>>5600502The best soldiers of the Royal Guard are pretty good. Their strength and conditioning are top notch and they are as skilled with their weapons as one can expect of those with pure mortal blood. Their arms are excellent quality as well- finely forged full bronze panoply, with shields, swords, and spears to match. In drill and athleticism, they can almost keep up with you.
The cracks in their ability show once you begin sparring them. As is tradition, you start unarmed- bare-chested fighting in loincloth.
You win. Their best challenge you, sizeable and grizzled men who are crushed ‘neath your overwhelming strength and size. But what’s more interesting to you is that they repeatedly make the same mistakes. They continually use the same takedown defenses, continually attempt the same combinations, and continually you beat them with unconventional techniques. They seem blind to the sweep that invariably puts them in the dirt, or the creeping chokehold you impose with all the inevitability of the setting sun.
The same goes when you begin dueling them in armor with blunted weapons- their conventional training presents exploitable openings and they display no alacrity in correcting it. Even when you start fighting them in pairs, and then in trios, the results remain the same. You stand tall and they are on the ground nursing bruises and fractured bones. Sometimes it is pure strength that crushes them, other times it is a cunning opening blow, otherwise it is simple experience winning out over time.
These men are well-trained, well-armed, and well-conditioned, but they are untested. A thoroughly green force. You suspect your own soldiers, fighting with vastly inferior arms and armor, could give them a real run for their money purely on the skills your training and their combat-experience have beaten into them. When this force meets real enemies, they will bleed hard until only their best remain. Your men have already survived that winnowing process.
They seem to realize their inadequacy. Their morale has fallen dramatically- another sign of their untested spirits. When one of them, a younger man who has consistently gotten closest to scoring a serious blow against you, asks why he can’t win, you tell him with the brutal honesty why. Him and his fellows are the best of a peacetime army, but war will slough off their worst and harden their best.
You have won the respect of at least a good portion of the Royal Guard.
>+1 Kleos for beating up Agamemnon’s finest in their own house. 