Street Cultivation 3: Chapters 11-12 (Patreon)

Chapter 11: Juggling Training

The juggling thing was not a joke: when Rick was exhausted from all his physical and lucrim training, he picked up the rubber balls and learned how to juggle. Most of his routine was completely coherent, but not that.

Every morning he took a number of pills along with breakfast, which proved challenging on their own - he could feel them burning through his system. Most of the morning was spent on fundamental lucrim exercises, trimming the fat and gathering free lucrim for a new Lucore. Or a foundation, if his performance proved inadequate.

In the afternoons H trained him mercilessly with sparring sessions that ended with a burst of aura the instant he fell into old habits. It would take a long time to retrain old habits, so whenever H became too frustrated, they switched to training his new footwork. That captured Rick's attention easily, helping him move more freely with the Bunyan's Step and smoothly use it in multiple directions.

By the evening he was exhausted and battered, risking overtraining. Though he technically had the evenings free, he was given reading to complete and he wanted to do some training of his own. He couldn't risk pushing himself past the breaking point, but he could draw up the Dark Blood Kettle to absorb what he'd experienced in the day.

After all of that, he collapsed exhausted every night. Fortunately their rooms were nearly completely sound-proof, and he controlled the lights, so there was nothing to keep him from getting great nights of sleep. Which meant he could rise early to begin the next day.

There seemed to be absolutely nothing stopping him from leaving, so Rick didn't mind his seclusion. He had internet access and had done enough research to find out that they were staying at a perfectly normal, if expensive, training center. They had half the top floor entirely to themselves, forming a series of bedrooms and supply closets alongside the main training room.

Occasionally through an open door he heard staff in the hallway, but they never disturbed him. It was actually possible to order room service, though Rick decided that was unnecessary extravagance. He kept eating the awful nutrient bars and whatever else he was given to balance his diet. If he was here to train, he was going to train.

H himself came and went, aside from their core afternoon training sessions. Though he had set up in one of the other bedrooms, and it was the only room that was locked, when Rick got a look inside it was completely empty. Most of his mentor's time was spent away from the training center, monitoring the developing Showdown events and looking for other talent. It made Rick wonder if H had been training anyone else while in Branton, but H refused to answer irrelevant questions by simply ignoring them.

Overall, Rick was reasonably comfortable, both with his situation and his decision. The one fly in the ointment was the Midas Foundation, which bothered him in a way he couldn't quite pin down. Research online turned up absolutely nothing, so either it really was extremely proprietary or it was going by another name. Either way, Rick was more comfortable strengthening what he already knew than abandoning it for something else.

Though his life was mostly training, it was satisfying enough. He could still video chat with Melissa from time to time and there were no longer any major distracting concerns about his life. So long as he kept up with the brutal training regimen, he was getting paid to train and padding his investment Lucores. It didn't get much better than that.

Juggling proved a little obnoxious, since it seemed irrelevant, but Rick set himself to it. After a few video tutorials and some practice, he managed to get the basics. Since he only had three balls, it wasn't overly difficult. A week into their schedule, when H arrived for their sparring session, Rick was waiting for him and juggling three balls.

"Congratulations on your basic hand-eye coordination." H reached out and snatched all three balls from him. "I'll have a heavier set of them for you tomorrow."

"Obviously there's no Showdown juggling event." Rick was never sure how far he could push H, but he decided that after a week of being obedient, he had some slack. "I assume you're doing this as some sort of classic indirect training, as opposed to just busywork."

"If that's so, then why question the wisdom of my training?"

"You're just going to give me slightly heavier versions? That's too easy. If you want me to grow, you should challenge me. Show me your endgame here."

For several long seconds H glared at him, and then, to Rick's shock, a tortured sort of smile passed across his face. "Maybe you're right. Fine, take them back and we'll do this in a different order. Start juggling again."

Blinking, Rick caught the balls as they were tossed to him and began his usual pattern. It went fine until H tried to punch him in the face.

On instinct Rick dodged away, but that meant that the rubber balls fell to the ground. H merely grunted "Again" and kicked the balls at him.

