Riku raised his eyebrows in the way that communicated being impressed without saying the word impressed. "Tsukishima only adjusts people she thinks have upside."
"Or people who are embarrassing her class."
"Those she just watches fail as a lesson to everyone else." He settled back into stance. "You’re getting the adjustnt. Different category."
I was beginning to understand that there were different taxonomies at work here. Different classes of student. The ones who got left to struggle, the ones who got corrections, and sowhere above that, the ones who got Tsukishima’s actual ti and attention. I was apparently in column B now. Not sure what I’d done to escape column A.
We went again. This ti I kept my grip looser on the rear hand like she’d shown , and when Riku tried the false-weight technique again, the difference was imdiate.
My reaction speed was asurably improved.
I got the redirect in ti and we ended up in a close exchange, neither of us breaking off for almost four seconds. In sparring ti that was a genuine eternity.
Long enough for the ambient noise of the room to fade out and for the world to narrow down to just stick movent and footwork and breathing.
"Yeah," he said, breathing slightly harder than before. "That’s better. Way better."
Across the room I could see Belle’s partner trying to figure out how to close distance on soone with a crossbow without getting clipped again. Belle was watching him figure it out with the patient amusent of soone who had all day.
Naomi had shifted to a different rhythm with her partner, less competitive and more cooperative now, both of them exploring the sa patterns from opposite sides like they were teaching each other by accident. Tsukishima noticed from across the room and didn’t intervene, which ant she approved.
My phone buzzed in my jacket pocket. I ignored it.
It buzzed again.
Riku glanced at it. "You can check if it’s urgent."
"The only things that text urgently are either relationship problems or potential federal cris, and I’ve had enough of both this week."
He processed this. "Interesting week."
"Formative."
We trained for another forty minutes. By the end, my shoulder had a developing bruise from the one hit I hadn’t avoided, my grip was substantially less terrible than it had been when class started, and I had a reasonable read on Riku’s attack sequencing patterns.
He had a tell in his left shoulder before he went for a low sweep. He probably didn’t know about it. I didn’t ntion it, which was probably ethically neutral and tactically sensible simultaneously.
Tsukishima called ti.
The room exhaled collectively, the shift from focused effort to recovery that happened at the end of every sparring session. Water bottles ca out. Weapons returned to racks.
The Ruby-Obsidian social barrier, which had lowered slightly over the course of class because hitting each other was apparently a bonding experience, went back up to its normal height.
Belle appeared at my right shoulder while I returned the spear to its rack.
"Your crossbow partner looked defeated," I said.
"He kept trying to close the gap like distance was the problem. Distance wasn’t the problem. Respect for distance was the problem." She tucked a strand of blue hair behind her ear, tucking it away from her face where it had co loose during the session. "Naomi did well."
"She always does when she stops thinking about whether she’s doing well."
Across the training floor, Naomi was talking to her sparring partner, an easy exchange that only happened when two people found mutual respect through the specific honesty of hitting each other for forty-five minutes.
Her conversation with the Ruby girl had a relaxed rhythm to it now, the kind of comfort that ca from shared effort. The Ruby girl laughed at sothing Naomi said. Naomi’s expression softened with visible relief, the tension she carried in her shoulders during the session gradually releasing as the adrenaline faded.
The shell necklace from her mother sat at her collarbone, visible above the collar of her training jacket. A small reddish mark decorated her left forearm from an impact she’d taken clean and kept moving through without complaint.
She’d barely seed to notice it during the fight itself, which was probably the best indicator of how much her pain threshold had improved since the first week.
Belle followed my line of sight.
"You do that a lot," she said.
"What."
"Watch her like that." A pause. " too, when you think I’m not looking."
I looked at the weapon rack instead of at Belle.
"The war theory," she said, her voice going quieter, dropping the performance she usually wore in group settings. "I’ve been thinking about it since you said it. In the stairwell."
"And?"
She was quiet for a mont. "The things that ca through the gates in the first years, before hunter organizations existed, they weren’t random. The FGRA records I’ve read about, the ones from the early docuntation phase, the creatures showed coordination that single-species evolution doesn’t explain well."
She picked up a practice knife from the nearby rack and turned it over in her hands, not purposefully, just sothing to do with her fingers while she thought. "Researchers called it ergent pack behavior. Adaptive response to human hunting patterns."
She set the knife down. "But if you were a general deploying units through an opening in a hostile world’s defenses, that’s also what it would look like."
I looked at her.
She looked back.
"Still not sleeping with you until you prove the theory," she said.
"You’ll cave before I prove anything."
"You cannot be this smug about a relationship that runs on milk extraction."
"I’m choosing to emphasize the relationship part."
She grabbed her crossbow case. "I hate you," she said, in the tone of voice that didn’t an that at all.
Tsukishima appeared from across the room, making her final pass through departing students.
"Monroe," she said.
I stopped.
She looked at for a mont with the golden-brown eyes that processed everything in a room simultaneously.
"The adjustnt held through the full session," she said. "Good."
User Comments
0 comments from readers