“Set an alarm for your first class,” Ian suggested after I helped him relieve a sort of debilitating cramp that’s apparently caused by watching your naked girlfriend talk tough to government agents. “Your first class isn’t until like ten, right? You can get way more sleep that way. I’ll tell everyone at breakfast why you aren’t there.”

“Okay, but… everyone?” I said. “I mean, tell Amaranth…”

“Well, Dee might already know,” Ian said.

I waited a few seconds to see if she’d respond from the other room, but she didn’t.

“I think she’s become pretty reflexive about throwing up a wall of silence when you stay over,” I said. “Anyway, if it’s just people from the suite and Steff, yes, tell, but otherwise, just say I didn’t sleep well.”

“Okay, but I can’t always tell when Two’s friend is there.”

“I guess Hazel’s cool,” I said. “But seriously, don’t talk about this stuff in front of Nicki.”

“Not that I think it’s a good idea to spread this around, but you want to start by keeping secrets from her?”

“I don’t want to scare her off,” I said.

Ian headed back to his own room so he wouldn’t wake me up when he got up, and I settled back down for a few more hours of sleep, mercifully dreamless and mercifully alone.

I didn’t like to skip breakfast because it would be an easy habit for me to acquire. Not having my usual plates of sweet and savory goodness at the start of the day wouldn’t leave my stomach grumbling for the rest of the morning or my body crashing later in the day. Breakfast was a treat for my senses and a chance to socialize rather than a physical need. The intermingling of my immortal and mortal heritages meant that I didn’t actually need to eat or perform any of the other functions associated with eating.

But getting up for breakfast gave me one more chance to see my friends during days in which we’d all be off doing our own things. It gave me a chance to start waking up a little bit earlier than I needed to, so I could be sharper and more alert during my morning class. I didn’t have much advantage over the fully mortal in that department. Some diabolists have stated that demons could go longer without sleep than humans could with fewer adverse effects, but that aside the basic need was the same: about eight hours about once a day.

With the sunlight that managed to sneak in around the edge of the curtains and the sounds of life echoing all around the hallway, I didn’t manage to sleep all the way until my alarm. But with the suite all to myself and nowhere else to be, I was able to enjoy a long, hot soak in the tub… my first of the school year.

I’d had a complicated relationship with the shared bathroom in Harlowe Hall. I’d loved hot baths and showers, but the longer my first year went on, the more the bathroom had felt like hostile territory. It wasn’t just that I’d actually been physically attacked in them. Being in them meant I was sharing space with people who hated me, who felt threatened by me and were a threat to me because of that.

That had been a big part of the appeal of a private bathroom for me. But once everyone else got moved in, I’d started deferring to the others’ needs. The fact that Two and Dee both might need to use the bathroom had kept me from staking a claim to it for an hour or more at a time.

I realized as I sat enveloped in hot water and suds and steam that this had been a mistake. It would be a total dick more to take up the bathroom in the morning, but I had spaced out my classes to make sure I had time to myself during the day. A daily soak was probably not in the cards, but I figured I should be able to manage it once or twice a week and be better for it.

A bubble bath wouldn’t make up for lost sleep, but it was definitely a better start to the day than stumbling out of bed, pulling on some clothes, and staggering off in the direction of my local hazards lecture. I’d left the door from the bathroom to our half of the suite open so I’d hear the alarm in my mirror going off which meant I could forget about the passage of time and just relax, something that I badly needed when I reviewed what had happened in the night… when I thought about what I’d done, what I’d said.

By the light of day… or the light of a windowless bathroom, anyway… my actions did not seem half as clever as they had at the time. Standing up to my father had felt good, but it might have been better to not let him know I was going to be working against him.

I felt that it couldn’t have been helped, though. If I hadn’t acted so defiant in my dream, I couldn’t have acted that way awake. There was no way for me to put on a meek front and just pretend to capitulate to him, because it wouldn’t have been a front. Basically I was a recovering capituholic. I had no resistance to the path of least resistance.

Anyway, it was done and there was no way to undo it. If I got back to Kent and told him I’d changed my mind, I had no doubt that I would have to pay dearly for him to consider recalling the arrow I’d loosed. Rather than worrying about where exactly it would land when it came back down, I decided to focus on the present and my immediate future.

Ian wanted to assert more dominance… the thought of that left me tingly in interesting places. Submission might have been a close cousin to capitulation, but it was far more useful and it left me feeling full of direction and purpose rather than adrift and at the mercy of the winds and tides.

What would it mean in practical terms? Right now the answer seemed to be sex more often but with fewer orgasms. Then I thought back to how he’d phrased his suggestion about sleeping in… forcefully and matter-of-factly. It had also been reasonable, though, and definitely the right move.

I could definitely like this.

As long as I was comfortable and alone, I decided to work on my breathing, too. It helped that the air inside the shower curtain was warm and smelled like cinnamon and vanilla. I closed my eyes, slowly pushed a breath out, and then even more slowly drew one back in.

Submission.

I’d always had an easy enough time throwing myself into my schoolwork when it was subjects I cared about and classes I wanted to be in. Other times it was a struggle… a struggle that could be managed, but one that was easier to manage when the rest of my life wasn’t giving me anything else to fight against. That didn’t seem like it would be the case for the next while.

Was it possible that I was overlooking an easier way?

My day would start nicely enough, but the rest of it was made up of classes I didn’t particularly care for, that I had as a result of obligations that were forced on me. Okay, I’d agreed to take this second class with Coach Callahan in order to save my grade point average during my first semester, but the chain of events that had led me there had started with the requirement to take a weapon proficiency class.

But neither her class nor Professor Swain’s was really all bad, and even if they had been completely pointless and terrible, I still had to get through them and I had to do so with a decent grade.

I breathed in and out and thought about how it felt to to be under the palm of Amaranth’s hand, to be under Ian’s control. I thought about how good it felt to be following a process, to be given clear instructions… to have clear lines of authority.

Professor Swain was my teacher. She didn’t want to cross over to the main campus to teach a delving class three times a week any more than I wanted to be taking one, but she did it all the same… she did it, and that meant she was my teacher. She probably didn’t get a lot of respect as a gnome among humans, but she was a professor and she deserved it.

Callahan… as much as she clearly relished what she was doing, something in her seemed to chafe at it, too. Possibly it was the effort it took her not to kill any of her students. Whatever it was… well, she seemed at least mildly squicked out when I acted submissively in response to her, but she’d never complained about the results.

I worked the way that I worked.

By the time the alarm ended my bath, I’d managed to work myself into a state of utter calm and confidence that I didn’t break my concentration or start blushing when Acantha stopped and stared at me as I came into her classroom… later than I normally would have arrived, but still a couple of minutes before class began.

“Is something wrong?” I asked.

“Not a thing that I can discern,” she said. “Did you sleep well last night?”

“Actually, no,” I said.

“Whatever you took for it agrees with you.”

“That would be a bath,” I said, and she laughed.

Somehow she seemed a lot more relaxed than normal, too. That probably had more to do with the fact that some of the more unruly voices were gone from the room and in their absence the rest of the class seemed slightly more willing to treat her more like a knowledgeable professional than a substitute teacher in elementary school.

Twice during class Acantha said something to me about my attentiveness to the safe handling procedures. Attentiveness was not something a teacher had ever specifically recognized me for. It felt good… not just like a compliment, but like praise. I beamed more than I blushed.

I thought it was a good sign, too. She’d given me a perfect score and extra credit on my first assignment for exceeding the bounds of it, but she’d also told me she wanted to see my ability to work within confines… or as she’d put it, to show her I could be prudent.

I was hoping to see Nicki at lunch, but she wasn’t there and Ian told me she hadn’t joined them for breakfast, either. Maybe she wasn’t an early riser, but I had a feeling she’d need a dose of reassurance the next time I saw her. Hazel and her suitemates were with us, and so I didn’t want to get into the whole subject of who knew what about my nocturnal dealings at the table. Amaranth told me that Ian had said I had something to tell her about, and she suggested we wait until the evening when we could do it behind closed doors.

That afternoon I wasn’t moaning in my head about having to go to Local Hazards… I wasn’t even telling myself that Eloise’s geomancy would make it worthwhile, though I was still looking forward to that. I’d say I didn’t have any feeling about the class itself one way or the other, except I did… I felt ready for it. Not happy and not grumbly, just ready. It was coming up and I was prepared for it.

“Hey there!” Eloise said when I walked in. “Looks like someone got up on the right side of the bed this morning.”

“Yeah, and it felt so good I did it again a few hours later,” I said.

“Well, you look like a thousand gold,” she said. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you walk in with your head like that.”

“Like what?” I asked.

“Up,” she said.

“Oh,” I said.

“Nothing wrong with keeping one’s eyes to the ground,” Professor Swain said. “You can miss a lot of things if you aren’t watching where you put your feet. Of course, you miss a lot covering your feet up, too.”

“I like to go barefoot,” Eloise said. “But human culture frowns on it.”

“Shoes are a conspiracy to sell more carpets,” the professor said. “You’d get years’ more use out of your carpets if you didn’t wear shoes.”

“You won’t hear me arguing with that. I don’t wear shoes inside my own home,” Eloise said. “But the university actually requires them.”

“Mark my words, someone is getting a kickback there.”

By the time it was nearly the end of the day, I was starting to feel a little self-conscious for the first time since I’d woke up… but mostly I was aware of all the things that were missing. I was used to having a certain amount of background anxiety, a nagging doubt that I didn’t belong in whatever place I was or that whatever I was doing, I was doing wrong. A full calendar year at college had diminished my fears and made them recede from the front of my brain, but they’d always been there.

For the first time they’d left me completely alone for the day. As soon as I realized that, I kind of felt like I was due to get completely knocked on my ass by life… but then, I’d already faced my father and a government agent who would probably have no qualms about killing me in my sleep if he had orders to or if he thought it would further his cause. I’d already had my wake-up call, and I’d dealt with it, gone back to sleep, and got on with my life.

Coach Callahan reminded me near the start of her class that she wanted to see me taking more chances… pretty much the opposite of what Acantha wanted from me.

“The point of class is risk mitigation,” she said. “You take the opening that’s in front of you, you end the fight without messing around. But I know you have enough brains in that skull to not lose sight of that for part of a week. What I don’t want is for you to get too comfortable while you’re using your demon strength to blow past defenses. So today, tomorrow… you find other ways to take your classmates out, and you figure out how to do it as fast and hard as the obvious way. Clear?”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said… which got me a raised eyebrow, but Coach Callahan was the queen of doing what needed to be done, and I needed to be in that head space to make doing what she told me to second nature.

I could think on my feet. I could solve problems. But when someone was coming at me with an axe or sword and the problem involved hurting them before they hurt me, I needed to be completely in the submission zone.

By telling me she wouldn’t be counting how well I did for the next two days as long as I pulled out something by Friday, she’d given me the freedom to experiment. I started by trying for less direct victories… making opponents come to me and knocking their legs out from under them and then finishing them while they were down. That was something that would have been completely against my nature if I’d been doing it for myself.

As it was, they went red before the second blow about half of the time that it worked… but I made myself follow through anyway, because stopping to see if the extra blow was needed was not what Coach Callahan wanted to see. It was not the point of the class. If they were red, my phantasmal weapon would pass through them like the phantasm it actually was. No hurt, no foul.

That’s not to say that it worked every time. I hit the floor sometimes, and some of my classmates were agile enough to avoid a low blow without losing momentum. I received my first jump-kick that day. Even though it was real and not phantasmal, I couldn’t complain because it didn’t harm me any more than an illusion would have and I think the girl who did it was probably reacting in the moment. It took me by surprise, though, and gave her enough time to finish me off.

By the half hour mark, my record for the day was four and three and my opponents were less willing to come at me. Since I wasn’t being graded, I tried throwing my staff at one of them. It spun into his sword with enough force to knock it out of his hands and send it flying, but I didn’t have a follow-up and he had my staff. He didn’t have enough strength or skill with it to score a quick victory with it, and so I was able to wrench it back from him after taking a blow to the head and one to my arm.

The arm injury kept me from doing a one-hit kill. I wasn’t coordinated enough to swing the staff in my off-hand very effectively.

I won that fight, anyway… eventually. I might have had a harder time letting go of my feelings about conflict and violence and just getting down to what needed to be done if I hadn’t been deep in my submissive state, but by the time I finished I was way out of it. Battering a guy into submission required me to let go of my own… my altered mental state was able to carry me right up to the door and even knock on it, but it couldn’t carry me through it.

Being purposefully submissive instead of just bending with the most aggressive source of pressure could make my life easier and better, but it seemed submissiveness was not going to be the answer to everything.

Imagining the practical progress she might make on cracking the problem didn’t actually help much, because then I was trying to imagine what she might find, which was the same thing as trying to figure it out myself. It was as much the emotional lift that came from having shared the metaphorical burden as it was anything else. I’d passed it off. She could worry about it for a while.

I knew she hadn’t been thinking that when she came looking for me, but it seemed like this was a natural and beneficial side-effect of having a partner: you had a partner.

Amaranth liked to remind me that I was never on my own, that I never had to face anything alone. There was a lot of truth to that, and it went beyond having friends and lovers who would stoically stand beside me even when they had no reason to other than a desire to support me. If Bohd had presented me with something that wouldn’t have appealed to Amaranth’s love of learning and books, then it might have been something that fit with Ian’s interests and strengths, or Steff’s.

Or Two’s, or any of Two’s friends… the chain really did go on and on.

I was alone when I stepped into Coach Callahan’s class, but having friends I could count on had brought me to that point and given me the ability to deal with it. It was just one hour of standing on my own two feet. I had to get through it, and while I did have to do more than just get by while I did so, I still only had to do it for an hour.

An hour of fighting past my natural inclination towards passivity, an hour of exceeding a skeptical teacher’s expectations, an hour of excelling… but just an hour.

Even with the conversation with Amaranth, I still made it to the designated salon a little bit before class officially started. Coach Callahan waved me over towards her after I finished making a mockery of my staff with the red cabinet. The mocked staff came out looking a lot less solid than usual, but I assumed the coach had adjusted the box’s settings for a reason.

“Yesterday you sucked,” she said. “But let’s not talk about yesterday. Let’s not even talk about today. Let’s talk about Monday, and every day after Monday. You think the point of being here is that you made a deal with me, or getting an A to impress your sweaty-naked-times-friend. I couldn’t give a shit about about either of those reasons if I ate my weight in fiber beforehand. Yeah, even the deal. It got you here and I like that, but it doesn’t impress me that you kept your word. So let’s talk about the rest of the semester.”

That didn’t seem to be something that required a response from me, or invited one, so I just nodded.

“You had a strong start and one stumble,” Coach Callahan said. “A start is good, but it isn’t more than a start. If you thought you could come in, impress me at the outset, and then coast on that, you were mistaken. It takes more than a good start to win a battle… but it usually takes more than one mistake to get you killed. At least, if no one steps up to seize on it quickly enough… and to be fair, you’re in about the top twenty-five percent of the class in mercilessness right now, which means you’d have a decent chance of being able to recover from a stumble. I’m not going to call this a deal, because you don’t make deals on the battlefield… you accept realities.

“So here’s the reality you need to work with: you give it everything today, and then you do the same thing next week… every single day next week… and I’ll give you an extra credit assignment to help you make up for yesterday. You screw up after next week, it might not be fatal. You screw up sometime next week, and we’ll talk. You screw up today, and you might as well bend over and kiss your ‘A’ goodbye. Understand?”

“Yes, Coach,” I said.

“Oh, you’ve just been talking to her, I can tell,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Now, I want you to take a moment to appreciate the fact that I’m telling you this at the start of class instead of just silently judging you by criteria you can never know or guess. I could do that in perfect fairness, because I shouldn’t have to tell you to try all the damned time. I could do it even if it wasn’t fair. And you’d probably fall on your face because you wouldn’t have any idea that you hadn’t irrevocably fucked yourself with your performance yesterday, so why bother trying now? Do you understand why I’m telling you this?”

“You want me to know how nice you’re being,” I said.

“I’m doing you a favor,” she said. “Don’t mistake that for being nice.”

She turned and stalked off towards other students she had pre-melee messages for. A lot of them were just short barked instructions about things like where to keep their chins or eyes during combat, but I was somewhat pleased to note that I wasn’t the only one she came in close for more personal instructions.

