Shining brilliance flooded Alya’s sight from all directions. The coursing cyan pulse of ether enshrouded her vision, as though she fought inside a giant sapphire. Fighting with her etheric abilities was akin to harnessing a great and terrible beast; she was a whirling dance of death and just one fatal slip away from disaster. [i]Thump-Thump. Thump-Thump. Thump-Thump.[/i] Alya’s heart pounded in her chest. Her vision pulsed with the exertion. The broken metal bar she wielded quivered along with her hands in anticipation of further violence. Blood and torn strips of flesh sloughed off the shaking weapon. She flashed a wild sneer towards her foe, partially obscured by the white clouds of her rapid breaths. [i]Thump-Thump, Thump-Thump, Thump-Thump![/i] She could no longer distinguish the staccato gunfire echoing all around from her own heartbeat pounding in her ears. Across a floor of dented steel, the hulking mass of an Icekin loomed over Alya. He growled his fury at the comparatively tiny Inquisitor’s defiance. The low, guttural noise reverberated in Alya’s chest and shook the flooring underfoot. Alya threw her head back and belted out a psychotic burst of laughter in reply. [i]Thump-Thump-Thump-Thump-Thump![/i] The rest of the world no longer existed. Nothing but Alya and her opponent mattered. The bitter, lethally cold wind was gone. The world was all white snow, silver steel, and red viscera. The deck underfoot was lit only by the shining of blue and gold ether. The screams of dying men and the howls of wounded Icekin hounds and the growls of the monstrous beasts all became instruments backing Alya’s performance. It was the symphony underscoring a long series of duets, and now Alya regarded her next partner. [i]Thumpthumpthumpthumpthump![/i] “You think [i]you’re[/i] the greatest bear I’ve danced with?!” Alya shouted, raising her improvised weapon. The monster surged forward, closing the distance with massive strides. Her hands unsteadily wagged the pipe back and forth, the taunting message clear: [i]Come and play, Icekin. I’ve faced much worse than you.[/i] [hr] [i]The impact hit me so hard, all I could see were stars in my vision. The man’s vicelike grip held me by the neck. His off-hand was raised, as if to slap me in the face again. What little air I could get came in short, rasping breaths. My feet couldn’t reach the floor. He was holding me aloft. I struck out at him, but his arms were longer than mine. I was never very physically large, but no fourteen-year-old girl could possibly match an adult man in size and strength. It was impossible. I tapped my hand against my leg, once, twice, three times. We weren’t allowed to continue sparring once our training partner tapped out. If we did, someone could get hurt. Those were the rules of the Red Seminary.[/i] [i]Only, the Muraadan man didn’t release me. Maybe he didn’t see it? I slapped my hand against my bare leg, loud enough for the smack to ring out in the arena. One, two, three. From the viewing platform, I remember Father Gregoroth’s firm tone. “Have you only trained for friendly sparring matches, girl?” he demanded. “In a fight, Lord Varya’s enemies aren’t going to stop until you’re dead.”[/i] [i]I hanged there, suspended off the floor, for what felt like it must have been at least half an hour. The strange, foreign tattoos running up and down the man’s arm were all I could see clearly. Darkness encroached on the fringes of my vision. I grabbed for his hand, tried to pull his fingers apart enough to breathe. His arm may as well have been carved from stone for all I could move it. He backhanded me again. The room seemed to tilt and shift in place. And why had Father Gregoroth turned out the lights? I could barely see...[/i] [i]That’s when I remember starting to panic. Was this guy going to strangle me to death right here in the arena of the Red Seminary? I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t see. I remember trying to call out for help, which was stupid, Father Gregoroth could clearly see what was happening and Father Gregoroth, the Great Bear, would never step in to help a struggling student. My arms felt too heavy to move. There was no help coming. I remember how truly alone I felt in that last moment.