Godslayer Lysette: Chapter 237

Chapter 237: A Proper Welcome to Ft. James

Another uneventful day passed in the infirmary of the garrison, which Lysette had since learned was officially named Ft. James, in honor of the immediately preceding king.  With nothing to do except Cultivate and wait for the morning to arrive, Lysette passed the time mostly focused on the goings on in Ciricu, 

About an hour after sunrise, a knock on the door preceded Doc Ivies’s arrival, carrying a clipboard and accompanied by what appeared to be a medical understudy.  The two were wearing matching camouflage-colored lab coats, and Lysette greeted the pair with a smile which was Reciprocated, and a handshake declined by both.

“Good morning, Cadet,” Doc Ivies said.  “I apologize for refusing your greeting, but you are still technically under quarantine.  Procedures, cross-contamination, I trust you understand.  Before we get started, I wanted to introduce Lieutenant Sanders.  He’s a new medical intern here at Ft. James.  

“Now then, I do have some questions for you.  Are you feeling well?  Anything abnormal that you’ve noticed over the last two days?  Sleeping patterns are fine?”

“I’m feeling as well as I always am, physically speaking.  All this impending war and waiting for assignments is a little difficult to adjust to mentally.  As for sleeping patterns, I don’t really need to sleep as much as I used to, being a Cultivator, but I haven’t gotten any less than I typically do in a night.”  Lysette smiled at the technical but very misleading truth.

“No fever, fatigue, runny nose, sore throat, itching, excessive coughing or sneezing?  No stomach ache, headache, nausea, diarrhea, cramping, no watery eyes?  No swelling, inflammation–”

“No, none of those, although I might start getting a headache and ringing in my ears if you keep asking me about all these symptoms so quickly.”

“Again, I apologize, Cadet Tronete.  Just procedures I have to go through and questions I’m required to ask.”  He pulled a stethoscope out of one of the inside pockets in his coat.  “Just a couple of quick checks of your heart and lungs now, to make sure there’s nothing abnormal that you’re not feeling at the moment.”

Doc Ivies placed the device on Lysette’s back.  “Now just breathe normally.  It might feel a little weird while I listen in, but I promise, it won’t hurt and I’ll try to make this as quick as I can.”

Lysette complied as Doc Ivies’s instrument scanned the various lobes of her lungs, taking a few seconds between each to jot various scribbles on his clipboard.  As he got to the last one, Lysette prepared for the most difficult task of the whole ordeal— simulating a heartbeat with her Cultivation long enough to convince the doctor that she was biological and alive rather than just a shell being piloted from afar.

Lysette began counting seconds, timing her false heartbeat four heartbeats to five seconds, as she expected a trained Cultivator in great physical condition to be.  And as Doc Ivies continued to listen in, she increased it up to a ratio of five heartbeats in six seconds, again simulating the twinge of anxiety expected in a medical setting.  She increased it a bit more as he continued, furrowing his eyebrows as he listened in before finally stopping his testing after thirty seconds too long for her comfort.

“Your heart rate is a bit higher than I’d expected.  Usually for a Cultivator of your capacity, I’d expect thirty to thirty-five beats per minute.  Nothing to worry about, fifty is well within healthy parameters, especially in anxiogenic environments.  You may want to speak with a specialist if this persists, just to rule out anything with a longer incubation period, but other than that, let me just check your ears and nose real quick and you’ll be good to go.”

Another two minutes of awkward examinations of Lysette’s aura, oral, and nasal passages followed before she was finally given leave to head down to the mess hall to join the other soldiers for breakfast.

The dining facility, easily a time and a half the size of the Academy’s cafeteria, was oppressively loud.  Soldiers talked within their various units, spewing cluster vulgarities that would make the guys back in Ciricu blush with embarrassment.  Lysette helped herself to a plate of eggs, some sort of sausage loaf, and a cup of fruit.  Though she wasn’t hungry and the food neither looked nor smelled particularly appealing, Lysette took a large portion to better blend in among her comrades.

She sat down on one of the few empty chairs in the hall, not paying too much attention to any individual conversation surrounding her, though keeping an eye on everything through her aura that now spread wide enough to cover the entire room.  The food wasn’t as bad as she’d feared.  Far too much grease and char for her liking, and lacking in the more subtle spice profiles that she’d grown accustomed to at the Academy and in Ciricu alike.  Inoffensive, filling, and nutritious.  Exactly what a good soldier’s diet should be.

“Hey, you,” a man’s voice said from the other end of the table.  “New recruit?”

Lysette nodded.  “I am, yes.  Arrived here about four days ago.”

“Four days ago?”  The man laughed, and some of his comrades joined in. “Practically a baby over here!”

That comment got a number of people from surrounding tables joining in the laughter.  Lysette played it off in stride, taking another bite of the sausage product in the meantime.

“Have you been assigned to your unit yet?” he asked.

“No.  I’ve been doing a lot of intake paperwork, then got confined to the infirmary for another two days on suspicions that I might have come down with some strange illness.”

“Well, we gotta properly initiate you, give you the proper welcomes and greetings and introductions so you know what’s what around here.  Since it’s your first time, we’ll give you another minute to finish your meal, worm.”

“Worm?”

