Chapter 54

My friends, sisters and I wouldn’t be doing anything more than watch for a little bit, so we sat down on the mats so she could go over the first of the techniques we would be practicing today. After a while, one of the members of her team came out, dressed head to toe in his matte black armor.

“Okay. The first technique we’ll be looking at is the Palm Strike, or Palm Heel Strike. I’ll show you a full speed and full power version before breaking it down. Ready, Amos?”

“Ready,” the man nodded.

Amos began coming at Kiri who got into her fighting stance as he approached. She had her knees bent and her hands held out in front of her. As soon as Amos was within range, she stepped forward and struck faster than we could see. We were surprised to see Amos going flying several feet backwards from the force of the hit, landing softly thanks to the cushioned mats behind him.

Kiri walked over and helped her teammate up before turning to the rest of us.

“A Palm Strike can be a very useful tool, either to force someone back or cause an incredible amount of pain, depending on where you hit them. I hit Amos in the chest, though the main target for a Palm Strike is the nose. Anyone who has been hit in the nose knows how much it hurts. I’ll do one more full speed demonstration, this time on our trusty training dummy’s nose.”

Amos walked over and grabbed the dummy and proceeded to place it where he was previously standing. Once it was placed, he stood behind it and braced it for Kiri’s hit. When she was ready, she got in her combat stance and closed the distance. Like before, she struck incredibly quickly, causing the dummy’s head to bend backward unnaturally. The dummy shrugged it off though, taking the hit without even the slightest bit of damage.

“You’ve probably noticed that my hands are held up but they are completely relaxed,” she said, turning towards us while still in her stance. “With relaxed hands, you can quickly move into a punch, Palm Strike or grab without telegraphing your intent. You can also more easily block with relaxed hands, as the muscles in your arms won’t be tensed up, slowing the speed at which you can move.”

“Moving on, a Palm Strike is probably one of the simplest ways to hit someone. In some ways, simpler than punching. A Palm Strike uses the outside of the palm, here, or the heel of the palm, here,” she said, touching the parts of her hand.

“To perform a Palm Strike, you hold your hand parallel to your target, with your thumb tucked in and your fingers straight. You can tightly clench your fingers as well, but if your strike misses its mark and hits above the eyes, then you can easily break a few bones. If hitting someone in the chest, it doesn’t matter as much, but I recommend a flat hand.”

“A common mistake that people make when practicing the Palm Strike is that they keep their hands in this position all the time,” she said, holding both flat hands up in front of her. “This is very bad, because your arms are tensed up to keep your fingers straight and your thumb tucked in, slowing the speed and reducing the power of your strikes. On top of that, your opponent will know exactly what your plan is. You’re telegraphing it the entire way.”

“The proper way to do it is to keep your hands relaxed as you begin the strike, switching to the correct position while you’re moving,” she said, demonstrating the technique. “I’ll show you a few more slow motion Palm Strikes before we get the pads out and you can attempt it yourselves.”

Amos had gotten one of the pads in question. Holding it out in front of him, Kiri began repeatedly hitting it with Palm Strikes while talking us through it. When performing each strike, her hands didn’t change in the slightest by the time they were halfway between her and her target. Only after that midway point did she finally start flattening her hand as she tucked in her thumb. Her arm almost hit full extension about an inch away from the target as she rotated her body to get the maximum amount of power.

“Oh, one more thing before you guys can get started,” she said, holding her hand up with her palm facing us. “It is very important that you keep your thumb tucked in like mine is right now. If you don’t tuck it in and miss, then it is very easy for your thumb to get bent backwards, spraining it at best and breaking it at worse. As you practice, make sure to keep your thumb safe.”

“There is a benefit to keeping the thumb tucked in as well. Each of you hold your hands up like mine, with your thumb un-tucked.” Once we had done what she asked, she continued. “Alright, now tuck your thumb in like mine. You’ll notice immediately how your entire hand tightens up, particularly as you bend the knuckle in your thumb. When your hand is tighter, it’s also much stronger, allowing you to hit just a little bit harder.”

“Alright. I want everyone to break off into groups of two. Anja, Sonja, I would like you two to start off holding the pads, since the two of you are more experienced than everyone else is. If you see your partner doing something wrong, point it out so they can fix it. And that’s all I have to say for now.”

We broke off into four groups of two; Mason and Anja, Ben and Sonja, Alexis and Lucille and finally Aleena and I. Each group picked up one of the pads that Amos was holding when he and Kiri were demonstrating at lower speeds, which were about two feet long and had handles on either end. I held it at first, allowing Aleena to go first.

