Vincenzo began to learn because Cammo had finally begun to teach him. During the weeks of travel, Cammo and him started to spar nightly, with the wizard displaying the full extent of what his mastery of mana allowed. “All a Glow is, is the ability to bring your mana out of the circulation of your body, letting it flow free. When it flows free, you could do more with it. That’s all it simply is,” he explained. “The thicker the Glow, the greater the mastery. Its effects are exponential as well. A wizard with a Glow four inches thick might be able to hold up something weighing five hundred pounds, but someone with five could do a thousand.” Cammo could sprint a mile in a minute, take the hardest punch Vincenzo had to offer without a bruise, and hit even harder. And from those hits, Vincenzo learned that he was holding back more than a little. Cammo put a sword in his hands and tested his skills, but was quickly disappointed. Vincenzo handled the weapon like he had never held one in his life, and he admitted to such. Cammo decided to focus on hand to hand, saving the sword for utility and finishing off a weak foe, and was pleasantly surprised by his ability. Vincenzo liked one show on TV more than any other, and that show was MMA. He’d watch every match he could; it was really the only thing he came back to the apartment for, apart from sleep. He watched it so much that by age twelve, he’d already begun to mimic them in the cramped room of his apartment. He was no good, then—bad form, bad timing, a lack of respect—but Marco, sensing a positive hobby, put him into classes. He quit two years after out of a disrespect to authority and teenage angst that embarrassed him later, but he left dangerous. He was a natural fighter, learning holds, strikes, grapples, and other techniques with ease, and it was information he never forgot and never could forget. It saved his life more than once, and he guessed it was going to keep on doing that. It was practicing a high kick that Vincenzo realized he was flexible. “Must be the regrowth,” Cammo muttered, not really interested in the strange change. Vincenzo decided to act the same, focusing solely on his ability to strike fast and hard, yet stay light, a challenge made even more difficult by the thick snow covering the ground. By the third week, he could kick his height with a brutal speed and power that impressed even Cammo. Plum slept as they trained, but Vincenzo always made time in the morning to entertain her with his newfound mastery over his body, doing splits and handstands and whatever would get a laugh. Cammo was a strict teacher, and his punishments were harsh, but Vincenzo learned tricks in recovery that eluded him for years—like the kicking himself up off the ground, rolling without losing his bearings, and other acrobatics. Initially, he was confused by the lesson, but Cammo swore its usefulness. “I’m a pragmatist,” he said. “I know it seems flashy and pointless, but it saved my life more than once.”
Vincenzo wanted to learn magic. He told Cammo as such, but his hopes were quickly dashed. “I’d need three months at the least,” he claimed, “to even get you to bring your mana out half an inch. Three months we don’t have. For now, you’ll just have to work with what you have.” Vincenzo did. He practiced unloading and loading the barrels of his weapon for hours on end, and hitting the snowballs Cammo would throw high in the air for target practice, until he could reload and fire his gun faster than he ever could before. He turned the sword Cammo had given him with the emp’s permission—it wasn’t hard to get due to his lack of skill with the blade—into shotgun shells, which he then loaded onto two sashes Plum had sewn for him at his request, which he wore under his coat and over his shirt in the same “X” pattern as the mark of the Blood Moon across his chest and back.
But physical training was only half of what he discovered. Cammo taught him about the countries of the Overworld as well as the creatures that inhabited it.
“Cappellas are the most common. They have horns, horizontal pupils, and hooves. You’ve seen them before,” Cammo said. “And the most powerful kingdom among them, and the world for the most part, is Unigard. Unigardians have dark skin, wide noses, and coarse hair sometimes. You’ve seen them before, again. They’re the ones we have to worry about the most, because they’re organized. They know what they’re doing and by the power of their god, they’re sure as hell gonna do it. And ‘it’ is killing you.”
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“Me?” Vincenzo asked.
“Anyone with black eyes,” Cammo said. “You’re pale, too, which doesn’t help. They wiped out the pale ones in the past, and you can’t really find any that look like you now, but I don’t doubt they forgot it. I’m sure they have it in their Bible somewhere…”
Cammo went over everything he thought important, segmenting each lesson with a quiet skill that Vincenzo failed to notice until he realized he actually remembered what he was being told, and by the third week, Vincenzo knew much. It was a surface level knowledge, Cammo said, but it’d be enough for the time being. The only topic that he delved into with any detail was the one Vincenzo had been dreading to learn about: the Guerrieros. He painted a picture of lazy domination, with his father—Cammo never named him, but whether he didn’t know it or whether he simply refused to speak it, Vincenzo couldn’t tell—taking over hundreds of years ago and keeping loose control over every country of the world, only placing a couple of restrictions on certain actions with dire consequences. Cammo explained his age simply: Vincenzo’s father was a half-god. “Moon-men flesh is a gift from the moon. You eat it, you turn into a half-god. Usually though, the body can’t handle it and explodes in a few short moments. But there are other means of ascension… An intact tear, Vincenzo, straight from the eye of the Blood Moon. He got power from one of them and now he’s king. He’s king of the world… And, because of your relation, he’ll probably look for you if your existence is exposed.”
And that concluded his education.
Every night, after Cammo finished training with him, he woke up and left whatever cave they found, and just stood in the open air in silence and in thought, smoking the cigarettes Cammo had given him as a gift after the first time they smoked. Like many things, the emp knew what he was talking about, and smoking made his mind seem clear. Vincenzo still had the urge to walk out and never come back, and sleep and never wake up, and finally be freed of the guilt he never stopped feeling. Now more than ever, Marco, Alice, and Frey dominated his mind, and with that came the hatred. I have to figure this out myself, he knew, blankly staring into the distance no matter the weather. Cammo can’t tell me. Plum can’t tell me… I just have to know. That was his hardest lesson and he never fully learned. He hoped it’d become obvious, but the answer only became more and more muddled as he went… But one thing above all became clear: Plum needed him.
Every so often on his lonely excursions to nowhere, Plum would join him out of a mixture of concern and curiosity. She would tell him stories of her mother, of her home, and of her father during his quiet time. The little girl was sad, but in a different way. She felt loss, guilt, and confusion that at first glance seemed similar to his but was unlike his depression in one important way—she didn’t hate herself. But sadness was still sadness in the end, so Vincenzo never turned her away, or shut her down, or argued. He simply picked her up at the end of her rant and carried her back as she pressed her head against his shoulder and slept, hugging him hard as if she was scared he’d leave her. He promised her he wouldn’t even though she was sound asleep, and he felt her arms tighten. He had guessed wrong. It wasn’t fear she gripped him in, but love. It was a sobering thought, and even though his guilt didn’t fade, and even though he still held himself in a low regard, he decided he’d live. He gave her a small and secret kiss on the forehead and laid her down, before leaning against the mouth of the cave.
“I’m going to win,” he promised the world. “I’m not going to lose anymore. I’m going to win.” He thought of everything that would try to get in his way: poachers, knights, wizards, cultists, monsters, Slogine, the Guerrieros, and eventually his father. “No matter what. You hear me? I’m going to live.”
The wind wailed in answer, screeching at him in objection by shoving frost in his face, but it had no effect. Vincenzo Guerriero, son of Marco De Santis, brother of Plum Noowurl, defied nature with open eyes of black.
“I’m going to win.”