Grace Switch/Training

From Unofficial Handbook of the Virtue Universe

The Master’s Touch

Grace Switch learned knife-fighting under the cheerful supervision of To Seop Ha. The more cuts she took, the more cheerful he became. She wore gloves and a heavy leather jacket for her training sessions, but she trained with To Seop Ha, and she took at least one cut every session. She learned very nearly as much about patching leather as she did about knife fighting, and learned to hate both almost equally.

To Seop Ha felt alertness and preparedness were at least as important as actual fighting skill, and he tested her often, though rarely more than once in a single session. On one occasion he put a knife through her jacket while she was suiting up, but the jacket confused his aim sufficiently that she took only a long cut down her left arm. This leaving Grace weak to that side, he tested it frequently that day, and smiled more than he had in many months. “Never pity an opponent,” he frequently advised.

For To Seop Ha gave her more than just knife lessons. He gave her his advice, on how to live, how to kill, which laws would be enforced, which could be ignored, how to tell who would stand in her way, and who would stand aside. He reminded her frequently that laws were written for the benefit of those who wrote them, and only mattered if those same people through their agents would know they’d been broken. He was neither sentimental, nor gentle, and he spent nearly as much energy lecturing her as training her with blades. For as long as he trained her, his reasons were impervious to her questions, his knives faster than hers.

His fee for his services seemed slight enough Grace began to wonder how many pupils he had. Certainly, he made money somehow. Sculptures and paintings crowded the walls of the converted warehouse he used as his training hall. The bare concrete floors alternated between open spaces, overflowing shelves and piles and piles of books, carvings, trophies, artwork and power tools, paint brushes and cans of olive oil, linens and beer bottles, one pallet of bricks. And in the center of it all, the training square, its boundary in one corner marked by a heavy steel floor safe.

For as long as she trained with To Seop Ha, the most open side of the training grounds had had that safe marking its outer limits. It sat, closed, ready to break the fall of any who overbalanced, with or without help. To Seop Ha never looked at it or opened it. He gave no advice about it. And of all the ornaments that passed through his training hall in the years of her training, it alone she could swear had been there throughout. She knew that in some way, part of her training had to do with that safe. Any table or section of shelving could have delivered as many bruises. Her master had chosen a safe to mark this corner of his arena.

She arrived for her lesson one evening, dodged his attack on the advice of the shadows, finished putting on her jacket and gloves, and stalked towards the training square. As she neared the tottering book shelf that had been collapsing into the square for the last several months, he tried again. She took a cut to the left arm, and a rather painful one, but nothing that would not get worse if she let it affect her fighting. Turning to face To Seop Ha, she noticed out of the corner of her eye that the door to the safe stood ajar. He did not look at it. He offered no advice about it. She did not look, and asked no questions.

For an hour and a half they practiced, her only cut the one she’d taken as she entered the square. Without a smile, he nodded to her. She returned the nod, and walked out of the square. She patched two slashes in the jacket. She laid it on its shelf. And late at night she walked out of To Seop Ha’s training hall for the last time.