Young Swordmaster's Journey

Alec wanted to know which deity he had pissed off with his birth and how he could meet them so that he could give them a good, cathartic punch to the gut. Because, quite simply, no one's existence should be this eventful unless they had done something to either majorly please or displease some being of a higher power.

"Dammit. Do you think going out the window is the best bet?" Olivia asked as she backed up from his door right after the first two, surprisingly soft, knocks reverberated through his room.

Ordinarily, Alec might have said yes; however, his thoughts were still swirling with questions that burned for answers and confusion that muddled logic. So, instead of panicking or picking the smartest option, Alec only made a soft noise, swung his legs over the edge of his bed, and stood up.

Taking it as a sign that he agreed with her, Olivia made three determined steps in the direction of the window, only to pause and turn around as Alec began to walk in the direction of his door.

"Wha- Alec! What are you doing!?" Olivia hissed, trying to keep her voice as low as possible and only just managing to stop herself from shouting.

"I… Have an idea. Stay near the window, just in case." Alec responded, only the slight waver in his voice showing any of the myriad thoughts that rushed through his head as he reached a calm hand out for his door handle.

Knock Kn-

As the second rap on the door echoed through the room, Alec twisted the handle and opened his door, his gaze expectantly down at the ground before it had even fully opened, which meant that he was already looking in the perfect place to catch the slight widening off the dragon's eyes as its singularly raised claw followed the opening door.

Though that wide-eyed look didn't last much longer than a second and a half before something seemed to click in the dragon's mind, and its surprise died a swift death. Its gaze turned up at Alec as its arm lowered back down to place all four of its limbs on the ground once more.

Alec opened his mouth to say something, only for nothing to come out as his mind seemed to go blank now that he was actually standing there, staring at the very much awake and aware creature at his feet. In terms of physical stature, it may not even come up to his knee, but just staring at its eyes seemed to somehow make it appear so much bigger, and more dangerous too.

Standing beside the half-opened window, Olivia couldn't help but freeze as well as the dragon came into view. Her eyes tracked its every movement, every breath, every action with an unerring accuracy that surprised even her. Instinctually, she was prepared for it to act at a moment's notice, and was preparing herself to do the same. Her mind catalogued everything that it was just to try and glean the slightest advantage over the creature.

After a few moments of staring silently at each other, the dragon looked away and walked past Alec into the room. His face twisted in something that both teens could only assume was something close to mild disgust as he looked around Alec's new room.

Alec hadn't even spoken a single word to this dragon, nor had it even spoken a single word to him, and yet he still somehow managed to feel both snubbed and insulted. A feat that he was sure only something with a standing like a dragon could ever pull off, but still annoying to be on the receiving end of.

With a near-silent push off the ground and a brief flap of its wings, the dragon landed on Alec's bed and paused. Slowly, a leg lifted, and its weight shifted, then the leg came back down and pushed experimentally onto the mattress. Back, forwards, left, right. Its weight shifted from axis to axis as it essentially began to knead and prod his mattress, its pupils thinning with each test that the mattress seemed to fail.

Based on legends that Alec had heard, dragons slept on stone, precious metals, and priceless gemstones, so he wasn't quite sure why it was so annoyed at his mattress. All that he knew was that it was and that he was suddenly trying to calculate the cost of a new bed in his head and hoping that it didn't have to come to that.

Finally, though, the dragon curled up on the bed and closed its eyes. Though the young creature's annoyance and discomfort could pretty clearly be seen by both teens, even with their relative lack of knowledge regarding dragons and the intricacies of their body language.

Both of them were silent for a few seconds, just watching the dragon as it tried to find a comfortable spot to sleep in. A shift here, a shift there, a mild huff that seemed to ever so minutely heat the air around it.

"Alright. You just….do what you want." Alec mumbled dryly, jabbing a thumb over his shoulder frantically when Olivia looked over at him in surprise.

They had done everything they could to avoid the dragon before this morning, and most definitely hadn't spoken so loudly or directly in its presence. She couldn't understand a single part of Alec's thought process, but it didn't seem to be backfiring on them just yet, so she'd go along with it.

Besides, he was gesturing for both of them to leave his room now, and that was something that she was in no way dawdling to do.

Which meant that a minute later, and one softly closed door left in their wake, both of them were outside Alec's room and in the hallway of their new, pretty much completely deserted, dormitory building.

