The end result of my first day of training?

Four people were added to the list of creatures I hate.

“So…where do we begin?” My three ‘trainers’ had hauled me down to the basement after we closed and we now…watching me. With very judgmental expressions.

The next few hours aren’t going to be much fun are they?

“They’re going to be fun for one of us.”

“You want to start dog?” Ren asked, still looking at me in a way that made the fur on the back of my neck stand up in fear.

“I have a name you know,” Mica muttered before walking up to me and circling like a predator. “Where to begin…that’s a very good question. Do you know the answer?”

“Umm…how not to get hit?” After all, pain was bad, being hit caused pain, so why get hit when you could avoid it?

“Wrong.” Never mind. I’m full of shit as usual. “The most important part of the fight is not how to avoid hits, but how to take them.”

“…I’m not following the logic here. If I could avoid a hit then shouldn’t I?”

“Yes. You should. The question is, can you?” After making no less than three full circles around me, Mica stopped and looked me dead in the eye. “You’re inexperienced. You’re in unfamiliar territory. You’re going up against the best fighters this city has to offer. And these fights are long.”

“Good point…” The fuck have I gotten myself into?

“Mortal Kombat…wait…no fatalities…the joke doesn’t work if someone’s head can’t get ripped off.”

…How do you know about that? Have you been-

“Sifting through your memories? Yes. And you should be ashamed of yourself.”

I was brought back to strange caricature of reality I was now living in by a pair of furry fingers snapping in front of my face.

“You alright? You zoned out for a moment.” Mica…did not sound all that concerned actually. Maybe a little irritated…which was bad.

“Oh…yeah, I was just…it’s not important, moving on.”

“You’re embarrassed of me aren’t you?”

Like a father with a thirty year old stoner in his basement.

“Right…like I was saying, you need to learn how to take a punch. And to know where to begin, I need to see how well you can take one now.”

“Okay…wait, does that mean you’re going to-”

I woke up a few minutes later on the floor with all three of them staring down at me with my head trying to hatch into a beautiful baby bird.

“Well…he’s alive at least.” I think Robin was trying not to laugh. Or maybe she was about to throw up. Or maybe she wasn’t there at all and it was just a side effect of the concussion, I really have no idea.

“You know, it might be beneficial NOT to break him before we even get started.” Ren…just looked like Ren. Seriously, he always had this look on his face halfway between indifference and smelling something unpleasant.

“Well I didn’t expect him to go down from one punch,” Mica muttered, sounding a little embarrassed. As he should be. Who the hell thought it was a good idea to punch a guy with all your strength while he was completely unprepared for it when you could bench press an NFL linebacker. One in each hand even.

“You hit like a charging bull dear. I’ll be surprised if nothing’s broken.” The griffon reached down and grabbed my face, turning it this way and that. I let her do it. I was still trying to get a handle on this whole consciousness thing so it wasn’t like I could stop her. “I’m surprised.”

“Good. I’m gonna go tell everyone to stop writing a eulogy.” Ren walked off…somewhere. I assumed upstairs since I hear him climb the steps. Which left me alone with the bird holding my face and the dog who just cracked it.

Somehow I found the strength to say something.

“I get the feeling that we have a lot of work to do…so I am going to politely request you just kill me now.”

My request was impolitely denied and I found myself blindfolded and holding a stick.

“So what exactly are we doing again?” I twirled the stick around a bit, getting a feel for the weight. Something tells me I was going to have to swing it real soon.

“Fights are all about reflexes,” Robin answered from somewhere in front of me. “You could hit harder than anyone in the world, but that won’t matter at all if you can’t land a punch. You need to be faster and move quicker than the other guy if you want to win. Especially since you’re a cripple.”

“Wow. Blunt.” I really wasn’t sure how I felt about that. I mean, I lost an arm so it’s an accurate description, but-

THWACK!

“OW! WHAT THE HELL?”

“Like I said, you need better reflexes.” He voice was behind me now. This bird could really move. “So I’m going to hit you with this stick until you learn how to avoid it.”

“That’s it? That’s your whole training plan? Doesn’t really seem that-”

THWACK!

“OW!”

“Focus!” The voice was to the right. I turned to meet it. “No one in their right mind is going to give you a chance to sit there and talk. You need to always be ready.”

