Hey everybody! New chapter! This is the last training chapter- things get crazy after this! A Spirit, a madman, a plot, and a monster... and, of course, a knight...
Thank you to my reviewers! You've waited long enough, so I'll just write this damn chapter. :)
So! With that business finished, it's now...
"SHOWTIME!"
Chapter 9
Part 3:
Bow and Spear and Staff and Mace
Training Room, on the ship Excelsior, first day of the journey, 1:18 p.m.
Neville merely stared while Lupin summoned the shadows, and afterwards, when they traveled to their various corners of the room, he merely stayed behind his shadow of Lupin, watching him, somehow nervously feeling afraid of this shadow-Lupin, like he couldn't quite trust him. Unaware of the intense scrutiny (and unconscious clenching of the fist about the handle of his mace) that was going on behind him, Shadow-Lupin merely walked to the corner and turned around. Neville, who had never been particularly quick on the uptake, actually stumbled for a moment as they stopped... but his very clumsiness saved him: Shadow-Lupin missed the implication in his eyes that he didn't trust him, missed the shifty, somewhat hating look that entered Neville's eyes whenever he glanced at Shadow-Lupin. It was something that would save many lives later. Nine lives, actually. Maybe two more, but most definitely nine.
Having noticed nothing wrong, Shadow-Lupin merely watched calmly as Neville swayed violently from his sudden stop and finally got himself righted. Smiling slightly, Shadow-Lupin said, " So, Neville, what do you know about combat?"
Neville shrugged, tried to say something, failed. He was quite bad at lying. Just talking to Shadow-Lupin made him feel... dirty.
Lupin chuckled. " Well, that's okay. Nobody else really knew much either... let's begin with basics." With that, Lupin launched into a complicated series of hammer attacks. Neville tried to follow suit, using the weapon's natural gravity and his own weight to increase the force of his blows. And...
As the session went on, Shadow-Lupin never really did notice that Neville had not said one word. He also never noticed that, whenever he was not looking, Neville cast him quick, dark glances. And none of them ever noticed the fact that their very lack of awareness was a key point of Neville's new life.
-
Same room, same time. Opposite end of room.
The first thing Snape did was launch into sword strikes and stances, making Ron and Draco learn by doing. Eventually picking ten he thought most helpful, he instructed them to repeat, then went on to Cho.
" Ms. Chang," he said, voice dry and cracked as a brittle twig, " we have a simpler task for you. In the distance, over there..." He pointed, and in the distance, a target arose. " Fire on that target."
" I, too, am an archer," Snape said. " It is the cleanest and the quickest way to kill or to fight. It is also," and Cho would swear she saw the ghost of a smile cross Snape's face, " one of the greater methods by which opponents may be bothered, disturbed, or spooked into running off. Now," he said, and drew a great longbow out of, quite literally, nowhere, " watch me shoot. See my stance, see my aim..."
Cho followed him in practice.
-
Same room, same time. Corner of room.
Seamus walked with his trainer, prepared to show him up. He almost lost the chance, too.
The teacher turned, and began talking to him. Seamus began arguing, hoping for a chance to get into a fight. He eventually switched tactics and stated that he thought a practice fight- nothing hard, just practice- would help him get into the swing of things.
And he woke up on his ass the next second later.
" Try again?" Lupin said, looking at him with his raised, mighty eyebrows. Seamus, mouth smiling but teeth actually clenched in rage, rose and began to fight again.
And he spent the rest of the day beating or alternatively (and far more often) getting beaten by Shadow Lupin...
-
Same room, same time. Different corner.
Hermione walked with Lupin, and her mouth moved rapidly as they talked and talked, and finally, she was ready to train. And she discovered that a staff was a really massive wand, and it had the added benefit of being a club. And whacking things in the face, though crude, was as effective as things got, really.
Hermione laughed as she began to train, staff moving in easy, swinging circles. And she never saw Shadow Lupin's eyes moving with her. They were attentive and watching, but not hungry. No.
They were calculating.
-
That night, all of them experienced feelings of great difference and vastness.Hermione was alternatively happy and tired as hell- she had never been a physical girl, exactly, but had considered herself as being in good shape. She'd been surprised at how tiring the training was. The staff was right next to her- she'd read enough books to know that a weapon far away was a sure path towards death.
Seamus was mostly pissed and pleased with himself and others- for beating and being beaten, he acted much like a small rooster whose cackles are up and fighting a bigger chicken. Happy to be fighting, angry to be losing.
Though on the whole, he was mostly happy. His spear slept with him, right next to the bed. He was pleased with it, pleased with his skill. He'd discovered himself as a impatient, exceptionally active fighter, and with a spear, he thought, he could be dangerous as hell. The fact that his spear stayed in easy reach was, as with Parvati, a surprisingly useful advantage the next night.
