Sam

Two chimps stepped carefully around Sam, fingering the grips of their mallets. A third crouched off to her left, a blunted arrow nocked on his bowstring.

She heard rapid footsteps as Number Three charged from behind, leading the attack. Instead of retreating, she moved into—and ducked under—the wildly swinging mallet without turning, coming up as the chimp stumbled past her and got in the way of his brother. Turning to Number Four, she was just in time to dart a hand out and catch an arrow out of the air by its ball tip. Absorbing the momentum left her palm throbbing but not badly hurt.

Making it to the bow wielder while he was still trying to nock another arrow, he let out a shriek and tried to scramble back, but she stayed on top of him, first knocking the weapon from his hands with a side kick that sent its wooden limbs flying in two broken pieces. Following up, Sam hit a spinning back kick that caught Number Four in the face and knocked him flat. She knew even before he hit the ground that he wouldn’t be getting up for a minute, and turned away to focus on the other two.

Just in time to jerk back from a swing made by Number Three, then a slap from his long off-hand. Seeing Number Two trying to circle around in the corner of her eye, she moved opposite, keeping his brother as a shield between them.

Number Three suddenly let out a fearsome howl and pitched forward onto one knee. With a running start, Number Two bounced off his shoulder and leapt high in the air, coming down on Sam. By now she was wary of their tricks, and she caught the signs he was making with his free hand just in time to avoid the upheaval of broken earth that followed Number Two’s hammer striking soil.

Only, by moving she ended up right where Number Three wanted her, and she did not even see the blur of his mallet before it was already too late to dodge. Instead of trying to catch it, however, she just let the heavy wooden head slam right into her forehead, sending her skull rattling and her teeth chattering and her thoughts all going to mush for a moment.

By the time her vision cleared, she found that her body had moved exactly the way she’d wanted it to even in the absence of all conscious thought, her hand clamped down on Number Three’s main hand and twisting his arm so that the chimp was screaming in furious pain, contorting his body to try and follow the movement of his arm lest his shoulder pop free of its socket.

Number Two came charging in to save his brother, a determined set over his simian features. Sam responded by sliding her hand back over Number Three’s hand, catching the head of his mallet, and jerking the weapon free with a single sharp tug. Flipping it around and catching the handle, she hurled it straight at the advancing chimp.

Number Two took it hard. His head snapped back, and he tumbled gracelessly across the ground as he was carried on by his momentum, rolling nearly to her feet. Stepping over him, Sam stayed on top of the one remaining opponent, Number Three, who was trying to retreat and recoup. She weaved his desperate swipes, waiting for a good opportunity, and found a moment to latch onto an arm and toss him to the ground. She wrapped herself around him, limbs locking tight, holding his arm outflung and immobile.

After a few moments, Number Three reluctantly tapped his one free hand against Sam’s thigh, letting her know that he had surrendered.

Sam let the chimp go and helped him to his feet, grinning broadly. His brothers were still trying to pick themselves off the ground, Number Four with a bloody nose and Number Two sporting a long cut on his brow where the edge of the mallet had caught him.

“Nice one, guys!” Sam called, bouncing with joy. None of the others seemed to share her excitement. She would have felt bad for them, if not for the fact that they had been pounding her into mincemeat for the past three days and change. They could do with a little comeuppance, frankly, and she hadn’t gone that hard on them.

[Congratulations! You have reached Level 4!]

Aw, sweet! Sam thought, doing a little dance as she made her way toward the farmhouse. Better and better! Will is going to be so proud of me when he gets back.

When she got to Level 3 while trying to work her way through just a pair of chimps yesterday, she had split her four attribute points evenly between Toughness and Strength. That seemed to have made just enough difference for her to break through two chimps, then three, back to back.

For Level 4, she thought she might put an extra rank in Shock Absorption. Having a few ranks in both that and Stoneskin seemed like it couldn’t be a bad idea, and Shock Absorption specifically had been a life-saver in her training ever since she picked it up.

“Good job, kid!” Mongrel called from the porch with a lazy wave. He had pulled out a folding chair each for himself and Number One and was wearing a battered straw hat, passing a smoke back and forth with the old chimp.

“Are we doing four at once now?” Sam asked. She shaded her eyes from the sun as she looked up at him. “I just leveled up again.”

“No need. Let’s give these poor boys a rest—I think you’ve squeezed about all you’re going to get out of fighting them.”

