Alex and Seph returned home hours after summoning Matthew. When he walked in, he instantly knew that something was up. Their home was not a grim place, so why was the air so tense?
He found his parents in the dining room. Standing near them was an unfamiliar man. He was good-looking, average height, and had long, silver hair. Despite having a scar across his left eye he didn't seem like a battle-hardened warrior. Rather he looked at Alex with a sense of fascination and wonder. Ares called out from the dining room table.
"Alex, sit down. We need to talk."
Alex panicked a bit, and said, "Coming."
Emilia looked at Alex with worried eyes as he sat down. She started speaking after he was situated.
"Sweetheart, you're too strong. Your father and I talked it over and we decided some things."
Ares spoke up, "That's right. Your mother and I decided we're going to begin your training early. You need to learn to control yourself because the last thing we want is for you to get hurt because you didn't know how to control your own strength."
Alex could tell his parents were clearly lying about the reason they were starting his training early. They had never been good at deception and constantly winking at each other was not helping their case at all. However, their intentions were clearly pure so Alex went along with it.
A smile returned to Ares's face and the tension dissipated.
With a mischievous glint in his eyes, he continued, "With that being said, I'm going to teach you physical combat personally."
"Oh honey, please go easy on him. He's our precious baby boy... As for magic, I'm not very talented in it, so we got you a teacher! This is Valk, an old friend of mine."
The silver-haired man interjected, "Pleased to meet you, Alex! I have heard much about you."
Alex smiled, "Ah nice to meet you too, Teacher. Oh… can I call you that?"
Valk returned the smile and responded, "Please do."
Ares spoke up again, "Since it is still your birthday, we can begin tomorrow. I wanted to start today, but your mother was against it."
Emilia shouted, "I still think we should wait until he grows up more!"
Ares looked at his wife and calmly said, "Honey, we discussed this. It has to start soon."
Emilia sighed and nodded, "Haaa~ Yes. Fine. You're right. But until tomorrow, we celebrate!"
...
The next day, Alex was roughly shaken awake. Looking out the window, the sun was nowhere in sight.
"Dad? …What time is it?"
"It's time to get going, boy!"
Alex was pretty much dragged into the backyard by his enthusiastic father. An unfamiliar look of focus showed on the face of the God of War. He stared at the grass and the trees that made up their yard. With a snap of his fingers, a stage appeared in the middle of the yard. He snapped again and racks and racks of weaponry came into existence.
"Alex, what's your preferred weapon? Wait, never mind. You have an aptitude for bare-handed combat, I remember."
Ares ran to the racks of weaponry full-speed and began searching through them. Spears, swords, shields, and all other kinds of weapons were thrown into the air as Ares continued his search. After a while he exclaimed, "Found 'em!"
He walked back over to Alex with a satisfied smile on his face. In his hand, he held a pair of black, fingerless gloves. In his chest, several swords were embedded hilt-deep. Alex looked at the scene in horror.
Ares looked down, nonchalantly pulled the swords out and tossed them to the side. The wounds quickly healed and disappeared without a trace. He began to laugh at his son's scared face.
"Hahaha! I've been through much, much worse. Don't worry!"
Alex was unsure if those words were supposed to comfort him.
He then showed Alex the gloves in his hand, "These gloves were made by Vulcan. My brother is super talented when it comes to making things like this. They may not look like much but just watch."
Ares snapped, creating a wooden table. He placed the gloves on the table, and ran back to the weapon racks. He retrieved an enormous war axe. The axe looked like it weighed thousands of pounds and yet Ares was playfully swinging it with one hand, whistling as he made his way back to Alex.
When he got back to the table, Ares took up the axe with both hands and swung down on the gloves with tremendous force. The table was wiped out of existence and a crater appeared where the table had once stood. Putting down the axe, Ares grinned and looked for the gloves within the crater.
He quickly found the gloves and handed them to Alex, "See? Pretty good."
The gloves were still in perfect condition.
"Alright son, put those on. I have to teach you a little bit before your first spar."
"A spar? When will that be?"
"In like an hour."
"...."
Alex put the gloves on and was immediately picked up and thrown into the arena by his father.
Landing with a thud, he looked up and saw his grinning father standing right in front of him.
"Look closely, I'm gonna teach you the proper stance now."
With that, Ares took up a stance. Ares put his left foot in front of his right, keeping the heel of his right foot slightly off the ground. He put both fists up in front of his face keeping his chin down. Alex recognized the form. It looked very much like the way right-handed professional boxers from Earth stood when they fought.
Alex had not trained in martial arts before dying. It was surprising to him that he could copy the stance perfectly on his first try.
Ares exclaimed, "Huh. You're a natural, Alex. I see no flaws at all."
Alex thought to himself, "This must be because of [Bare-hand Combat Mastery]. I shouldn't be able to copy that perfectly, no matter how simple it looks."
Ares snapped and created two wooden training dummies. One was adult-sized and the other was Alex's height.
He then made Alex watch as he set up his stance in front of the dummy. He bounced up and down on the balls of his feet and without his fists moving at all, two fist-prints appeared on the head of the dummy. Two seconds later, the sound of fists striking wood ripped through the air.
"Dad, what did you do?"
"How was that? I'm pretty cool right?"
"Dad, please tell me."
"Haaaah. Fine… Would it kill you to praise your father? It's just a jab. I punched twice with my left hand."
"But your hands didn't move!"
"I know, I know. I'm awesome. Now you try."
Alex stood in front of his child sized dummy. He adopted the fighting stance he had just learned and attempted to perform what he just witnessed, even if he hadn't actually seen anything. His left fist flashed out and left an indent where it landed.
"Hooooo. You're pretty good too. Not nearly as fast as me though! Hahaha!"
"Dad, I'm 5."
"Oh. Right."
The remainder of the hour flew by as Alex slowly learned how to fight.
Soon, it was time for Alex's first battle to begin.