Had to skip Tuesday due to work sucking my soul out so thoroughly I needed to sleep for four hours. I made up for it with interval training on Wednesday, which left me less sore than I’d expected.
Showed up to Thursday and only one other fighter showed. Tres sad. However, that other fighter was Shax (he’s one bad mother Shut yo mouth), Erstwhile Kappellenberger. After authorizing at his first Ymir, Shax won the whole shooting match the next year. He’s got a background in Wang Chun, the same height and mostly the same athletic ability as me (when I’m not in excellent shape), and is a smart cookie, which means before picking up a sword he’s working from a higher platform than most starting fighters. When he’d been regularly practicing for two years, his game was tight and solid; winning Ymir was not a fluke.
He’s been working on his acupuncture accreditation for the last two years, though, so he only makes it out once every few months. For all his rustiness, though, he’s still an excellent fighter (some part of his brain remembers what he should be doing, but his muscle memory’s lost a step). We fought single, dagger, buckler, and two-hander. But this is about me, so, things I learned:
Removing physical advantages forces my game up a notch
Given recent musings, this isn’t too surprising: When I have some innate physical advantage, I rely on it. I don’t necessarily think this is a bad thing, but it does mean I don’t have to focus as much on exactly timing my binds, for instance. There were a couple of times where Shax caught me running slow, trying to close a line just after he’d snuck his tip past. I’m not exactly sure how to take this back to fighting people who aren’t mirror images of me, though: I can’t equalize our range and footspeed, which means the sweet-spot for my binds will always be larger than it is when fighting Shax. Maybe I just need to grab Griffin, Valinn, and Shax for a 6-Footers Fightclub once a month.
I used to be way more violent than I am now
Shax was the fourth person to show up at the Kappellenfechter practice, after Skippy, Betsy, and Jeff. Shax and First Joe showed up after practice had been running for all of three months, which meant I’d been fighting less than two years, and we proceeded to fight each other with me as the most experienced fighter around. Artifacts of the fighting style of those days of the Kappellenfechters show through in Shax’s rusty form. Charging? Yep. Beating the living hell out of an opponent’s blade? Yep. Seizing the opponent’s blade to remove it from the fight? Yep. While all of these are valid, the Kappellenfechters used to keep these at the top of the playbook, and left control and finesse somewhere further back.
Shax has another year of classes, and then thinks his life may be freed up a bit more then. He clearly still has the fencing jones (he’s got a helm coming his way that’s been on order for over a year), and is excited about getting into cut-and-thrust, so in a year we may have him back, and I’d guess within six months of that he’ll be once again leaving the wake of dead bodies that is the mark of the Kappellenfechter.
I’m guessing no fencing for the next two weeks, so don’t be surprised if there’s not another of these until the new year.
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