Logy really wasn’t bad when you were doing exactly what she wanted you to do.

In this case, I was practicing sword-fighting. I didn’t want to—what I really wanted to do was roll around in the dirt and wallow, like a pig in a drought—but then again, this was probably for the best. Getting active gave me something better to do than, well, ruminate. And the mere presence and irritatingness of Logy gave me something to focus on.

Not only that, but she was my target! Teeing herself up! Not that she was allowing herself to take a beating. No, this was just standard sparring between our humanoid forms. And while our Stats were through the roof and our swords were magnificent objects of destiny, battling each other in these conditions felt so profoundly mundane.

You know how an epic clash has these big sounds and energy whooshes? And even a fight between wild animals comes with growls and stuff? Well, we had none of that. Just flat clangs of our swords, and Logy responding in utter silence to all of my moves. We didn’t even get the cool factor that comes with the gold sword deactivating the silver in a pinch and coming in clutch, because Logy was using a random rusty decoy. She might literally have gotten it from the bottom of a bog—it smelled that way.

Oh, and it wasn’t even graceful. It seemed that when I counteracted the Debug Blade’s blistering decimation of my Intelligence Stat with even the most pathetic of Intelligence-boosting cantrips, I lost that fluidity I once had, the grace I’d used to murder countless raccoons. Woohoo for world peace, but aww for my chances of landing a decent hit on anything.

It just went to show that my mission was, seemingly, never over. And I was in the perfect state to mull over all the worst aspects of this!

But…after parrying Logy—a very slow and rough parry, mind you, that Logy patiently accepted—I stabbed the blade in the ground and raised a hand to tap out for a moment.

…Wow, I actually jammed a sword straight into the earth. Real deep. And it hadn’t hurt my arm at all. Weird how much of a difference Strength made. Also, the sensation of my Stats returning to normal almost made me lightheaded. It was like recovering from transdimensional numbness. Ihhh…at least it was brief.

Anyway, I brought out my spirit board (technically Chora’s, but I was trying not to think about that) and asked her a question. “U THINK ID BE BETTER IF I HAD MORE HAND-EYE COORDINATION?”

Logy stared ahead. Not even at me. Her eyes were flat black, her mouth oddly nonexistent. Just like I remembered them, and yet incredibly odd in the light of day.

I don’t understand what you just asked

Uh…could I really explain this? How could I word it… “OK SO U KNOW HANDS? HANDWRITING?”

Why are you saying that

What’s an ok?

I sighed aloud. “ITS SHORT FOR THE WORD ‘OKAY.’ HUMANS LIKE IT”

Logy shifted.

You’re already testing my patience with your lack of apostrophes

Well, it’s not like the spirit board bothered! I thought. What do you want from me?!

Ohhh, so the letter “u” in this context means “you.”

“RIGHT”

Y’know, if I had realized Logy was having trouble deciphering my messages, I might have made them a little longer and clearer from the start…or then again, maybe not. I wasn’t sure she would thank me for the courtesy, and gratitude does not equal “refraining from insulting Taipha for the time being.”

Okay, so it turned out Logy did know what hand-eye coordination was. She sent over a fresh reply.

More coordination could only help. But in terms of sheer capability, Stats will win out over the physical limits of the body and brain any day.

No, your movements are so languorous because of that other thing you told me

“MY WIS AND INT?”

Exactly

I groaned and shook my head wildly. “UGH BUT THATS WHATS KEEPING MY HEAD FROM HURTING! THATS NOT FAIR!!!”

HAHAHA what’s fairness. You’re a cat

I took offense to that, which caught me myself off guard. I mean, I wasn’t not a cat. But…but come on, fairness was good and stuff! We liked it when there were fair humans! A-and fair animals, those could exist too!

“R U SERIOUS?” I asked. “EVEN CATS HAVE SOME IDEA OF FAIR. MAKE ALLIANCES, MAKE TRADES”

Logy shrugged.

Okay, I didn’t know that

But still. You and your cat society grafted that onto the world yourself. No law of the cosmos says you’ve got to be fair

I squinted at her. “OK BUT WHAT ABOUT GODS? ARKMAGI???”

Her eyes flared.

Don’t bring up my Maker lightly.

That actually made me laugh. I stuck out my tongue at her, pleased to have made her angry but not wailing-on-me angry. (Not yet, at least.) I board-screamed, “HYPOCRITE!!!”

She shifted again. Okay, so even a butterfly had obvious nervous tics. In her case, she would shuffle on her feet, almost like a…a dancing horse.

Alright, that was a little too funny. I had to stop chuckling at some point.

Logy very pointedly raised up her blade, running a delicate finger across the edge.

I don’t think I came here to be demeaned

She had a point. And frankly, I didn’t want my training to be overwhelmed by witty backtalk. Part of me would much rather refine my clumsiness into a style. Or the beginnings of one, at least, to tide me over until I completed the cantrip that could salvage my swordplay.

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

As our swords banged awkwardly together again, I began to see the problem. You see, I had a vast reservoir of Wisdom within me, just sitting there waiting to be tapped into. In fact, it was almost like that reservoir of aura I had lazing around in my circulatory system or whatever.

Tapping into it in the heat of battle wasn’t second nature. Instead, I was tapping into my Intelligence for this battle. Which was slow, and that meant I sucked.

Every sword move I was making was rote, and based on some stray human idea. Left jab, right jab, left block, right block. It was extremely elementary. So…why wasn’t Logy upping the intensity?

Oh, maybe because she didn’t wanna kill me.

So if I wanted to break free, I had to do what the Debug Blade forced me to do by default: let go of my smarts and rely fully on the Wisdom, which was nothing but instinct magnified.

And in that moment, everything changed.