She was doing exactly what Kiri said not to do, holding her hands out flat rather than having them relaxed as she began her strike. As she performed the strike over and over, she slowly got better and better, with the strikes becoming progressively harder as she started putting her bodyweight into it.

Kiri, Amos and the other members were circling the room, correcting us whenever they saw any issues or otherwise giving us some tips. After about twenty minutes she had us switch places, with Aleena holding the pad while I practiced the strike. There was a pretty big disparity in our heights, so you can probably imagine how hard it was for her to hold up the pad while I was hitting it. Along with the height difference, I was also quite a bit stronger than she was, resulting in her being hit in the head a few times as my strikes drove the pad into her face.

Thankfully there was a quick solution to both of those issues. Handing the pad to me, she began switching into her own dragonkin form which would increase both her height and her strength. She also modified her form so that she topped out at around six and a half feet tall, making sure that we were on even footing, so to speak.

I’d had a little bit of experience with punching monsters already, so learning how to perform a Palm Strike wasn’t too difficult. The hardest part was probably keeping my hand relaxed as I began the strike, but that got easier as time went on. I had improved quite a bit when Kiri told us to stop and direct our attention back over to her team.

“Now that you’ve got the gist of how to perform a Palm Strike, we’ll get into another drill. We’ll give you a quick demonstration and then you’ll break off into two groups of four. It’s sort of a monkey in the middle drill. I’ll be in the middle, and Amos, Yti and Suga will form a triangle around me, each with one of the pads in hand. Once I say start, one of them will roughly bump me from behind. I will immediately turn in their direction and begin to rapidly perform a series of Palm Strikes until I am bumped again. When that happens, I’ll turn and start focusing on the person who bumped me.”

Moving into the center of the room, Kiri stood while the other three encircled her. When she said start, Amos pushed her from behind, starting the drill. Spinning in place, she moved into her stance and threw a flurry of Palm Strikes towards the pad that Amos was holding. After a few seconds, Yti roughly shoved her from behind and she turned, repeating the process. They went for about a minute and a half before stopping.

“Okay, now that you’ve seen the drill, I want the eight of you to repeat it. I’m going to keep both of you separated, so Mason, Anja, Alexis and Lucille in the first group and Ben, Sonja, Aleena and Jonathan in the second group,” she said pointing at the twins. “We’ll go with thirty seconds at a time to start and then slowly ramp that up to about two minutes. Go grab a couple of extra pads and then we’ll get started.”

Once we had our pads, we moved back onto the mat, making sure to spread out a bit so we wouldn’t bump into the other group inadvertently. The twins ended up being the ‘monkey’s to start with, as both of them had prior fighting experience and had gone through this drill before.

When we were in position, Kiri came over to our group and picked someone to push to start us off, though after that it would be much more random. That person actually ended up being me, which was good because I was the strongest person in the group and didn’t want to push anyone so hard that they went flying a few feet.

Both Mason and I had actually had a few small issues getting used to our newfound strength. We were pretty strong before we started adventuring because we both played football in high school, but our strength had doubled or tripled in only a couple short weeks. There were a few incidents with shattered glasses and one with a broken tap, but we had a decent handle on it. We still had to be careful when picking stuff up because while it felt like we were using the same amount of force, we were actually using much more.

When the whistle sounded, I gently nudged Sonja, starting us off. I used very little strength, which meant that she barely even moved at all, but I immediately prepared for the assault. The benefit of being so much stronger meant that the pad didn’t move very much, even with Sonja hitting pretty hard.

After a few seconds, she was nudged again, this time by Ben. He used a bit more strength than I did, requiring Sonja to keep herself balanced so she wouldn’t fall over. Once she had recovered, she turned and started throwing another flurry of Palm Strikes until she was bumped once again.

She ended up spinning nine or ten times before Kiri called us to switch. Ben handed the pad to Sonja before taking her place. There wasn’t a whistle the second time, so as soon as we were ready, we began. This time Sonja started us off, pushing Ben more roughly than we had been pushing her.

I could see the reason for that, though. Of the eight of us, Ben was the one with the absolutely least amount of experience with fighting in melee or hand-to-hand combat. He was tentative in the first drill we did, though he wasn’t tentative at all, now. In fact, he was throwing harder Palm Strikes when Sonja nudged him than he was when Aleena and I did.

“Switch!”

I handed my pad to Ben and then stepped into the middle. Getting into my stance, I rotated in place until I was nudged. Aleena was the one to start us off, so I turned and began throwing Palm Strikes at the pad she was holding. I held back a bit since she was back in her human form, and I had already sent a pad flying toward her face previously.