THWACK!

“OW!” The strike came from behind me.

“Definitely need better reflexes.” I growled and swung to my right. I didn’t hit anything but air.

THWACK!

“FUCK YOU!” I’ll admit it, I completely lost my temper and began flailing wildly like a sugar addicted seven year old playing samurai with a stick.

THWACK!

THWACK!

THWACK!

“You know, there’s this thing called dodging…”

Shut up.

THWACK!

THWACK!

THWACK!

This continued for quite some time.

“I take it you’ve had enough?” She stared down at me from above. Or at least I assumed she did since she wouldn’t let me take the fucking blindfold off!

Oh, and I’d somehow ended up on the floor again. Those cat like reflexes really come in handy.

“You only…hit me…cause you…could see!”

“Maybe.” She reached down and pulled the cloth off my eyes. Just as I thought, she was looking at me with a wide smile on her beak. “But if I can see and you can’t and I can’t hit you, just imagine how hard it will be when you aren’t blind!”

“I’m imagining all the lumps it will take to get me there.” I sat up, rubbing my head. It was becoming painfully obvious that hammers in my skull would become a common occurrence.

“Pain is just the body’s way of telling you to learn how to dodge.” She offered a claw. I ignored it and stood on my own.

“So, though I fear it might kill me to ask, what’s next?”

“Shouldn’t you be asking me that question?” A familiar deep voice made my skull shrink in fear. Mica padded up behind me. Surprisingly quiet for a guy that must weigh as much as a small car.

“I thought you already trained me. You know when you broke my face.”

“That was completely different.” He walked in front of me and stood next to his griffon girlfriend. “Robin and I had a discussion…”

“You mean when she yelled at you?”

“I did yell at you.”

“We had a discussion,” he repeated more firmly. “And we agreed…”

“She decided.”

“WE AGREED…” It came out as a half growl, but he reigned himself in the second he saw that Robin was snickering at him. “That she would handle the dodging and taking hits part, while I would work on strengthening your body.”

“Okay…and how exactly does strengthening my body work?”

“Simple.” Surprisingly enough, what he pulled out from behind his back wasn’t weights or a medicine ball or something to hit me with, it was a book. He took it to a nearby chair and sat down. “I am going to sit here reading a nice book and you are going to do whatever I tell you.”

“Come again?” I liked the sound of that about as much as anyone would.

“Guess I’ll go help Angus with dinner.” Robin, like the traitor she is, left me alone with the doberman who…by the looks of it was reading the pony version of Ulysses. “Don’t break him to quickly, okay?”

“Yeah, yeah.” He opened the book. “She never lets me have any fun…”

“Excuse me!” I’d been in situations where people were actively trying to kill me. How the hell was I more afraid now? “I’m don’t think we’re here so you can have fun!”

“Yeah, we’re here so you can do sit ups.”

“…What?”

“Sit ups.” He peered over the top of the book. “Start doing them. Now.”

“…Alright.” It was probably better for me to just get it over with. I sat on the ground. “How many should I do?”

“Just keep going till I tell you to stop.” He was already reading. I could guess that the stop order wasn’t going to come for a while.

“Doesn’t sound like it would be all that effective.” And if my gym teacher couldn’t get me to do more than fifty sit ups, like hell this prick was. “Is there another method we could use or…”

“I could hit you again.”

“Alright, alright, I get the message.” With a sigh, I got on my back and started doing sit ups.

…What? Have you ever been punched by a giant anthropomorphic doberman? It really fucking hurts!

And it’s not like it was that hard. It’s just sit ups. A lot of people do these in their spare time. Outside the U.S. anyway.

This day could have still turned out tolerable except for one scaly factor.

“Well. Isn’t this unexpected.”

What do you mean?

“A hot griffon chick beats you with a cane and now a big muscular diamond dog is bossing you around and you have to do whatever he says…”

Whatever you’re implying, stop it.

“I’m not implying anything virgin.”

You say that like you aren’t one.

“What makes you think I am? I’m a badass avatar of a fricking god! Tons of ladies would want to get with me! I could have man-whored myself up and down the jungle for all you know!”

Except you’re two hundred times the size of anything that’d have sex with you and you were stuck in a cave for thousands of years.

