Free Web NovelChapter 25: 25. Fake-Off Counts and So Does Sensory Overload! Welcome to My Curriculum
Lia raised her wooden sword, clearly having a difficult time saying what she wanted to do. "A-alright... uhm..."
"I’m going to.. attack with a... what did you call it again? Oh! A slash from the right that goes across." Lia locked in.
She moved forward, and Kaela quickly changed her position to block, using only the sound as a guide to where she will attack. The wooden swords hit each other, and Kaela’s defense worked surprisingly well even though she couldn’t see.
From the sidelines, Clara yelled. "Lia, your telegraph was too clear! Try faking it with your voice."
"Kaela, you’re leaning too far forward!" Catherine said more, her instructor instincts kicking in. "Get yourself back in balance!"
William was pleased to see both women fighting their disabilities while trying to sort through the chaos of the commentary to find useful advice. Lia’s need for perfection was hurting her because she kept pausing before making a move to think of the best way to describe it.
Kaela’s aggression was getting her in trouble because she couldn’t see where Lia was and kept missing her attacks.
Lia said, "Vertical strike from above," but then she quickly switched to a low sweep.
Kaela tried to block high, but she got hit on the shin.
THUD!
"Awwww! What the fuck!" Kaela gritted her teeth. "That’s cheating, you fucking liar!"
"Nuh-uh! I made it up for our training," Lia said, sounding surprised at herself. "Instructor Wade said every move was acceptable, not just every honest move."
"Fake-off counts!" Lia smile smugly.
William smiled while clapping. "Now that’s what I’m talking about! She finally managed to find the answer!"
"Give Lia a point for finally realizing that perfect technique doesn’t matter if you can’t change." William nodded. "Kaela, you should learn from this too."
"Don’t think that your opponents will fight fair because when you got the upper-hand... they’ll do anything to cheat!"
"Goddammit! I don’t want to lose!" Kaela starts to stomp the ground non-stop, "I’ll fucking beat you to plump, Lia!"
"Let’s see if you’re worthy enough for that, Princess!" Lia answered with a smug look.
They started over and kept going, with the group watching while giving more and more creative comments towards them and each other. Ellie gave Clara advice on how to fight with a wooden sword.
THUD! CLANG! THUD! CLANG! THUD! CLANG!
Olivia suggested using magical theory in ways that had nothing to do with fighting with a wooden sword. And Catherine gave harsh but accurate corrections that would have been harsh if they weren’t so accurate.
The duel went on for ten more minutes, and both women slowly got used to their problems. Lia began to employ innovative verbal announcements, utilizing timing and misdirection to disrupt Kaela’s audio tracking.
Kaela got better at spatial awareness by using the sounds of footsteps and breathing to guess attacks that weren’t just the ones that were announced.
When Lia finally won three to two, both women were breathing hard and sweating, but at least they moved much better thanks to their training. Lia had to stop being paralyzed by her analysis, and Kaela had learned how to fight with more than just brute force.
[Training Finished: Lia Valestria]
[Skill Improvement: +3 for being able to adapt in combat]
[Kaela Aurelius has finished training]
[Skill Improvement: +4 for Sensory Combat Awareness]
[Instructor Experience: +15]
William took the practice swords and said, "Good work! Both of you."
"You both learned something important there." William smiled. "Lia, you can make things up when you have to."
"You don’t need to see things as much as you thought." Willian glanced at Kalea. "And for Kaela, keep those lessons in mind."
""Yes!"" Both Lia and Kaela nodded at the same time.
William nodded back and then looked at the other people in the group. "Alright... Let’s start with scenario two."
"It’s your turn, Ellie and Clara." William pointed both of them. "Now... I want this one about control and putting things in order."
The two women came forward, looking scared, which was exactly what William wanted. Students who were worried paid more attention and learned faster because they knew that failing would have immediate effects.
William set up a bunch of training dummies in the arena, each with a tag of a different color. "Ellie, you’re going to fix these dummies, and the colors you see here show how bad the injury are."
