On the marble. Amidst the garden. Staff in hand. JOY humming behind my shoulder. Brutal heat waves beating down on bare skin. Sweat dripping down black hair, stinging my closed eyes. Welts smarting painfully. Every muscle sore. Tinge of salt in the air. Fingers rubbed bloody and raw by friction. The calm expectation of a professional weighing me down like a manacle around my leg. These are the price of growing power. What it takes to become the best. But judging by my record against Tay today, I still have a long way yet to go.
It is the fourth summer since I met her, and the fifteenth of my life.
I’m coming into my height more with each passing day. Growing leaner, faster, stronger. Striped with muscle and flexible like a sapling tree. More disciplined in both mind and body. I’ve been outpacing my studies in the capital’s academies so consistently that the tutors no longer know what to do with me. Yet book knowledge, grades and schoolyard rank; they never did and still do not appeal to me. Combat determines everything in our world. So it is only fitting that I shape myself to excel in it side-by-side with the girl who first introduced me to it.
This tradition between Tay and I started on one of my trips years ago. A noise from out in the garden woke me early in the morning, the misty hour before dawn. I went to the kitchen, smelled Mars’ caf, and followed it to the back porch where he was working. One of the rare times he could visit. Every so often a silhouette of a wild girl would sprint past atop the estate’s outer wall. I asked if it was alright to join her.
Mars smiled behind his cup, didn’t look up, and said, “I knew you would.”
Since then, we’ve been partners in crime. Inseparable from sunup to sundown, whether off exploring nature in the mountains or practicing our JOY classes and using them to race to the nearby coast. And then the physicals. Mars works us like dogs, and he doesn’t care to scale his training regimens down from the level of pro league fighters for a couple of grade schoolers with too much energy. He says it’s for our own good. I think he just wants us passing out early around the fire so he can have a few hours of peace and quiet to himself before bed.
Even so, I can’t deny the results. Suffer all I will in this garden and its heat, when I return to the capital and face off against my peers at the academy, I’m stunned at how easy it is to beat them. Not just beat them. Exceed them on a fundamental level and dismantle them entirely.
It’s unnerving, sometimes. I’m very good at fighting. Maybe too good. Just like my studies. And I wonder if that’s why Mars looks at me in that strange way he sometimes does. Like there is a history between us that stretches long before I was born, and it is not a good one.
It took years to grow accustomed to this grueling tradition. Stamina and strength has never been my strongest suit. I’ve always been quicker on my mind than my feet. Tay, by contrast, is a natural. She’s a neverending fountain of energy. Always has more left no matter how many hours we drill and spar. I try to rationalize it by remembering she’s grown up training at an elite level since her earliest years, but her stamina is still on an entirely different level from mine, even with all the catching up I’ve done. I have to force myself up every step of progress. For her, it’s like the world leaps to do her bidding. If she ever cared to put her mind to studying books, I’m sure she’d blow me out of the water there, too.
Mars watches us from the shaded back porch of the main house, lounging on a sun chair with a half-eaten apple in hand. Tay and I are forced to train out in the sun. Always are. We’re already soaked through with sweat by the time we finish warming up with JOYless physicals. Shirts are stripped off and left to dry on the wood. Our developing musculature stands out in tension, flush with blood, as we wait for instruction.
“For sparring, we’re focusing on your aura, Tay!” Mars shouts. “And Thane, you’ll be practicing it as well. You’re still lagging behind her.”
I nod as I gasp for breath, hands on my knees. My fingers swipe through a projector screen to activate my classes in a motion that’s been worn into my central nervous system. Tay mirrors the motion beside me, still not fully synced with her newest prosthetic arm. Something in the fingers, I think. She was having trouble tying her sneakers earlier. Our classes activate in tandem- hers a carbon-copy of her father’s, mine a manifestation of my personal strengths.
All the songbirds get as a warning is a crackling fireworks flash that ripples up Tay’s body before her ki kicks into gear with a jet engine shriek. Raw life energy floods from her heart through every pore in her body in a ravenous torrent, then settles into a rippling aura of white gold that shimmers around her like liquified starlight. Her hair is flung straight up in the current. The shriek fades to a rushing, airy waterfall sound as she tightens the flow of energy closer to her skin, supersaturating the atmosphere until motes of that energy begin physically dripping out of the air. They flutter around her like falling blossoms, one sweeping over to bump against my nose.
Outwardly, there’s no sign like that when my classes activate. No armory prompt to summon a weapon like a Duelist, no gear appearing like a Mage or Mecha. I feel the buzz of my JOY’s neural link in my skull, and that is all. If I were to open a projector screen, it’d show that I didn’t choose three classes, but rather, three copies of the same one: the Shifter class.