Neville was asleep and extremely happy. He'd discovered that behind the weight was a lot of power in his hammer- and he liked it. His baseball bat swings could kill, he thought, and he wasn't too much off from being wrong. And (he thought to himself) isn't that what counts? He slept with his mouth open, hammer on the floor. In a move that was much more characteristic of himself than he'd like to admit, Neville had propped the hammer up poorly, and it was rolling about on the ship's floor as it slowly went its way toward Loch Ness.
Cho was unluckiest, in a way. Bows are poor weapons at close range, as they are simply too slow to fire well. She had no feelings whatsoever for the small hand at archery she'd displayed under Snape's surprisingly gentle teaching- a teaching she had bothered to feel grateful for when, in the middle of her training, he'd turned to snap at Ron for some minor screw-up or another in his traditional dry, scary voice- and she was mostly tired and sleepy. Her bow was across her on the other side of the room, and her arrows were with her on the floor.
-
Second day of the journey. Night. Excelsior. 1:30 a.m.
The sound of a door being kicked in, unless you are a police officer, a drug dealer, or an exceptionally unlucky home owner, is not a sound one is used to, and is not a sound that can go unheard without some kind of reaction. The reaction of most of the nine was to snap awake, but the reactions they had after that were very, very different. What permeated them all, though, was the sheer evil that seemed to come from their attackers. These creatures were nightmares- or their close relatives, at any rate.
Harry awoke to the noise of someone busting in his room with no thought at first, but then something - hit him, and he felt more evil and menace than he'd ever have thought existed come at him from the direction of the door. With but one new thought- Voldemort!- screaming through his mind, he leapt up, unconsciously kicking out, but his attacker dodged and he was thrown up to the wall, a rough, constricting hand on his throat. He fought back with his feet, kicking like mad at an attacker who felt like iron to his naked feet, and felt himself looking consciousness as he was choked.
Ron awoke to an enemy at his gates and immediately grabbed his sword's scabbard. He'd received instructions on cleaning his sword that day, and he'd left it out after oiling it to air-dry; he'd forgotten to put it back. Ron swung the scabbard in front of himself and cleanly stopped a blow that was aimed at his head, scabbard rattling as it received a blow. Kicking his feet out and spreading cover all over his opponent's field of view, he reached for his blade and fought back.
Seamus awoke before realizing what the noise actually was, and found his body, spear in hand, responding to the intrusion just as it had fought Lupin- short swings, quick pokes, lightning jabs. As his mind caught up to what he was doing, his enemy- black and nearly colorless in the low lighting of the room and the outer hallway the door breaker had come in through- stopped his spear with the same blocking motion that Lupin used with his spear, though this enemy fought with his hands. Seamus smiled and responded with the move he'd come up with earlier that night, as he contemplated what Lupin had done. He headbutted his opponent as hard as he could, sending him nigh to oblivion and out, stumbling, into the open hallway, tripping as he went over the doorway onto his back. Seamus struck down with his spear and felt flesh give as he pierced his opponent's form. He let out a battle yell that would have startled a wolfpack, and his opponent kicked at the spear embedded in its right leg as Seamus continued to jerk it around like an angler with a fish.
Parvati woke to battle with the weirdest of thoughts- Who's knocking down the walls at this hour? All the older boys and girls know that you can't do that at this hour without waking someone up!- when she noticed that the door was being broken in. She yelped and grabbed her whip, her automatic reaction to flail her arms causing her chain to swing out and smack the enemy in the face just as he got in. He fell, and Parvati actually said " Sorry!" before realizing that anybody knocking your door down is not a friend in the first place- and then felt the evil, though to a lesser degree. It reminded her of the darkness of her vision, and that thought brought into memory the feeling of precognition, of preparing to receive visions, that she had felt before that terrifying vision of black tides smashing against white shores that were holding up the stars. And she started striking back, the enclosed space making whip cracks hard, but a flail could work, or maybe a grab...
She was slapped in the face by a hand just as her whip connected with feet and jerked. Both fell as blows met, but one's trip down was much harder. And it wasn't Parvati's.
Draco snapped awake when his door was smashed in, and his quick thinking saved his family jewels, since he was out of bed before a large foot smashed right where his crotch had been. Wondering if that was the sort of thing that got a man interested in having children before anything else could happen, Draco whipped his rapier out to fight, slender sword carving deadly strokes in the air.
Hermione woke, but her tired muscles could not move quick enough to get out of bed before she was headbutted with such viciousness that she nearly blacked out. Fighting back against the blackness with words in her mind that she half-remembered but apparently knew by heart (I took the road less traveled by/Do not go gentle into that good night/Death will learn nothing from me) she literally thought herself to consciousness and punched her foe. He had a quizzical look on his face before she slugged him again, right before her hands reached her staff and the words of light touched her lips.
