The Sharah, as I quickly found, was exceptionally difficult to learn by yourself. I assumed it was the nature of the movements being free-flowing, and without a specific structure like the more rigid katas that I had performed in karate classes when I was a kid.
I did get the impression from the movements themselves that they were more about the basis of movement than movement in combat specifically. I wouldn't even be surprised if Mayer know other movements that were more specific to combat.
I stumbled around in the dirt for a few hours in the dirt, trying to remember Mayer's precise movements, but when you do something for nine hours it all starts to blend together. One thing that it did achieve, was a clear feeling of wrongness in my movements.
It just felt like I was faking, that I was just blundering along and that I wasn't truly grasping the essence of it at all. It was like anything I guess, but having seen Mayer, whose skill in performing the Sharah was so clear—it was a night and day difference.
The only thing that I had to go off was the sense of wrongness that I had in my head. If I did something that felt even slightly less wrong, then I would continue to do that until I could substitute it with something slightly less wrong.
During the time that I was bumbling along with Mayer, I had felt so much more capable and questioned things less. But now that I was alone, left to my own devices, I felt almost totally incapable of doing anything that could improve my performance of the Sharah. But I continued to do it anyway. I didn't really have anything else to do, just this or some other training style stuff.
I could run, or do push-ups or something of a similar effect, but if I were to be perfectly honest, strength and endurance training was horrifically boring with my body. I knew that much from the time on the Jothian's farm. I could run at my theoretical max speed for days and days and never truly have to stop. I'm sure that I would receive and massive boost in my agility, and maybe I would slowly get better at running itself, but other than that?
Nothing.
However, this… the Sharah. It was skill, a complex and intricate performance that used every part of your legs, forcing you to train your body to move in the correct patterns and positions. If I thought about it, it was like relearning how to move, how to walk. It wasn't exactly the most physically strenuous task in the world. But it was about learning to make every other task more achievable and more efficient.
At least that was what I thought. I couldn't possible fully understand at this point in time, maybe in the future.
But as the sun slowly dipped below the horizon, I realised that I could be working on multiple things at once here. My hammer was still laying in the dirt a few meters away from the well won patch of dirt that I had been drawing circles in for the past fifteen or so hours. At the start of the training session, I had tried summoning that thing as fast as I could, but it ended up feeling like fire was leaking out of my hand. So, I was somewhat nervous about trying to train the summon and unsummon process.
First of all—out of pure curiosity—I tried to unsummon the hammer from a distance, and that didn't do anything at all. I thought as much. Being able to unsummon your Soul Weapon from afar would be incredibly useful. It would also mean that you could never lose your Soul Weapon, and it could never be taken hostage. Which was sad, all things considered. It meant that I was vulnerable, and also that a physical manifestation of my soul could potentially fall into the wrong hands.
I walked over to the hammer and unsummoned it. I walked back over to my little circle and started to do my best mimicry of the Sharah again. As I did so, I summoned the hammer, facing its head towards the ground beside me where it wouldn't impede on my next few movements. After I had done those movements, I then turned around and grabbed the hilt and started to unsummon it.
I immediately stumbled over myself and had to restart.
Thinking as well as trying to perform the Sharah was extremely difficult for me. Mayer could literally do the Sharah with his eyes closed, but I wasn't nearly so practiced.
I tried the same movement over and over again.
I had decided that there was effectively no way for me to imitate Mayer's performance of the Sharah in all its ever shifting and infinitely complex glory—so over the past few hours, I collected all the main movements that I could clearly remember and slotted them haphazardly into a kata of sorts. It looked and felt stupid, and even more unprofessional from the start, but it was the best I could do with my little experience.
What I was trying to do was fit the summoning and unsummoning into a 'cycle' of my Sharah kata. So, I decided that I would unsummon the hammer at the start of the cycle and summon it again at the end of the cycle, but I had to make it fit somehow.
