“We’re playing something else after this game is over,” Vaozey grumbled, staring at the pieces on the table between us with a deep scowl across her face. I tried not to take too much pleasure in beating her at a game she had only heard of the day before, but my human side couldn’t help but enjoy it. It doesn’t help that we can’t even leave our rooms right now, I sighed, I never had a need for entertainment before, but I’m starting to understand what boredom really means.

We had no issues getting into Muhryehv, Shahpao’s false paperwork was easily accepted by the guards at the gate who didn’t give us more than a passing glance. Even the work we had done to hide the muskets in a secret part of the weapon wagon was completely pointless because not a single person suspected us of any wrongdoing. Half an hour later, we set the caravan down outside of an inn that was apparently specialized in providing temporary layover services to caravans such as ours and were assigned to our rooms. Everyone got their own, though they were small, and that was when Shahpao reminded us that Vaozey had a very widely known face, and to a lesser extent so did I. Thus, while the rest of the soldiers had a few days to go out and relax, we had to stay indoors.

Vaozey didn’t even last half a day before growing angry out of frustration, and in an effort to both calm her down and figure out a way to occupy my mind when I couldn’t train I ended up swiping a few of the platters used to deliver our food and constructing a game board to use. I knew a number of different two-player games from my training, but I settled on reproducing Western Capture Chess, a game that was specifically designed to be difficult to computationally solve and level the gap between skilled and new players. After carving the pieces, each one a wedge with an icon describing their movement on top, I used some heat magic to burn a nine-by-nine grid into a second platter and introduced Vaozey to the rules.

She wasn’t very good at the game, though not for lack of trying. The first match was a disaster, as expected, but she improved rapidly until hitting a wall with her predictive abilities, often falling for basic traps that I laid out with high-value pieces and quickly becoming overwhelmed through simple use of board control. The first day ended with her nearly throwing the board in anger, a surprising regression to her previous mental state from twelve years ago, but the second was calmer.

“I can make dice,” I suggested, and Vaozey moved her champion to take one of my bishops. Does she not realize that my cavalryman has that spot controlled? I wondered.

“Shit, wait,” Vaozey swore. “Seyt, I can’t take that back, can I?”

“It doesn’t matter anyway,” I said, reaching out and moving a general. “With that, I’ve taken your commander.” Vaozey looked at the board for a few seconds, then let out a long and painful groan as she leaned back in her chair, glaring at the ceiling.

“This is like a game for nobles,” she complained. “It’s not fun at all.”

“As far as I know, it was, at one point,” I replied. I didn’t know a lot about the specifics of pre-twentieth-century history, but I did know that the two source games for Western Capture Chess had been around for several centuries each in their home regions, and were popular among intellectuals.

“So why do you know it then?” Vaozey asked. “I thought you were just a-” she paused, trying to find words, “-a regular soldier.”

“Games like these are good for training the mind, to a point,” I replied. “Do you want to try something else?”

“Don’t you have other training to do?” Vaozey asked. “I can leave you for a while. Just give me the game board.” Yeah, I should probably get back to more important matters, I thought.

“Go ahead,” I said. “I’ll probably just use the rest of the day.”

“Must be nice being able to sleep a whole night,” Vaozey scoffed, picking up the chessboard and pieces. “If you can figure out how to swap that with me, I’ll gladly give you my ability to only sleep half of one.” Once she left, I put the chair and table to the side of the room and removed the bag of wax pills that I had taken with me when we broke off from the wagons. There were still dozens left after my first day of testing, more than I could hope to consume in our three-day planned stay in the city, so I took out two of them and brought them over to the bed.

Expanding magic capacity was normally a slow process that happened as someone’s body matured, according to everyone I asked, but it seemed that whatever method my operator had used to provide me with my body hadn’t accounted for that natural growth. Using magic in general would also increase capacity, but not very quickly. That left one method for quick growth: The one I was using, deliberately overloading the body and holding magic inside it to stretch the cores. One pill a day would be more than fine if I had months to work with, and it was possible I did, but being ready later was always inferior to being ready immediately, so I had taken to using more extreme measures.

Laying in bed so I could fully relax my body, I popped the first pill. My reserves were already full, so as soon as the wax broke open and my body began to absorb the contents I was quickly overcome with painful burning and stabbing sensations all over, corresponding to oversaturation cell damage. To mitigate it, I opened my cores, increasing their size as far as they could possibly go and allowing magic fuel to flow out of my blood and into them. It felt similar to inhaling deeply, but with a different organ, and the sensation in my body faded.

