Bloodstained Blade-Chapter 26 - The First Week
After that interaction, staying entirely silent was no longer an option. Once the young man knew that he wasn’t completely alone in the wilderness, he developed an incessant need to chat with someone who hadn’t existed that first day or even during his time laboring away in Kalraka.
Though this wasn’t much more annoying than Ivarr’s thoughts had been, and the Ebon Blade took an aloof approach. Instead of getting caught up in a debate, it gave curt answers sparingly, and its wielder seemed to respect that, for the most part, in the days that followed. The only time the blade became vocal was during their weapons drills.
Ivarr was clever and hard-working, but for all of his other strengths, he was not a good swordsman. It found that out the hard way the first evening when they found a tribe of stray beastmen. After the blade helped him with his tracking ability, they spent two days following the tracks of the small splinter clan of less than a dozen, which would be a good first test for him.
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As it turned out, when they finally found them on an upland boulder field, more than half of that number were does. That should have made the battle incredibly easy for its wielder. As it was, though, Ivarr was wounded twice in blows that never should have struck him.
+149 Life Force
+8 lesser monster souls
He fought with wild strikes that had no technique to them and committed to every attack he launched. In that way, he was no better than the Ebon Blade’s last wielder, Gar-lok, and the weapon cringed at the thought.
The blade had spent hours trying to decide whether its current wielder really was less skilled than Ren had been or if it was simply angry at him for wasting Life Force the way he had. Not even lesser monster souls or the bountiful Life Force that it drank, bringing it to 684/4000, was enough to blot out the memory of the sloppy technique it had endured.
In the end, it didn’t really matter. What did was that when Ivarr said, “I really showed them!” while he was cutting off the horns of the dead beast men to bring back for the bounty, he’d listened to the Ebon blade’s chastisement with a little humility.
You really didn’t, it informed him. Without me, you’d be bleeding out on the stones, and by nightfall they’d be roasting you over a fire.
“That’s true,” its wielder admitted, “But in fairness, I had no idea you could heal me.”
That makes it worse, not better, the blade answered before lecturing Ivarr on everything he’d done wrong during the fight, from telegraphing his blows too often to not watching his footwork or his flanks.
The blade quickly put him to work on improving that. That night, before Ivarr ate, it walked the boy through a series of exercises that it only barely remembered. The memory was so faint that it didn’t even know where it knew them from, but it was certain that it must have been from Baraga.
There was nothing complex to the exercises. They were a series of basic attacks in increasing power, interrupted by some sort of step or defensive move. Overhead slash, block and riposte, side step, side slash, ninety-degree pivot, reverse slash, and so on. When the blade demonstrated it to its wielder, it looked almost like a dance, with clean motions and flourishes that showed an economy of motion that even it did not truly possess in the heat of battle.
Its wielder, though, displayed just the opposite, and it was days before he started to show any skill. That frustrated the sword.
Combat is not a separate skill from what you already know, it explained to him. It is an extension of all the skills you already have.
“Killing feels pretty different from everything else I do to me,” Ivarr answered defensively.
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It's that morality that holds you back, the blade lectured him. The right time to decide whether or not someone is going to die is well before weapons are unsheathed. Once that happens, the death of one side or the other is the only outcome.
Its wielder bristled at being talked down to after every encounter and training session, but the blade couldn’t help it. During the rest of the day, it was nearly silent, but in those moments, it needed the young man to understand just how much he had to improve.
Part of it knew its purpose wasn’t to help its wielder get better. Someone was either good enough to wield it, or they weren’t. In this case, though, it could practically taste the other greater monster souls it needed to advance along the path of death, and it desperately wanted that.
The blade could not hope to win against minotaurs and griffons while being wielded by a goblin or the sword arm of an unwilling man. That meant that it needed someone brave and reckless like Ivarr.
It did need to those souls, too. Need wasn’t too strong of a word. If it ever wanted to find the power that would allow it to absorb the Life Force of all the carnage that was taking place around it the next time, it led a horde or an army to ravage a city. That made a little bit of instruction a necessary evil.
That first week in the mountains was the hardest. Not because Ivarr ever came close to dying again but because his lack of skill annoyed the blade almost as much as the questions he would ask it.
“Where do you come from? What other powers do you have? Where did the governor find you?” Variations of those were the most common questions, but without fail, they almost always led to the fourth question, “Why didn’t anyone use you to save Kalraka when the beasts came?”
Because I entered the city at the head of that ragged army and razed it myself! Was the answer it wanted to shout, but it could not do that lest it find itself buried somewhere on a scree-covered slope and left to rust.
More strangely, it found itself unwilling to lie to its wielder anymore. This was another change caused by its recent soul repair. It would have lied to Kell without a care.
I was willing to betray my first wielder, Ren, though, it remembered with a pang of guilt. It was like each time it repaired it own soul, its code of honor became a little stricter.
Now, though, the idea of lying felt almost as bad to it as the idea of betraying the man wielding it. It gave this a great deal of thought but had no answers as to why such behavior was now anathema to it.
Instead, it gave dismissive answers like, As you are in the midst of discovering, there is a limit to what magic can do when it is in the hands of someone without the skills to wield it. It was a true statement but not a definitive one, which is why the topic came up again and again.
Still, Ivarr wasn’t hopeless. He was just unpracticed. He was brave and clever, which were things that could not be taught, and in the battles that followed, he did better each time. The second group of beastman Ivarr encountered only landed a single blow on him, and that was from a bow. Although he was squeamish about pulling the arrow out, he didn’t let himself get surrounded that time, which was real improvement.
+121 Life Force
+6 lesser monster souls
Even the night when he woke up in the middle of the night at the blade’s warning to fight a skulking warband of goblins bent on ambushing him when he was stripped to the waist and half asleep, he acquitted himself better than he had in that first fight. If anything, he'd shown himself to be a better warrior when he was so tired he couldn't think straight.
+222 Life Force
+13 lesser monster souls
Ivarr managed to avoid any serious wounds in that fight, too, which was an improvement. Well, at least serious wounds related to the goblins. Charging around in the dark, he slipped on some ice, breaking his ankle. That mended quickly, at least, and none of the little green vermin managed to escape him because of the temporary lameness.
That was as pleased as the Ebon blade could be. Even though they had yet to find another giant beast worth killing, the fact that he’d killed more than a dozen goblins and beastmen before turning back toward town, combined with the hundreds of Life Force it had gathered, was acceptable. With each encounter, that number rose.
What had been 684/4000 after the first beastman clan, 845/4000 after the second group of savage goatmen, and 1067/4000 after the goblin ambush was real, steady progress. While it might take weeks to boost its storage or its siphon at that rate, it was enough for now. So, when Ivarr had eaten the last of his hard tack and decided to head back down the mountain with a bag full of horns and ears to sell for the bounty that awaited him in town, the blade didn’t complain.
It was not heading towards its goal very quickly like this, but it was making progress. In a few weeks, it might have a few more of the greater monster souls it craved, as well as a wielder who had some idea of how to use it properly.
