Chapter 80: Chapter 69 – Refamiliarization

"Ask any seasoned fighter, and they will tell you, that while they can use most anything they get their hands on, they would still favor a weapon they are used to, and have used for a while ideally.

 

As fighters and soldiers, we usually have a specific weapon type we favor, but also train to be able to use most anything in hand as a weapon. While most weapons are simple enough, some often takes a good amount of time to familiarize oneself with, and these are usually less popular since you rarely have that luxury in the midst of battle, and weapons do break.

 

Young lady Aideen has the latter issue entirely covered of course. Weapons made from adamant are the envy of us soldiers, for who would refuse a weapon that would literally never get damaged or break?" - Myrddin deVreys, Commander of the Death's Hand, circa 64 VA.

Palace of Bones, Tohrmutgent, Lichdom of Ptolodecca, second day of the third week of the eighth month.

 

Aideen trained alone in the rear courtyard of the cathedral, with logs as thick as an arm set around her in a wide circle. They were just placed lightly on the ground, and not supported in any way, ready to tip over with the slightest touch.

 

Around Aideen's body was a dizzying blur of black metal as she spun her weapon around her at high speeds, so fast that the eye would only register a blur. It had taken her a whole month to acclimatize herself with the weight of the new weapon and how it affected its balance, and a whole other month before she stopped hitting herself by accident with it while she trained.

 

By now she was more than used to the new weapon, its hefty weight a comforting thing in her hands, as she whirled it around her in its three-sectioned form with both blades out, on both ends. Whatever contraption the dwarven smith designed was done so well that the balance felt the same regardless of whether she had the blades out or not.

 

With a flair of her hand, she sent the weapon on a wide swing, and all the logs around her toppled over nearly simultaneously as she caught the whirling staves with her hands and looked around to inspect her handiwork. Around half the logs were split into two with a clean horizontal cut, while another two had a deep gash but wasn't cut through, and the rest were intact save a slight dent to their sides.

 

She looked at the glistening jet black blades on her weapon, with not the slightest nick on them. When she inspected it magically she could feel the thrum of the enchantments laid on them as well, with the smaller components and the main body of the weapon itself enchanted for more durability - likely overkill considering how ridiculously durable Adamant was, though an understandable precaution given the small, fine components within - and a second enchantment that repelled magic, one reason she couldn't inspect it too closely.

 

The blades had more surface area, and they were given an extra enchantment that made them even keener, their edge so fine people could shave with them. It was that fine edge coupled with the weapon's hefty weight and momentum that had allowed her to slice those logs cleanly, though her control of it had still faltered somewhere in the middle of the strike.

 

Sighing, she raised the logs again one by one, carefully setting them into place again. To be fair, she had made fast progress, as at first more often than not she would fail to even strike her target with the blade of the weapon, or angled the blow wrong and get the blade stuck in the wood instead.

 

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She chuckled as she remembered how more than a few times she had stabbed and sliced herself with them by accident while she trained. The blades had parted flesh and cleaved bone with ease, propelled as it was by the weight and momentum behind it. It was also designed to be extracted easily from a body, other than in cases like where she got it stuck in a log.

 

The lack of a training partner she could go all out with was slightly bothersome, but then again, if she counted it right, by now she had trained with her weapon for three entire decades. Grandpa Aarin did help her out from time to time by having some Death Knights or Bone beasts serve as her training partner, but they felt somewhat lacking, compared to someone with an active mind.

 

When she thought about it, ever since she had died that day, she had been like a leaf being carried by the flow of a stream. Things had moved so fast, and she was still a young girl at the time, that she just followed along. Not that she thought her parents did her wrong. She would have probably done similarly in their position.

 

Now that decades had passed though, she started to think more about herself, for herself. Strangely enough, leaving Vitalica had been a catalyst to that, as it had changed her thinking from what was good for her nation as a whole, to just what was good for her group of refugees at that time. Now that the refugees were secure and rebuilding their lives anew, even that was no longer needed, and she started thinking just for herself for the first time.

 

Aideen had often pondered over the past few years on what she would be doing with the rest of her "life", considering that by grandpa Aarin's best guess she might well be immortal by this point. One disturbing fact that bothered her was how none of the other countries around them seemed to have accepted other Unliving like her with open arms, as even now there was still a small, yet steady trickle of them seeking refuge in Ptolodecca.

 

There were not that many of them, to be fair. Over the three decades since the day she died and rose into unlife, there had been ten people who also rose into unlife in Ptolodecca alone, and approximately forty more who had come in seeking refuge from their neighboring lands.

 

Those who came seeking refuge, were often brokenhearted, and told tales where their own loved ones had balked at them, and in more than a few cases burned them at the stake as if they were an abomination, or worse, despite the protests of the local clergy of Tohrmut.

 

Then again, Tohrmut was rarely worshipped in other regions, and southern Ur-Teros where the necromancer nations thrived was the Deity's primary grounds of worship, and thus his clergy in other regions rarely have much influence if any, when they were not downright looked down upon that is.

 

Aideen wondered, if in the future, when she had laid down the bonds of her past, that maybe she could try do something about that.

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