Summary:
June 20 2014: Partisan imparts some hard won knowledge to her soldier friend. Hacker, meet mat.
Hangar 19
Usually Partisan's workshop, temporarily graced with the presence of a blue fall mat.
Characters
NPCs
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Mood Music:
[*]
She's set things up, because well this is very, very far from the first time she's taught this sort've thing. Fuck Partisan has set up legitimate special forces schools before, so no this is nothing new. She's set mats out, procured a number of "blue guns", rubber knives, billy clubs and so forth for the day's training. There she waits.
Gym shorts and an "I'm gonna liberate the FUCK out of you" t-shirt, the sort've thing you might expect then. Tattoos finished, hair tied back into a pretty lazy ponytail and Rage Against the Machine blaring. Well ok this -is- the first time she's set about to teach this shit where winter clothes or bug spray were not required items to survive.
*
Jericho's wondering also if it's perhaps the first time she's going to teach this to someone whose already pretty extensively trained. Granted, sure, she makes him look like a new 11 bang-bang fresh out of boot, but that's because compared to her he is. Compared to most other people on the planet he's got more combat training and experience than anyone you're likely to meet. Which doesn't mean he's expecting this to go well. He's not. She does have, after all, over three times his age in experience. He is expecting this to be educational though.
*
His arm is completely healed - an odd story which he's had to promise to tell her later - so he's shown up in similar gym shorts and a light tan tee with one of those abstract designs on it that for some reason can be found in any US Military Post Exchange. No pony tail for him though. His hair's not nearly long enough for that and it looks better on her anyway.
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Partisan nods softly "Right, first let’s go through all the stupid fucking shit the US military taught you that'll get you fucked up. Before we go further, I want you to kick my ass or try your fucking hardest to do so. No holding back, or I'll start breaking fingers just to get your heart rate up understand?" No preamble then. Stepping onto the mat with her hands held at her hips.
"So cowboy the fuck up motherfucker, and kick my ass."
*
Jericho gives Parti a wry 'we both know how this ends' smile and does as asked. MAC is, say what you will, a decently workable combat system and has a number of moves in it for quick takedown. It's not really an art designed for incapacitation though. Normally that'd give him pause, but this is Partisan after all and he's not worried about her, so he goes right for the kill moves. He's got enough under his belt to know that his advantages in size, weight and reach are at least in theory pretty formidable so he makes use of that as launches into a sequence designed to end in a broken shoulder, and shortly thereafter, a broken spine.
*
It isn't that she's blazing fast, or enormously strong. Up close and personal on this level, that's not what impresses about the Partisan herself. It's the timing, the precision and the raw unpredictability. The moment Jerry's arm grabs onto her, she's on the move. Pressing in close so he doesn’t have room to wrench at her arm. Her free hand sweeps up to lock down on his wrist, before she drives her right knee into his armpit. The left swinging up and over his head before slotting back. With her right leg bent at the knee, this produces a fulcrum to draw his arm outstretched and lock it into position. The calf pressed firmly against the throat makes it particularly difficult to breathe, and the radical shift in weight draws him over as her shoulders hit the ground. Swinging her legs down to roll him up overtop and flat onto his back, right into a perfectly executed armbar.
"Your way too messy, the fuck was your plan?" Drawing a finger down from elbow to wrist. "Oh I'm sorry, are you finding it hard to articulate your prior plan of action whilst I apply pressure to your throat? I already have full control here, elbow, shoulder, throat." Clamping onto a finger to bend it at an uncomfortable but not quite damaging angle.
"Fingers are a terrible weakness, aren't they?"
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It's not immediately clear if he really has an answer to that. Even if he did, however, the pressure on his throat would prevent him from giving it right away. He doesn't even bother to try. This is really uncomfortable but at least his ego isn't injured. He'd rather expected to wind up in a position like this. Hopefully she won't break his finger to make her point. At the moment he's got nothing really to do but lay there until she decides to let him up. Under ordinary circumstances he'd take the broken finger and keep fighting but, if that's the way this is going to go, the training session is going to be over really, really fast.