It made me feel better about myself both to know that I wasn’t the only one who’d stumbled, as she put it, and that I wasn’t the only one she was doing favors for. It was more than just a fairness-derived desire to not get special treatment. The clearest implication I could see in her distinction between being nice and doing favors was that favors had to be repaid. If she was making a rare exception for me that would be a bigger favor, requiring a bigger repayment.

“Everyone, circle up!” she said when class began, and we all lined up in the now-familiar circle around her. Once again, she picked two students from opposite sides of the circle at random to come into the middle.

“There is a saying that the best defense is a good offense,” she said. “This is only situationally true. The best defense is the one that works. If you take out your opponent before they can harm you, then you have exercised the best defense. But you will fight opponents who are stronger than you, faster than you, more vicious than you, or in a better position than you. You can train to be stronger and faster. You can damn well train to be more vicious. You can look for the best position to strike from.

“But there are limits to all of this. Offense is not enough. It’s not never enough, but you have to be ready for the times when it’s not. This class alone is good for that, because every person you fight here has the same goal as you do: to put the person in front of them down as fast and as hard as they can. One of you is going to be faster. One of you is going to be stronger. One of you is going to want it more.

“Out in the wilds, a situation like that is the perfect chance to practice the art of hitting someone before they know what’s coming. In here, that doesn’t work, and anyway I don’t want to train you all to only be able to win when you’re facing someone in a fair fight or you’re the one throwing an ambush. So today, we’re going to be doing what I call ‘endurance drills’. The skills and instincts you’ll need to succeed today are the same as you need every other day, just with a slightly different emphasis. When you pair up with someone, touch weapons and then take a few steps back.”

She gestured to her two random volunteers, who did so. One of them became bright red and the other bright blue, though they were still translucent and flickering.

“After a five seconds they’ll go solid, and that means it’s time to fight,” Callahan said, and they did indeed grow more substantial-looking as she spoke. “If your weapon’s red, you are on offense. If your weapon is blue, you are on defense. Your weapon will be solid to your opponent’s weapon as normal, but incapable of inflicting any pain or injury. Hit him with your sword in the head, as hard as you can.”

The girl whose blade had gone blue lifted it and swung it with all her might at the boy’s head. It was hard to say if there was any impact at all or he just flinched, but she might as well have bopped him on the head with a cardboard tube.

“You’ll automatically switch sides after five minutes, or whenever blue gets incapacitated. Go ahead and kill her, red,” she said.

When the guy stuck his sword through the girl’s torso, the swords flashed, switched colors. They also went translucent again, and began to slowly fade back in.

“After a total of ten minutes, your weapons will ghost out and the bout is over. Find different partners, touch weapons, and start again. Your score for today depends entirely on how much time you spend with a blue weapon. This means staying alive when your weapon is blue and killing your opponent quickly when your weapon is red… and not delaying when you’re between partners. This is an hour long class. I expect everyone to have five full-length ten minute bouts by the time they leave, even if you’re still in the middle of one when the bell rings. Everybody pair off and fight.”

This time, she didn’t need to give any further encouragement than that. Through whatever method the complex enchantment behind the mockbox used to determine such things, I was chosen to take defense first when I squared off against my first opponent, a girl with a three-part staff… a sort of flail made out of three short staves stuck together with flexible joints.

It wasn’t the sort of weapon I had a lot of confidence squaring off against, much less defending from. My mixed melee class the year before had given me some experience fighting against (and with) all kinds of weapons including the more complicated flails, but compared to something common and straightforward like a sword or axe I was a rank newbie. I was pretty sure I’d gone up against the girl at least once at some point earlier in the week, but the goal then had been to end the fight quickly and move on, not dance around.

I might have been okay if she had been less experienced in the use of her weapon, but I knew before our weapons phased in that this wouldn’t be the case. You didn’t pick up something that complicated just because it looked cool. Her staff’s flexibility gave her an advantage in gettting around my blocks, and I took a bunch of bruising hits in what I estimated was the first minute or so of our bout.

I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to make it the full five minutes even before she managed to trip me up and knock me on my ass. As jarring as that was, that was far from the end for me… I wasn’t disabled, I’d held onto my weapon, and was able to bat away her strike at my head.

This was the weakness of her weapon choice. Anything that can be used to conk somebody over the head can be used to kill or disable, but her weapon gave her fewer options for a kill shot than something pointy. She could wind up and snap her weapon with more force than a rigid staff, but it took more time and space to do that.

I hoped that Callahan was paying attention when I got back to my feet. Maybe she’d think I learned something from her speech to me about one mistake not being fatal. If nothing else, it made a good metaphor for having “stumbled” in Thursday.

I didn’t make it to the five minute mark in my first bout, though I was pretty sure I came close. She took me out the same way I had managed my first disabling strike of the year: with a shot to the knee. My staff had caught hers as she tried to take my legs out again, only the end of it came whipping around and hit my knee from the side. I felt an explosion of pain… or a rather convincing illusion thereof… and fell to the ground. The simulation judged that I was incapable of fighting on, and since this time I did lose my hold on my weapon as I reflexively grabbed my injured knee I wouldn’t be inclined to argue. The pain vanished, and my fallen staff turned red and pale.

To my credit, I took her down much more quickly than she’d been able to take me out. It wasn’t that she was worse at defense. I was just really good at offense. She was used to intercepting weapons and redirecting them with her spinning staff. I was able to blow right through the impromptu shield she presented and retake my position on the blue side almost right away. I held onto it for another few minutes. She did manage to get it back, but I got it back again almost right away. Maybe thirty seconds later, our bout ended.

“You’re really strong,” she said.

“You’re really good,” I told her, and that was all we had time to say before we both turned to grab another opponent.

I might have taken a moment to look for someone with a weapon I knew I could beat, but Coach Callahan despised people who tried to beat an exercise by beating the exercise… by taking advantage of parameters that only existed because this was a simulation of actual combat happening in a controlled environment. If she saw me stopping to try to figure out who to fight next, she’d definitely count that against me while deciding my grade. We’d all started fighting at about the same time, and so several other fights were ending within seconds of ours.

The good news was that I didn’t have to go out of my way to end up fighting someone with a much more common and simple weapon. My second opponent was a big bruiser wielding a two-handed bludgeon what was either a spiked metal club or a mace. Even a semester of mixed melee hadn’t been enough to teach me the difference for sure. I knew that a mace, properly speaking, had a fixed head… if you put it on a chain, it was a flail. This was less round than I thought of maces as being, but fancier than I expected a club to be. The spikes made me want to call it a morning star… but again, I thought of that as round.

Whatever it was, it allowed the wielder to put a lot of force behind it but it didn’t have the reach of my staff and it didn’t give him a lot of options for parrying. Inspired by my last opponent, I took him out at the start of the bout by sweeping his legs… and then hammering his whatever into his own face with my staff. That got me on blue, where I avoided more than I parried. Appearances aside, I was probably stronger than the guy… but that didn’t mean he couldn’t slam my staff with enough force to jar it out of my hands.

“Endurance drill” was a good name for it. The time spent on defense wasn’t as physically demanding as spending most of an hour trying to swing a weapon through the space where a person was standing, but it was taxing in its own way.

On offense, the goal was clear and the requirements for reaching it were lax. Outside of times when the coach set us to strike at a particular target, there were any number of ways to end a fight. Coach Callahan favored the immediately and obviously fatal as being the most reliable, but she hadn’t dinged me when I took a girl out by mock-shattering her knee on the first day.

On defense, the goal was just as clear-cut but your opponent controlled not just the pace but the path to the goal. You couldn’t just dodge, or just parry, or just anything for the whole five minutes… you had to react to what was happening.

It was also less clear how to defend impressively. Callahan had told us what rubric she’d be judging us by, but it was hard to figure out where the line between “adequate” and “impressive” was and what would stand out. Never being knocked out at all might have been great, but I’d blown that in my first bout. I had managed to spend the majority of it on the blue side, though.

I made it through my second bout without taking a substantial hit, much less being knocked out of the fight. The third one, against a girl with a pair of short swords, was a lot more even than either of the previous two. I had the feeling that I’d stayed blue longer than she did. My last two bouts really felt like slogs. One of them, it was so because my opponent offered no real threat and so I just had to be careful not to make a mistake and the other because he was just enough of a threat to keep me on my toes. In both of them I was barely in the red at all.

I had started a sixth bout… just started it, in fact… when my staff turned completely insubstantial, falling out of my hands and through the floor. Luckily the same was true of my opponent. I did end up crashing into him a little bit, out of surprise.

“Okay, that was a bit more interesting than what I’d expected,” Callahan said. “But my little doohickey says that you’ve all had five full bouts now, and I’ve got places to be tonight so we’ll wrap up a little early. Some of you stopped when you got to five and some of you kept going anyway. Don’t think I didn’t notice who did which.”

There was no doohickey in evidence, which made me curious about how much control she had over the mockbox and the illusionary copies it produced. She’d already showed a lot more versatility with it than I’d realized it was capable of.

“We’ll be doing these little drills regularly… not every week, but whenver I think you’re getting too complacent about the attack-attack-attack thing, or you need shaking up,” she said. “Some of you missed the point that you could stay blue for much longer than five minutes by taking your opponent out quickly when you were offense… I saw some of you holding back, acting like you were on a break when it wasn’t your turn to defend. Or maybe you thought you were being nice, giving your opponent a chance to rack up some time.

“That was a mistake. A lot of teachers say they want to see everyone they teach succeed. Well, I can’t say that because whenever two people get in a fight for real, only one of them can succeed. If I could get away with failing the bottom half of the class, I would… and I’d have harsh penalties for failure. I can’t do that, but I can give the bottom half an incentive to be in the top half, and for the top half to stay there. You’ll find out more about that on Monday. For now… get the hell out of here.”

I didn’t think Callahan had completely thought through her reasoning there. Given that she wasn’t allowed to line up the entire class and force us into deathmatches with each other at the end of the year, there wasn’t any reason she couldn’t root for all of us to succeed, by her definition of success. Even if someone in the class was a better fighter than me, if I never lost a “real” fight then she’d done her job.

But even though I disagreed with her reasoning, that was essentially a quibble about a side point… if she wanted everyone in the class to be the best fighter they could be, encouraging competition wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. It would almost certainly be more cutthroat than I thought was healthy or warranted, but as she’d said, she could do things like that regardless of what I thought was fair.

And I needed to be in the top half, no matter what that entailed. She’d already done me the favor of telling me where I stood… in the top quarter, by at least one important measurement… but it might not be so easy to stay there once she turned up the heat on everyone.

It was true that I just had to get through an hour of the class at a time, but as helpful as it was to focus on that, it didn’t change the fact that I also had to make it through the whole semester.

There is only one black door, though its outer face can be found in many places. There are some magic doors that do not exist anywhere in particular. The black door is not one of them… that is to say, it does exist anywhere in particular. To be more specific, it exists anywhere that it needs to exist.

One would not say that it exists everywhere, because that would imply a profusion of universes made up entirely of black doors. It exists as needed, neither appearing nor disappearing but simply being where it needs to be, when it needs to be there.

There are some places in some worlds where the black door is always needed, and so it can always be found by those who know to look. There are other places where it exists only infrequently.

It does not come and go. When it is there, it has always been there. When it isn’t, it has never been there. All who have seen the black door and visited the inn that lies beyond it know when it exists because they remember its existence. When it is gone they remember it only as stories, if they remember it at all.

At this point in her story, the being known most recently as Jillian Callahan… a student of offense turned teacher of defense… had already passed through the black door many times in her comparatively lengthy existence. A mortal champion of a world could only climb so high facing mortal challenges belonging to her own world.

Callahan had first been led to the Inn of the Black Door by rumors she heard from long-lived elves who died soon after. In her days, she had already faced off against gods, dragons, and giants. She had slain eldritch abominations for whom death itself proved to be a fairly abstract inconvenience. The world in which she had been created had not yet run out of challenges for her, but she was drawn to novelty, and the Inn gave her access to that.

She’d never come to the Inn specifically to start a fight within its walls, but it had often happened that a fight broke out while she was there.

This time she had not come to the Inn to begin a hunt, and that galled her. Within the very essence of her soul, the natural mortal fear of eternity had been twisted and externalized into a revulsion for the eternal. She could sense the age and power of the drinkers in the taproom around her and longed to lash out and end a few things.

She looked around the taproom. It was the usual sort of crowd that the Inn attracted. There was a good mix of people of sorts that she recognized, the familiar elves and dwarves and ogres and such of her own frame, as well as some who resembled slight variations on those themes. Less familiar figures included such oddities as mechanical-looking men, semi-coherent clouds of dust and light, and beings stranger still.

A slight majority of the inhabitants of the Inn’s bar were human, or human-looking. A trio of young women… one stout, one quite fat, and one thin… seemed to wave at an indeterminate point somewhere behind her as her gaze moved past them. Callahan felt perturbed by this, as though in some distant world an invisible barrier had somehow been penetrated. The gesture felt gratuitous somehow, almost pandering.

She made eye contact with the bartender, a slight and smooth-cheeked man. He swore into his sleeve, then put on a smile and slipped out from behind his bar. He glided towards her, his loose trenchcoat fluttering behind him like a cape. A number of the bar’s more humanish patrons had actual capes on, a style choice that Callahan assumed reflected the fashions in worlds more closely connected to the Inn.

“Godslayer,” the barkeep said to her, more by way of acknowledgment than greeting.

“Dark,” she said.

“It has been a quiet night,” he said. “I would consider it an immense personal favor if it remainedso.”

“Really?” she replied with a lopsided grin. “How quiet do you want it?”

“Louder than the grave,” he said. “At or about the same volume as it is now, in fact.”

The bartender was immortal, not by nature but by dint of his own stubbornness and some impasse with his own god. She could feel that, and it both sickened and excited her. She refrained from killing him not out of politeness but because she’d done so on previous visits and it had never done any good.

“Relax, Johnny,” she said. “This is a social call… I’m actually here on a date.”

His eyes widened, but only by a bit and only for a moment.

“Ah,” he said. “That is unfortunate.”

“It is?”

“Yes, it means I owe the little trickster ten dollars.”

Callahan, having been to the Inn and traveled the planes in at least a shallow wading sort of way, understood this word to refer to a sort of money common in certain worlds… a fiat currency represented by paper or intangible numbers and backed by nothing but belief. It was a ridiculous and fantastic notion, but anyone who travels between worlds soon notes how what is pure fantasy in one frame may exist as fact in another.

“He’s here, then?” she asked. She’d been idly entertaining the hope that he’d intended all along to stand her up or do some mischief elsewhere while she was off-world.

“He awaits you in one of the back booths.”

“I wanted to get here before he did… has he been here long?”

“I could not say,” Johnny said. “I did not mark his arrival.”

Under normal circumstances, the Inn always had enough back booths. This was because like its door, the booths existed at need. Not only did their numbers match the needs of the Inn’s clientele, but their size and shape did, too. They were all the same size, and that size was the right one. Big and wide enough for an ogre, small enough for a party of pixies, able to intimately accommodate a pair of lovers meeting for a quiet drink or an entire harem that’s popped out for a pint.

Thus, when Callahan slid with some ill-grace into the bench opposite the one who styled himself as the gods of gnomes, she found herself looking the diminutive figure right in his soft, dark eyes. The table between them appeared perfectly level, and the benches on which they sat were the same size… but it was the right size, for him and for her both.

Resolving the visual paradoxes inherent in the Inn’s architecture and furnishings was not something that every mind in the multiverse could manage, which was among the reasons that not everyone could find the black door. Callahan could navigate the impossibilities, but doing so left her even more uncomfortable. Her date for the evening appeared perfectly at ease, with the surroundings, with himself, and with everything else.

“Owain,” she said.

“My dear Jillian,” he said. He gestured to the empty table. “I took the liberty of ordering drinks… and drinking them.”

“You make a habit of taking liberties,” she said.

“They’re medicinal,” he said. “I’ll summon the serving girl.”

He snapped his fingers, and a beautiful girl came hurrying up. There was something familiar about her, though what it was, Callahan couldn’t quite say. Her face, maybe. Or her hair. Possibly her eyes, or her outfit. She’d definitely seen her before. Callahan had never been big on aesthetics… or had any interest in other women… but the girl was definitely a real beauty. That much Callahan was sure of, and only that much.

“Hey, Coach!” the girl said.

