Machia sat in a reverie for a moment, looking off out through the broken window, a faint frown on her face. Then her eyes flicked down, contemplated exactly as deeply - and took a bite.

*

'Normal' training was how she had phrased it. Another sign of her wicked mind.

Titanomachia's idea of normal started from several presumptions. One was that her biological engineering was entirely sufficient for strength and speed, and so regular exercise was only on the rotation for reasons of testing, calibration and familiarity. The main thing she was interested in teaching was training under various types of debuff. For all her earlier dismissal of Xoxic as a hack, she was very determined that her trainee not be upstaged by a hack - and that meant running and dodging while under the effects of numbing agents, choking gas and frenzying spikes. 

Forunately these would mostly be the real thing. Xoxic was a dealer in poisons and chemicals, but the referees tended to frown on the use of bioweapons in the arena. This meant that these weren't 'real' poisons - they were Cubegel, a catchall phrase for compounds that essentially biohacked the Cube interface. This could produce various biological surges, most commonly used in emergency situations - like an emergency override for bleeding or cardiac arrest carried by paramedics, or breathing filter vials that were packed as little cells on the sides of fire extinguishers which could let people walk out of smoke-filled buildings. The important part was that Cubegel was extremely reversible - by operating entirely through the Cube's interface, it could be reversed just as easily by that interface. 

Machia didn't like the stuff herself. It was the difference between building an airplane and building a missile - even if they used the same architecture, only one was concerned about the return trip. But if Xoxic was going to spend her energy budget loading up on weird compounds then weird compounds were going to be present in the arena, and Machia needed to know what her design would be capable of in those conditions.