Zhang Heng heard the quarrel outside, and he immediately recognized Commodus’s voice. So he walked out of the house.
“Your Majesty.”
“Your Majesty?” The slave girl was taken aback. “Wait. Are you really…”
“No one in Rome dared to pretend to be the emperor.” Commodus waved his hand for his guards beside him to step aside. And Zhang Heng also asked the slave girl to go back to the house first.
“Your majesty, why did you come to visit me at such a late hour?”
This was a good question. Not even Commodus knew why he wanted to see Zhang Heng so much.
After watching the bullfighting show in the afternoon, he was unable to calm himself for a very long time. Zhang Heng’s heroic figure, standing behind the bison, kept cropping up in his mind. Other than that, he had just received bad news. It seemed some from the Senate weren’t very happy with him. Some greeted him with a smile when they saw him, but were in fact, colluding against him in private, scheming something malicious. Feeling a little irritated, Commodus left the palace and walked here.
Of course, he would not tell these things to an outsider. Commodus was about to congratulate Zhang Heng for his great achievements in the previous gladiatorial performances. But before he could speak, Zhang Heng continued, “Your Majesty seems to be having some trouble.”
“How did you know? Do you know how to read minds?” Commodus asked in surprise.
Zhang Heng did not answer the question. Instead, he turned around and walked back to his house. After a while, he took out two training swords, throwing one to Commodus.
“Huh?” Commodus grabbed the wooden sword, somewhat surprised.
“Attack me,” said Zhang Heng, the other wooden sword in his hand.
“Uh, I don’t know how to fight.” Commodus was anxious, and he immediately wanted to return the wooden sword to Zhang Heng as if he had picked up hot iron.
“You are the one who led the army. You should have practiced how to fight.”
“Of course!” Commodus seemed quite proud of it. “A qualified emperor needs to learn how to lead his soldiers in battle. Although I don’t need to go on the battlefield to fight most of the time, I’m confident enough to say that my combat skills are actually quite good. I can take down two ordinary soldiers alone. Although my father complimented me about it, I am still nowhere as good as you.”
“That’s fine.” Zhang Heng then put on a defensive posture. “I don’t know what troubles you, but I think I can help you forget your troubles temporarily.”
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“No, no,” Commodus waved his hand, “I can’t; I’m the emperor. I shouldn’t do this kind of thing. If someone else sees it…”
“There is no one else here. As long as I don’t tell others, no one will know. Come on, a fight with me shouldn’t be harder than going to Dior’s house for dinner, right?”
Commodus laughed. “Haha! Senator Dior is the most powerful person in the Senate. If I want my reign to be stable, I will need his support. However, I don’t like him at all. This old fox wants to take more power from me. But this is how politics works, doesn’t it? What’s the matter? Did I not put on a good show that night? How did you see through my acting? By the way, I remember that rumors were swirling around that you were a prince or general of the Han Empire. Is this true?”
“Those sorts of things are not important anymore. Now, I am only a slave in the city of Rome,” Zhang Heng said.
“Okay.” Commodus finally made up his mind. He held the wooden sword in his hand. “Then, let’s fight for a while. Let me first tell you something. I still have a lot of things to do, and I can’t stay here for too long.”
…
Commodus did not expect that he would spar with Zhang Heng for an hour.
It was a fact that he could not beat Zhang Heng. This fight could not be considered a gladiatorial battle. Instead, it was like a gladiatorial lesson. Commodus never thought it was as dull as the sword training he had gone through before. On the contrary, he felt a force pushing him, motivating him to learn more from Zhang Heng, and it made him forget the passage of time. During the fight, Zhang Heng deliberately controlled his strength, using only a little more than Commodus.
Since Commodus felt that he was close to claiming the victory, he kept trying to figure a way to beat Zhang Heng. He would constantly reflect on his wrong moves and how he could make further improvements. When he finally figured out his mistake and reaped the satisfaction, there would be a new challenge waiting for him.
It was a pity that Commodus would never get to play “Sekiro Died Twice.” Otherwise, he would find out that the difficulty of the challenge he was encountering highly coincided with its difficulty curve. Not only that, Zhang Heng, a person who understood history quite well, knew that Commodus liked to fight. One of the main reasons why Commodus gave up on himself and decided to go all out to become a gladiator was because of Lucilla’s betrayal. Still, his love for gladiators had been in him since he was a child. It was hard trying to hide something like this. Even Dior could see it last night, let alone Zhang Heng.
When Commodus dropped the wooden sword in his hand and collapsed on the ground due to exhaustion, he realized that the time had flown by. And as Zhang Heng said before, most of his worries had indeed disappeared, replaced by a sense of satisfaction after he discovered his improvements.
“This is my first time finding out how interesting it is to be in competition!” Commodus gasped.
Commodus, however, did not know about the grueling process a slave had to go through before he became a real gladiator. Most gladiators in the schools were slaves, and they had to risk their lives when they performed a fight. Then, they would be eliminated if they did not perform well during the training. The unfortunate ones would be sent to mines. All of them had to try really hard to survive, so no one could genuinely enjoy gladiatorial teaching like Commodus would.
Zhang Heng did not say a single thing. He could see that Commodus was in the mood and wanted to utter nothing that would ruin the atmosphere. At the same time, Zhang Heng gradually figured out Commodus’s temperament during the time that he spent with him.
History might have remembered him as a tyrant, but Zhang Heng noticed that the twenty-year-old Commodus displayed no traits of harming the country and the people. On the contrary, the current Commodus was working hard to become a good emperor. Having a father that excelled in ruling the empire, he had been living all this while under his old man’s shadow. No matter what happened, the first thing that would cross his mind was what his father would have done.
In an attempt to keep the vow he made when his father died, his goal was to become a qualified leader and continue the glory of Rome. However, he did not know how to do it. Aurelius did train him well, but at that time, he was still under his father’s wing. Hence, everything had gone by smoothly. However, once Aurelius died, Commodus realized that the political situation there was far more complicated than he thought upon his return to Rome from the front lines.
He needed to deal with pressure and probing from all the parties alone, and the worst part was that his sister was now his only family left in this world. The latter, unfortunately, seemed to have no interest in helping him. His mother was gone before his father died. In other words, there was no one to advise him on how he should deal with the political situation here. It was the reason why Commodus always hesitated when he made a decision. Sometimes, he would even doubt himself.
Zhang Heng now understood why the Balance Blade had to kill Altrus.
Under this circumstance, the advisors and friends around Commodus had a great influence on him. Zhang Heng did not believe in the oracle at all. Obviously, some people thought that Altrus’ influence on Commodus was too significant. That was why they wanted to hire Balance Blade to get rid of him.