The next time I was nudged it was by Sonja, but I barely moved at all. Spinning in place, I began striking at the pad she was holding. She wasn’t prepared for my strength with the first two or three, but she quickly adapted and held the pad relatively stable for the rest of my first round. Ben had a little bit more difficulty, as he hadn’t put more than a few points into Strength thus far.

After Aleena had gone and we all had gotten our toes wet, Kiri told us to go again, this time for two minutes at a time. We decided to go with the same order, so Sonja handed off her pad to Aleena and then stepped into the middle of the ring. When she was in position, we started again.

Kiri, Amos, Yti and Suga went around correcting anything we were doing wrong, which wasn’t a whole lot. Some of us had the mistake of holding our hands flat the entire time, or not tucking in our thumb, but those were minor issues. With more and more practice, they would disappear. After twenty minutes or so, the whistle sounded again.

“Okay, one more drill before we move onto the second technique I wanted to look at today. Amos and Suga will help me this time, and then you’ll break off into your previous pairs. My team and I will be helping out for this, and you’ll see why in a moment.”

Amos had the pad again, and he stood directly in between Kiri and Suga. Kiri was actually behind Amos this time but she didn’t have a pad in her hands, which confused me.

“This is an awareness drill,” Kiri said. “Amos is going to call out a number between one and six, and that will be the amount of times that Suga needs to hit with her Palm Strike. At the same time, I will be pointing to either my left or my right, and Suga will need to call that out. It will be to my left or my right, not hers. Just to make it a little bit harder and to make her think. We’ll demonstrate it now and then you guys can try it out.”

They started when Yti blew the whistle, Amos calling out ‘three’ and Kiri throwing out her left arm. Once Suga had hit the pad three times, she called out ‘left’ and then Amos called out another number. They went for about forty-five seconds before Yti called time, signaling them to stop.

After we had formed into our original groups, Kiri and her team spread out and joined us for this drill. Kiri went with Alexis and Lucille, Yti with Mason and Anja, Suga with Ben and Sonja, and then Amos with Aleena and I. Aleena wanted to go first, so I grabbed the pad and stood in between her and Amos.

There was no whistle or anything to start us off, so everyone started whenever they were ready. It was a little confusing at first with four different people calling out numbers and another four calling out directions, but we got the hang of it soon enough. It still wasn’t easy, though. There were plenty of errors even after we had spent a while performing the drill, either calling out the wrong direction or hitting the pad too much or too little. It would be another thing we would have to get better with as we practice more.

After about thirty minutes and a bunch of switching off, Kiri blew her whistle, ending the first drill. We were given a few minutes to grab a drink or go to the bathroom before taking a seat on the mat so she could go over the second technique we would be learning today.

“Alright, so now that you’ve got the basics of the Palm Strike down, now we’re going to move to our first kick. The one you’ll be learning first is called the Front Instep Kick. It can end a fight pretty quickly in some cases, but in others it will just be a little painful. I’m not going to subject any of my teammates to it, so I’ll demonstrate it on the pad that Amos is holding,” Kiri explained.

I immediately knew what was coming, just based on the description she gave and the level at which Amos was holding the pad. I reflexively put one of my hands over my groin as Kiri got into her fighting stance with one foot in front of the other. When she was ready, she unleashed a very fast kick that swept upward, hitting the bottom of the pad.

Slowing it down, she explained how to perform the kick. It looked like a pretty simple kick to the groin, but there was much more to it. As soon as her back foot came off the ground, she was moving her hip forward until it was over her forward foot, while simultaneously leaning backwards. The combination of those two things was what was responsible for the majority of the power.

“When performing a Front Instep Kick, you want to hit with the top, or instep of your foot to get the maximum amount of power. If you hit with your shin or your toes then your kick won’t be nearly as powerful and you might injure yourself. There is still the risk if the person moves out of the way a little and your foot gets bent back, but as you get faster there will be less time for your opponent to react,” she said. “Okay, get into your groups of two and my team and I will be around to help you out.

It was a bit harder to learn than the Palm Strike had been, but we got the hang of it, eventually. There weren’t any other drills for this technique other than practicing, so we spent two hours on it alone. After about an hour there were dummies setup so we didn’t have to take turns holding the pad while the other one kicked it, allowing us to get a bit more practice in.

The twins had no problem with the technique whatsoever, so after that first hour they joined Kiri and her team in making sure that the rest of us weren’t doing anything wrong, giving us tips along the way. Once those two hours were up we were done for the day, so we cleaned up and headed to the mess for lunch.

“So today’s the day, huh?” Mason asked. “In a few hours you’ll be able to change your form at will.”

I nodded while setting a small plate down on the bench for Vixa. “I’m pretty excited. I’ve got a few different things I wanna try out, though I might wait until we get to Veria. Kiri said that there is a big menagerie there that takes up something like eight hundred thousand square kilometers of land and ocean. There are thousands of different species that call it home, with some very nasty reptilian species living there as well.”

