Iron Grows Harder the More You Strike It
Teaching someone is hard.
Could you really call it education if all you did was recite what you already knew, the way a child reads from a textbook? Education was not the act of spitting knowledge out. It was the act of handing a lesson down. Anyone could talk about what they knew. Making another person actually understand it was another matter entirely — that was why teachers existed as a profession, and why people went to university for the privilege.
In that sense, I had no confidence I could teach Jump properly.
Passing on what I knew would have been easy enough. I would only have had to hand him the things I had learned as a mercenary. But that was not what Jump wanted. More to the point, that kind of teaching would never make him better. If a few light words could raise someone's skill overnight, I would never have suffered the way I had.
The method that came to mind first was the one I had learned in my mercenary days. Its flaw was that it was brutally stupid: you repeated a motion until you could perform it even in your sleep. If we had time to spare, maybe. In our current situation, it did not feel like a good way to teach. And this was, strictly speaking, inside a game. Enemy movement here was nothing like the real thing, so I could not simply import the old method as it was.
There was no shortage of things I could have taught him. The basic strategies and tactics alone would have filled a book, and spotting openings in a firefight was only a sliver of the whole. The psychological war started long before the first shot. I had no intention of dumping all of that on him at once, of course. Even if I told him, he would not be able to use any of it today — and what Jump wanted was an immediate jump in skill.
"Jump. You all right if this gets a little rough?"
"Yeah. That's fine."
Changing the method to fit the situation and the person — that, too, was the mark of a decent teacher.
"What do you think your strength is?"
"I've got confidence in my Physical."
The memory of watching his play from the spectator seat surfaced in my head. If there was a Physical anywhere in that footage, I would have needed a microscope to find it. Had the word changed meaning while I was not looking?
See one thing and you know ten. It was not hard to guess how Jump had been playing all this time. Someone had tossed him a polite compliment, he had taken it as gospel, and he had been brainlessly charging ever since.
We were going to have to start by beating the basics into his body. People like him would not listen no matter how many times you explained it. Even if they sat there and nodded along, it was worthless if the body refused to follow. Think too much while you are moving and you will make a mistake. That did not mean I wanted him to stop thinking. The point was to think — just not too much. Once you made a call, the ability to act on it immediately mattered just as much.
You could talk until you were hoarse and never make someone understand that. It was something you had to grind out through countless live fights.
"Unknown? Why the gun all of a sudden?"
"You asked me to teach you the game. Figured dying would be the fastest way to learn."
"W-wait a second. We're social animals, right? Communication? Dialogue? We don't have to go the violent route—"
He was not wrong, exactly.
"If I just talk, I look weak."
"What kind of bullshit is—"
He was never going to understand it from words in the first place. I was not the kind of idiot who took the long way around when a shorter road was sitting right there.
"Counter me as hard as you can."
There was nothing special about my teaching method. I would do everything in my power to kill Jump, and Jump would do everything in his power to stay alive. Simple, and stupid — and, I thought, the method that suited him best.
Growth was what you earned through experience and ruthless self-discipline. Anyone who sat comfortably where they were would never grow. The more it hurt, the more a person grew. Was there not a saying for that?
What does not kill me makes me stronger.
Jump had a habit of hesitating before he moved. He was probably stalling while he decided whether the call in his head was the right one. Caution was not a vice — but it was a luxury reserved for people who could read a situation fast. Jump's Physical was already lacking, and on top of that he was trying to think his way through every play, so he was always a beat behind the enemy. On a battlefield, that kind of mistake would get you killed.
There was not much I needed to do for him. I would keep attacking until he had no room left to think. If he got hit before he could even decide what the best move was, he would start figuring something out on his own.
Bang!
Shhk—
I killed Jump every time he respawned. Sometimes with a gun, sometimes by driving a knife into a vital point. It was a customizable map, so the respawn was relatively fast — which meant I could keep the pressure on without breaking the flow.
"Hey, wai—"
Shhk—
"Unknown, just listen to me for a—"
Bang!
"Fucking piece of—!"
What Jump lacked was irregular play and an eye for the situation. If he was going to claim he dove in on Physical alone, he needed to read all of that on instinct and execute without a flicker of hesitation. The instant you started calculating whether it would work, you had already failed. To call Physical your strength, you at least had to be able to read a fight by feel and move. Playing on "Physical" the way he meant it was just another way of saying he intended to stay at this level for the rest of his life.
I had killed him maybe thirty times when his movement started to look noticeably better. His reactions were still glacial, but compared to where he had started, it was a genuine leap.
"Just now you shouldn't have been spraying blindly. You needed to save rounds for when they closed in. Always watch your reload timing."
I did not forget the feedback. Instant correction — nothing helped improvement more than that. Separate from my original distrust of his skill, Jump was following my teaching surprisingly well. Once the death count climbed past sixty, though, his mental finally gave out, and he stopped even trying to fight back.
That, I had not seen coming.
Fine. I would admit it: I was clumsy at teaching other people, and I had not paid enough attention to the mental side. I had also underestimated how badly dying in a game could grind someone down. Listening to Jump's screams — half frustration, half despair — I learned something. Dying in a game hit the mental harder than I had thought.
...Don't look at me like that.
Who starts out perfect? Jump was, if I was being honest, the first person I had ever tried to teach. Of course there were going to be rough, unfinished parts. And just as iron grows harder the more you strike it, Jump's mental had come out of this a little tougher too. Was that not a good thing? Mental mattered a great deal in games, which meant Jump had just been handed a chance to upgrade both his Physical and his mental in one sitting.
Yes. I was aware that was an extremely self-serving way to look at it.
"We should take a short break."
"Finally..."
I thought I heard Jump let out a long sigh and mutter, I think I picked the wrong person to learn from, but I decided to ignore it. It was also true that I was not yet good enough to call myself a teacher. I knew that the moment he realized his skill had actually gone up, he would come asking to be taught again.
"Hey — the ones laughing at me right now, you wanna come in here and try this? You get in here and you won't even react. I'm only reacting this well because it's me. Bedroom Challenger bastards, I swear, all talk."
He was working the viewers. The chat did not seem to be treating him kindly, and he was getting angry about it — but whenever a funny line popped up he jumped on it and pulled the room along with him. He would have been far better off using that time to review what he had just learned.
This was exactly why teaching was hard. It did not matter how passionate the teacher was if the student had no will to learn. You could explain a math formula all day; if the person listening was thinking about something else, you might as well have been talking to a wall. I would have settled for him at least looking like he was trying, out of respect for the person teaching him.
Contrary to all of that, Jump seemed to be in fairly high spirits. Was being able to react to my attacks really that thrilling? From where I stood, he was still so slow it almost hurt to watch. They said a student always looked insufficient in a teacher's eyes. Maybe our standards were simply different. I was thinking in terms of him dodging at least one of my attacks; Jump seemed to consider it a success if he reacted at all.
Setting a clear goal was fine. Set it too low, though, and the hunger never came. Still, tossing him a small carrot would not hurt.
"Your Physical isn't as bad as I thought. Once you adapt, a promotion might actually be possible."
Anyone listening would have known it was empty flattery. Sometimes, though, you needed to plant a little false hope. That was how you got someone to push a little harder.
"That's enough rest. Let's go again."
Hard enough that he could survive the training still to come.