The Hounds of Helghan (4)
At seventeen years old, Mael was not yet old enough to drink. He supposed, however, that riding on the rush of victory was the closest thing to drinking alcohol. Bolstered by his graduation as the top of his class, plus a glowing recommendation from the schoolmaster himself, Mael came into the academy feeling like he stood high above the rest, like nothing could stand in his way.
The rude snap out of his drunken stupor didn't come in the form of a hangover, but from instruction under Sergeant Fomenko.
Mael, along with fellow academy students, convened in a training room to surround a woman dressed simply in a tanktop and cargo pants.
"Gather 'round, soldiers in-training," she said. "I'll be teaching you the fine art of smashing in noses, cracking necks, and crushing balls." Chuckles rippled through the young men, but she kept a straight face. "In other words, close quarters combat. This planet, with its greater gravity and lovely soup of an atmosphere, warped us all into brutes. Let's use that to our advantage." Slowly she paced around. "The name's Fomenko. Used to serve as an Elite Shock Trooper. Couple of injuries put me out of active duty. Now I'm here at the academy. From Leet to Teach, some say. Today I will demonstrate—you there, the tall one in the back."
All eyes turned to Mael, who hunched his shoulders and folded his hands behind his back.
"You got a problem?"
"There's no problem here, ma'am," he replied.
"Don't give me that crap." Fomenko pointed to the jagged scar running down the sunken skin of her left eyelid. "I may have one eye, but I can spot bullshit as well as anyone with two eyes. Even better, sometimes, I bet. You say there's no problem, but I saw the look on your face. You look like you can't take me seriously." Keeping her right hand behind her back, she extended her left to curl fingers at him. "Get up here in the front. Come on, don't be shy."
She beckoned at him like he was a dog. Mael scowled and bristled, but he forced himself to comply with a superior's order nevertheless, pushing past his peers to face her in the makeshift ring of spectators.
Fomenko's one-eyed gaze made a brisk sweep of him from head to toe. "You really are a big fellow. What's your name, cadet?"
"Mael Radec, ma'am."
"Radec...the top graduate of this class, right? I heard about you." The former elite shock trooper slipped into a fighting stance. "Well, top guy, show me what you can do." She pulled out her right hand from behind her back, except that she had no right hand at all. Her right arm ended at an uneven stump at her wrist.
Mael mirrored her stance. Obviously he outranked her in height and weight. When they had both been standing upright, the top of her head barely reached the base of his neck. Though she was fit, womanhood made her figure curved and slim. And of course, she bore the remains of debilitating injuries. Two eyes and two fists versus one eye and one fist. Every aspect of this match was tipped in his favor. Or so he thought.
Mael swung in a blow aimed below her sternum, but his fist met air instead as she twisted out of his way. A few deft blocks and thrusts wrenched his punching arm out of place. Mael tried to land another blow with his other fist, at her blind spot. Fomenko rewarded his attempt with driving her right wrist square into his gut. Crests of uneven bone from her stump sent spikes of pain through his back, like exit wounds from bullets. She swept a leg from under Mael to send him crashing on his back. He grabbed at her to bring her down with him. Not fast enough. His fist closed around nothing and plunged right onto his nose with a dull crack. Winces from the spectators.
Fomenko stepped back while Mael wheezed and rolled over to snort out blood from his broken nose. "As I was saying, cadets, today I will be demonstrating the basics of this fine art. If you think you got the upper hand with me because of my gender, because of my disability, think again." She gestured to her fallen, humiliated opponent. "Here's the first lesson: you punish yourself by underestimating the enemy. The tallest and biggest tree in the woods can be still be cut down to a stump, but only if you know how to cut it." Then she curled her fingers at someone else in the ring. "Next!"
Mael staggered to his feet to make way for the next hapless victim of the sergeant's demonstrations. He clutched his throbbing midriff with one hand and staunched the flow of blood from his nose with the other. Later that day, after several delicate rinses of his face in the bathroom, he found that little spar had left him with a deep cut through the right side of his nostril. With the ignorance and arrogance soundly beaten out of him, he accepted the reminder of that first lesson with newfound respect and humility.
When he saw the sergeant again for another lesson, he swallowed down his bruised pride and offered himself to be the first volunteer of the day.
Fomenko reacted to this with eyebrows raised in amusement. "Oh, back again for another round of clobbering?"
Mael inclined his head to her in deference. "You've only shown me a glimpse of your technique last time. I want to learn about everything you have up your sleeve. Even if you have to beat me black and blue to do it."
"Huh. You've got spirit," she said with a little laugh. "Anyone else might've slunk away with his tail between his legs." She beckoned at him. "Well, if you insist."
Even as word got around, and he became the butt of jokes for getting his arse handed to him by a woman, Mael could not hate the sergeant for making an example of him. She may have beaten him like his father, but unlike his father, she had done it to teach him a lesson. And learn from it, he did. Whoever said "size doesn't matter" was right, after all. Mael stood corrected.
He would go on to have many more instructors, and learn many more lessons from them, throughout his time at the academy. He even developed fondness for his instructor of battle tactics and philosophy, who rewarded Mael's studious enthusiasm for texts on war with access to his private library. Despite all this, the lesson that Mael considered the most memorable and valuable came from a woman with one eye and one hand.
In concept art of Colonel Radec unmasked, he has a scar down his right nostril. Naturally I wondered how he got it, and this chapter is an attempt to answer that question.