章 11: Issue #9: Eye Of The Chiroptera
As much as ritualistic magic goes, the one that Giovanni did to me was a tad bit underwhelming. Don't get me wrong, it was creepy as all hells, but when you're living in a world where Gods walk amongst the mortals and mortals fuck Gods, you're going to have a set of expectations.
Frankly, all Giovanni did was wave his magic wand and gave me a heart attack. Sure, the heart attack was a peculiar event, but it just didn't have the magic of it all.
Bruce did some tests to ensure that I was physically and mentally stable for which I passed with flying colors. An act that resulted in a very dangerous precedent, the manner of which still aches me to this day.
With the results finding me healthy as a cow on a Dutch prairie, Bruce had, then, created a specific training regimen for me and Dick. Each set had a minimum quota to which we must perform, or Bruce drops us from training.
It was harsh, but, according to Alfred, Bruce would still be Dick's guardian. The only thing changing would be prohibiting the boy from sneaking out at night and trying to find his family's killers. In fact, one of Bruce's conditions to Dick was that if he ever drops from training, Dick would have to forget about revenge. Harsh, indeed.
Mine, however, was relatively lighter. Merely dropping me from training forever. That would be bad, of course, but I have other options. That would complicate matters, though, as Batman knows my powers and has created my workout routine based on said powers.
The routine is simple; Divided into weekdays and weekends.
Weekdays start with:
One hour on the omni-directional treadmill. For half an hour, he tells me to run as fast as I can in two minutes with three-minute intervals. After that, he gives a five-minute rest, before doing a power walk for as long as I can.
I failed spectacularly in the first month, my breathing erratic, and my running techniques quickly blew a hole through my shoes. But the months after that were surprisingly easier. Not a lot, but the fact that I didn't need an oxygen tank whenever I finished the first half of the treadmill training verified that I'm making substantial progress.
After the treadmill comes the various weighing machines. There were six of them and I had to run through them for thirty minutes each. Given that there were a limited number of said machines, Bruce had elected to allow Dick and me to train together.
Dick likes to call this part, Three Hours In Hell.
I didn't laugh at first, but when he told me that it was a wordplay on the term 'Seven Minutes In Heaven', I still didn't laugh.
Anyway, much like the treadmill, the weight machines nearly broke me in half. I could not even lift the ten kilogram barbell standing up and even more so when I had to lay on my back.
It was the same with the ten kilogram dumbbells, barely able to do two reps with one on each hand. Bruce even taught me new pushing techniques, but, apparently, I needed time to build some muscle to make those techniques effective enough to make a difference.
It didn't help when Dick, and his smug face, barely a dozen feet away, pushed the weight up and down like it was nothing. I swore there were times that my urge to throw the dumbbell at his dumb face was just simmering to the point of boiling.
'Alas, I was too good on my own, well, good.'
Much like the treadmill, I also got the hang of the weights. Eventually, after four months, I graduated from ten-kilogram to fifteen-kilogram dumbbells and barbells. Unfortunately, Bruce had told me that those would be my limit until my second year of training.
It was for my health and growth; he explained. I soon came to understand that fifteen kilograms was the minimum weight for a certain organization's young training regimen, but I was too weak to handle it at first.
Honestly, this guy. He's too compassionate for his own good. I guess he's trying to modify the training he received from the League of Assassin, trying to make it less murder-y.
Next came the reflex and willpower training. Bruce had come up with a way to train those too, much to my chagrin.
Reflex training was an hour long, mostly consisting of dodging and evading randomly generated attacks from the AI of the Batcave's supercomputer.
Bruce placed me in a 30x30 meter room, a paltry space inside of the cave system, but large enough for a little old me. There was nothing inside of the room, merely white tiles from the floor to the ceiling. The room felt clinical and sleek, giving me the sense that I would be lobotomized in the next second.
He turned off the lights and told me to: "Evade the balls."
And, boy, did I not do it. In fact, for the better half of the six months, reflex training accounted for more than 3/10ths of my injuries.
I didn't get the hang of it until the second month, when my father accidentally stabbed me in the shoulder with a fork. He had been using it to make a point, swaying it around me like it was a pointer. But, just before he hit me, I tensed up and my heart beat a little faster.
Following that life lesson, I urged my senses to pick up any clues of an impending attack. At first, I thought myself silly for doing such a thing, but, even though I got hit more and not less, I persevered and stood longer until I got a response from my taut nerves.
It was by the fifth month that I got something out of that idiotic idea. Bruce, the all knowing jack-ass, had known what I was doing and only gave me advice after a month.
