Bee let out a long, low groan. When she tried to move, the best she could manage was a bit of useless side-to-side wiggling. She could only see out of one eye, the other one gummed shut. The afternoon sun was shining in through the window on her left, casting a warped square of golden light across her chest.

She was thirsty, but also needed to pee. There was no way she’d make it all the way to the outhouse, or even out of bed for that matter.

It wasn’t long before Will came in, and once he saw that she was awake he immediately got a stern, parental look on his face.

“Did you have fun?” he asked.

She managed a tiny smile. “Yeah.”

He pulled up a stool next to the bed and sat down. He offered her a healing potion, which she glared at, not wanting it anywhere near her.

“I suggest you drink it,” Will said firmly. “You know, while you were out I had to give you a potion enema so you wouldn’t suffer permanent brain damage. Fun, right?”

“Ew.” Bee made a face that caused her cheeks to flare with pain.

“It was no fun for me either, believe me.”

“I don’t. Pervert.”

“You’re being bratty again.” He flicked her on the forehead, hitting a bruise, and she hissed with pain. “Point being, if you won’t take your medicine there are always less pleasant methods.”

She drank the potion when he offered it to her lips. Stupid cranberry.

After that, he stuck a cigarette between her lips and lit it for her. She was happier with that, taking a long drag and then giving a relieved, smoky sigh.

“I need to pee,” she mumbled around the cigarette.

“You can just go.”

“What do you mean?”

He sighed, lighting a cigarette for himself. “You’ve been out for two days, Bee. I had to hook you up with a catheter. Which was fun, because I had to make it myself, and I don’t know anything about catheters.”

“Jesus.” Bee peered down at the covers laid over her legs, not quite wanting to know what was underneath. “What the fuck, Will?”

“How about a ‘Thanks for keeping me from becoming a vegetable, Will’, or a ‘Thanks for keeping me from pissing myself, Will’? You can be very ungrateful.”

“I’m not ungrateful, I’m horrified that you’ve been shoving tubes into me.”

He shrugged, puffing on his cigarette. “That’s what happens when you decide to fling yourself at a brick wall over and over until you break into a thousand pieces. You get treated like a senile octogenarian. Maybe that’ll give you some pause in the future.”

She had no answer to that.

After a long and sullen silence, she asked: “I lost, right?”

Will nodded. “Spectacularly. But you also did better than anyone could have expected. That Trashman guy had a lot of levels on you, and way more upfront attributes compared to your slow burn brute build.”

“So I didn’t embarrass myself?”

“No, I wouldn’t say so.”

“Does that mean I pass the second part of my training?”

“That depends. Did you level up?”

“Well, things got really blurry after a while. I definitely leveled up once. I think.”

“Go ahead and ask the Concord what level you are.”

Bee frowned. “Concord, what level am—”

“In your head, stupid.”

“Oh, okay. Duh.”

Concord, what level am I?

You are Level 6.

You have unallocated level-up rewards. Please sleep in order to allocate them.

“I’m Level 6, apparently.”

“That’s very good.” He took Bee’s cigarette to tap the ash into the empty potion bottle, then gave it back. “I’d say that means you’ve passed.”

“Yay.”

Will gave a grunt as he remembered something. Going into his pocket, he fished out a thick stack of colored paper bills. He placed the stack on her chest and patted it.

“Those are your winnings,” he said. “It’s 2 500 from beating Tryhard, plus another 2 500 that Freddie threw in for the rest of it, even though you didn’t have a formal agreement.”

Bee eyed the money. “Is that a lot? Am I rich?”

Will chuckled. “It’s a fair chunk of change. For reference, I’d say I’m somewhere in the middle to upper middle class bracket, and I have a bit over 40 000 saved away.”

“Oh. So I’m not rich.”

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“Sadly, no. You are not rich. But at least you won’t need an allowance for a while.”

“What? You’re cutting me off? When I’m vulnerable like this?”

“I… guess?”

“You’re a monster.”

He laughed, took a last drag off his cigarette, and plopped the end into the empty bottle. He took Bee’s away and did the same to that one.

“We’ll be moving on with the third part of your training once you’re recovered,” Will explained. “I think Level 6 will be high enough for it. In the meantime, though, I have some work to catch up on. Crooked Dick is pretty upset with me that I didn’t deliver a shipment this week.”

“You said you were going to rest,” Bee pointed out in a stern tone.

“Yeah, and I have, for two days. I feel better now, so I’ll be going back to work.”

She was skeptical, but he did look a lot healthier, his face having returned to its normal shade of deathly pale, rather than drowning victim white.

“Whatever. I want our date tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow?” He scratched at his nose. “Bee, I don’t even know if you’ll be up and about by then, and like I said, I have a lot of—”

“You promised.”

“I didn’t give a specific time frame.”

“You promised.” She would have crossed her arms with indignation if her body had been capable of it.

Will sighed heavily. “Yeah, all right, sure. If you’re on your feet tomorrow, we’ll go stay at the inn. Happy?”

She nodded with a smile, not caring how much it hurt. “Yes. Very.”

“Good. But if you collapse, you can give yourself the fucking enema.”

