Air sheared just against my ear as Jun’s diverted blow barely missed, and I stepped into her guard for an elbow strike to the chest that would leave an unarmored person reeling and breathless. Unfortunately for me, Jun was indeed fully armored. She was barely affected by the attack and retaliated as I backed off.
A left hook cracked against my jaw, but I, too, was armored. “You didn’t respect the sacred count of ten.” I complained, swiping my spear in a wide arc at Jun’s legs.
She jumped over it and slammed back down to the ground, then charged me with her sword held off to her right side. “In a real fight, you don’t count down from ten.”
“Well it’s a good thing this is for training purposes, then.” I emphasized, blocking Jun’s overly telegraphed attack with my spear’s shaft and kicking her square in the chest. She skidded back with a gasp of surprise, the Scorched Bloodcoral Concoction that had fully worked through my body granting me enough power and speed to finally do some damage.
“That kick packs a punch.” Jun laughed and coughed at the same time, ignoring my obvious jab at her surprise attack. “That liquid blessing’s doing wonders for you.”
“The other recruits are going to love fighting you.” I muttered. All that did was make Jun laugh harder and push just as hard, forcing me to backpedal if I wanted to keep my range advantage. She kept taking small nicks on her armor from glancing strikes that I managed to land, but they were far too shallow to dissuade her.
Not for a lack of trying on my part. At first, I wrongly identified her movements as reckless and uncaring of any wounds she’d take. But as we clashed, and she just kept pushing me back, I realized just how wrong I’d been. She was watching me like a hawk. Every move I took was subtly countered by a shift in her stance, or a lunge at a now open shoulder, or a punch to the gut that left me reeling even through the armor. Her fighting was anything but reckless. It was calculating and efficient, but done at such a high speed that it seemed to be the opposite.
It was terrifyingly impressive, especially since I knew Jun wasn’t trained for this. She was either a natural, or she’d been training with Nia when we were supposed to be sleeping. Most likely both. I found myself grinning as I took a hit across the hip, just barely twisting out of the way of a useless leg and tackled a very surprised Jun with the intention to send her sprawling to the ground.
Unfortunately, I’d forgotten about the tendrils. Jun’s chestplate unwound itself and smashed into my chest, sending me flying back until I crashed into a coral branch and slammed to the ground. I heard her muttering to herself as my world quickly stopped spinning, frustrated with her level of control over her function, and when I propped myself up on my feet her chestplate had mostly recoiled.
“Still don’t have full control of it?” I asked, shifting my spear into the hammer I’d used against Harvester. Reach meant nothing if Jun could easily disarm me, so I needed the weight behind the hammer for safety. How the weapon changed weight as well as shape I couldn’t begin to guess, but it did. “Do you need a minute?”
“Yeah, sorry.” Jun grumbled. “I know you wouldn’t give it to me in a real fight, so sorry again. Skies above, this is so frustrating. It just doesn’t listen to me.”
I frowned and placed my hammer on the ground head-down. “That shouldn’t be happening. It’s your function; anything that’s not working should just be because you aren’t used to it yet. But flat-out not listening to you is dangerous and a problem.” I stepped closer to Jun and showed my empty hands as a sign of peace. “Maybe there’s something I can do to help?”
“No, no I’ve got this.” Jun assured me, then grunted in annoyance as her chestpiece just wouldn’t go back together. “Just… give me a second. I’ll make it work. Go get your hammer.”
“Alright.” I reluctantly agreed, then backed up to grab my hammer without taking my eyes off of Jun. I uncoiled my gauntlet with a surge of battery and wound it around my upper arm, then recoiled it back into place with barely a thought. The Floodforest’s Gift worked perfectly fine for me, but there had to be something keeping Jun from using it properly.
Two minutes of Jun’s frustration later it was obvious that she wasn’t going to get her function under control without dismissing her chestpiece and resummoning it. What was equally obvious, however, was that she wasn’t about to dismiss her chestpiece any time soon. I’d never had a single issue with control over a function like Jun did, and I wasn’t sure that anyone I’d ever met in my old life had had this problem either. A lack of battery or knowledge on how to activate or control the function, sure. But not Jun’s strange problem with deactivating it.
She seemed perfectly able to control it, as she’d shown by punching me in the chest with it, but apparently deactivation was a completely different beast for her. It made little sense to me, but as I tried to work through a thought process that would lead to Jun’s problem, it started to click. Only if my assumptions were correct, of course.
“How are you trying to turn it off?” I asked, startling Jun out of a series of muttered curses that made no sense to me.
“How am I trying to turn it off?” She laughed and shook her incredulously, then gestured angrily at her function. “The same way you turn anything off; you stop giving it the thing that makes it work.”
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That was what I’d assumed. “So are you trying to tell it to turn itself off, or are you just cutting off the flow of battery to it?”
Jun froze. “Abyss below, I’m stupid.” She cursed, then sighed and closed her eyes. Her tendrils retracted almost immediately, then her sigh was one of relief. She fell to the ground laughing, sprawled out with the thought of our duel completely forgotten. “Why’d that work? Shouldn’t cutting off the battery flow make it turn off?”