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Shifter is the eighteenth and final class, and it only grants a single power: allowing you to exchange one thing for another. The exchange has to be deemed ‘equal’ by a JOY, but that’s the class’ only rule. The exchange can be between any two concepts. Physical attributes and stamina are the most common- give up agility in exchange for being weightier, et cetera- but more nebulous things like emotions aren’t impossible, either. They’re just unexplored. Because any shift- no matter how big or small- requires total concentration to maintain, the class is almost impossible to use in combat at a more complicated level for any realistic period of time. It's ludicrously unpopular because of that. Simple, instinctive shifts of physical properties that can be maintained without much conscious thought are the preferred usage. Usually those have a full-body color shift that comes along with them- red spectrum colors tend to mean offense, while blue spectrums are for defensive shifts. Otherwise, see a neat flower or a cute girl? Think about lunch for a split second? The shift drops, you’re caught with your pants down, and someone like Tay is about to rewrite your bone structure in a foreign language.
While she bounds off to her usual half of our marble fighting square, I let myself sink into a flow state. Prune the distractions from my mind. The buzzing cicadas and growling tanuki fade, as does the infrequent shade of the clouds. I focus on the tools before me. Three copies of the Shifter class are at my disposal. Two of them can be exchanged for anything of equal value, even another class, so I cycle one to Ki Fighter per Mars’ request, cajoling a grade schooler’s thin white aura out of my heart. Barely even physical, it’s a meager shadow of the roiling pillar of starlight that is erupting out of Tay at any given moment.
Still. It’s something. More progress than the last time I tried this. I exhale slowly through my nose, settling my wooden staff in neutral stance behind my back. Another shift gives me access to the Duelist class, injecting all the manner of melee combat enhances into my nerves. Tay is waiting for me when I look up. Grinning wide as she runs two hands upwards through her hair, feet bouncing, hips faintly swinging, distracting like a pendulum. Mars barks the command to begin.
She’s halfway across the square before a single frame passes. Blinking from point to point with just a thought and a tiny expenditure of her endless stamina. I brace to meet her charge and barely spot a blur of red beaming towards me out of the corner of my eye, just a frame before Mars’ half-chewed apple drills into the side of my head.
Stars explode through my vision. My concentration shatters and I go stumbling off target, aura fizzling out with a little airy gasp, staff slurring through the air as the shift slips away. Tay pivots to track my fall, eyes widening.
Her mistake. The next apple, this one completely whole, brains her in the back of her skull. She sprawls atop me in a pile of freckled skin and thrashing limbs before whirling around to glare death at her father.
“You were unfocused before you even stepped up to fight,” Mars chides, already tossing a third apple between his hands. “Look at Tay.”
I do, cheeks flushed with shame. My concentration faltered to an apple. She rages even brighter in response, fueled by her anger. Raging aura blasts the marble clean of spring debris. The nearest groves of bamboo begin groaning as they are made to bend away from her wrath. Too much rising power for the air to contain, it begins shuddering through the ground as well, vibrating through the rocky floor of the garden.
Such incomprehensible strength. It seems impossible that it comes from the same source as mine. I am trying to overcome my humanity, and she’s just trying to rein in deity. She grows stronger from her failures. Mine put me back at square one.
Mars halts his vegetarian threat for a moment. He crouches beside me, larger than life, offering a hand that I am not worthy to accept. He turns it into a fatherly pat on the head instead, ruffling my hair. “You’ve picked a path with incredible potential, Thane. Someday, if you keep it up, it’s the kind of power that could belong to a Champion. You could tap into any class the moment you needed it. But you can’t let that potential blind you to what really makes the best, the best.” His eyes drift to his waiting daughter. With a smile, he ruffles her hair too. The terrifying amount of starlight pouring from her tapers away and the violent gales settle as she preens under his hand.
“The old man once told me that in the end, all classes are equal,” Mars tells us both. “Any class, if sufficiently mastered, can seem completely overpowered and invincible. What separates them isn’t the powers they give, but the people who use them.” He taps a calloused finger gently against my bare chest. “You may think Tay’s power is different from yours on a fundamental level. But you couldn’t be further from the truth, Thane. There is no such thing as strength inherent- it’s you who makes something invincible.”
I bow my head in deference. When I open my eyes, Mars is holding the apple in front of me. “If you drop your shifts every time you get hit, that power will never belong to you,” he says. “You will always bear the risk of being beaten by someone like Tay. Someone who finds strength in simplicity, and isn’t weighed down by doubt. Her strength cannot be taken from her. Yours can.”
“My mind must become a weapon,” I sigh, finishing his oft-spoken advice. He’s told it to me a hundred times if not a thousand. On days like today, it feels further away than ever before.
Flashing me a wry grin, Mars swats my shoulder and heads back to the porch while Tay helps me to my feet. Her fingers squeeze once around mine. Mars grins at the sight.
“Let’s start again. From the top, with a little more situational awareness this time. And don’t forget- first comes hands.”
Breathing deep, I reassert my shifts and return to my starting position, picking up my staff on the way. I wipe the sweat from my brow and sink into the flow state. A small aura of ki forms around me, blowing my bangs from side to side. Tay waves at her father.
“What are you going to be doing?” she shouts.
Mars shrugs. “Reading, napping… I’m not sure yet.”
Her face wrinkles in anger. I can’t stop myself from joining the man in laughter. The moment I dare to glance over and find Tay stifling a giggle of her own, there’s a flicker of motion from the porch as Mars slings the next apple at my chest like a backhand bullet.
This time, I hold firm.