“Daughter?”

“Amaria.” His browline was a single straight eyebrow, and it was unamused all the way across. “Or do you go chasing too many girls to remember a name?”

You know, this is a conversation I’d like to have away from any swords. “Oh, yeah. I haven’t seen her since the ruins. She was, she did a good job, I thought.”

“Funny how she doesn’t have a Class.” The swordsman growled. “Just a crush on some peasant that’s taking too long to die.”

Jasper tilted his head. “Peasant?”

“That’s what I said.”

“No, sorry, all I heard were the flies buzzing over this shithole.” He clenched his fist tight to squelch the dagger’s appearance. “I think you were trying to insult me.” Jasper was talking fast, and he could feel the sweat on his face acutely. Fuck it. He’d absorbed too much punishment, taken too much abuse– his shit-eating was at capacity.

And as always, there was only one way to vent. “But you know, a town this poor can only afford one good insult, and that’s the slap in the face you feel every morning waking up here.”

The man seemed genuinely frozen.

“Yeah? Yeah. That’s a silver wren for the lesson in insults.”

There was a short, snorting bark of laughter. Not real amused laughter, not laughing with the joke, but the sound of a man too angry to do anything else. The kind of laugh that said he was already envisioning kicking Jasper’s ass.

“First lesson, then, boy.” He drew his blade. It was steel, something foreign to this town. Runemarks glittered on the edge.. “Don’t pick a fight you can't win.”

And then things happened very fast.

The swordsman advanced, moving in a spring-like, dancing step that covered the ground far quicker than it should have. A hidden Skill let him glide across the earth like a killing wind; his hand flicked forward and the saber’s edge became a scythe of steely light, too fast to follow except as a blur.

Like his footwork, it was Skill enhanced. It arrived a second too fast for Jasper to react–

He was caught still lifting his blade when the enemy’s point arrived at his throat.

“Well there we are. Lesson learned?”

The saber flicked back and opened a shallow, thin cut across his throat. Barely a scratch, but enough to sting.

“Sure. Ambush people who don’t know how to fight, and you’ll always win.” Jasper snorted.

The swordsman stepped back, a hand up. “Now, if you think that’s not fair…” A vicious smile. “How about I close my eyes, and you try to hit me? Hmm?”

Jasper saw the trap. He smelt the trap. He felt it closing around him. But all he said was, “Sure.”

The man closed his eyes, sword raised up above his shoulder in a reverse grip, waiting. “Then come on.”

But Jasper backed away. He knew this trick. This was some kung-fu, old master bullshit. He was supposed to try and he was supposed to get his ass kicked.

So his goal was to not do that.

Backing up…

He set his hand on the small control crystal that turned on the practice dummies. There were three settings, marked out by three notches in the golden ring that held the crystal. Jasper chose the hardest. A faint light rippled under his fingers, and the dummies animated, dropping off their stands and lurching about on soft, straw-stuffed legs.

They saw a man with his sword up, and they lunged. Three wooden practice swords slashed at him from three different angles.

His face twitched as he realized something was off, but to his credit, his eyes stayed shut. He tilted to the side and let the first strike swoosh past him, and the saber swung around, chopping into the dummy’s throat with the blunt edge of the blade. The next strike, he deflected on the back of his knuckles. An agile twist let him step past the attacker and wallop them on the back of the head– again, striking with the blunted reverse edge.

The final practice sword darted towards his shoulder.

The man’s sword whipped down to intervene with such force it split the practice blade in half, and as he returned back to a guard stance, sword upright against his chest, he struck forward with his elbow and bashed the dummy down head-over-heels.

Jasper kicked a fallen practice sword up into his hand and jabbed for the man’s face.

The swordsman knocked it aside, took a single step forward, and–

Gasped, as the point of Jasper’s rapier sunk into his gut.

Slowly.

Every time the dummies had acted to attack, there was an instant reaction. So the man could sense them. But it wasn’t as good as sight; he had no clue what the overall position of people was, or where the next attack would come from, not until it was on its way. Sheer speed and the limberness of an eel had let him move between them despite that…

But with Jasper’s rapier, there was no ‘attack’ to sense.

Jasper had simply held it out, baited him, and let him walk into the still blade.

The swordsman’s legs shook beneath him as he let out a small, pained gasp, and stumbled back. His eyes flew open, a look of disbelief on his face as he stared down at the bloody point of the blade. “Hhh.” He groaned. “Huh. That was… clever…”

Jasper flicked the sword, cleaning the blood away.

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“Who taught you?” The man slumped back, leaning against the wall and holding his gut as blood trickled through his fingers.

“Nobody. I just figured out how your Skill was working.”

“Ah. Well. There’s your first lesson. Relying on Skills leaves you with blind spots. If you try to fight that way, just letting your Skills guide you, you’ll lose to anyone whose Skill happens to be higher. It’s not a recipe for a long life…” He glanced down. “As you seem to have taught me.”

“Yeah, I’m guessing I shouldn’t close my eyes in the middle of a fight, either.” Jasper nodded towards the wound. “Are you going to be okay?”

“Me? I have a recovery Talent. I’ll stitch myself back together in a few minutes. If I was younger…” He sighed. “If I was younger I’d be over there beating your ass black and blue already.”

“Sure, old man.” Jasper pulled up a stool and sat down. “So there’s Skills and then there’s skill…”

“Mm. Do you have Fencing already?”

Jasper calculated, and chose to lie. With his Operative ability feeding him skill with the sword, anyone who thought he was playing by Ardish rules would assume he had a capital ‘s’ Skill.

“Yep.”