“La Belle,” Callahan said. “I made you cry once, didn’t I?”

“Three times,” she said. “And I only showed up for your class once! The other two times I was just thinking about it. Can I get you something?”

“You work here?”

“It was the only place I could get a job after I dropped out,” she said. “And wandered into a dimensional vortex that dumped me here. And I got cursed with bad luck a few times… just once at first, but it turns out that getting cursed is something that happens to unlucky people. Also, I had really bad references.”

Callahan stared at her for a few moments, and then said, “Nothing for me, thank you.”

“Oh, okay! Just shout if you need anything… oh, only don’t actually shout or I might cry. It’s great to see you here, though!”

Owain sat smiling placidly until she had gone away, and then said, “Indescribable beauty.”

“What?”

“You’re trying to figure out what she looks like, except for beautiful. Don’t bother. It’s a faerie gift,” Owain said. “The whole family’s lousy with that sort of thing. Only they’ve gone back to the well so many times that most of the obviously good ones are taken.”

“Oh,” Callahan said. “That… that actually explains a lot.”

“Now, where were we?” Owain said. “Oh, yes. My habit of taking liberties. You may call it a habit, but in fact I can stop any time I want. Start, too. Or keep going, or turn and go off in a different direction… you see, this is the beautiful thing about living a life of liberty. It’s so wonderfully freeing. You can do whatever you want.”

“Right now, I want to see my eye,” she said.

“But your replacement has grown back in nicely,” he said. “Quite exciting, this mortal magic. One almost fears to guess at what they might manage next.”

“Doesn’t matter,” she said. “The terms of our deal are still the same.”

“You only need two eyes,” he said. “What are you going to do with a third one?”

“It’s what you could do with it that worries me,” she said.

“Well, worry not… I’ve left it untouched, as per our deal,” he said.

“I don’t like to repeat myself.”

“Then going into education was perhaps the worst mistake of your life.”

“You may not be a real god, Owain, but I’ve killed things far older and less divine than you,” she said.

“And far younger, I should expect, but I don’t believe you’ve ever killed anything exactly my age before so I think I’m safe for the moment,” he said.

“Show me my eye,” she said.

“Oh, very well,” he said. “I hope you appreciate what a rare treat this is… this is a privilege few people have, without recourse to a mirror… and you get to do it in stereo, too.”

He reached into one of the many pouches that adorned his vest and pulled out a large jewelry box… larger still in his hand… and set it down on the table in front of him, facing her. He opened it.

“Are you satisfied that this is the item in question?” he asked.

Callahan nodded.

He nudged the box forwards across the table. “Go ahead, take it.”

“Now?” she said.

“Whensoever it best suits you,” he said.

She had not moved her hands at all since he had put the box down. It wasn’t so much that she feared a trick, or even that she expected one… she knew there was a trick, the same way she’d known where to find the black door the moment it once again existed in a place where it had always been.

The door was always there. There was always a trick.

“I find it odd that you’d give up your only hold over me so early in the evening,” Callahan said. “Are you actually trusting me to keep my word?”

“No, but I’d relish the sight of you fleeing me at the first opportunity, like all the hordes of all the hells are nipping at your heels,” he said. “Because no matter how casually you might try to saunter off, no matter how much you swagger, that’s what it would be… and more importantly, that’s how it would be told. I can’t say what that would do for your reputation, but it would advance mine considerably.”

“How did I even end up here?” she asked.

“Through the door, I would imagine.”

“I went to the picnic to terminate my primary target,” she said, “only to find you’d somehow known I was coming…”

“You’re always coming,” he said. “No indelicacy intended.”

“…and sent him away before I got there.”

“He left, I think you would find, of his own initiative.”

“And you had nothing to do with that?”

“Well… maybe I did, but I couldn’t let you kill my brother, could I?”

“He isn’t your brother,” Callahan said. “None of them are.”

“Except for the women, who aren’t my sisters instead,” Owain said. “Anyway, he doesn’t know that, and if he knew I had gone and let you kill him, he might start to get suspicious. Why do you want to kill old Carl, anyway? He’s not exactly a bad sort, once you get to know him, and even better if you don’t.”

“I don’t care about his morality or his politics.”

“In this line of work, it’s the same thing,” Owain said.

“It’s just what I was made to do,” she said. “Birds got to fly, fish got to swim.”

“Does it give you pleasure to serve your former masters’ will?”

“It scratches an itch,” she said. “I wouldn’t kill him just because they wanted me to, but that won’t keep him alive, either. When I do it, it’ll be because I want to.”

“And it bothers you not a whit that you only want to because they wanted you to?”

“Why should it? I have lots of desires and no idea where most of them came from. I trust this one because I know its source.”

“I wouldn’t have figured you for the philosophical sort,” Owain said.

“Give me a big enough blade and I can be downright poetic,” she said. “You know what bothers me the most about you, little man?

“I’m not a man, and I’m hardly little,” he said. “I’m just very, very far away.”

“I have fought things that would give nightmares to nightmares. I have killed things that could never die and things that were long dead when I got there. But somehow, nothing I’ve ever faced has ever given me the willies like you do.”

“It’s because you don’t know what I am, and that drives you bonkers.”

“That’s never stopped me from killing anything before.”

“What unnerves me is that you see through me at all,” he said. “Most people don’t. Most gods don’t.”

“Illusions are better against soldiers than they are against weapons,” Callahan said. “But you know what unnerves me? Even knowing that you’re working a con… the biggest con in the world, probably… I still fell for your schtick. I held off on attacking. I agreed to come here. Why? I don’t know. You said something, wrapped me up in your words somehow. And the next thing I know I’m plucking out my eye to leave you as collateral!”

“You drove a harder bargain than most would have, under the circumstances,” he said. “If you hadn’t insisted on some caveats then as you said, I could have done all sorts of interesting things with it in the intervening period… I know all sorts of fun games that are funny, to quote the bard.”

“No bard I’ve ever heard of.”

“You should travel more,” Owain said. “It’s wonderfully broadening. You should see me in my homeland. I’m huge there.”

“Where exactly are you from?”

“I’d rather show than tell.”

“Then I guess I’ll have to go on wondering.”

“So does that mean you won’t be going back to my place?” Owain asked.

“Don’t look so disappointed,” Callahan said. “There’s only one reason I agreed to this dump as a venue, and it’s not just because it’s neutral ground.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s an inn,” she said. “It has rooms.”

“Ohhhhh.”

“Don’t feel too flattered… this is just a recon mission for me,” she said.

“Fair enough,” Owain said. “I like to think I leave most women I bed a little bit wiser for the experience.”

“And one more thing.”

“What’s that?”

“You’d better look a hell of a lot bigger up close.”

“Sorry,” I said. ” Are you okay?

“Yeah, it’s my fault,” she said. “I was hoping to talk to you more after class, and you didn’t seem to be in any real hurry to leave so I was waiting for the crowd to thin out… but then I looked up and you were heading out the door, so I ran to catch up.”

“You wanted to talk to me?”

“You say that like it’s some kind of a shock,” she said. “I wanted to ask if you’re going to the dance on Saturday?”

“Where is it, the pent?” I asked. I hadn’t been paying attention to any notices about dances… my record with them was kind of mixed… but open air dances seemed like a pretty regular thing at the start of the year.

“Yeah,” she said. “Saturday. My friend Tasha is flipping crystals for it. Well, she’s helping. It’s her new job.”

“Maybe I’ll check it out,” I said. I was trying to be non-committal, but as I said it sounded to me like I was trying to be cool. “I mean, I’m not sure what I’m doing yet…”

“I know you have a girlfriend,” she said, and that was the first time it occurred to me that maybe she’d been flirting with me, or at least sizing me up for flirtation. With that, my limited ability to hold an actual conversation with a person disappeared as all the blood in my head rushed to my cheeks.

“Uh, yeah… well, I have two, actually,” I said.

“Yeah, see, I thought it was open,” she said. Her grin got bigger, and I don’t know if she was pleased at being right, or pleased by what she’d been right about. There was something almost cat-like about the way her cheeks went out when she smiled and the look in her eyes.

It wasn’t the least bit threatening, but I’ve never needed much to feel threatened when it comes to attention from other people, especially other girls. I hadn’t thought of Nicki as cute or not cute… I’d never had the habit of sizing up people like that, and a year to come to terms with my sexuality hadn’t changed that.

“I guess we are,” I stammered out. “I mean, we have other partners… and Amaranth is pretty much, you know… well, she’s kind of pointedly open. But… I’m not really looking to date anyone else.”

“I’m not looking for a date,” she said. “I wouldn’t mind a dance, though.”

“I’m not much of a dancer.”

“Well, there’s this traveling dragon show doing a presentation out on west campus…”

“I’m actually more into dancing than dragons,” I said quickly.

“Okay… so I’ll see you at the dance, then?”

It felt a little like I’d walked into that. It wasn’t the worst thing that I’d ever walked into, but I wasn’t at all sure that it was where I wanted to be. Nicki seemed friendly, and I could always use another friend… particularly considering how easily I seemed to make enemies. I still had no idea what had happened to alienate Twyla, for instance.

But I didn’t need another complication in my social life.

“I… I’ll have to talk to Amaranth first,” I said. “To see if we’re doing anything.”

Her eyes flickered down just a bit. It might have been random, but in my mind she was checking my neck for a collar. Probably that was my imagination, but then, she did seem to be up on the latest rumors concerning my love life.

“Should I be talking to Amaranth, maybe?” she asked, grinning.

If we were going to date, then there would probably need to be multiple conversations with Amaranth… between her and Nicki, her and me, and the three of us. Possibly Ian, too, though he’d never minded the idea of me having multiple girlfriends, once he got used to the idea of Steff being a girlfriend. Steff and I were a lot more casual.

Not that I would expect Amaranth to have a problem with the idea, either… she was pretty enthusiastic about the idea of love as something to be shared as widely as possible.

Which meant that if Nicki did want to pursue me, she’d find an ally in Amaranth. Things had worked out well when Amaranth first pushed for me to go out with Ian, but I would rather she preserved her record there than pushed her luck again..

That was why I decided the best thing to do was to step up and handle this myself. Deferring to Amaranth was an attractive option… but it meant deferring to Amaranth.

“I’d rather you were talking to me, actually,” I said.

“Great!” she said. “Then I’ll talk to you Saturday.”

She bounced away before I could say anything, leaving me to wonder again how I’d walked into it.

It would be her own fault if she ended up disappointed, I told myself… and almost believed it. I liked Nicki okay, so far. She was friendly and she seemed cool. But she also seemed to be very forward… not even really overbearing, just a lot more outgoing than I was. I’d had very mixed results when it came to people like that and my boundaries. Some of them were just outgoing and forward and didn’t realize how easy it was to run roughshod over someone who wasn’t, and others… well, others not only knew how easy it was, they had counted on it.

On the other hand, I couldn’t deny there was something attractive about having someone willing to take me by the hand… that was why it was so tempting to defer to Amaranth. I wasn’t bothered by Nicki “steering” me so much as I was trying to be aware if it approached a line, much less crossed it. It was like I’d said to Ian earlier: consent made all the difference in the world.

Lost in my thoughts over Nicki, I completely forgot about Twyla until it was too late to have any choice of finding her. In fact, I ended up getting more lost than ever before in the design center’s loopy hallways… it was only when I glanced out a bubble-shaped window and saw with some confusion that I was apparently on the second floor that I realized I’d been wandering aimlessly.

I hadn’t even realized that the building had a second floor, and it was hard for me to imagine being so distracted that I walked up a flight of stairs without noticing. At least not successfully… my wandering mind had conspired with many a staircase to deliver a painful lesson on situational alertness.

Looking out, I figured out the truth of the matter pretty quickly. The campus grounds were mostly rolling hills dotted with drainage ditches, because we were in the Enias River valley system. At the front of the design center, the floor I’d come in on was ground level. At the back, the ground sloped away down towards the trees. A back entrance would have to go into the basement, or maybe the back end was just built up on supports… but probably there was a rear entrance, because I could see a little footpath and there were some students hanging out down there. Probably it provided an easier place for smokers to take a break… they weren’t supposed to smoke by the doorways, but I couldn’t see anyone using that entrance for anything else.

Though none of the people I saw seemed to be smoking. There were three guys and two girls. One of them was the pigtailed Ms. Andersen… and I still didn’t know why she’d seemed so familiar, but now I recognized the others. I’m not great with faces, but even I tend to remember people who put arrows into my shoulder and then threaten to leave me for dead.

They were the delving students who I’d encountered after being accidentally teleported into the school’s labyrinth a year ago.

So Andersen probably had been asking about the sword for reasons related to a delving class. I couldn’t imagine a Glamour & Design student minoring in Delving & Discovery, or vice-versa… but maybe with the school’s new hazard course requirements, she hadn’t had a choice.

I also couldn’t imagine exactly what they were up to. Delving students were pretty infamous as a group for pulling off pranks that required things like penetrating into secure areas or scaling buildings, and also infamous for figuring out how to get course credit for their shenanigans. A persistent rumor that floated around the ethernet and attached itself to any school with a big delving program was that students who managed to steal the answer key to a particular final were the only ones who got an A.

But stealing a sword that belonged to dwarves… even if they planned on giving it back, or even if they just planned on getting around the security and then leaving proof that they could have taken it… the chances seemed high that they’d die in the attempt. Dwarves didn’t leave a lot to chance when it came to protecting their property.

Granted, not every delving major made it to graduation, and this particular group had demonstrated some seriously skewed priorities in the past.

For that reason alone I didn’t want to get involved in their business. If I tried to warn them off… well, the guys in the group had made it pretty clear that they saw me as just another monster to be slain if I was in their way, and even their supposed cleric of peace hadn’t offered much of an apology over that. I hoped they didn’t try anything with the sword, but that was all I could really do.

I hoped nobody else tried anything with the sword, either. I doubted Andersen’s questions would slip Professor Stone’s mind if something happened to it.

Still, it was possible that the information was for something other than a “practical” assignment… maybe they had to outline the steps they would take to liberate something like the sword, or describe some obstacles that might be encountered in an old dwarven fortress.

I did my best to put them out of my mind while I found my way out of the design center. This was easier than it might have been, as I had Twyla and Nicki to fill it up with.

Was it really worth working things out with Twyla, if she was determined to be angry? Outside of this one class, there was no reason we had to see each other. One more person in the world who didn’t like me didn’t exactly change anything.

But even if I hadn’t had much direct experience with her, she’d always seemed sort of decent compared to the girls she got thrown in with during our freshman year. Being on her bad side felt a bit like a missed opportunity.

And Nicki… I had no clue what she wanted from me. When I went back over our conversation, it kind of seemed like she thought I was basically campus-famous and wanted to hang out with me. Was I completely full of myself for feeling that way? The alternative was that she was, you know, into me… and I honestly felt like that was more arrogant than thinking I had enough notoriety to chase. I just didn’t see myself as that attractive.

Amaranth would be quick to point out that no one is actually “that attractive” so much as being attractive to a given person. I could sort of buy that, if only because it seemed a more likely explanation for how I’d ended up with three lovers and a number of people who’d otherwise expressed interest in me when I thought I was fairly plain.

But even operating under that theory, it was still surprising when someone found me in particular attractive…

Of course, attraction could mean a lot of things. Maybe seeing me around campus while hearing whatever rumors she’d heard was part of why Nicki was interested in me. It could also be mostly curiosity. I might have invited Twyla to a dance or to go see some presentation if I thought it was a chance to find out more about what was bothering her… that is, if I had the social skills of someone like Nicki and I thought there was a chance in hell that Twyla wanted anything to do with me.

My head was awash with a swirling sea of Nicki and Twyla all through the rest of the day… with occasional cameos by the delvers. Unfortunately, all of that meant that I wasn’t exactly at my peak during my daily combat class.

To say that I got my ass handed to me would be putting it likely, and ignoring the many other useful and important parts of my body that underwent similar transactions.

“That was absolutely disgraceful,” Coach Callahan said to me afterwards. “If you come in here with a performance like that again, not only can you forget about any chance of making an A, but I will have sex with everyone you love. I will record it, post echoes on the ethernet, and win several hardcore amateur awards for the performance”

“I… what?”

