War God for Hire- Gladiator by David Burke (books under 200 pages .TXT) 📕

her made it quite the temptation. And it had been a while; heck, it had technically been over three years while he was reforming in the void. But no. He steeled himself. He had decided to build real relationships, and that didn’t mean they all had to just be about fun.

He had high hopes for what was budding between he and Hilde. He wouldn’t ruin it by moving too fast. A part of him kicked himself, but another knew that a little discipline would make it all worthwhile in the end. Once the decision was made, he no longer second-guessed himself but instead felt that this was the right path.

“You have no idea how tempting that is,” Kyle began.

“Good, because that is my intent,” Hilde replied with a full dose of her sultry tone.

“But remember, I said I’m committed to changing who I was. I want this. I believe this is gonna happen, but not yet. I want to keep getting to know you, so that when it does happen, it will be all that both of us could ever want. For now, though, I need to focus on learning how to absorb more essence,” Kyle said.

He could almost feel the disappointment in her words as she said, “You are probably right. We will make you strong, and then you can have me whenever you want.”

“No, then we will have each other.”

Chapter 16 - Focusing

Despite the focus that Kyle had to get stronger, to master this essence power, he was still a man. At least, he was mostly still a man. And the not-so-subtle offers and hints from Hilde played in his mind. It was adding a greater degree of difficulty to the task of gathering Earth Essence.

So much so, that over the next hour, he was only able to pull two more points of it into himself. He berated himself and not even Hilde’s attempts to remind him that many mortal mages would be thrilled to have three points of Earth Essence to work with, especially on their first night of learning how, helped.

He realized at some point, that the problem wasn’t so much an inability to execute the technique but an inability to focus for long enough. The wall that he had been working on had already surrendered the readily available essence, and now he needed to move onto another wall. With that, he also needed to learn how to maintain his concentration for longer than three or four seconds.

It wasn’t that he couldn’t focus on it, but rather something he had learned a long time ago. The type of hyper focus required for hitting a hundred plus mile per hour pitch could actually only be maintained for a few seconds. After that, the brain simply wouldn’t keep it up. So, he had learned techniques to keep himself on the edge of that focus and ready to fall into it at any point.

One coach had called it being the coiled snake. He needed to find little details to focus on, ways to keep himself acutely aware of what was going on while being ready to snap into that super keen precision instantly, just like the snake would be ready to strike. The problem was that he didn’t have much to focus on here. He didn’t have a pitcher to watch for body language cues. He couldn’t take stock of where the defenders were on the field.

As he thought through this process, Kyle realized that this level of focus was a good corollary to the training he had done as a gladiator. It was also about picking up on all those little cues and finding ways to be relaxed in his motion, while still watching for just the right instant to react either to an incoming strike or to an opening. The connection between the two excited him and made him feel more at home with the idea of being a fighter. That inner part of him that he took to be Krig’s memories or soul or whatever also resonated with the common ground he had found. Kyle wasn’t sure if he should be pleased or scared about that connection.

For him now, the difficulty was with how boring the wall was. He could only stare at it for so long, thinking about its surface and looking for minute defects. It never changed. That thought caused him to feel like something had clicked into place. Earth Essence was about stability, lack of change. There was the potential for growth and movement in it. He could feel it, but it was always slow and deliberate.

In that moment, he had a flash of a memory. He remembered how his sister Jordan had always been so deliberate and slow to act. Except he didn’t have a sister named Jordan. The thought or memory was still so vivid though. Then he realized that Krig had a sister named Jordan, the earth goddess. That made his head spin.

Rather than delve into that or why he suddenly had a recollection like that, Kyle just focused on finding a memory of his own. He hadn’t thought about his one true long-term girlfriend, Tessa, for a long time. That alone was a testament to how strangely content he had found himself the past few weeks. Yet somehow thinking about her as a way to focus himself didn’t seem to work.

Hilde came to mind and while he was feeling a budding connection with her, he simply hadn’t seen her for long enough to truly dwell on the details of her appearance. So he started thinking about Nyda. The way her hair shimmered in the light cast from the sconces in his cell. The light blue of her eyes and how he could get lost staring into them. The shape of her lips, lines of her neck, the surprisingly full curves of her breasts in proportion to her slender frame.

Nyda became his meditation. Maybe she was an infatuation. She had only spent all that time with him