It was really difficult, and sometimes even thinking, 'Okay so in three more steps I grab the handle…" would make me mess up badly enough that I felt better restarting.
It took me maybe thirty tries to unsummon correctly and have performed the Sharah well enough to move on to the next part of the cycle. It would only be in the middle of the third quarter of the kata that I was able to place it where I had unsummoned the hammer from.
The whole idea was to make it so I was able to repeat it—and on top of that, the more naturally and the faster I could unsummon and resummon the hammer, the smoother the Sharah would flow.
Killing two birds with one stone I would say, if I could actually pull it off in the first place.
As good as it is to have someone as obviously amazing as Mayer as reference, it sure makes you say 'Well, Mayer can do…' or 'Well, Mayer does…', only further making you feel inadequate. Maybe its also the other Champions. They are purportedly super intelligent and stuff. How long would it take for them to pick up this stuff? If they were anything like some of the main characters in stories I've read, they would pick it up so fast that even the seconds were meaningful lengths of times—shocking every man and their dog in the entire city, or something equally as ridiculous.
But I was only a regular dude, trying my best to do this weird dance thing while summoning and unsummoning a massive hammer made from my soul.
I've let that sort of thinking stop me from doing lots of things in my life. 'Well I could never be as good as this person.' It was an excuse in a way. Sure, sometimes I said that because I genuinely wasn't interested, but sometimes it was because I looked at those people and realised just how much work it would be to get that good at it.
But here? Here I had no choice. I couldn't give up like that anymore. If I did, then I forfeited the right to survive in this little competition that God had set up. I would never go home—I would never be anything other than a regular dude in the midst of all the geniuses.
So, I continued to try.
I didn't manage to summon the hammer again well enough, and I had to restart from the beginning again. It was another ten tries until I managed to unsummon the hammer well enough to continue, and I failed again.
Over the course of the next two hours, I managed to get my success rate with an unsummoning to one in three, but I still wasn't able to get it to summon quick enough and seamlessly enough to be able to continue to the next stage and then to the next cycle.
It was extremely slow going. I had repeated the same few steps leading up to the unsummoning possibly thousands of times now, and the steps leading up to the summoning at least a few hundred times.
Another hour went pass without being able to summon the hammer again. I had been close a handful of times, but it was so incredibly difficult.
The reason it was so difficult was because of the extra weight that I suddenly had to manage somehow, whilst still performing the steps of the kata. The weight didn't stay the same either, it grew until the head was completely formed, and only then were you able to place it down on the ground, because otherwise the hammer head hadn't formed fully, and the surface was uneven and would fall over onto the ground, making it impossible for you to circle back around and easily unsummon it.
So began the arduous process of trying it again and again until it worked.
I was confident in my ability to pull it off, but the weight of the hammer was so massive, that holding it up in the air while doing complex footwork for just over a second, which seemed to be about as fast at unsummoning as I could achieve while doing the Sharah.
It was painful, my legs burned, my feet burned, my arms burned almost every muscle burned. It was horrible, but It only made me more stubborn.
Stubborn was something that I had never really been. I don't know what it was exactly, but I had always viewed stubbornness as overtly bull-headed. I always saw examples of the 'I'll be right' mentality, and I grew to hate it. I paired it with irrationality. But this? This was exactly the situation for stubbornness. It was then and there that I performed my first true act of stubbornness.
I tried over again. I could do a few hundred tries in an hour now, and I was able to pull off the unsummoning seven out of eight tries, an extremely large improvement over when I was initially trying to first get the kata going.
I had quickly come to the realisation, however, that I would have to be able to perform the lead up to the summoning perfectly every time until I had a reasonable chance of successfully pulling off the summoning.
It was because, even though I was able to perform the movements leading up to the summoning most times out of ten, even if one thing were to put me even slightly off kilter, then I would basically be unable to bear the weight of the summoning. The weight was so huge that it required an extremely solid dispersion of weight between the feet, if it wasn't basically perfect, then I would immediately almost fall over, or drop the hammer because I can't hold it well enough.
