.
“I could tell I wasn’t breathing,” Ryuu griped, once they were all awake and seated in the recovery room. Little Sen (new name yet to be determined) was no longer present when they woke, by the way. It was just myself and the trio.
“Naturally,” I nodded. “You were dead, after all. Be thankful that being dead saved you from the sensation of suffocation.”
“But I was conscious! And I could see!”
By design, the trainees lie where they drop, feeling the intense pain from the killing blow, until the training session exits. Unless their eyelids were closed at the moment of death, they can see whatever direction their eyes are facing.
“Death in the simulation is, frankly, an intentionally horrifying experience,” I told him. “We do terminate early if the trainee is in some horrid circumstance. Once they’ve been crushed under a mountain or bitten into chunks, chewed and swallowed, we don’t bother continuing the experience.”
Both Chiara and Dilorè looked pretty horrified at both of those ideas. But Ryuu wasn’t deterred.
“Do you think that’s what death is really like?” he demanded.
“It is not,” I replied flatly. “I can assure you of that, Mr. Kowa. I’ve died several times.”
He didn’t have a retort for that.
“Real death is nothing like what you experience here,” I repeated. “That’s on purpose. If you had realistic deaths in here, reaching total loss of sensation, you would come to tolerate it. You would develop bad habits and become reckless. Then, once you went back out to the real world, you would probably quickly get yourself killed.”
Even worse, as we learned early on, the trainee might become addicted to the adrenaline and the pain. Technically, the physiological reasons for that were not in play, but it is difficult to separate out the physical parts of a clade’s mental processes without destroying the value of the training, so we have to simulate that part too.
Judging from the look in his eyes, Ryuu was suspicious that I was giving him a simplistic answer.
The thing is, he was right, but it would be counterproductive if I told him that we actually valued the intense frustration that he had felt while he was unable to move even his head. That, and the post-mortem analyses he would start doing for himself after each death, and the bitter determination to survive and avoid those things that he would develop. Those three results were far more valuable than the pain. Nature intended pain to be a catalyst for other results, after all.
Even if he never did beat the dragon, even if the team met one of the lesser requirements that allowed completion of the Dragon Stage, Ryuu had to get to the point where his highest goal was improvement. Valuing that goal was important for my Servants because a normal Mortal brain was not good at dealing with the unnatural life extension from the blood bond. Mortal minds have built-in expiration processes. They must be trained for longevity, and a lifelong thirst for improvement makes a good foundation.
The need for Ryuu was slightly different. He needed to maximize his growth cheat. He’d had the thirst to improve at first and developed rapidly. I was going to make him get it back.
I had slightly different goals for Dilorè and Chiara, but this stage would support those goals as well.
I spent a long, slightly annoying twenty minutes allowing Ryuu to vent his anger before spending perhaps another hour discussing what would happen next. Simulated servants operated by the spirits running the simulation brought a meal to us while we spoke. At the end of the meal, I had everyone lie down and close their eyes.
* * *
Ryuu opened his eyes to a scene of chaos. He sat with his back against a stone surface in a recess that was deep enough to give him a minimal degree of shelter, but hurricane force wind drove the rain almost horizontally, only feet away from his face, and trees and debris were whipping around in front of him. Thunder roared in a continuous cannonade from repeated lightning strikes, illuminating a forest landscape not dark enough for night. In a storm like this, the light level suggested it would have been daylight without the storm clouds.
He had lived on Huade for more than eleven months, with more than nine as an adventurer. Naturally, his first action was to check for his sword and discover that it wasn’t there. He immediately checked for other items, determining in the end that all he had other than his shirt, trousers, belt and boots was a utility knife.
His attention shifted from there to his surroundings. Until now, he had yet to move much other than his hands, but he now stuck his head out a bit. That didn’t last long. The howling wind drove him right back into his nook.
What he had seen was that he was at the top of a short rocky rise off the forest floor, and runoff was streaming past him at the bottom of that rise, perhaps becoming a flood.
What he had not seen was any sign of Chiara, Dilorè or myself. The other two weren’t active in this room, and if I could be described to be anywhere in this scene, I would be in the transparent ball that he had yet to notice floating beside him. Well, it was probably hard to see in this light.
Actually, I was sitting in an instructor’s booth, sipping a coffee-like beverage that was popular in the time of the Dragon Stage. I watched him on a curving screen that wrapped partway around me, filling my visual field from one peripheral zone to the other. Behind my seat, an attendant stood ready to feed me or assist in any other way I asked. A control board in front of me had a few basic controls, resembling an arcade video game, but these could only move the display, rotating the ball or flying it around. Any changes to the simulation itself would be through an order to the operator spirit, not my direct action.
“That water looks like it’s getting higher, Mr. Kowa,” I said into the flexible speaking tube that extended from the control board as my microphone.
His head whipped around, looking vaguely in my direction, trying to see me.
“Look carefully. You can see the camera if you follow my voice.”
“I can barely hear you!”
My lips curled upward as IT moved the ball closer.
