Much better. He punched the bag lightly for the seven minutes, his fists warming, the pain somehow welcome, the loss of thinking, thinking, thinking a relief.
He moved over to the stretch bag, a smaller target that when hit snapped back toward you, building reflexes. After he got used to its movement, he looked beyond it, using the periphery of his vision to react. Then he went to the chin-up bar, and found he could do three now. Three! It seemed both an impossible achievement and pathetic at the same time. Three. Then back to the heavy bag.
By some accident, he turned on the lights on the bag. It lit up sections to tell him his next target: right kidney, gut, left jaw. With each punch, the bag reacted to how hard Kip hit it by blossoming in color from his punches. Light touches lit the bag blue. Kip’s hardest kicks reached up to orange.
It wasn’t long before he was wheezing at the effort of trying to get the bag to turn red.
He braced his gloved hands on his knees. He was hitting the damned thing as hard as he could.
No, he was hitting as hard as he could muscularly. Magically, he should be able to hit it harder.
But he didn’t want to shoot his little green bouncy balls of doom across the room. If he could add his will to his muscles with magical stuff he threw, why couldn’t he add his will to his muscles?
He remembered the wights in Garriston, leapfrogging from roof to roof, shooting luxin downward as they jumped, using the back kick to extend their jumps. It was the same concept that worked for Gavin’s skimmers and the sea chariots. But both of those interacted more externally. They didn’t have to, did they?
Kip drafted a shinguard, then kicked off his shoes. This next part was going to hurt. It always did. He began kicking the heavy bag to warm up for it. He’d been shown how to put power into kicks a dozen times, but it hadn’t settled into body knowledge until today somehow. Maybe losing some weight had helped. He swung both arms in a guard to the left, letting his body stretch, his left foot turning until it pointed backward, hips opening, then jerked his arms back in, the torsion providing power as his right leg came up and pounded the side of the bag and set it swinging. That bag weighed two sevens. Not bad. He repeated it, not quite as successfully, from the left.
Enough warm-up. He filled himself with green luxin, then stabbed a bit of it through the skin at the back of his right heel. He winced, cut it wider.
Here goes nothing. He stood with his right foot back, twisted, snapped, and as his right foot came up, he shot green luxin out of it.
The sudden transfer of weight from his body into the air, but this time not opposing his body but aiding it, threw Kip’s foot forward at tremendous speed. He kicked the bag so hard that he lost traction on his left foot and fell heavily on his side.
Laughter burst out from the door.
Kip popped to his feet in an instant, mortified. It was half a dozen members of his Blackguard class, led by Cruxer, who was grinning big. If it was possible, it seemed like the young inductees had changed in the weeks Kip hadn’t seen them. Cruxer was bulking up, his tall, lean frame looking more muscular by the day. His eyes, though, looked five years older, either from the death of the girl he’d loved, Lucia, or from being in the Battle of Ru. Affable Big Leo’s arms of banded iron looked even bigger. Gross Goss wasn’t picking his nose, but he was itching it with a big thumb. Tiny Daelos didn’t look any bigger, but he was beginning to look reedy and not just skinny and small. Ben-hadad still had spectacles with flip-down lenses, but he’d reworked them. These didn’t look thrown together with string and glue; they looked a masterwork, a perfect complement to the burning bright intelligence in his eyes. Only Ferkudi looked the same, the craggy-nosed dope. Actually, that was deeply reassuring.
“Good thing Breaker fights better than he … uh, kicks,” Ferkudi said. “Kicking is part of fighting, though, isn’t it? Ah, that’s a real flesh protuberance.”
The kids laughed.
“Shut up, you nunks,” Cruxer said good-naturedly. He led as naturally as the first-place Blackguard in the class should. He bowed his head to Kip. “Godslayer.” He delivered it flat, so it could have been teasing or not. Or knowing Cruxer, he meant those who wished to take it as teasing to be able to do so, but he really meant it.
Son of a … Kip thought that nickname had died when he nearly had on the ship. “Crux. Wh—what are you doing here?”
“In the Prism’s practice room, you mean? They got so many recruits for the war training out in the yards, we Blackguards have been pushed into storage rooms and side rooms everywhere half the time. Teia somehow got us permission to use this one when the yards are full. I was going to cut her from the squad before that. She’s not so good, but after she got us this place—”