Tuesday, November 6, 2018

Chapter Ten - Lǎohǔ Zǒu Sēnlín (Tiger Walks Forest) Part II

Haruo went a little easy on Bebe Hart seeing the fear in her eyes at facing a black belt. But he didn't go too easy on her. After all, if this fight was for real, she wouldn't be getting a break.

She started getting braver on the attack in the latter part of the match and Haruo decided to let her know that even so, he was still able to teach her a few things that she didn't know yet.

The next opponent was Autumn and she came out firing on all cylinders. She actually managed to give Haruo a pretty rough time but none of the blows counted as Haruo was able to redirect most of them or block them entirely.

Holly on the other hand wasn't as sure of herself as Autumn and came out tentatively and Haruo compensated by going a bit easy on her, but like Bebe, she warmed up to it and then gave Haruo just about as much as he could handle. For a green belt, Haruo was pretty heartened to see that she had the fire in her to challenge a black belt.

He made sure that she was aware of the good things that she did on the mat and where her weak points were so that she could work on them. That was the way that the martial artists were able to improve their technique. The Sifu's job was to make sure that any student was able to correct anything that they were doing wrong and to gently guide them along their way to their blackbelt. In fact the very word 師傅 (師) si meant teacher and (傅)fu meant father.

From there, the class went into a full-on contact sparring match with River to the side watching alongside Sifu Haruo.

Phil of course wanted to learn a bit of "sparring with weapons" so he brought in his M-16A3 (unloaded of course) and worked up a sweat inside his environment suit.

Of course, after that...individual instruction with River watching one of the pairs of sparring students and Haruo watching the other two, all that was left was the talk to end off the practice session.

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