Who needs talent when you can count the steps

Being taken to do fishing instead certainly helped to soothe the boy's anxiety about the training, it was comforting to know his father could understand why he was reluctant to do fighting training. Crux tried to hold his position but the shifting of the sands under paws already less balanced than they otherwise might be and he felt his cuffed leg sliding and Crux decided he'd rather give up his position before he fell flat on the sands. So as his father asked him to think about what parts of himself he should take care to protect Crux pulled himself back to a more comfortable neutral position. His head tilting to the side as he thought on the question.

"Back of my neck..." He started to answer, he was thinking of all the times he or his siblings had been scruffed by their parents in their short lives and he could already imagine how embarrassing it would be to be scruffed by an opponent. As for things that'd be easy to grab or affect his balance? Well that was easy. "I also probably want to avoid having my tail grabbed... And my leg." Crux started confidently enough but as he thought about his leg, awkwardly angled even at a more relaxed position as the sand didn't really support it very well, he grew a bit more demure and dropped his gaze, trying to pull his cuffed leg back into line with his hips as if to hide it.

No doubt there were things he'd missed, the boy wasn't fearless, far from it, but his own mortality was absolutely a foreign concept to him and so his more vulnerable softer areas were completely missed in his assessment of his weaknesses, instead the most obvious list was made of experiences he's already dealt with. His leg, getting scruffed and all the times his tail had been yanked in play with his siblings.

Speech