[Erick Sanders]

Two, Three, four, five. I counted the tiny red light as it flickered above my strained face, turning off and on in rapid succession. I pushed as I watched and counted the light, pressing the weight bar over my chest. Two hundred and forty-five kilograms was supported on my arms, well over double what I could lift in the real world. Six, seven, eight, the light flickered at more than ten times a second. The dial was firmly twisted in my mind and the headache had become a dull reality for the last month.

Diera always found ways to maximize my time, double up on all training sessions. Just like lifting weights and practicing with my implants simultaneously. Sometimes I would count a rapidly blinking light, others I would have to sense and dodge incoming projectiles with my EM sense. She had said it was pointless to just train sword work without training the rest of the body too. Diera lamented on the old stories she would read as a kid, where the protagonist would just train to use a sword or a spear and neglect any physical conditioning like an idiot.

“Honestly, its all well and good, but all the knowledge in the world isn’t going to do much if you’re still a weak shit,” She said for the hundredth time. She leaned against the chipped stone wall made real by the holographic projectors in the training room. At first, she had decided to make the room a prison yard, with metal walls and all. Recently she had changed it to a chipped and eroded stone ruin amidst a thinning forest.

I heaved for the fifteenth time and re-racked the weights. Jumping up, I sprinted past Diera, “twenty-three,” I hissed as I ran, pumping my legs beneath me.

"Correct," she casually called.

I sprinted to the far stone wall thirty meters away and lept. My foot hit stone and I pushed off, propelling myself vertical, using a small handhold to fling myself further up the wall until I grabbed the ledge at the top. With a small grunt, I pulled myself up and over the ledge spinning to sit on the edge to look down at Diera who was still leaning against a crumbling wall by the weight rack, flicking through her scanner.

For the two months, I had probably spent more time in this room than anywhere else. I had it allocated for five and a half hours a day. Often Diera would force me to spar, practice forms in one on one sessions. When we weren't, she would be posted in her usual spot as I worked out but often I would just be alone. Running sprints, lifting weights, fighting holographic targets.

Jack and Mia had complained at first, but after many failed arguments, they accepted this as a new routine. I would rise in the morning, attend lectures, have technical training on the sword with Diera, then more lectures, and finish out my day in here. I would fall asleep over legal textbooks at my room's small desk, only to be pulled to bed, or once even carried to bed by Mia when I refused to move.

My waking life had been much the same, I had increased my workouts to two a day, morning and night, as well as adding in a weight march and run in the middle of the day where I could, my laptop had stayed open with a drafted letter of resignation as I contemplated how long I could live off my savings and the money made from The Dream, but my increased grocery bill as I measured my calories had made me hesitant.

Right now I sat on the wall, almost 10 meters up against the edge of the large room, I was still sitting there recovering when Diera stood up from her slouch and shook her sleeping legs.

“I’m off, go eat something!” She called, as she waved her hand a metal tube in the upper corner of the room hissed and I had to roll from the top of the wall as a metal stake zipped through the air and disappeared into the stone where I had been sitting. I manage a curse as I fell back first towards the ground, managing to touch a fake rock that stuck out with my right foot. I kicked off and pulled my knees into my chest, spinning in the air I flipped over and landed with a rough roll on the rubber grass. When I turned around only Dieras heel was visible as it disappeared through the doorway.

I sighed and twisted the dial in my mind to turn off the time dilation, my brain thanking me as the headache began to subside immediately. With Diera’s constant instant that I use it as much as possible to help speed up the integration and strengthen the connection, I could now hold a mild state of slowed time perception for a full minute and a deep state of slowed perception for a solid ten seconds, which felt more like a minute. Diera had made me see the benefit of analyzing a situation more than reacting to a fight. I could use it so see the tensed muscles, twitches of movement and predict the path of a bullet or blade better than ever before, for that I thanked her. For the constant headache, I cursed her.

I slung my swords over my shoulders and pulled my jacket from where it hung on a tree branch. I slapped the panel on the wall and the hologram disappeared, the now black trees and stone walls collapsing into itself as it disappeared into the walls and floor, leaving only the weights set that Diera had requisition and now lived in the corner of the room.

The building was quiet, as it usually was this late in the evening, lectures long since finished and dinner well underway in the guild halls. I made my way through the empty hallways and pulled my jacket loosely around my shoulders as I pushed out the front door into the chilling evening air.

Winter had swept in quickly into the mountains to my enjoyment, snow came with it. Where I lived in the north of New Zealand, snow was a rare pleasure, and in Auckland it was non-existent. So I made sure to enjoy my walks through the grounds between lectures and buildings, soaking in the pristine white landscape and grounds.

I was trudging across a snow padded lawn between buildings when I felt a tingle at the edge of my EM sense which was stretched out in a sixty-meter line as it scanned circles around me. My head snapped to the side and I peered off into the shadows. Focusing my EM sense I could just make out the bodies of five people as they moved between the trees, Where are they going? I wondered.

At this time of night, almost everyone other than the stragglers and the most dedicated would be cozy in the dining halls, tucking into tonight’s dinner of roasted meat and root vegetables. I hesitated for a moment before my curiosity got the better of me and I turned into the snow and began pushing through it towards the group.

The noise of their chatter carried well over the firm packed snow, and I could hear them arguing over the cold, two dominant voices echoing above the others.

“Honestly, it’s not far. When this is all done we can have a drink in the hall.” One of the voices said, followed by a cracking laugh.

I could feel the four bodies properly now, two of them were human, or very humanoid, while the other was one of the long-armed creatures we had seen on our first day, it dragged its hips and small back legs through the snow as its body vibrated with laughter.