“How am I supposed to continue my training, then?”

The pot-bellied man grinned mischievously. “Don’t you worry, sweetheart. I’ve got a plan.”

That sounded slightly ominous, but Sam was willing to hear him out, going vertical on the porch while Number One went to fetch her some water.

“They arrange these fights in the city,” Mongrel explained. “Folk pay good money to come watch other folk rough each other up. Pretty casual, you know.”

“Uh-huh.”

“We’ll sign you up for one. It’d be a good way for you to get some proper fighting experience in a, uh, controlled environment, and they put on specific matches for fighters Level 5 and under, so it’ll all be perfectly fair.”

Sam stared up at the drifting clouds. When Number One appeared with a dipper of water, she stayed on her back and let him put it to her lips. She drank greedily. It was fresh from the well, cold and delicious.

“I dunno,” she said with a contented sigh after swallowing the last of it. “You’re talking about those fighting pits, right?”

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“Yeah.”

“When we went to the city, Will seemed to be pretty against me going near them at all. Are you sure he’d be all right with this?”

“All right with it? He’s the one who suggested it!”

“Really?”

“Mmhmm. When he put me in charge, he said to take you down to the pits when you were ready for some advanced training. He was right in keeping you away from that place to start out, but I don’t think he expected you to be improving this quickly.”

“So it’s okay?” Sam asked, looking doubtfully at the upside-down man.

“Perfectly. Wanna give it a shot?”

Sam grinned.

[She says yes.]

* * *

Mongrel

It took all of Mongrel’s self-restraint to keep from rubbing his hands together and laughing maniacally at the thought of all the money he was about to make.

The girl was a natural. Better than a natural. A prodigy! Was there anything above a prodigy? If there was, she was that.

He had seen fellows in the Level 5 to 7 range get torn to pieces by just one of his boys. The good Miss Darling, just days after washing up in the Frontier, had taken on three at once. And aside from that, she was already Level 4.

Oh, yes. This should work out very, very nicely for me.

He only noticed that a self-satisfied chuckle had slipped out when he saw the girl shooting him a sidelong frown as they walked down a Darkside thoroughfare. He began to make an excuse, realized that he didn’t care enough to actually think of one, and just shrugged vaguely instead.

The entertainment district was, without any exaggeration, the only sliver of Sheerhome worth a rotten shit. Instead of ugly militiamen, there were pretty working girls patrolling the street corners, extolling their virtues both verbally and through more… visual communication. Invariably enhanced with at least a few points in Appeal, and sometimes the Ideal Self passive, the girls often had considerable assets spilling out of deliciously sleazy clothing. He winked at a few of them, getting smiles and titters in return, until Sam—rudely, unfairly, and mercilessly—hit him over the back of the head.

“Sorry,” Sam said flatly. “My hand slipped.”

Mongrel spun on her with a witty retort ready on his tongue, but decided eventually to be the bigger man. The way her knuckles cracked as she worked her raised fist was a trifle dramatic, and did not frighten him at all.

The only bad thing about Darkside was that he risked running into Nyx here. He had last seen her in this area, after all, and he didn’t see why she would ever leave, considering the abundance of desperate, drunk, and/or sexually frustrated mortals.

Luckily, he did not catch a whiff of the bitch, which was a good thing. He was glad to be rid of her. One less headache to worry about.

At its northern end, the Darkside opened up into a giant fairground filled with a sea of tents, pavilions, and paper lantern displays. Smoke pillars from a hundred cook fires rose into the air, and a roar of noise accompanied the roil of townsfolk milling about makeshift streets of tramped mud between the uneven lines of canvas pop-ups.

The fairground had all sorts of attractions—plays, carnival games, food stalls, dog racing tracks—but most people came for the pits. They were dotted liberally about the place, and it was easy to make out their locations at a glance from the enormous poles thrust high above the tents that marked them out, each pole painted with a number to designate which pit was which.

“Don’t wander off,” Mongrel cautioned with a sharp gesture in Sam’s direction before slipping into a large, octagonal tent with colorful streamers whipping at its corners. He’d left the boys behind at a stables, since this was an important business dealing, and, bless the lot of them, they didn’t exactly give off a professional vibe. The inside of the tent was somehow even louder than the rest of the fairground, with bookies shouting at each other while they moved about their desks and blackboards, their voices set to a backdrop of papers rustling and stamps clicking and shalk scuffing.

