Chương 85: Chapter 84: One a week

"An hour a week from the right person is worth a year from anybody else, and the person giving it always knows this better than the person receiving it." - Halvard Tsen, weapons master, Area 4 Shaw's office replied in four days. The Keeper was willing in principle. But he would confirm once he had the full list of people attempting and what each of them intended to attempt, and he would need that list three weeks before the festival.

"Three weeks," Tinder said.

"So we have two and a half. That's... not a lot."

"It's fair enough, though." He read it again.

"He's not being asked to come and watch students run about. He's being asked to put his name on an event. He should know what's in it first." Phinx agreed with his sentiment when Kara brought it up with her. The week that followed was the most hectic one Kara had had since the trial. Kara, Tinder and Sunny worked contacts in every direction and most of them came back empty. Not refusals, directly.

Silence, or a reply that arrived four days later and said the person was travelling, or an enthusiastic yes from someone who then asked what the University would be paying, at which point Kara learned to put the money question in the first message and saved himself a great deal of time. Sunny was the one who got the first hit. He simply asked people, and many answered him, and when they did not answer him he asked somebody adjacent to them.

On the fourth day he came into the demonstration room with a big smile and said "got one," and on the sixth day he said "got our second," and both times he looked considerably more tired than a person who was enjoying himself ought to look. The first was a woman in her fifties who had spent twenty years working salvage in the deep fields under water. She didn't hold any record, but she intended to attempt the dead lift record under water with a current running.

Sunny knew her because she had done contract work in one of the shows, and he had heard that she once lifted something out of a collapsed frame that three people had tried together and said could not be lifted. She agreed inside a day. She did not ask what the University would be paying. The second was harder to explain and Sunny explained it badly.

A man who practised stillness, who had held still under different conditions - from a fast flowing river to a whirlpool and had even attempted it on a minor flash flood. He had failed his most recent attempt, but came back with only minor injuries. He had never once attempted it in front of a crowd because he had never been asked in a way that interested him. Kara asked how Sunny had convinced him and Sunny said he had told the man the Earth Record Keeper would be in the stand, and that was all.

The man had gone quiet for eight seconds and then said yes. Tinder found the third. Hers was the one Kara had been most worried about, because it needed a bonded pair, and pairs were harder to convince. Split Field needed two beings at opposite ends of the stadium, out of sight and out of hearing, completing two tasks, with the recorded mark being the gap between them. The standing mark was four tenths of a second and had stood for nineteen years.

She found a bonded pair out of Area 9, a man and a partner he had been bonded to for thirty-one years, and she found them by going through the Registry's public listings by duration and writing to every pair over twenty-five years in descending order, which took her three evenings. She got eleven replies. Nine were no. One was a maybe that dissolved. The eleventh said yes and asked whether they could arrive two days early to walk the ground.

"They want to walk the ground," she said, putting it on the table between them.

"Say yes," Kara said.

"Okay, and... done." Three secured, two weeks left and their options were growing thinner. The combat arts hall at six in the morning was cold and empty. One set of lights was on at the far end over the open floor. Kara had the dart at his hip and the umbrella in his hand and a light breakfast sitting somewhere behind his ribs feeling like a mistake. Narak Tamba was standing under the lights with his coat off. Kara steps faltered for perhaps half a second.

He kept walking, and arrived with a quiet smile on his face.

"Good morning, Sir."

"Was it that obvious?" Narak asked.

"Hmm... I wouldn't say I was sure of it. But I did consider it as a strong possibility considering your knowledge of chained weapons and the fact that it wasn't a regular Professor." Kara set the umbrella down against the wall.

"One thing which slightly confused me though was that Instructor Ken had mentioned - when he handed me the chain dart from the store room for the first time, that there was nobody at the University who could use it. I wasn't quite sure exactly what to expect."

"That is correct." Narak looked mildly pleased.

"I am not a chain dart user. I use the rope dart." Kara took a second with that.

"But you ruled out the rope dart for me. In your office, last year. Inside about a minute."

"I did." Kara looked at him, the question of why clearly hanging from his mouth.

"I ruled out the rope dart for a boy who needed reach, offensive power and a moving platform and who was going to be carrying something in his other hand for the rest of his life," Narak explained.

"It was the correct call and I would make it again. What I know is still most of what you need. Let me tell you which parts are not." He held up a hand and counted them off.

"Mass. A rope carries very little mass. All of the weight is in the head and the line simply follows it. A chain carries its own weight down its whole length, which means it is still travelling after the head has stopped, and that is why Ken has had you doing recovery for six weeks." Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon. Kara nodded his head thoughtfully.

"Secondly - Redirect points. I can run my line across my own neck. It is a standard redirect and it is how I change the line's direction without a second hand." He looked at Kara flatly.

"Do not do that with a chain. There are perhaps four points on a body where a chain redirect is survivable and one of them is only survivable because it is padded. We will go through them." Kara hadn't considered that.

"Third - Short range. You can grip a chain halfway along and what you are holding is nearly rigid. A rope gives you nothing there. That is an advantage you have that I do not." Narak shrugged.

"Fourth is that a chain is loud and a rope is not, and there is no fixing that. Plan on being heard."

"Understood."

"The techniques for the rope and the chain dart are mostly the same, with some differences accounting for the difference in weight. Luckily for you, let's just say I tried a lot of different mid-range weapons when I was younger before settling for the rope dart. The rest is upto Ken." Kara looked up.

"Ken is a dual weapons specialist. He's one of the best in the planet at that and he knows how to use multiple weapons fairly well. He's a bit of a weapons nerd. Don't tell him I said that," Narak said with a wink.

"It is why I asked him to keep you rather than handing you off completely, and it is why those five drills are as good as they are, because I could not have written them. I use a rope dart and a knife and I have done for thirty years, and that pairing will teach you nothing, because a knife is very different from an umbrella. Ken knew that and built for it."