[/i] [hr] Alya brought down her metal pipe with a wild rush of ether. Bones snapped under solid steel. The Icekin’s muzzle dented inwards, mangled into a hideous scowl. A splash of crimson marred its white face. The [i]crunch[/i] of shattered bone reverberated down the metal and through her arm. Only by the strength of her etheric reserve did she spare her own limbs from shattering themselves. For a split-second, she locked eyes with her oncoming foe. Then the Icekin struck back like a speeding train. Even despite her ether-enhanced strength, Alya felt herself lifted from the ground by the impact. The Inquisitor sailed twenty feet backwards into the hull of the [i]Kyselica[/i]. Its reinforced steel, armored enough to ram an iceberg at full speed, buckled under the impact. Shorn rivets shot out in all directions like a hail of unaimed gunfire. Even with dazzling ether flaring all around her, the world momentarily flickered out of existence as her head dented the hull behind her. But there was no time to rest. No time to think. On instinct, Alya threw herself to the right with as much strength as she could muster. Not a second later, the beast struck where she’d been like a blow from a Titan’s hammer. The Icekin’s hulk tore a jagged edge open in the dented hull, punishing his missed blow by slicing deep into muscle. Alya rolled on impact with the ground. She didn’t have time to right herself before she slammed backwards into a steel pillar and came to a stop. Alya shot up to her feet as the coursing ether commanded her injured limbs upwards, back into the fray. She spat blood onto the deck, and laughed. “I’ve slaughtered nineteen of your kind, beast! I’ve lost count of your dead hounds! Now come and make it twenty!” The Icekin’s mangled muzzle turned his every enraged breath into a bloody snarl. He charged, and Alya’s dance continued. [hr] [i]I don’t actually remember what happened next. One moment I was choking out. Then I remember when I could see again. I was on the ground. A small spellblade shimmered in my hand. A crimson streak marred the wooden floor. What happened?[/i] [i]His shout brought me back to the present. “You little [/i]bitch![i]” Across from me, the Muraadan man clutched his arm. Blood seeped between his fingers, dripping onto the floor. “You said this was no-weapons, Inquisitor!” From on high, Father Gregoroth laughed.[/i] [i]Well, he sort of laughed. It was more like a low rumble that somehow filled the arena. It echoed from every direction. “And you said you were a fearsome brawler. Do you really feel fear at the sight of a little girl clutching a butter-knife like that?”[/i] [i]I stared dumbly at the spellblade in my hand. I definitely didn’t summon it. I know, because I’d completely forgotten I could do that. I preferred training with much larger weapons. I had never had any great skill with ether.[/i] [i]And then he was on me again. His blow struck me dead center. Sent me flying. Damn, but it hurt so bad. It felt like my insides were going to explode. Landing on my back knocked the wind out of me. I had no time to recover before he was there, again. He kicked me. Once. Twice. Three times. I felt a rib crack. It hurt like being stabbed. I tried to scramble away, rolled over, and saw the fury burning in his eyes. That’s when I knew what this was. We weren’t training.[/i] [i]He was trying to kill me.[/i] [i]He was trying to [b]kill[/b] me![/i] [i]I felt an icy stab of fear, even over all the pain. I’d faced death before. Well, Albina had, anyway. But it’s one thing when the danger is abstract - when it’s hunger or cold or exhaustion. But to have another person there directly trying to violently end my life? Maybe it was the fear. Maybe it was the blow to my stomach. I wet myself, there on the wooden arena floor. I sobbed out loud. I would never admit that to my warsiblings, of course. I’m sure they’d understand; they’d survived the Red Seminary too. But still, I've never told them how this fight really went. A lack of fear, of that sheer unthinking terror, is just one of those mutual fictions we had wordlessly agreed upon.[/i] [i]I rolled and scrambled backwards. The hot stabbing pain in my side from the broken rib elicited a high yelp. This wasn’t like sparring. There we’d follow choreographed, rehearsed sets of moves. What was the correct move to respond with when your opponent pulled the “I will beat you to death” move? I hadn’t been taught that. Neither had Albina. I pulled away. I needed time. Time to figure out how to respond. An involuntary cry escaped as I failed to dodge far enough. That tattooed arm reached out, swept me off my feet. My face hit the wood, hard. I tried to roll, but when I rolled onto my side the pain stopped me in my tracks, and he kicked me onto my back.[/i] [i]I was alone with a killer. If I couldn’t figure out how to answer that, I was going to die.