After the initial lightning clashes, River and Bastet have a few almost hesitant exchanges. Bastet feints at River, clearly not wanting to commit and then have a spear strike her; River remains mostly on the defensive, also clearly not wanting to commit to an ineffective offensive.

“Alright, stop there,” I say. They both do, relaxing and turning to look at me quizzically.

Did you not wish us to fight to yield? River asks me, surprised. I shake my head.

“Not necessarily. The point of this isn’t to beat the other person, it’s to improve your own technique and fighting approach. So, while I check you both over and heal any injuries, think about what you learned from that little exchange.”

Master, my injuries are inconsequential: I can easily fight again, River protests.

Mine too, Bastet adds. I shake my head again.

“I also need to practise Flesh-Shaping – that’s part of it. So while I’m fully aware that neither of you suffered anything worse than a scratch there, you’re not the only ones this sparring is for!” I finish with a smile, not wanting either of them to think that I’m angry. With my explanation, their hackles – metaphorical and literal – go down and a sense of thoughtfulness comes across the link.

Curious to see whether I can heal River with the mana left in him earlier, I move closer but don’t touch him. Concentrating on the link that remains intact, I focus on sending that little bit of mana to the still-bleeding scratches on his chest.

What I quickly find is that telling the mana to ‘heal River’s injuries’ is useless. Expected, since I’ve lost the automatic healing of Lay-on-hands, but a little annoying. However, I do have some success. I am able to direct the mana to the wounds and start healing them.

The problem is that I have to focus so strongly on the mana that I become blind to everything else around. In fact, closing my eyes works better as that shuts out the distraction of my vision. My other senses are easier to ignore without literally closing my ears or nose, and once I’ve sufficiently managed to reduce the input of my senses, I’m able to move the mana. It’s a bit like trying to make something levitate with one’s mind; I feel a sudden kinship to Matilda.

Once the mana is used up in River’s wound, I lose the connection completely and the rest of the world fades back into focus. Of course, becoming blind and deaf to everything around me is dangerous even when I’m not in the middle of battle. I have to hope that this Skill will become easier to use with practice as otherwise I’m going to be very vulnerable indeed.

“May I?” I ask, hovering my hand above River’s chest.

Of course, my Bound responds, sounding surprised – again – that I asked. But I’ve decided that, unless it’s a question of life and death, I shouldn’t get in the habit of assuming permission to touch my Bound. Not without some other indication that it’s desired, like Bastet cuddling into me, or Sirocco coming to sit on my shoulder.

Putting my hand over the six lines of scratches, I close my eyes and start the process of pulling more mana out of my Core. I challenge myself to pull out as much as I can control, feeding it out of my Energy channels and through my skin into River. There, I pause. I wonder….

Returning to my Core, I pull out more mana and feed it down the channels, through my skin, and into River again to join what I’d already put in there. Paying full attention to what’s happening, I’m happy to note that it seems like adding different ‘dollops’ of mana doesn’t mean that the mana stays separate; instead, it seems like one part of my mana is easily attracted to and mixed with another part of my mana.

Although there are another couple of experiments I’d like to try, I don’t want to leave my Bound bleeding for longer than necessary, so quickly redirect the mana to the scratches. Although my healing skills are faster this time than the previous – my familiarity both with closing broken flesh and River’s body working to my advantage – I still take a while to heal all of the damage. Unlike before, here there are six slashes rather than just one, and it’s tempting just to heal one at a time.

The purpose of this is to challenge myself, though, and so I split my attention and do two at once for the first two slices. As I get used to splitting my attention like that, I speed up, the last parts of the slashes being twice as fast to heal as when I started. I next try to heal three cuts at once, but find myself doing a little bit on each and switching focus rather than true multi-tasking. A little disappointed, I return to doing two at once: perhaps once I’m confident with that, I’ll be able to do more.

If nothing else, my discoveries have proven just how much I need to practise with this Skill before we will be at the same level of safety in going out into the forest as we used to be with Lay-on-hands. When I finish healing River’s wounds, I check my status screen, pleased to see that Energy Manipulation has increased a level to Initiate nine, and Flesh-Shaping has increased two levels to Novice eight.

“Alright Bastet, your turn,” I announce, opening my eyes and turning my head to look at her. She saunters over to lie down next to me. “Where are you hurt?” I ask her, not seeing any marks with a quick once-over. However, when I had mentioned about healing, she’d agreed with River that her own wounds were merely scratches, indicating she has been hurt somewhere.

My chest, she says, rolling onto her back. Sure enough, looking closely I see a little bit of staining on the feather-fur to the left side of her chest.

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“May I?” I ask her and she bats at my hand with her taloned front paw as if to say ‘get on with it’. Grinning a little, I touch her soft coat and worm my fingers down to touch the flesh beneath.

Repeating the same process as I had with River, I quickly find the culprit. It looks like she wasn’t completely successful in avoiding River’s spear when she aborted her second attack. Though it didn’t pierce her through the heart, it did glance off her ribs, taking with it a chunk of skin.