I walked over and sat down in front of Jun, then drew a circle in the dirt. “Think of a function like this circle. If all a function has to do is give you strength, or speed, or something like create a fire, it’s all contained inside the circle.” I drew arrows pressing down on the circle and a small lightning bolt inside of it. “The battery, which is the arrows, creates something out of nothing. So when the battery stops coming in, something stops existing. What you were trying to do would work for these kinds of functions.”
“Which means there’s another kind, right?” Jun half-asked, half-stated. “Which is what the Floodforest’s Gift is?”
“Mmhm.” I confirmed, wiping away the lightning bolt in the center. I then erased portions of the circle itself, then redrew the lines spreading out at all angles. “The other kind of function needs to manipulate something, and it’s way rarer. Floodforest’s Gift unspools the tendrils that make up our weapons and armor and uses battery to control them. And if you suddenly cut off the battery input, the function will keep working with what little you left inside of it to try and do what you ordered it to do. What it won’t do is automatically cancel itself.”
I drew more arrows connecting to the misshapen circle, then erased and re-drew a normal circle before erasing the arrows. “Commanding it to turn off will make it turn off, but it still has to physically happen before you completely turn off the battery input. It’ll take some getting used to so you don’t waste battery, but after a day or two you’ll have it down to a science.”
As it turned out, I’d simply forgotten what it was like to struggle to get used to something. I’d have to burn that part of me away, as I was about to embroil myself into something that I knew absolutely nothing about with Jun’s people. I watched with a small smile as Jun activated and deactivated The Gift multiple times in quick succession, building the muscle memory she’d use when she eventually fought for her life.
My fingers laced together as that thought screeched to a halt. The only reason Jun had fought for her life was because of her core function. The people here hadn’t fought for their lives in decades, if I believed what the Matria had told me, which explained why they took their leisurely time training up new recruits. When there wasn’t a sense of desperation and survival behind something, why bother putting yourself into situations that could seriously hurt you?
Under the chosen, my people could be flourishing. There had to be a few good souls under the vast umbrella that I hadn’t met, and if they rallied humanity to clear simple hazards and build up settlements in the few safe havens we’d scoped out, they might be in a pretty damn good spot right now. In the best option, there would be people who never once fought for their lives in the new world. People could be soft. People could be parents and know they’d come home every night.
Or they were fodder for the chosen who wanted quick power at the cost of taking a life.
“Something on your mind?” Jun asked with concern, scooching closer to put a hand on my shoulder. She completely wiped the circle I’d drawn away. “You’re looking down at the ground a whole lot, and you don’t usually do that.”
So I physically ‘looked down’. I chuckled at my own pun and shook my head, then gently removed Jun’s hand from my shoulder. “I’m fine, Jun. Just worried about my… family.” I caught myself before I said ‘my people’, just in case there were prying ears about. “Hazards might be the least of their worries right now, or it could be the only worry they’ve got. And I’m not sure which one would be worse.”
“Probably the not-the-hazards one.” Jun said in what I guess was supposed to be a helpful tone, but came off as slightly sarcastic. “Because the other one means that it’s the people they’ve got to be afraid of.”
She’d hit the nail on the head. I sighed and nodded, then pushed myself to my feet while brushing the dirt off my legs. “Let’s get back to fighting. It somehow hurts less than thinking.”
----------------------------------------
I collapsed against a coral tree as my lungs took in breaths that felt like liquid fire. I didn’t know how long Jun and I had been fighting for, but the sun was still high in the sky and beating down on the both of us. I glared at my opponent one last time before signaling that I was done, and she let out a long gasp of relief and leaned back against her own tree for support. Without the Scorched Bloodcoral Concoction I’d stood far less of a chance against Jun’s superior stats, and only my slightly better technique let me stand for as long as I did.
Jun swiped a hand through the air and sucked in an excited breath. “Two levels on all my armor pieces and three on my sword. Not enough to get a stat bonus or a new innate function, but we’re getting there. Oh, and I just got a message that my Rootia’s coming to see me. Not sure how that’s going to happen, since both of them are still back home, but it’ll be nice seeing one of them again. Even if I don’t know which one it is.”
“Rootia?” I asked.
“You know, your parent’s parents. Rootia and Rootio. No, wait, that’s just what I call them. Grandparents is the actual term.” Jun explained. “What do you call them back on Earth?”
“Grandparents.” I answered between breaths, bringing up my interface to see what I’d gotten from our training. I saw very similar growth to what Jun had described, which meant that I’d been fighting almost twice as hard to keep up with her core function’s increased experience gains. It certainly felt like it, but it was good to see something to confirm it. A little annoying, but good.
“And my Floodforest’s gift went up two levels too! Nice!” Jun said happily, then sank to the ground. “How’d yours… wait. Do you hear that?”
As my pulse slowed itself and the throbbing let other sounds in, I heard what Jun was referencing. Or, to be more accurate, didn’t hear. All sound had died, and as I pushed myself to my feet, the coloured dirt underneath didn’t make a single noise.
Something was terribly wrong. And whatever it was, Nia was involved.