[/i] [hr] Alya and the Icekin together wreaked untold havoc in what was once the [i]Kyselica[/i]’s navigation deck. Paper maps were strewn everywhere, tattered beyond recognition. An overturned table made of dense Lanostran oak lay in three pieces and covered in blood. Etheric light glinted off shattered glass and jagged metal from various instruments and meters, all rendered beyond useless by the violence. Alya clutched a mangled sextant in her hand, its brass slick with blood. Snow blew in through the large hole in the wall before being crunched underfoot, and the metal deck grew increasingly perilous. The Icekin was vastly better at navigating an ice-slick surface than Alya was, and ether was far from an inexhaustible resource. Breath came hard, her lungs filling painfully with the icy air. Much of the quickly-freezing blood on the floor was her own. Their fight wasn’t one of graceful precision and finely-honed technique. It was a dance of raw, primal violence. The Icekin lunged, faster than such a lumbering hulk seemed capable. Alya’s magically enhanced reflexes were by now the only thing allowing her to keep up. She slipped past a bloodied arm and smashed the brass sextant into his face. Alya focused all the strength she could muster into the rounded edge of the device, slamming it into her foe’s impossibly dense skull. The golden ether she’d harvested from Zviera flared all around her, and she hoped beyond measure that the monster’s skull would give out under the impact faster than the brass tool did. But neither were the first to give way. The Icekin reeled from the superhumanly strong blow, but Alya’s footing slipped in the blood on the deck. She wavered unbalanced for a single heartbeat. In that moment, his mighty limb, thick as a tree’s trunk, struck out and flung Alya like a rag doll. She flared her ether to land, lest she break her neck on impact. But that took a moment of attention and focus, and this wasn’t a fight in which moments could be bought for free. An enormous grip seized her by the leg, and the world spun crazily around her. First she was sideways, then she was airborne, then upside-down as the towering Icekin held her aloft. Alya flipped the broken sextant around in her hands, exposing a jagged edge and plunging it towards the Icekin’s vulnerable belly. She let out a strained laugh as the sharp metal plunged into soft flesh. With an outraged snarl, the monster retaliated by whipping her around by her leg, smashing her into the ship’s chronometer like a human flail. Glass shattered and metal bent on impact with her shoulder. Clockwork mechanisms slowed to a halt, letting out a grinding sound in protest at the intrusion. Alya’s head smacked into the brass side of the chronometer. The left side of her field of vision went red and winked out, fading into nothing. A searing pain spread across that side of her face, joining the hundreds of pains across her body. She instinctively rolled to the right, to avoid the next incoming blow - but the dodge was abruptly yanked short, leaving Alya floundering. Without her left eye, Alya couldn’t look down to see, but the pain of pulled muscles told her the clockwork gears had pulled her arm firmly into their motions before jamming to a halt. She could swear the monster actually grinned at her turn of fortune. His bloody, disfigured paws seized her by her right arm and leg as she aimed a kick at his mangled face. Alya’s laughter stopped all at once. Even with etheric, superhuman strength, it wouldn’t take more than a couple minutes for the Icekin to tear her limb from limb. “I’ll have you know I don’t fight alone!” Alya threw the Icekin a wild, wide-eyed glare, somewhere between hostility and joy. “Lord Varya, I pray to be allowed to continue serving in Your glorious name!” [hr] [i]I nearly died before I found my answer. He had knelt down, his knee driving into my hip and pinning me in place. His hand was so much bigger than mine, it was trivial to pin my arm and my spellblade with it. Blood dripped from his slash wound onto my face. I remember it got into my eyes, because I couldn’t see clearly. I tried to throw him off with ether, but to tell the truth, I had almost no experience in fighting with ether. Albina’s memories of training in this regard really didn’t help. She seemed to be able to use a family signet of hers as a focus somehow, in a way I had never really figured out how to copy.