"A sound body can hold a healthy mind, without a body that's nurtured to the peak, strengthened, broken, reformed, and strengthened once again, no amount of intellect will serve you in this world, because it goes beyond just having the mind of an adult in the body of a child, what matters is to have a body worthy of such a mind. So Number Seven, if you do not want to sleep with more lash marks on your back tonight…. Run!"
I heaved, ignoring his presence behind me as I went round a hill, my chest burned from the strain and my legs shook under the weight of not just my body, but the pack twice my size that was on my back. Commander Yusuf kept close to me, his huge and bulky body so imposing it almost seemed to blot out the very sun above me. He scares me, as much as I hated to admit it, this man scared the ever living crap out of me. I know how very out of my depth I currently am, as the rigorous amount of exercise he has put me through over the past week is something my previous twenty-year-old body would never have been able to handle, but yet it was being thrown on a six-year-old.
Over this past week we have done nothing but run, and run and run. And it was not just me, but the beast that belonged to me would have to be subjected to the same torture. He said it was training, that building habit and the muscles from young would be beneficial to both I and the beast in the long run. He had said that because of the presence of the system, most muscular problems can be avoided, like stunted growth due to straining a body from a young age, or having an overly buff body due to too much exercise. Apparently size of the body was largely dependent on the allocation of your stats.
With a lot of strength and constitution you would have an extremely buff body, but pair that well with agility and you would have a lithe frame built for speed. Commander Yusuf had laid out a training plan for me the first day we started, apparently he wanted to make me into a speed based fighter. From the general knowledge provided by the system, compound raptors were fighters, basically brawlers with a lot of speed and quick attacks. They were too straightforward and animalistic to be assassin type fighters, but they had above average strength due to their huge bulk, so while they couldn't hit as hard as truly strength oriented monsters, their speed and savagery could cause a lot of damage before anyone could say yes.
"Seven let's stop here for today! Tomorrow we will have our first combat training! You will learn Jujutsu!"
I didn't even deign myself fit enough to give him an answer, and if I had to be honest there was no way I could do anything other than collapse on the ground, breathing heavily with my beast on top of me. She needed a name, but I wasn't willing to give her the name they wanted as that would mean they had control over me. It's made them think I couldn't name her because of my inability to speak, but regardless I will worry about naming her later. But right now, I just want to sleep.
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The next day was pretty much filled with study, but this time I had to watch as Commander Yusuf brutalized a guard in the premise of teaching me the martial forms of Jujutsu. The intricate dance of redirecting an opponent's force, and locking and twisting their joints into various angles to either incapacitate them or completely disable them was; as much as I hated to admit it, extremely fascinating. Commander Yusuf was of the impression that before I could learn how to attack, I had to learn how to defend myself. And the dance was wonderful in its own right.
The way his legs were placed, and how he would dance around his opponent, using the opponent's own force to pull, drag, push and shift the rhythm of a fight. It was beyond amazing and I happily took to it like a fish took to water… or at the very least that's what I thought. It took me another week of study and imagery memorization, watching a fight in different terrains before I was allowed to actually start learning the moves. Running around the entire day was shifted to just early morning jogs around the compound of the facility, which was basically a six kilometer lap that I had to run multiple times.
Evenings was a light jog without the use of any sort of burden, the laps were also shorter, but the rest of the day would be filled with a three-hour morning combat training from 8am to 11 am after that there was a little break and a bit study. Though the study was mostly focused on war tactics, history, knowledge about politics, beasts, cards, dungeons, and alien races and their governments. My beast still nameless was undergoing training of her own, at first she was trained in much the same way dogs and other human pets were trained.
They treated her like an animal, but I knew she was smarter than that. It was three months into our training that she spoke her first words, six months in using our current routine she could hold full and simple conversations with me. The subjects being taught at that moment changed a bit as Tai-chi was added along with Jujutsu to help me control my force and that of my enemies, subjects became more practical as engineering came into play.
8 months in I started having full on spars with the soldiers in the facility, safe to say none of them held back and almost always beat me to within an inch of my life every time. They were stronger and faster, and all I could do was try to defend and incapacitate them. I learnt as much as I could and actually developed something of a love for engineering. But there was so much to be learnt from it as it had so many aspects, but worst of all in everything that I've learnt, I have not even forgotten anything, it was almost as if the knowledge itself was locked in my head.
A year after waking up here, taller, smarter and at least a bit stronger I had my first test, and this time a lot of new faces I've never met where there in attendance. They said it was an evaluation, and I get the feeling my very existence depended on my display, so whatever the case may be, I had to give my best.