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Partisan eases up, loosening her grip and rolling neatly back to her feet. "Now, how did I just kick your ass oh big strong army man?" Patronizing, check. "I didn't push anything, Nancy could have pulled that off. Nothing about what happened has jack fucking shit to do with the fact I'm a werewolf, that was classic fucking warfare 101. I used my combined core and limb strength, against one body part. I used my entire body, to defeat your arm and the rest followed."
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Jericho nods. He is listening. He really is. "Body mechanics 101, yes." He's levered himself up onto his arms now and then back onto his feet. And sure. Nancy could have physically pulled that off.
"Bout two then?" That's all the preamble before he throws a knee from right next to her. Wind then grapple. There are other ways to use the size difference and not all of them have to be done from a distance. All he wants to do now is isolate one body part. He'd prefer an arm but if she tosses a leg up, particularly to defeat her knee, he'll take that too. Then down to the mat they'll go and there are about a dozen ways to break the leg. That's the idea anyway. Hey, if he's going to get a painful education he might as well go all out.
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Partisan takes the knee, but well that's not quite enough to drop her. Her arm sweeps around that knee, and she presses in tight. Sweeping her heel behind his own, before pressing in to drive Jericho down to the mat. She does not, however follow on.
"Your ignoring your advantages now, and playing to my strengths. You've got reach on me, I'm only dangerous in a grapple to you. You've got a huge advantage in distance, so fucking use it. I -cannot- touch you, if you keep me at range now can I? Focus tighter, something you can destroy without a grapple. Knees, ribs, shins, ankles. Break me down, take me apart piece by piece and do it on your terms. You keep getting close to give me elbows and knees and I'm going to tie your ass up and put the hurt on."
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Jericho nods and then flips himself up in an instant stand and changes stances. Arms in close, up in a position to block or push. The next time Parti tries get close he sweeps out several sharp kicks. No action movie moves, these, just controlled strikes intended to keep her at range. Alright. Against a skilled fighter head shots are idiotic without proper set up and there's no way he's going to kick her arms into a break. Any time she gets close he'll need to reopen the distance. First target. Right knee. Partisan's equally good to either side but he favors his left slightly. If he can deny her mobility this gets a lot less dicey.
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Partisan is getting hit! "Thats it!"
Staggering with each blow to her knee, but well considering how fast she heals? "Keep them low, any kick above the belt line I'm going to grab and any punch above the rib cage and not to the face is going to get snagged. Take out my ability to close on you, and then get into it."
Motioning Jericho closer, and pressing his hand to the collar of her shirt" Never punch without an anchor if you can avoid it, and remember blows to the face produce compliance but not destruction. I'd ask you not to wail on my throat, but that’s where we go. You need to chill out a little, you’re entirely getting too wrapped up in end results here. Focus on little goals, get your head zoomed into the now. Destroy my mobility or my defenses and then go for the finish. Now, what do we not have here that we'd have in a real street fight beyond the shit in our pockets?"
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Jericho pauses but doesn't completely let his guard down. Call it a flashback to SF school but he'd rather not get gut punched in the middle of the conversation for doing so. Still, he sees, or thinks he sees where Parti is going.
"We don't have an environment. There's no clutter here. Nothing to impede movement, nothing to be weaponized in the middle of the fight. Even in a street in New York there's apt to be something yes?"
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Partisan nods "Desks have corners, streets have curbs. When you split wood, do you hold it in your hand or do you set it on a stump? What happens when you try to drive a nail into a 2x4 your holding in empty space? Your fists, and your elbows and your knees are pretty fucking shitty when we have concrete, steel, and whatever else is on hand. Even before we bother with picking things up, -anchor- before we try to hit things whenever and wherever possible. If you slam a man's eye socket into the corner of a table you'll kill him right there, prop their head against the curb and -THEN- start pounding. Fights don’t happen in mats, or in sand pits right? Think about the nonweaponized bullshit in your pockets, would a cellphone serve to focus a blow to the throat? Could you pitch pocket change in someone's face, what about the innocent looking shit. Could we use an unopened plastic water bottle offensively, what about a scarf?"
