I was lead to a training building with several men standing inside it. They all seemed to be wearing camouflage or some type of exercise outfit, but I couldn’t tell rank or branch. Once I arrived I was shown a rack of wooden weapons beside several sets of training weights. “Take what you think you’ll need.” said Adams before addressing the men. He called out the last names of five of the men. All of them stepped forward, moving like trained fighters and with far more muscle mass than I had. “You five, listen up.” he said. “This is Taylor. He’s from a private security company and is trying out to be the Ambassador’s body guard, so I thought you guys might want to test him for me.” Several of the men laughed, one of them running his thumb across his neck while looking at me like a cheesy villain from a prison or gang movie. The General looked at me. “Don’t worry about breaking bones, I’ve got a healing technique that will patch them up in a matter of minutes.”
“Patch you up, he means.” said one of the bulky bystanders who was more brawn than brains.
“Good one,” I said, grabbing a wooden sword from the rack. “I’d give you a treat to congratulate you, but I’m out of crayons.” I was only guessing at his branch of service, but I seemed to have guessed correctly.
The man smiled. “The blue ones taste like raspberry.” he responded and some of his buddies laughed with him.
Everyone else cleared the field and the five of them spread out around me. Two had wooden knives, but the other three looked like they had wooden knuckles. I raised my sword into a defensive stance and the General signaled the start of the fight. The others immediately rushed at me, so I jumped at one of the ones with a knife, hoping to prevent all of them reaching me at once. He swung and I blocked it, but he raised a fist to punch me. I jumped above his fist, careful not to jump too high as this room only had three meter ceilings, then swung downwards, hitting him on the top of the head. It didn’t do much more than startle him and I realized that the man was using a barrier technique. I had forgotten to use one at the start, and had left my shield belt at the house, so I would be at a disadvantage if he hit me.
I came down and planted my feet on the shoulders of one of the other men, then jump backwards with a burst of Fire. The man’s t-shirt was too soaked with sweat to catch fire but he reacted to the momentary burst of heat beside his face by wincing, making him the last one to come at me. I was going to have to take this seriously if I was going to win. I swung my sword, reproducing my improved version of the Sweeping Flame Slash, and one of the men was knocked off of his feet, though the use of barriers meant that he wasn’t injured by the technique.
Just as the other four got to me I strafed right, using a Fire movement technique to boost my speed by pushing off of all of the hydrocarbons in the straw mats under my feet, like cellulose. It had taken me several hours of practice just to be able to use the technique while maintaining my balance, and several days before I could use it in my sparing sessions with Liza. Thankfully the room was protected with a formation to prevent techniques from damaging it. As soon as I was beside them I jumped at the guy at the end of the row, hitting him with my shoulder. The unexpected movement caught them off guard and two of them fell over.
I fired several Fire slashed at them and jumped backwards only to have the fifth guy tackle me, knocking my sword from my hand. He was about to plant a meaty fist in my face when I released my qi pressure. This guy felt his strength suddenly decrease as he was partially suppressed, and I boosted my strength to throw him off of me and towards the feet of the people that had almost reached me.
Knowing that I couldn’t reach my sword in time I threw a fire ball at the closest man, then lit my hands and feet on fire. The force was enough to knock him down, but three of his friends were running at me, so I jumped forward and planted a strength and fire enhanced fist into the nearest man’s face.
My fist screamed in pain like I had just punched a tree, but I knew it wasn’t broken. Right, they had barriers up. I quickly surrounded myself in a protective field of Fire qi and the two that landed attacks, one a series of punches and one a series of knife strikes, impacted the field, preventing me from taking any damage.
I knew that, as I was burning qi with every attack and the men here were only burning small amounts when they attacked, I would run out of qi faster than them, so I let myself be distracted for a few seconds as I activated my qi gathering technique over the area within ten meters of me. This would help offset the expenditure to some degree.
I was penned down and knew I needed to come up with something fast, and after a few seconds I had an idea. Adams hadn’t specifically said I could only use the weapons from the rack. As three of the men beat on my shield I reached out with my chi and grabbed some light weights. The first thing I found were arm and leg weights with five or ten kilos of iron pellets in them to work as weighted clothing. There was also several fifty kilo vests which followed the same idea. So I pulled all of them towards me. This took considerable qi, as my Average Metal root meant that less than one percent of the energy actually went into moving them, but they hit the two in the rear, knocking them forward into the ones attacking me. The design didn’t allow me to strap them onto the men, thankfully, or I probably would have tried to puppet one of them and exhausted myself. Instead, I launched a Fire Palm strike against the one that was attacking from the right while locking my foot behind one of his ankles. This caused him to fall over backwards, and I ran over to the weight rack.