I pushed myself faster, leaping over the top of the snow and landing in their already deep tracks.

“Are you sure about this?” A third voice said, only to be hushed by a forth.

“Here, it's just here. I told you it wouldn’t be far!” The sounds of crushing snow and cracking ice had disappeared and were replaced with the soft patter of feet on concrete. I crept forward through the trenches created by the group, peering through the snow, I could just make out the group of four, the creature reached into its pocket and waved his arm through the air. The clearing lit up as three small lights bloomed in the night, floating through the air around the group.

They were standing in a clear patch of concrete. No, it was a single slab of stone, dropped in the center of the clearing. Etched into its surface was a ring of gold, with two smaller rings on opposite ends.

“Faron? Are you sure about this?” The question came from the smaller of the four. He stood a head shorter than the rest, and while the others all displayed athletic builds, this young man was slim with his jacket pressed tight around the middle. His golden scales shimmered in the low light.

“Yes Daron, now shut up!” The other scaled man hissed as he removed his jacket and pulled a long curved sword from its sheath.

“Yeah Daron, shut it. This will be fun. What would Faron Senior say if he thought his son was cowardly?” The creature cackled, and his partner began removing his jacket and bringing out a sword.

“To the death, or if you're forced from the circle. Have you ever died before?” The last man said, his four arms flexing against the cold, though I suspected the thick hair over his body would do a lot to keep it at bay.

“I don’t think this will be the first.” Faron snarled, rolling his shoulders and squaring his feet.

This was a duel, I realised. Two fighters and their doubles? Was having a double really a thing people did? The thought struck me as archaic and outdated. Something I would only have seen in fiction. In my personal experience, when two people wanted to fight, they normally just fought.

The two stepped into the ring of gold and after a moment began circling each other slowly.

Faron isn’t a soldier, and the other man hasn’t done this often, I realised. Their hesitancy was wrong, they both could have ended this fight already. They’re young. Even though I was young, the thought surprised me. This was a campus for the top guilds, how had a skinny guy with a beer belly and three inexperienced fighters made it into one of the galaxies top companies?

The two circled twice more before the four-armed man jumped forward with a thrust, Slow but on the mark. If it had of been a little faster it would have skewered the scaled man, as it was, Faron slapped the blade aside and responded with a sweeping slice that was ducked. The two began trading blows, their feet shuffling in the snow in perfect form. They are trained for dueling, not fighting, I noted.

Their movements were precise and measured, but in a real fight no one moved like that, they were constantly open from the side, and I saw five occasions each where I would have followed up an attack with a kick, elbow, or a sweep of the leg. But these two kept it clean and restricted to only their swords. I almost scoffed at the ridiculousness of it. This fight could have been over in two seconds.

Their tempo increased and they shuffled back and forth across the stone until Faron's back foot stepped past the golden line and out of the circle. The Gold flashed a deep red, and Faron's face fell into a defeated scowl. He began lowering his sword, “We can go agai…” His words were cut off as the other man's sword plunged into his heart.

Faron blinked down at the blood as it dribbled down steel his jaw hanging limp as he fell to his knees. The other man pulling the sword free. “Well I guess it is your first death, Sorry about that, I didn’t realise you had stepped out,” The man said in mock apology. He stepped back letting Faron tumble forward into a pool of his own blood.

Daron jumped forward only to be grabbed from the side by the long-armed creature. He wrapped his long limbs around the smaller young scaled man and held him in place as Daron struggled to get free, anger crushing his features, eyes began to water as the tip of a sword pressed into his neck, nicking the skin and drawing a bead of blood.

“What do you think Geo? Kill this one too?” the swordsman asked his friend.

“Everyone has to experience their first death sooner or later, right?”

“Exactly what I was thinking,”

Daron squirmed, trying to wriggle free while stretching away from the sword tip, “Please,” He squealed.

I should have left it, I should have let them kill him as I walked away, but something in his tone, his frightened desperation that ripped through the snowy forest. It was so pathetic. My swords were already free as I flew across the snow, using an edge of a tree to propel myself through the air. My legs were stronger than they had been when we arrived, I was faster as I covered the distance in an instant and cut through the back of the swords man’s neck with no resistance. He toppled to the ground as the hilt in my right hand slammed into the side of the other man’s head, toppling him. The two men fell the ground together, one dead, the other stunned.

Before the long-limbed alien could move, I pressed the toe of my boot into his temple, covering his eyes and pressing his face into the stone. Best not to let him see my face, Jack wouldn’t be impressed if I made enemies.

Daron stumbled backward away from me, tripping on the snow and falling onto the white ground, still watching me as I looked down at the man and pressed the tip of my sword into his back, directly over the heart. “You should pay more attention to who is watching,” I muttered. With a flex of my shoulder, the man shuddered and died.

“Thank…. Thank you!” Daron stammered as I walked over to him, reaching a hand and hauling him back to his feet.

“You should grab his stuff,” I said, nodding to Faron’s body.

“Can’t we just take him?” Daron asked, reaching down and beginning to pull the body from the ground. Gently, but firmly I pushed it back down and out of his grip

“Leave it, just take his things.”

“He will be annoyed when he realises, I left it here.”

“Well fuck him too, he can come get it himself if he wants. Grab his shit, we should get back to the campus,” I said. Stepping back towards the buildings.

Daron scrambled, grabbing Faron’s jacket and sword, pulling his scanner from his wrist. “I hope he isn’t too mad,” he said, looking back at the bodies, “thank you again, I’m Daron Enserton.”

“Erick,”

“It’s nice to meet you Erick,” he said, as he fought through the snow after me.