Tournament of Souls.
So here I was. I was at the biggest fighting tournament ever. Last year, this tournament, The Tournament of Souls, have 64 fighters. This year, twice that many! I wondered how I would do. Here in London, England was one fourth of the tournament, a 32 fighter ordeal. In Sparta, in the Ottoman Empire, there was another one of these tournaments. The last two were in Beijing, China, and Tokyo, Japan. Four tournaments means four winners, right? Yes. These four winners would then have a last fight between all of them in a surprise location. All of the journalists in the world covered it, so getting to the semi-finals in this made you a superstar!
I'm Winston Moore. I'm an Englishman. I'm 24 years old. I don't have many advantages, except the first three letters of my name. Get it? It spells 'Win'. Ha. Ho. Hum. In this huge tournament, nobody really dressed right. I had almost no metal at all on my garb, except maybe some part of my leather boots. They were pretty low, going to my ankle. Then I had socks going up to just below my knees with leather strips in them going horizontally then vertically. I cut my breeches that had an abstract pattern on them to just above my knees. Whoops! Turns out that I cut them a bit unevenly. I then had a shirt long sleeved shirt on, tied together with pauldrons. I wasn't sure what these shoulder pads were made of, but it wasn't any metal. I had a cloth bandana keeping my hair that ran to the middle of my neck out of my face. Then, there were my weapons.
I had figured that since everybody was wearing flashy clothes, weapons didn't have to be too sharp. Two months before this event I went down to the market for weaponry. I found a cheap looking little blacksmith's shop and I picked up two of the cheapest shortswords available. These swords had a neat looking, pretty long handle, and out of them rose a rectangular steel blade. It was hardly a blade, since it didn't end in a sharp tip at all. I had the owner of the smithy make them sharper-edged. After that, I was ready to enter the tournament.
I decided to isolate myself from the world like you hear all of those great fighters do. The Tournament of Souls started in two months, so I headed into the wilderness. After a close encounter with a wolf, I found a derelict barn. The red paint was chipping off slightly. I headed inside, and tossed my leather bag that held a week's provisions onto the nearest bale of hay. I looked around. I didn't see why anybody would want to abandon this place. It looked about ten years old with dust all over. It had good stables, and surprisingly all of the hay was fresh. It smelled like dirty horses in here. Looking up at the loft, I decided that it could collapse at any moment, so, grabbing some hay, I made a makeshift bed that wasn't under the loft. Stepping out of the barn, I saw a scarecrow. I would make more of these using the hay to practice moves on.
I was totally set.