The second time, Rick managed to shift just his head to avoid the first punch, but the second was a body blow. Somehow he managed to jerk his elbow down to deflect the strike in between throwing one ball and catching another. Yet the next moment H kicked him directly in the chest, sending him falling backwards and obviously losing his juggling pattern.

"You'll be ready when you can keep juggling through all of that." H ignored him and walked over to his room, dragging out his case of tools. Rick stared at him a while, and when no further explanation was forthcoming, decided to object again.

"Do you mean that my defenses need to be so good that I can stay completely in place? Maybe I could do it with enough defense or speed, but even if I could, wouldn't that be forming weird habits?"

"I may not be a hand-to-hand specialist, but you're not going to become strong enough to stop me that way. No, you need to keep juggling through taking hits."

Rick narrowed his eyes. "That's not possible. The physics of it don't make any sense if you're knocking me around, not unless you mean anticipate what will happen so far ahead..."

"No, you're going to juggle with pure aura. Like this." H found what he wanted and rose, holding three silver spheres in one hand. He started to juggle them one-handed... until they began to spin on their own. While H kept his hand flat and approached him, the spheres spun in a circle above his hand. "The problem with this technique is that it requires you to be able to multitask far better than most warriors can. So we started with normal juggling to get you used to it."

"But these weren't the spheres you wanted me to use?" Rick reached out to snatch one of them, his hand easily breaking the aura sending the spheres circling. When it touched his palm, however, a shiver passed through his entire body.

Gasping, Rick dropped down to one knee, struggling to hold up the silver sphere. It buzzed and vibrated strangely, but the worst part was the ripples it sent through his lucrima soul. As if it had been designed to disrupt the normal smooth flow of his lucrim and his aura... and that was probably exactly what they had been designed to do.

"Now you're seeing it. Try all three." H dropped the other two spheres into his hands.

Though Rick made a couple abortive attempts to juggle, he soon realized he'd just humiliate himself. Simply holding his balance and maintaining his aura was difficult while holding the disruptive spheres. Just gaining the ability to do that would be training of a sort, though he suspected there was a deeper meaning still coming.

Instead of pushing further, Rick decided to focus fully on advancing. He was eager for the challenge for its own sake, plus he'd actually impressed H a little. Best to not waste any of that. Rick stopped trying to juggle and just rotated the spheres in one hand, struggling against their effect.

"I obviously need more time to adjust to these," Rick said. "So the final goal is to be able to juggle these with my aura while engaging in real combat?"

"That will be the sign that you're ready, but it's not the goal." H glanced toward his case of supplies, his face again sour. "I don't have them on hand, since I still think this is an inferior path for you, but in the end you'll create tools in place of the spheres. Instead of fighting you, they'll assist you. But if you try to use them without sufficient presence of mind, you'll just hurt yourself worse than you usually do."

"Got it. Knowing what I'm going for makes this a lot more interesting." But the spheres were starting to make his entire arm numb, so Rick had to set them down. "You're right that those are a bit much for me, so maybe it would be better t-"

"No, I was softballing you. Let's take this up a notch." H flicked a finger and the rubber balls flew to his hand. "I have two more exercises for you: maintaining normal juggling while releasing fully powered strikes, and juggling using aura. Try to master the disruptive effect in your own time."

"And then we fuse all three together?"

"Don't get ahead of yourself. See if you can kick me without falling over."

H shifted into a defensive stance and urged him to strike, so Rick began with the new exercise. It felt bizarre to be juggling while trying to kick at an opponent, but now that he understood the true purpose of the task, he was far more motivated. Keeping proper form with his kicks while simultaneously juggling felt impossible at first, then simply a bizarre contortion, but he could feel the mental workout.

After he had the basics down, H showed him the basic technique for juggling using aura. Rick had expected it to be the simple application of concentrating aura into "hands" that could manipulate matter, a common trick to those who could afford it. Instead, it proved to be something much more fascinating.