“Yeah, that’s a nasty wind. Sure glad I’m not there.”
I sipped my pseudo-coffee while enjoying his angry face.
“So what do you expect me to do here?” he demanded, while eying the current at the foot of the slope sidelong. It was definitely raging stronger and faster.
He didn’t ask about Chiara and Dilorè, but that wasn’t surprising. I had told them the training rooms would be individualized.
“Well, you have two problems. One is that rising flash flood. The other should be showing up around about now.”
Multiple lightning strikes crashed down in three spots out in the forest in rapid succession, giving brief illumination to the storm-darkened landscape. The combo stretched long enough to nicely light up the massive figure looming in the distance. It was humanoid, with enormous horns jutting from its skull, and it was clearly moving through the trees that came up to its knees.
“What the hell is that?” Ryuu demanded, straining to see the shape in the difficult lighting.
Perhaps I should feel ashamed of myself. I really was starting to enjoy this.
“Mr. Kowa, meet Etne-Agerak,” I stated. “His name roughly means ‘Brings the Storm’, and he is responsible for this weather, because he is very angry with you.”
He narrowed his eyes as he stared into the ball. “Catherine told me that weather magic isn’t possible.”
I hesitated, trying to place the name. Didn’t matter, so I stayed on subject. I agreed, “According to the best Orestanian scholarship, weather magic is very definitely impossible.”
It actually is possible, but it’s an advanced application of wizardry, which is outside the scope of modern science on Huade.
“Then…”
“It isn’t magic. It’s divine authority. Mr. Storm Bringer is the god of hunts and storms from an extremely ancient mythology.”
“He’s a what?!”
“Many of my Servants learned stories about him in their classical education, so we used him for this scenario. The people who built the Dragon Fighting Arena believed in him.”
“I thought they lived during the time when you people were running things?” he complained. “Why were they making up their own gods?”
“If they had believed that we really came from the celestial realm and ruled by heavenly authority, they wouldn’t have rebelled against us, right? No matter what we said, they could see we were living, breathing creatures. They wanted to believe in a power beyond what we were teaching them. Humans are very headstrong creatures, Mr. Kowa. They will believe what they choose to believe, no matter how much proof more educated people mound up before them. Literal celestial maidens walked among them, yet they still had their own beliefs.”
Another round of repeated lightning strikes clearly showed Etne-Agerak shaking a bow taller than a stadium lighting mast in the air.
“You expect me to beat that? I don’t even have my sword!”
“Yeah, no. Beating that is probably beyond any living being,” I agreed. “Your goal is to survive and escape. Shouldn’t you get going soon?”
“What the hell can I do in this rain?” he demanded.
“Look down, Mr. Kowa. If you don’t leave this spot, you’ll drown.”
He looked down to see that the water had now become a massive river, flooding the nearer parts of the forest. The flood would reach him in not too much longer.
Good for him. He didn’t panic. He quickly assessed the wall, found handholds, and started scaling. I used the videogame-like controls to stay with him.
The attendant helpfully mentioned, “You can use the controls to automatically follow, Commander.”
I nodded, telling her. “For now, I want to keep control.”
As he climbed, perhaps he could tell that the rock wall was a cliff about sixty paces tall. That’s White Cliffs of Dover territory, a seriously difficult climb in any weather, and he had typhoon winds trying to rip him from the cliff. Nevertheless, he continued to successfully cling to the rock and make his way upward. Ryuu’s muscles are very developed; powerful arms and legs propelled him upward as quickly as he could find handholds.
It was true, that if he managed to get to the top, he could escape. We designed our rendition of Etne-Agerak to be forty paces tall and unable to fly, so a trainee would win if they made it to the top.
That wasn’t how trainees usually won, though. Which only made sense. Ryuu was right out there in the open on a cliff face.
The storm god brought up his bow, this time gripped vertically, and took aim at the hero. A bolt of electricity formed and became an arrow as he drew, then arced through the air when he let it fly, nailing Ryuu in the back.
Even if Ryuu survived the strike, he couldn’t have continued clinging to the rock while his nerves were electrified and his muscles were frying. He dropped, plummeting several paces to strike a ledge. Somehow, he didn’t tumble off.
He wasn’t moving, but I couldn’t see the animated death aura surrounding his body yet. It was possible he was conscious and seeing the same scene I now saw, of the storm god’s rage declining as his wife, the rainbow goddess, hugged and soothed him. The beautiful wife’s rainbow dress shined brightly, casting colors that reflected from the sky as the dark clouds dissipated.
For some reason, the two figures in the sunset finally helped me remember that Catharine was the name of the priestess who was carrying Ryuu’s baby.
“…should I tell him?” I wondered quietly to myself. She should be about five months along now, since she became pregnant when they celebrated New Years together.
“The trainee has expired,” the operator spirit reported softly from an unseen sound source.
Not yet, I decided. I only read it in IseNai. I need to confirm it in real life before I tell him.
“Place him in time dilation in the recovery room for now,” I requested. “Let’s work with Chiara next.”
