Ali vomited as he rolled down the hill, smacking into the skinny tree trunks of the rainforest the entire way down while managing to maintain a steady pace and to hit many trees on his way down. The rocks that occasionally tumbled down after him sometimes rolled over his limbs, testing the strength of Ali’s bones, and sometimes trees toppled and fell on him, but didn’t stop his momentum, the slope of the hill was severe enough that he was hit and continued to roll.
“You will roll forever if you don’t stop yourself!” Ali heard the mocking voice of his teacher yelling. He realized that his teacher must be keeping up with him on his descent, probably bounding through the trees like a squirrel as the Weris are known to do, which is one of the reasons they enjoy such a fearsome reputation on Wiis, they can disappear in the rainforest in the blink of an eye.
Ali found his way to the Weris Sharp thanks to Whadgaf, the Hajferis female who had a reputation around the universe for her incredible fighting skill that she honed with the Weris. Before Maxx found her, she was unwilling to share the secret techniques that she had learned deep in the rainforests of Wiis, but Ali was a reminder of the horror she’d witnessed on Galanta when the Pito came and destroyed the planet, the Galatia defenses incapable of even slowing them. When he came to her brave enough to face that danger, she figured that she had underestimated the primate and maybe he could survive training with the Weris Sharp. Their methods can be brutal and many have died trying to prove themselves. Whadgaf would feel no guilt if he had died, they were all going to die soon anyway because the Pito were so formidable and the Weris refused conflicts on other worlds, they would only face the Pito if they landed on Wiis. If he survived, maybe the Sharp techniques would give him the edge he needed against the Pito.
Rolling down the hill, Ali was not sure that he would survive the training. He had been in the forest trying to keep up with his teacher for three years when he brought Ali to the edge of the steep hill and his teacher told him that he would have to learn to be quick on his feet the hard way.
“The hill never fails,” the teacher said. He was a short red man, half Ali’s height, and he wore the traditional hooded shirt and short shorts that stopped halfway down his thigh of the reclusive Weris who were an ancient lost tribe of Rhasdwiis that subsisted in the jungle and knew it better than any others. “You will find a way to regain your momentum and come to a stop before you hit the marsh at the bottom that is home to ferocious animals that will be happy to have a meal fall out of the sky.”
“What will this teach me?” Ali asked, confused. The hill was as close to vertical as it could be to still be called a hill.
“You are powerful, there is no doubt about that,” the teacher said. His voice was ragged and worn as his skin that was old and showcased his many years fighting for survival in the rainforests. “But you do not know how to wield it properly. Your body is still learning to move with, right now you waste energy fighting it for control when you could be in perfect synch. Like falling down this hill, if you can figure out how to control the momentum of your own power, you can move easily, call forth your strength quickly. Did I convince you?”
Ali shook his head, “Feels real tenuous, sensei.”
The teacher looked up at Ali curiously who shrugged it off.
“Trust the process. I would not shove you over this hill if I thought you would just roll down to the bottom. You can do this, just figure out how to use the momentum to get to your safety. Use it, don’t let it toss you around.”
“What do you mean, shove me over this hill…” Ali was saying as the teacher shoved him very hard from behind and sent him falling and bounding off the ground, rocks and tree branches.
Ali stands in the silence of the command room and the silence reminds him of his time with the Weris Sharp. The ship is large and it is full of warriors, Fonlanders, recruited as very strong foot soldiers in a test of strength against the ultimate threat to existence. They are very strange to Ali, some are armored warriors in Gold, Ivory and Terracotta and they are like robots. They don’t seem to eat and they only act in reaction to something else unless they are given orders by the Halfyn Heir or the Golden warrior known as Adofo. There are other warriors who are humanoid animals that are familiar to Ali, he has spent enough time with the Kazi of his own universe and they are humanoid rodents that he has become very familiar with. But none of it is so strange that its a real distraction from what they face. He is hopeful that the ships that follow him toward the Pito are full of able bodied beings who will send the enemy back to wherever it is they came from, Ali is hopeful that his existence will not fall to these hostile interlopers.