Instead of his aura flowing with his breaths, H taught him how to develop a swirling pattern. His aura surrounded the spheres and caught them up in it, so they rotated completely naturally. At least that was the idea. Rick couldn't crack such an unusual technique in their first session and H only pressed him until it was clear that he truly understood the underlying premise.

Rick smiled and dropped back onto the floor, letting his aura relax. It had been a strange workout, but he could understand the benefits. He was unclear on what purpose the final spheres would serve, but he theorized that they would be part of the technique that would improve his sensory capabilities.

"What are you doing?" H glowered down at him.

"We've been training for a while." Rick groaned as he got back to his feet. "Just taking a little break."

"We haven't been training at all. This was extracurricular work because you got too big for your britches, so the clock hasn't started on our usual sparring." H cracked his knuckles on one hand. "Today I think we're going to work on your defensive footwork. Thoroughly."

Though Rick winced in anticipation of the bruises to come, he found himself grinning.

-

Chapter 12: Showdown Celebrity

Nearly a week later, Rick had made significant progress on all three fronts, but was nowhere near ready to combine them. The parts of him that had remained a little skeptical if juggling could really "expand his mind" to prepare for other techniques had been completely convinced. He felt more alert in his normal life and the effect was even more obvious when using lucrim.

Until that point, he hadn't realized just how much he tended to focus on a single Lucore at a time. When he needed to use a Bunyan's Step, there was a moment of delay when he gathered his lucrima soul around it. Even his defensive core, which continued to operate passively, didn't function at its full potential except when he was bracing it, leaving him more vulnerable to surprise attacks.

Had he tried to learn a fancy new technique that required constant use, like Tom's lightning, Rick was sure that it would have made him a clumsier fighter. But now, he could bolster his defensive core barely even thinking about it while simultaneously using a Bunyan's Step and attacking. And juggling.

Yet H wasn't satisfied. He was basically never satisfied, but whatever he had in mind obviously required more.

During one of their sparring sessions, Rick's control completely broke down. The spheres kept rotating on instinct, drawing more of his focus than anything else, but his aura spluttered out and he tripped over his own feet. After eating a face full of floor padding, Rick slowly pushed himself up, trying to figure out what had happened.

"Guess you've pushed a bit too far." H stood over him with nothing like concern, but there was no scorn in his expression. "You're already training as much as your... intellectual capacity can handle. So let's change things up in a different way: time to see a real Showdown."

"Haven't I already gotten a good enough sense for how it works?" Rick didn't object to the idea of taking a break, since he was obviously exhausted. He limped to collect the balls in case they were going to pack up and leave.

"No. You've seen preliminaries, qualifying rounds, and maybe some junior events if you did your homework. But the preliminaries are over for this location, so it's time for the real events to begin. I'll give you my seat access and you can see your ultimate goal."

That seemed like a reasonable enough plan to Rick, so he cleaned up and did more passive exercises for the rest of the afternoon, trying to smooth problems in his aura or clots in his lucrima soul. He realized that he'd probably created a lot, given his training regimen, but without Lisa he wasn't sure of the best way to liquidate them.

He'd expected H to take him to the event, since he didn't know where it was, but instead he just got a text about a taxi outside the hotel. Going down to the ground floor was a bit surreal as Rick saw most of the building for the first time. It bothered him more than he expected, and though he didn't want to ease up on his training, he resolved to be less insular in the future.

The taxi itself was some sort of elite service, with ether-reinforced paneling and no way to see the driver. Unfortunately it also had tinted windows and Rick couldn't figure out any way to turn them off, so he was driven to the stadium without getting to see much of the city.

Though he could dimly see a stadium through the tinted window, they passed the main entrance and instead drove into an enclosed parking lot. Rick frowned down at the ticket he'd been given, but it did say something about a special seat. He'd assumed that was just company jargon, like "economy class" being the worst airline seats, but maybe it did mean something different.

Since the parking lot itself was boring, Rick simply headed to the obvious entrance, though he noted how heavily armored many of the vehicles were. The attendant looked at his ticket and then escorted him to a separate hallway. After a quick walk, Rick approached the roar of the crowds and finally reached the Showdown itself.