“I’ve been asked to cut down on threats of bodily harm while the school’s under consideration for some grant or lawsuit or other damned thing,” she said. “That’s okay, though… constraints breed creativity, right? Right. Seriously, though. Get with the program and stick with it. You’ve impressed me so far this year, but then the year’s barely started and you’ve impressed me before, too. Doing a big impressive thing every once in a while is only impressive once in a while. If you can’t go the distance then you need to go home.”

A lot of times it was easy for me to be frustrated with Coach Callahan, but this time I knew she was right.

That, of course, only made it more frustrating.

Whatever set-up she had done didn’t seem to involve anything physical, as the center of the room was as empty as it always was, nothing on the floor but the safety mats. I assumed she’d been tinkering with the settings on the red mockbox that we were supposed to use for the class. She was leaning against the wall next to it, providing a visual reminder of which box we were supposed to be using… and a verbal one to people who didn’t pick up on the clue and headed for another box. She had one eye on approaching students and one on the old-fashioned paper scroll timepiece over the door that was slowly rolling on towards the appointed hour.

She was making a point to steer people towards the right box, but she was ignoring the students who were standing around chatting or hanging out, their weapons unmocked. She’d told us to have our weapons copied in that box before class begins to avoid lines, but apparently not everyone had listened a cared. I felt a twinge of annoyance at the idea of being required to be in a classroom and doing class-related things before the actually starts, but I swallowed that, deciding that rationally any class would require me to do things outside of class time… in this case, my homework was due a few minutes before and involved the class room and facilities.

I did wonder why she couldn’t set more than one mockbox up with the required settings… though if she were planning on tinkering with them from time to time, having a single dedicated one for the class probably kept things simple.

Although I didn’t have anything like a class roll to compare the crowd to… and wouldn’t have been able to match names and faces if I did… it looked like Coach Callahan had been spot-on with her prediction that a good number of the class would skip the second day. I didn’t expect the whole class to show up as early as I did… some would probably ignore or forget her instructions and show up on time, but even as the last minutes slipped away the room still felt emptier. It wasn’t that most of the class was gone, or even half… but enough to be noticeable.

When the timepiece slipped around and the bell rang, a bunch of students suddenly decided to head for the mockbox. Coach Callahan stepped forward and slipped in front of it.

“You should already have mocked your weapons,” she announced. “If you are holding a live weapon, put it down because we do not use live weapons in this class.”

The errant students looked at her or each other in confusion. Even though I wasn’t part of the group being chided, I felt a slight heat rising in my cheeks and an urge to drop my gaze… embarrassment empathy, I suppose. I don’t know if they felt embarrassed, but I would have felt embarrassed in the same situation, and so I felt embarrassed for them.

“If you are holding a proper mock weapon from the red box, choose a target who hasn’t,” Coach Callahan said. “And then… without hesitating or apologizing, strike them down. You should be able to manage it in one hit, but definitely do it in as few strikes as possible. Messing around or toying with them counts as hesitating.”

So this was what she meant by there being a refresher, I thought. The hard lesson we’d learned the day before of hitting someone in the head who wasn’t fighting back became even harder when the target wasn’t even armed. There was fear and panic in the faces of the tardy targets. I shut it out, and tried not even to think too much about the person I chose, a kind of stocky-looking guy wearing a sleeveless shirt and with a greatsword at his feet. Looking back, I might have picked him if I’d thought about who looked the least vulnerable or who looked the most like the kind of person I thought of as a warrior jock… but in all honesty, I was only heading for him because he was the closest person to me.

I wasn’t the only one close to him, though, and someone else hit him with a sword strike right as I got up close. I caught a glimpse of a great big gash across his chest and abdomen, but it disappeared as he glowed red. With as little thought as possible, I just turned in the spot and lashed out with my staff at the next nearest person, a brown-haired girl who had her hands up and was backing away from a kid with a mace, and incidentally backing towards me.

I swung with enough speed that my staff seemed to go right through her skull, but mercifully all I saw in terms of effects was the red glow.

So far, there was no obvious difference in how the mockbox was set up: maximum realism of wounds, but everything being canceled out as soon as the target was incapable of fighting back. The red glow lasted for fifteen seconds, during which further hits were impossible. There were more students holding mocked weapons than there were valid targets, so some people got hit a second time as they came out of the red period.

Coach Callahan was watching with interest. I had a feeling she was keeping track of who had scored a “kill” on the first go-round and who’d been left waiting for someone to refresh. I wondered if the people in the second group were ahead in her estimation compared to the people who hadn’t mocked their weapons in time. I wasn’t sure about that at all… Callahan demanded a kind of respect from her students, but she really didn’t seem to prize the following instructions as a virtue in itself.

Readiness was more of a virtue than obedience… those of us who’d had our mocked weapons in hand at the start of class had taken a step towards being ready, but if one of us turned around and demonstrated that we weren’t, the fact that we’d followed an instruction probably didn’t count for much.

“Good,” she said when everybody with a weapon had taken their shot. “We will almost always be starting class with an exercise in ruthlessness, so make sure you have your weapon ready when class begins. If you did not get to take part in the exercise, consider this a warning… not your only warning. This warning will be repeated as often as necessary. Now, if you haven’t mocked your weapon already… get to it.”

She stepped aside and let the rest of the students make their copies. Some of them looked sheepish, and more than a few of them… mostly the bigger guys… looked pissed at having been made an example of. I made a note that if I got any choice about who I was fighting against today, I’d try to avoid them.

“So that this is not a complete waste of time,” Coach Callahan said as they lined up to use the cabinet, “I’ll take this opportunity to respond to a couple of questions I got from some students after yesterday’s class. It seems like some people weren’t happy with the idea of a class focused entirely on violent resolutions to fights. It seems that some of you got the impression that the point of this class is to learn how to kill.

“Let me put it to you simply: this is an entry-level class. Making a person dead as quickly and effectively as possible would be at least a two hundred level class, if I was allowed to teach you that. What I teach you in this class is to hit people like you don’t care whether they live or die, and the simplest and easiest way to do that is to not care whether they live or die.

“Some of you might ask why I’m not teaching non-violent takedowns. I repeat: this is an entry-level class. Making sure you win a fight without killing an opponent who is trying to kill you isn’t one hundred level stuff. It’s not two hundred level stuff. It can be done, but it’s expert stuff. There’s a reason they call those people who can knock people out with a touch ‘grandmasters’ and things like that. There’s a reason that more prisoners have traditionally been taken at the point of a sword than via a club to the head. When you enter into a fight and you want to keep your opponent alive more than they want to kill you, you are fighting at a disadvantage. I’m not wasting any time in this class teaching you how to deal with that disadvantage except by the obvious way of not fighting with it.

“All of which flows nicely into our topic today: hesitation. They say that he who hesitates is lost. This is usually true. Why? Because he who hesitates hesitates. He who makes a habit of it grows hesitant.

“You can find a lot of military and combat philosophers who will tell you that it’s all about picking your moment, recognizing the right moment… but again, this is an entry-level class. What good is it to recognize something if you don’t know what to do with it when you find it? Our lesson is: seize the moment. Act in the moment. Live in the moment. You want some fucking philosophy? Be the moment. That’s pretty philosophical, right? Everybody form a circle.”

We circled up, and just as she had in the previous class, she pointed to two random students on opposite ends of the class to start today’s demonstration, a girl with a mace and a guy with an axe.

“You and you,” she said. “You’re the first dummies for today’s exercise. I’ve made a little modification to our red box. Here’s how it works: when you hit someone with your mocked weapon, their weapon will diminish in strength. What does this mean? Being the first one to hit counts for a lot. I’m normally not one for this kind of gimmickry, because A, that’s not how it works in real life, and B, figuring out how to make the first hit count for a lot anyway is pretty much the point of this class and any system which gives you points or some reward for just making the hit is counterproductive there. But we’re continuing the lesson from yesterday, of breaking down the barriers that keep you from acting.”

Unlike yesterday, the two people she selected did not delay in coming forward. She gestured for them to keep coming until the three of them… her and them… were standing in a loose triangle in the center of the group.

“Now, I’m going to do something else I usually hate,” Coach Callahan said. “I’m going to have you two demonstrate something in slow-motion instead of actually fighting. I want everybody present to understand exactly how this works, because we’re going to be fighting using these settings for the next two or three days. This demonstration will not be repeated, and we’ll be jumping right into things tomorrow.”

I understood that this was to some extent Coach Callahan’s continued punishment for those who skipped today… I say “to some extent” because I couldn’t believe she’d throw away two days of her curriculum for spite’s sake when she believed that the early days of the class were the most important ones. Those of us who’d showed up got a demonstration beforehand, those who skipped would have to hit the ground running.

Once I thought about it, I was almost sure that the students who skipped would be disproportionately represented among those who didn’t think to mock their weapons before class tomorrow… so they’d get hit twice with the stick of Show Up Everyday Or Who Knows What You’ll Miss.

“Okay, so you with the mace,” Callahan said to the girl she’d pointed to. “You come forward and tap him on the shoulder a bunch of times… just tap. No free shots in my class unless they’re deserved, or everyone’s getting them.”

The girl stepped forward, raised her weapon, and somewhat hesitantly reached out and touched her opponent on the upper arm. His axe flashed. She did it again a few more times and it flashed a few more times, becoming markedly less substantial-looking by the last one.

“The difference from one hit is subtle from a distance, but pretty obvious when it’s right in front of your face,” Callahan announced. “Hence the demonstration… I want you all to know what to expect, so you don’t get too distracted when it happens… you will get distracted, though. You can’t not be distracted when your weapon suddenly flashes and turns all ghost-like in your hand. But that’s just part of your incentive to be the first one to hit. When you’re disabled, your weapon and your opponent’s weapon will both return to normal.” She turned to the girl. “Pop him about three more times.”

The girl with the mace did so, and by that point the axe was practically invisible.

“Now lower your weapon,” Coach Callahan said to the girl. She turned to the guy. “Swing at her neck.”

The guy looked at the girl kind of apologetically, but he hefted the axe… it seemed to have the same weight to it… and swung it at her neck. She flinched a little as it approached, and the impact kind of knocked her sideways a bit, but she kept her feet and the axe seemed to deflect off her neck… not like it hit a solid wall or it was repelled or anything, but like a fairly light and blunt edge had hit something too tough for it to harm.

Her mace did flash, registering the hit.

“See?” Coach Callahan said. “That’s what happens. That’s your extra incentive to not hold back. Now, I can cancel it any time.” She pointed a finger at the axe-wielder and his weapon popped back into full apparent corporeality. She repeated it with the mace-wielder. “And I will, if I see any of you playing around with it… if you’re flailing around, trying to weaken your opponent’s weapon with little hits so you can safely land a big one, I will restore their weapon and they will kick your ass and then we will have words. Going for glancing hits to wear your opponent down is a valid strategy in actual combat, but it doesn’t work like this does. Don’t think of the weakening as a bonus you get for striking first. Think of it as a penalty you’ll take for striking last. Anybody not clear on the difference?”

I was pretty sure I had it. We were supposed to be trying to win the fight by disabling an opponent with realistic damage inflicted by a realistic weapon. This extra element was supposed to encourage us to go for broke, not set up victory with a bunch of glancing blows that would do nothing in real life.

“Okay,” she said. “When I say ‘go’, everybody grab a partner. When one of you has reddened the other, both of you look for a different partner. Don’t declare someone your partner unilaterally, but switch with the bare minimum of thought and consultation. Again, hesitation is the enemy we’re fighting today. Okay, break up the circle and go, people.”

She clapped her hands together a few times for emphasis as almost everyone in the class started turning around looking for their first partner. Some people were slower on the uptake than others and some people were already standing among friends and able to just move away a little and then get right to business. I wasn’t in the latter category and didn’t want to end up in the former category by default, so I just turned to the person nearest to me.

“You wanna…?” I said, as I took in who I was actually talking to. A girl with dark tan skin and a pair of those little things that might be axes or scythes.

“Sure, why not?” she said. I had a huge advantage in reach with my staff, but I figured that the sort of person who carried two weapons like that was probably pretty good with them.

We stepped off to the side a bit and back from each other a little. She seemed to settle into a fighting stance, and then immediately darted forwards. I got my staff up and around and batted at her from the side. With my strength behind it, it was a good hit that might have knocked her over if it had connected solidly, but she did this kind of running duck-to-the-side thing so it just kind of clipped her shoulder. Her thingies flashed red and she slashed at my leg twice, making my staff also flash twice.

I brought it down and just clubbed on her a bunch of times as hard as I could, taking a few more cuts from her in the process. I felt my legs going out from under me at about the same time I heard a messy-sounding crack and she went red.

I backed off.

“Good comeback,” she said, getting to her feet.

“Nice… dodgy thing,” I said, wanting to return the compliment. Mindful of my need to impress Coach Callahan with my seriousness, I then turned to find my next opponent.

She’d said the day before that we were going to be focused more on the act of attacking than the technique in the beginning of the class, and this was apparent in most of the match-ups of the day. The incentive to move meant that everything was a little more clumsy than it might have been, a little more awkward… and it also meant that the awkwardness didn’t stop or slow the fights. There were a couple of bouts I was in that devolved into two people swinging away with drastically weakened weapons, but the vast majority of them were over very quickly.

Coach Callahan made her way around the room as we fought, not giving pointers so much as yelling at slackers and intervening when she felt someone was missing the point of the exercise. When nothing in particular had her attention, she addressed the class as a whole, her voice easily carrying above the sounds of assorted frays.

“Most of the times when you’re really able to pick your moment in a life-or-death fight are times where you’re already way ahead, strategically. Assuming you’re fighting defensively… and I’m supposed to be teaching this class with the assumption that you are fighting in defense of yourself and not attacking people for the hell of it… then the right moment to strike usually occurs between the time that you identify someone as a threat and the time that they perforate or remove something that you’re likely to miss in the long-term.

“Yes, okay, there are some matters relating to timing. You want to strike at a time when your opponent is within range, at a time when you’re likely to hit and do some kind of damage while not exposing yourself to any in return. But those kinds of evaluations have to be made in the blink of the eye. They’re more in the realm of internalized technique than reasoned calculation. If you go into a fight thinking that you will wait until you see the right moment and in that moment you will act, you will spend the right moment looking to see if it’s the right moment. If you go in thinking that you will act as soon as you have a chance, that you will take the shots as the chances come up… well, there’s a better chance you’ll end up acting.”

The more she talked about moments, the more our earlier talk popped into her head, where she’d lectured me on the importance of momentum. As much as she’d sneered at warrior-philosophers earlier in the session and as much as I was loathe to admit that her lessons might apply to day-to-day life in a way that went beyond knowing what to do with myself in an unavoidable fight, I found the whole thing resonating with me in an unexpected way.

I’d gone through periods of my life where I’d just sort of drifted from one crisis to another, and the thing about drifting is that it implies maybe more movement than it should… without a strong impetus, something that’s adrift might not be moving at all on a meaningful scale. I’d picked up some direction, but it was so easy to fall back into that kind of listless, aimless existence.

Hesitation is the enemy we’re fighting today, Callahan had said. It was very like her to personify something that must be overcome as an enemy to be fought. I couldn’t wrap my mind around that viewpoint… I had my own approach to problem-solving that suited me a lot better. But my more reflective and analytical view had its own problems, and leading to inaction was one of them.

On the other hand, I’d managed to get myself into trouble through acting without thinking before… clearly there were times for reflection and times for action. I wasn’t about to embrace a life of mindless reaction, but I felt Coach Callahan had hit on a truth: hesitation creeps in naturally when you’re not working to overcome it.

Hesitation is the enemy wasn’t something I could get behind completely, but become the moment? If that wasn’t exactly my speed, it was a speed I could admire.

She walked backwards out of the circle, keeping her fingers pointed at the two people she’d singled out without looking, both of whom looked around at the people on either side of them as if they were testing out the idea that maybe someone else had been picked to go first.

I could understand the impulse… I was pretty grateful to find myself about halfway in between the two initial combatants, meaning I wouldn’t have to be among the first few people to step into the impromptu ring.

It wasn’t so much that I wanted to put off the fighting part of fighting class for as long as possible. There’s just a certain awkwardness and uncertainty in going first. The coach’s instructions had been simple and straightforward, but by the same token they’d also been short. When there aren’t a lot of details, it could be that the instructions were self-explanatory or wide open for interpretation, or it could be that the person giving them thought they were self-explanatory but there was plenty of room for wrong interpretations.

