Kerryn read through the parchment laid out on the table. “First of all, do you see how each of your stats has two separate numbers?”

  “They’re both the same though. Except the first one is bold,” Varre pointed out.

  The warrior nodded. “Yes. That means that you have not undergone any proper training yet. If you had, they’d be different. My strength for instance, is 16 | 130.”

  “So both of your stats are higher, but the second number is way bigger.”

  “The first number is my natural strength. As you can see, I’m a bit more muscular than you,” he put his elbow down on the table, “let’s try arm wrestling.”

  That’s not very regal, the king thought to himself, but I suppose he is my trainer. I should expect some physical tasks. He straightened up his chair and readied himself for the challenge.

  As expected, the warrior was far stronger. Varre managed to hold him for a few seconds, but was ultimately defeated. His hand was pushed against the table.

  “As you can see,” Kerryn explained, “I am stronger than you. But not by that much. This may be enough to beat a drunken thug, but it will do you no good against monsters. Or even some large predators, like a bear. That’s because the first number only reflects our natural strengths. You can increase it through regular training and muscle growth. That’s the extent of most commoners’ abilities. Now,” he started looking around the courtyard, but ultimately his eyes settled on Benjamin, “do you mind if I borrow your chamberlain for a second?”

  “Go ahead,” the king urged the servant forward.

  Benjamin looked a little concerned, but he was willing to make sacrifices for the sake of his lord’s training. He gingerly stepped closer to the warrior.

  “I will try to lift him now,” Kerryn grabbed the chamberlain beneath the shoulders and heaved. He managed to do it, but it was clear that he was struggling. He walked a few steps forward, swaying, before releasing the poor man.

  “Now watch this,” the warrior closed his eyes for a second.

  He appeared to shimmer, but the effect quickly dissipated. Varre recalled seeing a similar effect before Perry and Jury started training back at his manor.

  Kerryn approached Benjamin again, but this time, he lifted him effortlessly. To show off even further, he started running around the courtyard, holding the unfortunate servant in the air, as he flailed his arms. He contemplating throwing the chamberlain in the air, but luckily changed his mind. Instead, he jumped up by himself, while still holding Benjamin in his arms.

  He finally released the chamberlain after landing. The terrified man ran back to the king, as the warrior closed his eyes again. The shimmering effect reappeared for a second and then the adventurer returned to the table.

  Varre stared at the scene slack jawed. “That was a little different.”

  “Exactly,” Kerryn sat down, “that was my enhanced strength. It has a value of 130, so quite a bit higher,” he paused to look at Benjamin, “sorry man. Normally, I’d show it off by lifting a heavy rock or something, but there was nothing big enough here.”

  The chamberlain wiped the sweat off his brow with a handkerchief. “It’s alright. As long as my lord learned something.”

  Varre leaned forward in his chair. “How do I use this enhanced strength?”

  “You will need to close your eyes and concentrate. I will walk you through the exercises later,” Kerryn waved his hand, “the important part is that this is how most powerful adventurers fight. We activate our enhanced state to bring our abilities to superhuman levels.”

  “If it makes you so much stronger, why do you ever leave it? Wouldn’t it be better to always stay enhanced?”

  The warrior smiled. “That’s the dream of many adventurers. But it doesn’t work like that,” he pointed to the list of Varre’s talents again, “do you see this? Your energy?”

  “It’s 10/10,” the king confirmed.

  “Right. That’s how many minutes you can enter the enhanced state for,” Kerryn explained, “however you must be careful about your recovery time. It takes about an hour to recover each point. You need to be careful. Once you activate it, make sure you use your time well.”

  “Ten minutes is an awfully short amount of time,” Varre protested.

  “It is, but as you’ve said it yourself, you have not gone through any training yet. I worked hard to achieve my limit of two hours,” the warrior looked proud of himself.

  “That’s one hundred twenty minutes. If you fully deplete it, it would take you,” the king paused for a second, “five full days to recover?!”

  Kerryn chuckled. “Indeed. However, that’s only meant for emergencies. Most fights are won within a few minutes. I only need such a large limit for long, extended battles against huge monster hordes, or for when I’m stalking around their lair for a long time and I need to be ready to defend myself,” he pointed to the parchment again, “let’s take the toughness stat for example. If it’s high enough, your enhanced state can shrug off blows that would kill a normal human.”

  “Interesting. So a single assassin can kill the most powerful warrior in the world, if he just manages to catch him off guard,” Varre stared off into the distance.

