Chapter 23: Chapter 23 Basic Education

True to Sarah’s word, the next morning started early. There was a pounding on Nathan’s door and Kachi’s enthusiastic voice sounded loudly. “Get up lead foot! We’re headed out. Don’t hold us up!” Nathan heard a chuckle, then the pounding resumed.

Nathan had been warned about this, so his clothes were laid out and ready. Less than a minute after first awakening, Nathan unbolted the door and stepped out. Khachi hid his surprise well, but seemed a bit put-out that Nathan was up and dressed so quickly. Nathan hurried through his morning ablutions and emerged into the common room to find everybody just finishing getting ready. Stella and Khachi were almost insultingly bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, with Aarl and Sarah visibly annoyed about it.

What followed was a series of exercises that reminded Nathan of descriptions of boot camp physical training. It had clearly taken on the form of a ritual to the Heirs as well. Calisthenics, running several loops around the training hall and then taking on some of the static obstacle courses in the pre-dawn light. Nathan was able to keep up, but only by leaning on his sprinting skill and spending stamina freely. They hadn’t eaten yet, so it wasn’t replenishing much at all even when they did stop to take a breather.

The group was clearly used to pushing each other, and while Stella lagged in the running she didn’t drag or fall behind. Nathan did notice that there was something wonky going on with her run - as if each step was propelled by extra force. Khachi led the exercises, disgustingly cheerful as he vaulted over obstacles in full plate, calling out to everybody in a sing-song chant. Nathan wanted to resent him for it, but the wolffolk just seemed to be having so much fun with it. Nathan didn’t want to snark at his good mood, even if he himself wasn’t a morning person.

After the exercise they trooped into the dining hall as it opened up. The same pudgy man as yesterday was depositing trays of food on the buffet table. The food looked basic, but delicious. Meat, eggs, starchy tubers and piles of vegetables in a rich gravy. The chef winked at them on the way by, wiping his hands on a stained apron as he walked out the door to fetch another load. The Heirs loaded up plates and went to sit at the same central table as before, with Nathan asking the Heirs to stash food in their various magical holding items for him later. They acquiesced with humor. Khachi joked that he wished he could replenish his Faith resource by eating instead of praying. But then he smugly mentioned that Faith allowed for miracles, and he didn’t see Stamina pulling off any of those. Nathan waved his left arm at Khachi dismissively.

Other teams were starting to filter in, but it didn’t seem like anybody else had the morning exercise routine of the Heirs. Nathan asked about it, and apparently Khachi had inherited it from his mother. The parents of the other members of the Heirs had leaned on them to participate, and now it was a habit. Stella did an impression of her father extracting a promise from her, clasping her hands in front of her before softly and seriously saying “For no matter the power of the mage, sometimes it is smart to run away very quickly. And you can’t fly yet, so you can't use that as an excuse like we can.”

Nathan noticed that he wasn't sore after the morning's exercises. Probably [Regeneration] healing his muscles. Nathan wanted to find out if that strengthened them or not - but it was something he'd need to keep an eye on over time. Maybe tomorrow he should bring a snack and do more exercise than the rest of the Heirs.

Next they were off to classes, and this is where they bid each other farewell. Nathan headed off towards tutoring to read and write, and received some ribbing for it. His response was sarcastic “I know how to read and write perfectly well, thank you very much! Just… not in whatever the local language is. You don’t even use the characters I’m used to. Very rude. You should just use the twenty-six characters I’m used to.”

Nathan spent a few hours with Velek learning the characters of the local system. It was a phonetic alphabet, with only twenty characters. But there were four different kinds of modifiers that could be used to change some pronunciations enough that it was closer to thirty-five. At least the modifiers were standardized. In fact, the alphabet seemed less like something that’d evolved naturally and more like something somebody had designed at some point. There weren’t as many idiosyncrasies as there should have been in a naturally-evolving language, and the use of the four modifiers was too systematic.

Nathan shrugged at the realization. It wasn’t like he had proof, and so what? It didn’t mean there was some great mystery - something similar had happened with the Korean alphabet. Some king had decided to design an alphabet from the ground up to make it easy to use and learn, and it’d worked. Nathan was just glad it wouldn’t be too difficult to learn to read and write the language Taeol’s spell had taught him to speak.

After that, Nathan was reunited with the Heirs in a large room with all of the other trainees for their next class. Jolba stomped into the room, froze gossipers with a look and lectured them on the rules of Adventurers. It was a dry list of responsibilities, expectations and privileges, but Nathan found the novel information fascinating. As Adventurers, they were neither free agents nor entirely in service to Gemore. It was more like committing to some amount of public service, which was tracked, and receiving special privileges in return. They would be provided housing, basic necessities and the ‘Adventurer discount’ while being active Adventurers, but were expected to take up jobs in a ‘reasonable’ timeframe, and work not for their own enrichment but for the good of Gemore.