Still holding the “breath” of magic, I reached onto my chest and put the second wax pill in my mouth, then slowly relaxed again and swallowed it. The difference between magic cores and lungs was that cores were actually extremely stretchy because they were made of mostly muscle, so instead of rupturing like lungs would when overfilled they would tear instead. Sucking in another “breath” on top of the first, I managed to reduce the intensity of the oversaturation pain by about half before my body simply refused to follow my orders anymore, which was better than it had been the day before. Then, balancing the delicate and painful equilibrium, I began the hardest part of my magic capacity training.

I had put a lot of thought into how healing magic worked in tandem with muscle growth. The systems in place for healing magic were incredibly, impossibly complex, with many exceptions and special rules to allow the body to work. What qualified as “damage” that was to be fixed immediately, or even with type-two regeneration, didn’t always follow rational expectations. Muscles were one of those cases: magic would generally not heal muscle tissue that was damaged by slight overuse, but it would act to reduce swelling and pain caused by slight overuse. That meant that muscles still grew through use, but only if they were pushed, and only at a normal rate for a creator human, at least by default.

I didn’t have to work with the default configuration of healing magic though, nobody did if they had enough skill at conscious control of subconscious systems in their body. While my cores were screaming in pain from nearly bursting, I directed the excess power in my blood to them and began the slow and careful process of fixing the damage that I was inflicting on them. Too fast, and no size gains would be had. Too slow, and they wouldn’t heal at all, breaking apart faster than their cells could regenerate. The appropriate rate was still glacial and horrendously expensive by the standards of most healing magic, several hours and multiple cores’ worth of energy for a proper healing cycle, but was suitably accelerated from the normal rate that the investment was more than worth it.

I wonder if a human could do this, I thought as I took deep breaths, keeping the vast majority of my attention on controlling my magic. I’m not sure that anyone I’ve ever met here has the level of focus required to maintain concentration for hours at a time. Hmm, maybe Mawyeyz, come to think of it. He is a magic expert, so if there’s anyone I know of who could do this besides me it’s probably him. Maybe I’ll write the technique into a book once this is over. Uncomfortable thoughts about what might happen after my mission bubbled up, but were pushed aside by the necessity of focus. I’ll deal with that when it happens.

“You have been given a virtual body that resembles a human. You will be subjected to a series of injuries. Affect the appropriate pain response to each stimulus. Your responses will be graded and a final score will be given at the end of this test.”

Oh, I remember this. I failed this test so many times. Come to think of it, I don’t understand why they didn’t just program the subconscious muscular reactions into the body. I never have to think about pain response as a human, I just choose the degree to which I allow it to affect my-

“Test one: Acid burn, left forearm and hand.”

That really hurts. Why does that hurt? Why can’t I ignore it?

“Test two: Gunshot wound to lower torso.”

I need to wake up right now. I need to wake up before I end up vomiting in my sleep. Come on, wake-

“Test three: Shattered pelvis.”

Why am I not waking up!?!?

“Test four: Plasma burns, eighty percent skin coverage.”

Some screaming should be normal, right? I hope I’m not doing this in my bed right now.

“Yuwniht!” Vaozey shouted, shaking me out of my sleep. The disjointed emergence from my dream was so sudden that I nearly vomited, rolling out of my bed, collapsing onto the floor, and gasping. It was only once I saw the blood dripping from my eyes and nose collecting beneath me that I realized that the pain I was feeling wasn’t a phantom sensation, but something real. At the same time as the realization, that pain intensified again, exploding out from my stomach in a wave that seared every nerve out to my fingers and toes.

“What… happened…?” I croaked, still delirious.

“I don’t know, you’re bleeding, and you were yelling,” Vaozey said, trying to hold down the panic in her voice. “Did something go wrong with the training?” The training, right, I remembered, and pieces fell into place. I’m overloaded for some reason, that’s what this is. I guess it’s probably from my stomach core. A quick check confirmed that something in that area was definitely hurting worse than everything else. Need to discharge power or I’m going to die, I thought, laser, laser is the best way.