[/i] [i]He slapped me, then backhanded me. It was purely vindictive. Surely he had me dead to rights without further blows? I pulled as hard as I could, but he brought his free hand down on my neck, and then I couldn’t breathe. I kicked my legs, but only found air. I reached for his wrist with my off-hand, but couldn’t break that vicelike grip. I pulled. I scratched. I struck. I slapped. Nothing.[/i] [i]He leaned down, his face so close to mine I could smell the virrika on his breath. He taunted me. He was angry now. I don’t remember the exact words. I was panicking too much to focus on them. I think I hit him in the face, but not with any real force. I had nowhere near the physical strength needed to escape. I had no means of leverage. I was at the Muraadan’s mercy.[/i] [i]I just remember thinking, damn it, somebody help me. A fellow warpriest, Father Gregoroth, hell, [b]anyone[/b]. And that’s when I remembered that I wasn’t alone. You see, I’m never really alone…[/i] [hr] [b]BOOM![/b] In the interior space of a ship’s hull, the shotgun blast reverberated like the detonation of a bomb. The Icekin staggered, letting go of Alya’s arm and turning in surprise. Zviera stepped back, his gold eyes wide with fear and surprise. The shotgun at his hip clacked loudly as his shaking hands worked the pump action, and then it roared again. [b]BOOM![/b] And again. [b]BOOM![/b] And again. [b]BOOM![/b] And again. [b]BOOM![/b] With each explosion, a widening patch of blood and viscera appeared blossomed from the Icekin’s torso. His low, deep growl became tinged with pain as he turned to march on the newcomer. The recoil was almost enough to knock the exhausted Omestrian off his feet. The shotgun clicked and spoke no more. Zviera backed away, shaky and blood-slicked hands trying to load a new shell. He fumbled and dropped the shell, which clinked as it bounced across the deck. “Ah, m-mistress…!” Alya’s laugh returned as abruptly as it left. She’d never been happier to see her servant. “It’s empty, idiot; use my halberd!” With the Icekin distracted, she twisted in place until her left shoulder completely dislocated, and looked down into the shattered chronometer. She scrambled to sort her mangled arm out from the maze of twisted gears and wires pinning it in place. Zviera could barely manage the heavy, all-metal, phoenix-bladed halberd on a good day. Exhausted, ether-drained, and with a bullet in his shoulder, he couldn’t manage to fully lift the weapon at all. Gravity moreso than muscle brought its blade plunging down towards the oncoming monster. Even with grave injuries, the Icekin swatted the clumsy strike aside effortlessly as he marched on Zviera, with murder in his eyes. Zviera backed away, but didn’t run. He probably couldn’t run if he tried, anyway. But there was no way he’d come this far to bring Mother Alya her weapons only to run away just ten feet away from her. He tried to muster what little courage he had, dropping the empty shotgun and the heavy halberd and raising his shaking hands to fight the approaching beast. [hr] [i]Albina doesn’t usually talk to me when I’m in a fight. She probably feels pain, too, maybe? So distracting me isn’t really a good idea. But she wordlessly reached out to me at that moment, and a piece of the puzzle I didn’t even know I was missing fell into place. Her family's signet had never been my catalyst. In hindsight, why would it? But to think, my catalyst had been with me all along![/i] [i]I remember how the surge of ether glowed blue around us. I remember well how I threw the man six feet into the air. I especially remember the surprise on his face. The utter bewilderment as he went from a victorious finish to flying through the air, just like that. I'll never forget that look. [/i] [i]Fear had all but paralyzed me. Tears had done nothing to help. Pleading almost got me killed. So it’s clear the answer is none of those things, right? Not in a real fight, anyway. He landed with a hard smack against the wooden floor, and I pounced almost before he’d even landed. I’d like to say it was a graceful and elegant fight from there, just like out of a martial arts rehearsal. It wasn’t. I just remember grabbing his head and throwing downwards towards the hard floor. If I could knock him out, he wouldn’t be able to try to kill me. We’ve occasionally knocked each other out by accident in sparring, me and my warsiblings. A quick checkup with a healer and no lasting damage has resulted. This was well beyond what the Red Seminary allowed in a training bout, but he’d started it. Hadn’t he?