You still don't know how she did it.

You can view the exchange from every conceivable angle. Titanomachia coming towards you. Maxima and Musashi by your side, forming an invincible wall of violence. The look in her eyes as she accelerated into a full run towards you. Not determined. Not excited. Not even serene. It was like she was already thinking about what you were about to do wrong - and how she could fix it.

Musashi's sword hit Maxima's shield. Your fist caught nothing but ribbons and hair. The geometry of bodies folded and unfolded, even if it meant Machia slowing to a walk, squeezing around you like you were a pedestrian in her way, dipping into a crouch and launching like a coiled snake -

And on, to the scoring zone.

You'd never seen anyone move like that since Gata in her prime. Even Maxima, who had fought Gata in her prime, said so afterwards. A new mountain arose before you, an ultimate challenge, the barrier you would have to cross to become a champion -

But before you could reach it, the mountain crumbled to dust.

You are alone. Your phone is lighting up with messages - Argeltia, Lios, Decima and The Kraken are all asking you to train with them, corpos are offering sponsorship deals for what they expect to be a new champion while you've still got that rookie discount. But the stars of yesteryear are fading and nobody from your generation comes close to where you've already reached. And so you watch the wind turbines over the stormwater channel and think again about Titanomachia.

"If you're thinking I'm gonna just fucking sit here and contemplate the ephemerality of the wind or some shit, you can think again, bitch!"

Samira "Sammy" Collins lifted her empty left hand, currently bereft of any decoration except for one small silver bracelet, and punched a steel pole holding up a wind turbine next to her. It's not the hardest punch she's ever thrown. She's got enough sense left in her to know that if she hit a five foot thick piece of wind turbine generator steel with the hardest punch she has, she'd break three fingers. And girl, she doesn't feel like dealing with that shit tonight.

No, instead, she punches just hard enough to put a light dent in the metal and make her fingers hurt with pain shooting up her arm. Yeah, like that, like you gotta feel it. Enough to know it was a real punch.

She shudders as the pain passes through her, and punches it again. It makes a good ringing sound, nice and deep and solid. Her jean vest flares out, showing off her electric lime t-shirt that cuts off at the belly-button. She should be cold, but she's been working too hard to feel the wind that way. Instead, the wind is good. The wind is power, it's motion, it's life passing over her body as she punches. Wishing she could draw it into herself and save some for later like these turbines.

"Wow, seriously, I'm wishing I'm a fucking wind turbine? This is your fault, Machia! You hear me! It's your fucking fault!"

She stops, pulls her phone out of her jeans pocket with the aching hand. Looks at the messages. Puts it back away. Fuck'em. She'd get matched against who she got matched against. The rest didn't matter. She wasn't sure what did matter anymore. Feeling this pole mattered.

She'd be here till she got too cold and tired to feel anything at all. And then she'd collapse somewhere with a cheap bed and wake up the next morning to eat the cheapest shitty hotel pancakes on the face of the earth like they were god's gift to humanity. and then...then she was going to find Titanomachia. She was going to find her and make her change her mind. Yeah. That was the ticket. Her finger hovered over the phone again, looking at Machia's public page, reading every word of her announcement again and again. Why? Why why why?!

The sound of the pole echoed into the night. kthunk. kthunk. kthunk.

Strong hands reached out. They gripped the bent light pole and with a wrench, twisted the metal back into an upright position. Maxima looked up at her work, frowned, and twisted it again. "You did a number on this thing, huh?" she said. "Maybe if I..."

She thinks for a moment, then grips with both hands, rips the pole apart slowly - so that it doesn't tear the electrical cable inside - squeezes the torn part of the top pole into a narrow wedge, and pushes it into its base. It holds. "Got it!" she said.

She smiles down at you.

You've still got no idea how you could bring down Maxima. There's just too much of her to punch. Even Argeltia feels smaller than her. Maybe it's because Argeltia feels pain, whereas Maxima breathes it. She carries oceans of it on her shoulders, but as long as her kneecaps keep she'll stand, and as long as her cheeks hold she'll smile.

"Rough night, huh?" she said. She had a bag with sports drinks, bandages and peanut-butter protein bars. She didn't offer; she just started giving, like to do anything less was inhuman.

Sammy's eating a protein bar. She didn't say thank you, didn't say anything at all. But it was in her hands, and then it was in her mouth, and she's licking a bit of peanut butter off her lips that was left there from how fast it went in.

