[History of Shinsou] Chapter I: Deliverance
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Garah outskirts, Telgradia. Eight years ago.
The blade keened through the air, ninety six centimeters of perfectly balanced steel tipped with deadly sharpness just missing his neck.
That man was Riisa Endymion, Captain and member of Telgradia's famed Council of Five. The masked giant quickly jerked his robed chassis from side to side to avoid several more swipes from the cold sword. As he planted a huge foot into the snow and pivoted, a streaking barrage of dark matter followed the shaft through the wintry skies.
The purple electricity from the spell was still dancing across the snow when, a second later, the perpetrator of the assault flashed past. The fast moving shape was another Telgradian, garbed in his favorite white leather overcoat. One hand tightly gripped around the hilt of his slender sword whilst the other plunged into the snow, using the momentum of his own attack to swing his athletic body back around for another pass at Riisa. The goliath, wearing his traditional white haori and flanked by two no-dachi anti cavalry swords associated exclusively with him, delicately stepped back and swerved the counter.
“Slow,” Riisa stated from his lead. He unsheathed the no-dachi in his right sheath, his heavy footfalls unerringly finding the safest path through the deep snowdrifts. “Far too slow, Atlas.”
“...Hmph. We'll see!”
Atlas Revaan spoke from alongside him as the Telgradian closed in with another strike. Despite the fact that Riisa was more heavily armoured than Atlas, he still kept up with consummate ease, pivoting on a dime to avoid the deadly stroke. Atlas brought a response from his place at the rear of Riisa almost immediately, but failed to register a hit. Attacking his mentor at full sprint had been more draining on his stamina than he had hoped, although his frustration was somewhat mitigated by the satisfaction of seeing his magic actually successfully strike the Council of Five Captain. For now, however, Atlas concentrated on keeping his feet moving over the hard-packed snow, careful to only run where Riisa had already ran for fear of losing himself in the treacherous drifts.
The biting wind caught the respective cloaks of the two Telgradians and trailed them out in the cold air behind, one of them a rich royal blue and the other a more practical and simple white. Like diminutive specks of dust lost amongst the never-ending white, the adversaries ploughed on with their training through the field, leaping a wall and then slowing slightly to climb the next embankment. The small grove of trees to their left afforded them scant protection from the elements, and all the while two spectators watched from their lofty positions in the tower of the Crucible.
"He's getting better. Much better." Telos Soltair, father of Atlas, spoke through cracked lips. His oaken hair fell about his face, whipped by the wind. "He's even starting to keep up with Riisa. What do you think, Dxun-Ra?"
A mellow looking man peered from beneath a woven sedge hat, leaning forward on his cane. "The improvement is vast, but not enough. We can't use him as he is."
Riisa interrupted another of Atlas's deft attacks with an abrupt hand gesture, summoning a sphere of marine blue Dakuatsu. Seeing the danger, Atlas dropped to the cold wet snow without a second thought, the fleetest of instants before the concussive projectile sailed past him and levelled a disused stone outhouse twenty metres away.
“There, that's why,” Dxun-Ra indicated, extending a graceful finger to the recovering Atlas, "He's too slow on his feet. Riisa is already back in on him." The Captain-Commander of the Telgradian Council of Five could make out the flaws in the movements of the shape crawling like a mindless ant through the snow.
“Last week, he couldn't even follow Riisa's movements. Look at how far he has come in seven days." Telos chided in reply, drawing a wan smile from his own face. For nearly a week they had spent working on Atlas's agility to help him keep up with the Council of Five's greatest warriors. He had temporarily broken the back of the job, giving Riisa a hard time by closing him down at every opportunity and countering with deft strikes and clever uses of dark matter. It was so efffective that Riisa had deemed the mage too dangerous to let out of his sight. But as dangerous as it would be to jump into battle unprepared, it would be simply unacceptable to let his target slip away again.
“He isn't ready, Telos.” Dxun-Ra prompted, bringing the Telgradian back to the reality at hand. Telos took another glance at the training ground below, noting the formations, the general disposition of the foes, and above all, their forms. The faint rasp of metal against metal sang in their ears as Atlas Revaan smashed his blade Enpera against Riisa's twin no-dachis.
"Give him one month," Telos assured his commander, "And I promise you he'll be better than I ever was."