My arms sagged like spaghetti and gorilla-swung the blade into Logy, flying toward her hip. She blocked it easily. No problem. I just gorilla-swung the other way. She blocked that too.

Soon I was exclusively gorilla-swinging, changing the height, speed, and direction of the swing for infinite variations! Somehow, she still blocked them all. Worse, she didn’t say or do anything suggesting the remotest surprise.

STOP. This sucks

I pouted. No it does not! I was on to something!

What are you even trying to do

Are you trying to copy the way you normally fight with the Blade?

No! Not at all! I was…

Never mind. I groaned with the realization that she was pretty much right. “I DIDNT DO IT ON PURPOSE”

Of course not. Nobody is bad on purpose

“LOGY…DO U USE SARCASM?”

I’d rather not answer that

It would defeat the purpose of sarcasm

Wow. There’s something about you and Sierra that just…sucks the words right out of me. I’m shocked every time.

I was beginning to worry about Logy, actually. She’d started out life as an imposing figure—in terms of Stats, Levels, and weird glitch-related abilities, she still was imposing—but every now and then, she sent out a message that really made me wonder if her Intelligence was…if it could possibly be…even less than mine.

I took pity on her. “LOGY U JUST ADMITTED U DO USE SARCASM”

Yeah that was the joke

Okay, never mind. Taipha loses again.

Uh…getting back on topic… “ANYWAY HOW DO I FIX IT WITHOUT HEAD HURT”

“Without head hurt”? Really? I just said I hate abbreviations that make little sense. What was THAT

I gave her a “hmph” and a sashay. “IT WAS ON PURPOSE”

(Note: it wasn’t.)

She gave no signs of either indulging that or suffering under the heat of my incredible diss.

You know, I could really learn from that.

Speaking of learning, I started wondering if my whole strategy of “trying to let go” was barking up the wrong tree. It was an oxymoron! As I clinked and clunked against Logy once more, I thought back to Lyen-Chunst, and how Chora—frustrating as she was—could only become a master of the art after establishing a rock-solid grasp of the fundamentals.

Maybe my instinctless baby brain could only handle left parry, right parry. But if it did those moves well enough, and quick enough, and with all my multiplied force behind them—I’d be good!

I launched another perfectly predictable blow at Logy’s block, but this time she staggered.

I’ve been waiting for this

It’s strong

Obvious. Like a rock. But strong

Alright, maybe Earth was my element.

This clod of dirt was about to show her what it’s made of (dirt)!

Now that I’d accepted the idea that I was just too low-INT to strategize much, new paths ahead became clearer. Before, I’d had a million options for cool attacks and counterattacks under the vague heading of Untapped Wisdom and no idea how to get there. Now I had like three options in plain sight. Attack high, attack low, attack from the side.

And someday, I might even attack diagonally.

After a few minutes of me battering hard against Logy’s blocks, my sword actually slipped beyond her defenses. It almost nicked her. Not because I’d been creative. Just because I’d been fast, and blunt, like a soaring stone.

Logy paused, then gave me a bit of a wake-up call:

Let’s move on to actual sparring now

I literally dropped my blade in surprise. You call what we were just doing fake sparring?! I’m dripping sweat! And my brain is—

My Intelligence and Wisdom returned to normal levels. The world was in balance and all was right again. All the “revelations” I’d just had about finding the ideal fighting style were unmasked: my combat reasoning really had reverted to grade school.

I could literally envision a whole galaxy of other cool moves I could’ve been using on Logy just now, if only my brain hadn’t been out of whack. Yet again, I sighed.

You’ll get it

Logy said her first encouraging thing to me. Ever. In fact, it might have been her first encouraging thing in all of time and space. It caught me so much by surprise that I didn’t register it at first, thinking she wanted me to grab something off the ground.

But no, she repeated the sentiment for good measure.

You’ll develop a new understanding once you’ve practiced enough in this state…if that’s the way it has to be

Oh yeah! It didn’t have to be this way, not quite. Bayce said she’d make a better Intelligence cantrip if this one worked out, after all. Not a perfect solution, but far better than this. “THE INT COMES FROM SOMETHING IM WEARING,” I told her, pointing at the new necklace. “A CANTRIP. U KNOW THESE?”

Was it just me, or did Logy huff back?

Why would I know these. What are “these”

I almost slapped my forehead. If there were fifty million billion weapons and resources I had no clue about, then there were twice as many for her. Now that she wasn’t threatening and decimating me, she could probably use all the Stat boosts she could get, just like I could. Especially if we were both defending the Vencian Wood from some greater threat.

So I descended into the unending torment that is explaining.

It was still afternoon. The day felt so young, and as we in our non-humanoid forms sat by the stagnant little pond, what the dragonflies had left behind, I realized that the time-honored advice really worked. Time and busywork had distracted me from my falling-out with Chora.

The feelings that’d been eating me up after Chora yelled at me (and I yelled at Chora) didn’t seem quite so gnarled. They still stung at a touch, but the pit they had formed in my belly just didn’t matter as much. I didn’t like the idea of seeing her again right now. Nor did I hate it, like I had an hour before. It stood to reason that in an hour more, I might want to go back and say “hello,” and “I’m sorry.”

As I explained to Logy some of the things I had learned about the Vencian human world, their magic and weapons, these thoughts about Chora circled in the backstage of my mind. Logy wasn’t asking many questions, making it even easier for me to maintain two tracks of separate reflections.

Then we were interrupted, and the sound made me feel deeply bad for a whole different reason.

…Get it? Bad, as in ba-a-ad? Like the sound of a sheep? Because a sheep’s bleat was what we were hearing!

But seriously, I hoped Logy wouldn’t go evil again and eat the sheep or something.