"Red is urgent, yellow is very bad, and green is not." William raised five fingers. "You have exactly five minutes to go through them and fix as many as you can." freeweɓnovel.cѳm
"That’s not so bad," Ellie said, not sure what to say.
"But wait~! There’s a twist~!" William said, "And I’m not making it easy on ya."
William pointed at Clara. "Clara, you’re keeping an eye on us."
"I’m going to have one of these dummies attack Ellie every thirty seconds."
"You need to look and listen to find out which one it is, and then use these practice arrows to stop it before it gets to her."
"Ellie has to start her triage over again if she misses even once."
He gave Clara a training bow with dull arrows that were meant to set off the dummies’ deactivation sensors. She got a little scared when she realized how much she would have to do at once.
"N-no way," Clara said. "There are too many things going on at once to keep track of..."
William said, "Welcome to real combat situations," with no sympathy. "Healers work under pressure, and their team keeps them safe."
"If you can’t handle the stress in this training, you’ll be shocked to death in real combat."
William looked at both of his assistants. "Catherine and Olivia, you two are getting in the way as well while making noise, moving around, and doing anything else you can think of to make Clara’s sensory overload worse."
"WHAT?!"
He could tell that Clara’s analytical mind was already starting to freak out at the thought of all that unfiltered information. She needed to get over this by being forced to learn how to prioritize under pressure instead of trying to deal with everything at once.
"Begin!" William said, and the timer started.
Ellie ran to the nearest red-tagged dummy right away, and her healing magic lit up with that familiar green glow. William paid close attention and saw that she was already doing better than she had in their first training session.
The gradual reduction method he had taught her was becoming more second nature. Clara stood on a raised platform at the edge of the training ground with her bow raised and her eyes scanning the dummies with extreme care.
Catherine and Olivia started to move around the arena. Their footsteps and occasional talking made background noise that would normally be ignored but became important when Clara needed to pick out certain sounds.
William turned on the first dummy after thirty seconds. It started to move toward Ellie in jerky, mechanical steps, with its targeting sensor locked onto her position.
Clara’s head snapped toward the movement, and she already had her arrow drawn.
"Fifteen meters in the southeast quadrant," she said to herself as she kept track of the math.
STAB!
The arrow hit the dummy’s sensor and set off the mechanism that turned it off and the dummy stopped moving.
"Good," William yelled. "However, it took you four seconds to acquire the target."
"Enemies in real life move faster, so speed up your processing!"
Ellie moved quickly between dummies for another thirty seconds. As she got into a rhythm, her healing became more controlled and precise.
She had finished two important cases and was starting on a third when the next dummy went off, this time from behind her.
Clara was already pursuing the target, but at that moment, Olivia tripped and fell loudly near the archer’s platform, creating a significant distraction. For a split second, Clara lost her focus and let go of her arrow a little off-target.
But it still hit, but William shook his head. "That was careless move."
"You let things outside of you break your focus!"
"There are a lot of things that can get in the way on real battlefields." William raised his voice. "Learn how to filter it!"
As William activated more and more dummies at once, the training got harder and harder. This made Clara have to choose which targets to focus on based on how close they were to Ellie.
At first, she was very scared because of all the sensory overload, but as she learned how to organize threats in her mind, that fear started to go away. Critical threats were dealt with right away, potential threats were watched, and irrelevant stimuli were ignored without thinking about them.
At the same time, Ellie was making her own big discovery. She stopped second-guessing her healing choices when she was under a lot of stress and there were threats all around her.
Muscle memory took over and she stopped worrying about overloading or underperforming, instead acting on what she had learned.
Ellie had successfully treated all of the most serious and critical cases before the five-minute timer went off. Clara had stopped every activated dummy except for one that got within five feet of Ellie before being disabled.
Both women fell to the ground in exhaustion, but their faces showed how proud they were of having done something they thought was impossible.
[Training Finished: Ellie Von Synthia]
[Skill Improvement: +5 for Emergency Healing Protocols]
[Moderate Confidence Restoration]
[Training Finished: Clara Crestfall]
[Skill Improvement: Prioritizing Threats +4]
[Development of Sensory Filters: Big Steps Forward]
[Instructor Experience: +18]