Apparently, the trick to it was to: "Hear the wind."
Of course, he offered more than that, but I understood the gist of his words. A ball that light and traveling that fast ought to make a sound. A whistle, perhaps. It took me another thirteen days before I focused hard enough to hear that lovely whistle and five more just to move fast enough to evade the ball.
Although the trick helped, I still had to evade the subsequent balls for which my speed and reflexes were not honed enough. After that stunt, though, I lowered the injury rate for relief training to about 1/5th of the overall rate.
Then we have the willpower training. It wasn't much different from the reflex training in that I have to suffer too against an unavoidable attack. In fact, all I had to do was to stand still for an hour as Dick practiced with his throwing weapon.
Thank my lucky stars that he was awful with the Batarang. Of course, my luck ran out after half a month when Dick got advice from Bruce on how to use his wrist whenever he threw the wooden Batarang.
After two months of acting as a living dummy, Dick had to graduate from me and to moving targets. As such, Bruce replaced my daily willpower test to a more traditional training.
After the second month and onwards, he would have me stand below the gushing waterfall for thirty minutes. It was a different feeling than the other regimen. Having the sound of water falling at, in, and around you at half the speed of sounds was awful.
After that high-intensity workout, the three of us would ascend the cave and have lunch at the manor. Alfred would serve different dishes every day, one that contained a balanced and nutritious diet. His food was not only delicious but also gave us strength and better conditioning for the second half of our weekday training.
Bruce clearly liked and benefited from the food, having seen him devour the food as if it would be taken away from him the next second. It was a different kind of battlefield every lunch hour, one that I intended to not lose.
After lunch, Bruce would place electrical nodes on my head and connect them to an advanced electrograph machine that could make deductions once it received enough information.
He then made me take hundreds of pages of mock exams ranging from 2nd to 6th grades. I, of course, aced them with ease and a little bravado, because in my previous life, I had a hard time working on the same course load.
Apparently, he noticed that, so he upped the range of my tests until I couldn't finish it without a smile on my face. It was in the 12th grade tests that I had a hard time, more specifically, it was the algebra ones.
I was not a math major. I studied art history and barely attended my math class, just enough to get the college credits.
Bruce also tested my spatial reasoning. He placed me in the same room as the reflex test, before activating some sort of hard light hologram that allowed me to touch, smell, and even taste the various scenarios loaded onto the room.
Most days he would project the room into a beach where he would tell me to build sandcastles, which I gladly did, having been subjected to knowledge exams beforehand. I would build these walls and engrave little coats of arms on the surface of the walls and doors as many as I could in the two hours he allotted me.
He would then ask me for details about my coats of arms. Something I would be obliged to do, much to his annoyance. I think he felt annoyed.
He kept humming and grunting when I told him that the tyrant and slave-king Lord Sopharson's coat of arms has a dolphin being killed because his father had drowned in the sea and one of his men found his head being sexually abused by dolphins.
Frankly, I didn't know if this helped me in any way possible, but I liked having to rattle off the benign fictional history of an aristocracy to Batman.
I would always go home at about six in the evening, having told Alfred that mother likes to have dinner thirty minutes before her favorite detective show was on. The man was more than happy to oblige, seeing as he even discussed the themes and inaccuracies of the show during our ride over.
Speaking of my mother, Maria never complained whenever she saw me limping down the garden path, my body full of bruises and my face dirtied to the point that a new maid once mistook me for the ghost of her stillborn baby.
She did all she could to help my body adapt to the pain after the training, giving me soup and even staying up all night just to check if my fever had gone down. It really settled and fixed my conviction on giving her the best life I could.
Not much was to be said about my father, as he was always late to dinner, arriving no less than eleven in the evening. Of course, by that time, I had already gone to my bed, reducing the times in which he sees my body's condition.
It was the breakfast that I have problems with. He would join us at the dining table, always prattling on about his business deals and what-nots.
By his words, the mining corporation that we own had been saved by Wayne's back-end business deal and his little tryst with LexCorp. Apparently, even though Luthor had gotten my DNA and tossed me aside, the agreement was strong enough to at least garner Father with a fallback of money.
That actually earned my interest. As such, when Lucious came around the manor, I would always converse with him regarding the latest news in Gotham's economy. Turns out, there was a removal clause that allowed father's company to receive a few million dollar's worth of assets when Lex Luthor removed the company from his list of company partners.
I didn't know Luthor would do that. Frankly, I deign not question the business strategies of the world's most intelligent man. I'm just happy enough to know that he's satisfied with what he got from that hospital bed six months prior.