His seat wasn't in one of the special boxes, but it was in a slightly raised area. There were a few other people there, glancing at him as he entered, and he noted that they all looked like fighters. Actually, they might be trainers, given that they all had six figure generation rates, but they ignored him and returned to focusing on events, so he decided to do the same.

What he saw was certainly far different from the simple qualifying events in the Branton stadium. All the spotlights were on at full blast, rendering the field as bright as day. At the moment, figures in uniforms were hurling a black sphere between one another as they raced around the field.

It caught his full attention until he realized that it was essentially just a sport: another variant on the "move the ball to one end of the field" premise. The ball was so heavy that it didn't bounce, the players flashed around the arena with lucrim techniques, and full contact blows were allowed, but it didn't have much resemblance to actual combat.

Of course, the professionals on the field were doing far better than he could, agilely twisting past one another and sprinting with the ball. They could probably take him in a fight on pure power alone, considering how much lucrim had been invested in them. He couldn't tell much from a distance, but he'd read that top athletes were produced through millions of lucrim. Even if they weren't overpowering like Teragen, they were among the best in the world at what they did.

The crowds seemed to love it, cheering raucously at particularly good exchanges or when the teams came close to scoring a goal. Rick wasn't sure how long the game had been going on, but the score was 1 to 0, so he suspected that it was a low scoring game. Was it the main draw of the event?

When the timer on the scoreboard finished, the teams took a break for what seemed to be a quarter. But as the field cleared, the crowds shifted. From what he could see of the main stands, some people relaxed or left to get food, but everyone in the raised area along with him began to focus, as if things were just beginning for them.

Athletes in tight running gear began to enter the field, but it was nothing like the local sporting events Rick remembered from school. The spotlights shone on the entrance where they appeared and one of the largest screens focused on each athlete, giving their names, countries, and other data. None of the lucrim details that Rick would have found most interesting, but he saw that some of the people beside him were pulling up more data on tablets or phones. They weren't scouting, so perhaps they were analyzing the contestants or checking out the competition.

As the runners lined up, the spotlights shifted to focus on a circular track that ringed the oval playing area. They got into position, a hush fell over the crowd, and then aura flared high. All of them burst forward, the combined shockwaves sending a rush of wind through the crowd despite the safeguards around the arena.

In a fraction of a second, all of the runners had rounded the track, the screens displaying freeze frames to show the small differences between different contestants as they crossed the line. But a race that ended in one second would be boring to watch, so of course the race was composed of many rounds. In fact, the main screen displayed the number of laps each contestant had completed, as any smaller measure would change too quickly.

Though Rick could track the rapid movements, he could only imagine that the event was a chaotic mixture of color for untrained people. The athletes were mere blurs of color around the arena, while the screens kept showing dramatic flashes of slow motion as they counted up the laps.

Yet as he watched, Rick found himself... almost disappointed. They were all fast, obviously, far faster than his top biking speed. But they all ran in essentially the same way, with one lucrim technique propelling them forward and another binding them to the ground to keep traction at such insane speeds. If Rick had tried, he would have attempted a series of Bunyan's Steps, or he could imagine even stranger techniques that relied on redirecting momentum at the curves of the track.

Presumably the elites didn't use them because they weren't as effective as this method of running. No doubt anyone who tried what he was thinking would be treated as a fool. Yet the result was that the peak of athletic performance was everyone doing the same thing, some just better than others.

He could still see how the event could be gripping, if a bit frantic. As the race continued over a minute, differences in stamina started to show. Everyone was still moving so fast they were a blur, but he saw several early leaders on the scoreboard start to drop in the rankings. One of the mid-ranked runners began to surge upward, putting everything she had into the race, and the crowds roared each time her name jumped up on the scoreboard.

In the end, she couldn't quite overtake the top runner as the race ended. Though the last runners looked far behind on the scoreboard, in reality it didn't take them much longer to finish. Yet they were completely ignored as the lead runners were championed, highlights replayed on the big screens as they were awarded seals and left the field in victory.

