Novel Full Chapter 441: Supportive Abuse
Chapter 441: Supportive Abuse
I kept... uhh, training Alexia. If you could even call having twelve distinct colors of hell beaten out of my face training.
After a while, I was half-convinced she was just taking her revenge for the time I left her in the hedge maze.
She insisted that wasn’t the case and I was simply being paranoid... before beating me into the ground all over again.
By the end of the week, I was squirming like a dying fish on the floor, clutching my neck in pain. "I— ghh! S-She... punched me in... the th-throat!"
"You’re getting better," Michael nodded, stacking weights onto a bar with such nonchalance that it made me want to throw a plate at his head. "I’m not as good as Alexia in hand-to-hand, but even I can tell how much progress you’ve made. And so fast! A week ago, that punch would’ve crushed your trachea. But now, you managed to lessen the impact."
"Fuck you!" I wheezed, my voice as rough as a rusted gate scraping across gravel. "I’m dying here and you’re giving me a performance review!?"
Michael chuckled, not even having the decency to look guilty as he hoisted the barbell onto his shoulders. "I’m just saying. You definitely improved. She can be a little rough, I know. Believe me, I know. But her insights are weirdly useful, no matter how unusual the method."
I knew he was right. But I still wanted to hire a professional hitman to take them both out.
"Hey, Sam. Move over," he advised.
I groaned, then rolled over onto my stomach and started dragging myself across the matted floor like a slug.
The whole reinforced basement was big enough to house several weapon racks, a sparring ring, six automated combat dummies, a training simulator, and an entire gym.
Now, obviously, since Awakened humans possessed bodies that defied standard biology, standard fitness equipment was mostly useless to us.
A regular dumbbell would feel like a piece of hollow plastic.
So the gym area, specifically the weightlifting section, was inlaid with gravity-enchantment runes. They were powered by Essence Stones and could be turned on or off manually.
Once activated, the local gravity field inside the enchantment circle would spike to increase the weight of everything within its boundaries by a factor of ten, fifty, or even a hundred, depending on how suicidal you were feeling that day.
Right now, Michael was essentially squatting the weight of a commercial sedan just to warm up his legs.
It might sound impressive, but in reality, all of our current PRs were significantly lower than what we were capable of before the Noctveil Wilds.
Really, that whole thing took a heavy toll on us. None of us were in our optimal physical shape, having lost a lot of weight and muscle mass.
The effect was definitely more visible on the girls, since their naturally leaner frames didn’t have as much mass to spare.
Alexia, for example, despite still being able to punch holes through solid concrete, looked noticeably slender beneath her workout gear.
Juliana also had a certain gauntness to her jawline that hadn’t been there before we were thrown into that Death Zone.
Of course, just because the girls got a little skinnier didn’t mean the guys were having a grand old time either.
In our melee training, Michael and I had discussed how there was a slight disconnect between our mental commands and actions.
You’d think it shouldn’t have happened since we were regularly fighting in the Wilds, performing at our absolute best just to survive.
But that was the catch. There, we were running on pure adrenaline and survival instincts for weeks. On top of it, the oxygen levels in that jungle were nearly double the norm.
Our bodies had adapted to that hostile, hyper-oxygenated ecosystem.
Now that we were back on Earth, the sudden absence of constant, mortal peril made our nervous systems feel sluggish.
It was like trying to drive a luxury sports car through a muddy swamp. The engine was roaring, but the wheels just weren’t gripping the asphalt the way they should.
And besides the strain, some of us also bore physical scars. Ray, the last time I saw him, was missing a hand. My own right arm was a graft. Michael was one eye down.
...Actually, I always kept forgetting that last part. It was starting to become a problem.
This one time I saw his eyepatch and asked why he was cosplaying a pirate before I could recall the reason.
He started shouting and crying at Juliana in response, screaming about why she had to stab him in the eye and how she was enabling my emotional illiteracy.
Juliana simply took a small bite of the apple she was eating at the time and told him that he should be thankful to her for giving him a rugged, nautical aesthetic. He looked manly that way — a contrast to how he was crying like a bitch.
That made Michael cry even more.
Really, sometimes I aspired to match her level of unbothered audacity.
Anyway, I hauled my battered torso off the mat, propping myself up against a pillar just in time to watch Michael drop the barbell.
The heavy metal hit the rubberized floor with a ground-shaking thud as the black-haired young man sighed, "I hate lifting—"
"I can tell," I snickered. "That’s why you were fat as fuck."
Michael rotated his head slowly like a possessed doll in a horror film and shot me the nastiest glare possible.
I immediately tried to cover up. "Uhh, I mean before! Remember? When I used to bully you. Ah, good times."
Okay, it was a bad cover-up. Sue me.
"The hell you mean you used to? You still do! Now your bullying is just more verbal than physical!" he barked, grabbing a towel to pat his neck dry. "And I was saying I hate lifting with an artificial gravity field. The ratios are so broken. In a real squat, your legs are pushing a heavy external load while your upper body stays at a normal baseline. But this rune amplifies my mass too. My arms alone weigh a hundred pounds each right now. My quads are giving out just trying to lift my own gargantuan torso before the barbell even registers as a proper workout. It’s a frustrating way to build targeted strength. It’s more calisthenics than weightlifting."
Hence why the majority of Awakened, who weren’t willing to spend hundreds of millions on Smart Gravity equipment, looked more like lean track athletes than bulky powerlifters.
I let out a raspy laugh that quickly devolved into another fit of wheezing. "Oh, I am deeply sorry, Your Grace. Next time, I’ll ask the Academy logistics department to import a literal asteroid for you to bench press. Would that satisfy you?"
He kept looking at me, deadpan. Then he threw the towel in his hand at my face. "See, you’re doing it again, you asshole."
I swatted it away with my good hand, scoffing. "Fine, fine, stop wailing. I’ll buy you Smart Gravity gear when I get my father’s vault keys. Until then, suffer like the rest of us common folk."
"You are literally a duke’s son!"