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"Keys." Jericho supplies. That's a trick he *does* know. Ever chuck a ring of keys hard at a milk carton? Most people haven't though Parti probably has. The damage that does to flesh is equally horrific. Especially say, on the face. Facial wounds don't tend to be physically disabling… but they're psychologically quite effective even against hardened combatants.
"And yes. That's one reason I prefer it when it gets cold. So many more things you can hide when folks don't look at you funny for bundling up."
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Partisan smiles. "Now when you were taught how to throw someone over your heel, fuck throw me over your heel and do it as close to what you remember and then stop there."
Extending her arm "Do it, then -tell- me what you follow that up with."
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Jeri nods. "Alright." He's done this… well, more than he cares to recount in the last year. Grabbing Parti's arm he hooks his leg in behind hers and gives her a good shove, stopping just as her shoulder and elbow lock out.
"Normally here I'd either break the arm or go for a throat punch, depending on how much I needed you dead right the hell now." He says, not putting any particular pressure on the lock.
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Partisan nods "But why is that a waste of effort, given what we just discussed?" Shaking out've the lock and getting to her feet.
"Gimmie your arm, and we'll do it the right way."
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Jeri holds out his right arm and waits for the inevitable hacker meets mat experience. Ordinarily it might be tough for someone Parti's size to get the leverage to force him down. But ordinarily people Parti's size and apparent age know exactly jack and shit about CQB.
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Partisan presses into the arm, and then she doesn’t grab it. She just sort've lets Jericho's arm hang out, as she sweeps a hand up to his throat and pushes. Over her heel and into the ground, but she follows after. Whipping his skull hard into the mat, before popping up to her boots and stepping back. Mat or not, "regular girl strength" or not. The difference in leverage and follow through, combined with the -whip- is. Well. More than uncomfortable, it's downright fucking bell ringing.
"Now I could press home with a triangle choke, but the smarter bet is to back up and kick you in the ear like I'm kicking a soccer ball. This gets me back onto my feet, and ready to draw my weapon or do whatever else it is I need to be doing right now. Which is faster, does more damage and uses less muscle. Your way or mine?"
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It's a moment before the room has stopped spinning enough for him to answer Parti. Damn little girl powers to make rooms turn upside down.
"Ow…" He picks himself back up to his feet. "Your way, thanks. Though I do think I got that the first time."
No need for a second demonstration on that. On concrete, without armor up? That'd have ended him quite handily possibly without the choke.
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Partisan nods softly. "We're going to be doing a little bit of everything today, so grab a blue gun longarm or sidearm and throw me the rubber knife. We're going to focus on the fourteen foot rule, and why it's bullshit if you know how to work it."
Fourteen feet, is the distance where a bringing a knife to a gunfight means the knife wielder will usually win. Fourteen feet, is the point where they usually teach you to drop your weapon and go straight into a proper brawl.
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It's only a moment before he has both off the table. At least she's not going to kick his ass for a solid eight hours straight. "Roger that." He carries a knife and collapsible baton on him generally for this and other reasons, but hey. Parti' got moves. That he knows beyond a doubt now if he didn't know it before he came in. Which he did.
Partisan snags the knife, it's no kerambit but hey it's basically a sculpted chunk of rubber what do you want?"
Alright, so 14 foot rule right? So for me to close on you, who have a gun fast enough for me to shoot under you I'm gonna have to be hauling ass right? If I don't sprint in, your gonna snap my ass with a gun first right?" Motioning for Jericho to presume a shooting position, as she casually flips the blade around to an icepick grip.
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Jericho does this. "That's the theory, anyway." Theories though are like the gas mileage stickers on cars. They're nice on paper, but Jericho already knows that they're frequently like quick haiku translations. They don't tend to work out in the real world as often as you'd like. Still, he draws a bead on Parti with the rubber gun.
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Partisan zips in, lifting one hand to push the weapon out of the way. The rubber knife is thankfully fairly floppy, so when she drives it under Jericho's ribcage it hardly hurts.