“This is Pultine…Am I doing this right? Just talk into the thing? Fine, this is Pultine, and I wanted to say something as we arrive at our destinations. You are all here because you are capable and we will all return to the Fonlands or whatever realm you call home. Of course we want to defeat the enemy, but the mission here is to assess the enemy. The Arcana Master who is responsible for bringing us all here and taking us home, and the Smiting Chamber are monitoring all of us to know what we experience.I am telling you this so you know, it shouldn’t be a secret. Fight with all of your might, there is no need to pull punches here. The enemy we face will devour innocents with no conscience, so any of them that you destroy will save many lives. But we are not asking any of you to die here. If the enemy you face is too much, retreat. There is no shame in retreat. This is only a first battle and if you desire revenge for what happens today, there will be enhancements that we can offer for a later campaign. I ask that you fight, but above all, I ask that you survive. You are most valuable to everyone alive. The Mother-Father and the Vodun bless our efforts here and smile down on our efforts. Be safe and be fierce…Yes, that is it. Say over? I just said I was done…”
The end of the message makes Ali smile, but he is also filled with confidence. The beings of Fonlands are strange, but they are earnest and they seem to know more about what his universe faces than he does, or anyone else in the universe. So many of the Masters of the Universe have been lost in the fight against the Pito and Ali is excited at even a glimmer of hope. But he can’t know what he is in for. He had faced the Bludonians corrupted by the Pito, but he had never faced the Pito directly. He is nervous about the unknown, but maybe nervous is not the right word. He is antsy, eager to know if his skill can compare to something as vile and fearsome as the Pito. He has been to impossible places, done impossible things to amass skills that many said were lost to history, but he is standing in a spaceship as the living embodiment of many lost and ancient arts of his universe and pocket ones connected to it and he just wants to be enough.
The key to the devastating power of the Weris Sharp is their ability to move extremely fast and undetected. Even though Ali’s teacher was a man of small stature, he had defeated enemies ten times Ali’s size because it was near impossible to lay hands on him and he could use the incredible momentum he could generate from running, jumping, flipping and swinging to empower punches and kicks. He could fling things at incredible speeds as well and he could turn most anything into a dangerous projectile.
“Take control of your momentum!” the teacher yelled at Ali as he continued to tumble down the hill. Occasionally, it seemed that Ali had gotten up onto his feet, but he didn’t move them fast enough to avoid falling again. The best the teacher had seen Ali do so far was to grab onto a tree trunk and stop himself completely for a few minutes before he lost his grip and went tumbling again.
Ali was dizzy above all else. He was mostly numb to the pain of smacking into rocks and wood, that wasn’t a problem for him, but the dizziness was making it hard for him to concentrate and do what his teacher yelled at him to do. He closed his eyes and tried to ignore the physical sensation of his body rolling and bouncing and he calmed his breathing as best he could so that he could focus on the steady in and out. As his body pitched up off the ground from a rock that he rolled onto like a ramp, he found just enough time to feel his body and he turned enough in the air to allow his feet to hit the ground. He focused on his breathing, letting his body do the rest; the last few times he got up on his feet, he was too distracted by the thought of falling. Ali breathed in and out as his body moved, legs as fast as they needed to go, turning to avoid trees and ducking to avoid branches. He jumped just in time to catch a branch with his hands and his body swung up and around the branch twice before he was able to settle on it.
“I knew you would do it!” the teacher said excitedly as he made his way through the branches to congratulate Ali. “Though, you are much closer to being eaten than I had hoped.”
Ali could see the hungry beats in the marsh with high grasses growing up through the waters, they looked like alligators.
“You are well trained, you are strong,” the teacher said as he hung from a branch with one hand. “The difference between you and me is that I trust myself to do what must be done to avoid dying. You think that you must think your way through things to stay safe, but thinking too much causes apprehension and missteps. Feel and be, that is the way of the Sharp.”
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