*****

Bee made Will leave the room so that she could do her business. It turned out to be pointless anyway, since he was the one who had to empty her catheter afterwards. He brought her some water and a little bit of thin soup. When he fed her by hand, she really did feel like some decrepit old codger. Then she dozed off for a while with Will watching over her. He was still there when she woke up, watching her with that dark, unnerving gaze.

It was starting to get dark, and he had lit a candle on the nightstand.

“He was really strong,” Bee said without any prompting.

“I think his build was kind of shit, actually,” Will opined. “You’ll surpass men like that soon enough. You’re just not quite there yet.”

“You think so?”

“Mmhmm. I didn’t spend all this time optimizing the shit out of your build for nothing.”

“What do you think I should pick for leveling up?”

Will thought about it for a moment. The way he kept all the builds and options in his head, like an encyclopedia, always amazed her. He’d always been like that.

What a mega-nerd.

Then he gave an awkward little smile, patting down his hair. “Actually, in regards to that, there’s a thing I’ve been meaning to talk to you about. It’s a little embarrassing.”

“What kind of embarrassing?”

“The embarrassing kind of embarrassing.”

“Why? Did you accidentally pick the wrong skill one time and the memory still haunts you?”

He scoffed. “No, what? I would never do that.” Then, with a sigh, he added: “It’s about this passive.”

“Okay, go on? The suspense is killing me here, bro.”

“It’s called True Bond. It lets two people who both have it do something like meld their souls together. It’s a little like Create Familiar, except it’s an equal exchange, and it only works between humans.

“Basically, it lets you hear what the other person is thinking, feel what they’re feeling, pick out their location from afar. Once you put enough ranks into it, it lets you share an ability one of you have with the other. And, most importantly, at higher ranks it also lets you use each other’s AP crystals.

“That’s one of the reasons I had you keep yours intact with your divine vow. If we both were to take this passive, theoretically, it would give me access to all your AP, since you have no use for it. It would be very efficient.” He looked out the window, pursing his lips with poorly concealed embarrassment.

Bee stared at him in mild belief. “Did you just propose to me? Did I just bear witness to the most autistic proposal in human history?”

“That was not a proposal,” Will insisted. “This is why I didn’t want to bring it up to you. I knew you’d make it weird. This is purely about build efficiency.”

“Right, right.”

“Stop.”

“I’m not saying anything. I’m agreeing with you. Build efficiency, yes yes. Of course, indubitably.”

“Stop.”

“What are you going to do if I don’t? Put more tubes in me? Pervert. Creep. Weirdo.”

Will rubbed at his eyes with his palms. “Anyway, I don’t want you to make a decision or anything. Just think about it for the future. I’ve got some other ideas for the upgrade point you have right now.”

Bee chuckled, and stabbing in her ribs turned it into a groan. “All right, I’ll let you off the hook. What do you think I should get?”

“Well, if you put 3 points in either Awareness or Senses, you can take Danger Sense. I’d recommend you go down the Awareness route, because at 5 Awareness you can take Sage Sense, too. The two of them together would really help you with your ducking and weaving. You know, so that you don’t have to end up like this.”

“I dunno,” Bee said after a brief consideration, “I don’t really feel like I want that.”

“They’re really good passives.”

“I know. Buck has them, right?”

“Yeah.”

“They’re a pain in the ass to deal with.”

“But you still don’t want them?”

“Don’t think so.”

“What are you thinking instead?”

She thought about it for a minute. “Toughness, probably. Are there any good passives for high Toughness?”

Will slowly nodded. “Normally I’d fight you on this, but I’ve realized that the hands-off approach is probably the best one with you.”

“That’s unusually Type B of you.”

“Do you know what you did during those fights?”

Bee pursed her lips. “You mean the white thing? It felt pretty natural at the time, but looking back on it I guess it was a little weird.”

“It was inspiration—an inspired hit. More than that, you got off two in a row. That’s incredibly rare.”

“What does it mean?”

“I don’t know too much about the mechanics of it, but basically inspiration means getting so in tune with yourself and the activity you’re engaged in that your output shoots up dramatically, like a moment of divine clarity. You can get inspiration on almost anything. Someone could land an inspired block, or get an inspired Brew while making a potion, or hold an inspired music performance.”

“Could you take an inspired shit?”

“No. Shut up.” He ran his tongue over his teeth, glaring down at her. Then he swallowed his bitterness and continued. “For an inspired attack, the most common number you see floating around is that it increases the power output fourfold.”

“Damn. And I did that?”

He nodded, holding up two fingers. “Twice. Like I said, very rare. Apparently Buck’s done it before, but I don’t know anyone else who has. I already knew you had a good combat sense, but this is on another level. If you can find a way to harness that inspiration consistently, it would be a game-changer.

“Again, I don’t know much about the details yet, but I’ll be reading up on it to see what you could do to trigger it again. Clearly, though, it has something to do with that intuition of yours. Which is why I’m also trusting that your intuition will shape your build into something that’ll let you hit that peak stride.”

“Bro, finally he understands my genius.”

“Oh my god, stop being annoying,” Will said and flicked her on the forehead again. “If you try to pick something exceedingly stupid, I’ll still fight you on it.”