Funny, right, that there really wasn't anything to improve on here. The greatest genetically modified super foods the world could offer and the best dense snack was the same mashed up nuts that everybody had been eating for generations. Far enough back to before there was genetic enhancement, far enough back to when they had historical vids that were only in black and white and still people were eating peanut butter bars to sustain them on the road, the trail, the war front. Made you wonder what the point was of improving all these things.

She wiped her mouth with a bare arm. "What do you know? Maybe this is just how I build muscle." She's got a grin now though. A combo of the food and an idea that just occurred to her. "Unless, you'd like to go a round instead. I'm pretty sure that'd be good training. Assuming you're even half as tough out of the arena as you are in it, Maxi."

"I wouldn't recommend it," said Maxima. She gently rolled her shoulders, leaning gently back against the damaged lightpole. "It's a cold day out. I'd hate to see you catch a chill."

It was strange seeing her without her armour and shield. It made her look small - even though she still had an entire head on you. It also made her look unfamiliar. Maxima in her full combat suit was one of the most well-known and studied figures in Aristeia!. Thirty years bringing the exact same defensive combat style to every match meant that even children knew her moves by heart. Green rookies knew that if you stepped inside the envelope of her shield no harm would touch you.

But none of that gave any hint as to what she'd do when dressed in her COW! FIGHTING! singlet and blue jeans. But looking into her ice blue eyes you could sense a killing intent that you never felt from her in the arena.

"Babe, if you think I am even remotely fucking close to taking a hint, you're not paying attention to the dented lightpost. I'm gonna show you I'm on the same level as Machia."

There are three things you should give Sammy credit for here. First of all, Sammy moves the drinks and bandages out of the way. No use wasting good stuff, you know? Second of all, she does not make the assumption that Maxima is going to move the same way she would in the arena because she's not a complete moron and this isn't the Aristeia! stadium. Third of all, whatever bluster she's been putting out, her hit isn't one of those hits that'd kill you if it connects. She's serious about sparring and she moves as fast as she can move, but the force she's putting into the strike isn't murder force and if Maxima is half as good as the aura she puts out, she'll be able to tell. Cuz, like she said, she wants training. She's got a mountain to climb, whether it's made of rock or dust.

You were right about one thing: this was not the stadium.

Maxima steps back. Steps over the fence. Steps back some more, the flawless confidence of someone who had needed only one glance to memorize the terrain layout behind her. She keeps her hands up in a guard stance and just gives up ground, gives up ground, gives up ground. With no scoring zone to force her into position, with no rules to commit her to any sort of attack, with no wall anywhere behind her there was no limit to how much ground she could give. Any attack was impossible if she could just backstep, which she did as she started going down into the stormwater channel, balancing on the sharp edge of the sleek stormwater channel like a mountain goat.

Her boots touched the water. Soon she was ankle deep, then knee deep in the fast-flowing current. It was chill, sharp in the late autumn air, soaking in moments. Maxima's clothes were water resistant, her boots were thick, the jeans an advanced aquatic neofiber, cold water ran across her legs without causing as much as a shiver. Your own gear would not hold up so well.

"Told you," she said calmly, though there was still that killer instinct in her. She was offering you a way out because she was nice, but you could feel the violence scratching for release inside her. "It's a cold day. You don't want this to go any further."

Sammy pauses her assault and lets out a respectful whistle. "You know, I didn't have any idea what the fuck you were talking about earlier, but you already knew how this was gonna go, huh? Before you even started talking to me, huh Maxi? You showed up with granola bars, bandages, and what, like a scoped route out for a mile around us? Guess you're a veteran for a reason. Respect."

Sammy wipes some dirt off her face, bounces a bit on her legs. Yeah, she can already feel the bite at her ankles, she'd only been wearing high top running shoes and they didn't have a tight seal, and the water was lapping around the edge of her pants legs at her knees, the jeans getting heavier to move in with the weight of the water. And the cold would stick in that kind of fabric, nevermind how heavy her vest would get once it was soaked in water too.

She's not seeing Maxima though, not really. She's seeing Titanomachia. Moving around her like Machia alone was the only person not wearing training weights while Sammy was already submerged above her head. Moving around Maxima and Musashi like she had the medium all to herself and it was everybody else's fault for drowning themselves.

"But if you think this isn't what I want, you're cracked. This is the good shit! How am I ever gonna get better if I don't figure out how to move past getting dunked in freezing water and recovering from frostbite?"

Not that she's gonna do it to herself. No, Maxima isn't the only mountain goat here and she's NOT Machia either. So when Sammy kicks and pushes herself along the edge of the stormwater channel and up the side, feet pounding so hard that she's running above the water, it's the sort of movement that hasn't been seen since Gata's days. And sure, Maxima was there for it, and maybe she knows how to deal with every speedster and movement specialist there is. Except that she doesn't because she lost a bunch to Gata and she just lost to Machia. So let's see how she does against Sammy. You never know till you find out.