Mongrel did not need to look around long before his eyes settled on the man he was looking for. Golden Boy was, as his name suggested, golden. He shone like a sparkling treasure at the back of the room, his skin an impossibly lustrous metallic hue that almost hurt to look upon, buffed to a distracting mirror shine that reflected every movement around him.

Golden Boy, a Level 16 Entertainer, was short and round and bald as a cueball. Not only was his skin gold, but so were his teeth and nails. Indeed, everything but the whites of his eyes was golden. Aside from a gold-sequined speedo and a pair of puffy yellow slippers, Golden Boy had his body entirely on display—a disturbing marvel that was nearly impossible to tear one’s eyes away from.

Spinning a scepter of polished brass with a ruby-studded sphere for a head, the city’s biggest fight organizer was dictating instructions to a gaggle of his employees, snapping his fingers at one, then another, then yet another. As the men and women were given instructions and dismissed, more arrived to take their place.

Mongrel was halted by a security woman before he made it two steps inside the tent, a burly Builder whose scarred hand fell heavily on his shoulder, thumb digging into the dip of his neck.

For some inexplicable reason, she did not believe that he had business with the organizer, and directed him to go outside and get in some line to speak with some secretary to make some appointment. That sounded like a dreadful lot of work, and an unacceptable amount of standing about. Mongrel did not like to stand if he could avoid it. It drained him.

“I need to speak with Mr. Boy about a fighter,” Mongrel explained patiently, sighing and patting the back of the woman’s hand. “Now be a good brute and let me through.”

The woman’s already broad nostrils flared almost comically, like she was planning to suck all tha air out of the tent, and her grip migrated from his shoulder to hook through his collar.

“Last chance,” she growled. “I suggest you walk out of here now, shitface—or you won’t be doing much walking at all anymore.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

The woman scowled, and her nose flared even wider somehow. “I’ll snap your spine, man—that’s what that means.”

Mongrel offered his most winning smile. “That would put a terrible dampener on the lively air around here, wouldn’t you say?”

“Not for me.”

“Mr. Boy!” Mongrel called, tilting his head back to lob his voice over this rude woman’s frizzy head. “I have an important matter for your perusal!”

Several things happened at once. The mannish brute cocked back her fist to punch him. Someone caught her wrist. There was a bit of scuffling. Two women ended up on the floor. There was a loud snap of bone splintering.

At the end of it, Mongrel’s face was thankfully still intact, and Sam had been wrestled to the floor between four other toughs, each one pinning down one limb, while the one he had dickered with was wailing and clutching her grotesquely twisted arm, slumped against a desk with money and papers strewn swept onto the canvas flooring.

The roar of activity had gone completely dead, everyone still and silent, gawking round-eyed like owls.

“Sorry, Mongrel,” Sam grunted, spread eagle. She had ceased struggling. “I know you told me to wait outside, but it looked like you were in trouble.”

A fifth tough approached, drawing a long knife. He knelt by Sam and yanked her head back by a fistful of reddish hair, pressed the blade to her exposed throat. Sheerhome’s rather short legal charter did prohibit murder, but what constituted ‘self defense’ was rather vague, and legal definitions seemed to miraculously change to suit whatever the right honorable Lord Brimstone wanted at that particular moment.

Brimstone was quite fond of the money generated by the pits. The fight organizers suckled happily at his withered teat, meaning they enjoyed many legal liberties. If they decided to put Sam in the ground over a little thing like this, most likely there would be no penalty against them.

“Up-up-up-up!” Golden Boy cried from across the room. He came over at a brisk trot, round belly proudly outthrust, and rapped his man on the head with the scepter. “None of that, now! What did I tell you about blood inside the tent?”

The tough stood up, mumbled a sheepish apology, and stowed his knife.

Golden Boy poked Sam between the eyes with the end of his scepter. “Who is this?” he asked, eyes fixed on Mongrel. “Is she a fighter?”

“Yup,” Mongrel confirmed.

“She’s good.”

“Of course she is.”

“I must have her.”

“Of course you do.”

Golden Boy snapped his fingers insistently until his security people got the message and removed themselves from Sam, allowing her to quickly spring to her feet. She approached the woman with the mangled arm, grimacing as she reached out to touch it, then thought better of it and slowly withdrew her hand. “I’m sorry about that,” she said. “I didn’t mean it.”

Golden Boy giggled with delight.

The woman with the backward arm looked somewhat less amused.