Dancing with Myself (Training)

[Salem Norongachi]

17 BBY
The Worldcraft Talta
Project OMEGA Facility​

"Keep moving. When you aren't moving think about moving. Know the next dozen steps before you've taken the first. Account for your surroundings. When you enter a room know the exact dimensions of that room. Know where you don't want to be. Know what you can use. There ain't no honor in a fight, its fist meets flesh and that's all there is to it. If you happen to have a chair leg, brick or broken bottle in that fist, all the karking better."

I listened, felt the words slip inside my head and lock there with a soldiers clarity. It wasn't hard, all I'd known was a soldiers life. I was bred for this, a concoction of genetics designed to bring out the very pinnacle of human physical prowess. Thats what they told me at least but the man before me, dancing even as he lectured, made me feel slow. Like I was always a move behind, every step I took he was there, every punch or kick and he was gone then suddenly inside my guard.

My ribs ached from the body blows, my face swollen down the one side and I could taste the blood in my mouth. He was good, this mysterious brawler. Better than the rest, the drill sergeants that the Empire had provided when I began my hand-to-hand training. They'd known the moves, some of them weren't even half bad but they lacked grace, they lacked precision. They lacked the instinct that I was built with and that my opponent had forged through whatever hellish life had brought him into the Emperors service and to my home, my birthplace, and my training ground; The Worldcraft Talta.

I could feel their eyes on me as we circled each other, fists balled and at the ready. The scientists, my 'parents'. Gauging me, judging me against their desired outcome to see if I fitted the bill. It was true that while I'd been growing in my artificial womb they had flash imprinted me. Downloading all the theory of combat, of the Force, of war into my forming mind. However, as they so politely reminded me, theory wasn't good enough...

It had been months since I'd taken my first breath of air. Unsure and unsteady on my newborn feet. That had quickly faded when they threw me in a pit with a couple of inmates. Its amazing what instinct can do, I can still feel the blood, hot and slick, between my fingers as I ripped one of their windpipes out. It was a slaughter, pure and simple, they didn't even know why they were there. This grizzled old Vet of some forgotten war, he knew why he was here and he was willing to kill me to leave again.

I figured they hadn't told him that nobody leaves Talta without a toe tag.

"I can read you like a book, kid. I know what you're gonna do before you do. Its like watching a clockwork toy wind up. Its like you're made of stone. You're mind knows what it wants to do but your muscles? They haven't a frakin' clue." The jibe might have ruffled someone else but from what I've observed in the humans around me, they seem to have left out a few of the baser parts of humanity. They told me to fight this man and so I would fight him, until they told me to stop. It was that simple, I had no investment in anything beyond that order.

He was correct however, I could clearly see what he was going to do. The subtle nuances of his muscles, an almost unnoticeable look to where on my body he wanted to strike, just a flash but I saw it. I knew how to counter the kicks, the punches and the elbows that he had rained down upon me but my body couldn't keep up. It was always a fraction too slow between thought and action, it wasn't hammered into my muscles yet. That much was clear.

A quick jab clocked me square in the face, my head jilted back but I didn't flinch, didn't wince when I felt the bone break and the blood begin to flow down my lips and chin. I knew what was coming, I had seen the pattern and was already taking a hasty half step back and tilting my upper body away from the devastating hay maker that had been his calling card throughout our fight.

I had him, the fist slipped by inches from my face and he had overreached. I moved forward, ready, willing, to drive my fist into his exposed ribs. What I didn't notice was the half step he'd taken a millisecond after throwing his weight into the punch. Our boots hit the ground at the same instant and then that outstretched arm to the left side of my head slammed backwards. The elbow caught me directly in the jaw and knocked me sideways, a spray of red shooting from my mouth as stars began to fill my vision and I sought to steady my footing.

I half turn and retaliate, a sloppy and desperate punch. He has my arm ensnared like a vice, one hand on my wrist and twisting, the other on the back of my shoulder and pushing, so that he's right at my side and my upper body is forced forward. He half turns and knees me in the gut, I feel the air driven from my lungs and then as I stumble backwards his hands are in my hair and the last thing I see is a closeup of his forehead before darkness takes me.

 

[Salem Norongachi]

The day starts with the run. The Worldcraft is a fifty mile round trip, its surface as interchangeable as the whim of my Imperial Instructors. Stinking bogs, arid stretches of desert, sub-zero tundra. The very heat from the small artificial sun can be dialed up or down depending on how the mood has struck them on any given day. Most days I run alone, in silence. The only company I have is the steady rhythm of my breathing inside the full-faced helmet of my battle armour. On rare occasions there are others, one or two, they have no name and do not speak but we recognize each other on a level the Imperials will never know.

I wonder, sometimes, If in some distant part of the galaxy the Emperor has tasked other brilliant minds to unlock the secrets that were so cruelly denied him. Other creatures born of science and the struggle for absolute perfection. It doesn't matter, in the end. Whatever process gave them the gifts beyond the mundane of Humanity usually fail. Fifty miles was a fair distance by anyone's standards, regardless of the terrain, but I was usually tasked with several circuits on the days I had company. Most of my running mates didn't survive the distance, they would fall to exhaustion and that would the last I'd see of them.

Then there were the ones who stayed the course. Thats when it got real interesting.