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Jolba emphasized this multiple times, his favorite example being an anonymous adventurer given the choice between finding a magic item and stopping a ravening monster - called a muckgrabber - from entering a town. “You end the threat. Protect those depending on you. That’s the job. If you don’t like it, go somewhere else and be a treasure hunter. But that’s not what it means to be an Adventurer of Gemore.”

From context and some nearby mutters Nathan was able to gather that these weren’t old traditions. This mindset was something that Jolba and the Guildmistress were trying to bake into the next generation. And while the Heirs seemed to be on board, it was clear that not everybody was. Well, it was a sentiment that Nathan could get behind, and this wasn't even his city He didn’t feel properly grounded enough in the world to have enough context for all of the social complexities going on here. It seemed like the general adventurer culture was pretty macho, and that was colliding with Sudraiel's vision of adventurer responsibilities.

The rest of the day proceeded much like the previous one, with Nathan settling further into the group. He was still an object of attention, but the trials of the previous day had mostly settled the Heir’s qualms. When Khachi tried to suggest another spar Stella shut him down hard, and announced that Nathan would practice with Sarah while Aarl and Khachi should “hammer away at each other with your oversized hunks of metal, it’s what you’re good at.”

Sparring with Sarah was a learning experience for Nathan. He’d sparred in martial arts training, but it had been with pads and for points. And while the lessons applied, the availability of easy healing made this an altogether different experience. They fought to surrender or incapacitation, and it should have been a grueling, awful experience. Sarah wasn’t being brutal, and she was telling him where he went wrong, but she also wasn’t holding back. Nathan had his wrists broken, his ribs cracked and his nose crushed more than a few times. But [Brawler’s Indifference] and [Regeneration] made the experience rather tolerable. He could ignore the pain and shock of injuries to continue the fight, and heal the injuries quickly enough. Before long he was digging into the stashes of food to replenish his stamina. Nathan wasn’t entirely sure why he was able to just keep eating and replenish stamina. But, no argument here. There was plenty of food, and it was well-spiced enough that Nathan wasn’t getting bored with it. If he kept this up maybe he would start breathing literal fire eventually.

At first Nathan held himself back from the more vicious blows, but over time he learned that Sarah was superhumanly fast and flexible. So he restrained himself less, allowing himself to take openings for crippling blows as they were presented. Going all-out felt great, and Nathan was thrilled by the spar. It wasn’t the same all-consuming rush as his earlier life-or-death fights - but it had a bit of the same taste. A taste he hadn't felt in spars at home. Those had been dominated by the need for safety. After compensating, Nathan started landing blows on Sarah. His larger build and use of Stamina made his blows hit hard, and Sarah had to be careful to properly block or dodge nearly every one of his attacks. Stella was able to heal minor injuries like bruises and black eyes, though she was visibly uncomfortable doing it. She was frowning at Sarah’s face as one particularly large black eye diminished.

Nathan took the opportunity to ask. “Stella, what’s going on? Is there anything wrong with the healing?”

She shook her head, continuing to watch the progress of the healing as she replied. “No, it’s just that the [Curing] spells are Davrar’s. You channel basic mana in a specific shape and then the person heals. It’s really not magic. It’s… like a cheat. A lot of mages don’t notice, but there’s no way this mana shape is doing the healing. You can tweak the [Curing] a little bit with the inputs, but the changes make no sense, aside from more mana making the healing faster. It’s like you’re tying a useless knot with mana, but then a wound heals.” The mage took a second to collect herself.

“The magic doesn’t make sense. My mom tells me that it’d be impossible to heal people without it, but I don’t like having no idea how the spell actually works! Khachi’s faith is better at this kind of nonsense anyway, but mom says I need to practice. It’s just that there's no rhythm behind this spell, and I don't know why some things work better than others! I like to understand why my spells do what they do.”

Nathan nodded. That frustration made sense to him. But so did Davrar’s guidance of healing spells. Bodies were complicated, and healing in moments was very different from detonating out mana like a fireball. This was exactly the kind of problem Nathan would want to tackle. If he used magic, which he did not. So he smiled sympathetically and said “Yeah, that sounds frustrating. Do you think she means being more comfortable with the injury and the spell?”

Stella shrugged at his words, clearly wanting to avoid the topic. She bent back to polishing off the injury, carefully gazing into Sarah’s eyes to be sure there wasn’t any lasting damage. Then they went back to training.

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