My first combat instructor taught me an invaluable lesson when I was little more than thirteen years old.

The "story behind it" is that I had gotten into a fight with a bigger, stronger thirteen-year-old, a soldier's son, and thrashed him almost into unconsciousness. The combat instructor heard about it and, true to past precedents that had left me unable to move for days at a time, he had put the heat of volcanic eruptions with the flare of his temper. In simple, straightforward wordage, he made it clear that unless I could beat him in a fight, I was going to end up every bit as painfully beaten as my opponent had been once I was through with him. It was no empty threat. I lost. Before I had finished telling him I would fight, he had already started hitting me, and I never did recover my balance enough to overcome his momentum.

That the instructor had been my father, and that I had ended up bruised in just about every part of my body, and that I had broken two bones by the time it was over, made the lesson no less worth my time. If you are in an unbalanced fight, one so unbalanced that the opponent might as well get a mop and start cleaning you off the for ahead of time, fairness is neither to be expected of or given to your opponent. Freak McGreen was no exception to the rule. He had to have been a few times faster than me, he was definitely a lot better acclimated to taking damage, and he had to have been a match for be in strength. Since he commanded a store of power that made him the rough equivalent of a small army of force, he qualified as an enemy who supremely outmatched me.

I was on him, literally, before he had drawn another breath.

Eyes on me or not, no one has the reflexes to react quite right to six and a half feet and two hundred pounds of wildly ferocious, sprinting warrior. His guard with the broadsword was slow and far clumsier than it would have been or could have been with a rapier—microscopically so, but more than slower and clumsier enough that I could use the delay. I hit his stomach at a sprint, hard, and took grim satisfaction in hearing his sword slap uselessly against the padded floor. A full body tackle at the waist has the exceptional ability to nullify speed and reflexes just about altogether; I kept going before he could react, pushing him forward until his back became solidly acquainted with a rack of halberds.

Well, gosh, that must have hurt. Bummer.

If I felt bad for him, my sympathy must have registered as gleeful abandon, because my body went into overdrive on him. I once dropped a real brute of a bare-fist boxer in a little under fifteen seconds, so when I say I beat the snot out of my green-haired little freak of an opponent, it means I was thrashing him with my fists, elbows, and knees with enough speed and consistency that he was getting hit once or twice a second, if not more. And the only way I hit is "hard."

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[Graphics by Me.]

[The signature links to Aleksandr Sokoll.]
["I believe in sleeping." ~ Bruce Lee]