“So, I was talking to Rayne,” Kaye started, at the door to the room he was staying in.

That was a statement that could mean any number of things.

For one, he hadn’t been keeping up on going to the club over the past few weeks, and even with the issue of her broken pelvis, he couldn’t see her missing out on showing up. Whether or not she could personally participate, she was still probably the single best polearms teacher in the whole place.

While he mostly used glaives and naginatas and she preferred double-edged sword-staffs and the like, she was still able to kick his ass basically every time, even when she was using the same weapon type.

It might have been more embarrassing if that weren’t the case for generally, almost everyone who showed up to the historical martial arts club, and in particular, anyone who even made an attempt at polearms.

For another, it could be an Arrows thing, though he couldn’t imagine what. He was good, sure, but Rayne had been playing professionally before her “retirement.”

He was having difficulty believing that particular bit of information. Granduon had a system of waivers for that, for any issue that wasn’t nervous. They were perfectly willing to let people peg their physical stats to any group they could reasonably prove themselves a part of, and Rayne had the experience and tournament results to incontrovertibly prove herself a contender for both north laners and mist divers.

It could also be Rayne Smith, he supposed, but she wasn’t exactly likely to talk to him again.

“Did she give you a timeline on when she was going to kick my ass again? I figured I’d at least have a few weeks where she wouldn’t be allowed to do much.”

Kaye snorted at that. “Nah, but it would be funny to watch her beat’cha from a wheelchair. Eh…” she trailed off for a second, then shook her head. “Maybe not you from the wheelchair, but Ezra at least.”

He had to roll his eyes at that. Ezra was cute, but also very much only in the club because his brothers were. He was more likely to drop anything he was using than hit a sparring partner with it.

Not that it mattered much, but Rayne probably could beat him from a wheelchair, so long as any armrests didn’t get in her way.

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

“So..?”

“Oh, yeah! She was talkin’ with me about how she’s moving to coaching for Arrows and thought she might be able to swing you onto a team. Something about a weirdo squad.”

“Any idea on that what that ‘might’ is doing?”

“Said she wasn’t in charge of team selection, that’s on the current captain and sponsor approval.”

Jeremy just nodded at that. He didn’t exactly want to spit on the attempt from Kaye, but it wasn’t exactly likely that any team would take him. Much as he was fully able to compete, he also played as a physical tank.

Even with the muted sensation that Arrows turned that into, the vast majority of people looked at the idea just once and immediately dismissed it as “for masochists” and “not particularly effective” before even bothering to figure out what you could do with it.

Personally, he just preferred the faked-pain to trying to follow the deformation, discoloration, and vibration of his own shields as well as his opponent’s.

So he wasn’t going to stake much of his hopes on it, even if Kaye had been effective in a similar role for years. Even she used weakpoint shields with the armored powersuits, not body reinforcement nanites.

They were itchy, of course, but he found that they tended to make him nearly invulnerable late into the game if he managed to not die.

Although having lost progress stack on top of the extant time-based death penalty wasn’t fun, either.

“Oh yeah! And she was confident enough in the thing that she wanted you to meet with the captain later today, that was the thing. Rayne thinks she can be convinced if she meets you.”

“Wait, she’s serious?”

“Sounded like it. Why wouldn’t she be?”

He grasped at the air a bit, trying to sum up the information in his head, but it just wasn’t coming. “It’s just… playing… phys tank isn’t like. A thing. So she could just like, say that and then it doesn’t work out. Like the other couple of times, I guess?”

“Oh! Yeah, she said something like that, then… oh yeah…” Kaye pulled her phone out, tapping the screen a few times before slipping it back into her pocket. “Those are the other members they’ve got, one of them new today but ‘preapproved for comp by Granduon.’ Her words, not mine.”

He gave Kaye a strange look. “You’re not like, into Arrows, Why did you put up with the game talk?”

She gave him an unimpressed glare in return. “Because she’s in a hospital bed right now. What’s she gonna do, take one of the sticks out? Suddenly develop an interest in TV? We talked about some concerts, too, but she’s gonna be kinda restricted from most of the small venues too, so she wasn’t really in the mood to talk about it.”

Jeremy raised his hands placatingly. “Okay, okay. I get it, you just let her talk, and the Arrows thing is her talking about work.”

“Damn right! Your schoolwork is done, though, right?”

He checked back on the computer screen in front of him, clicking over to the list that he’d made of the day’s tasks. “Not yet, but soon. Why?”

“Well, you’re gonna be in the pod at nine…”

“I’ll have dinner ready for you at eight thirty, then.”

Kaye gave him a thumbs-up, then basically ran back to her own room.

He sighed at that. Of course her primary concern had been food. How had he thought otherwise, exactly?

It wasn’t the worst thing in the world; her one-track mind had kept her as his friend through times where he really thought he might have insulted her before.