The Training - Part 3

The new day rolled in and today was the last day before the ball. She was pretty much ready for it, physically more so than mentally.

As she started the day, doing her normal routine, the dress soon arrived and was brought to her room. The maid who did so offered to help put it on her, but Octavia like before quickly refused. Sylvia had headed to her room to write some letters leaving Octavia to make sure the dress fit well.

Donning her outfit she made her way over to the 'almost a mirror' mirror and took it all in, and she was speechless. The dresses of this era were very different to modern dresses, but both were beautiful. The layers of cloth flowed down her body, and the gorgeous red layer on the inside stood out stunningly, with the pale pink embroidered with flowers framing it.

The problem that she had with the dress in the shop with it bunching up against her tail was solved, the dress having been sewn very nicely to stop it. It now met the top of her tail and surrounded it without the fabric bunching up and ruining the flow. It was lovely.

She still wasn't too sure about the massive sleeves, but she would have looked the odd one if she suggested not having them.

…

With the dress all ready to go, and them having taken the fragrances with them from the apothecary, there wasn't much left to do to prepare for the ball, aside from the dancing. She had thought she would need some form of etiquette training, but upon asking Sylvia she said she was fine. She spoke well enough that she could be mistaken as a lower-class noble, a baron or some such, and because of that nothing else was needed. As long as she didn't offend anyone, she should be fine.

And so, after breakfast was eaten, the day officially started with the final amount of dance practice. They had been through the song many times now and had managed to adjust the moves to work with her tail. She had practised and practised, so much so that she knew them almost off by heart now. The flow of the dance was practically ingrained in her brain and she just moved on instinct. All that was left was touch-ups and perfecting any issues they saw.

…

Several hours when by in the blink of an eye, where they repeated the dance over and over again. Thankfully, Sylvia hardly had to jump in because of a problem, and they only ended up perfecting some of the moves. Octavia was able to keep her tail right up against herself with ease now, it having not dropped once during their practice. It all looked to be good to go for the ball.

There were still some problems obviously, minor things that would only be pointed out if some judges specialising in dance were watching them. Not having her arms straight enough, head tilted incorrectly, missteps or miss-slithers in Octavia's case, timing issues, the list did go on. But, to an outside observer enjoying themselves at a ball, unless you were really looking to fault someone on their movement, everything looked great.

With Sylvia's nod of agreement that they were ready, they soon broke off for lunch and enjoyed a calm meal with the Lord and his family. Not much was said aside from discussions on the ball, people they were looking forward to seeing, and topics of discussion they planned to talk about during it. Not much of it made sense to Octavia, but she understood that while this was an event to enjoy there were bound to be politics involved. With so many nobles around, standing around and dancing on occasion, what else would they be talking about? News and trends in their towns were one thing, but if films and shows taught her anything, they may also talk about rival factions among nobles, possible attacks and even war. Whether this would actually happen or was all just in Octavia's head would only be known when she attended the ball.

…

Lunch soon ended and her next training session with Althea rolled in. She was not as exhausted from the dancing as she had been before and so she turned up on time and ready to go. She had several hours of training ahead of her with her teacher and she was ready.

As she slithered into the courtyard, Althea turned to her and smiled.

"Ok, so today will be combat training against an opponent. Now, you have a good number of moves and techniques down for your staff so you will use that for this lesson. The good thing is that once you have the same things figured out for your poleaxe, what I teach you today can be applied to it easily. There will be no need to apply things differently because of your weapon."

"Well, that's good," Octavia thought to herself, not having to do anything extra for it to work with her poleaxe.

"Really, this can be applied to any weapon as I will be teaching you how to gauge and read a person when you're fighting them. Knowing how to defend and attack people who are using different weapons. Now, arm yourself and stand over there."

Althea then headed over to the side where a table stood, where Octavia hefted her staff and made her way to the centre. On top of the table sat several weapons all lined up, and Althea quickly grabbed a sword and a shield.

"Now, to start I'm going to take you through how to deal with a person wielding a sword and a shield. One thing to look for is which hand they hold each in, and this will apply to all the weapons. Everyone has a more dominant hand like I spoke of in the last lesson, and this is the one people are likely to hold their weapon with. Some people can use both hands with ease, which is something to look out for, but most of the time, they would use one. If you can damage that hand enough that they can't use it, there are very unlikely to be able to wield their weapon well with their other hand. Understand me so far."

Octavia said yes as right now it was just common sense. From her time in school, she had broken her wrist once and she was hopeless in writing with her left hand. It made sense that the same logic applied to weapons.

"That's not to say you can just no longer worry about your attacker if they end up using their other hand. It's still going to be a dangerous person holding a sharp sword, and anything can happen in a fight. Now, what hand they are using tells you where best to aim and block. A person holding a shield, means they probably trained to mostly block with the shield rather than the sword, and so you want to attack the side they hold their weapon. This doesn't mean you attack all the time on this side, as that would make you predictable, but you are likely to cause more damage hitting that side rather than the one holding the shield. It's harder for them to get the shield across their body, and they want to be attacking with their weapon rather than defending."

Althea quickly put down the shield and continued.

"This is different if they just have a one-handed weapon without the shield, as this means they are either more agile fighters and can easily use their sword to block or they just are just idiots and decided to leave a hand free. Because of this, what side you choose to attack really doesn't matter too much, as either way they will either have no skill to defend or as an agile fighter, they can probably defend against attacks from either side."

Althea continued going through each of the weapons on the table talking about where she should be aiming for to deal with the person. For the halberd, there is a single blade on one end and you need to discern which hand they are leading with, but as a pole weapon, the whole massive shaft of the weapon can be used to block. She even talked about the staff and how like she taught her the quick attacks, this means it's hard to judge as well.

Octavia was starting to despair as from what she was learning, it seemed like there was no surefire way to actually fight back against people. Althea saw her expression and could understand what she was feeling, so she continued to alleviate her feelings.

"I can see you have realised that with the number of weapons out there and the way people fight, there is no one right way to fight back against them. There are however many different ways to defend and fight back, all of which you will need to use your judgement in the heat of the moment to decide which one to use. In this session, I will take you through a good number of them and hopefully, over time, when your opponent comes at you in a specific way, you will know what to do."

How Octavia was going to remember all of these she did not know, and as she looked over at the table she saw that a mace and dagger were the only other weapons aside from the one she showed her. She knew there were a lot of other weapons out there and what Althea was going to teach her was only a small selection of the possibilities she would face in the wider world. But, in the face of realising her situation, she decided to just get on with it and walked up to Althea with her staff in hand.