A New Blade.(solo)

It had started off as a normal day of deliveries for Shin, nothing unusual on his run, no problems delivering his packages. As he came back into the courier station he noticed Jaulten off in a corner with bandages on his arm, it was extremely odd for Jaulten to be injured, couriers got attacked quite often, but they all had training and Jaulten was the best with the blade amongst all the couriers. Shin walked over to him and said "What happened?"

Jaulten looked up at Shin and said," I got attacked, you know that this can be dangerous."

"But you got hurt, you're a really good fighter, the best of us. How did you get hurt? Was it a lot of people? or a really skilled guy? What happened?"

"It was just one guy, he wasn't particularly skilled or strong, but his blade moved in unexpected ways, and he slipped around my guard and nicked my arm. I found out later that his blade had a curved handle and it threw off the blade's path just enough for it to throw me off while trying to fight him. I mentioned it to Teach and he's calling an emergency training session in a few hours, He intends to show us all the basic premise of the weapon and a few others he's thought up, he was quite angry at himself for the oversight though."

Shin was a bit disappointed, he had expected to have the day to himself and now he was being told he had a training session. "I had expected to have the rest of the day free... today is my light day."

"Too bad, you guys are lucky it was me who came up against him instead of one of you, the outcome could have been far worse, are you going to just throw that away for some free time?"

"No, of course not!"

Shin thought about what he should do in the meantime. It was scheduled for a few hours later when all of the couriers would be there, and so he had a few hours of free time, so he decided to go home and started practicing throwing knives. It had taken him a lot of practice to figure out how to throw them properly, the hardest part was still making sure they hit point first, but he was getting very good at that now. He took out his little target board and placed it about 30 feet away, when he had started he could barely hit it at 10 feet, and could never make it stick in the board, now he could. Shin took a few practice throws at that range until he got the distance down and was reliably hitting the board. Now came the hard part, he had realized a while back that throwing it at a stationary target is a lot different than throwing knives at a moving target, but he had yet to find a way to solve that problem during training, it had however made him realize that he himself would probably never be stationary while throwing them, so he had started to practice throwing them while running at high speeds, it didn't work to well and he knew he had to practice it though, so he started to practice that as well, the results were atrocious, 8 out of the then he threw missed the board and the other 2 didn't stick in it, it was going to be a long practice session. Over the next hour Shin came to realize that running straight at the target and throwing the knives as hard as he possibly could made the blades travel extremely quickly and that he was still relatively accurate with them, he mentally jotted this down in his mind as a useful tactic. A little while later he packed up his practice kit and headed back over to the courier station.

When he arrived it was full of couriers and Teach was pulling out two different weapons, one was a normal sword, except for the fact that the blade was bent from the hilt to the side a little bit, and the other one was a sword with a curved handle, very much like what Jaulten had described to him. Teach called for silence and then began explaining the principals of the weapons, they were both designed to throw off the opponent and disrupt the flow of the fight, as well as evade guards and block at odd angles, and so he went on to explain the variety in ways the blades could be used, and what type of people normally used them, light fighters generally used the bent style as they could flick their wrist and have it come from a different angle while stronger fighters usually used the curved handle as they usually only need to get in one good blow and that is enough for them, as the teacher explained the weapons shin got more and more interested in perhaps using on himself, with his speed it would be an added guarantee to his attacks and it would throw people off even harder than having to fight this speedy little kid. The more and more he thought about it the better he liked the idea and so he paid more attention to the explanations of how the weapons were used. It only took him an hour to explain the usages of the weapons and demonstrate them, and after that he dismissed the class.

Shin walked over to the Teacher and waited for him to notice him so he could ask him a question or two, and eventually he did notice and said, "Yes Shin? Got a question for me?"

"Sort of. Um do you think you could teach me how to use the bent bladed sword?" He replied while slightly fidgeting.

The instructor stopped and stared at shin for a moment and shook his head and sighed, then said, "Hold out your arm." And Shin did so, the instructor stared at his wrist and grabbed it, feeling it then released it and said, "No."

"Why not?"

"Your wrists are too weak to currently handle that fighting style, if you really want to use that style then you need to build up your wrist strength, I can teach you the other style though, your wrists are probably strong enough to handle that."

Shin was disappointed and a bit depressed, but it raised his spirits to know he could learn the other style at least, "Okay."

The instructor nodded his approval and rummaged through his bags til he found a blade that was about the right size for shin to be wielding, it was a little over 2 feet long, 6 of that being handle and the other 18 inches being blade with a small guard on it. He brought it back over to shin and said, "You remember what i said in the class about the principals of using this weapon?" Shin nodded vigorously and then the teacher said, "Good, go home and practice the basics you remember and we'll start practicing on your training days, I also expect you to come in more often for training do you hear?"

"Yes Sir!" Shin replied smartly, and headed out to go home to practice with his new weapon.


Once he got home he drew out his new weapon and started to carefully swing it around, it had a much different feel to it than would be expected, and the style of holding the hilt differed a lot from what he was used to using, he had to kind of curve his hand around the handle, and it gave him a lot of control over the movements of the blade, and he realized that in order to truly master this style he would not only need a stronger wrist but a stronger grip as well. He practiced for a little while with his new sword, trying to manipulate the blade how the instructor had shown them, but it was much much harder than he had thought it would be. After a little while he forced himself to stop, he didn't want to develop any bad habits with the new sword without an instructor around to fix them. Shin smiled as he put away his new blade, he had a training day tommorow, and he could hardly wait.