“So you’re telling me you found him passed out, looking like that, in the training room. And you decided to drag him back to our place. Again?”

“Well where else was I supposed to put him Vega? If I just left him there, he probably would have gotten robbed.”

“I don’t know? Maybe your house. Not someone else’s?”

Through the slowly opening slits of his eyelids, Jay watched Vega and Akira arguing. Sure enough, he was back in the twins’ living room. Somehow even sorer and stiffer than the last time he woke up here.

“What time is it? Sorry I stayed the night, I’ll leave now.” Jay said. He mustered enough strength to sit up, letting out a yawn as he greeted Vega and Akira.

They looked at him like he was a corpse that had just come to life.

“No you’re not. Lie back down.” Vega said. Pointing Jay back to the sofa.

Jay wasn’t going to do that.

With presumably only 3 days until his fight, he had to use every available minute to prepare. Couch surfing wouldn’t help him win his fight.

Jay planted his feet on the ground. He knew something was wrong when the wood floor beneath him felt as soft as carpet, but he pushed through and attempted to stand up.

Huge mistake. Dizziness spun Jay’s jaw while nausea socked his gut as soon as he got up. It took all of Jay's focus not to throw up. While Jay was busy keeping his insides, inside. His balance betrayed him. His knees buckled and Jay was a flail of limbs as he collapsed to the floor.

He expected to hear an “I told you so” from Vega, but her wordless laughter was somehow even more annoying.

Lyra entered Jay's eyeline from above. She looked down at him with the tired eyes of a disappointed sparring partner, annoyed that Jay had been knocked down so easily.

“Didn’t Akira say you were done for the day? Why did you go back?” She asked.

Because I thought I was built different.

Jay didn’t say that of course. One twin laughing at him was embarrassing enough, he didn’t need another. Jay pulled himself back onto the sofa and muttered a half-truth about not knowing how bad it would be.

“Well now you know.” said Lyra, with more than a hint of frustration. “Did you at least learn something useful? Because you won’t be able to harmonise at all today.”

“What!”

All day? Jay couldn’t afford to miss a day, he only had three left, but Lyra didn’t look like she was joking. Jay understood her frustration now.

“Why can’t I train at all today?” He said.

“Oh yeah I ran a marathon and passed out at the finish line last night!” A slightly deeper version of Akira's voice said. Through context Jay figured out it was supposed be an impression of him, but it was a shockingly shit impression. “But no worries guys. I can still run another one today.

“That’s how dumb you sound right now. Harmony isn’t too different from training your body. Run too much, jump too high, and you’ll pull a muscle. Train more and your body gets used to the exercise, and you can push further than before.”

Jay wanted to fight back, to argue his case, but he had no solid ground to stand on. Literally and figuratively. These guys were all at the peak of E grade, they knew far more about Harmony than him.

Jay kept his thoughts to himself and filled them in on last night’s training session.

Feeling merciful, he didn’t share too much of the storm sage’s profound wisdom with the group. But Jay told them how the sage’s method of poetic Harmony didn’t work for him, so he used his body as the link.

The approving glances from Vega’s direction felt a lot better than the laughter from before. Although she furrowed her eyebrows when Jay mentioned his execution of the technique.

“Your process is good. But you'll need to free yourself from your body eventually.” She said. Akira, who stood beside her wearing a thoughtful expression, nodded in agreement.

“I think its fine for now. Especially since he’s gonna fight close range.” He said. “What she means Jay, is that by leaning on your body as a focus to create the essence overlap. You limit your possibilities to your body’s capabilities. You need to detach yourself from what you think is possible to advance further. That can wait for another day though. Your schedule’s a bit full right now.”

Akira pointed at a gold framed projection of a Goldenback gorilla in the centre of the room. Lyra had sat already next to Jay and looked ready to press play.

“Aaaand that’s my cue to leave.” Said Vega. She grabbed Akira by the arm and started walking out of the room with him. “Have fun watching your next opponent rip people to shreds all day! I won’t be back for a week, so I’ll miss your next fight. Don’t die!”

Vega delivered the last line with a wink and a bit too much amusement. She dragged Akira out the room with her, leaving only Jay, Lyra, and the gorilla in the room.

“She does that sometimes. Just gets up and leaves without telling me where she’s going. Sometimes she comes back with a new technique, a better understanding of an essence, other times she just complains how she wasted all her time.” Lyra said, concern sinking into worry across her face.

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“Anyway. I’ve compiled all the fights of a Goldenback fighting a short-range humanoid. The least experienced gladiator on the list had nine fights, so I don’t know why they matched you up against one.”

If he couldn’t train, Jay was glad he at least had something to fill his time. Watching film was probably the next best thing to actually practicing.

----------------------------------------

The first three fights were a clinic on what not to do. All crushing victories for team gorilla, Jay and Lyra's tactical analysis rarely extended past single sentences.

“Don’t do that.”

“Yep”

“Definitely don’t do that.”

“Definitely.”

Don’t stand still, don’t get greedy, and most importantly, don’t get caught.

All three fights ended when the human stood still too close to the gorilla. As soon as it gabbed onto its smaller, weaker opponents, the fight was already over. They couldn’t escape from its grip and once one of their limbs got ripped off, they didn’t last much longer.

“Now that we have established that getting your arms ripped off by standing too close isn’t a viable strategy, let’s watch someone win a fight.” Lyra said. Her deadpan voice betrayed none of her emotions. Jay wasn’t sure if she was deadly serious, or buried her sarcasm so deep that he couldn’t even recognise it.

