War God for Hire- Gladiator by David Burke

Author:David Burke [Burke, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-03-22T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter 16 - Focusing

Despite the focus that Kyle had to get stronger, to master this essence power, he was still a man. At least, he was mostly still a man. And the not-so-subtle offers and hints from Hilde played in his mind. It was adding a greater degree of difficulty to the task of gathering Earth Essence.

So much so, that over the next hour, he was only able to pull two more points of it into himself. He berated himself and not even Hilde’s attempts to remind him that many mortal mages would be thrilled to have three points of Earth Essence to work with, especially on their first night of learning how, helped.

He realized at some point, that the problem wasn’t so much an inability to execute the technique but an inability to focus for long enough. The wall that he had been working on had already surrendered the readily available essence, and now he needed to move onto another wall. With that, he also needed to learn how to maintain his concentration for longer than three or four seconds.

It wasn’t that he couldn’t focus on it, but rather something he had learned a long time ago. The type of hyper focus required for hitting a hundred plus mile per hour pitch could actually only be maintained for a few seconds. After that, the brain simply wouldn’t keep it up. So, he had learned techniques to keep himself on the edge of that focus and ready to fall into it at any point.

One coach had called it being the coiled snake. He needed to find little details to focus on, ways to keep himself acutely aware of what was going on while being ready to snap into that super keen precision instantly, just like the snake would be ready to strike. The problem was that he didn’t have much to focus on here. He didn’t have a pitcher to watch for body language cues. He couldn’t take stock of where the defenders were on the field.

As he thought through this process, Kyle realized that this level of focus was a good corollary to the training he had done as a gladiator. It was also about picking up on all those little cues and finding ways to be relaxed in his motion, while still watching for just the right instant to react either to an incoming strike or to an opening. The connection between the two excited him and made him feel more at home with the idea of being a fighter. That inner part of him that he took to be Krig’s memories or soul or whatever also resonated with the common ground he had found. Kyle wasn’t sure if he should be pleased or scared about that connection.

For him now, the difficulty was with how boring the wall was. He could only stare at it for so long, thinking about its surface and looking for minute defects. It never changed. That thought caused him to feel like something had clicked into place.

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