The weather was nice, nothing particularly interesting was happening and Neela had brought in a load of fish only the day before. Devoid of much to do and reasons to keep her at home Neela had, as she often found herself doing recently, wandered off from the fort, heading out towards the training circle she had claimed for herself recently.
After some stretches Neela quickly lost herself in her exercise, letting the sense of movement and the dull thump of her limbs against the sand filled bag fill her mind, only a small piece of her mind watching in pride as each movement, repetition by repetition, slowly became better. After just over a week of dedicated training Neela had almost successfully shaken off the rust on her skills and was starting to actually improve on her old abilities, picking them apart and improving them. The lack of a common partner didn’t help in this endeavour but there was still a lot that Neela could do with her punching bag, spare time and her memories of her lessons.
Surprisingly, considering what she was doing, Neela had also been thinking a lot. The collie found it easy to switch into autopilot when drilling kicks and punches like this and had done a lot of thinking the last week, going over in her head her reasons for doing this. At first her reason for training had been simple; to get back her confidence and live a normal life again, but things weren't so simple now she looked deeper.
Neela had lost almost everything in her life multiple times and she had precious few things left. The thought of losing one of those things, Tony, Jace, Casa, made her blood boil with a targetless anger. Up until now Neela had sought to protect those around her by ignoring her skills, by blunting her own ability to use her body as a weapon through lack of practise. But that didn’t work when outside threats presented themselves.
So she trained, not only her body but her mind. She wouldn't protect her loved ones from herself by blunting the knife that was her body but by taking care in handling it, and sharpening it for use against those who would threaten those she loved.
Still, thoughts of fighting for her home and family were faint and vague, worst case scenarios that would hopefully never play out. For now she would stick in the present, punching and kicking her bag.;
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