Читать книгу Element. Flame of Elisar онлайн
Yoos took the whips and handed one to me.
He had to give a few more orders, after which they brought us a basket of melons, old broken pots and a bunch of round logs.
All this was carefully topped on a wooden table, a little away from the trainees.
Yoos walked closer to this still-life-looking thing, took a tighter grip on the whip, gave a sharp swing… A whiz and a brief crack! The same instant one of the melons exploded into small pieces, as if it had been blown up from the inside. Another swing – and a pot turned into a pile of clay bits. After that he turned to the neatly arranged logs. He was wrapping them, as a wizard, with the end of the whip and throwing at a mannequin used for practicing stabbing skills, inevitably hitting it nowhere but at the head. Every single time!
“Swing, acceleration, hit! Set the direction as accurately as possible. And then stop sharply in the end. That will bring more force to the strike. That must produce this crack!”
He took another swing, and the whip made that very specific sound, leaving another pot shattered.
“Wanna grab something with it – you make a swing, stretch your hand following the whip, and then, in the very end, pull it back a little. This will help it pick the thing. Do not worry if it doesn’t work out right away. You will get your feel of it anyway. But you have to feel the movement, as if this was part of your body, part of your arm… Here, look,” he demonstrated all of the above, and another pot hit the same poor dummy.
“Well, we will learn the throwing a bit later. Get skilled in the lashing and grabbing first.”
I looked shyly at the whip in my hand. It seemed so easy while I was watching Yoos. However, I quickly realized how deceptive that impression was as soon as it was my turn.
“You do everything, exactly the way I showed. Try, learn,” Yoos said, while still throwing the logs at the dummy. And as he was doing so, that very same Nort was running around and arranging carefully all the logs back on the table, each time risking getting one of them hit him on the head. “I got to leave now. Will be back in the afternoon to check everything. Got it?”