"That... Actually makes a lot of sense. He seems to know something about almost all the weapons."

"That's why he's our lead Combat Instructor." Narak moved out onto the floor.

"Now, show me all the five drills." Kara showed him all five. The wrist drill went clean both ways, with both weapons, in both directions. Recovery, with the interface calling holds at random, went clean eight times in ten. The bell he struck nine times in ten on the return. The chalked ferrule came in at three fingers. The bowl he got twice in ten attempts.

"Four of those are finished," Narak said.

"Do not do them again beyond keeping them warm. Keep doing the bowl every day until you get it right."

"Sure, will do." He came over and picked up the chain, ran a length of it through his fingers and let it drop.

"Do you know what the first two were actually for?"

"Umm... conditioning and coordination?"

"They were for this." Narak lifted the dart in one hand with nothing in the other.

"A wrist that works as a hinge without the forearm helping, and a weapon you can stop inside one beat. Those two things together are what lets a man run a chain with one hand while the other hand is busy. Everything I am about to show you sits on top of them, and if you had turned up here without six weeks of that behind you I would have sent you away." Kara said nothing for a moment.

"Before we start," Narak said, "I want you to keep two things in mind."

"Sir."

"The first is that you do not tell anyone. Maybe your closest friends if you really trust them, but no one else." He looked Kara dead in the eye.

"A council head teaching a student personally is close to unprecedented. If anyone found out, it would lead to a difficult situation for both you and me. This is why I didn't say anything until Instructor Ken personally approached me to help you. A recommendation from a Combat Instructor is easier to defend."

"Understood."

"You are not troubled by that."

"No, Sir." Narak looked at him for slightly longer, and then let it go.

"The second is that you get one hour a week, and some weeks you might not get even that, and I will not always be able to tell you in advance. Everything between the hours is upto you. Use my time and yours wisely."

"Yes Sir, I will," Kara said.

"I know you've been using the demonstration room. It's a slight misuse of your privilege as part of SDC, but it's technically not against the rules and as long as noone is inconvenienced by it, that's fine. Others use their privileges for far worse." Kara looked down sheepishly. Of course Narak would have known about it. Narak handed him the chain.

"Let's start with the hip coil." His past six weeks of practising with a weighted dart had not prepared him for this. When he had practised it last year for a few weeks, he had used both hands. It was nowhere near as easy as he'd thought with the hip coil and one hand, and Narak explained why. With two hands free, the off hand holds the line and feeds it, and the chain goes as far as the off hand lets it go. Kara's off hand held an umbrella now, so the line had to live somewhere else and feed itself.

"On the hip first," Narak said.

"We'll try the shoulder later. Shoulder gives you a longer throw arc and you will spend two years learning to clear your own head. Hip is shorter and uglier but it will be usable inside six months." He showed him how to lay it, and Kara laid it wrong four times, and on the fifth Narak took hold of his wrist and moved it two inches and the coil sat.

"Now this." It was a ring. Smooth metal, about the width of two fingers, on a short strap that went over the shoulder and under the opposite arm.

"The chain runs through that. It takes the friction instead of you. Without it you will lose skin off your side and your forearm in the first week and you will stop training because it hurts, which is the actual reason most people give this weapon up even if they don't admit it." He fitted it and stepped back.

"This one is mine and I'll need it back at the end of the session. You can get your own at the University store. They are not cheap but there is no substitute, and if you turn up next week without one we will spend the hour on something else."

"How much is not cheap?"

"You will find out," Narak said. Then he stood back and told Kara to throw. The first throw went about nine feet, came back wrong, and the chain caught the inside of his own elbow hard enough that he grit his teeth. The second was worse. By the eleventh it did not get much better. The coil went out too fast. The ring did exactly what it had promised and the chain came back along a line he had not chosen. Narak did not correct him for the first forty minutes.

He stood off to the side with his arms folded and let it fail. When he began, the corrections were precise and the reasoning explained clearly. The redirect points took most of what was left of the session. Narak put a hand flat on the outside of his own thigh, then the back of his shoulder, then his hip.

"Those are the three redirect points. You bounce the line off one of those to change its direction and you need to do it without your other hand coming into play." He tapped his forearm.

"Four, but only with leather on it. Without leather on it, it will open you up." Kara worked the thigh one for twenty minutes. It was ugly, but he knew it wouldn't happen in a day. Post that, Narak took the chain off him, took hold of it about three feet up from the head, and what was left in his fist went as rigid as a bar.

"This is for close range," he said.

"You are not throwing anything. You have a short rigid length in your fist and the rest of it is out of the way. You can use this as a stabbing or slicing weapon." Kara took it back and had it inside four attempts.

"That's the first thing today that's worked."

"Because you have been doing it for a year," Narak said.

"That is an umbrella grip and an umbrella distance and your hands already know both. You are pretty much applying what you know already with a different weapon." Kara tried it again, just for his own satisfaction.

"And it's time," Narak announced. Kara looked at his interface just to confirm that three hours had really gone by.

"How long will it take?" he asked.

"For which part?"

"The coil. One-handed, running clean, not having to think about it." Narak considered him for a moment.

"You are dexterous, you have the wrist down and I'm assuming you have a skill considering you picked up Ken's drills so fast." He picked his coat up off the rail.

"Four weeks to stop hurting yourself. Maybe a couple of months to be usable in front of somebody who is trying to stop you. A year or more before you can use it without much thought. Longer if you want to truly master it."

"That's a long time."

"It is the shortest of the available answers and I have given you a real answer rather than an encouraging one." Narak put the coat over his arm and collected the ring.

"Next Tuesday, same hour, unless I send word. And get your own ring by then."