"Alec, what the hell was that?" Olivia wasted no time asking him, only getting a tired sigh from the teen in front of her as he brushed some hair out of his eyes with one hand.

"I was thinking about the dragon's actions, everything it's done since its appearance, before you came into my room this morning, and I think I've had a realization." He replied simply, a placating hand already in the air before she could even fully open her mouth to start arguing with him.

"I think there's something about me that's drawing it in. And I think that it's just looking for somewhere to sleep. I'm fairly certain that it's not a threat….at least not an active one."

"That doesn't fill me with confidence."

"It doesn't fill me with it either." He shot back with a small roll of his eyes, only realizing after the fact that such a response wouldn't win him any brownie points.

"Oh, goodie."

"Anyway," He was quick to continue, trying to brush past his more blunt than intended language in the face of her very real worry, "I don't think that we're getting rid of the dragon anytime soon, so I thought it best that I just try to….get used to it."

"…"

"…"

"…One day you're going to get yourself killed and you're going to have no one but your own stupidity to blame for it."

"That bad, huh?"

"Your reasoning makes sense, I suppose. But trying to socialize with a dragon is the height of idiocy, no matter what context it falls into."

"Would you rather I try and fight it, then?" He asked coolly, raising an eyebrow at her.

"That's the one option that is worse, Dius."

"Exactly." He stated dryly, "I'm going to go to one of the early morning classes since I'm already up and out of my room. What about you?"

"The footwork one or the parrying one?"

"The parrying one. The footwork classes always feel…off to me, somehow."

"Alright then, give me five minutes and I'll join you."

"Want me to wait here then?"

"No need." She shook her head and opened the door to her own dorm, "It's not like it will take long for me to get to class, you might as well just meet me there."

"Alright, sounds like a plan." Alec nodded and turned on the ball of his foot, only to realize that he was still shirtless and wearing only underwear and a pair of worn-in pants.

And so, with a quiet wish to anything or anyone that may be listening that his theory about the dragon and its temperament was true, he opened the door to his dorm and quickly walked back in.

XXXxxxXXX

Twenty Minutes Later, Dragon-Scale Academy Training Yard

Clack Clack Clack!

The three blows met Olivia's guard in a rapid rhythm, her eyes narrowing only slightly as she tilted the alignment of her blade and caught another blow. It was child's play for her to follow the natural rotation of her blade in response and bring it up and around in a move she had seen Alec do more than once, often against her.

Her blade met that of her opponent's, brought up in a hasty static block above his head that nearly ended up with him bashing himself in the head with his own weapon from the force of her strike.

Locked in a stalemate like this, she was always bound to lose; it was inevitable. From his position, he had all the muscles in his body to push back and up against her while she had only the muscles in her arms, and perhaps some of her back as well. It would simply never function the way that she would prefer it to.

Therefore, she just didn't play that game. In a motion that seemed to surprise her opponent more than it ever should have, she drew back a half-step and shifted the point of her blade. Instead of falling to her base desire to press down on him and flare her mana in a brute force attempt to break through his guard, which just felt so primitive now, she dredged up memories of her numerous spars with Alec and the myriad of moves and techniques that he had pulled out, to varying effect.

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This was parrying practice, so she couldn't go too hard on the offensive here, sadly, but she had just the kind of bait and switch that someone like him clearly wouldn't know how to handle. A shift of her weight, an adjustment to her grip on her blade, an emotionless face, and a simple raised eyebrow. All small changes, but enough to elicit just the kind of response that she wanted.

A roar left the boy in front of her as he leapt towards her from his previous kneeling position, his blade trailing behind him at his side as he prepared what was no doubt meant to be a big, powerful swing. She had to give him props for at least retaining some semblance of control over himself and not attempting some wild overhead strike, but his target couldn't have been anymore clearer.

She had been just like that when she had first entered the Academy, too, hadn't she? Well-executed but simple moves, basic moves, ones that you could burn into your muscle memory easily, and that didn't really require much to pull off with an average amount of skill. When had she started to see such a move as mediocre? When had that change occurred that had turned his reaction from the natural response to his position, a skillful response even, to something dry and dull and quite frankly annoying?

'Ugh. I actually miss sparring with Alec.'

