“Ladies and-” Takashito realized he had made a mistake, faltered, but recovered quickly, “My apologies. Gentlemen and… gentlemen.”

“Xac’s almost a lady,” Wyatt whispered to Xaxac, and Xac giggled.

“I’d be a pretty lady,” Xac stuck out his tongue, “An’ I wouldn’t have’ta shave.”

“It is easier, I believe,” Takashito continued, “To learn anything as a unit. It is easier to make it through life if you have people to help you. So I would like to teach you, not as individuals, but as a team. When you work as a team, you grow in strength, strength that will help you even when you are alone. A single bee can not do much, but a swarm can kill a bear.”

“You can tell he was in the military,” Agalon huffed from his position at the table with Ara, “I guess all militaries is the same.”

“When we work together it will make it easier to identify individual strengths and weaknesses. Most of you are large and fairly strong, but you are not particularly fast or defensive. We called this type of fighter a ‘glass staff’. You are good at attacking, but if you are hit, you are at a disadvantage. You do not avoid blows easily, and once your stamina runs out, you will die. I am told people die in this sport?”

“Folks die in the cage!” Somebody called out from behind him, and Xaxac did not allow the message to sink into his brain.

“Well, we would like to avoid that,” Takashito explained, and began to use a stick to draw in the dirt. “You all seem fairly strong, so I would like to concentrate on intelligence, which seems to be your weak point.”

He drew a human figure and stepped back.

“We will work smarter, not harder. I will teach you to change based on your surroundings, and to know your environment, but also, to know your enemy. Magic is not the only thing that flows through the blood. Blood is made up of a water called ‘plasma’, through which everything is carried to the body. This is a map of the circulatory system-”

“You’re wastin your time,” Agalon called, “They can’t understand that. And I don’t know what you’re writin, but they can’t read.”

“They cannot read?” Takashito asked, “They cannot… they can understand what blood is. They are warriors. They are not stupid.”

“Not on account of they’re fighters,” Agalon said as he stood and walked over to look at the diagram, “On account of they’re human.”

“What?” Takashito asked.

“This is too hard. You’re gonna confuse um.” Agalon explained, not unkindly, “I need you to train Xac, so he’ll understand. He don’t know about… blood and nerves and all that.”

“Because he is human?” Takashito asked in confusion, “What… what are you talking about? Some of our best warriors were human, using the technique I am about to explain. When I went to school at the mage academy, our student president, the best pupil, was Imperius Oldman. He was human.”

“If your elven mages can’t cast better than human I ain’t nary bit shocked y’all fell in a day and a night,” Agalon said, and Xaxac watched Takashi’s body shake.

“Our kingdom fell so quickly,” He explained, choosing his words carefully, “Because many things happened at once to disadvantage us. The Emerald Knight killed the Great Ocean Spirit. The Queen was murdered by assassins. And a natural disaster in the form of a hurricane the likes of which the planet has not seen before or since hit in the middle of the war! Do not pretend as if the Urillian ships were not destroyed and had it not been for the Emerald Knight that war would have had a very different outcome!”

“Excuse me?” Agalon asked in a way that made Xaxac shrink back into the crowd, “I’ll have you know, I was right there- I saw-”

“I was there!” Takashi snapped, “I was there the night the Emerald Knight killed the Great Ocean Spirit! I was there the night my entire world went dark and the heavens opened upon us to punish us for allowing that to happen! You will not take credit for the work of a vengeful god-” The crystal on his collar lit up a bright green and he let out a blood curdling shriek, fell to the ground, and Xaxac knew that he could trace the way the blood flowed, because under Takashito’s blue skin, his veins had turned green.

“I reckon that’s enough of that,” Ara said as she stepped forward, and Xaxac saw that her staff glowed in time with the crystal on Takashito’s neck.

“Don’t poison him!” Agalon snarled, “I need him! That’ll have him down for days!” He boldly snatched the staff from her hands and glared at her, “Give me that!”

“We can’t have him spreadin misinformation an insultin the nobility to their face,” Ara explained patiently as Takashito’s face slowly began to change back to its normal color.

“I reckon I’m a big boy,” Agalon snarled, “I can take care a’ myself. I don’t need no punk kid with a badge fightin my battles for me. Don’t do that no more!” He turned and offered Takashito a hand, “Come on, boy, get up. Are ya’ alright? I need ta’ heal ya.”

“Not really,” Takashito admitted, and when Agalon pulled him up, he shook, “I… I apologize, your grace. It was… it was a… difficult thing to… live through.”