After a short break, Rick realized that he'd fundamentally misunderstood. Those weren't the top runners, they were just the appetizer. The next athletes didn't just get a spotlight, there were pre-prepared hightlight reels showing them performing. Not just in running, but in other speed events. One of the names even sounded vaguely familiar to him and he wondered if he hadn't seen the runner on a cereal box or something.

That race was more hyped but more intense. Since it was just the two of them, there was no point in dragging things out. The commentators were breathless the entire race, suggesting that a world record might be broken, but in the end both times were over a second below the record.

Reflecting on that left Rick gloomy through the remaining races. Any of these athletes could have crushed nearly any racing event in the world, but here a matter of tiny fractions of a second made all the difference between success and failure. Well, he suspected that even the failures were paid obscene salaries. But he struggled to imagine that he could compete like this.

It also left him oddly dissatisfied. In any practical competition, other factors would play a bigger role than raw speed under pure conditions. Of course, the point of the event wasn't to be practical. Most lucrim competitions weren't practical in the modern world.

Another quarter of the sphere game passed. Though Rick paid more attention to the commentators, trying to understand the details of the game, overall he started to lose interest. The techniques the players used to move the heavy sphere were obviously strong, but not particularly useful to him. He wondered if this was one of the lessons H wanted him to learn.

After the quarter, however, there was a longer break. Singers and dancers entertained the crowd while the field was shifted, this time creating several combat circles and a small hill. They even set up the double rings of the Unlimited Defensive Ring, catching Rick's attention. Maybe this set of events would be more relevant to him.

As he'd hoped, the next competitions involved more free form combat. The audience actually seemed less interested in many of them, which he could understand since the action was barely visible to normal eyes. There was a literal king of the hill competition that got plenty of attention, however, since it allowed for dramatic reversals and slow motion replays of people claiming the peak.

Once again, all of them could definitely crush him in the event. Yet after watching with intense interest, Rick began to understand that their skills were also artificial in a sense. Due to the need to maintain the top of the hill position, techniques that locked fighters in place or increased mass were overwhelmingly favored. In a real fight, those wouldn't have made sense.

Not that he had room to talk, since his own event was just enduring blows from all sides.

They did several ring-based events which he watched with keen interest. The Ranged Defensive Ring was actually beautiful in a sense, brightly colored bursts of power shooting into the center and being blocked or deflected in all directions. An old man used some kind of redirecting technique that sent all attacks curving away, creating a flower of aura above him that was more art than combat. He received a special seal for that, an event the cameras replayed endlessly.

Rick receded into himself, reflecting on what he had seen while passively observing. Until the announcers declared that the next event would be a special preview of the junior league... and mentioned Raggest by name.

Immediately Rick focused fully on the field, soon spotting Raggest as he entered to fanfare. The young man grinned and waved at the audience, but there was a look of absolute focus in his eyes. His event seemed to be a fight over ground, two combatants pushing back and forth along a narrow column.

Though Rick tried not to think of his dream, he couldn't help but analyze Raggest's combat potential. He definitely had a six figure generation rate, and though Rick thought he had more experience, Raggest was definitely good.

Beyond that, he didn't seem overly specialized like so many of the other athletes had been. Rick could see how the others had special techniques for holding their ground and pushing their opponents back, but Raggest fought like he was trying to take down an enemy. It won him several early matches, but backfired on him when he met someone who could endure his assault.

Judging from Raggest's grin, he clearly didn't care.

As they were at that moment, Rick knew he wouldn't have a chance. Raggest's signature technique was a golden beam of aura that Rick knew he couldn't defend against. Most likely he could survive it, but Raggest was good enough to keep him at a distance, so he would inevitably lose. Everything H had said about Rick's limitations came back to him and he began going through his exercises again while he watched.

By the time the sphere game ended, Rick felt like he had seen too much. The Showdown hadn't just been a sporting event, it had been an extravaganza that consumed the entire evening. He completely understood how it could draw such crowds, but it also left him a bit overwhelmed.

That night, he dreamed about fighting Raggest in the stadium, both of them covered in blood. Rick woke up and couldn't sleep for a long time.