“Look… away,” I gasped, holding my hand up. I don’t care how you form it, just use every bit of power in my blood right now and shoot that wall! I demanded, yelling at the part of my brain responsible for magic. An instant later, a thick green beam of light flashed out from my hand, so bright that it blinded me, and I felt the pain starting to recede again. The relief was so powerful that I didn’t even notice the sensation of my retinas healing, and I collapsed right into the ground again, limp.

“What the seyt was that?” Vaozey gasped, and I saw her blurry form doing something to her face. Probably rubbing her eyes, I thought. “Shit, the wall is on fire,” she swore, running over and batting the faintly-glowing flames with her hands to put them out. Should have just cloaked, I realized. The smoke finally reached my nostrils, a mixture of wooden and chemical smells, and my head started to ache. I few breaths passed, and I pushed myself back to my knees, then crawled back into my sweat-covered bed.

What happened? I asked myself, doing a checkup of my body. Though I was no longer suffering a full-body cellular breakdown from magic fuel oversaturation, my stomach was still aching painfully, and I could feel the concentrations of magic fuel going up and down in my blood. Brain core is fine, I thought with a quick check, heart core is fine, stomach core is… it doesn’t want to move. For some reason, my stomach core had contracted almost entirely, and was refusing to respond to mental commands. It’s cramped, I realized, I didn’t factor that in, I didn’t think muscle cramps could even happen with healing magic.

“Are you okay?” Vaozey asked, and I opened my eyes to see her hovering above me, looking concerned.

“Muscle spasm,” I said, realizing the Uwrish didn’t have a word for “cramp”.

“What muscle?” Vaozey demanded, now angry.

“Stomach core,” I grunted. “What time is it?”

“Three hours or so to dawn,” she sighed. “You look like shit.”

“I don’t think I slept well before this,” I admitted. “If the dream was any indication, at least.”

“Never took you for one to have bad dreams,” Vaozey snorted, crossing her arms. Even though she was acting aloof, her body language still looked concerned.

“I’ve had unpleasant dreams before, but that’s not what I meant,” I replied. “In the dream, I was in extreme pain and couldn’t escape it. The sensations probably bled through from my body even though I wasn’t conscious.”

“I’ve only had those as memories,” Vaozey muttered.

“This was a memory,” I sighed, closing my eyes again and relaxing into the sheets. “Training.” Don’t say too much, a voice in my head reminded me. Why care? another asked, You aren’t under any obligation to keep secrets anymore.

“They beat you up in training?” Vaozey asked, sounding amused. “We do that here, soldiers need to know how to take a hit after all. I’ve done it a few times myself to demonstrate kehpveht strength.”

“No, this was just-” I said, inhaling and pausing. “Soldiers from my homeland do not respond to pain. However, for someone like me who… can be sent into enemy lands under the cover of not being a soldier, it’s important that we respond to it appropriately so that we aren’t found out.”

“I thought you were just a normal soldier where you were from?” Vaozey asked, and I opened my eyes to see her frowning as she loomed over me.

“I am, soldiers like me are sent in mostly for sabotage and infiltration missions,” I replied. “That doesn’t mean we’re not normal soldiers, it just means we have a specific role. In terms of… rank, we’re equivalent to Uwrish conscripts. We do not have command of any others, and we are not valued highly.”

“Nothing about your homeland makes any sense, I hope you know that,” Vaozey replied flatly. I assure you, it would make even less sense if I were to tell you the full truth, I thought. “So what kinds of things did they test you with?”

“In this dream, the first was an acid burn,” I said, holding up my left arm. “From the elbow all the way down to the fingertips. Then, a gunshot to the stomach, a broken pelvis, and…” I paused, inhaling and letting my arm fall, “full body electrical shock, enough to cause convulsions. I didn’t get to the end before waking, but I remember there were about fifty injuries tested per session.” I hadn’t planned to lie, but I didn’t have a way to explain my lack of scarring to Vaozey in the case of telling the truth. “I was graded with a score out of a possible one hundred points on the appropriateness and authenticity of the reactions.” I closed my eyes again, my eyelids feeling heavy.

“That’s sick,” Vaozey hissed. “That’s seytoydh disgusting. What purpose does that serve? What could justify that?”

“To ensure-” I began, but Vaozey cut me off.

“How old were you?” she asked. I hadn’t been “born” yet, was the real answer, but not one I could explain.

“Young,” I replied quietly.

