brought her potential Slayers over to a nearby forest, had given them the order to pick a tree, and instructed them to start running circles around it until she told them to stop. And just to make things interesting, anytime she shouted 'back!' they had to reverse and start running in the opposite direction, and anytime she shouted 'change!' they had to find a new tree nobody was using and start running around that one instead.

It was an all-round stupid, exhausting exercise that trained absolutely nothing and did little more than allow her to see who would follow her orders and continue running until they'd given her absolutely everything they had to give.

It was perfect.

"Back!" she shouted, watching the few Earthers that were still on their feet pause and turn a hundred and eighty degrees, immediately beginning to go in the opposite direction. It had barely been half an hour, and already she'd seen just about everything she needed to see to make her first cuts.

Alka walked around, quietly observing the different ways people dealt with exhaustion. There were those who had given all they could give and were now sitting down, leaning back against the trees or sprawled out on the ground as they desperately tried to catch their breath, deciding they'd tried hard enough and would be better served to recover in preparation for the next exercise. There were those who were just as tired who stopped for the occasional break, only to find a little bit more and push themselves to keep going every time they heard her call out one of the orders.

Then there were those who didn't. Stop. Moving.

Alka felt her eyes flaring as she watched the nine Earthers who looked like they were absolutely dead on their feet. They'd given her everything they had to give, and then dug deeper and given her a bit more. Not a single one of them was moving at a pace faster than a desperate shamble as they continued to blindly stumble their way around the trees, but the speed didn't matter.

Muscles could be trained. Endurance could be improved. But the determination to continue doing what was asked of them long after their bodies had thrown in the towel, that was something that couldn't be trained. At least not easily. Focus wasn't the same thing as willpower. It wasn't an attribute that could be easily improved with a few levels here and there.

"Alright, we'll stop there!" she finally called out, noting how the nine Earthers continued stumbling around their trees for a few more seconds before her words registered in their heads. While they stumbled to a full stop, or finally collapsed down onto the ground, Alka nodded and turned to the fourteen Earthers who had stopped moving entirely and hadn't even tried to rejoin the exercise once they'd caught their breath.

"You lot, head back to camp," she ordered, jerking her warpick back the way they'd come. "You failed."

"What?!" One of them asked, angrily forcing themselves to their feet and stomping over. She was a young woman with a good amount of muscle and a sleeve of tattoos down both her arms, which Alka got a great look at when she thrust a finger toward her face. "You're failing us, just because we couldn't run around a stupid tree for an hour?!"

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"Yepp," Alka nodded, entirely unfazed by her obvious aggression. "That about sums it up."

The woman looked like she wanted to grab her by her shirt and threaten her, but there was one tiny problem with that desire.

Rather than clothes, Alka was clad in what looked like a full suit of darthsteel armor that seemed to draw in the very light around her. She was still wearing her black cloak that Vin had lent her ages ago, more so out of nostalgia than any sort of necessity, but it wasn't quite so easy to grab someone by the cloak. Part of Alka was curious if the angry woman would still try, but she seemed to think better of it.

"To hell with this," she spat, turning and making her way back to camp. The rest of the dismissed Earthers quickly followed suit, deciding rather intelligently that they should quietly obey her directions rather than throw a fit like the first girl.

Alka went to congratulate the remaining Earthers on surviving their very first exercise, when she realized one of the fourteen dismissed ones was still here. A particularly short girl stood before her, her arms crossed and feet planted.

"Did you hear me? I said go back to camp," Alka said, staring her down. "You stopped running. You're not Slayer material."

"I didn't realize you were testing us like that," she said, her lips a thin line as she refused to move. "I'll do better next time."

"There is no next time," Alka said bluntly. "You failed."

"Last I checked it's not a crime to stand here," the girl smirked, raising an eyebrow as if daring Alka to do something. "If you don't want to include me in your little exercises, that's fine by me. I'll just follow along on my own and pick up the Slayer class myself."

Alka stood there, silently staring at the defiant girl. She knew from Vin and Shia that she struck a rather imposing figure, and she knew the unnerving effect she had on people when she stood there, unmoving as she watched someone.

It was a good thing she didn't have a face anymore, because she wouldn't have been able to hide her massive grin.

"Alright," she decided after a long, tense silence that nobody dared to interrupt. "All of you lot who are still here, congratulations on passing the first test to becoming a Slayer."

She turned around, mentally chuckling at the thankful looks on everyone's faces. Those wouldn't last for very long.

"Let's keep going, shall we?"

As the days passed, the number of potential Slayers she had rapidly began to dwindle. Her thirty-two had been quickly cut to only nineteen after just the tree exercise, and she continued to lose another a few more trainees each day as the Earthers decided potentially becoming a Slayer wasn't worth the hell she was putting them through.

