As Blair and Samsara head up the stairs Martyr was still boiling in anger at Styrmir's son.
He looked like an asshole at first, but a bearable one. But hearing him make fun of Spectre for being poor told Martyr everything he needed to know about the kid.
The thing that pissed him off the most was that he used his dad to stop himself from getting clapped.
He was exactly like the rich kids at his school, or Nova's kids.
A spoiled brat.
"Oh I'll get him one day." Martyr thought.
"We'll get him." He heard to his left.
Looking over he saw Vanagloria looking at him. Martyr's face must've given away what he was thinking of through his face.
"Oh we will. I'm training you to become the number one lightning user on the islands so you can steal the champion's spot from him." Martyr responded, making her laugh.
"Good. That's my goal. I'm gonna be the number one." She said, still smiling but with enough confidence in her voice that he believed her. "In fact we should train right now."
"Actually I think I'm gonna take a shower first. I haven't showered sense the inn and I just wanna make sure I do it before we go out into the forest for a week." Martyr said, getting up from his chair.
"Yeah, good idea. I'll take one after training and for now I'll just look for the room while you do that."
"Fine with me."
…
After a long drawn out shower, Martyr finally comes out of the bathroom into the kitchen with a new change of clothes feeling completely refreshed.
The days really went by fast in the truck. They were already hours away from starting their first trail and champions day still felt like it was yesterday.
Martyr then walked past Spectre in the living room still sleeping.
In the meeting room he noticed a little yellow sticky note left on one of the bulletin boards hung on each side wall.
Martyr walked over to the other side of the room to find in quite possibly the worst handwriting he had ever seen it read out, "go to the bottom floor :)"
There were lots of marks above the message on the sticky note that had clearly been Vanagloria messing up and crossing out her mistakes.
Following her instructions he walked back over and continued down the stairs.
As soon as he gets far down enough to peek into it, he is immediately blown away by the size of the room. It was pretty similar to the gym in his highschool as it had a basketball court in front of him and a little sandy dueling area in the middle of the room. In the back there was even a mini trampoline park looking thing in the back.
The walls were still pure stone, but it looked smoothed out like the walls on the outside of the cave. There was an entire layer of athletic mats covering the first 10 or so feet of the stone walls.
There were also two other staircases to the right and left of him, seemingly connecting to the other houses.
"Heyyyy! Martyr!"
The lightning girl was waving at him with one hand and a basketball in the other. Her hair was stuffed into a messy looking bun. She looked like she was breathing hard, like she had been down here for a while.
"Hey toss me a ball!" Martyr shouted down, leaning over the railing of the stairs.
Vanagloria tossed it up perfectly, landing right in his hands.
He aimed down at the basket and took a shot but wasn't even close. Like, he barely made it on the basketball court itself.
Martyr quickly ran down the steps, taking three at a time to get to the floor that seemed so far away.
After almost a minute of running down he finally reaches the bottom and touches down on the shiny floor.
"Y'know the stairs aren't supposed to be the training part of this gym." Vanagloria snickered at him. In the time it took him to run down the stairs she was able to casually walk over.
"Shut up." He was breathing heavily, leaning on the rack of basketballs next to them. "I've always hated any workouts that take endurance. Shit sucks."
Vanagloria pursed her lips and swung from side to side as she waited for Martyr to catch his breath. "So… you wanna play a quick game of horse?"
"I mean we 'could'… but we 'should' be training right now."
"Just one quick game? We could even do a three letter game. Just H-O-R."
"Whore?" Martyr laughed.
"Not the five letter word. That's what all the guys called horse in Umberville's public basketball court.
"Fine, we can play one game. You first."
"Yes!" Vanagloria pulled down her fist in her victory as she started skipping over to the middle of the court full of gleeful energy.
"Ok wait wait wait, hold on." Martyr grabs a basketball of his own and jogs over, lagging way behind her.
Vanagloria had a big silly smile. She was positioning herself directly in the middle of the court, not waiting for Martyr.
"No way you're just gonna start it off with a half-court shot. You not Curry."
"Watch me." Much to Martyr's surprise Vanagloria chucks the ball behind her with a wild amount of confidence and banks it in first try.
"Oh my god." Martyr says while Vanagloria laughs her ass off.
"How the fuck did you do that. Nah your cheating or something there's no way. I'm being set up right now."
Vanagloria calms herself down. "I played basketball for 5 years. I was too short to dunk or get around everyone else so I practiced shooting. When you're shorter than your blocker you can turn around and shoot backwards so they can't block your shot. No one ever sees it coming."
"Aww come on. I thought you just did track." Martyr groaned.
"I did stuff like cross country in the fall or track in the spring during off seasons. But no if I didn't get a spot in the Vying I would've tried to make it as a professional basketball player, or sprinter. It would've been hard though, neither of those get nearly as much attention as any sort of elemental combat competition."
"Yeah, I only did one sport, which was one season of indoor track. I am pretty much entirely focused on combat. I only played basketball with friends out on a public court or something like that."
"That might be enough to still win this game."
"Nah, I think it's safe to say you win that game. Lets go over to the sparring pit and start training." Martyr said as he rolled his ball over towards the rack.
"Waaaaaaait no don't go… we just started… it's like a five minute game. I'll go easy." Vanagloria said, genuinely disappointed.
"Ugh." It hurt him to his core to have to do this to her but he knew that she wouldn't fare well in the forest trail if she didn't know how to use her element yet. I mean she literally blasted a hole in their floor earlier.