I’m surprised it didn’t bleed more, but to be fair I can see that the actual amount of flesh lost was limited, and it’s already started healing. Still, this is a wound I haven’t actually yet tried healing, making it a good exercise for me.

Regenerating flesh to fill the small hole left by the spear takes more energy than merely knitting existing flesh together, and I have to return my consciousness to my own body to grab some more mana. Not that I’m actually using a lot of mana objectively-speaking – by the time I return back to my body, I’ve regenerated what I took before – but my ability to control it is still limited.

I also have to be careful not to just regenerate the same type of cell all the time: even though it was a small section of flesh, there were blood vessels, nerves, and small glands in it which had to lead to pores on the surface. The surface, too, was slightly different from the flesh below. Then there were also some feathers which were lost meaning that the follicles have to be regenerated too. I probably could replace the feathers themselves, but they seem rather too complex for me to try right now.

The only way I find myself able to do the task is by scanning the area around it and duplicating what I find. Then, making sure the blood vessels match up and that the flesh is intact with no indication of scarring or defective healing, I pull out of her body again.

Using my physical eyes to look at the wound after gently moving the existing feathers out of the way, I can’t help but feel rather chuffed with myself. Sure, I’ve healed Bastet many times before, from much worse wounds than this one, but previously it was mostly just pouring mana into the injured part and letting the magic work by itself. The closest to what I did here is probably when I healed my eye, but even then that was more about guiding the magic in vaguely the right direction rather than actually instructing it.

This, I get the sense that if I instructed the magic to just repeat a single cell to fill the whole of the space which had been damaged, it would have done that just as ‘happily’ as it had done what I actually instructed it to do. Then Bastet would have had a small section of flesh which had no blood flow, no sensitivity, and no feathers – a much worse prospect than just letting her own healing do the job.

So when I once more sink some mana into Bastet and can barely even tell when I’m in an area which was healed compared to an area which was undamaged, I’m pleased. I can only tell because there’s some lingering residue of my own magic which makes my own mana act a little differently – more like it’s in my own body rather than Bastet’s.

While I’m in her body, I take the opportunity to ‘scan’ it like I did River’s. I reckon that my increased familiarity with his body thanks to the ‘scan’ was part of what helped me control the mana I left in his body even when I wasn’t touching it.

I do find myself lingering a little bit in her wings, finding their construction fascinating. I’ve always loved watching birds fly. In fact, I used to be interested as a child when I went to mediaeval-inspired festivals at our local castle and saw the falcons and hawks. Once I saw a ‘hunt’, and the speed at which the hawk dived on the ‘rabbit’ was amazing.

Though it hadn’t exactly been ‘mediaeval’, they’d actually videoed the event and showed the video later in slow-motion on a large screen. Watching the way the wings had moved prior to and just following the strike had kept me rapt for a good ten or eleven video loops.

Now, it’s like I’m back in that reenactment as I trace the inside of Bastet’s wings with my magic, looking at the joints, the way the feathers connect, the tendons that join everything together. I hope she is able to fly one day, I think wistfully. Maybe then I could join her. After all, if I can use Flesh-Shaping to understand how she and Sirocco are able to fly, then perhaps I could do the same.

Pulling myself back to the present, I turn to my two Bound. I have other things I want to test with them, ideas which sparked during my healing of River, but they can wait for darkness to fall. Sparring can’t.

“Alright, what did you learn from that short bout?” River and Bastet exchange wordless glances.

Bastet is fast, she prefers to leap at me unexpectedly, River offers. I nod in agreement, having also seen that. I chose to act defensively to fend her off.

“And do you feel it was effective as a strategy?” River hesitated.

It was effective in preventing her from attacking me, but didn’t offer me any advantage in and of itself. I would have to wait for my opponent to commit to an attack in order to gain the advantage.

In a pack, you would be surrounded, chimes in Bastet, sending me an image of her working with her previous packmates to surround an enemy. One of them would be ‘bait’ and then the others would pile in when the target was vulnerable – much like I experienced myself in our first meeting when I had to hide underneath a tree for the night to avoid being eaten. I ‘forward’ the image on to River as I had done with his comments to Bastet. He tilts his chin to accept her point.

Yes. Though if I had the numbers on my side, the situation would be flipped the other way, he points out. I would also generally have some sort of poison on my spear; even a glancing wound might be enough to make me the victor as long as I could survive until it took full hold. I direct his words to Bastet, the transfer automatic by this point. I seriously hope that when I rank Dominate up next it will offer intra-Bound communications as me having to be the connection between them is going to become more and more frustrating now that Bastet is actually verbal.

“And you, Bastet?”

I could not overcome his long claw, she says immediately. My initial attack was good. In a real fight, my opponent would be dead.

“But you can’t guarantee that your opponent would be dead in one attack,” I point out. “The salamander wouldn’t have died so easily.”

Agreed, she admits. That’s why the pack is important. She’s right – her attacks work better as part of a pack than alone. And the environment is not ideal. Always in view. Again, a good point: in the forest, the environment she is adapted to, she would be able to more easily hide and then attack from another angle, even if she was hunting alone.

“So, any advice for each other? Or anything you want to work on?” I ask both of them.