  “There are many tales about that exact thing happening,” the warrior smiled.

  “Fortunately that is what your majesty’s guards are for,” Benjamin added, “they will alert you if you were to ever come under attack. You’ll have the time to act.”

  “Of course, right now your enhanced stats are exactly the same as your natural ones. So it will not matter even if you do activate it,” Kerryn slapped his knees and stood up, “that’s what I’m here for. We will train you, to make sure you can defend yourself in combat.”

  Varre followed suit and started stretching to warm up. “Very well. Where do I begin?”

  The warrior picked up the vial of elixir from the table. “Remember this? Drink it.”

  The king had already sniffed the vial before, but he stopped himself before it reached his lips. “Benjamin, is it really a good idea for me to be drinking weird liquids out of strange vials?”

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  The chamberlain smiled politely. “While I applaud your careful judgement, I assure you it’s safe. The court mage inspected the elixirs himself this morning, and it was kept under the watchful eyes of the guards. You can go ahead.”

  Varre shrugged. “Fine. But it’s on you if I die from this.”

  He pulled his head back and drank the vial in a single gulp. Just like the smell, the taste was strange. Unnatural. It left a sweet, lingering aftertaste in his mouth.

  As soon as he swallowed, he felt a strange shimmer pass through his body. It reminded him of the effect he saw on Kerryn earlier, though now he felt it in his own skin.

  As if reading his thoughts, the warrior immediately asked, “did you feel that? Good. Now whenever you want to enter the enhanced state, try to recall that feeling and allow the same energies to course through your body.”

  “Can’t I just drink this every time instead?” the king asked, panting. Surprisingly, he felt out of breath.

  Kerryn smirked. “Even if you could, it wouldn’t be worth it. That’s not what the elixir’s for,” he took the empty vial away from Varre and gingerly put it back in the little chest, “this substance is one of the only things that allows you to train your enhanced attributes. At least efficiently.

  “Most beginner adventurers have to save up for months before they can afford to buy even a single vial. Stronger ones can drink it more regularly. This is important. As the concentration of elixir in your blood builds up, your training becomes faster. That’s why powerful nobles and kings tend to be stronger than the average commoner.”

  Varre returned to stretching. “What makes it so expensive?”

  “It’s made from monsters,” the warrior answered mysteriously.

  The king immediately paused. He started feeling sick. I knew something was wrong. What the hell did I just drink?!

  Kerryn raised his arms to calm the monarch down. “Don’t worry! It’s not made from their blood or anything. I don’t really understand the process myself, but various monster parts are heavily processed by expert alchemists to create it. They probably only extract some essence from them or something. It’s perfectly safe.”

  Varre remained unconvinced, but relented for now. “Fine. Now what?”

  “Now, try to recreate that feeling. Do you remember how the energy flowed through your body? Focus on that. Concentrate. Remind yourself how it felt. Then, try to recreate it.”

  The king had to spent the next two hours practicing the motion. It was frustrating and quite frankly boring. He stood in the courtyard, hiding from the summer heat in the shade and kept trying to imagine strange powers coursing through his veins. At first, Varre tried sitting down on the ground and meditate like all those people doing yoga.

  Unfortunately, Kerryn did not allow that. “If you learn to do it while sitting down, you won’t be able to activate the enhanced state in combat! Stay on your feet. Come on, look at me and do it like this!”

  Even after spending so much time on meditation, the king only managed to achieve a couple brief successes. The warrior finally allowed the monarch a short break. They returned to the table, just as Benjamin laid out a simple meal for them.

  Varre was starving. He threw himself on the food. The chamberlain still had not managed to vet all of the servants, so the quality was a little worse than it should have been. Despite that, the king did not complain as he wolfed it all down.

  In the meantime Kerryn read through Varre’s talents again. Carefully this time. “Wait. I think there’s a mistake here. It looks like your luck is twenty five.”

  “Yeah,” the king answered while chewing on a chicken drumstick, “I was told it’s pretty high.”

  The warrior stood up from his seat. “Are you serious? You have twenty five luck?”

  “Yeah.”

  Kerryn sat back down and ran his hand through his brown hair. “On the one hand, I don’t want to believe you. But on the other hand, you have no reason to lie.”

  The chamberlain lifted a finger. “Mr. Kerryn, please be careful of what you are insinuating. I’ve seen his majesty’s talent check personally and, though it is exceptional, it is also accurate.”

  The warrior was very agitated by this revelation. He kept rereading through the list, as if he could somehow change the number to something more reasonable. Finally, he looked back up. “Well, I suppose it at least explains how you managed to ascend to the throne.”