Her opponent's blade glanced off hers like a drop of water off a duck's back, his body wobbling unsteadily as he placed a heavy foot down to press into a lock with her and only found himself tipping forward and to the side instead.

'What would he have done there? Certainly not expect me just to meet my blade with his and push back uselessly against him.'

Her blade met her opponent's three more times in rapid succession, her impassive gaze locked not onto his eyes, as his own seemed to be continually trying to do with hers, but with his body instead.

'Locking eyes with an opponent is a regular move of mages. A sign of respect for another follower of the path of magic.' She repeated the words that her mother had told her so many years ago, when her training to be an adventurer had been in its infancy.

So why, then, did her opponent keep trying to do it while they were having a sword fight?

Melee fights were, almost by necessity, fast-paced and brutal affairs. Despite what her mother had told her, Olivia knew that a mage could only get away with such an 'honourable' move so frequently because they had the spacing and external shielding to keep themselves safe while doing so. In a sword fight like this, spacing, positioning, intention, and prediction were what decided the winner from the loser and vice versa.

They quite simply did not have the time to waste so much of it hamstringing their fighting ability in some attempt to see what shade her eyes happened to be.

It was a simple thing, at the end of the day, but one that she found her blood being set on fire by, and her brain buzzing with every instance that she noticed it. She wanted people to come at her with their absolute best, to face her with every ounce of their ability and force her to grow stronger for it, to prove that she can handle anything that they throw at her.

Once upon a time, this simple action of looking one another in the eye amidst a heated exchange hadn't annoyed her like this either, when had that changed?

With a crack and a loud cry of pain, her opponent fell to the ground while gripping his face, his blade dropped on the ground at his feet, and both of his hands were protecting his face. Standing above him, her breathing fairly even and her foot stood on the tip of his training blade to stop him from suddenly grabbing it, the young adventurer stared down with a blank gaze.

'Huh? I didn't strike him that hard. It should only be enough to leave a small welt. I only jabbed the pommel into his forehead, and it's not like I was trying to knock him out or anything…'

"YOU BASTARD!"

The cry of sheer rage caught her attention and brought her gaze over to her right, where she could see what looked to be an elvish, or half-elvish, boy swinging wildly, and the rolling wave that was Alec.

Ever since that [Gold-Rank] quest and the water elemental, Alec had been incorporating new and, quite aggravating, movements and blade techniques into his arsenal. Constantly shifting around his opponents and forcing them to adapt or fall to his blade's edge. Honestly, with the new patterns he was developing with his blade movements, facing him in a parrying class was a bit unfair to anyone who wasn't used to the teen and all the unpolished parts of his skillset; namely, anyone who wasn't Olivia.

He was refraining from the slimier of his regular move set, she noticed, not tripping or blocking their movements, nor hitting them with the hilt or pommel of his blade, as Olivia had just done. Yet despite that, the difference in their performance may as well have been night and day.

The elven boy's strikes were linear, static, by-the-book strikes that she could read through with an ease that honestly startled her a little. Alec's strikes, in comparison, were a constantly moving and shifting circular monstrosity of a fighting style, forcing the other teen to back off constantly, even when Alec left openings and flaws specifically for him to attempt his parries on.

With the flaws that he was leaving open, Olivia could see multiple possible routes to strike back with each movement that he did, and yet all that the elven boy did was run in recklessly and retreat frantically in a constant cycle. It was amusing, yet equally infuriating, to watch, and she really didn't know how to feel about this all.

Which was why, when Alec ended the spar with a decisive throwing of the other teen's blade to the side of their training area, all she could do was sigh in relief. Unaware of the looks that she got from a variety of people around her at the fact that she seemed so relieved for a regular spar to be over.

A variety of whispers and murmurs began to go up around her, but all she could pay attention to was the veiled look of dissatisfaction that covered Alec's expression as he tapped the tip of his blade idly on the ground at his side.

Once upon a time, she may not have noticed such an expression; once upon a different time, she would have noticed the expression and been utterly confused as to why he looked so dissatisfied with such a spar. Now, however? Now she not only noticed but understood his reaction down to her very core.

Those kinds of opponents, those attack and movement patterns, they were utterly childish. Simple and naïve in their form and function to a point where it almost took more energy to point out all their flaws than it did to actually exploit them.

"Dius," She called out as she walked over, his attention turning to her naturally as she did so, "Are you taking another class immediately after this one or putting a break between them?"