Whatever happens, Sammy's smile is real and sharp, and her fists are sharper.

There is a very specific way that kangaroos murder dogs.

When a kangaroo is pursued by a dog it retreats into the nearest body of water. When the dog comes in after it, the kangaroo grabs the dog's head and holds it down under the water. It's a brutally simple technique. There's no counterplay from the dog. The terrain renders the entire encounter completely linear.

She can accept as many hits as she needs to. Let you hit her blocking wrists, punch her jaw and kidneys, take impact after impact. Your combo carries you forwards as she cedes yet more ground, sending you both deeper into the water. No matter how much damage your opening assault inflicts it's not enough to knock her out - and then you're waist-deep in water and all your speed is gone. There's no grace in wading, no way to sidestep the grapple. And then you're in a grapple with Maxima, who is larger than stronger than you, and the mechanics of leverage play out in the only way they can. Your head goes under.

She doesn't give any sort of lesson. For one, you're underwater and wouldn't hear it, but she's also not that kind of teacher. The sheer inevitability of the situation speaks for itself. You can feel her tap out the ten-count on the back of your head with one finger before she lifts you up and tosses you onto the shore.

A second later, she throws a towel and a heat pack.

Tap tap tap. Sammy's feet taps against the side of the waterway, against the hard cement. Her bare feet, the tips of her nails. Her shoes are off, her pants are off too, and the vest, lying next to her to dry. She's wearing her lime shirt and a pair of bright pink panties. Those two she just wrung out and put back on, heat pack underneath her shirt against her chest. Extremities get the coldest, gotta keep them moving, tap tap tap.

"So, what kind of DNA you got in there? Fucking water buffalo or something? I don't get how you're this much of a tank. Fucking hell, if this place had a roof instead of being open, I could've hit it hard enough to drop it on you. But I hit you and you just shrugged it off. Maybe rhino? Is it rhino? Don't fucking tell me it's rhino."

There's a casualness to her now. This was a good loss. It wasn't like the loss to Machia. She could get stronger here, push harder. Or get faster. Gata would have...hmm "So, what would Gata have done? You fought her a bunch, right? I wanna move like her. Could she walk on water, punch you and then run around you even here so you never got a hand on her? Or would she be the type that never closed on you, forced you back until you were sinking into the ocean?"

Maxima looked at you. The smiling, muscled COW! FIGHTING! bovine on her singlet looked at you. "It is a mystery," said Maxima. "But unrelatedly, there's a lot of different types of cow out there, you know? There was a period in the early 21st century where cow genetics were dominated by a certain genre of cow beauty contest. They judged cows based on how "feminine" their head and neck placement was, which is an insane thing to say about a 600 kilogram animal. It got to the point where the competitions banned plastic surgery on cows to prevent people from making them more "beautiful". This continued up until Tail and Eye Disease, the mass culls and the rise of synthetic meats and almond milk, at which point there was a window of time when it seemed like the most popular cow chassis was too synthetic to survive outside a factory farming environment and all the factory farms were closed. But luckily weird hobbyists had maintained certain reservoirs of legacy cow genetics - and the Desolation of the Equator was not just good news for sheep. In addition, illegal rural genetic engineering has created several particularly hardy and violent strains whose purpose is to keep Murray-Darling river hippos from ranging inland and murdering motorcyclists."

"Gata would have eaten shit if she tried what you tried," she said, continuing on from her hyperfixation without slowing down, changing tone or any visible sign of transition. "You ever see a cat try to fight a cow? No? Because the cat knows better. The only reason we're even mentioned in the same breath is because we were playing a game, and the game made us both do a thing that neither one of us wanted to do. If we stopped playing, Gata could never hurt me - and I would never see her again."

She took a sip of her canned vegetable smoothie. "And I never did."

"That's..."

Sammy's foot stopped tapping and her ears drooped a little when she heard that Maxima had completely lost touch with Gata. Her hero. The reason she'd signed up for Aristeia in the first place, the model she'd chosen for her own gene engineering. And what she gets is, what, that the game is the only thing keeping any of them in touch. That it's useless to...

"Okay, what gives?" She's looking up at Maxima, all the girth of the woman towering over Sammy as she sits and holds a hot pack to herself to keep her core stable. "Like, what the fuck are you here for? You never kept in touch with Gata at all, but here I am trying to pull some version of her routine and you, what, just fucking show up out of the goodness of your heart cuz we were on the same losing team? With like, a bullshit amount of prep for a fight that Gata would never take because it's unwinnable without a motherfucking wall to back you into. What the fuck's your deal?!"