“Yes, you with the morning star and you with the incredibly gay ponytail,” she said as she reached the edge of the circle. “Go!”

“I’m a girl!” the not-at-all-boyish and not even particularly androgynous auburn-haired girl with the ponytail said.

“Yeah, well, your ponytail isn’t and it sucks cock in the men’s room for coppers when you’re asleep,” Coach Callahan said. “I can tell these things. Now you can keep pretending you don’t know I was talking to you or you can fucking go before your opponent wins by default, and by ‘default’ I mean by driving the iron nails sticking out of the end of his big weighty bludgeon directly through the roof of your skull while you’re staring at me with your upper vagina gaping at me.”

Though her opponent had taken about three steps forward into the ring, he wasn’t any quicker about rushing forward and attacking her than she was about attacking him.

I really did identify with both of them. When you’re not quite sure what was expected of you, it often seems better to do nothing than to do the wrong thing… but the coach’s requirements really were as straightforward as she’d made them sound, and doing nothing was the wrong thing when dealing with her.

“We have forty-five minutes left to get through eighteen pairs of fighters,” Coach Callahan said. “I plan on getting everyone through the circle with at least twenty-five minutes to spare. Your grades for the day will depend not on how well you fight or how many heads you crack, but entirely on how much or how little you help me in this plan.”

The girl with the ponytail kind of ducked her shoulders like she’d been sent up to the blackboard to complete a problem after being caught not paying attention in class. She shuffled forward a bit, taking her mocked handaxe off her belt by grabbing the haft just below the blade, then raising it up and adjusting her grip further down the handle.

“This is not a fencing match!” the coach barked. The girl with the ponytail flinched, though she was directing her commentary to the guy with the mace, who was still standing there, waiting and watching the girl. “You don’t wait for your opponent to get ready. You don’t square off. You should have splattered her skull by now.”

The two reluctant combatants stepped forward. I wondered at the wisdom of doing this as a group activity. I didn’t know that they wouldn’t just be circling around each other half-heartedly even without a sea of eyes around them, but the audience couldn’t be helping things.

The girl lifted her axe up high as she got near the guy with the spiked mace… not near enough to hit him, just nearer than she had been. He raised his own weapon and she jumped back, then seemed to suddenly remember the round shield hanging on her back. She fumbled it off and got it on her arm.

“Again, you could have killed her while she was doing that,” Callahan said. “It’s not the exact kind of opportunity you will have often in a real fight, nor will you see it very often in this class… but you should be looking for those opportunities and you should be taking them. You’re both dead three times already… you for letting your guard down, you for being too reluctant to strike a fatal blow. In thirty seconds the day’s exercise changes… if you’re not going to fight, you can be target dummies for people who will.”

That got them moving. The girl stepped forward, with her shield up at a level that would probably have been unwisely high if she’d been in a real fight… since she knew her head was the target, she was only protecting her head.

She made a few downward chopping swings at the guy’s head. They weren’t exactly half-hearted, but they didn’t seem to have a lot of strength behind them… it was like she was used to fighting to first strike or a certain number of hits, where the only goal was contact between her blade and her opponent, with the level of force not mattering. Her opponent was able to step aside from one and then bat the axe away on the second swing. He followed it up with a bash of his own, which she took on the shield.

“Better, but you’re not counting coup,” the coach said. “The goal here is to take your opponent out with a single blow to the head. We’re starting with the head for a few different reasons, but among them is not the fact that the head is a particularly soft and vulnerable target. I have seen human warriors fighting with an axe that size embedded in their skulls. Don’t just try to bring your axe down on his head. Bring it down through it.”

I recognized the reluctance on both participants’ parts to do just that. They were probably both okay with swinging weapons at each other, fighting to win a fight even to the point of simulated death… but somehow there was a difference between the kind of swings they thought of as “fighting” and very deliberately hefting their weapons and trying to beat the other’s person’s brains in.

Knowing Coach Callahan, I figured that was why she was doing things this way… spending the first day making us fight in front of the group and focusing on head shots. In every way except the purely literal, it had to be one of the most visceral ways to end a fight… you took aim at the thinking part of your opponent, the part that could look at and talk to you, that could laugh and joke or beg and plead and cry and you hit it.

“There is no sense pulling your blow any when you aim for the head,” Callahan said, as much to the whole group as to the current combatants.. “There is no point in aiming for someone’s head if you aren’t willing to kill them. Forget what you see in the television… if you hit someone in the head with a blunt object hard enough to knock them unconscious, you have hit them hard enough to kill them. In the heat of a battle you might not have any idea which one you’ve done, which is why you don’t go for the head if you care about anything besides stopping your opponent right now.”

The fight didn’t last much longer, though it was probably still too slow for our instructor’s preferences. The girl made a few harder swings at the guy’s head, but the fact that she was almost literally hiding behind her shield meant her aim wasn’t that good. He tried bashing it down a couple of times. The girl cried out when he got the head of his weapon stuck on her shield, some of the spikes sticking through in a way that they had to be at least poking her arm. He was able to force her shield down, but he had to unstick his mace in order to take another swing at her, and she got her shield up.

He looked at the teacher with an “Oh, come on.” look. She just looked back.

“Can I hit her somewhere else?” he asked her.

“The goal is defeat her with a head shot,” she said.

I couldn’t help noticing that wasn’t a no.

The guy scowled, but only for a second as it seemed like he parsed that, too. He swung his mace at the girl’s unprotected stomach. She was slow to react, and she did so by trying to bring her shield down instead of stepping back out of his weapon’s arc. The phantasmal spikes ripped right through her t-shirt and the unprotected flesh underneath. The coach had been right about the realism of the red box mockeries… the girl’s clothing actually appeared to tear, and there was what looked for all the world like quite a bit of blood. She doubled over and fell to the side, her axe flying from her grip. A few people had to duck as it sailed outside the circle.

The guy looked down at his fallen opponent, then at the impassive face of the instructor.

“You’re not done yet,” she said.

It only took two more hits but by the time he was done, the results weren’t pretty. The girl had clutched the side of her stomach and was starting to get up when the first blow hit her head. He was still a little reluctant, and it showed. It was a brutal hit… a spiked mace to the head can’t be anything but that… but it was more like the sort of impact she might have had if she’d stood up too quickly underneath one hanging on a rack than the sort that would result from a reasonably strong man driving one into her skull.

“Not there yet,” Coach Callahan said. “You’ll know when you’re there.”

His second attempt drove a spike into the side of her skull. He let go of the mace and she fell over again, with it still stuck.

“Believe it or not, that’s not a fatal wound,” Callahan said. “Not an immediately fatal one, anyway. If she were on her feet and had a weapon, she’d still be able to take a swing or two at you. The red box settings mean that when she’s completely disabled, she’ll go red. Keep going!”

He didn’t have to go far. She “went red” as he retrieved his weapon from her, a messy operation that I could barely stand to watch and won’t be able to describe. Mercifully, the illusionary damage and all the splatter and debris vanished at the same time that the red aura enveloped her whole body.

“When that happens to you, you’ll know because you’ll see a reddish haze over everything,” Coach Callahan said. “And because all illusionary wounds on you and the person who ‘redded’ you will heal, you can always get back up and do it again but there’s no stupid arguments about who tagged who last. You two clear out. Next two, up!”

The next pair were a little more willing, or a little less hesitant. It was a guy with a great big broadsword and another one with a lighter looking blade. Neither of their weapons really struck me as being natural headcrackers, but I figured the guy with the heavier blade had the advantage. They both seemed to know their stuff, though, and my eye for action isn’t anywhere nearly good enough to sort out exactly how the guy with the thinner blade turned it around… but he managed to get in close and crack his opponent over the head with the hand of his sword.

Hilt? Pommel? I guess it’s all the hilt, below the blade… I’m pretty sure the bottom of that whole part is the pommel. Anyway, that’s what it looked like inflicted the “reddening” blow.

“The red lasts for about fifteen seconds,” Coach Callahan said. “When you’re red, you’re dead… or close enough. In any case, red means the fight is over. Your own weapon won’t do shit when you’re red, and neither will another red boxed weapon do anything to you. Now, when someone goes red during a repeated one-on-one exercise, there will be no bullshit taking advantage of the quick regen or the enforced helplessness to score a quick point. There are no points in this class. There is only the point, and the point is to learn how to be the one who survives a real fight, and you don’t do that by figuring out how to game the mechanics of the simulation we’re using.

“Seize every advantage that comes your way. Take all the cheap shots you can… they’re called cheap because they don’t cost you anything. But the purpose of this class is not to learn how to get really good at defeating the same opponent again and again using quirks of the red mockbox.”

The next few bouts were all over pretty quickly, some after an exchange of almost-blows and some with a single swing or jab. In a few cases it really was hard to tell if it was a mock-killing blow or not. In others… well, it was brutal. Some people really took the coach’s message about bringing their weapons through their opponents’ skulls to heart.

Luckily the dead-red glow erased the gore almost as quickly as it happened, but it was still tough to watch.

“This class is about how to end a fight quickly,” the coach said. “But there are two ‘hows’ there. There is the practical how, which we’ll get to later, and there is what I’ll call the moral how, for lack of a better word. We’re starting with the head not because it is the be-all, end-all of fight-ending targets… it isn’t. We’re also not talking about the techniques you would use when you aim for the head, though we will and I can see that it’s needed.

“Most of you have had some kind of fighter training before. You’ve probably ‘killed’ someone in mock combat before. That’s good. That experience will help you today… not so much the techniques you used but the experience of swinging a weapon into another person’s body and bringing them down. But there’s a difference between those fights, those tests of combat skill, and setting out with a deliberate and focused intention on ending a fight… which is to say ending a fighter. We don’t ‘spar’ in this class. We don’t ‘skirmish’. We strike.

“You can get through most fighting classes without ever learning how to smash someone’s head in without hesitation or pity. You can have a career on the Skirmish hex or in the pits… not my pit, but in pits… without ever learning this. Here, it’s the first and most important thing you will learn, before you even learn how to do it right. There’s no point in learning how to do it right if you’re going to hesitate to do it at all.”

Some of the match-ups lasted longer than others, but none of them lasted nearly as long as the first one. I doubted any of them even took a minute. My turn came way more quickly than I’d expected. Having watched the girl with the ponytail fumble with her gear, I canceled the shrinking on my staff as I was stepping forward.

It wasn’t the best move… all of a sudden I had a great big staff in front of me at a time when I was more focused on the person in front of me than the placement of my legs. I tripped. It was only a minor stumble, but I had the bad luck of being paired up with against one of the elves. They darted forward, there was a probably almost literally splitting pain in my skull. All control of my body vanished and the world went red as I hit the mat.

That was my first fight in Coach Callahan’s class… tripping myself up with my own weapon and getting “tagged out” immediately.

“Good hustle, Frybaby,” she said. “You’re still dead, but you’re promptly dead. That counts for a lot. Not for you, of course.”

I didn’t even see the weapon the elf had used until we returned to the circle… it turned out it had been a large dagger or small sword. While the curved and toothed blade looked plenty wicked, the thing looked like it had more weight and damage potential in the spiked handguard. I was pretty sure that was what had hit me.

We did make it through the whole circle in under twenty minutes, after which the coach told us to split up and partner up… those who’d lost our matches go to one side of the room and pair up with another loser, while the winners went to the other side and paired up.

“In a real fight,” she announced, “the penalty for hesitating or screwing up or even doing everything right but being less good or less lucky than the other guy is that you die, or you end up under their power, or you get a lot of painful injuries that don’t fade like a bad dream. The avoidance of these things are a powerful motivator that can sometimes be enough to make you snap into action. The problem is that you don’t get to find out how well that works for you until you’re staring it in the face.

“So in this class, there will be penalties for hesitation and there will be penalties for losing… not my preferred motivators, but the best I can manage under the circumstances.” She looked at our group. “You guys… you don’t fight. You take turns hitting each other in the head. You don’t fight back. You stand still for it. When you’ve each done it three times, you go over and join the other group.”

She looked at the other group.

“You keep doing what we’ve been doing. But switch partners. When one partner goes red, you both switch partners with another pair. Keep it diverse, too… I want to see boys fighting girls, I want to see big hulking brutes fighting little shrimps, I want to see everybody taking on all comers without hesitation. Those are our keywords for today: without hesitation. Our enemies for today are hesitation, pity, and mercy. We will slay them, even at the cost of at least wounding reasonable caution. Don’t avoid a fight because you’re afraid of losing. Throw yourself into it! We’re past the penalty phase for the day, at least when it comes to losing fights.”

Because I was neither the quickest to try to pair up nor someone that other people were naturally drawn to, I realized that everybody else in the loser’s circle had grabbed a partner except me and the ponytailed girl from the first fight. She was looking around like she wasn’t sure what to do next. Her eyes went right past me.

I took a few steps towards her.

“I guess we’re together,” I said.

“Are we?” she said.

“We’re the last two left,” I said. “We should get to it before Coach Callahan gets after us.”

“I’m Meaghan,” she said

“I’m Mack.”

“My hair’s not gay, by the way,” she said.

“I don’t even know what that means,” I said. “We’re supposed to take turns… um, do you want to go first?”

She shrugged.

“Do you want me to go first?” I asked.

She didn’t even shrug that time.

I really hated to judge her for it, because I was neither the most decisive nor most sociable person in the world myself, but we needed to get on with it. When she didn’t answer, I lifted my staff and… got to it.

It was harder than fighting. I really could understand why Coach Callahan was having us start the class this way. Swinging a weapon in someone’s direction, at them, was one thing. Trying to cave in their head was another thing. I ended up closing my eyes as I brought my staff down at her head… I couldn’t help it. I saw her jump back and heard her yelp, but she had been completely unprepared for it and I still caught her, the butt off my staff hitting her forehead with a sickening crack.

I opened my eyes to see her falling over, struck red.

We sort of ended up taking turns by default, if only because she still didn’t seem to have quite grasped the point or nature of the exercise and came back up to her feet, swinging. I just sort of lowered my head, trying to guide her into striking it. That part was surprisingly easy… submitting myself to the “death” blow, knowing that it was coming and that it would hurt and lay me out on the floor. That I could do without hesitation or even much flinching.

After she knocked me down, I started blocking her blows and battered her down again. It was easier the second time, because she was fighting back… all hesitation was gone, she was just pissed off. That was against the letter and spirit of the exercise, but I couldn’t control her.

In that way we ended up trading death-blows three times, though at that point the only way I could get the girl to stop fighting me was to bash the side of her leg with my staff to mess up her knee so she couldn’t stand up anymore.

“Nice job, Frybaby,” Coach Callahan said. She clapped me on the shoulder… well, she hit me on the shoulder. “You’re working ahead in the textbook a little… go join the rest. I’ll get the shield maiden straightened out.”

It was easier, after that. I did get struck red more often than I didn’t that first day, but smashing someone’s skull pretty much became no different than swinging a staff at them any other way. Pretty much. There was always that moment before the illusions canceled themselves, when I saw the image of my opponent’s face suddenly deforming, breaking apart… it was hard to get that out of my head. I had seen worse, I had seen things so much worse than that, things that were indisputably real… but that didn’t make it any easier to look at. If anything, it made it harder.

The best I could manage was to not linger on it, and the constant trading of opponents helped there. By the end of class, I was hardly seeing the faces as anything but targets.

I’m sure that was the goal, or part of it. The fact that I reached it so easily was probably a good thing in terms of my chances of reaching the A that Amaranth was requiring from me… but I wasn’t at all sure it was a good thing overall.

Modern ideas mean that wizards tend to be more well-rounded these days… the notions that studying such base and mundane matters as arms and fighting or carrying weapons and wearing armor would actually inhibit the ability to use magic have all been pretty soundly dispelled. A robust education is seen as a good thing. This is why MU and most other modern universities all have a liberal arts approach to education, teaching mundane subjects and combat skills alongside such things as enchantment and elementalism.

But even if learning how to swing a sword or strapping on a shield wouldn’t damage your ability to use magic, my feeling was that it’s still true that time spent studying fighting isn’t time spent studying magic. You can’t study both at the same time, unless you were studying how to fight with magic.

That sort of thing might have sounded like the perfect way for wizards to defend themselves, but combat casting can take a lot of specialized training. To be able to throw off volleys of spells on demand like a siege engine or a one-person regiment of archers would require a lot of dedicated practice of evocation. Combat buffing is technically enchantment, but it’s a far cry from the sort of enchantment I was formally studying. I could use my limited knowledge of enhancement to give myself a bit of a boost before or during a fight, but the techniques for doing that well were different than the ones I’d use to better enhance an item.

