Swing and a Miss

Now that he was in a pack and consistently around more wolves he was being introduced to more and more things that he had never noticed or considered before. One of those things was the different kinds of weapons and styles of fighting that some wolves seemed to implement. He had his own dagger and the matching pair of bracers he had to go with it, but he honestly hadn't used it much in real combat. He used teeth, claws, and horns way more often than his dagger, though he did use it on occasion. If anything, he used it more often for skinning prey animals after hunts or for more utilitarian things like cutting rope or hacking through vines and brush. He did feel like he should get more proficient at using the weapon he already had—and he would certainly do that—but now he was curious what other kind of weapons he had as options and if he might enjoy some of those more.

He found out about a store of weapons and armor that the pack had and sought it out, curious to see what they had. There was some long, thin swords, some armor made of leather with metal plates, a couple of dagger-length blades that were skinny and had extra points out to the side, and a heavier axe with a large, flat blade. The swords were interesting, but he didn't know if it was going to be all that different from what he was used to with his dagger since they were pretty light. The only real difference would be the fact that it was longer so he'd have to adjust the way he was swinging it instead of using more of a stabbing motion. The axe, however, was a completely different experience. He attempted to pick it up and immediately noticed how heavy and unwieldy it was. It took him a couple of adjustments to find a point on the handle where it didn't feel like it was going to pull him over just with the weight of it and find a good balancing point.

Once he did though and he got used to the weight in his mouth he thought he might go give it a try. It definitely wasn't in the running to replace his dagger, but now that he had it he was just curious to see if he could manage to swing the damn thing. He went out to a training area that he knew some of the pack utilized—a set up made by Venom's brother, Plague—in hopes that he might find some kind of training dummy or something that he could take a good swing at. As he walked he tried to imagine the kind of wolf that might actually use this in battle. He was a big wolf—as tall as anyone else he had ever met for certain. He wasn't the most muscled or the bulkiest wolf, sure, but he wasn't a small guy by any stretch of the imagination. If this was difficult for him to lift and maneuver with then he doubted that anyone much smaller than him could even lift it! It did cross his mind as he was stepping onto the training field that perhaps the reason it was in storage was because no one could use it, but... Now he was here so he might as well give it a shot.

Remus walked over to where a "dummy" of sorts was sitting. It was a vaguely wolf-shaped bundle of straw wrapped in a rough, tan fabric with rock and sand at the bottom of the fabric that surrounded it to weigh it down and keep it from falling over. There was a kind of comical "head" on top was more like a lumpy oval than a real shape of a head that someone had stuck two small triangles of fabric on the top of it to be "ears". There were some places where the dummy had clearly been ripped or stabbed open many times and stitched back up. It was definitely an older variation of some of the nicer dummies were at other corners of the clearing, but for his purposes this was going to do just fine. If anything he didn't want to ruin one of the good ones if he did manage to connect a swing at it. The axe was heavy and unwieldy, but he imagined that it probably did a lot of damage if you managed to hit something with it.

Standing in front of his "opponent", he shuffled into some adapted form of his usual fighting stance and held the axe steady for a moment before bringing his head to the side and then swinging it to the left to swing the blade of the axe in a wide arc. The swing felt surprisingly good with a satisfying heft to the momentum it had. The only issue was that he misjudged the length of the weapon just enough that his strong swing missed the dummy completely, leaving nothing for the axe to hit and stop the momentum of his swing. His eyes went wide for a moment when he realized what happened a moment too late and he went toppling over into the straw dummy as the swing pulled him off of his paws before he could let go of the axe. Dropping the heavy weapon, it flew a couple feet away as it was tossed away from him and hit the ground with a thud. Yeah, definitely not going to be an axe wielder any time soon.

"Remus Armada"