“Lecturer Gaius.” Senator Alexandre nodded at the young boy, clad in a white cloak. “You nervous about your first class?”

“Not really, no.” Gaius replied, a slight grin on his face. “As I understand it, my job is to beat other people up, and then tell them how to not get beaten up that badly. I’ve had experience in that matter a few days ago.”

“Indeed, I’ve heard about that.” He looked at Gaius from head to toe, with Nakama hanging by his side. “Still, are you going to be fighting in full gear?”

“Naturally…not with my sister, though,” said Gaius. “Senator, you’ve seen the snowpyres fight, right? I don’t think one of them would sit around and wait, while an unprepared Harvester takes out his gear and explains that he only learnt how to fight when prepared.”

“You have a point, but a Harvester’s first priority is to avoid getting ambushed in the first place.” The senator looked at the crowd sitting around in the Sheltered Duelling Grounds. “And yet, despite my belief, I fear your way will become more useful in the days to come. Call it intuition, but things have been going way too well for us. I’ll give you free rein as to how you want to conduct your lessons.”

He nodded at the young boy once more, and walked into the middle of the Duelling Grounds. “Today, Lecturer Gaius will be joining us.”

A light smattering of applause followed, which died down seconds later as Senator Alexandre started the first part of the lecture, the theory segment.

“Today, we’ll be dealing with how to escape an encirclement by snowpyres. In the recent Harvest, three Harvesters were killed by a snowpyre army heading to the Library of Ancients. Twelve were badly injured while breaking through the entrapment.” The senator snapped his fingers, and still images of three bodies appeared behind him. Blood stained the ground where they fell, and their corpses had been torn open and eaten. “Whatever the other Harvesters recovered wasn’t enough to allow us to identify them.”

Gaius glanced at Nakama. When the images were projected, Gaius had wanted to cover her eyes, but the assassin within him told him that it would be doing her a grave disservice. Blood, slaughter and death were commonplace in Orb. To be crippled by such sights was a fatal weakness in such a brutal world.

“In light of such an unusual movement, the Congress wanted me to cover the topic of escaping an encirclement.” The senator folded his arms. “Short of a relocation artefact — which may not even work at times and are incredibly rare — the only way out would be to slaughter a path through the massed ranks. This method, although simple, relies on the fact that with such numbers, individuals are naturally reluctant to sacrifice themselves to stop the escapees.”

“So,” continued the senator, “this fact underscores the requirement that the individual units in the encirclement are sentient. Absent that, and the next best move would be to wear them out. Back yourselves into a corner, and do not break ranks even if there’s an opening. Snowpyres are predators. If you were to escape through a passage they intentionally revealed, you will be flanked and hunted down.”

“Either way, the only way to remain safe would be to evade them entirely. Paying attention to your surroundings, like I emphasised in previous lessons, can prevent you from getting encircled, or even meeting a force so overwhelming in numbers…”

The senator droned on. Eventually, he went on to describe about the various ways to detect incoming entities, ranging from ways so mundane like listening to the ground, or things that the Cardinal Champions mentioned, like dust or wildlife escaping.

Gaius was fairly sure that the Champions had taken all these tips from classical treatises on war and tactics, but these sudden epiphanies were beginning to grow old. The only thing that Gaius couldn’t wrap his head around was the notion that surely, some of the natives of Orb must have realised that the Champions alone couldn’t have come up with whatever they did.

Perhaps it was some sort of political fiction, or even a compromise to fulfil these Champions’ vainglory. In the years that passed, it was possible that the doubters passed away, and superhuman — well, whatever passed as superhuman in this magical world of Orb, anyway — traits were ascribed to these Champions.

Silence continued to dominate the Sheltered Duelling Grounds as the senator moved on to talk about ways in which one could hide from other entities, how to move in terrain. These tips were good, if nothing else, but practice made perfect.

Despite his thoughts, Gaius was ultimately of the opinion that no matter how much one prepared, it was ultimately impossible to stop every single bad thing from happening to you. Even if one adhered to Senator Alexandre’s guidelines and tips, the world might decide to poke you with a guided middle finger, loaded with five redundancies for tracking.

Strength — the ability to kill — was the final failsafe. The firmest foundation, from which all other possibilities were then made possible. Which was why Gaius would beat this lesson into the Harvesters. No matter who you were, who was behind them…death is but a step away.

“Prevention is better than cure,” the senator concluded. “And yet, some things are just inevitable. Which is why we are now moving on to our practical segment now. Lecturer Gaius, if you please.”

The young boy nodded, and exchanged places with Senator Alexandre. The sight of a sea of faces in front of him was rather nostalgic, and at the corner of his eye, Nakama was brandishing a thumbs-up at him. He couldn’t remember much of the details, but on Earth, when his body began to decline, Gaius had taught children how to survive in the slums. It was still somewhat surreal to be a lecturer, with a child’s body, but what that mattered here was talent.

And the ability to kill.

Gaius surveyed the Harvesters in front of him, and nodded. “Today’s conduct will be simple. Everyone present is to form up into groups of four. Within each group, one person will be the target of the other three, and the target’s goal will be to remain standing after five minutes. After five minutes, the designated target will rotate.”

“Do not try to go easy on the target.” Qi exploded out from Gaius, as he drove his cultivation for the first time ever since he arrived on Orb. The gathered Harvesters shivered, as what seemed to be a demon in a child’s skin glared at them. “Trust me, when I say that I will know. You have one minute to split up and to decide on the target.”

His voice, the expected child-like quality surprisingly absent from it, sent the Harvesters present into a bustling mess.