"Now, here’s how to avoid that situation entirely. If I have to sprint to get into you, I'm going to have a hard time changing direction right? If you have a long arm, pound me in the face with a gun barrel. If you have a handgun, fall. Roll onto your back, keep your knees up and engage me when I show up to someplace you've displaced. Make sense yet, use my momentum against me."
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A body in motion and all that. Jericho nods. "Yeah. Prone shooting drills were pretty common. And I had a few occasions to use them." Slgihtly massive understatement.
"Just don't get shanked. Which is best accomplished by not being where the shank is." He appreciates not getting knifed. A lot.
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Partisan steps back to that magical fourteen foot mark. Waiting for Jericho to get set, before she dashes in to precisely repeat the previous drill. "Now, how do you get back up whilst maintaining control of the weapon with both hands hm?"
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Jericho's response is to throw himself back and down, onto his back, shooting between his knees which are kept up to fend her off if she decides to press the rush. A leg slash if it happens is a lot easier to deal with than a gut one. Gut wounds are painful, debilitating and often a good way to die slowly, in the best case scenario. "Something like that, I should think."
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Partisan rolls down onto the mat beside Jericho. "Alright, now let's get back into our feet whilst maintaining full control over our weapon. Let’s bust out a little systema shall we?"
She rolls her legs up, to mimic Jericho's position. Then she hunches her shoulders forward and smoothly throws her legs over her shoulders. This rolls her backwards, and in a single smooth movement into a kneeling position.
"Systema, the Spetsnaz fighting thing? It has nothing to do with striking, or grappling or anything else. The entire system, deals exclusively with movement. We can drive our hand to the deck, and get up if we want but in doing so we compromise our weapon retention. We can roll onto our side, and put a knee under us like the Israelis teach but this takes too long and doesn’t work on anything but flat city streets. This is smooth, keeps us low and retains our weapon control."
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Jeri is nothing if not a quick study. This too is a bit different than the US style of doing things but simply watching it reveals the advantages. "Hrm. Like this, then." He throws his weight backwards, coming up in a kneel like Parti, the weapon still held in both hands and ready to fire. Well, if it were real, that is.
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Partisan nods softly. "Exactly, and if we need to change direction we're facing?" Pressing her raised knee downward as she sweeps the bowed knee out to the side. Half way over, she has both knees and at the end she's just reversed the position.
"Smooth and we don't lose full control of the weapon at any time. From here we can reverse our position, by just laying back and rolling over. If we have to get back up again, we restart the process." Rising finally to her feet with a roll of her shoulders.
"The Spetsnaz boys are pretty fuckall worthless, No joke they're nothing special. Everyone acts like they're hyper hot shit, but all they have over regular boots is motivation and some advanced movement skills. Their training overall still sucks, their equipment still sucks, and their whole tactical philosophy is garbage. For all they've fucked up though, their movement is really very, very good both in terms of being aware of their vertical orientation, but also in terms of working out biomechanics so they can move around easier in dynamic shooting positions. The western system has fixed firing position, and everything is just movement between these fixed positions. The Systema way, is to stress constant movement. This especially in a very small one or two person element, does pay off."
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Standard infantry doctrine is for a fixing element and a maneuver element. Get into asymmetrical warfare and a lot of that goes out the window. He who hesitates, he who stays still, that man goes home in a body bag, if there's anything left of him to recover.
"I can see advantages to that. Lot harder to nail a target that isn't politely presenting itself to you, or locked into a predictable pattern, however well drilled."
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Partisan nods softly. "Soldiers do not fight like partisans. We will always be outnumbered and out gunned. We're taking a hit in terms of our hit ratios, which is why we need to keep our level of violence up. Like when we sparred, we focus on individual elements and break them off and break them down. We're not trying to defeat a squad, we need to defeat one guy eight times or however they want to organize themselves. So in this very quick scenario, you defended yourself from a guy with a knife and immediately returned to the fight without injury and without making a target of yourself. Now you're low and have a good view of things, we have options right?"
