It’s probably because of the warm glow in my body that I don’t immediately attack when the two newcomers warp into the room. They’re both big, broad-shouldered types in that sort of classic Orc-y way. Their dentition is kind of extraordinary and they’ve got a hideous-but-cool thing going on with color and texture from probably scarification on their faces, with warpaint visible on the unarmored bits of their bodies that matches their faces.

“Hey,” I say, lamely. I clap my hands together, extinguishing the lightning between them. I ground it out into the Aether since I have plenty of charge in the tank, by which I mean that I can’t fill up any further than I have; 27 out of 27 mana, a full bar of Charge, and a full bar of Focus, for all that I can’t seem to. I haven’t figured out how to repurpose elements rather than recycle them, and lightning’s not what I want right now.

“Hey yourself.” The orc on my left sounds a lot more confident and present than I do. She smirks at me, knowing how much more cool than me she sounds.

“Talking to the food?” The orc on my right has a voice about two registers lower than her alto, a rumble that I can practically feel in my bones. “Is that a thing we do now?”

“Eh.” She shrugs, not taking her eyes off of me. “This is new. Usually they don’t try talking to us.”

“Because you’re monsters?” I scratch the back of my head with one hand, wary.

“They’re monstrous, not monsters.” Amber’s voice is quiet as she steps up next to me, and the male orc’s head rotates just a touch, enough to make it clear that his eyes are on her. There’s a hunger in them, something fierce and unguarded. Turning, not enough to lose sight of the orc across from me but enough to look at my companion’s face, I see that hunger reflected in the Paladin’s eyes.

“I’m guessing,” I say slowly, sort of chewing on the words, “that there’s a bunch of complexity to this situation, with a bunch of competing traditions and whatnot, and everything could be viewed with a certain amount of nuance. But I’m also guessing that you two want to fight us.”

That got a cold gleam in the female orc’s eyes. “Challenging us, little spark?”

I smile at her all friendly-like, but my heart’s not in it. My heart is racing and there’s a fire in my belly. I want to give Amber what she wants, in more ways than one, and I want to see what we can do together, and I want to shut that cold gleam down. She’s got some funky bracers but nothing else in the way of gear that looks interesting or impressive, and he’s got a tapered stick, maybe some sort of baton, so I can’t easily tell what they’re going to pull out. I’ve got two null-combos riding in my hair from where I scratched my head, which means two each of [Dampen Magic], [Suppress Magic], [Dispel Magic], and [Purge Positive Effects], and that’s about all I was able to manifest before it looked weird. They’re still touching me, so I can still modify their commands, at least.

“By the grace of the Gods watching.” Amber says it like it’s a ritual, and I can’t help but scoff a little, laughing.

She shoots me a betrayed look, like I’m undercutting her, which I guess I am a little. “Godsforsaken’s in the name of this place. You think they’re watching here? Any of them?”

Both of the orcs give a sort of amused grunt, and their muscles start to do that sort of pre-battle tensing thing. “And what blessing would you invoke, soft-face?”

I smile at her toothily. Soft face my ass, I’m just not an over-muscled slab. I can feel the blood pounding through my body. I’ve never been hungry for a fight like this, not since I was a kid. “The Void’s hungry. Let’s you and him feed it.”

The millisecond I finish saying it, everyone moves. The orcs both break into a bright glow that runs along their tattoos and scars, but my orbs are faster than their activation. They haven’t even taken a step before the light gutters out, and whatever was going to happen doesn’t. I’m pushing my limited internal mana store into a few orbs, but the chick is in my face before they cohere, and I almost block like she’s just throwing a punch.

That’s a mistake, and I turn my footwork into a pivot away from her main hand. The bracers have a couple of wicked blades coming out of them, so when her other hand comes around to gut me, I deflect her up at the elbow, throwing a punch of my own. My form is solid, though I’ve always been more focused on the cardio workout part of martial arts than the actual punchy bits, and there’s maybe four thousand Newtons - a thousand pounds of force, I guess, in vernacular units - in the strike. It hurts.

Specifically, it hurts my hand.

She doesn’t give me any time to recover from the punch, but that’s fine, it’s not like my feet were involved. I fade backwards and then sway, but she brings her fist back around with a weird shuffle step and I take a glancing hit that sends me staggering. I turn that into a dive away from her followup and come up into a roll, and she’s grinning at me as the kading ka-ka-kading from the other side of the room rolls out. I can’t spare a glance, but it sounds like Amber is basically beating her way through a steel wall with her sword with those ridiculously fast strikes of hers, the bell-tones not just overlapping but so tight together they’re indistinct.

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Orc lady is making a mistake by giving me even a split second of breathing room. She takes a flashbang to the face for it, which she shrugs off with a huff and a couple of blinks, hopping backwards in case I close in for a clinch. I don’t, because I’m not an idiot; it’s a couple of orbs that zip in instead. She’s not an idiot either, and she pops them with the blades before they touch skin, but in the meantime my buffs are coalesced.

She notices that real quick, when I sway away from her strike again but this time do a sort of squatting duck under her backfist and nail her in the knee with a kick. I leave her with a present, a leech orb, but she slaps it with a grunt and it pops. I snag the puff of mana, but it still leaves me down a point, and for all that my mana regeneration is pretty good even in a fight, she’s fast, and I’m not getting much back.

