“Ok, so… what now?” Mary asked after they left the canteen. She wasn’t really hungry after all the stress she went through. Her stomach would probably try to strangle her later on, but she couldn’t help how she felt.

“Now,” Margaret said, “we’ve got some free time.”

“You could use that to think over your behaviour,” Hans grumbled.

“Oh, shush it, sweetie. It’s not her fault she’s an idiot,” Margaret scowled at him, but then smiled at Mary. “Don’t worry, honey, keep hanging with us, and you’ll eventually get just as normal as us.”

Somehow, this scared Mary almost twice as much as randomly flying fireballs did. “And… what’s the next lesson we have?”

“Mixered martial arts with professor Zuzurrizal, first thing tomorrow morning,” Hans said. “It’ll be much more fun.”

“Mhm… did you mean mixed martial arts?” Mary asked. She’d heard of the thing - actually, it seemed to be the most useful kind of martial arts. Why limit yourself if no one forced you to? And in real life, the enemy wouldn’t be limited to your move set either.

“Nope,” Margaret grinned at her. “You’ll see. Still, that’s only tomorrow.”

“Wait a minute. How many lessons do we actually take?”

“However many we want, honey. It’s up to us to decide what we want to take. Only, most of it had to be decided near the party’s initial assembly. Sorry,” Margaret shrugged apologetically.

“If something really doesn’t work for you, we could still alter it - that’d cost us about a week’s worth of paperwork, though,” Hans said. Mossie whizzed a bit louder at that, as if daring Mary to say something finable. It wasn’t happening - she’d had enough for the day.

“But it’s only a day if we want to add a lesson or two,” Margaret offered cheerfully.

Maybe it wouldn’t be that bad… it’s not like Mary had a lot of ideas of what she wanted to learn. Bromman advised her a bit on that topic, but he and her party seemed in agreement about the selection so far.

Guess what. It was that bad.

Mary rolled on the hard floor, covering her last layer of bruises with a new one. Where she’d been seconds ago, a heavy, two-handed axe landed with a muffled thud. It was placed on a metallic arm of some automaton, and judging by the dent it made, one strike would be enough to send her to another world.

Not that it was trying to do so - the axe’s head was covered by a thin foam padding. It was just training, after all.

Mary rose to her knees and immediately threw herself the other way as a marshmallow tipped arrow flew towards her eyes with a speed that would shame an eagle into balding. She tried to land with a graceful roll, but only the roll part succeeded. She overtilted to one side, and a gloved metallic fist grazed her stomach. The air left her lungs as the impact carried her over the side of the ‘mat’. An automated scoreboard flipped another point of her score, which currently stood at minus fifteen.

“Come on, Ms Oceanrunner, are you even trying to win?” professor Zuzurrizal shouted at her from the inch-thick metal pole in the centre of the pandemonium, where he stood balancing on the tip of his toe like a ballerina. Very deadly ballerina. “You won’t ever get to your opponent if you keep dodging in random directions!”

Oh, right, her sparring partner. Mary glanced at Margaret, who at the moment was running away from a spinning, supposedly dulled saw blades twice the size of her arm. She was doing significantly better than Mary, although she didn’t seem to be going in any specific direction either.

And that was the beginners part of the area. Hans explained to her (after they’d arrived here) that there were several levels here, one under the other, and the spinning atrocities from the lowest ones gave mixered martial arts its name. According to more experienced students, the obstacle courses there looked (and felt) like being thrown into a mixer.

Mary groaned and started picking herself up. Professor Zuzurrizal did not like his students slacking off, and as she’d already noticed, his way of motivating them to move involved a lot of throwing marbles at them. And they did not have any padding.

Mossie didn’t leave her side through the ordeal, likely hoping to catch her muttering something inappropriate under her breath. After the last incident, it grew much, much more irritable with her. Unfortunately, it seemed that its manoeuvrability was through the roof since none of the hellish devices could so much as touch it.

Margaret managed to leave the field on her own after the previous round, which pushed her score back into positives. It wasn’t really a competition, and all that Mary hoped for was to survive the experience. A couple ‘mats’ to her right, Hans was actually trading blows with some other boy, who looked significantly younger, but no less fit. He was probably from the black leather party she met at the selection ceremony, although she couldn’t be sure - that was one of the most popular designs. And this one had some afterimage trailing behind him with every move - it was a bit hard to look at like her mind wasn't exactly comprehending what it was seeing. The boys still seemed to be mostly focused on avoiding the automated dangers, but apparently, they were doing enough not to get marbles thrown at them… for now.

Mary tried to calm her breath for a few seconds, but after narrowly dodging a marble flying towards her head, she stepped back onto the health and safety violations themed murderpark.

Her only consolation was that after this, they were supposed to go to the library. A peaceful and quiet evening with books - that was all she needed right now.