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"Right. Shoot, disengage, re-position, etcetera. The more options you have the harder it is to predict what you will do next simply because your next move can be so many things. It's a similar deal in net-centric warfare. Never let your opponent see what you're actually doing until you absolutely must. If you can conceal that from him the whole time, so much the better."
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Partisan lifts her hands "No, you’re not getting what I'm putting down. Shoot, disengage and reposition are not separate things. All three things need to all be happening at the same time, the entire time without a hiccup. These are not separate elements at all."
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Jericho nods for a moment considering. Good theory but he can't quite visualize it. So he flips her the gun and motions for the knife. "Show me?" He crouches down, ready to rush her as she did him.
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Partisan accepts the trade, going for a… wait this is a plastic gun she can’t brass check. "Alright, come on then." Lifting the pistol into position as she adopts a notably relaxed post-weaver sort've stance with the pistol pulled in tight to her chest and angled off to her side.
"At your leisure."
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The hacker nods once and the charges. His knife work isn't bad. It's not hers, but it's not inexperienced either. Which stands to reason. A combat knife is his go to weapon when a gun will absolutely not do. So in he goes at a sprint just like she did, weapon held in an easily reversible grip.
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Partisan rolls back, and before her shoulders hit the ground she's already calling out "Bang, bang bang." Down go those shoulders and there is no pause, no skip, no break. In a single smooth motion those legs sweep over and she pops up into a crouch before moving off with pistol raised once more.
"I'm not doing the steps faster, I'm doing them at normal speed I'm just not stopping at any point. I'm not doing this in -steps- at all, right?"
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He stops his rush after she's done and straightens up. "No, I can see how you're doing it now. All one fluid motion."
He nods. It's going to be a very instructive evening indeed.
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Partisan nods softly. "When we train in steps, or when we put parts together we have this tendency to make chains of movements. Each one separate and unique, each one its own self-contained unit. First 1, then 2 and then 3 and so on. The way our brain works, this forces us to have pauses in between these steps. It takes a conscious effort, to avoid this and to focus on acting in smooth cohesive streams or ropes of action rather than these interlocking chains. Right?"
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He's following now. "And doing so makes your reaction times quicker and more fluid." The army has a saying, slow is smooth, smooth is fast, fast is deadly. "Which makes you appear to be moving faster than they are. You aren't… well you can." He can too, though he needs help. "But even without that you can seem to just because you're not processing chains of actions."
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Partisan nods softly. "You kick my ass in brainpower, I seem like I know all of this and I'm some super deep tactical planner. I seem like that because I have a reservoir of experience, but that isn't so different from your own advantage. Your much smarter than I am, your issue isn't in that you're some newfie out there or that you don’t know what to do. Five seconds later, you already know what you did wrong every time. The difference is you’re making concious choices, where instinctive decisions are already adequate and occasionally more effective."
She rises, snagging her cigarettes and slumping down onto the mat. "Ok so the human brain is like a computer. We have this thing called "active memory", which is like the desktop of our computer. These are the conscious things we're aware that we're thinking about, and there is only so much room there. The more we think about the little shit, the less we can focus on the big shit. You're using up resources without the need to do so, but your instincts are usually spot on. I don't need to tell you to take cover, to work the flanks, the get sight alignment and surprise trigger break. You do that shit automatically, but because your -thinking- about them? You lose capacity to anticipate, and to more effectively process what’s happening in real time. My reaction times are superhuman sure, but when you’re moving instinctively you're not that much slower than I am and that is pretty fucking nuts. So what we're working with here isn't how to do arm bars, or how to defend against a knife with a gun. Intellectually, you get that shit. Instinctively, you get that shit. In practice, you’re a fucking mess because you’re using your noodle in a wasteful and inefficient manner."
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Jeri nods and looks back at the mat. "Well I know of one way to solve some of that." Train, train, train. There's a reason the army does it like that. They're not wrong and until someone figures out a better way to drill something into muscle memory, it's all they've really got to work with.
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