“A child,” she stated. It wasn’t a question, and she sounded angry again. “They subjected a child to that inhuman ‘training’.”

“It’s one of my earliest memories,” I added, after a short pause, and I heard a sigh. I suppose that, if it were done to a human, it would be considered unconscionable by most, I admitted to myself.

“You overtrained,” Vaozey said. “Muscles only spasm like that if you really overuse them, but I assume you know that already.”

“I do,” I confirmed.

“Go to sleep, we’ll play another round of that damned game tomorrow,” she huffed. “Don’t tell anyone about this mishap, and do anything stupid until then, you hear me?”

“I won’t,” I replied, but the room was silent. Before I could open my eyes to check if Vaozey was still there, I fell asleep again. Unlike before, I dreamt of nothing, and it was peaceful.

“I win,” Vaozey said, moving her piece into place. She didn’t sound very pleased with the situation.

“Yes,” I agreed.

“You let me win,” she frowned. Obviously, I did let her win as she suspected, but only because I didn’t want her to insist upon playing a dice game where it would be impossible to tell if I had cheated.

“No,” I lied.

“When you make a move, you always pause while looking at the piece you want to move for a moment before you grab it,” Vaozey said. “I saw you pause a bunch of times, but then move a different piece. You let me win.”

“Fine, I did,” I shrugged.

“I made some dice last night,” Vaozey said. “Let’s play something else.”

“Just don’t accuse me of cheating,” I said.

“Don’t cheat then,” she scoffed back, removing a bag from her pocket and tossing it on the table.

On the morning of the fourth day in Muhryehv, Shahpao had us pack all of our stuff up and we set out again for Towrkah. Everything had gone well, our supplies had been refilled, our beasts were rested, and Shahpao had even managed to acquire a few of the goods I had asked him to look into while we were in town. There wasn’t any hair bleach or makeup, sadly, but among the things he did find were a jar of the same incendiary oil that Vaozey had used in Owsahlk, a pack of shard-like hiltless knives for use with external force magic, and a pail full of small iron ball bearings. Apparently, the final item had to be made on request, but it was simple enough for the smith that the cost was negligible.

Thus, while I sat inside the weapon wagon and occupied the bulk of my effort with training my cores carefully, I also found time to experiment with methods for stacking and loading collections of ball bearings into one of the muskets in place of their normal ammunition. It was surprising to me that the Uwrish hadn’t yet conceived of a shotgun, but I supposed that the presence of healing magic meant that early forms with less powerful shrapnel might have been deemed useless in combat. I had overheard talk of primitive pistols in use by Kahvahrniydah, so I assumed it was only a matter of time before other advancements arose naturally.

“You still alive in there?” Vaozey asked from outside.

“Yes,” I grunted back. Ever since the incident with my stomach core, she had taken to paying much closer attention to me while I was training my magic capacity, apparently fearful that I would kill myself accidentally. It wasn’t overly invasive, just a few check-ins every hour or so, but it reminded me of having to report to a commander over radio comms.

“Don’t blow yourself up,” Vaozey advised, her voice receding as she did so. Back to her usual spot then, I thought, turning back to the mess of wax and iron ball bearings I was working with.

Something that I probably should have told Shahpao, but neglected to because I hadn’t realized it was necessary, was that the balls of iron needed to be approximately the same size. The blacksmith’s product wasn’t awful in terms of metal quality, but there was nearly an eighty percent size variance between the largest and smallest balls he made, with the average variance between randomly selected pieces being around ten percent. The difference in sizes made the creation of a properly shaped stack of pellets harder than it should have been.

Two hours later I finished my core training and had around eighty wax “shotgun” loads in front of me that were divided into three different kinds. They weren’t all exactly uniform, but they did have approximately the same mass as a musket round, which was the important part. Grabbing one of each and a musket, I hopped out of the wagon and made my way to the front to tell Shahpao to call a stop for the demonstration. Since we were fairly hidden in the woodland at the moment, we just pulled the wagons aside and gathered up the soldiers in a nearby clearing.

“So what do you have for us, Yuwniht?” Shahpao asked, and I held up the musket.

“This weapon is more versatile than you all realize,” I began. “Due to the smooth interior of the barrel, it can fire a number of ammunition types beyond single metal balls, each of which has its own role in fighting or hunting. I know your people don’t typically use these for hunting animals, but it’s good practice so we might want to start doing it with those who are less familiar with them. For today, I’ve produced three similar but differently performing ammunition types that I will now demonstrate.”