“I hear that,” Agalon agreed as he moved Takashito’s body one way, then the other, in some sort of pattern, or as if looking for something Xaxac did not understand, all while the staff he held glowed a bright green, “I… it was weird, wouldn’t it? How quick it got dark? How quick them clouds rolled in? That wind that’d knock ya off your feet. How high the waves… it happened so quick…”

“Tsunamis…” Takashito agreed, “I had seen them before, but never… never like that. The ocean was angry.”

“I…” Agalon spoke so quietly Xaxac was sure it had not been intended for him to hear, that it had not been intended for anyone except Takashito to hear, “I didn’t do it. I swear I… we… we did… a lot. But we… we didn’t do that. You know we didn’t do that, right? You know we really can’t control the weather.”

“One cannot kill a god of the sea,” Takashito explained, almost as if he was talking to a toddler, “and expect nothing to happen.”

“You can’t kill the god of a forest and expect nothin to happen, either,” Agalon said, “That feller don’t learn but you… you gotta understand that… sometimes ya gotta march forward or get stabbed in the back.”

“Your grace-”

“My name’s Kailu,” Agalon corrected, “My friends call me Kai.”

“Your grace,” Takashito continued, “I think that we all… sometimes tell ourselves certain things so that the past does not hurt us so severely. May I please do the job I was sent here to do? I would like to go home, someday.”

“Yeah, kid you can try it,” Agalon sighed, “I don’t reckon you’re gonna get through to um, but you can try it. Can you stand up?”

“I have had worse,” Takashito assured him, stopped leaning into his touch, and turned back to the fighters, “I apologize. I fell on my visual aid. Let me clean this up.”

“You’re shakin real bad,” Xac said, then to the fighters he emphasized, “He’s shakin real bad. Reckon he oughta sit down?”

“Xac, hush!” Wyatt whispered, “What’d I tell ya about runnin your mouth? Don’t question the elves.”

“I’m just sayin, that looked like it hurt,” Xac whispered back, “He turned green! Do… do blue folks turn green when they can’t breath?”

“I dunno,” Wyatt said, “And I dunno how anybody could ask. Reckon it’d piss him off if we asked? I ain’t never seen nobody what looks like that. He always looks like he’s suffocatin.”

“Not everybody turns blue when they’re suffocatin,” Xac said, “I don’t reckon. I think only pale folks do that.”

“I can breathe,” Takashito said, “And, I can hear you. I can breath better than you can. It is difficult to suffocate a water elf. Please just… pay attention. As I was saying, this is a map of the circulatory system. There are certain places where the blood carries nutrients and air to the rest of the body and meets with another system called the nervous system. The nervous system is the fire equivalency of the circulatory system. The circulatory system is the blood system. Have I lost anyone?”

“There’s fire in the body?” Wyatt asked, “Now, ya know, that makes sense. On account’a body heat is a thing.”

“And fevers,” Xac said, “fevers are a thing.”

“That is… good enough for government work,” Takashito said proudly, “We call these places ‘strike points’. I will not tell you the individual names, because you likely cannot read if you have not been taught and it is difficult to remember without notes, but we will go over them eventually. For now, just look at the visual aid.”

He drew lines out from the body in several places, “These are seven key strike points I would like you all to memorize for our next lesson. There are many, many more, but these will help you even with the first match. You need paper. I bet you do not have paper…”

“It hurts to watch him try this hard on somethin that ain’t gonna work,” Agalon told Ara.

“He had ever chance to listen at you,” she said, but her eyes were locked to her staff, which Agalon still held.

“Alright then, I will just leave this here,” Takashito said, “And you can study it. You live here, do you not?”

“I don’t,” Xac said, “But I reckon I got it. There ain’t that many of um. It’s like… thighs, lower arms, shoulders, neck, and nose. I got whacked real good in the shoulder one time, smashed my whole body into the ground, shoulder first. It hurt like a motherfucker. I’ll remember that’n, I know. Even if I can’t look at it.”

“It’s real easy to break your nose,” another of the fighters added, “We know the nose is a weak point. You can break somebody’s nose real easy. I don’t know how you didn’t break your nose, Foo Foo, that same day.”

“Nobody better not hit me in my face again!” Xac snarled, “I need my face! Don’t nobody try it! I swear to the good lord above!”

“Ain’t nobody gonna hit you after what you done to the bull!” The fightered assured him, “You’re little but you’re crazy.”

“Thanks,” Xac giggled.

“Focus, please,” Takashi begged, “I would like to show you all… um… ‘y’all’ some poses that are good defensive postures and how to flow into and out of them. Please, look at me and try to match what I do.”

The fighters spread out to leave enough space between them, and Xaxac noticed how easily he fell into line among them.