In other words, learning combat magic effectively would pretty much require taking a double major, so almost everyone gets stuck taking weapon classes.

For my first semester at MU, I’d enrolled in a class called Basic Knife. Basic Knife and Basic Staff were the softest of the soft options for fulfilling the school’s minimal weapon proficiency requirements. That they existed at all was a bit of a bone thrown to the old days when the world divided neatly into categories like users of magic and men who fought.

They weren’t the only options available for people who carried daggers or staves, but they were the best options for someone who wasn’t really interested in fighting but hadn’t been able to find a way around the requirement for one weapon proficiency class.

I hadn’t realized how much of a joke Basic Knife was when I took it… it was nicknamed “Bladies For Ladies” and the major focus of the class seemed to be how to carry a dagger about one’s person without hurting oneself.

I still would have taken it, though. I had no interest in fighting, and I’d resented the fact that I was required to spend three hours a week one semester learning how to do it.

Circumstances and my friends had impressed on me that fighting was something that could happen whether I wanted it to or not… and like swimming, it’s better to have the skills before they become essential than to try to pick them up on the fly. Or on the sink, as the case may be. So, I’d transferred to a more advanced class at Amaranth’s insistence.

That class was recommended by Steff, and it was taught by her favorite teacher outside the necromancy program: Coach Jillian Callahan.

The rumors I’d heard about Callahan were the same as the rumors you heard about any tough teacher, only more… well, more. They said she’d liked to kill a few students for demonstration purposes, before the school rules were altered to prevent that.

Well, actually, she had said that, though a lot of the people who spread rumors about her rejected that as being unbelievable. Not that the things that the same people breathlessly repeated were at all plausible. Depending on who you asked, Steff’s “Jillybean” was either some kind of god-killing abomination in humanoid form, a super soldier bred by the old empire, or some sort of eternal warrior who had fought in every major war of the past several centuries.

While those things were pretty obviously not true, she had made no pretense of hiding the fact that she would have just as soon killed me as taught me anything, but as long as the former wasn’t an option she had done her best to see that I learned something in her class.

Unfortunately, as she’d pointed out, the Mixed Melee class that I’d joined was actually a bit above my level. It didn’t have any prerequisites, but it assumed a basic competence that I’d lacked. I wouldn’t have necessarily failed it, but it would have killed my GPA for the semester even if I gave it my best shot. So, we’d forged a deal: I would give it my best shot and then she’d give me a pass/fail grade, as long as I agreed to take another class of hers.

It had seemed like a good deal at the time. Well, more than that, it had seemed like a necessary deal at the time. But it really just deferred the basic problem, which was me being graded on my fighting ability. Three credit hours of a weapon proficiency class were part of the general education requirements for graduation, and a pass/fail class didn’t count.

So I’d sought out Callahan… Coach Callahan… during the second semester and asked her opinion of which of her classes I could score the highest grade in. I had counted on her being able and willing to give me an honest appraisal, because her whole motivation seemed to be to get me into the class I was best suited for. She had flat out told me that there was only one class she could see me getting an A in… and then she’d told me it was a five credit hour class.

“It’s not about pretty techniques,” she had said. “And it’s not about fancy footwork. It’s about ending fights quickly and decisively. It’s about surviving. It’s a five-day-a-week class because it’s my baby. I’d make all my classes daily if I could, but I fought for this one because I believe in it. It’s also the class you need.”

It was probably the longest thing she’d ever said to me without yelling, swearing, or calling me a name. In fact, she’d sounded surprisingly at peace as she said it. So with a little misgivings… she’d said that I could earn an A, but that didn’t mean that I would… I’d signed up for five credit hours of hitting people with a stick.

My new fighting class met in a location that was familiar to me, the memorably named Kessherrakh Salle in the fitness center. It was a long room, equipped with floor mats. The cabinets along the backwall were enchanted as mockboxes. Any weapon… any object, really… placed within them would be duplicated in phantasmal form. The mock weapons were illusions, complete with the illusions of tactile presence and heft. They could inflict illusionary pain and even wounds, depending on how the box was set.

In my Mixed Melee class, I’d been used to mocking my staff as soon as I arrived so I would be ready when class started. For this new one I thought it was better to wait until I received instructions. I arrived in the salle to find a bunch of other students… mostly human, or at least outwardly appearing to be.

There were three guys who looked like they were mostly elven… more elven than Steff, but with some traces of human ancestry. On slightly closer look, at least one of them was a slightly butch girl. Or maybe very butch, for an elf. There was a guy who looked like he either had some orc blood or a smaller proportion of ogre blood.

There was also a kobold who I almost overlooked completely, she was so small… kobolds weren’t tall to begin with but this one was tiny, maybe two feet tall. My brain wanted to code her as female and it took me a few seconds to work out why. Kobolds were goblinoids, and goblinoids aren’t mammalian. There were no identifiable secondary sex characteristics I could pick out.

Oru the goblin tended to wear things that were identifiably skirts and dresses, and did things with her hair that somewhat paralleled human standards of femininity, but kobolds valued conformity. Head-shaving was expected. Shiel the kobold had been smooth-headed when she showed up, but had stubbornly and proudly grown a head of short, bristly fuzz over the course of our freshman year… she’d explained to anyone who would listen and more people who wouldn’t that kobold women were expected to keep smoothly-shaved heads while men could get away with a head of stubble to show that they were busy.

The fact that the kobold in the class had a shiny-smooth pate didn’t prove that they were a girl, as the reason for the shaving preference was that most kobolds were naturally hairless, but I’d heard Shiel give her spiel often enough that my mind associated the look with women.

Something else about the tiny kobold was tugging at the corner of my memory, but I couldn’t place her. I was almost positive that Shiel had been the only one of her kind attending Magisterius University the previous year.

The kobold girl looked so scared and out of place that I almost went over and introduced myself to her, but in the end my good intentions were no match for my own social awkwardness… while I was sure that a friendly face would make her feel better, I couldn’t convince myself that my face was friendly enough for her to welcome its intrusion before Coach Callahan arrived.

She said nothing and made little noticeable noise as she walked through the propped open door, her steps bouncy and light… but almost everyone in the room turned and looked at her, anyway. I had seen her manage to blend into a crowd of students before, but she definitely had presence when she wanted to.

Coach Jillian Callahan looked human, more or less. She looked more human than anything else, anyway, but if you really looked at her and thought human there would be a few things that would just barely register as being off. Something about the way the muscles were attached to her bones, the way they flexed when she moved… something about the shape of her bones underneath it all.

She looked enough like a human that even if you caught onto the wrongness you’d probably think that it was her dominant bloodline, but she didn’t have a drop of human blood in her body. According to Steff, she was a mixture of elf, dwarf, orc, and ogre that somehow averaged out into a mostly-human-like shape. Her typical dress was pure urban barbarian, all studded leather and with her arms and legs bare for easy movement. She carried a sword or a battle axe depending on the day… today both were on her back. Both were big, well-made, and enchanted to almost artifact-level.

I had no idea how old Coach Callahan was, but she had to be older than she looked because she could easily have passed for a student… a cheerfully psychotic student.

“Welcome to Fighting To Disable,” she said with a big, sharp grin on her face. Some people have a disarming smile. Coach Callahan’s smile would take your arm off at the shoulder. “Formerly called Disabling Strikes. Renamed when I took it over because naming an entire class after the last step in a process is fucking stupid. I am Coach Callahan. You will call me Coach Callahan. I will call you whatever name I think you deserve. I will give you whatever grade I think you deserve.

“I am the fairest fucking teacher you will ever have, because you will never get more or less from me than exactly what I think you deserve, except in those circumstances that school rules prevent me from doing so. Before you get too comfortable about that last caveat, let me remind you that you signed a waiver for this class exempting myself and the school from penalty for any healable injury you may suffer in the course of your education. If it ain’t permanent, I can get away with doing it to you. Believe me when I say that I’ve tested the limit of this thing. I don’t mind testing it again.”

She wasn’t bluffing even a little bit. I already knew of her willingness to break bones and inflict pain and damage on students who annoyed her.

“I prefer to think of this class as fighting to win. I mean, that’s how you win a fight: be the last one standing who’s still able or willing to fight. Be advised this is not a non-lethal fighting class. Our focus is on ending fights quickly and efficiently, which means removing your opponent’s ability to continue fighting, which often means killing the living shit out of them.

“If you didn’t actually read the fucking class description and just assumed from the title that we would not be using lethal force in this class, you will want to talk to the registrar while we’re still in the grace period. The class you’re looking for instead would either be Subdual Damage or Unarmed Grappling, both taught by Princess Periwinkle the Pretty Prancing Pony. But don’t call him that to his face… it’s Professor Pretty Prancing Pony. Respect is not just for your betters, kids.

“Also, be aware that even though unarmed fighting classes make up less than five percent of the fighting classes held on this campus, more students have been killed in them than all other combat classes put together. You can’t mock a fist. At least not while it’s attached to a living being. On that subject…”

She pointed to a tall, upright red cabinet near the corner of the room.

“The first thing I want you to do every day when you arrive for class is use the red mockbox, and only the red mockbox. To prevent a line, do this before class begins. That box is going to be set up all semester long for maximum realism, because all we care about in this class is what will really happen when you really hit someone. Go to it!”

I had no doubt that Callahan had my best interests at heart, as she saw them… this was the first really strong indication that the class she thought was best for me was not necessarily the class I would enjoy the most. My dislike of fighting could take on some snobbish overtones, I’ll admit, but it has always been rooted in a visceral reaction to violence.

In the years before my demonic nature manifested, I’d just plain disliked it… witnessing real violence or even strong anger had always left me shaking and queasy. After I turned, it got even worse. When my grandmother took me in, she had made it very clear to me what I would be capable of if I ever lost control, and I’d had a few glimpses that confirmed her word.

But I was already committed to the class two or three times over, so I sucked it up and dutifully got in line with everyone else. As a bright point, I realized that if I only ever had to de-shrink my staff in class then I wouldn’t have to use up any of its charges… I’d still need to periodically add a charge to stave off the drain, no pun intended, but as long I put the scaled-down staff in the cabinet and enlarged the duplicate, then I’d only ever be taking the mocked enchantment off of the mocked staff.

Coach Callahan had ambled over to the front of the line and was leaning against the wall, inspecting her students and our weapons. I kind of expected her to say something about my having what looked like a two-foot-long baton, after having done so much work with long hafted weapons the year before.

“Blank? Interesting choice, Frybaby,” was what she said. I really didn’t appreciate her nickname for me, but it was less obviously insulting than the one it had evolved from. “You’re an AE nerd, right?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Yes, Coach Callahan.”

“And you’re still with What’s-Her-Cunt, I see,” she said. The fact that I didn’t flare up at this was a testament to either my self-control or my memory, given that I was within casual dismemberment range of Callahan. Either way, I had to imagine Amaranth would approve of me not blasting my mouth off in response to an insult aimed at her. “You pulled off some interesting things with on-the-fly enhancements last year. That was good. You want to use what you’re good at. Don’t get all caught up in the cool factor of things like size-changing tricks. Remember that at the end of the day a weapon is for hitting and hurting people. Remember it before the end of the day, if you can.”

I nodded at the advice, which I had to admit was good… it felt a bit like a slight at my convenient repackaging job, of which I had been pretty proud, but I tried not to focus on that.

“Everybody feeling sufficiently mocked?” the coach said once the last person, one of the elven students, had finished with the cabinet. “Good… form a circle, children. It’s time to get your murder on.”

It was bizarrely normal, if that wasn’t a complete contradiction in terms. Steff was off spending time with Viktor according to Amaranth, but she came and went anyway. The fact that Ian had pointed out the folly of trying to have private conversations about serious matters meant that neither he nor I told Amaranth about Mariel, and while I was burning with the need to do so for the first several minutes, the urge quickly passed. I would tell her some time when I knew we were alone, or at least far away from anybody who might know what we were talking about.

It was possible that the ancillary lesson to the one about there being no real privacy on campus was that we were spending too much time on campus… and so much of that time going between the same few places. I went to my classes, I went to the library, I went to the union… and mostly just the lunchroom… and I went to my dorm, where I pretty much just hung out in my room. Going downstairs and sitting in the hallway had been like a major event.

It was weird to think of my life as humdrum or repetitive when so many things happened in it. Even before I came to school, my life had been anything but uneventful or ordinary, but when I looked back on the preceding nine years I found them tedious. I supposed this made the supposed ironic curses about having an interesting life or living in interesting times sort of off-the-mark… calamities weren’t usually boring when they happened, but a life full of calamity wasn’t necessarily going to be all that engaging.

On the other hand, the events that had followed from the last evening showed how good it could be to be shoved outside my comfort zone in ways that weren’t exactly world-shaking. Yes, the thing with the fish-beast and the owl-turtle thing were weird and crazy and completely unlike anything I’d ever experienced… but the thing that had really had the most effect on my day was that I’d woken up with Ian, in his room.

We’d ended up spending the morning together, without any plans or discussion, it had just happened. It was sort of weird that it hadn’t happened more often, with us having a long lab class together twice a week. I just felt really comfortable with him, to the point that I didn’t even have any awareness of being comfortable or being with him. His presence felt as natural to me as bath water did after the initial shock of hot water and cold air subsided and things had evened out and it just felt like you were floating in… well… nothing at all, really.

It was like the difference between someone surrounding you like a cloak and someone surrounding you like nudity.

I had a dim recollection of the ridiculous owl-turtle thing… who seemed even more ridiculous when considered by the light of day… saying something about an “intense connection”. Or had that been something Dee had said, in her explanation of what had happened? My memories of the shared dream were kind of fragmented, and it felt a bit as though my mind was actively resisting filing them away in the usual way. That might have been part of why I didn’t feel weirder about the whole thing.

My enchantment lab was a welcome piece of familiar normality in the middle of the afternoon… a class I was good at, one directly connected to my major, and one that I didn’t share with anybody that I knew. While it had led to my pleasant morning with Ian, having classes with people who knew me seemed fraught with complications, and it didn’t seem to matter if they were friends, enemies, lovers, or Sooni.

That was something I’d want to keep in mind during registration for the next and future semesters… while I liked spending time with Steff, I wasn’t sure I wanted to have any more classes with her. It would be nice if there were a way to avoid sharing a classroom with any La Belles.

It was kind of depressing to realize that there were more fellow students I’d want to avoid having classes with than there were teachers… but once I’d thought about it some more, I decided that this was a good thing. For the most part, I was getting along with the people who could actually have some direct impact on my academic standing and my future. Aside from Callahan, there wasn’t a single teacher I currently had that I really had a problem with, which worked out nicely because she was the one I was least likely to have any other classes with in the future. Conveniently, she was followed in that measurement by Hart, who I could also avoid if his caustic nature became too annoying.

I was stuck with Callahan for the rest of the semester, though, and it was too late to do anything about that. Okay, yes, I realized she was not out to get me… more so than anyone else with a pulse… and that she had actually been pretty generous in her treatment of me, but that didn’t mean that I liked her or enjoyed spending time with her. It being Thursday, it couldn’t be helped. After my second lab ended, I headed over to the fitness center and Kessherrakh Salle… getting hug-groped by Steff in the hallway outside it.

“Don’t sneak up on me like that!” I said, after shrieking my lungs out. Her hands were really freaking cold, and she’d managed to get them under my coat and clothes and into a couple pretty sensitive spots. “Do you know what I could do to you if I lashed out in surprise with all my strength?”

“Miss?” Steff said. She giggled. “Don’t mind me, I’m just ridiculously, obnoxiously happy today.”

“Yeah, well… I doubt you’d be so happy if I didn’t miss,” I said.

“Are you kidding?” she said. “I’d be positively beside myself.”

I rolled my eyes.

“For that one, I might hit you on purpose,” I said.

“Save the violence for the classroom, where it belongs,” Callahan said, passing us briskly on the way to the salle. “And where you belong, for that matter,” she added over her shoulder.

“Come on,” Steff said. “I hate being late for an ass-kicking.”

“Yours, or someone else’s?” I asked.

“I’m not picky,” she said, and we headed into the large room that nevertheless seemed a bit undersized for a whole large fighting class. While the open field we’d traded away for it had lacked in environmental niceness, it had given us a lot more room to spread out.