After her voice comes back down, she adds "peanut butter bar was good though, thanks for, like, not being a jerk about it, whatever it is." Stupid, sentimental, but then she could count on one hand the number of people that would have been ready like this, or that would have just fed her no questions asked. It meant something, even if it was coming from a crazy cow.

"Don't flatter yourself," said Maxima flatly. "It did not take that much prep to beat you. I came here to tell you something it took me too long to learn. The people in the hexadome? They're not your friends. They're your co-workers. They don't owe you anything. They're playing their roles. When they want to hang out, train together? They're trying to get something from you. One day they'll bounce. Don't break your knuckles over it."

She turned, raised a hand in a wave. "Keep the stuff. Later."

"Yeah, later bitch."

There's no particular malice in it, just a kind of apathy, matching the tone and vibe of the farewell. Okay, we're not friends, got it, guess you're just the delivery girl then, see you whenever.

By the time she's dragged herself out of the sluice, she's shrugging back into her jacket and pants, now mostly dry, and she's crunched down on peanut butter and it's way too late to sleep. So instead she pulls out her phone. No none of the Aristeia! players, she's got something more relaxed in mind. She sends a quick message to a few folks: "Yo, Creek, Lime, Tammy, come join me for beers and karaoke, I know you're up for it, my treat."

She may have lost, but there are some perks to being in the circuit, and being able to go to a cheap hole karaoke place and book a private room that serves light beer is one of them. Venting is another. "Can you believe the nerve?" She asks Creek while Tammy is belting one out from across the room with a voice that belies her small frame. "She gets her ass handed to her on the same team as me, and then shows up with a care package to tell me to remember that we're not friends, and also that she didn't have to work too hard to kick my ass. Jesus fuck, what is that even about, right?"

Creek's a tall, buff, caring type of girl and offers a good listening ear, so Sammy continues after taking a big gulp of her beer. "And like, what's even in it for her then? No that's a stupid question, she's probably just psyching me out. More like, who the fuck gets to know Gata and everybody like her on a casual basis and is just like 'nah, whatever, I never spoke to her again.' Like, she meant something to me, you know? Ah well, least I have friends and not just thirty 'colleagues.'"

She puts in another song to line up for after Lime finishes her quiet ballad, and also an order of chicken wings for good measure.

"Did she say that she, Maxima, was not your friend?" asked Creek thoughtfully. "Or did she say that everyone else wasn't? Because like you said, doesn't really seem like a co-workery thing to do. It doesn't even sound like she even said that Gata wasn't her friend."

"I thought they were friends," said Tammy, sitting down. "At least they played it on TV."

"Maybe Maxima wasn't playing," shrugged Creek.

"Well, not important!" said Tammy. "I don't think she gets out of her group, and you're gonna win, so you're not gonna meet her! But have you looked at your group? It's all over the place!"

"How are you going to train for that?" said Creek. "It's breaking my brain just thinking about it."

"Hmm, I dunno. Hell of a way to split hairs? She said the people in the hexadome aren't my friends, kinda can't tell fuck all whether she was counting herself or not. It's a good question though, thanks Creek."

Sammy pulls her phone out and looks at her group bracket again. "Yeah, all good questions. I guess the real lesson tonight was that insane prep is normal prep."

She pulls out one of those floaty graph apps and starts sorting her group into different piles for Creek. "So like, there's two utterly fucked versions of this group, and then one weirdly balanced one that comes into twenty flavors of ice cream. Fucked ones are where Argeltia and the Kraken end up on the same team. They're both just, like, terrain, you know? Like you're not fighting one bitch in a suit, you're fighting like a billion tentacles or teleporting giant hands or whatever. So if they're on the same side, the arena is just a hellzone full of crap. If I'm on that team, that means I'm playing a scorer and it's like me and whoever using the terrain to score and avoiding getting ganged up on. Honestly, probably my easiest match, just ride a teleporting giant hand to victory while everybody else is playing hentai simulator."

She smiles a toothy smile at that one, and polishes the meat off a chicken bone. "If I'm against that team, well, depends a bit on comp, but I'm probably a fighter except in the one comp where it's Kraken, Argeltia, Bit and Kiss, and Pashadiah, where I kinda gotta do the scoring because nobody else can manage it. I can't tell if that's the worst match or the best match, depends on speed." She tosses that one specific comp into its own corner of her holomap with a big circle and question mark drawn around it. "But yeah, other than that one, if I'm against the field control side, I'm just punching as many girls as possible so that the scorers on my team can navigate the obstacles and punch a bunch of fucking tentacles in their tentacle faces."

