“You know,” Nathan observed idly, shifting his shield to deflect an incoming spear strike to the side, “I seem to be doing a lot more violence than I’ve ever done in my life.”

“Perils of the Birth,” Tanya observed as she parried a similar spear strike and casually twisted her sword to slash through an armored throat. “Millionborn go to places with conflict or whatever, toss you into the deep end. Not a lot of slice of life.”

“And,” he continued, largely ignoring her as the spear stuck to his shield instead because Saucer decided to eat it, “I’m a lot better at it than I would have expected. Even granting that I put a huge amount of my early power meta-accumulation into trauma suppression so that I didn’t have constant breakdowns, that doesn’t explain why an over-civilized softie like myself is, like, any degree of adequate at this.”

“Don’t worry, you’re not even close to adequate.” Tanya’s voice was dry as dust, somehow conveying that it was true and also delivering it without sting or barb. Her hilt came up, bringing the sword into a diagonal that a sword rebounded off of, and she stepped forward to hit her newest opponent with her pommel. That woman’s skull failed under the hit, and Tanya pivoted and cut to the side as she stepped back, killing Nathan’s opponent. “Like, Saucer needs a few years of real training to hit mediocre. Another few to make you hit mediocre.”

Saucer’s wielder and soul-bonded partner snorted in amusement. “Have you considered that your basis of comparison might be broken? Kinda like how I don’t think of myself as particularly good at video games because I only made Immortal in DOTA, not leaderboard, but that put me in the top like one hundredth of a percent of the playerbase.” He stepped forward, shield meeting shield of the combatant in front of him in a resounding clash that drove his opponent back a step. In the opening, he stabbed awkwardly downwards through the chainmail of one of the two incoming other attackers, taking advantage of that person’s lack of a shield and the close quarters to snag a quick kill before stepping back. “People who strive in something tend to compare themselves to their peers and those who’re better, and then we compare others to us, and it… skews stuff.”

“I don’t have peers,” Tanya growled dangerously. Her sword flickered out, six or so feet of steel licking out to kill all of their enemies within thirty feet, granting them a reprieve while Nathan fixed his footing. “I sure as corpses pile don’t have anyone better to compare myself to. I’ve only ever lost one fight in my life, and that one was all setup; and I’ve fought everyone who’s crossed my path.”

“Well.” Nathan slid one foot a few inches to the side, bending his knee just a little bit more. He could feel the increased stability in the stance, but he didn’t understand at all how he could tell, nor how it had occurred to him to shift in that manner. Correctly, he filed that under things that were because of being a Millionborn and having Saucer to use subconscious indicators with weight and heft in order to nudge him in various ways—though incorrectly, he ascribed slightly more of it to mimicking others than he should have, given how little he understood the relevance of Tanya’s footwork. “That sounds like a fun story,” he said after a few long seconds, seconds in which he brushed an incoming spear strike aside with his own spear and then thrust out with Saucer, a newly-formed spike piercing through his opponent as the momentarily spike-equipped shield ate that opponent’s life force in the space of a single heartbeat.

“It’s not that fun,” Tanya disagreed. She wrenched a sword out of a too-weak pair of hands, shattering the wrists that held them as she did so, and swung with too little care. The result was her stolen sword shattering as it hit, and she spat on the lack of floor before hurling the jagged-tipped hilt into the last enemy’s head. “Survive all five waves and I’ll tell you anyway.”

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“Five waves?”

“Yeah, that was just the first one. The warmup chumps.” She shrugged. “Sharpen up or die.”

“You could kill all of these in your sleep,” Nathan observed thinly. “I can tell, because I’m not that big of an idiot. So what’s the deal?”

“Sharpen up,” she repeated herself, a hint of ice entering her voice that made him shiver, “or die.”

“Fine,” he said shortly. “Here’s to not dying shortly, I guess.”

The second wave proved a step up from the first wave that was noticeably only because of how much of a non-challenge the first wave had been. If the first one had been a meditative warmup of practicing, in somewhat slow motion, the motions of combat, the second one was a mild cardiovascular exercise warmup.

Similarly, the second wave began to take more form, as Nathan observed out loud to Tanya’s noncommittal grunt. The enemies who strode into their fighting range were, starting at the second wave, men and women and people of other or indeterminate genders, rather than being abstract opponents who merely possessed the oppositional nature—likewise, instead of remaining in the realm of abstract in distinguishing characteristics, they included humans, catfolk both leonine and with a more domesticated bent, rabbit-kin, and one boar-tusked miscreant whose appearance and presentation was split diagonally across their furred but otherwise nude form.

Their weapons did the same. Instead of swords writ general, there were tulwars and sabers and longswords, which were in no way interchangeable and it gave Nathan some puzzlement that they could ever have had an abstract representation which was at all functional. Similarly, instead of spears there was a dozen different iterations of what he recognized as the Mediterranean Omni-Spear from the blog readings he’d done while pretending to be busily working at a job which ultimately required very little effort, a practice which he’d mastered in a position where his mastery of it was irrelevant due to the fact that his munificent salary was fundamentally paid not for working hard, or even seeming to work hard, but rather on uncomplainingly working for a resort that catered to some of the worst human beings on the planet Earth without sabotaging them and killing all of their clients, something which he would have been perfectly capable of doing but which in the end would have been superfluous.

He gave no thought to any of that in the moment, however. Saucer, as his shield, fit perfectly upon his arm as he shifted it with what he thought were minimal and smooth motions of his body in order to bring shield and weapon alike to bear on one foe after another. His spear stabbed, sometimes to probe for advantage but usually to take advantage of an opening created by his opponent trying to hit him and getting fouled by Saucer.

And all the while, Tanya continued to be a bored-seeming thresher, steadily killing everyone who approached her, occasionally grabbing a weapon from one of the hapless automatons they were fighting and hurling it more often than not at an opponent on Nathan’s side for lack of an immediate target of her own that she found more deserving.

Soon enough, the second wave came to an end, and Nathan set himself in yet another incremental improvement on his best efforts at a balanced stance. He could tell, again, that it was better, that he had gotten better out of proportion to the meager untutored practice he was being afforded; but equally, he knew that he needed it too much to question it overmuch or object.

If the third wave was to be as large of an increase in difficulty as the second one had been, he thought to himself with mild concern, and each wave after that to be as much again? Well, it would be an interesting challenge to survive the fifth, indeed.

Reader: it did not require sphinxes of black quartz to judge that prophecy.

Well and good, and convenient. They are mostly for vows, regardless.

But we digress—the third wave, in its due momentary course, began.