"Newbie," I vaguely heard someone say, interrupting my sleep. "Newbie, it's time to wake up," immediately followed, and I opened my eyes before sitting up. I saw one of my fellow soldiers standing beside my bed, already fully decked out in his exercise uniform.
A quick look at my watch showed that my internal clock was not wrong and that it was only 4:50 a.m. I had been planning to wake up at 5 since we only had to be at the exercise field at 5:30 a.m.
"Newbie, don't look at me like that. Believe me, I'm doing you a favor," the soldier, whose name was Thomas if I did not remember it wrong, said when he saw me checking the time before I turned to him.
"You better head to the bathroom while you can to take care of everything. The bathroom can get really chaotic after 5 since that's when everyone else chooses to wake up. I'm sure you don't want to bother with that mess," Thomas elaborated, and I had to agree with him. Waking up 10 minutes earlier was worth it if I could avoid an overflowing bathroom.
"That's true. Thank you," I thanked him for his thoughtfulness, and he returned a smile. "Alright, hurry up. We'll head to the training field as soon as you're ready," he urged me to get ready, which confused me a bit since there was still quite some time until 5:30 a.m.
"Why the rush? I thought PT started at 5:30," I asked and looked a bit amused at my question. "You're right," he agreed. "That's when PT starts, but what your guide did not tell you is that the captain expects us to do our warm-up by ourselves," he explained with a smile.
"Without doing some stretches and warm-up exercises, you'll suffer during and after the PT," Thomas added, and I thanked him for elaborating.
I took my workout uniform, and my toiletries, and headed to the bathroom. I saw someone leaving as I entered, and there were another 2 people inside. They gave me a nod before focusing back on brushing their teeth.
I took care of my own morning routine and only changed into the workout uniform afterward. As I was preparing to leave, the other soldiers began trickling in, and after stepping back into the main area, I saw all the other soldiers heading to the bathroom as well.
Surprisingly, Thomas was not the only one waiting for me, the soldiers I previously saw were waiting with him.
"Let's go," Thomas said before leading the way. I followed him, and a few minutes later, we made it to the training ground. "Follow my lead as much as you can," he advised before he and the others began doing some stretches.
Thomas introduced the stretch forms while demonstrating them, and I was almost certain he was joking since he called them stuff like "Arcanine coming down the Mountain" and "Scyther's Prayer", and I could feel his amusement, though he did keep his face serious during the whole thing.
Still, it was hard to be sure since I had no idea if he found the names amusing, or if he was amused because he was joking. A quick check courtesy of my super library showed that Thomas was not joking and that those stretches/positions were truly called that, so he simply found them funny, which I could understand since they did sound pretty exaggerated.
After a series of 13 stretches/positions starting with "Mankey picking peaches", and ending with "Snorlax Yawns", he asked me to show him if I managed to get them right.
"What kind of Mankey are you supposed to be?" he mocked while pushing my back further down. "Bend down some more, and pick up those peaches from the ground," he said and I could not help but mentally complain that Mankey's should be plucking those peaches from trees.
Besides, Mankey/Monkey plucking peaches had a totally different meaning as far as I was concerned. Still, I let him do his corrections, and he had something to complain about during each one, even my "Snorlax Yawns" was not spared.
"Have you never seen a Snorlax? Which Snorlax arches it back as much as you do? It's a yawning Snorlax, not farting," Thomas complained even though he only corrected my position by like a millimeter.
"Alright, that was decent enough," he said after I held the "Snorlax Yawns" for 20 seconds. "Now do the routine 5 more times. Ideally, you should be doing the routine two times while holding each stretch/position for 60 seconds, but since this is your first time, you can work your way up to that," he declared with a smile.
"I can do that," I said. "Holding the positions for 60 seconds, I mean," I clarified. "Sure, just make sure to stop if your muscles start to burn. We don't want you to tear anything after all," Thomas returned before he went ahead and did his own stretching routine.
I felt the amusement the others around us felt, but they kept quiet, so I ignored them and focused on my own stretches. Obviously, I did all stretches with no problem. Honestly, it would have been a joke if I had difficulties holding those positions considering how much better my body was compared to a regular person or even a regular soldier or martial artist.
Being a Tier 3 Aura User was no joke, especially not one that was actively training their body like I was. I felt Thomas and the others' surprise when they saw that I truly had no problems doing the full stretching routine, and they actually came up to me to compliment me once I was done.
"Alright, now that we've loosened up our muscles, we'll run a few rounds around the field to warm up," Thomas declared, and one of the others decided to pipe up. "We'll make sure to keep a moderate pace so that you can keep up all the way," Daniel, at least I think that was his name, said, and the others seemed amused when he said that, though they did not show it.