She crafted a rickety obstacle course and had them run it over and over again, all the while pelting them with clods of dirt and small rocks while shouting at them to maintain awareness of their surroundings.

She led them into the nearby forest dungeon and forced them to go toe-to-toe with some of the wolf monsters with nothing more than sticks they'd manage to scavenge from the forest floor.

She had Alice help her create a mock battlefield filled with countless pitfall traps, and made the different trainees fight one another with dulled weapons, forcing them to pay attention to both their opponents and the surrounding terrain lest they stumble and fall into one of the hidden pitfalls.

Her training was harsh, and more than one of her trainees had to be sent to Frank or Shia to receive emergency healing when they snapped a bone or received a bloody gash that required immediate attention.

Unfortunately for her, those who ended up being sent for magical healing usually didn't come back.

She wondered if having a guarantee that they'd earn the Slayer class at the end of all this would have helped her keep more trainees fighting for the chance, but she supposed she'd never know. She was upfront with them all from the beginning that this was all one grand experiment to see if she could pass her Slayer class onto them. There was a very likely chance that even after everything she put them through, the ones who managed to push through it all would make it to their first prestige and still not see Slayer as one of their options.

Still, that wasn't to say none of them had what it took to become the first Slayers of Edregon.

"Vin and the combat classes will be in charge of ensuring that if the Red Dawn do end up showing up, they won't be able to mess with the fleeing former prisoners without having a fight on their hands," she explained, directing her head toward each of her nine remaining trainees as they worked on chopping down trees like she'd ordered. "In which case, what will we be doing?"

"Watching for monsters!" Nine different voices immediately answered her, without pausing in their tasks. Each of her trainees was focused on the task she'd given them, but not to the point where they weren't still paying attention to their surroundings. By now, they knew the moment they let themselves get distracted there was a solid chance they'd accidentally step into a hidden pitfall trap, or they'd suddenly find themselves smacked in the back of the head with a clod of dirt and punished with additional physical exercise.

"Exactly!" she nodded. "Now, that's not to say we won't also be keeping our eyes peeled for other threats, but our priority will be on monsters! We'll be running through the desert fragment, and I've seen first hand what the monsters within that fragment are capable of. If you're not careful, you'll end up swallowed whole, or crushed under the weight of a monster far larger than any of you.

"Tiffany!" she barked, directing her next question to the short woman as she finished up cutting down her tree. The defiant girl who had stood up to her and refused to leave that first day had shown that she truly had what it took to be a Slayer, struggling her way through every obstacle Alka put before her and refusing to back down. "What's the best way to approach fighting an elite monster that's slow but powerful?"

"Surround it and utilize our number to whittle it down," she answered immediately, recalling their numerous practices. During training, Alka herself had pretended to be an elite monster, and while it wasn't nearly as good as the real thing, she'd thought she'd done a rather good job of striking fear into their hearts as to just how deadly an elite monster truly was.

Still, she feared finally fighting one in the flesh might cause her to lose another one or two members.

"Chris!" she snapped, causing the youngest of her Earthers to flinch and wait for her question. Chris was dedicated and refused to quit regardless of what she threw at him, but he was a bit more timid than the others. "Tiffany is right, of course, but what if you get separated and have to take on an elite monster on your own? What do you do then?"

Chris hesitated, glancing at his fellow trainees as if hoping someone would help him. "I… I don't know," he finally admitted.

"You kill it," Alka laughed, her eyes flaring at the shocked look on Chris' face. "No matter what it takes, no matter how badly you get hurt, you don't go down until that elite monster does. Once it's finished off and the people you're fighting for are safe, then, I give you permission to lie down and die, but not a moment before. Am I clear?"

She received a chorus of 'yes Slayer!' from her trainees, and for a moment, she almost thought she felt a foreign warmth spread through her chest that she hadn't experienced since she had her own flesh and blood form.

"That's what I like to hear!" she said, raising her warpick over her head and pointing at the nine logs they'd managed to cut down. "Alright, Vin and the combat classes should be just about ready, so let's not waste any more time! The nine of you are to strap those logs onto your backs and carry them with you at all times while we're in the desert! The only time you're allowed to take them off is if you see a monster that needs to be taken care of! Understand?"

She received a slightly more tired chorus of 'yes Slayer!' this time, but by now, nobody was all that surprised at the fact she was taking advantage of this potentially deadly military operation to continue their training. Some might argue that tiring themselves out was a stupid thing to do when they might be mere minutes away from crossing blades with the Red Dawn themselves, but those people had already been weeded out of Alka's little experiment.

Slayers didn't complain about suboptimal conditions for a battle, or not being prepared for what was asked of them.

Slayers did one thing, and one thing only.

They fought monsters. And they never stopped.