Opening the musket, I popped in the shot load with the largest ball bearings first, followed by a slightly overstuffed packet of black powder, then closed it and took aim at a tree around fifteen meters away. A moment later, a significant section of the tree’s outer bark exploded, and I used some magic to quickly clear the smoke from the black powder explosion. With a gesture, I instructed everyone to take a look at the damage, and they began to murmur.

“That was something similar to what my people call a quadruple-aught buckshot,” I explained. “There were five smaller metal projectiles in the wax wadding, instead of just one. This produces a less accurate shot with less energy per impact, but multiple impacts.”

“Will it penetrate armor?” someone asked.

“This one might, but not from a long distance and not anything well-made,” I replied. “Generally, this sort of shotgun ammunition should be used to try to secure a lethal or disabling hit on a lightly armored opponent.”

“Doesn’t sound useful,” someone else said. “Maybe for hunting…”

“Don’t forget, there are five projectiles,” I said. “You do not need to be as accurate with this sort of ammunition as with a single projectile shot. Due to a number of factors, the projectiles will tend to spread out into a long cone shape from the end of the barrel instead of following a single line. You can see that in the pattern of impacts on the tree.” Some soldiers leaned in closer, looking for where each shot had hit, and the murmuring grew louder. “Now, the next is a double-aught with nine projectiles that are slightly smaller. Observe.”

Loading the second shot, I aimed at another tree well away from the group and fired again. This time, more of the bark than before was stripped off, but it was clear that less overall damage had been done. My observers seemed to find it more impressive though, and quickly rushed in to look at the results.

“This ammunition is the one that I will be able to produce the most of with the current components I have,” I explained. “It will not be effective against opponents with armor, and will likely not be lethal from ranges beyond twenty or thirty paces, but it will be able to quickly disable most human targets due to the energy of each projectile being so low that most will not penetrate the body. This ammunition is an explicit counter to Rehvite warriors, who usually wear little armor.”

“There are only eight impacts,” someone said.

“One might have missed,” I replied. “The spread is quite extreme, as you can see, but that’s a good thing. You only need to hit with a few projectiles to temporarily stop an enemy, and the spread pattern makes such a thing fairly likely. Consider two or three of you shooting at once from different angles at an enemy: Instead of scoring somewhere between one and three hits, you will score over a dozen in most cases.”

“What’s the final one?” Vaozey asked. She had stood back from the group but looked just as interested as the rest of them. I smiled, looking up at the trees. The noise had scared away most of the birds initially, but they had returned while we were talking. Some twenty meters away, up along a large branch, four decently fat animals were watching us. I loaded the final shot, three dozen tiny metal balls wrapped in paper with a coating of wax, then pointed the gun at them and fired. One bird got away, but three fell to the ground, twitching and writhing in pain.

“Someone get those,” Shahpao ordered, catching on quickly. The soldiers rushed over and subdued the animals, breaking their necks and collecting them.

“This last one isn’t that useful for fighting, but it’s quite good for hunting,” I announced. “There were thirty-six projectiles in that shot. I doubt you could kill a human with it unless you were only a step or two away, but on anything that doesn’t have armor or skin thick enough to count as armor, the amount of pain it inflicts is nothing to scoff at. The hardest part about hunting with birdshot is picking it out of the victims afterwards.” A few soldiers laughed, and one who was holding a bird began popping some of the iron balls out of its body, grimacing. Shahpao, frowning, approached me.

“You should have told me what you were going to use those iron balls for,” he said quietly. “If I had known, I would have purchased more.”

“We can always get more in Towrkah,” I replied. “It’s probably best to spread out the orders anyway. Metal balls don’t have many uses to your people, as far as I know, so it’s a conspicuous purchase.”

“True enough,” he agreed. “Take one or two soldiers tomorrow and have them help you process the rest of that pail. I’ll work out how to order more components safely. We need to work on the names, though. Shaatgahn, dahbahl kwaadruwpahl aot, bahkshaat, nobody is going to remember that.”

“You can all decide on your own names,” I said. “You’re already calling muskets ‘rifles’ anyway, so I doubt trying to force you to use the correct word for a shotgun will work.”