Chapter 3: Resonance

I wished I could say that training was easy and that I just blasted through it. It wasn’t as if I had been completely out of shape before coming to this world, and I’d done a bit of physical conditioning in high school before an injury took me off the competitive ski team. I liked to think I’d been pretty athletic.

But none of that mattered. This body was completely different and new. I was rebuilding everything from the ground up—stamina, endurance, strength, basic muscle control. All of it had atrophied so much in this body.

The only thing I had going for me was spite. The more that people like Ticks stared at me, glaring, the more I wanted to prove them wrong, and the self-pity and indignation at having to rebuild my body from scratch evaporated. They didn’t think I could do it, and I really didn’t want them to be right.

And of course, the threat of death was a helpful motivator.

So I traded all my pay for an extra meal a day. Two bowls of steamed oats at breakfast and an extra fried egg, an extra helping of soup at lunch, and double the rations at dinner time. Dinner was usually some kind of wild meat that the hunters caught or purchased from Slowbend.

At first, it felt like I was simply putting on fat, but with my routine, my muscles began growing again. I wasn’t sure how normal it was, because I’d never had to do this back on Earth, but it felt fast. Perhaps that was something to do with Duplicate biology, but the other Dupes didn’t know what I meant when I asked. They hadn’t considered the speed of putting on muscle, since they’d been training for combat as long as they could remember. Since they’d been created.

The others had been created with bodies that were about eighteen years old, then received two years of training and education at a place called Homecamp—which was far, far back from the front lines.

That meant I had plenty of catching up to do to get back where Lemming had been.

I formed a routine. In the morning, I always had chores to do at the camp, and so I found ways to do them that took twice the effort. If I had to carry logs, I carried them under my arms instead of on my shoulders, and I took the long way around camp. If I had to move kegs of water and ale, I made sure to carry them instead of rolling them. I sharpened palisade logs with the heaviest knife available or voluntarily helped carry water from the stream. I took whatever odd task I could find and did it in the most difficult way I could imagine.

Soon, the other Dupes started asking me to do their chores for them. I took everything with a soft smile and a dutiful nod. Some of them were just lazy, and some of them wanted me to break—I wasn’t going to let that happen.

Besides, eventually I’d start making friends this way, right?

In the afternoons, although I was always exhausted, I found myself training for a few hours with Shave and a few other Dupes who I had won over with chores.

We started with spear training. I thought Shave was going to make me train in a shield wall formation or something, but he simply began with thrusts and jabs, and we slowly moved onto more complex movements.

Much to my disappointment, I did end up having to do more than just jab with the spear. There were slashes, whirls, and more. Shave called the fighting style the ‘Sun Splinter,’ because it involved a lot of attacks from above. The goal was to overwhelm the opponent with an offense-heavy style before they could land a hit themselves.

Dupes, as it turned out, had a lot more training than what I assumed the average medieval footman had. I’d never been a historian, but I was pretty sure the average soldier didn’t get martial arts training like this. It seemed like they were trying to prepare me to fight a large group of enemies by myself.

Were we that badly outnumbered? I wasn’t sure what we were going to face, but I didn’t want to get caught off-guard or flat-footed, so I kept training hard.

The days of the week all had different names here, as did the months, but from what I could work out, it was the equivalent of the middle of July. Every equivalent of Sunday, the Dupes had a day of no tasks in camp, so we were permitted to head into Slowbend. Of course, even on Sundays, I didn’t skip combat training in the afternoon, but I did use my mornings to try to acquire some books.

The first problem was that I had no money.

Here, they used coins called sceats, which came in copper, silver, and gold. Our wage in the 294th was two silver sceats a month and ten copper. But I had been exchanging my wage for extra food, and I had nothing to pay the Greenway merchants who risked traveling out to the front lines.

I had my eyes on a manuscript. It was a history book, and not all that valuable to most people here, but I needed to learn about this world somehow. Besides, it was a manuscript, hand-copied onto sheets of parchment, and that still made it decently expensive. It was two silver sceats.

So, to pay for it, I did more chores for Commander Galliard in the evenings in exchange for extra pay (which had the added benefit of getting me more exercise). More sweeping, more ferrying goods around, but I eventually got myself two extra silver sceats and purchased the history manuscript—and only a day before the merchant departed for safer lands.

After that, I spent my evenings reading. Although Dupes could read, most of them didn’t seem very good at it, and this body’s Focus was a real issue. But it seemed that I could improve it with practice, so that was what I did.

Although I had been spending most of my dinner time alone, reading or staring at the sky, one night I joined Shave’s group around a crackling fire, a skewer of venison in hand, and asked, “How hard is it to improve your attribute scores?”

Most of the Dupes around the fire all laughed. Ticks watched from a distance, but he didn’t join us.

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A Dupe named Romance (because he’d gotten caught with a romance manuscript back at Homecamp a few years back) said, “You only ask that now? Word of your little arrangement with Ticks has circled around the camp.”

“Well…” I looked around slightly awkwardly. “Sorry. Just didn’t think to ask. I thought they would improve as I trained.”

“That is correct, lad,” Shave said. “Attributes are a method of tracking progress. You’ll gain a point of strength if you get stronger. Of course, the System lets our bodies grow beyond the limits of regular mortal Men. It takes a bit of work, but you’ll get used to it. And you’ll learn ways to manipulate it if you’re lucky.”

I nodded. “Magic. Like you said.”

“Call it what you will,” said a different Dupe named Trench.

“Did you guys make the System?”

Another bout of laughter. Romance jostled my shoulder and Trench beckoned me to sit on the log beside him.

“The System, the Path, call it what you will,” Shave said. “It’s been around longer than any of us, lad. We’re just caught up in its flow.”

“Okay, but really, what kind of magic can we do?” I asked.

“There are many kinds of magic in this world,” Trench said.