Chapter 72: True Master
Valens first started with the shoulders. Stress often piled in the back of a body, round the sides of one’s neck and down near one’s core. There would be pain in the head, and around one’s stomach as well. Churning mostly, without a clear reason. That, and the odd cramp that would come out of nowhere.
Sensitive work, really, but he might as well have been stabbing his Lifesurge needles into a stone block from how the Bishop’s muscles barely budged under his touch.
A touch more strength here.
The Bishop gave an ‘oh’ when Valens found just the spot. He followed it with an ‘ah’ when Valens cracked the joints in his knees to relieve the strain. He let out a trickle of saliva down his lips when Valens squeezed gently the pressure points of his neck. His tongue lolled out, and surprisingly, it didn’t look as hard as Valens expected.
I should get that diary right away, and start this stat study. If Strength makes your muscles hard as rocks, then there has to be a reason why it leaves out your tongue.
“Is this really happening?” Garran said when Valens worked an elbow down the Bishop’s right shoulder, trying to hear the ‘click’ of the bones. That made Valens pause for a second, and they stared at each other with the Templar. “What are you doing?”
“A calming, soothing session for the Bishop,” Valens said, then clamped his jaw shut as he pushed further into the Dawnkeeper’s back. Sweat dotted his forehead as he kept at the effort. “The man’s like a mountain. No wonder why he was that grumpy in our first meeting.”
Lenora stumbled a step against the sight, Mas equally baffled as he blinked at them. Captain Edric, on the other hand, seemed to have finished with his wallowing and was instead staring at the pair of them.
“We have an old saying,” Valens said, face straining as he finally popped that one stubborn muscle group in the Bishop’s back that had almost petrified there like a stone block. “If you want a healthy mind, you have to first take care of your body. The body carries the deeds of a man upon its shoulders. It shouldn’t be left unattended for too long, as you never know when it might crumble down.”
The Templars all had the ideal body types of a warrior, with Lenora looking like a muscled fairy. The activity of their work surely played a part in that as much as the stats, and if Garran had been right about his words, the Bishop himself had lived a life of constant battles and wars against the dwellers.
Trouble was, it was easy to let the tides carry you on through the troubling times. Easy to get lost in the job and forget the demanding work of keeping yourself healthy through all of it. So then, it shouldn’t come as a surprise when you take a soldier, or a Templar in this case, out of that chaotic life and put them in a city of thousands, often the case was that they would be helpless against troubles they knew not, rooted deep in their minds now that they had all the time in the world to think.
If only Intelligence gave you more intelligence, and Wisdom made you a little better at sorting out your deep troubles.