Then an idea pops into his head.
"Aight. here, I'll meet you halfway."
"Okay…"
"I'll teach you how to dunk."
"I don't even think I can physically do that." Vanagloria says, looking up at the 10 foot hoop.
"I've spent tons of hours trying to jump higher but I can only dunk on 8 or 9 foot hoops."
"Okay but now you have lightning powers."
"Oh yeah! Yeah teach me how to do the booster jump thingo."
"Yeah I'll teach you that. Let me just demonstrate first." Martyr said as Vanagloria backed away to give him space.
Martyr then started running towards the hoop. As he ran he drove all of his energy down to his feet and jumped at the tree throw line.
Right as his feet left the ground he let a burst of fire energy out of his shoes and boosted his jump, getting probably triple the height he normally would.
He soared through the air for about two seconds and landed onto the rim, with one hand hanging onto the top of the backboard.
"Try something like this. All you gotta do is shoot energy out of your shoes." Martyr said down to Vanagloria who looked like she was trying to figure out the logistics of what just happened.
"Uh okay." She said as she walked backwards to the other wall.
Martyr jumped down and ran to the side of the court to give her space.
She got into her running position and started to activate her element. Little jolts and sparks of lightning started dancing around her limbs and hair.
And then…
'BOOM"
Not even a second after Vanagloria kicked off she immediately had to start skidding to stop herself as she had basically teleported in the middle of the court.
A strong wind hit her soon after, shoving her and making her stumble in the process. She looked around, disorientated.
"I did the thing! Not the one I was supposed to but the other one!" She shouted over to him once the realization of what she had just done dawned on her face, her voice full of glee.
Martyr had now seen three different people with lightning elements do this in the past week.
"Holy shit you just bolted." Martyr was wildly impressed. He didn't know how hard it was for somebody to do that but it would be a really useful move nonetheless. "Do you remember what you did to make it happen?"
"I mean this was the spot I was focusing on when I was about to kick off. This was gonna be where I jumped off from." Vanagloria was looking back from where she came.
"What did it feel like? Do you like, shoot yourself through lightning or something?" Martyr was trying to wrap his head around it.
"I don't know. All I know is I'm gonna try that again."
"Wait!"
'BOOM'
She was already gone.
Vanagloria was already over on the other side of the court, looking around at her new surroundings while the boom echoed all throughout the arena.
Then she bolted over to the middle of the dueling arena, making sand fly into the trampoline park. It took her a second to find Martyr but once she did she started waving.
"This is so easy!" And then she was gone again.
Then a second later she tapped him on the shoulder but when turned around she was all the way across the court.
It was making him dizzy just trying to follow where she was.
"Wait, stop for a second! You're gonna tire yourself out."
Just as he expected she didn't listen and continued, laughing while doing so. He couldn't blame her for doing this, this was probably the first cool thing she was able to do with her new powers.
And then after about five more loud booms she finally started to run out of steam.
"You can't do that." Martyr said as Vanagloria walked over to him, completely out of breath.
"Oh my… holy shit…" She had her hands behind her head, her whole face completely red.
"It feels like I just ran an 800 full speed." She managed between breaths.
"That's very specific. But yeah, you can't abuse your elemental like that. Especially if you just got it." Martyr lectured.
"You get a good amount of it to use without getting tired but after a while it's just gonna start fatiguing you more and more. It might take you a half an hour for your body to gather up enough elemental energy from the air to feel normal again."
"Ugh, does that mean we're done with training?" Vanagloria sounded disappointed.
"No, actually it might even be better to continue like this. Your elemental stamina is prolly super low right now so we should try and push it. Just a little."
"Are you sure that wouldn't hurt me?"
"No if we pace it right the worst it's gonna be is your gonna be winded like you are right now. If you feel any sharp pain in your stomach or hands, then we shouldn't push it any further."
"Okay, I'll do it."
"Good, okay. Let's get started then."
Martyr had a whole mental laundry list of things he wanted to teach Vanagloria to do. All of them were things that he wished he knew when he first got his elemental shot.
He started first with making her run from one side of the basketball court to the other. Martyr had heard that lightning powers can make someone run faster and the myth was in fact true.
Vanagloria said it wasn't much faster than she usually was, which she apparently was the record holder for her school's non-elemental 100 meter dash with 11.81 seconds. Martyr wasn't going to fully believe it until he got proof but nonetheless she absolutely could beat that time with her element.
He didn't really understand how it worked but Vanagloria said it didn't feel too unnatural despite it literally being unnatural.
After they spent an hour or so on that, they tried to do the jumping exercise again. It didn't go terribly but it was pretty clear lightning didn't improve Vanagloria's jumping and really only her acceleration into the jump.
Vanagloria was still satisfied because it gave her just enough boost to just barely touch the rim which was a big moment for her.
Next they spent another hour or so practicing the accuracy of Vanagloria's finger gun.
She wasn't great at it. Lightning is super erratic so it wasn't a huge surprise to them but it wasn't definitely something she still had to practice.
They used a little shooting range in a door behind the right staircase. Martyr tried out some of their bows and slingshots they had in there, but he wasn't great with that either.
After that they spent another hour on that exercise. They played a quick game of WHORE and went back upstairs to take a break.
Vanagloria took some exercise clothes back downstairs so she could take a shower in the meeting room bathroom while Martyr went to go get lunch.
"Oh hey Spectre." Martyr was very surprised to find Spectre awake with a bowl of cereal at a small table next to a small opening in the wall for food to be passed out to the living room.