I quickly grabbed two ten kilo weighs meant for the curl bar and frisby threw them at the men, accelerating them with a burst of Metal qi. One of them hit a man in the stomach, knocking the air out of him and causing him and his barrier to collapse. The other clipped a man’s arm, causing him to scream. Apparently, his barrier wasn’t as comprehensive as the barrier devices were.
I was at less than half of my qi by that point, so I started to get desperate. I knew I couldn’t beat them physically, so I would have to use qi. I can’t fly inside, and so I couldn’t get much distance, so I had to try something different. Something creative. That’s when I remembered my final project. It was worth a shot. I quickly pulled together water in the air and ordered it to bond with the CO2 to make Methane and oxygen. For only one second this created a mass of slightly oxygen rich air mixed with methane. I then pointed the methane towards the men that were only meters away and sent out a cone of Fire qi, igniting the methane.
Bright blue flames shot out and enveloped the three men that were still attacking and, while one of them managed to land a blow, the other two stopped attacking, one of them to put out his burning uniform that had the sweat flash steamed off of it and the other with burns on them, likely from the same flash steaming process.
My barrier took the fist and I was sent backwards, hitting the wall and knocking over the neighboring weapon rack. The man tried to hit me again, likely running on adrenaline and therefore ignoring the pain of the burns I had given him, so I brought my foot up aiming for his stomach. Instead, it landed between his legs, but he appeared to be wearing a cup to protect against such damage. Instead he closed his legs together and twisted, and I heard my femur snap. I screamed in pain and he moved to punch me in the face. I grabbed the first thing I could find and thrust it at his stomach, putting everything I had into a stab. The wooden knife snapped, as I had failed to reinforce it, but the shear force of the blow broke through his shield, letting the half of the blade that was left stab into him. The blood that poured out told me that he was out of the fight, but that I had likely gone too far for a simple sparring session.
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Adams ran over and immediately started to heal his wounds. The pieces of wood that were left in the wound were forced out and the wound quickly closed. He then ran over to the others and checked up on them, fixing a cracked rib and snapped radius before coming over to me. “Well, I did say not to worry about injuries, so I guess you did what I said, but you still went a bit overboard.”
“Proved I can take on five guys to protect the Ambassador, though, right?” I asked as he set my leg, causing me to grit my teeth from the pain.
“Proved you can take five guys of the same level in a fight, sure.” he said. “We have another test to see if you can protect the Ambassador while doing it.”
An hour later, after I was healed and had recovered my qi, I was lead out to a wooden shack with a single window. Once inside I noticed that it was an old barracks, but that most of the beds had been removed to leave only one bunk. “Your job here is to protect the Ambassador from an assassination attempt, and to get him safely to the designated building, in this case, my office. I won’t tell you who all is involved in the attack, just know that some of the normal base personnel might be hidden assassins. You are not allowed to prepare, as in a real situation you won’t know when or if an assassination attempt will occur. The Ambassador will be sleeping when the scenario starts. Any questions?”
“Yes, sir.” I said, trying not to sound like a smart ass. “Can I call my girlfriend and tell her I won’t be home tonight?”
The General smiled and shook his head. “Fine. But don’t take long. Johnson wants to meditate, then get some shut eye.” I nodded and walked to a quiet area to place the call.
After notifying Liza that I wouldn’t be home tonight, and would tell her why once I got back, I put my phone away and went back to the Ambasador. “Sorry about that. Didn’t want her to worry.”
“It’s fine.” He said. “I used to call my wife while on deployments.”
“You’re ex military?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said with a smile and a nod. “Green Beret, then transferred to the Seals. Of course, I couldn’t call her when on a mission, and when we started they didn’t have the ability, so I had to send her letters, but…” The smile slipped from his face and he sighed. “I don’t want to talk about my wife right now.” he said with a look of sorrow on his face. “Let’s get to the mission.” I could tell that something happened to her, but wasn’t going to push the issue.