“It’s our affectionate term for the new folks around here.”  The man smiled eerily as he said ‘affectionate’.  “Because if they don’t get with the program and ship up, they’re gonna end up as food for the worms.”

Lysette scarfed down another several bites of egg in rapid succession before following the troop of two dozen soldiers out into the garrison’s commons, where soldiers were already in the midst of training.  Most of them weren’t Cultivators, or at least no Cultivator who’d had much of an opportunity to do much Cultivation.  However, their weapons, primarily a mixture of spears, swords, and bows, all were enchanted with some low-level abilities.

Judging by the way Essence moved around them, the swords and spears both had some sort of sharpness-boosting enchantment on them, allowing them to slash and pierce more quickly and with greater force.  They also seemed to have minor durability enhancements as well.  Nothing that couldn’t be mass-produced by low-level Cultivators— just something that would serve as a slight force multiplier for those who weren’t themselves gifted the power of the gods.

“I trust you’ve already been taught the basics of how to swing a sword.”  The man grabbed a pair of blunted bronze weapons— likely for exactly these sorts of occasions— and handed one of them to Lysette

Lysette nodded.  “Any particular rules of engagement?”

“You daft spring chicken!  You’re going to get yourself killed thinking about things like honor or rules of engagement.  On the battlefield, everything’s fair.  The enemy won’t care two shits about not striking you below the belt or stabbing you in the back or gangin’ up on you or anything like that.  They want you dead, and they’ll lie, cheat, steal, and use every damned dirty trick they can think up to make sure you do.  Consider this an introduction to a real man’s training!”

Lysette sighed.  “No chance to decline this match?”

The entire crowd of thirty-eight men broke down in laughter for nearly a minute before Lysette’s would-be challenger composed himself enough to speak.

“You are too much!  Listen.  I don’t know what shithole you crawled out of.  And I don’t give a damn either!  Here, there is no backing down.  There is no getting scared.  Because every punch you pull is an opening for those Elithrian bastards to kill someone, and if the service is lucky, it’ll just be you.

“We here might not be Cultivators, but that just means we gotta work that much harder so the ones on our side don’t get stabbed in the back while they are off doing those things only they can do.  So time to stop acting like a crybaby, draw your weapon, and let’s do this thing already!”

Lysette steeled her grip and mirrored the man’s fighting stance.  Low, knees bent, bronze sword in both hands, blade facing up and ahead and a sixty-degree angle and hilt just below her stomach.  She waited, allowing the man to make the first move.

And he did.  He charged, screaming a war cry louder than she’d expected as he went for a straightforward strike.  His movement was well-telegraphed, yet still practiced and smooth.  The diagonal slash came from Lysette’s left side, but the arc was too wide, enabling her to step backward to avoid the blow, then respond with a counterattack upon his exposed backside.

To his credit, he twisted his momentum around, suffering only a scrape as his blade intercepted her own with a clang that filled the air.  He broke off their swordlock an instant later, weaving his weapon toward Lysette’s hand.  She tilted slightly to avoid the disarming maneuver, then, wielding a bit more of her strength, flung him backward and forced the fight back to a neutral position.

He again took the initiative in the second clash, this time first throwing a small cloud of dust at Lysette’s eyes as a feint.  Lysette closed them and again sidestepped the horizontal arcing slice.  Then, as she opened her eyes, she caught a glimpse of a second man joining in the assault, the first man aiming high and the second low.

“No rules, no escape!” they said, and the crowd cheered.  “Everyone gets a welcome beating!”

Lysette backflipped to avoid them both, and as she did, she stole a few blades of grass and tucked them into her pants pocket while both of her opponents were reeling from their blows.  The crowd gasped as Lysette began batting back both of their swings, one parry, one dodge, then a halfhearted attempt at a counteroffensive.

One of the men behind her went for a haymaker uppercut from her blind spot, aiming directly for the small of her back.  Lysette was assailed from both front flanks by the two fighters from before, each launching a flurry of piercing thrusts from the blunted tips of their weapons.  They smirked, beaming with confidence, and Lysette waited until the last second before launching her attack.

The blades of grass from before streamed out of her pants and fluttered into the eyes of the man on her right.  He winced, pulling up his attack, and Lysette charged him at a pace she considered fast for a human, battering into him and knocking him to the ground.  She then, in a single movement, spun around and smacked her original challenger to the ground with a light slash at the base of his shoulder blade.

“Is this enough?” Lysette asked.  “I appreciate the welcome, but I don’t know how productive continuing this match is going to be.”

“You–  Lucky shot!”

“As I was informed earlier, there are no rules of engagement, and that everything was fair, including cheap shots and multiple others joining in to what was originally a one-on-one competition, just like it would be in a real battle.  However, let this be a lesson to all of you as well.  Do not mistake kindness for weakness.”

Lysette sprouted her crystalline wings and hovered just off the ground.  “Just because someone does not wish to fight, just because someone asks for peace, does not mean that they are incapable of war.  And, especially when we are in the midst of war, it is unwise to provoke others into the conflict.”  She bowed slightly.  “I thank you all for the sparring match, and I hope that our interactions this morning will serve to everyone’s benefit.”  Such is the highest goal of Reciprocity.

Chapter 236: https://www.patreon.com/posts/113910876

Table of Contents: https://www.patreon.com/posts/101896170

Chapter 238: https://www.patreon.com/posts/113980364