“Like dinosaurs?” Ben asked.

“Maybe? She didn’t go into it too much, but they didn’t have an extinction-level event like Earth did. There are probably some species that look like dinosaurs, but I don’t think they’ll be the same size as the ones that roamed the earth millions of years ago. Didn’t they only get that big because of the high-oxygen concentration back then?”

“That was a big part of it,” Ben nodded. “That’s why there were dragonflies with wingspans measuring two feet long. Insects benefit the most from a high-oxygen concentration, but it helps with other animals, too. The more oxygen in the atmosphere, the easier it is to supply oxygen to the muscles. That’s what allows animals to get pretty big and not collapse under their own weight.”

“Well I don’t think I’ll be turning into a dragonfly anytime soon, but I’ll definitely be taking some time to scan some animals when we get to the Mezotis system, and again before we delve into a dungeon on Veria.”

“Are there not any dungeons on either of the planets in the Mezotis system?” Anja asked.

“There shouldn’t be,” Ben replied. “Not unless there is an intelligent lifeform living on one of those planets that has gone undetected since the planets were first discovered. I’ve been doing some reading on the Net and apparently dungeons only form once a species reaches a certain level of intelligence. No one knows how it works exactly, but scientists have hypothesized that a species’ mana signature will change with their intelligence. Only once a certain threshold has been reached will a dungeon form.”

“The extremely rich actually find or buy dead worlds and then terraform them until they’re habitable. Once they are, then they actually pay people to move to the planet so new dungeons will form. They’ll only be at the level of a dungeon like the one in Algonquin Park, but they’ll increase in level pretty quickly as the people living there delve into them.”

“So how long will it take until dungeons start forming on Mezotis 3 and 4?” I asked.

“One will probably form within a few months, especially with the amount of mana that the dragon eggs are currently putting off, but after that it will take longer and longer. Dungeons can’t form too close together, so the mana saturation around their original settlement will increase very quickly, but after that it will need to spread around the planet in sufficient quantities to spark new dungeons.”

“That’s pretty cool. I wonder if the dragons will head into the dungeons at all. I know they can’t level or use Skill Gems, but it could be a way for them to make some extra credits,” Anja said.

I chuckled. “I don’t think they’ll have any issues making credits to trade with others, though that won’t stop the younger generations from entering dungeons. I believe they loaded up thousands of tons of rare metals and gems into Abi’s dimensional storage. On top of that, they’ve also got an entire planetary system they can mine. It’ll actually probably be pretty similar to how we’ve been playing Battlestate, though they’ll have a big step up on us.”

“Welcome back. Hello, Vixa!” Kiri said when Vixa and I entered the room.

Vixa, acting almost like a dog, ran over and jumped up on Kiri, leaving her back two feet on the ground while the other four were on Kiri’s legs.

“Do you want up?” Kiri asked, drawing a quick squeaky bark out of Vixa.

Laughing, Kiri picked her up, receiving a few licks to the face.

“So are you ready to get started?” she asked me.

“Absolutely,” I nodded.

“Okay, so it isn’t very difficult and won’t take more than a few hours, but it’s always helpful to have someone around to show you when you’ve done something wrong. There isn’t any risk in combining attributes from different animals, until you finish and transform into the new form. That’s when Scyftans new to shapeshifting run into issues.”

“I’ll give you an example so you get an idea of what I mean. When your mom helped you with your Seotross-human hybrid form, she did a bunch of little things to make it viable. She made your lungs and heart a bit bigger so you could pump more blood and get oxygen to the new arms. At the same time, she also strengthened all of your veins so they wouldn’t burst with the higher blood pressure.”

“You’ve got to keep stuff like that in mind when you make a new form. When in doubt, it is better to overbuild your new form than underbuild it. You can always go back later and tone things down, but you want to make sure that it is viable from the start.”

“Understood. So how do we do this?”

“You’ll need to let me into your mind so I can observe. You can shield the parts of your mind that have nothing to do with shapeshifting, but I will need to be able to see what you’re doing so I’m able to correct any mistakes. Abi will put up a barrier around the room when you’re ready, just so there will be a bit of privacy.”

Nodding, I took a seat on one of the mats and closed my eyes. It was easy to allow her entrance to a small portion of my mind and as soon as I was ready, she had me do something weird. After I had duplicated my human form inside of my mind, she had me lop the left arm at the shoulder, giving me a good view of the muscles, nerves, arteries and veins. There was still the upper part of the arm that I had missed, so she had me remove that as well, revealing the shoulder socket that had been behind it.