Rethi awoke from his forced slumber only a few minutes later, and we sparred for the rest of the night, brutally destroying each other's bodies. The boy still needed to get used to copious amounts of pain, and I was going easy on him. He knew that I was, of course, he had been dealing out pain on me for months, so he was as much a maestro of it as I was.
Tearing ligaments, breaking minor bones, damaging sensitive organs, obstructing breathing with force. It was interesting to be the teacher now, rather than the pupil, but as the hours passed, it seemed like the boy still needed to sleep. At least for now.
I trained long after Rethi went back to the house for rest, returning myself to the katas that I had formulated oh so many months ago—to get myself used to the weight of my hammer. Now, though, the weight was enormous and impractical.
It didn't help that the hammer scaled with my strength, so I wasn't sure, apart from formulating some shifting trickery, that I'd ever be able to wield the thing without looking like a drunk man swinging around a stick he picked up.
Hours passed as I trained, a usual occurrence. My brain had long since recalibrated to my twenty-four-hour schedule, almost allowing me to fast forward through my own actions as I repeated and tweaked my training on autopilot.
Before long the sun had emerged from behind the orb moving through the sky, the rays of light always a captivatingly beautiful sight over the glassy plains, with the condensation of morning dew resting gently on the blades of grass—stretching over dips and rises that formulated the landscape.
I let myself train comfortably for a few hours longer than I usually did, enjoying the silence and clear headedness that came with the warming morning air.
Interestingly, I caught sight of a singular person all the way out here, an unusual sight. Not many went out past this way, especially because of the threat from the forest wolves that way. Only travellers and merchants really came out this far. I squinted my eyes to try and get a better look at the person, dressed in farmer's clothes. For what reason they were out here I couldn't possibly understand, but I just gave the farmer a polite wave.
The farmer gave a hesitant wave back, and walked their way back towards the town centre. I wasn't really worried about hiding my hammer around the townsfolk, there really wasn't any reason. The education level around here was abysmally low, and even if they potentially recognised the hammer for what it was as a part of a legend, my word would overpower theirs by simply spinning some bullshit.
I sighed as I decided to walk my way towards Mayer's home myself. Last I'd seen of the ex-weilder of Hindle, he'd been bleeding from a stab wound and seemed like he had everything under control, at least form his emotions anyway.
I plodded my way along the dirt path, making it to the homey wooden structure and stepping inside. An immediate check of my surroundings with my empathy told me that Mayer was in bed in his room, probably the only time I'd ever seen him in bed outside him actually sleeping.
I walked to the kitchen first, making the man some tea and a small breakfast using the ether powered cooking implements. Though Mayer rarely bothered to even use them, just using his own flame for whatever reason.
I bustled my way into the old man's room, holding a few plates stacked with a not-at-all healthy breakfast of pancakes slathered in a syrup that wasn't anything that I had ever tasted before coming here, but it was powerful and overwhelmingly sweet, so it served its purpose.
"How's it going, cripple?" I asked jokingly as I walked into Mayer's room. Clean, orderly, and barebones would be a good description of his room, though there were a few personal items strewn about the place.
"Bah," the man scoffed with a painful grimace, "I can still give you a hiding, kid, don't you worry about me." I laughed as I handed him the tea and place the food on his side table, for him to attack later when he felt up to it.
"You wish, old man." I said, truthfully in a sense of the word. Mayer could probably still kick my ass three days from Sunday with shifting, but not physically anymore. Maybe not anymore at all, a somewhat sad thought.
I gave the older man a once over. Mayer still retaining his mostly youthful appearance that had gained from whipping out Hindle a few days ago, looking more like a thirty-five to forty-year-old man than someone in their early two-hundreds, but that certainly didn't change the fact that the man felt far frailer than before.
Beforehand he was a physical powerhouse, even without wielding Hindle. Now he had been stripped of that power, left to be just an abnormally fit and healthy man. Some of the attacks that I had trained with the man in the past would eviscerate the man now. Though I suspected that he was just as strong with his shifting as he was before.
I looked down to a large piece of cloth that was securely bandaged to the side of his stomach, where he was bleeding from after the ceremony. Mayer saw my looking, and with a crooked grin, ripped away the cloth and showed me the wound. Or, in this case, a lack thereof.
"Do I wanna ask?" I said, perturbed. After a moment, the place where the not-wound was began to trickle with blood, welling up through the skin with seemingly no regard for the barrier of flesh and skin. Mayer pulled the bloody cloth back into place, grimacing as he did.
"Magical revenge wound. All the pain and annoyance with none of the death. Gut wounds are a bitch." He said between gritted teeth. I nodded, amused.
"So Hindle is a vengeful blessed blade, huh?" I asked, and the man nodded, a wry grin on his face.
"Hindle has its own mind. Not a complicated one, mind you, but one either way. I'm not sure if it'll ever get to the point of human intelligence, but it did seem to get smarter over my time wielding it." Well, that could either be a good or bad thing, depending how it panned out. Typically giving items sapience, let along sentience it regarded as a bad move, but what can you do.