[/i] [i]Father Gregoroth was saying something. I was only dimly aware of his voice, though. I was hyper-focused on knocking the Muraadan out, on stopping him from threatening me any further. Slam. Slam. Slam![/i] [i]I heard a primal, meaningless scream emanating from my mouth as I threw his head into the floor. He hadn’t tapped out. Why wouldn’t he just tap out? After coming so close to death, my vision was red with fury. My pulse pounded in my ears. I determined I would just keep at it until my opponent surrendered. To hell with that fucking sadist Gregoroth.[/i] [i]It was Albina who got my attention first. I heard her, all at once. She cried out, [/i]Alya! Enough! Stop it, you idiot! [i]Blood was seeping out of the Muraadan’s ears and nose, I noticed. His head was bent at an odd angle, too, and he wasn’t moving anymore. His violet eyes stared upwards, wide, sightless. His mouth was open, as if to say something, but he didn’t make a sound, not even of breath. I, however, was breathing so hard I couldn’t hear what Father Gregoroth was saying anymore. My hands, no, every part of me really, was shaking so badly I actually had to try three times to stand up straight. The room spun around me like a carnival attraction. Every part of me hurt, every joint and every muscle and every bone. But pain felt like a distant thing, something I was aware of but didn’t really feel. Dazed, I watched Father Gregoroth descend from the judge’s platform, head held high.[/i] [i]I looked at the Muraadan. He hadn’t gotten up. I remember thinking, maybe I knocked him out after all? Surely nobody like him would dare disrespect a High Inquisitor by refusing to stand in his presence. I looked up at the Great Bear. Rage and helplessness and thrill and sorrow and fear and exhilaration and a thousand other emotions swirled around me. It was hard to focus. He was saying something, something about passing a milestone, something about learning a lesson. I couldn’t hear a thing over the ringing in my ears and my own rasping breath, really, but I somehow managed to choke out a thanks for his feedback.[/i] [i]Whatever lesson he’d intended, I learned two precious things that day. For one, I learned how to really use ether, how to go beyond the simple enhancements any soldier could do. The other was a simple but vital lesson: I learned what to carry into battle. I swore to myself I’d never be paralyzed by fear and sorrow in a fight again.[/i] [hr] The SA-issued pistol made a sharper, quicker [i]pop-pop-pop![/i] compared to the shotgun's furious roar. The bloodied menace dropped at Zviera’s feet as though his legs had disappeared out from under him, crashing down into the metal deck unceremoniously. Normally, a pistol was all but worthless against an Icekin. At anything other than her point-blank shots behind the beast’s ear, they would shrug off the smaller bullets with near impunity. Alya let out a final, strangled laugh as the dying beast rattled a final breath. Zviera just stared for a long few moments, not sure if he should stare at the dead monster or at his grievously-wounded mistress. She had a shard of glass sticking out of her left eye. Her left arm hung limp, unmoving, and dripping blood everywhere. She was covered in blood. Everywhere he looked, her body was beaten black-and-blue. The sight brought tears to his golden eyes; his mistress looked like she’d been thrown into a blender. And all because she’d had to fight unarmed? He bowed his head, immediately gasping out an apology, but he barely got two syllables out before she interrupted him. “Shut up,” Alya said, her voice no less firm for all her injuries. With her one good arm, she ignored her halberd and instead pulled her servant in closely, holding him tightly to her shoulder. The motion hurt his bullet wound, but he tried hard not to show it, not with all of Alya’s own injuries. “Ah, y-you’re hurt, mistress,” he managed to say. “You did well, Zviera.” She rewarded him with a kiss on his cheek, heedless of the amount of blood they were both covered in. “Mother Faina is in the solar, and if these Icekin reach her, it’s over for all of us. With my halberd, I’ll be able to defend her. Now reload my shotgun and then find somewhere safe. You’ve done enough.” “But-” Alya shook her head, letting go of her servant and looking over her injuries. “It’s alright, Zviera. Lord Varya protects. And today, you had the honor of being his answer to my prayers. Go and find somewhere safe, rest, and pray for Warband Goliath.” She gave the massive corpse a weary glance. One down. Only a few hundred to go. “We’ll need it.”