“Shame. Practice makes permanent, not perfect. If you learn poorly, the Skill you gain will reflect that. It might cover every aspect of fighting, but it will cover each of them poorly." The patriarch said. "The best swordsman, the cream of the crop, try to avoid developing a single fighting Skill. Instead, they focus on the components, on piercing, slashing, blocking, until those become Skills of their own. Someone following this path will have three times the advantage on you, and because their fighting is a combination of three skills, they’ll be far less predictable.”

Oh, that’s… So how many Skills developed from a single ‘source’ depended on how intensely you focused? Or was it something about your expectation, how you viewed the ability, that determined whether it broke down into one Skill or many?

Either way that was fascinating.

Jasper shifted forward in his chair. It seemed like they were approaching mutual respect here; the swordsman seemed willing to teach, and Jasper was willing to learn as long as the lesson was more than an excuse to beat his ass.

“So, what do I do when I meet someone with more Skill, and they don’t offer to go it blind?” Jasper asked.

“You improvise. Don’t let panic push you into relying on the guidance from your Skill. They’ve probably fought a half-dozen men with the exact same Skill, the same set of moves. Instead, mix it up. Throw dust in their eyes. Trick them. Shake their rhythm.”

With a grunt, he pushed himself away from the wall. He twisted his torso back and forth, shaking some life back into his limbs. It seemed he really did have a Talent for healing his own body– the wound was gone completely.

He reached down and picked up a practice sword.

“But in the meantime, you practice. You practice until you’re drenched in blood and sweat. I can see those soft hands of yours, boy. Trust me, you’d rather have calloused fingers like these, than a slit throat.”

He lifted the wooden blade into an easy stance.

— — —

Fighting for his life was, it turned out, easy. Adrenaline and fear gave him all the strength he needed when there was real danger. But in the practice ring, Jasper had to find his limits and push against them for one painful breath after another.

And if he ever slowed, if he ever let exhaustion unbalance him–

The swordsman’s wooden blade would whip out and strike him, correcting his pose, his footwork, his grip with a sharp swat. Jasper’s skin was shining with sweat and rough with bruises within the hour, splinters dug into the thin cuts that damn wooden sword opened up.

The swordsman’s training was–

Well, Jasper couldn’t fault it, was the problem.

He started by leading Jasper through a series of strange, flexible stances, flowing together like a slow-motion dance. They were motions that felt incredibly, almost sickeningly wrong to perform. That was because they were meant to run directly counter to the teachings of his Skill, and broaden his horizons.

Moving with your Skill was easy, but it was predictable. Moving against was risky, but sometimes, it was the only way to win.

The goal of the exercise was to let your Skill smooth your rough edges and aid you in fighting, rather than lead you by the nose, making you fight like an automaton. The swordsman had a word for people who fought like that. Sheeplings. Meek little creatures led by the nose.

The motions of the dance were slow, but precise. There was no tolerance for the slightest wrong angle in his knees, any weakness in his feet, any stitch or roughness in the flow between one pose and the next. More than once, Jasper simply tumbled over from the combination of exhaustion and disorientation.

But he always got back up.

The next stage of training was footwork. It was even more punishing. Sword-skills didn’t normally come with a footwork component, so this was laying the basis of a whole new skill. Jasper danced back and forth as the blade whipped at his feet, tapping against the dirt where his feet had been moments before. At this point his limbs felt like lead weights, but he kept fighting to the best of his ability.

“Strike.” The patriarch commanded suddenly.

Jasper’s whole frame was numb with exertion, and he couldn’t feel the sword in his grip. Still. He pushed forward, trying to remember the way the twisting motions of the dance had felt, and fuse them into the strike his borrowed knowledge wanted him to perform.

The response was an easy parry, and as the blades locked, crystalline steel against wood, the swordsman somehow angled to slip past him and strike against his knuckles. Jasper barely held onto the blade as he darted back.

“Again!”

Jasper tried again, lunging, the rapier’s crystalline blade extending out like a flash of dawn. The swordsman swatted his blow aside and advanced. Instantly, Jasper fell back, deflecting as best he could, driving back against the heavier blade aside as it came piercing, striking, swatting down at him– a flurry of blows that pushed Jasper to the courtyard wall and then struck the sword from his hand.

“Better that time.” Stepping back, the patriarch grabbed a jug of water and poured half down his throat, before tossing it over to Jasper. “Our time is up. Hopefully I’ve sheared you good enough to keep you from becoming a sheepling.”

Jasper drank with a gratitude that bordered on religious. Every swallow of cold, clear water was heaven, and it trickled down his chin in waterfalls. Lowering the jug, he asked, “If you’re the Patriarch of the city, why do you spend your time on sword lessons?”

“Because. I’m the Patriarch for as long as I’m the strongest, and when I’m not, they won’t bother with a grave.” He shrugged on his jacket, a black velvet number lined with silver thread in the shape of blossoms. “I’m not afraid of that. But if I get old and gray, if I die on a bed and nobody replaces me, they’ll have to beg some wandering adventurer to become the new Patriarch. They’ll have to give up their freedom, their riches, whatever’s demanded.”

Jasper lifted an eyebrow, a sweat-drop trickling through the fine hairs and dropping past his eye. “And if they don’t find a new Patriarch?”

“Then the first time a sand-drake spawns out in the desert, they’ll die– they’ll be bones long before the big cities can send help. Mark me, boy. Mercy and peace can’t come from the weak. Only when you have strength, and choose not to use it against others, only then is it mercy.”

He turned back.

“So, let me be clear where mercy ends. If you fool around with my daughter, one of us is going to die.”

Jasper, at this point, was just accustomed to threats. “And what are my odds of living?”

The Patriarch snorted and lifted his chin. “Better than some.” And with that, the training was at an end.

The Great God Aquoth Blesses You

Skill ‘Creative Footwork' is now Level 1.

Battle is won by the length of a sword; each step brings you closer to death or victory.