Larten master many weapons

The next few years were difficult for Larten. Training to be a General was a
hard time for any vampire. To start with, he had to master a variety of
weapons, even though he would never use most of them. Larten looked
forward to his knife and ax lessons but there were others – like the throwing
stars Vancha favored, and a spiked, four-headed club – that he loathed.
There was no such thing as an easy lesson. He was thrown in at the deep
end every time and forced to defend himself in the face of a very real attack
by his tutor. Larten spent many weeks nursing broken bones, and was
concussed so often that he regularly couldn’t get to sleep because of the
ringing in his ears.

What particularly depressed him was that Wester was making relatively
smooth progress. His younger friend suffered a vast array of injuries, the
same as every trainee, but nowhere near anything like Larten’s. And it
didn’t seem to matter how hard the orange-haired assistant worked—he
always came to more grief in his lessons than Wester or the others in their
group.

What Larten didn’t know was that his tutors were working him harder
than the rest. It wasn’t a conspiracy but simply the way they operated.
When the taskmasters of Vampire Mountain trained someone with aboveaverage
ability, they gave him especially grueling tasks.

***

The Saga of Larten Crepsley: Ocean of Blood, Chapter 12