  “Mr. Kerryn!” Benjamin yelled out, “this is absolutely unacceptable.”

  Sensing an opportunity to get back at his trainer, Varre decided to chime in. “I agree. I sentence you to do a hundred pushups right now! Chop chop!”

  The warrior laughed. “You know, I think I can accept that,” he got off the chair and started on the exercise. He continued talking, completely unphased by it. “Normally, I try to prepare a training regimen based on my student’s natural attributes. We try to further enhance the talents they are born with and consider your inborn abilities. But I’m afraid that there are no trainers in luck. Perhaps, if you weren’t the king, you would have become one yourself one day.”

  “Maybe I still will,” Varre smirked, “who said I can’t be both? Bring him here and I’ll have him executed on the spot.”

  “If you decide to go down that route, I’d love to be your first student,” Kerryn kept on doing the pushups, without losing his breath, “otherwise, your spread is similar to your uncle’s. Decent strength and toughness. Makes sense, as those are very noble attributes, well suited to aristocratic life. A hearty diet tends to increase them over time. No combat abilities yet, but that’s alright. I’ve never heard of this ‘strange mind’ though. What does it do exactly?”

  “To be honest, I don’t know,” the king admitted.

  “Have you tried asking your Court Mage about it? It sounds like a mental ability. It could be magic related somehow,” the coach suggested.

  “I suppose I’ll do that then,” Varre answered with a sigh.

  Technically, Elvira from the Mages’ guild was investigating it on her own. Or at least she did so months ago. Now, so much that had passed that the king couldn’t be sure if she even remembered anything about it.

  “Good. Then for now, I’ll ignore that ability. Luckily,” Kerryn emphasized the word, “I specialize in physical attributes. Strength and toughness specifically. I think we can largely keep the same training regimen the one Mikkel had.”

  “Does it matter? Since I’ve never been trained before, I’m pretty much starting out at zero. The elixir is supposed to grow my enhanced stats and you said yourself that those are the only stats that matter,” Varre shrugged.

  “It’s true. Some people try to focus on different attributes than the ones they have naturally high. It’s a good way to surprise your opponent,” he looked off to the side as if remembering something, “people see someone who looks like a twig, only to be completely blown off guard by a powerful sucker punch,” he turned back to Varre, “but treachery isn’t a good trait for a monarch.”

  “Don’t I get to decide that?” the king set aside the finished plate and stretched out on his chair.

  “Of course. It might even work the first time. But you are a very public figure. People will quickly realize. That your true strengths lie elsewhere. And they will remember. Besides. It’s not efficient,” Kerryn finally finished the last pushup. He was getting out of breath by the last couple dozen or so.

  “How so?” Varre walked up and offered the warrior a hand. No reason not to be friendly.

  The warrior stood back up, with the monarchs assistance. “The higher your natural attributes, the faster you can train your enhanced ones. This is why we will be training both.”

  “I don’t know,” the king shrugged, “I’m already spending so much time on all these council meetings. I’m not sure there’s enough daylight left for so much training.”

  Kerryn put his hand on Varre’s shoulder. “Then you’ll just have to train harder. The more you exercise, the sooner you can go back to your other duties. Now it’s your turn for push-ups!”

  Varre came to deeply regret his comment. It seemed that the coach took those words to hard and did not ease up on the poor monarch. The king barely had a moment to catch his breath before it was time to move on to the next exercise.

  Throughout the whole process, Kerryn kept reminding him to try and recall the shimmering feeling associated with the enhanced state. Even Varre’s mind couldn’t catch a break. He had to constantly concentrate, pushing both his mind and his muscles to the very limit.

  By the end of this grueling session, the king was completely exhausted. He felt like he deserved a weeklong vacation in a five start resort. Even that might not have been enough. He almost had a heart attack when saying goodbye to the coach.

  “Good work today!” Kerryn bowed, “I expect the same effort tomorrow!”

  “Tomorrow?!” Varre was so shocked that he could barely speak.

  “Exactly! Regular training is important for achieving the best results. And you need to make up a lot of missed progress!” the warrior’s lowered a bit, “as reward for your work today, I’ll let you in on a little secret. Tomorrow, we will attempt to spar. Now good night!”

  The coach picked up his equipment and left. This is outrageous, the king thought, they can’t really expect me to do this every day, do they? Maybe I can refuse, or at least pretend to be sick… No, I suppose I have to keep up appearances. At least for now.