So, hours and hours pass of me failing over and over. But I come to care less and less about actually achieving the goal and start to really try to make my movements flow like Mayer's did. It was a mixed bag at first, some movements were easier to pull off with the same floaty, almost ethereal flow that Mayer's every movement exuded, but the overwhelming majority were awkward.
Now that I was performing the movements in a set kata, I could repeat the movements as many times as I so pleased, so adding a new element, like the flow and the hammer, was much easier, because now you could think about your next step instead of haphazardly following along with someone else's movements.
My kata was clearly butchered in comparison to Mayer's performance. There weren't anywhere near as many moves, and not as many combinations, but I had to make it manageable for myself.
Implementing the flow set me back a few hours worth of work, making me fail the unsummoning one time out of four. It was a big blow to my confidence, but I pushed ahead, determined to get back to where I was before I added in the flow of the kata.
Over the next few hours, I felt the kata slowly evolve to more than what it was before. It was still obviously amateurishly made, but as I added in the flow, and changed some of the moves ever so slightly, the movements began to fell far more solid, more natural than they had been before. Whereas before, my movements were shaky, I was trying to keep up with a tempo that I had set myself, and I would rush some steps to make that possible.
This flow suddenly stressed the consistency of movement. While tempo is important, you can keep tempo and still move badly. But to both keep tempo, and to keep a consistent flow, you had to move properly and solidly, otherwise everything would crumble and you would be forced to start again.
It was the introduction of flow that made me fail more in regular sections of the kata. Beforehand I would stumble through them, but the flow was an unforgiving and cruel mistress.
Over and over and over I tried. I was deep into the night, maybe even in the early morning. I could almost assure you that everyone was asleep. It was freezing cold, but I didn't even notice it. My body was warm and buzzing with a strange energy that was totally detached from anything to do with my physical form. It cut through any tiredness that I had and made me forget that pain ever existed in the first place.
I was close.
I swear that I could feel it. My movements now felt seamless in comparison to what I was doing before, my movements all staccato and off kilter. Now I felt solid, and my movements felt meaningful.
More hours passed, and you could start to even see the licks of sunlight peek over the edge of Orisis. But I was absorbed. Time flew by me like a light breeze, almost undetectable. My mind turned off entirely, simply repeating the movements over and over. I wasn't trying anymore. I hadn't given up, but I wanted these movements to be so ingrained in me that I couldn't possibly fail or mess them up.
Time flowed as smoothly as my movements, surprising me in a way. There was a great deal of wrongness in comparison to Mayer, but as I felt myself move it felt so seamless and melodic. As if my joints themselves were singing to me, my body creating a resonating sound within itself, each muscle talking to another all singing a song of combined movement.
And it was there that it happened.
My steps against the ground were firmer than they had been before, it was as if the earth was hugging my feet, holding them and releasing them upon my every movement. Each movement flowed into another with a slow precision that I had been practicing for hours now. The unsummoning went easily, I barely even noticed as my hand moved out to grab the hilt, making the large hammer liquefy and return back into my body. Each step felt light and easily performed, and each planted foot felt as solid as stone.
Then came the summoning. My hand reached out, and the hammer started to slowly form from the liquid spilling from my hand. The weight grew greater and greater until a point into the kata where it was possible for me to angle my upper body so that I could use both arms to hold up the ever-increasing weight.
However, this is where the difficult part began. The section that had made me fail every single time. Doing the Sharah while the hammer head formed was like walking around with a water tank filled with liquid metal. But this time, my stance held, and despite the strange shifting of weight of the forming of the hammer head my movements remained unimpeded.
Then I performed the final steps, placing the hammer on the ground and then seamlessly doing the last minute or so of movements, that despite not having done them many times in comparison to the beginning section, I nailed. Then I returned to the beginning position of the kata.
Then I let the built-up elation soar across my body.