“Okay, listen up,” Callahan called out once everyone had their weapons mocked. “We’re past the introductions. Everyone is as up to speed on the basics of attacking and defending as they’re going to be, and we have slain the god of pain… so today we’re going to begin focusing on the ‘mixed’ part of the class a bit more. This is when your training begins in earnest. When this semester is over, you will not only be able to hold your own against a variety of opponents using different weapons and styles, you will be able to do so with any weapon that’s at hand. For today, though, we’re going to stick with our own weapons. When I call your name, come forward.”

She began calling out names in staccato bursts of five. There was a brief delay before anyone in the first group responded… probably because we weren’t used to being addressed by our actual names.

“You’re a group,” she told them. “Now get out of the way.”

She continued putting everyone in a group of five. I was uncomfortably reminded of earlier group-based activities in the same class… the others had been less than pleased to have the semi-infamous demon girl of Harlowe thrown into their group, and Callahan’s teaching assistant of the time had taken their side.

This time, my group mates didn’t look particularly happy or comfortable… but it was hard to say if that had anything to do with me.

“Through the end of next week, these people are going to be your fighting partners,” Callahan said. “Remember who you’re grouped with, because it will be your responsibility to find them at the start of class. After today… which is going to be a bit of a wash no matter what I do… we are going to waste as little time as possible with the fucking preamble. Within your group, you are going to do five minute fighting drills, with one person fighting one other person. The other three watch. When it’s over, you spend five minutes talking about it… what you think each person did well, what you think could be better, what you would have done in their place. Then two more of you fight, and you do the same thing again. This is what we call ‘peer-guided learning, and I earn seventeen hundred thousand bullshit teacher brownie points for incorporating it into the class, or something, so don’t screw it up. The mock boxes are set to ‘pain only’, fading in five minutes time, so you’ll be fighting unwounded and you’ll always be fighting fresh.”

My group consisted entirely of people who had long hafted weapons: a girl with a trident, a guy with a long axe on a pole, another guy with a spear, and a girl with a long scythe. I assumed the similarity wasn’t a coincidence… a quick glimpse around the room confirmed that like weapons had been grouped together.

“Come on, get to it!” Callahan called out. “Any group that needs more specific prompting will receive it!”

Everybody in my group was standing around… I wondered if they hadn’t caught the implicit threat, or if they were just that confident that someone else would catch it and step forward. It seemed silly… there was still over an hour left to go in the class, so we’d all have to fight a little before the end of it. The “little” part appealed to me… I was personally relieved to hear the format of the “peer-guided learning”.

But even if it was just for five minutes at a time, I’d made a commitment to apply myself to fighting, and I would honor that commitment.

“Well… I guess I’ll go first,” I said. I looked at the others. I hadn’t really caught the other names that had been shouted along with “Mackenzie”, and I wouldn’t have been able to match them up with the individual faces if I had.

The guy with the spear stepped forward.

“Guess it’s us,” he said.

“I’ll keep time!” the girl with the trident said quickly.

“My name’s Mackenzie,” I said. I felt kind of lame introducing myself, but it felt weird getting ready to fight someone who I didn’t know, especially as we were expected to talk about it afterwards.

“I know,” he said.

“If you’re fighting, fight… if you’re not, pay attention!” Callahan yelled.

So much for getting to know each other, I thought… though maybe it would be better if I did just focus on fighting.

We both had similar reach with our weapons… it occurred to me that anything that I could do with my staff, he could do with his spear, and then some. But if he wasn’t used to stick-fighting with his spear, it could be awkward for him to try to block my staff… that had to be different than slapping aside a sword or slipping past an axe. There were a few things I could try, anyway.

I shifted my spear into the long, swinging half-staff grip. My first attempt was meant to be something like a feint, just bringing the staff down in an arc just to see what he’d do… I wasn’t even close enough to hit more than maybe his arms. It apparently caught him off guard, though, and my staff ended up swatting his spear down. He kept his grip on it and lunged forward once my staff slid off it, bringing the tip up as he went. I jumped aside, and he ended up grazing the outside of my thigh.

I took a step back. It wasn’t a great beginning, I realized. The problem? I hadn’t had anything planned past that first clumsy swing… I’d wanted to put him on the defensive, but I hadn’t kept on the offensive, so he’d had an opening, if a somewhat imperfect one.

For the next exchange of blows, I started by swiping at his weapon from the side, and then just basically battered the fuck out of it. When he’d almost completely lost his grip on it and it was way off to the side, I tried to bop him with the end of my staff, but he stumbled backwards out of the way.

It would have been a good time for me to press forward, but I was a little bit off-balance myself. We repeated that a couple more times, though he was a bit more cautious and I wasn’t able to overwhelm him so completely. Each time, I had to break off my assault when he lashed out with a lightning-fast thrust of the spear. One time he missed me completely. The second time, he traced a line of jagged fire across my arm.

The next time, instead of lashing out at his weapon, I did my best to aim for where his fingers were curled around the spear. It wasn’t the cleanest of hits, but with my strength, it didn’t need to be. He cried out. The spear went out wildly to the side as he let go with his injured hand, which he gave a reflexive shake.

I noticed the perfect opening a little quicker this time, though not fast enough to take advantage of it. I was beginning to see the wisdom of fighting practice, beyond the mere learning of techniques… to be useful, this sort of thing needed to be reflexive, second nature.

After that, he changed his grip on his spear so that he was holding less of it sticking out in front of him. I kept a wary distance, knowing how fast he could lunge with it.

“Time!” the girl with the trident called, and we stopped fighting.

“I’m seeing a lot of circling around and not a lot of fighting,” Callahan called out. “That’s fine for now, but get it out of your systems… by the time we start again next week you need to be able to jump in and start swinging. We’re going to be making the most out of the least time.”

Apparently we hadn’t been the slowest group to get started fighting. We weren’t exactly quick off the mark at the critique, either. No one immediately jumped forward with insightful commentary, and I could see what Callahan meant by the day being a wash… we didn’t know each other, and we weren’t used to operating like this.

“Um… I thought you spent too long trying to hit his weapon instead of him,” the girl with the scythe said to me. There were a couple of nods at that.

“Well, I think he actually had the advantage in reach, given that he only has to hit with the tip of his spear,” I said. “I’d have to be holding my staff up by the end of it to match it. So I was trying to disarm him, or at least knock his weapon away.”

“That’s not a bad start,” Callahan said. “You need some practice at actually doing it, but attacking your opponent’s weapon isn’t a bad move if it’s the only thing you can reach. Not a bad start. Not great, though. Take a walk with me, Crybaby.”

“Um, okay,” I said, and let her lead me around some of the other groups, out into the hall. “Aren’t you supposed to be teaching the class?”

“‘Peer-guided’,” she said. “The first day of something like this, there’s going to be a lot of standing around and fumbling with things no matter what I do, so I like to space out the yelling in order to not appear completely impotent. Which I’m not. I’m just completely powerless to change the nature of eighteen-to-twenty-year-olds. But it’ll start to come together near the end of the period and after the weekend break we’ll come back and this’ll seem normal. Anyway, I didn’t bring you out here to explain my school strategies to you… I wanted to talk about yours.”

“What do you mean?”

“How did you end up in this class?” she asked.

“I quit Basic Knife and transferred in here,” I said.

“How did that happen? Why?” she asked. “What was the chain of events?”

“Well… Basic Knife wasn’t much more than Introduction To Sharp Object Handling, and… my friends thought I needed something a little bit more… well, more,” I said.

“By ‘friends’, I take it you mean that Johnson had something to do with this,” she said.

“Well, yeah.”

“Well, if I had one thing to say about Johnson, I’d say she’s enthusiastic,” Callahan said. “And if I had two things to say about her, I’d say she’s not that fucking bright. Enrolling you in this class was over-correcting… there’s a whole planar cosmos of classes between Basic Knife and Mixed Melee, and you would have been better off starting somewhere in there. Bladies For Ladies isn’t badass enough to do you much good, but you’re not badass enough to get the most out of this class.”

“It’s an entry level course,” I said.

“Yes, under the assumption that anyone who’s grown to the age of majority and graduated high school in this culture is going to know something about handling weapons and fighting,” Callahan said. “It has what we might call ‘unspoken prerequisites’, and you don’t match them.”

“And you decided to have this talk with me after the point of no return?” I asked.

“Yeah,” she said. “Because if you’d dropped the class, there wouldn’t be any point to it. And it’s not that you won’t get anything out of this class, or that it’s any skin off my back if you leave here underprepared for fighting, or if you don’t get out of here with the best grade. And that’s the thing: we’re getting to the part of the year where I have to start making up grades for people in order to be able to cover my ass and pretend I’ve actually been grading you all along. And if there’s one thing I pride myself for when it comes to my bullshit scoring system, it’s that I always arbitrarily assign the score that people deserve, mostly.”

“So you’re going to fail me,” I said.

“Not if you keep going the way you’ve been going,” she said. “I can see you getting a high C at best, if you dig deep and apply yourself and all that crap… but whatever you get from me, if it isn’t the lowest grade on your report card, it will be because you’re being lazy and careless in your other classes. Whatever grade I give you, it’s going to be dragging your GPA down. I don’t give a shit about that, but I assume you do. You look like a scholarship student to me.”

“I am… but if you’re committed to giving me a low grade, I can’t really do anything about that, can I?” I asked.

“No, of course not… I’m only bringing it up to rub salt in the wound,” Callahan said. “Anyway, I’m committed to giving you the grade you deserve, and that’s a better deal than most teachers would give you. If I had actually been grading you all along, you’d have enough zeroes and failing days that nothing you’d do would pull you up to a C. But I don’t care how you get there, I only care where you end up, and I could see you coming out of this class an average-ish fighter, or slightly below.”

“So, you’re letting me know that I won’t have a lot of leeway when it comes to my other classes if I want a decent GPA?” I asked. “I’d already figured that out… but thanks anyway.”

“You could save your GPA if you made this a pass/fail course,” she said.

“Isn’t it a little late for that, too?” I said. “I’m pretty sure that you have to decide that when you register for a class, not when you realize it’s pulling you down.”

“Rules like that only exist so that everybody and their brother doesn’t abuse things all the time,” Callahan said. “It’s really not a problem if somebody or her sister does every once in a while, though. I have a little bit of pull with the administration. Well, it’s not so much ‘pull’ as it is ‘shove’… the point is, I can get the registrar to change this to a pass/fail class for you. You still show up. You still try. You still learn. But at the end of the semester, your showing here doesn’t hurt your final grade any.”

“Even if that rule is bullshit, required classes can’t be taken as pass/fail,” I pointed out. “And not to doubt your… diplomatic abilities… but I’m not sure I trust that four years from now, somebody who’s never met you and doesn’t care about your threats won’t be telling me that my credits don’t add up right to graduate.”

“There are only two majors that specifically require Mixed Melee, and I don’t think you’re going for either of them,” Callahan said. “So, no problem there.”

“But weapon proficiency classes are required to graduate.”

“Right,” she said. “But not this weapon proficiency class in particular.”

“So this class wouldn’t count for anything?”

“The knowledge of fighting you’ve learned wouldn’t fall out of the back of your skull or anything,” Callahan said. “And in terms of things you care about, I guess you’d have one less bullshit-nothing-class like history you’d have to take to graduate. I mean, you’d still have three credit hours.”

“I like history classes,” I said.

“You would,” she replied.

“And I’d still have to take another fighting class later on?”

“Only if you want to graduate,” she said. “And here’s where we come to the condition of my generous offer: I want it to be one of my classes.”

“Are you sure you wouldn’t rather never see me again?”

“It’s possible,” she said. “But I’m really not sure. You bore me to tears, Crybaby, but you’ve got the look of something that could get interesting, one day. So I’d like to keep my eyes on you… and nudge you a little, if I can. When I can.”

“That’s…” It was among the more creepy things that anyone had ever said to me, and I’d had some pretty creepy things said to me in the past few weeks. “That’s, um… generous.”

“Not really,” she said. “Anyway, I have my reputation to think about. You’re not going to come out of this class a great fighter no matter what. This way we both get a do-over. That’s disgustingly close to fair, don’t you think?”

I thought it was a pretty disgusting proposition… but also pretty fair. I thought Ian and Amaranth would probably both approve of the deal, but I wanted the chance to get their opinions before I agreed.

“Do you need an answer right now?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “Just don’t take too long. I’ve seen classes get switched to pass/fail even after the term’s over… but I really can’t guarantee that I’ll give a kobold’s ass for this a week from now.”

Soon: Puddy.

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“What the hell is going on here?” she asked, her spiritual demeanor slipping. “This isn’t basic knives, Seekers! If you lose your weapon, you don’t start slapping and pinching like…”

Callahan stopped in mid sentence. She looked at the scratches on my cheek, and then at Gloria. Gloria froze under her glare.

Gloria looked stricken with guilt or something like it for about half of a second, then she stiffened and squared her shoulders off, proud as ever. Callahan continued to stare, and I wondered how she could stand up under that kind of attention. It wasn’t even directed at me and I felt like wilting.

Callahan said something so guttural and visceral sounding that it could only be swearing, though I didn’t know the language, and spit. Gloria’s eyes went wide and her face went through several contortions of pain as she collapsed onto the floor.

“The God of Pain is a jealous god,” Callahan said. “Deal with it.”

Callahan’s spit did that? I thought, before I realized Gloria was clutching her arm that I’d smashed with my staff when I’d knocked her into the wall.

Callahan hadn’t inflicted anything… I had. Gloria was just now reacting to it. She had been cheating, I realized… that was what the look of guilt had been about. She’d prayed for protection from pain, or the determination to overcome it or something like that, and possibly some other help as well.

“Do you need healing?” Callahan asked me.

“I… um… don’t know,” I said. I didn’t have a lot of experience with cuts, and it was hard to judge the severity of a wound when my body was a map of pain equal to many much worse injuries. “Will this stop on its own?”

“Before temple services are concluded,” she said.

“I think I’ll be okay,” I decided. I would have to go to the healing center after class… if I showed up for dinner with unhealed injuries Amaranth would not be happy… but as long as I wasn’t in any danger, I thought she’d likely approve of me toughing it out when I was learning so much.

“As you were, then, my sisters,” Callahan said, clasping her hands together and bowing. She looked to be very honestly pleased. That might have had as much to do with the way she’d dropped Gloria with a simple act of profanity as it did anything I had done, but she couldn’t exactly be displeased with me.

I’d fought on without complaining against a cheating opponent and turned the tables on her, I’d taken a bleeding wound in a mock combat class and decided to stay.

Once the shock of pain from the scratches was wearing off, I took a few moments to evaluate what had happened to my hand when I grabbed Gloria and her blessing-infused skin. I could take a few moments, because it was going to take Gloria a few moments more. She wasn’t giving up… she was trying to prop herself up, preparatory to actually standing, I thought. I stood back and let her. I thought there was a little pinkness on my fingers, and there was a little tenderness when I flexed them.

It could have been a bit of a problem with holding the staff, but it was pretty small compared to everything else. The fact that I even hefted my staff and stood upright meant I was toughing out much worse pain.

Gloria got herself up to the point where she was kneeling on one knee. She looked at me, and I really couldn’t read anything in her expression except defiance, though if it was me or the pain I couldn’t tell. It would have been so easy for me to keep her on the ground at that point, but as satisfying as it might have been, it wouldn’t help me any.

Well, it would be another theoretical IOU… but I wasn’t counting on anything coming from that. I wasn’t doing any of this for that man. I was doing it for me, and because Amaranth wanted it, and because I’d promised Callahan. I was doing it for Callahan more so than him. The fact that Callahan could shatter the protections of Gloria’s faith with a profane gesture was perhaps one of those things that in a sane world would have been a giant flashing warning sign, but on the other hand it was possible that Gloria’s divine magic was just not that strong. She seemed single-minded in her devotion, but I supposed that could be a sign of being insecure in her faith as anything else.

Gloria had not progressed beyond getting up on one knee, but she was looking a lot steadier. Her eyes were closed, and she was breathing slowly and evenly. She opened her eyes and looked up at me. I fought the urge to look away.

“For the record,” she said, “I do not think I did anything objectionable by using the gifts I have been given to deal with the pain I knew I would receive.”