The Ambassador sat on the bed and started meditating, so I barred the door with a chair under the door knob and closed the window and latched it. That should at least mean that no one could enter through either of those ways without causing enough noticed that neither of us would miss it.
After that I started extending my senses. Before breaking through to Condensation I could at most extend the range and sensitivity by a factor of fifteen, generally only using the technique to increase them by a factor of ten. While I was looking through techniques from the other world, however, I found one that could extend them by ten times as much, though it used around two hundred times more qi to do so, and therefore could be used for just as long by someone at peak tier 2 as the first could be used by someone at peak tier 1. The technique was extremely similar regardless of the element, only modifying what could be detected more easily based on the element. In my case, Fire qi could let you use it as thermal vision and Metal could let you sense metallic objects. My modification was also slightly more efficient than the basic one, using only one hundred times the qi of the basic form. With the senses training I had done and my current level, the technique gave me roughly four hundred times the sensitivity with eyesight and three hundred and fifty with hearing, so I was counting on it to alert me to possible threats.
When nothing happened for fifteen minutes, during which time the Ambassador didn’t even move other than breathing, my mind started to wonder. With the way the Ambassador talked about mailing his wife, he was likely older than he appeared. Maybe the cultivation made him look that way, but people in their seventies and eighties usually looked to be in their fifties. While the improvements from cultivation could slow aging to a crawl, it wasn’t that good at reversing it, with most of the improvement for elderly people being reversing the signs of aging, not the aging itself.
There was a slight sound on the roof and I snapped out of my wondering. I could ask about it later if I wanted to. Now wasn’t the time.
I concentrated my hearing on the roof. There was another sound, barely noticeable. Could it be a bird? Squirell? Rat? The bases barrier technically allowed through small creatures like that as long as they still had an animal’s qi signature and no technology on them, a precaution to prevent spies from sending pets, so it could be one. Then I heard a thumping sound. I concentrated even more and heard the slight sound of breathing every few seconds along with that double thump sound at a rate of sixty three beats per minute. That would be a human heart, which meant that someone was on the roof.
Now I just needed to figure out how to deal with it. I wasn’t allowed to leave for the safe zone until he had been attacked, but I could notify the Ambassador. He was still in meditation, so I sent a whisper into his mind. “Someone’s on the roof, sir.” I said, and he sent a mental nod. A few seconds later he started opening his eyes when I sense a large buildup of Wood qi. I pulled him down to the bed and activated the five elements barrier I had on me.
I had downloaded a version of this technique on a whim months ago due to the fact that it could be used with only ten or twenty dollars worth of materials. I then combined it with the Condensation level qi protecting barrier I had bought months after that. As I wasn’t the best with formations, I had Liza look it over and she fixed a few things, optimizing it to work with what we knew about spirit roots, and a new easy to use but low energy formation was created. While its performance was only on par with the vests we wore at the combat simulations, I could activate it myself and it was far cheaper than a barrier vest or belt.
Just after we hit the bed the roof exploded downwards, with a large amount of the mostly wooden roof landing on the barrier and a man standing over us in a black Ninja outfit. I pulled the Ambassador off the bed and towards the door, and the ninja dropped through the hole in the roof, swinging a wooden sword at me. While one would normally assume that a wooden sword wouldn’t cause much damage and would be fragile, one it was enhanced with qi that wasn’t true any more. A wooden sword could become stronger than a steel sword because qi tended to increase the strength of all materials that contained it, among other things.
As I didn’t have a sword on me, when I saw him come towards me I reached out with my qi towards one of the pieces of the roof that had several nails poking out of it and motioned towards the ninja. The board flew towards him and he scream in pain as the board stuck in his side. As he was still holding his sword I kicked it out of his hand and ran for the door as I started to notice the smell of blood and the fact that the area around the board was getting wet.
I could hear someone outside the door so, as it was likely another assassin, I kicked the chair out from under the door at the ninja that had just pulled out the board and was grabbing his wound, then kicked the door outwards and ran threw it, dragging the Ambassador with me. The man on the other side of the door was confused by the door hitting him, but that only delayed him for a little while. I saw that he was wearing a mask and carrying a loaded crossbow, so I knew he had to be an assassin as well.
He started to raise the crossbow, so I threw a quick fire bolt at him to set him on fire. The technique didn’t work as well as I thought it would, but it did cause enough of a fire to distract him so that I could kick him in the chest and start running again.