“……………………………Just do your fucking sit ups!”

And I did them. Good God almighty did I do them. I don’t know how long it was before Mica so much as glanced at me.

“Just quit if it’s too much for you.” He idly turned a page in his book.

“No…I’m…good…” My lungs were about to explode. But I wasn’t about to give him the satisfaction.

I have to give Som credit. This body has WAY more endurance than my old one.

“Not like you’re using it.”

Says the guy who does nothing but laze around on my wrist all day.

“I hate you.”

He told me that at least once a day. I’m serious, I can’t think of a single day that passed without him mentioning that he hates me. It didn’t matter if I’d given him a reason to say it or not, he’d just randomly slip it in at some point. We really were not on good terms with each other.

The next few minutes were bearable, if only because Atheris had shut up for one of the few times in his life. In fact, I actually started to enjoy it. Sure it hurt a bit, but the endorphins more than made up for it and I was seriously impressed that I could keep going for so long. I felt great! In fact, I…

Going to throw up.

“What?”

I’m gonna throw up!

“Ew! Just stop!”

Not until he tells me.

“You’re going to hurt yourself you idiot! This is obviously a test of willpower or something! Just give in before I have to smell what the inside of your stomach tastes like.”

Too late…

“RIGHT SIDE! RIGHT SIDE!”

I did aim for my right side. I hate that slithering bastard, but I’m not that cruel. The floor by me was covered with pale green slime that burned my throat on the way out.

“Well, looks like we’re done with that.” Mica commented on my panting form as I inched myself away from the stinking bile. “Let’s move on to pushups.”

Despite the pain, I was on my feet in a moment and staring at him with disbelief.

“Pushups?” I said surprisingly clearly for how much I was panting.

“Yeah. Pushups.” He smiled at me. I really wanted to take my blade to his mouth and turn it into a Glasgow smile. “Get to it. Dinner should be ready within the hour and we’ve still got ground to cover.”

“I thought…the D…stood for diamond…not…douche!”

“Well you thought wrong.” He went back to his book. “And try not to puke this time. Scruffy is terrible at his job.”

“No, no. A little more to the left!”

With a groan that only workers in an internment camp should be able to produce, I once more lifted the pile of four heavy boxes and moved them half a foot to the left, as per Mica’s instructions.

“Hmm…back a little.”

I carried them back a foot.

“…Maybe a bit to the right?”

A half step to the right.

“Now forward.”

A full step forward.

We’d been at this for ten minutes.

“Dinner’s ready if you’re interested.”

Oh that sweet angelic voice that sounds like vocal cords being rubbed on sand paper?

“It is?” Mica turned to Ren who stood on the stairs with an amused expression. “Huh. How time flies. Pack it in Mango, we’re done for the day.”

“Oh thank the Gods.” I slumped against the boxes and almost tipped them over. The one and only time I was grateful for them being heavy. Every damn part of me hurt, I had thrown up again during the pushups, and the only reason it didn’t happen a third time was because there wasn’t anything left in my stomach.

Turns out getting an entirely new body that was designed to be athletic doesn’t necessarily mean it’s used to being worked to its limits. If anything I probably would have done better as a human! At least there I had an idea of what those limits were and didn’t have them appear like a cliff in a Roadrunner cartoon!

“Come on Jack.” Ren grabbed my arm and helped me back up. “You don’t want to miss dinner. Angus made that one mushroom sauce again.”

“Really?” Mushrooms can taste like ambrosia if they’re made by that cow. “You have no idea how happy that makes me…”

“Just try not to fall asleep during the meal. We have sword training afterward.”

“WHAT?”

“Yeah.” He clapped me on the back and smiled. “Just because we’re out of the jungle doesn’t mean I don’t have more to teach you. Now hurry up or all the rolls will be gone.”

He left me then. Just went right up the stairs while I stared after him with a mix of disbelief, horror, and building rage.

No…no…NO! He couldn’t possibly be that cruel!

“He can kitten. He really can.”

But why?!

“Life hates you almost as much as I do. Deal with it.”

Ren, Robin, Mica, Atheris.

Four people whose names have been forever written into the list of people I absolutely hate.

And it was only going to get longer.