Echelon discovers that being a badass samurai takes more than waving two swords and striking a cool pose. Actually, I think I heard that stick crack - well, I hope it's the stick anyway.

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Back when I practiced Karate-Kyokushinkai and learnt new ways of killing people with my bare hands, we used to have joint training sessions with the friendly neighborhood Thai boxing club. Our training was bad enough for the teenager I was back then, but theirs was plain insane - including kicking a frigging *telephone pole* for an hour straight to toughen the tibias. To get to the point, the kickboxing newbies, after about six months of physical and technical training but no combat, asked their teacher if they could fight (I would never have tried that - my senpai would have kicked the crap out of me if I dared question his teachings); He refused, saying they were not ready. They insisted (most of them came from the local ghetto and had been in their share of fights before). So he accepted. And beat the everliving shit out of every single one of them. To the limping survivors, he asked "do you believe me now, when I say you are not ready ?" and they said "yes, teacher." and went back to training.
The lesson is, eager pupils need a good beating at first to understand that fighting is a serious business.