It had by now become apparent that these guys did not know that I was a certified Tier 3 superhuman with an aura focus, which meant that my body was stronger than theirs unless one of them happened to be a superhuman body practitioner or martial artist.
"Sure, let's do it," I said and signaled them to go ahead, before following suit. They started out a bit slow before steadily moving up to a pace that could be considered running at full speed for most regular people on Terra, which explained why they had been amused at Daniel's words.
I could not help but chuckle when I felt their shock that I could keep up without showing any signs of struggle at all. In fact, I was relaxed since this kind of pace was child's play to me. If I was not wrong, we were currently jogging at around 25 km/h. I did not have a speedometer, so I could be a bit off, but even in that case, it should not exceed 30 km/h.
That, for me, confirmed that they did not know about my physical abilities. I let them set the pace for the first two rounds, and after Thomas declared that the next one was the final round, I decided to tease them a bit.
"Now that we've warmed up a bit, let's get our blood pumping for a bit," I declared before moving to the front and steadily upping my speed. They had no problem following me until around 35 km/h. After that, I noticed them having to get serious, and once I reached what I was guessing was 50 km/h, they were truly struggling to keep up. Only Thomas looked a bit better than the others, but only a bit, so I kept that speed for a minute.
The first one gave up as soon as he saw that I was speeding up again, and the others followed his example as well a few moments later. Thomas was the last one to give up, and I saw them huffing and puffing for a moment before he resumed walking, but this time at a more sedated pace.
He also began to scold the others even while he was trying to regain his breath because they went from a full sprint to a complete standstill. Meanwhile, I finished the round before running to Thomas's side. I could not help but chuckle when the others began to grumble about me trying to "take off" upon seeing me re-joining them.
"Hey, don't blame me. I've made sure to keep it moderate. That wasn't even close to my maximum speed," I teased them a bit, and release a short laugh at their incredulous looks.
"You're one of those supers aren't you," Thomas asked, having finally understood why I was a lot breeze through the exercises. "Yeah, I'm a bona fide Tier 3 Aura User," I admitted and even Thomas was unable to hide his shock when he heard that.
"Tier 3?! At your age? Are you serious?", "No way!", "You're joking, right?", "Are you shitting me?", and "As if," were thrown out at the same time. "Yep, I'm certified and all that," I assured them. "It should be on my file," I added and the others were still a bit shocked by the truth.
"Well, shit. Captain is going to increase our load, isn't he?" one of the others let out a dismayed cry, and the others agreed with him. I could guess what he meant from the context, but I decided to ask Thomas just to be sure.
"If the captain sees a newbie easily handling the load he's assigning us, he'll use that as an excuse to up the difficulty. He'll do that until we either catch up or reach our limit, and since you said that you're at tier 3, there's no way we can catch up, so we're going to suffer a lot" Thomas explained and even he seemed to feel a bit down at the thought.
Heck, the way they were behaving even I started to feel bad for them, so I could not help but say sorry. Still, none of them blamed me. According to them, it wasn't my fault that Captain Stuart was a closet sadist. They actually looked around first before saying that to make sure the captain was not around.
We talked for the next 10 minutes about Captain Stuart and the stuff he forced them to do in the name of exercise. In the meantime, the other soldiers began to trickle in, and at point 5:30 a.m. Captain Stuart showed up.
As soon as he stepped onto the field, all soldiers moved, forming neat lines and files. Thomas dragged me along and I ended up being part of the first line, so I managed to get a good look at the fabled Captain Stuart. He appeared to be a rather big and muscular man, who from what I could say was close to 2 meters in height.
With his blond hair, crew cut, size, and muscles, I honestly would have believed that he was related to "The Surge" from the anime if he did not happen to have another surname. Not that I had heard anything about Surge himself so far.
Anyway, I felt Captain Stuart's gaze linger on me for a moment, before he ignored me. "All of you come up and take your weight, before doing 100 push-ups as a warm-up," he ordered, and when he said that a bunch of racks with weighted vests appeared behind him.
I noticed the psionics fluctuations that appeared at the same moment, indicating that they had been teleported over, but no Pokemon appeared, which meant that whoever did it, had a really high mastery over Teleport, and considering the weight of all those racks, it had to be pretty strong as well.
Regardless, I followed suit and went up to the rack along with the others. Thomas shared that the vests ranged from 35 kg to 100 kg and that Captain Stuart raised the lowest limit each month. Seeing how the lower weights would pose no challenge to me, I directly headed to the rack with 100 kg vests, which raised a few eyebrows.
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