She puts the entire terrain set off to the side in her diagram and starts a new section, finishing off her mug of beer in the process.

"If Argeltia and Kraken aren't on the same team, then we get the ice cream menu variety show. Every side gets some weird surprise terrain thing, and there's probably some combo fighter and scorer on each team, I guess except for the one other weird comp where Pashadiah and Bit and Kiss are on the same side in that situation and they have Astra, so if I'm against that I'm the scorer again while the rest of my team rips into them. But otherwise everybody gets a mixed comp in some flavor of fucking punch your face in while navigating surprise the floor exploded and trying to hit the scoring zone."

Sammy looks over the list again, and lets out a belch and a sigh. "Damn Creek, you know what. There's a clear starting point here. Thanks for being cool. Like, now that I look at it, the obvious practice partner is Decima. She's the only long-range fighter. If I'm on her team, figuring out how I can set her up for shots in weird terrain will crush most of these comps. If I'm not, figuring out how she aims will give me an edge. She was even nice enough to ask. Maybe we'll be friends."

Sammy laughs a sharp laugh and sends Decima a scheduling note in reply to Decima's message.

When they built the new magna-rail train track, the old steel and wood railway line was not cleaned up afterwards. It was just gently abandoned and slowly faded back into the landscape. The rain beat off the sharp edges, the sun beat the bright colours into greys, and winter frosts squeezed and snapped rusting steel. Old teeth of it emerge piece by piece from the rubble, leading in to a tunnel that has found an afterlife as a fungus farm. A bridge of interlocking arches stands nearby like a British aqueduct, a remnant of a cozy Rome.

Decima is sitting atop the bridge cross-legged, silver haired and serpent-eyed. Over her warm neutral grey synskin she wears a cape with a teal and black triangular camouflage pattern, an artificial cascade of colours that will be right at home in the neon of the Hexadrome - but somehow don't look fully out of place here. In front of her is a gun case, open to show two a single oversized pistol. It looks more like a toaster with a trigger grip, exposed red and white wires visible on the outside.

"I use a lot of different gun casings," said Decima by way of introduction. "But those are all for show. There's always something like this inside; sometimes the gun itself is just a low-yield holoprojector around this. You need to cut a lot of corners in your energy budget to make firearms work, and you need to walk a long way from traditional ideas of what a gun is and meant to do to make it effective in the Hexadome. But before I go into that further, what are you spending your energy budget on?"

Sammy walks up the to the bridge carrying a thermos of coffee in one hand. She's managed a change of clothes somewhere in transition from night to day, and she's now dressed light for warm weather, wearing just a pair of tight forest green shorts, a tan t-shirt, and a teal neck scarf over her own synskin. She looks a bit like she's on a camping trip, though her bag's too light for a proper one. No tent, no bedroll, just some arena gear.

She stares at the weird tangle of wires on a toaster. You can tell she wants to pick it up, but she doesn't ask yet. "Yeah, arena's fucking weird. Not sure what to make of this though. Like, shit, you've done a bunch of homebrew to save on your energy budget and then you make it look good. But like, it's still a gun, right? Bullets're fucking fast, too fast to dodge if you're standing where the bullet's going when the trigger's pulled. Isn't that the whole point?"

She looks from the gun to a gaze at Decima's serpentine eyes, takes a loud sip of coffee, and slings her bag down so the top opens and Decima can see a whole mixture of different light but durable armor shells in a few weights along with some strength enhancers for arms and legs. "I got options, what do you want to test today?"

"Not bullets," said Decima. "Bullets are useless. If I shot you with a bullet I'd lock up one (1) centimeter of your Synskin. Half the contestants wouldn't even feel it. Extremely energy inefficient. I need to get a lot more specialized than that."

She looked keenly through your bag. "Armour. Lots of it. Our group has multiple highly armoured targets with small, elusive weak points that can be targeted for massive damage. They are also, generally, very mobile and close ranged. My area of focus is, therefore, the medium range interception disabling shot. My attack pattern will be to land a crippling strike and then withdraw before the distance can be closed. Part of my defense will be that I will not contest scoring zones. As such, the practice I would benefit from would be harassing you; seeing how close I can get while attacking you, while you concentrate on something else. My idea was for you to play DDR, which would simulate you concentrating on other combatants while I line up shots. If you see the opportunity to attack me, do, balancing the loss of score on the game against the advantage of removing me from interfering."