Egil looked down the alley. Three people stood in the middle. A woman, a man, and a much older gentleman, with his arms crossed, watching the boisterous couple.
The man had his elbows way back, and appeared to be in some sort of lunge. He dropped one of his arms, and slapped his back leg, while rotating his hips.
Egil raised an eyebrow. He was definitely talking about structure. Not sure about those elbows though. He launched a punch at the woman, who stepped out of the way, covered, and launched three rapid punches... was that three?... she did it mid sentence without even the slightest change in the tone of her voice.
The older guy noticed Egil, and waved, from behind the oblivious couple. Egil smiled and waved back. He listened to the language. If there were actual sentences in it, he couldn't pick up the separation between them. Does English sound that continuous? He was a bit curious about the mechanics now.
The younger guy finally noticed him. "Go away!" He commanded.
I guess the show's over. The woman looked at the other instructor as if he had just offended everyone in the room. "Hey! Hey!hey!hey!hey!..." Dude just got overruled.
"Punch me!" She demanded.
"...what?" He looked at the other two guys... and the students behind them. Be ready to run.
"Do you want to learn?"
"Yes."
"Then hit me!" Yeah... definitely be ready to run. Egil, from his earlier training, learned to punch from a relaxed form, since the police all studied getting ambushed.
She blocked it. Then turned around pointing back at Egil, rambled off a series of words, and then deepened her voice, while moving her elbows back, while bobbing slightly. She was obviously mocking the other guy.
She turned back around and faced Egil. "Again!"
Egil punched. She blocked. "As fast as you can!" That was one thing he never trained on in the previous style. He threw a few more... terrible punches. She blocked all of them, moved into a joint-lock, Egil reversed it, only for her to jab his hand away, and resume hers.
Then she stopped, bringing her hands up to her face, and gave a mischievous gasp. Turning around, she pointed back at him.
Whatever she said, it put a massive grin on the old man's face. The younger man ran his hands through his hair in apparent frustration.
She turned back. "You are my student now! You'll need to move four times as fast!"
***
As Egil started training, he learned of the three instructor's names:
Daiyu, teacher of the fast style. Feng, her husband, and teacher of what's known in the school as 'hard' style. The older guy was Shen, teacher of the 'magical' style.
Egil didn't remember the cop style being this hard to coordinate. He was paired with other students of the school. The first exercise was simple enough, just keep punching with the same hand, and drop into a guard, if the opponent blocks.
A few weeks later came the chain punching. That was what Egil sucked at in the beginning. The goal was generally, to be as relaxed as possible. Once he understood it, Egil picked it up pretty quickly.
One of the key takeaways he learned from the last school was to just not care. In his search for that means for which to intercept an attack, he was thrown, hit punched, slapped, kicked... it all meant nothing. Interestingly, after the very concept of being hit became normal, the bruises stopped appearing.