"A break." He responded simply, shrugging and resting his wooden blade on his shoulder.

"Great. How about you and I stay behind after the lesson and do some sparring then?"

"Heh. The day when Olivia Kio, of all people, would ask me to spar." Alec smirked minutely at her, only getting a squint from her eyes at him.

"Just for that, Dius. I'm going to make it hurt."

"You can try, Kio."

Alright, that confirmed it. She was going to break his legs with a wooden sword. She wasn't sure how she was going to achieve that just yet, but she would find a way.

XXXxxxXXX

An Hour Later

Two thrusts of Olivia's blade at Alec's ankles veered off to the side wildly as they met the edge of Alec's own weapon, a following rising swipe from her bottom-left to top-right was dodged in its entirety as Alec lurched back and retreated with a small spin to stop her from pressing the advantage of his broken posture.

Like always, the two of them found themselves practicing in relative privacy as the training yard was left unoccupied after so long of the class going through something as 'simple' as parrying basics. Though neither of them minded all that much, in fact, they actually preferred it this way compared to them being surrounded by some murmuring crowd.

What it did mean, though, was that when someone actually did approach them, both of them were rather quick to notice. The approaching footsteps of the arriving party broke both of them from their readied stances as they turned to face whoever it was that was coming to them.

Said figure turned out to be the spiky-haired, freckled young man who was Callum. His grin wide and beaming as he made his way over, one of the academy's standard practice blades sheathed at his hip and a small bounce in his step.

"Heyo! Feels like I haven't seen you in a while, Alec." Callum greeted him cheerfully as he stopped with a small bounce.

"Because you haven't. We've both been busy." Alec responded with a small smile, getting a sheepish laugh from the older boy before he turned to look at Olivia.

"And you're Olivia Kio, right? I've heard a bunch of the rumours!" He smiled and held a hand out to her, which only got a coolly raised eyebrow and a half-second shake of her own hand before she pulled it back quickly.

"Well met."

"Woah, the rumours really weren't wrong. You are a total Ice Queen."

"Alec, who is this dunce?"

"Callum, one of our upperclassmen. I spar with him occasionally. He's actually pretty nice."

"See? No need to bite my head off." Callum grinned nervously with both of his hands raised in surrender.

"He's also a pretty good swordsman." Alec interjected before Olivia could retort with something that would no doubt burn the young man's ego even further, "His stamina is completely insane."

"Thanks for the compliment, I think?"

"Good." Alec shot back, a small twinkle of teasing enjoyment in his eyes as Callum squawked in faux-outrage at his response.

"Hm…There aren't many in the academy that Alec genuinely considers skilled." Olivia mumbled quietly, though both of the other boys caught it, exchanging silent looks.

For Callum, it was because he had heard the rumours, and teased Alec about them a couple of times, but seeing them interact in person, and having just heard her mumbled comment, he couldn't help but understand where a bunch of the rumours regarding the both of them came from.

For Alec, it was because he never actually realized that Olivia had taken his opinion on who was and wasn't a good swordsman into serious consideration. He knew that she had nodded or made small comments when he had stumbled his way through why they were bad swordsmen –which usually amounted to something along the lines of 'they just couldn't fight properly', since he struggled to put a lot of his observations into words– but he had never actually realized that she had not only been genuinely paying attention to his comments but logging them down too.

"Alright." Both boys looked back at her as she spoke up, her blade raised at Callum and her foot sliding back to put her in a more grounded stance.

Alec's eyes rolled in good humour, Callum's grin stretched into something halfway between gleeful and demonic.

"One spar, prove to me that Alec's opinion of you is true, and I'll play nice for a little bit. Deal?"

"Heh. Yeah." Callum took a few steps forward and unsheathed his blade, twirling it a few times before crouching down into a stance clearly meant for quick leaps forward.

The hair on Olivia's neck rose ever so slightly, and her gaze sharpened unconsciously as she gripped her blades' wooden hilt more tightly. A shine of something lit up Callum's eyes, and the unmistakable sensation of his magic filling his body hit her senses.

"Deal."

The ground beneath him compacted rapidly as he launched himself at her with his blade raised high, and all Olivia could think as he brought her blade up to defend against the crushing blow was that he better have the kind of stamina Alec alluded to, or he was going to crash and burn long before she managed to beat him herself.