The fourth gladiator to face the gorilla was a woman called Jana “The Iron Whip”. She looked like a fairly ordinary gladiator, clad in a steel helmet and light armour, but her arms and legs each had an extra joint in them. Jay wondered why her nickname wasn’t plural, as she carried a metal studded whip in both hands.

Even if her nickname was plural, she would have reverted back to the Iron Whip within the first twenty seconds of the fight. Her gorilla charged directly at her, as its brothers had done to each of the previous gladiators. Jana tried to whip the gorilla’s torso as she swung right to dodge the charge, but the Goldenback easily caught the weapon and yanked it from her hands.

Jay barely paid attention to that however, his attention was captured by the way Jana dodged the gorilla’s charge. She didn’t take a single step, her feet just slid across the ground, propelled by an invisible force. Jay wondered how she managed to move like that, what essence created her swinging motion. He hazarded a guess at the essence of the whip, before asking what Lyra thought.

She agreed it was probably the essence of the whip, given Jana’s branding, but said that it could also be something else.

“People often have more than one essence they use in battle. Usually, gladiators have a main essence they focus on, with supplementary essences alongside it for utility or synergy. She might have used the essence of the whip to move like that, but whips usually aren’t used in arcing motions. It could’ve been the essence of the swing. You can never be certain until you ask, each individual brand of essence is different to the user. An arsonist and a chef would spawn radically different interpretations of the essence of fire.”

While Jana’s movements were interesting, and may have contained insights for Jay to create his own essence movement technique, Jay needed to focus on her counterattack. Her wide, looping dodge took her out of the gorilla’s range and behind its back. As soon as she saw its back she fired.

Her extra joint amplified her attack power. The whip’s tip launched into the gorilla’s back faster than the creature could react. A mere blur on the replay.

The gorilla spun. Instantly swiping at the air behind it. It wasn’t aiming at its opponent; it wasn’t even looking at her. The Goldenback just twisted and turned. Dropping to the ground in a frenzy before getting back to its feet and scratching every available inch of its back.

“I thought that was weird too, so I read up on the species.” Lyra said. “The Goldenback gorilla lives in a place called the Sanguine Garden, an isolated jungle deep inside the Verdant Frontier. It’s the largest animal in the region, and as such it has no real predators. But the jungle is home to four separate families of parasitic insects and a clan of harmonising mosquitos. If one of the bugs bites the gorilla and isn’t removed instantly, it’s near certain death after one bite.”

“I see... So when its alone, it goes crazy trying to shake the insect off because it doesn’t have a mate to remove it. That’s punishable. But I don’t know if I have the speed.”

“You didn’t learn a speed increase from the sage? Surely there’s an overlap between lightning and speed?”

“I didn’t do anything like that in the trial, just Eye of the storm. Maybe I can repurpose that technique to increase speed instead of reaction time? I’ll test it out tomorrow.”

“Good plan. I think if you time it right you can do it. The gorilla has great acceleration for its size, but it’s not actually that fast. And with that much mass, it’ll be hard for it to decelerate.”

“True, I just have to time it right. The only problem is I can’t arc like Jana. If I want to be fast enough to get to its back, I have to get way too close for comfort.”

Lyra shrugged, and Jay agreed with her sentiment. Getting so close to a stronger opponent was uncomfortable, but he didn’t have any other option.

They unpaused the fight. Jana kept attacking the back. It worked every time. Regardless of the circumstances, as soon as the Goldenback’s back was attacked it immediately shifted its focus on trying to remove whatever insect just bit it.

Following the initial strike up was more difficult, however. Jana picked her secondary whip off the ground while the gorilla was busy flailing in its back. She tried to use it to attack the grounded animal. Tried. When the whip launched into the roiling maelstrom of limbs it was torn out of her hands once more. This time the gorilla ripped it in half rather than merely throwing it away.

“Everyone needs a backup weapon.” Lyra said. She pointed to Jana unstrapping a knife from her ankle. “You should do that too, just in case.”

Is it really necessary to have a backup weapon if your main weapon is no weapons?

Jay refocused on Jana. She did her patented arc and whip, sending the gorilla into a frenzy for what must have been the seventh time, except this time she closed the distance after. Instead of holding her whip, Jana’s fingers clamped the blade of her dagger. She held it above her head, waiting for her moment.

When the gorilla stopped flailing its arms, but before it fully came to its senses, Jana struck. Launching her knife into the gorilla’s throat. It didn’t even have time to acknowledge it was attacked before blood spurted out of its neck, staining the gravel red and signalling the end of the fight.

Every other fight Jay and Lyra watched went the exact same way. The gorilla charged in, and either grabbed the opponent or didn’t.

If the gorilla won, it was because its opponent stayed still for too long and got caught.

If the gorilla lost, it was because its opponent got behind it and hit its back. Sending it into a frenzy and killing it just as it came back to reality.

By time they’d finished Lyra’s list, Jay felt slightly more comfortable about his chances. Before viewing the fights, Jay had nothing to focus on. Now he had a target, a crack in the armour. No more was the Goldenback gorilla a dark cloud looming on the horizon. An inescapable threat, slowly advancing towards him.

Now it was just another opponent.

An opponent with a glaring weakness.

Jay ran through all the gorillas’ fights in his head. He ran through all the storm sage’s trials, and everything he’d learned about essence and Harmony. Individual fragments swirled around, gradually crystallizing into a strategy. It wasn’t perfect, but it was the best he could do.

Jay looked to Lyra, who had her eyes trained on him the whole time. She too looked like she was trying to figure out a puzzle. They sat there for a moment, until Lyra eventually broke the silence.

“So what’s your plan?”