“I’m not going to argue about that,” I said. Something popped into my head, and I rejected my first impulse, which was to swallow it. “I was winning anyway.”

“It is not a competition,” she said. “The… the object of the exercise isn’t to win.”

“Right, so it doesn’t matter that I was doing that,” I said. “I mean, if it did matter, I’d still be beating you right now.”

“It seemed to be a little more back and forth than that,” she said. I really couldn’t argue that, so I just nodded. Something popped into my head.

“Do you remember asking me if I was related to ‘Brimstone’ Blaise?” I asked her.

She nodded.

“You said you were not.”

“I didn’t think I was,” I said. “I guess she just didn’t like to talk about her old calling that much.”

“Does she know she’s related to demonspawn?”

“I’d guess she did, since she raised me for the last nine years,” I said. “She’s my grandmother, apparently.”

Gloria’s eyes widened very briefly, but then she said, “I suppose I would not admit to being a paladin if I were bringing up someone like you.”

It took me a moment to figure out how to react to that, and what I figured out was that I didn’t need to react to it. I didn’t care about my grandmother and her pride or shame that much. I couldn’t help smiling. I didn’t know how Amaranth would take me throwing little barbs at Gloria… well, that wasn’t true. I had a pretty fair guess how she would feel about it… but it wasn’t like I was actually insulting the girl. I was just telling her things that she probably didn’t actually want to hear.

It could be argued that this would be doing her a favor in the long run, and Steff would probably agree it was a step up from pining over her. The little bit of satisfaction I felt from realizing I’d stung her and she’d missed with her retort was making me feel a little better all over.

“Do you… are you ready to go again?” I asked.

“Will you allow me to retrieve my weapon, or will you strike me down as soon as I get to my feet?” she asked.

“You think I’m waiting for you to stand up just so I can slam you into the ground before you do anything?” I asked. I felt like I should have been insulted, but I was feeling kind of increasingly weirdly giddy. I laughed. “I don’t know how to tell you this, but… I’m just not that patient.”

She nodded, and then slowly got to her feet. She picked up her sword. It took her both arms to raise it. I stood back while she gave it a few test swings. I waited until she nodded to me, and then I let her make the first move.

I’d like to be able to say that without her divine protection, Gloria was no match for me and I was able to knock her down again and again without ever giving up a hit in return. Possibly if I’d kept whamming her, that would have been true. I thought about doing just that… it would have been legitimate, I figured, as I would need to practice that kind of thing on the fly, but there were other things I needed to practice more. Messing around with enchantments came naturally to me. Fighting did not.

So I fought. We fought. Gloria was slow and shaky at first, and I gave her some room to figure out how to cope with that. I didn’t expect any points for being charitable… in fact, I kept expecting her to accuse me of toying with her or mocking her, though she did not say another word the whole time. But if she wasn’t fighting me back, I wasn’t going to learn anything from fighting her… so I gave her a chance to fight. I learned a few things that way.

One was that just as the whole length of the staff was its striking surface, it was also all handle. I couldn’t just hold it one way the whole time and use it effectively. Some grips worked better than others. There might have been a right way to hold it in a given situation, but the situation kept changing.

It wasn’t changing all that quickly, though, because both Gloria and I were already hurting badly. We weren’t exactly moving in slow motion, but neither one of us could keep up a sustained effort.

Another thing I learned was that it really matter a whole lot what Gloria did if I actually connected, but if I didn’t then I regretted putting so much force behind it. She learned that one pretty quickly, too, and she was fairly fast and spry in short bursts. I had a feeling that if I got paired off against her again it would turn into an acrobatics routine. I decided I’d avoid that if I could… Callahan was right about Gloria learning, too. I could see her thinking during the lulls between our bouts of activity.

As those rest periods became longer and more often, I started to worry that we were going to get Callahan’s attention again. I glanced around the room and saw that we already did, but she across the floor, nodding in approval. I also realized that about a third of the class was on the floor, and everybody who was still up and about was moving and fighting like we were. Some of them were more active, but a lot were slower and wobblier.

I didn’t think that I had a particularly high tolerance for pain, but it was possible some of the people who were out of the fight had fought better opponents… or they were just less motivated to keep fighting. At the point when I’d been on the floor, I could definitely have seen the high points of curling up into a tiny little ball and giving up.

A third thing I learned was that being aggressive with my blocking was better than just trying to put a passive barrier between myself and the sword. It meant I had to adjust my grip less, and the results could be a lot better than just canceling out one of Gloria’s attacks.

The class wore on, and it wore us down. I couldn’t say how many times I knocked Gloria off her feet because I wasn’t counting. What good would it have done? If I kept my own count then I didn’t trust the man’s offer… which I didn’t, but if I didn’t trust his offer then it didn’t really matter what the count was.

A sudden stinging pain in my face made me cry out, and I had a moment of wondering what the hell had happened when I realized that the rest of the pain had disappeared… and so had the staff in my hand. Gloria suddenly stood straighter. All around us, people were getting to their feet. It seemed Callahan had canceled all the mocked weapons at once.

“The God of Pain has departed,” Callahan announced. “We’ll be meeting back here on Thursday and we’re going to start really mixing things up. Just so everyone knows, I’m doing a workshop or conference or some other excuse early next week, so no class next Tuesday. Emo Kid!”

I had been wondering if I should shake hands with or say something to Gloria before Callahan called me over, but I hurried across the room, through the throng of students who were going to retrieve their actual weapons.

“Good effort,” she said. “Are you going to do the same thing on Thursday? Because I’ve got a feeling you forget things faster than you learn them.”

“I… yeah,” I said. “I mean, yes, I’m going to do it Thursday.”

“Good,” she said. “And the week after that, I hope. When I get back into town, I’m either going to be in a really good mood or a fucking catastrophic one. You’re going to have some time to do some remedial reading over the weekend. I really strongly suggest you do it.”

I nodded.

“And you tell Johnson I’ll overlook it this time,” she added, “but if I don’t see her curvy ass in class Thursday, I’m going to have to mark her absent. Now go do something about that face.”

Wednesday: You don’t find out what Callahan’s doing. That would be too easy.

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I wondered if they were all conscientious objectors to the pseudoreligious trappings for some reason, or if Callahan had set up some other exercise for students she thought didn’t need any help “slaying the God of Pain”, or if the dwarves had all retreated en masse for reasons having nothing to do with the class.

Even with some of the bulkier bodies missing from the floor, space was very much at a premium. As more pairs of fighters got their weapons mocked and got down to it, the area available to each pair shrank. Already people were bumping into each other and narrowly avoiding errant swings from their neighbors as Gloria and I looked for a spot to stake out.

For a moment I thought this was poor planning… or reckless apathy… on Callahan’s part, but then I realized that she would want everyone to be bunched up right on top of their opponents, where even the cautious and the quick would not be able to avoid getting hit.

Footwork would not play much of a role in the day’s lesson… the object of the exercise was to keep standing, not to keep moving… to fight on in the face of pain, not necessarily to fight well. It would be dirty, it would be ugly, and above all it would be painful, which was likely to be the point.

Gloria was surveying the floor with a decided lack of her usual determination… it seemed like she was looking for a good spot and finding none. I knew that Gloria had learned to wield a sword by watching her brothers and imitating them by herself. It made sense that she wouldn’t be any good at fighting in close quarters… she wasn’t really used to having an opponent in front of her, much less people all around her.

I wasn’t good at fighting under any circumstances, so at least I wouldn’t be on unfamiliar ground.

“Come on,” I said, heading for the edge of the room. If we fought next to a wall, at least there’d be one less side to worry about bumping into people on. “Let’s just get out of everybody’s way.”

I didn’t see Gloria moving, or have any sense that she was following me so I looked over my shoulder… actually remembering to stop moving my legs before I stopped watching where I was going for once. She was still rooted to the spot, looking at me like she wasn’t sure she trusted me enough to run me through in a spot that I picked out.

Well, if that was what I was going to get for trying to be nice I’d just have to look out for myself. I made a beeline for the far corner of the room, then turned around with my back to it. Gloria was still standing there by the mockboxes… I was out on the floor and had my weapon ready. She’d have to come to me, and she’d have to fight with other melees going on all around her… or she could be the one who got yelled at by Callahan.

It didn’t come to that, though… Gloria shook her head like she was trying to shake away a bad influence, very visibly swallowed, and then stalked across the floor towards me. This time she offered no bow or other mark of respect in lieu of a prayer.

“I suppose you would be used to keeping your back to the wall,” she said.

“Not really,” I said. “Not in a fight, anyway… I have spent most of my life trying to stay out of other people’s way, but I haven’t spent that much time working on staying alive.”

As we squared off, I quickly found out that there were drawbacks to where I’d chosen to make my stand. Gloria needed a little room to swing her sword, but I needed more room to swing my staff. I was okay with the basic stance… holding the shaft with both hands centered around the middle… but I’d be banging it into the walls if I tried to swing it like a club, which was really my best bet when it came to inflicting pain. There had to be ways to attack with it effectively without holding it near the end and whomping, or jabbing with it like a pitchfork… something would work better if it actually were my pitchfork… but none of them popped into my head while I was standing there holding the stick up in front of me.

It was a great stance for defense. Gloria came at me without another word, though even I could see the moment on her face when she decided to attack me. The sneer on her face startled me. Luckily, my reaction was to bring the staff up… with the defensive enchantments helping guide my movement, I easily blocked her overhead swing, and the quick slash that followed. With the corner at my back, I was pretty much a fortress.

It looked like Gloria had accuracy enchantments… or rather, blessings… laid on her sword. That was just a guess. If it had been arcane rather than divine, I could have told in a few seconds if I got my hand on the thing, but that wasn’t an option with the original article and I wasn’t sure how it would work to try to read the enchantments on the mocked copy. But when I watched her movements closely, it seemed like there was something guiding the blade. Her swings started out sort of loose and sloppy but ended up focused and true at the point where my staff intercepted them.

It made sense… swords were a lot better for that sort of thing than staves. A blade embodied the idea of “weapon” much more concretely than something that was basically a big stick, and accuracy was a property of weapons. I vaguely remembered hearing that swords and arrows were considered the archetypal weapons by armoury enchanters… possibly I’d picked that up in my enhancements lab, though my attention had a tendency to wander when weapons were the subject.

Staves, on the other hand, were seen as defensive… at a practical level, they were better for blocking than killing. It was certainly harder to inflict an outright fatal wound with a staff, but for the purpose of the day’s exercise there were no outright fatal wounds, just painful ones. When it was enchanted enough to be practically unbreakable and wielded with enough strength, though, there was something to be said for a staff over a sword.

My weapon was all handle and all striking surface. I just needed to figure out how to use it. As much as it suited me to sit there blocking all day, Callahan had made it clear that anyone not getting into the spirit of the exercise would be helped along. That… and not anything that the man in my dream had offered me… was why I needed to figure out a better strategy. I’d take some hits while I was figuring things out, but it would be no different than being hit with a non-magic weapon: however much it hurt, I’d get over it.

I fended off a few more attacks from Gloria. Behind her, the floor was filling up. Most people had tried to grab what looked like open floor, avoiding the walls… but they were finding themselves just as boxed in, and now the pack was moving towards us. I decided to wait until she had more to worry about than me before trying anything really desperate or fancy. Instead, I lashed out at Gloria’s sword arm with one end of the pole after one of her attacks.

I hit more hilt than hand, and realized afterwards that if I’d really put some oomph behind it and followed through I still could have rattled her bones quite a bit. I’d been too hesitant, too tentative… too delicate about it. As it was, I barely threw her off her stride and took too long getting myself squared back up again. She took advantage of me being off-balance… mentally even more than physically… to pull her sword back and lunge at my stomach.

My staff’s magic saved me… my reflexes weren’t enough, but it all but snapped into position by itself. I batted her sword blade down with more force than I’d used trying to attack her. The impact jarred me… her grip loosened for a moment and she stepped back to adjust her hold on the hilt. Again it occurred to me seconds too late that I should have followed through there.

Why was I missing so many opportunities the time I was determined to succeed? Other melee classes hadn’t gone like this… had they? Or was it a case that I hadn’t even been paying enough attention to know I’d missed an opportunity? The principle that Callahan had espoused regarding knowledge might have applied: in studying fighting, what I was learning was how badly I sucked.

No, not how badly… how. In what ways. Fighting ability wasn’t a quantity, a numerical score. Standing around on a battlefield waving a weapon wasn’t a magic ritual that made you a better fighter. Even practicing specific movements that other, better fighters made would only take you so far. It was almost scientific: you figured out what worked and what didn’t work, and why.

Of course, like any such “science”, the rules you derived from it couldn’t stand up to repeated contact with reality and trying to rely on them too much would likely result in embarrassment or death, which would probably be why people also talked about “fighting instincts”, and why even the best fighters did occasionally die.

But thinking about martial skill as being like a kind of science appealed to me. I tried whipping at Gloria’s hand with the end of the staff again, this time more forcefully. She was learning, too… she withdrew her hand quickly, stepping back and around the swing and then lashing out at my arm from the side. That was a bit harder to block than the last one had been, but the fact that I needed to twist around to get the staff up to block it made it easier to follow through.

I heard Gloria grunt as I batted her sword out wide. I didn’t waste a moment ruing when I realized I should have smashed her in the face before she recovered. I was figuring things out. One of the things was that the staff’s magic was working against me… it would have been easier to just step a bit to the side and move my arm out of the way, but the instincts of the defensive weapon were stronger than my own reflexes. Could I do something about them? I didn’t want to have to figure out if what it wanted to do was the correct thing every time Gloria came after me, but that meant either following its lead every time or ignoring it every time.

Or silencing it altogether… I was, to some degree, an enchanter. Battlefield enchantment was considered a high-level discipline. I knew it was possible in general… there were whole fighting styles devoted to combining swordplay with spells that could be practiced and drilled until they could be cast in an instant to enhance an attack. I honestly wasn’t sure if MU offered courses in that kind of thing, and if it did then I would be far from qualified to take them.

But messing with the characteristics of a phantom weapon would probably be easier… being unreal, they would have less “weight” to them. It only took a tiny effort to feel the magic of the thing in my hands… the thing was magic, after all. I could sense the eagerness of the defensive spells. They were more complex than the sort of property enhancement I was used to. There was no way I could have woven them myself, but how hard would it be to suppress it or rip it out entirely?

For that matter, could I throw a little accuracy into my phantasmal staff? Sustaining that sort of thing for the duration of a swing would probably be no problem. Doing it in a way that didn’t totally fuck up the swing past the point that I was gaining any benefit from it would be another.

I blocked another attack from Gloria. Callahan had made it sound like there weren’t going to be any pauses or breaks in the entire period, which meant I wasn’t going to get much time or room to do anything complicated in. I made a wild swing at Gloria, forcing her to back into a big guy who was backing into her, and while she whirled halfway around out of reflex, I reached out down the pathways of magic I felt coursing between my hands, grabbed hold of the defensive spells, and ripped with all my mystical might.

I felt it giving way in a big way… too big, I thought at first. I felt the staff losing integrity inside my hands, saw it flicker and almost vanish. It snapped back into satisfyingly solid pseudoreality pretty quickly, though. In the instant after that, I realized that I’d just thrown away a pretty solid advantage.

The blue-tipped staff of defense had been almost as basic a magic weapon as you could find, especially compared to Gloria’s more elaborate holy blade. Now it was the most basic magic weapon you could find: a simple magic quarterstaff. A centuries-old wizard probably had better weapon enchantments on his staff of power than this thing did. It was now nothing more than a basically unbreakable stick for hitting people with.

It already felt more awkward in my hands. The way I’d been holding it before had felt so easy, so natural… now I wasn’t sure how to space my hands or what angle to hold it at. It was now very obvious that it had been the weapon’s preferences, not mine… what was that old enchanter’s saying about the trustworthiness of things that seemed to think for themselves? I didn’t suspect the staff was sinister, but just because something was well-intentioned didn’t mean it would be smart to rely on it.

Gloria looked at me like she could see the change. I had a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach. I made an effort to hold it like I’d been holding it before… it was a good position to defend from… and looked around the room. Callahan was looking at us. Her expression was as close to neutral as it probably got… she looked skeptical but not openly hostile. If she’d been watching, she would have just seen me making that wild swing and now she was watching to see what I would do next.

That meant it was time to figure out what exactly that was.

Monday: To the pain.

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