The light scattered and illuminated features that could not be brightened...
Cho got up slowly, which didn't matter since her intruder picked her up and threw her into the wall. This meant she landed near her arrows, and with the shock of being thrown helping her wake up from a sad dream, she groped for them, stabbing back with a weapon she could not take the time to fire. Her enemy inched back, apparently not having prepared for this emergency. Cho took the initiative and advanced.
Ernie Macmillan never got to his weapon. Instead, he woke to an enemy whose first blow had knocked the door down, and as Ernie stood with the unsettling agility of the long-time fat, he found himself assailed with punches and kicks. But the life of a fat but otherwise healthy man is one marked by feats of endurance belied by their weight, and the blows more angered Ernie than hurt him. Ernie launched himself head-on at his foe, a missile of weight and heft and midnight snacks, and the force of his blow knocked his opponent down and out. Ernie laid into him with his fists, surprisingly muscular and broad shoulders working under their sheath of fat. Soon his opponent could not have told left or right, even if he'd had face enough to look in their directions.
Ernie kept pounding, straddling his enemy in the doorway of his room, the battle beginning to rage in the hallway not a flicker in his mind. He didn't notice even when Neville showed up.
Neville had been awoken to a thousand confusing thoughts, but first and foremost was that his hammer was not where he'd left it. Looking for it quickly, his enemy found it for him as he rushed in and tripped over the hefty mace. Neville stepped on his shadow-hidden foe's face and grabbed his weapon, and in that instant hit the greatest run of luck in his life. He never thought about it like that- he was too proud of himself for his actions that night for deeper introspection- but it was like all the luck he'd lacked in his life was being saved for this, and he was saved by it time after time again.
His luck went in the spurts between his running and moving, and started with this. He struck his opponent with a blow that almost cracked the floor, killing the creature in a moment.
After that, everything seemed to happen in fast forward. In thinking so uncharacteristic of him as to be actually sent, he thought of the others and their possible danger, and these were his thoughts...
Burst of running- Seamus, in the hallway, pinning somebody to the floor with a spear. A swing of hammer and the foe was down- more running, some scattered laughing from Seamus as the spearman thanked him and switched targets to go save someone else, possibly Hermione-
Parvati's room, bad guy on floor, Parvati down, didn't look hurt, hammer swing, ooh, this one didn't die first time, wriggling a bit, moaning, hit him some more, yes, he's gone out of it that time- more running, Parvati staggering up, she's fine and talking, can't hear the words, too busy moving-
Ron's room, he's giving his foe hell, swinging away like a chainsaw on sugar candy, enemy is just dodging, too scared to get near him, maybe I shoud yell something at bad guy, ooh, good distraction, he turned and Ron didn't even blink at Neville, just ran the bad guy through with a grunt of Thanks- more running-
Cho swinging arrows, huh, that's weird, oh look mister there's a hammer in your face! Cho stabbing him as he fell to finish him off, she can finish here- more running-
Seamus in hall now, he's still laughing, that's creepy, he's yelling something that sounds like an order and Parvati's behind him now, and Hermione too, there's some guy in the hall that's fighting them like a cornered rat but Seamus knows what he's doing, he's got him tied up against the wall with his spear and Hermione's staff, and Parvati just whipped the piss out of the guy's face from behind them. Guess that was on Seamus' orders, huh, Seamus looks all black in the hall, and he's shouting orders like a general- black general yelling orders, that's crazy-
Draco's room, he's got the bad guy pinned, doesn't look like he actually needs help. Watch him slit a guy's throat, wow that's disturbing, slipped right in his guard and killed him in a second. But kinda fancy too- more running-
Harry's room.
Neville's luck didn't stop but he did, and the mad chaos of thoughts he'd had slowly folded into a simpler form. Harry was dying. He was being choked to death, his kicks weak, his eyes bleary, unclear.
Too bad for the bad guy that Neville had just perfected a style of fighting he would call " Battering Ram". It involved a big hammer and people's heads, knees, or any body part Neville could comfortably reach. Maybe he'd call it " Hammer Smacker" instead. No, that was a porn title. Save Harry, then decide.
Neville's blow nearly took his foe's head right off his shoulders, killing him instantly. Harry choked in breath, great heaping gobs that made Neville glad to have helped him. Neville stopped to catch the breath he hadn't really lost, and that was when the lights kicked on and the Shadow Lupins- for that was who had attacked them all, sans weapons- disappeared.
" You have been successful in surviving your first test," Snape said, as he and Lupin walked into the room.
-R & R! And Neville's part is meant to be slightly funny- I laughed a bit at myself when I wrote the hammer in your face line. Ah, good times and fanfiction. How it was meant to be.