'Hang in there legs, don't give up on me now…' I mentally tried to motivate my legs in an attempt to scrap together the last vestiges of the energy in my body.
Below my upper body my legs shook like leaves in the wind with sweat drenching my clothes causing them to cling to my body like a second skin.
Once I realised that my attempt to communicate with my nonresponsive legs didn't work as I had hoped I tried to divert my attention to everything but my fatigue. Roaming my sight over my surroundings I first took in the trees and mountains in the distance before glancing to the man that was subjugating us to this madness with the hilarious moniker of 'training' while it should rightfully be called torture!
The man was sitting not far away from us on the ground with a cigarette in between his lips and a book held in his hands, lightly puffing plumes of smoke into the air. Despite his peaceful conduct though said man was nothing short of vicious. The fucker took pleasure in watching his students groan under strain while doing his outmost to not grin whenever he saw us this bloody torture of a training regime.
Leaving my instructor alone for now my gaze turned slightly to my left where Brueno was nearly crying from the pain he was in. Just like with myself, his legs were shaking so hard it looked like he was standing at the epicentre of a level 10 earthquake. His upper body all the while was sweating waterfalls, soaking the bandages wrapped around his still bloody knuckles and fingers. Shigan training was hard like that alright.
I was lucky that I hadn't had to go through that shit and still got the results I was training for. Unsurprisingly our Shigan instructor didn't bat an eye at my non-existent injuries, which means Lockhard had told his colleagues about my devilfruit. Not that I was very surprised about that. I had expected that to happen and I was actually a little happy that I had told them.
It meant they were adjusting my training to help me get the most out of myself while also being pretty much in the dark about what else my devilfruit can do, or what it really can do.
Besides the regular training of our Shigan and Tekkai in the past few weeks, Lockhard had introduced us to another discipline that we started training in. Contrary to what I thought at first though, said discipline had nothing to do with the Rokushiki. In fact, it didn't even have anything to do with combat!
What we began to learn was disguising ourselves and information gathering. The disguising training was split into two lectures, which we received each day after lunch for one hour. One of them taught us the proactive disguising, meaning we disguised ourselves before the mission in order to fit in better. In the other we learned the reactive disguising, most often used in order to escape from a trail or hunter out to get you.
The first one was rather easy once you got the hang of it. All you had to do was gather some intel on the place/institution that you wanted to infiltrate, pick a target equal to your stature and steal said person's identity. Of course, you had to incapacitate the person first but how to gather said intel and so forth we would be taught about later in a different lecture.
Now, the reactive disguising was quite a bit harder. It demanded a high amount of situational awareness, creativity and even some pickpocketing. In general it taught you how to disappear in the masses, and if that wasn't possible, confuse your hunters so long that you could truly disappear while they still tried to find you.
Learning how to become a ghost truly was a challenge and it was fun to practise the skill with all the other students in small exercises where a group of students played the role of the hunters and another random student was the prey. All the other students meanwhile played some random town's folk in which the prey could disappear. Should the prey manage to disappear for a set amount of time than they had won. If they were caught, they lost.
Obviously, the students, no matter how mature they acted were still kids, and thus enjoyed such a harmless looking exercise immensely. I had no doubt in my mind that the higher ups had intentionally designed such a fun looking exercise for all these kids in order to create a family like atmosphere while also drilling the children in a set of skills they would undoubtedly need in the future. It had something macabre to watch all the children play with laughter and joy a game that would become nothing short of lethal for them in the future.
Despite my rather dark thoughts on the matter though, I equally as much enjoyed these small respites in our training where I could simply relax a little and let my mind rest a bit truly being a child for one more time. The irony isn't lost on me though.
"Alright, take a break. We'll continue with phase two later after you've had lunch. Dismissed." Lockhard said, his words piercing my drifting thoughts like bitingly cold wind your clothes in a storm, causing me to collapse in a heap once I realised what he had said.
While Lockhard slowly walked away from our training ground I felt like jelly sitting there in the dust.
"Ugh, I'm so tired I'm not even hungry! All I wanna do is fall into my bed…" Brueno said from besides me, also sitting in the dust, and I couldn't really blame him. Still, we both knew we needed the energy of our meals, so even if we weren't hungry we forced the food into our stomachs. And honestly, I've made the experience while being here that more often than not the appetite comes with eating all by itself.
"Don't remind me." I couldn't help but grunt out. My bed sounded pretty awesome as well but the day was still rather young so we'll have to endure, like always.
"Common, let's grab something to eat before we fall asleep here and are still forced to train under Lockhard." I told him while shakily coming to my feet. Besides me Brueno tried to do so as well but his legs always gave out under him so I offered him my hand and pulled him up with a grunt of fatigue.
Shuffling through the building we stayed and trained at we slowly made our way through until we could see a small group of students crowding around a poster or something that had been put up at the entrance to the mess hall.
Curious I made my way over and read what it said. "Excursion? Cool shit! Oi Brueno, seems we'll get a small respite from training!" I called over to Brueno who raised his eyebrow in response, after which he came over as well.
"What's it say? We gonna be send out to buy some cigarettes for Lockhard?" Brueno asked back on his way over, causing me to grin a little. At the speed the man went through said cigarettes I wouldn't be surprised if that actually were true.
"Maybe. I don't think it would be a good idea to ask the man later though…" I couldn't help but mutter, a small shiver running down my spine and from the expression on Brueno's face he felt equally as disturbed by the thought of doing so.
Turning our minds away from the poster we made our way into the mess hall to grab ourselves some food and soon dug into the good shit. As I said, appetite often comes with eating.
Though, our meal was interrupted when Katherine and Lockhard came into the mess hall, which silenced all conversations while the whole hall began to pay close attention to the duo.
"I hope you've all seen the poster at the entrance? Good, because we'll be taking you onto an excursion to a nearby island. So get a good rest tonight. You'll need all your wits with you tomorrow." Lockhard spoke into the silence filling the mess hall, which caused a slight murmuring to erupt amongst the gathered children.
While Lockhard obviously was done talking, shown by simply turning around and walking away, Katherine stayed a little longer to address her students directly about something but I didn't care much about it and instead began to dig in. All the while my mind was thinking about tomorrow. After all, it had been some time since I last did anything else but training and I was looking forwards to seeing another island for a change.
My thoughts though were interrupted by a thumping sound from next to me. Turning my head, I had to supress a bout of laughter at the sight of Brueno snoring away with his head mushed into his grilled potatoes. Shrugging my shoulders, I let the dude sleep instead of waking him up. Not my problem if he wanted to get some shut eye instead of some more energy. Though, I knew he would regret his decision later today. At least I would have something to amuse me while training that I could look forwards to.