It was now loop number three of bringing people along. And the training was hellish.Not for himself—who enjoyed it far too much—but his students who were now truly beginning to feel the sheer intensity.“Damn-damn! I-urk! Grk! Bwah!”Orodan’s fists came in via dual overhead hammer blows, Edrosic’s shield barely catching them. And just as the militia man did successfully block, a knee came in and knocked the wind right out of him. A right cross, an elbow in the same motion and then a shoulder check to the jaw all came in, like a continuous chain of movement which had Edrosic battered and unable to understand how he was getting hit so many times despite Orodan holding himself back to the man’s level of strength and speed.“You’re letting me beat on you a little too much Edrosic. You aren’t even a satisfying punching bag to abuse,” Orodan said while continuing to deliver a beating. “Return some aggression of your own. Show some grit and stop letting me do this to you.”“You’re a little too strong for that Orodan! Urk!” the man protested as he was knocked onto his rear. “I’m not built for this sort of fighting like you are!”“I’m matching your level of strength and speed in fact,” Orodan said.[Smite of Abrupt Deliverance 92 → Smite of Abrupt Deliverance 93]The skill gain came from not an attack, but the fact that he was holding a bubble of compressed time across the surrounding two-hundred metres of space around him. The Time Compression aspect of his Smite of Abrupt Deliverance was being used, and he felt that this was the limit of how many levels he could gain in the skill by working that part alone.But it helped quite a bit when each second of time within the bubble was a hundred-and-fifty seconds outside of it. This, Orodan felt, was the greatest extent to which he could compress time without drawing undue attention. After all, last time he’d compressed time excessively, the Mage had (...)