"That'll have to be Rethi's problem, hey? Mr. Midday will have to deal with sapient Divine Swords and Demigods while you get to sit back and drink tea till the end of time." I chuckled and Mayer nodded.
"Not quite till the end of time. This old man will have an expiration date soon enough." I raised an eyebrow, worried, but he just laughed painfully, "Don't you fret, kiddo. It'll be decades till that point. Hindle was nice enough to let me keep this youthful body, even if it did stab me in the gut."
We let he room slowly sink into a companionable silence between the two of us, something that over the months had become a staple of our time together. Rethi sometimes called me an old man wearing a twenty-year-old's skin for it, but over time I'd taken to Mayer's way of thinking. There was always time for talk later, but silence could achieve just as much as inane claptrap.
Looking into the man's emotions, I found a puddle of a few different intermingling emotions. There was sadness there, maybe even a slight tinge of regret. But there was also an overwhelming sense of relief and… happiness. He was comfortable, even when he was in immense pain. Content. I sighed deeply.
"You aren't going to come with us." I stated. Of course, I had known this from the start, really. He had come to this small little, nameless town to get away from everything. Mayer nodded, confirming even when he didn't need to.
"I thought I'd always be needed. A warrior for the people. A people that I loved and cared about more than even myself. A people that I sacrificed everything for, lost friends and men and women that I had known for decades for. Soon enough, when I sat atop the tower, praised to the high heavens, having become the champion for the people I loved, it all changed." Mayer looked out the window thoughtfully, staring at the wind that was gently glowing through the leaves of a tree. He took a sip from his tea, letting it sit in his mouth and letting his muscled relax against the pain in his stomach.
"The war was over, my usefulness depleted. The unity that we had found, allying against the horrors of the Champions shattered once more, even if everyone pretended to be under one banner. I was sent on skirmish after skirmish, land wars that meant nothing except for the poor bastards that ended up on the wrong side of a blade they couldn't have possibly deserved." Mayer's eyes closed as he saw far too many men, their faces garbled and smudged in his memory, but small features still returned to him. The chill that they caused him to experience transferred across my empathic link well enough for me to know just how deeply he regretted those days.
"Before long, I found myself in a world that I didn't recognize anymore. People I was detached from, no friends except those young enough to be great, great grandchildren, none of them remembering the war that reformed the world itself. All pushed aside in the name of moving forward." He turned to me, a dry amusement on his face.
"So, like a disenfranchised teenager, I ran away as far as I could and found myself here with far, far too much time to think for my own good." We shared a mutual chuckle at that. He didn't need to recount the rest.
He had come to the decision to leave Hindle to someone else, or not at all if necessary. He didn't have it in him anymore to fight wars that were so far removed from himself. He was a man stuck in a strange grey area where the world he lived in wasn't really his own anymore.
I'm sure I could argue all day with the man, to try to convince him that he could regain his connection to the world once more, but that'd be naïve and, frankly, insensitive. The only other frame for reverence that I had for those that had lived a long time was Keeper Armament, and he hardly seemed like he was connected to the world.
We let the silence reign for a while, but eventually I left. There wasn't much else to talk about really. The man had made his decision and deserved to have at least some peace and quiet while he was recovering from a phantom stab to the gut.
I wasn't sure what else I'd do that day, aside from training, until I walked out Mayer's front door and almost walked straight into Rethi. Managing to stop myself from pushing the boy over by grasping onto his shoulders, I took a step back from the boy.
"Morning Rethi." I said with a smile, "Come to see the old man himself?"
"Ah, not quite. I already talked to him last night before I went to bed." He said, scratching the back of his head, "I was actually here to talk to you…"
I quirked an eyebrow as the boy trailed off. Quickly, I delved into Rethi's emotional state and found myself very worried, very fast. Without making any fanfare of it, I nodded and started walking in towards the centre of town, where Rethi had come from.
"Let's talk as we walk, shall we?" Rethi nodded taciturnly, though the sad expression on his face was anything but the stoic façade that he'd been trying to emulate from Mayer for months now.
"We are leaving soon, aren't we?" he asked softly, and I nodded affirmatively. He sighed heavily.
"What am I going to do about my mum? I can't just leave her here." There was a note of iron will in his voice. He wouldn't budge on this, I had to find a way to fix this before we left or Rethi either wouldn't leave, or would be very, very angry with me.
Admittedly, I'd been rather hands off when it came to his mother. Rethi had told me bits and pieces of what was happening with her, and all of it was bad news. She was dying, and fast. Six months ago she could barely walk, now she was far worse, losing memory and sleeping most days all the way through. Her caretaker, Arren Smithe, knew the signs from her husband's progression. She was going to die in a few months, at most.
I let my brain speed into a frenzy, trying to come up with something. Rethi looked at me, a sort of questioning hope as I let my brow furrow into a look of consternation.
"Ah." I said as a possible idea came to mind. Rethi's eyes widened as he saw the grin widen on my face. "I have a plan."