I go toe to toe with her for the next exchange. She’s stronger, tougher, taller, and more experienced than I am, but right now with my buffs I’m just a little bit faster, and I’ve had more training, so it’s pretty close to a draw. Pretty close, but on the wrong side. I’m breathing hard as I deflect punch after punch, and she’s still steady and steely as she keeps up the pressure and more or less ignores my strikes, blocking with the intent to trap and break my wrist if I go for her face and letting me futilely punch into her rock-hard abs as much as I want. I learn my lesson after the first time, since even though it didn’t hurt per se it was a waste of my effort, and I try to turn every deflection into a joint lock or a chance to grapple.

It’s a blur, and she’s not slowing down, and I can’t slow down either. I’m floating, I barely even recognize that I have a body that’s involved in this fight; it’s pure motion, everything is blocks and counters and desperately striving for that moment of advantage. I see her feint coming and take the opportunity to throw her, I don’t even know how, but she brings me with her and I go down almost as hard as she does. We’re in the clinch and I get what should have been a pin, but she rolls anyway, letting me dislocate her shoulder so that she can land a solid punch right in the sternum.

I break. Buffs and all, I break. I can hear the cracking of bones, and the pain whites out most of my mind. I’m not even touching the ground for what feels like a full couple of seconds and by the time I hit the wall I’m already resigned to the fight being over. I don’t intend to go easy, but I’m slow and hazed with pain, so instead of a deflection into a kick to her face it’s a barely-a-deflection into her hand hammering down into my leg above the knee with a sickening crack and a flare of pain -

- and the orc’s bracer-blade is just a half-dozen centimeters from my face when she stops. It takes me a couple of seconds to realize it, and then the blades wink out, and she grins this wide-mouthed grin of absolute joy.

“- a fucking damn good fight, softie.” I reflexively take her hand and she hauls me up. I don’t even bother trying to hold back the scream of pain, but I’m standing on the unbroken leg. Well, I’m vertical, mostly vertical; most of my weight is on her as I look around in confusion.

I get it after a sec, and I grin back at my, well, not exactly sparring partner. [Agony Resistance] and a few other skills have kicked in, so I’m back to mostly functional for now, as long as I’m careful. “Lasted just long enough, I guess.” I’m breathing shallow, Skills notwithstanding. There’s definitely some broken ribs, and I don’t want to aggravate them any further.

“Yeah.” There’s a weird cant to the orc’s head, an attitude in her body. “Lasted long enough.”

You let me, I didn’t say. I’m not a complete idiot. It’s even barely possible that she was trying to win all along. “That was a good fight. Wouldn’t mind fighting you again, if I wasn’t on my way out.” I eye her, hoping she gets the hint. “Or with you.”

“Doesn’t seem likely.” Her face is way more intent than her voice. “With you on your way out.”

“I’m a fan of unlikely options.” I nod towards where Amber is chatting up the other orc; he’s sagged against the wall, and she has a hand on his shoulder. “We won, yeah? I missed what happened.” I missed what happened mostly because I was flying through the air, out of my mind with pain and shock, with a shattered sternum. I don’t say that.

“You won fair and square,” she says, nodding with that intent look still present. “Amber got a clean opening on Johannes’s collarbone. She pulled it, he yielded.”

“I’d accept your names as…” I’m searching for the word for a second. “As forfeits, I guess?”

That gets me a long few seconds of silence. See, there’s a lot you can do with someone’s name, freely given, and surrendered after a fair fight in lieu of any other penalty when the penalty could have been death counts as freely given. Or at least, that’s my guess; I’m new to this whole magic thing. If I’m an asshole, getting their names would let me -

“Mathilda.” She’s got a little smile, something complicated and unsure. “Mathilda Surefoot, Johannes Starbreaker, both of us Clan Berger, we who the winds and storm broke on for a thousand years, who reached for the sky with our bones in the fires below. The last, now.”

I nod slowly. She’s given me something important here, from their expressions, which reading between the lines means that between the Clan-name, their given names, and what sounded like feat-names, I’ve got the sum total of their… social identity, or something like that. “I -”

“- alright, that’s enough.” Mathilda shifts, and I let out a whimper as even her gentle motion jostles me. “Take this fool of a wizardling, girl.” She dumps me into Amber’s nonplussed, outstretched arms, smirking. This time, I scream. “He’s got some breaks. Took a good hit and wouldn’t stay down, too; but I like them with the low voices, and Johannes would be jealous.”

I can feel the mana flood as they discorporate, and I grab it somewhat desperately. There’s more than I can take, even emptied out as I am, so I shunt a fair bit of it into Amber. She finishes putting me down carefully, leaning against the wall, and starts unlacing my boots. “Hey, what -”

“Pants and shirt off.” Her voice brooks no argument, and when I open my mouth to try anyway, her lips are on mine, hot and hungry. “I’ve got bones to fix,” she breathes into my ear. “And then your forfeit for me to collect. I think I deserve it.” And for once, I shut up and stopped arguing.