Now that's my normal weekday; my weekend routine, however, was a little more different. For starters, Dick and I were to train together, which we were more than happy to accept, and that we would train outside of the cave.
Alfred had lightly admonished Bruce for forcing us in the cave for hours long, without sunlight or fresh air. Bruce, right then and there, designated the hectares of land and woods around the manor as our weekend training grounds.
In the first month, Bruce demonstrated his various assassins, spy, ninja, swordsman, marksman, magician, athlete, detective, and criminal techniques that he uses in his nightly vigilantism. It was extensive, but fortunately, he was more than gracious enough to provide documents that we could read during our weekday training. Not that we had much time during those, anyway.
The weather in Gotham had always been unstable, the fault of the various criminals using their powerful abilities, magical capabilities or innovative weapons. But once you remove the statistical quandary of such people, sunlight was never Gotham's friend. It was always slightly cloudy and sometimes bordering on total cover, a fact that criminals use when they decide to use Gotham as their base of operations.
Thankfully, much of Gotham outskirts was not that unlucky when it comes to weather. Wayne Manor had always been hit by direct sunlight, a boon to the Batcave's electric bill. Not that Bruce would have any problems with electricity, not until he gets booted off Wayne Powers' board of directors.
But I digress.
During normal weather, Bruce would train us with hand-to-hand, close-quarter, and swordsmanship combat.
The setting would be the forest clearing a mile north of the manor where Bruce trained his various close-ranged combat techniques. Fallen logs with broken skin and large boulders with large indentation became our background as he taught us basic combat forms.
Allowing us to perfect our foundations first, before delving into the basics of fighting with our fists and our bodies. This became our mantra for the past six months, a trait Bruce wanted us to inherit and always remember whenever fighting someone.
"Back to basics!" He would always order, giving not a second in the world before admonishing us for even the most miniscule wrongness in our forms.
I suppose those words had saved his life more than once. After all, any complex combat techniques would not work on a guy that can take a hit from a tank.
Now, if the weather wasn't clear, and the surroundings became dark and blurry, Bruce would change our training to one that benefited from such an environment. He would teach us stealth and sneak attack skills.
Modified from his League of Shadow's training regimen, Bruce would first demonstrate the techniques before allowing us to perform it to each other. While it was fun at first, the repetitive nature of crouching down behind bushes and waiting for the perfect opportunity to attack without losing an ounce of focus did bog down our mind and bodies from the silent war of attrition between Dick and I.
Of course, it didn't help that Bruce would always tell us what we did wrong during the combat scenario and perform it on both of us at the same time without us even knowing he was doing it.
I was frustrated, but I concentrated on that hate and used that to kick the shit out of Bruce's unguarded pelvis area. It didn't work, because I got too excited and yelled my attack, but at least I know enough to hide behind one of the world's greatest would-be assassins.
I also now know that if Batman catches you attacking his genitals, he'll hang you up in a tree for an hour and tell your friend to throw Batarangs at you until he gets 'good' at it.
When neither the brightly shining sun nor white puffy clouds were nowhere to be seen and instead replaced the dark, moody storm clouds that loomed over Gotham like a vulture, Batman would place us deep into the forest. Where our shouts and wails would be heard by no one.
He had only one purpose here. Sparring with real combat scenarios.
Each scenario has different objectives, but they all had one thing in common: it was us versus Batman.
'Nearly peed myself when I heard too.'
Our first spar happened during the second month, the second week of March, and our goal was to find and capture eight flags hidden within a ten-mile radius. We had three hours to accomplish the task or we'll have no lunch. Bruce will hold back for an hour, but after that, he'll come for us and steal all our captured flags.
It went horribly, of course. Dick and I split up and tried to acquire at least half of the flag, but we got lost on the way to meet up. Bruce picked us off one by one, silently hiding behind the dense foliages of the largely unkempt forest.
We conferred with each other, Dick and I, for a few weeks, mostly talking about how we'll beat Bruce in his own game. Hubris truly was mankind's greatest enemy.
As one would expect, the second sparring session came to a grinding halt when Bruce accidentally broke Dick's arm. The Boy Wonder thought it a good idea to use my body as a springboard for a jumping kick, but didn't account for Bruce using his own weight to throw him around like a rag doll.
Apparently, being a master of tactics takes more than a few months of training. Who would have thunk?
So far, there had only been four instances in which the weather was disturbed enough for Bruce to act out his plan.
Today was the fourth one and, with the last three being downright embarrassing for the two of us, Dick and I decided to test our teamwork, hopefully bringing down that no good punk.
"Just you wait, Batman. I'll be bringing you down!"
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