I had spent the better part of two months having my face caved in by the best hand-to-hand teachers the Empire could find. In that first fight I didn't know just what my body was capable of, I hadn't fully grasped the augmentations that had been gifted me at the genetic level. Some of my brief companions had the same abilities, sometimes they were stronger, sometimes they were faster.

For these fights the pit where I usually sparred were reinforced, ray and particle shielding hummed incessantly as my companion looked on from the other side of the wide circular space. The walls were heavy duracrete with durasteel reinforcements, they slopped upwards to a gallery of transparasteel where the General stood, gazing down upon us as the scientists around him eagerly awaited the results to pour across their monitors.

There were no bells, no bows or acts of sportsmanship in the pit. I looked at him, this boy. Scrawny, hair short brown in a military buzz cut. Credit to him, despite his smaller stature he was well disciplined. I sensed nothing but calm from him as I looked into his icy blue eyes. I still wore my battle armour but I cast my eyes to the General and he shook his head as if reading my mind. So my hands went to the clasps that held my breastplate to my body, one after the other they clicked apart and it fell to the floor. Greaves and boots came next until I stood in nothing but my black body glove. The suit of dark mandalorian style gear lay against the wall behind me and I waited.

I could feel him, his presence in the Force, the roaming tendrils of his powers fanning out into the ether. The very first lessons I was taught was to lock down my mind. To shield it, to turn it into a closed circuit. Nothing in, nothing out. If my opponent wanted to attack me that way, he was in for a shock. So began the quiet recital of the E-11 Blaster Rifles specs and operations manual, letter by letter. Next imagery, the artificial sun speeding across the sky and then sound the cooling of the pipes in my quarters, the rhythmic plink-plink-plink as the metal contracted. Its difficult to read anothers mind, harder still if they are actively maintaining thoughts that aren't what you are looking for, more so when there are three layers which are so disjointed from one another.

I cocked a dark brow when I felt the presence withdraw. I had no talents for mental manipulation, I knew the mechanics behind it but it wasn't deemed a necessary skill for a front line combat soldier. My talents leaned heavily toward the offensive and defensive; telekinetics, pyrokinetics, the absorption and rechannelling of energies. The manipulation of my body to be faster still, to hit harder than it was already capable of.

If I were capable of pity, I might have felt it as I took my first lungful of potent, raw, energy and distilled it into jet fuel. Letting it sear into muscle and bone, ligament and tendon, my body was on the verge of shaking from it. The rush, the power, it never got old. I was gone then, the world a still life, blurs and shadow as I moved with preternatural speed. I was on him in the space between seconds, slightly to his left, arm drawn back and then let loose like a cannon blast.

Perhaps I had been infected with pride, perhaps I had merely miscalculated but when I hit air and felt those scrawny arms lock like an iron manacle around my waste...I was surprised. He was fast, as quick as I was, his reflexes were beyond what I had faced until now. The strength he displayed as he ripped me from my feet, driving my upper body, neck and head, toward the unforgiving wall of the pit was also a revelation. It were like I weighed nothing at all and had I not the presence of mind to push my body into the suplex and planted my hands into the stone surface, I might have been done in right there.

My arms held, the powerful muscles halting the backwards momentum dead in its tracks and I pushed off with all of my might, ripping my torso free from his grip. Now I was flipping backwards up the slope of the wall, I slid for half a step as my feet hit the stone and then gathered the Force to me. I shaped it, compressed it, it became a bullet and my arm was the gun. I fired it outwards, the telekinetic blast avoided with a quick flip to the side from my foe. Now I pushed off from the wall, a further burst of energy increasing the velocity of my push from the wall. I was right on top of him, two kicks went high and his hands blurred in front of his face to deflect then I landed.

We exchanged a blistering series of punches, kicks, knees and elbows. How long did the exchange last? I wasn't really sure, my mined was in that space again, honed to a razors edge. The entire world could burn to ash around me and I wouldn't notice until the flames of apocalypse took me with it. We lock together, I have his wrist, he my fist. He tried to kick my legs out from under me but I anticipate it, moving my knee out to meet it and softening the blow. I immediately follow by dragging him inwards and crashing my head against his.

He stumbles back but I still have him in my grip, I rip him forward into a vicious boot to the gut. I can hear the breath forced from his lungs. My hand twists his twist, his elbow now taunt in his doubled over position. I'm a thought away from bringing my other arm down and snapping it in two when my world is turned to pain. The cascading bolts of electricity slip from his trapped wrist to my hand and up across my flesh. I feel my muscles convulse and I lose my grip. Then the follow up, straight to the chest and I'm flung backwards and batter against the wall. I can feel every inch of my body screaming in pain. My mind is awash with it, a static noise as it tries to process the aftermath of being cooked alive.

I am very aware, however, that I'm now on the ground and my adversary has a look in his eyes that suggests I'm in for more of the same. I look up at him, see the sparks dance at the end of his finger tips and as those sparks threaten to rip my body apart I make my move. The breast plate rises from behind my downed form, intercepting the wave of lightning and I'm on my feet. The helmet snapped into the air and I exert my will upon it, coils of serpentine energy that bend and warp its metal. I fire the smoldering, melting, armour plating forward, straight up the stream, the licks of blue drawn to its metal.

He slams the back of his forearm into it and sends it aside, obviously growing tired of the distraction impeding his victory, and then...and then...well, I guess he thought about throwing more lighting at me but the spike protruding from his sternum that used to be my helmet brought a very abrupt halt to that idea.