Chapter 39: Dinner First

Fenna’s greatsword came down at my head.

Before I tell you what I did about that, I have to back up two weeks, because otherwise the next part makes no sense and you’ll think I’ve started lying to you.

Sabine’s lessons were, in her own words, unsexy.

"You will not be learning a signature spell," she’d told me, sitting on a table in the ruin with her legs crossed. "Signature spells are for children with small cores and large egos. You have the opposite problem. You have an obscene amount of fuel and nothing to burn it in. So we will be doing the boring work."

The boring work was two things.

The first was Coating. You push mana out along the inside of your body and hold it there, over the muscle, and it makes you faster and stronger. It also hurts the entire time. Most students can hold it for about eight seconds before their core runs dry and they fall over. Sabine made me hold it while doing laps around the ruin until I threw up.

The second was Snap. You take a chunk of mana, shove it into one joint, and spend it in one motion. You get one step out of it, or one turn, and then it’s gone, and if you misjudge the amount you dislocate your own shoulder.

Both of them are invisible from the stands. That was Sabine’s favorite part.

"Nobody watches for the girl who is simply faster," she’d said. "They watch for big, flashy lights."

---

So. Back to the sword coming down at my head.

I wasn’t there anymore.

I Snapped from my left foot and went sideways two full meters in one step, which was about a meter and a half more than I’d been managing all match, and I heard the sword crack into the stone where my legs had been. Then I turned and went in.

I’d never gone in on anybody in my life.

Coating came up hot through my arms and legs until every muscle I had was pulling twice as hard as it could an hour ago. I closed the distance while she was still hauling that thing back up. Then I hit her in the ribs.

It was a garbage punch. My form was wrong and I’m pretty sure I cracked a knuckle. But there was about six seconds of a C-rank’s mana behind it, and Fenna Greywild left the ground and skidded backward on her heels.

The whole front row stood up at once.

"Did she just—"

"The fox? The F-rank?"

[Rank C now, thanks. Read the patch notes!]

Fenna caught herself, looked down at her own ribs, and then looked up at me with her chipped fang showing.

"Okay," she said. "Okay, okay, okay. That’s what I’m talking about."

She came back at me and I Snapped again, ducked under the swing, and put my shoulder into her stomach.

Here’s the thing about hitting Fenna Greywild:

It works. She’s a Knight Course girl with a big sword and no real armor, so every time I got inside the reach of that sword I got to do something to her. I put her back three steps, then four, then I got her heel over the white line at the edge of the ring and for one second I thought I had it.

The problem is that hitting her was also the single best thing I could have done for her.

She got faster. Her swings got shorter and tighter, she stopped setting up for the big finishers, and she kept grinning at me between swings.

"You’re strong," she said, backing me across the ring now, sword coming in short hard chops that I had to Snap away from one after another. "You were hiding it. That’s fine. That’s good, actually, that’s better. Do you know what happens to a wolf when the person she’s picked turns out to be strong?"

"I would rather not know, thanks!"

"Everything wakes up." She caught my hip with the flat and I went down and rolled and came up. "Everything. My blood’s going, my ears are ringing, I want to bite you. That’s not a joke, that’s a real thing that’s happening in my body right now. It’s instinct. Breeding instinct. You woke it up and now I’m running on it and I’m gonna be honest with you, Sakana, I feel amazing."

"That is the single worst thing anyone has ever said to me in an academic setting!"

Her next swing broke my Coating.

I felt the whole layer come off my left side, and my arm went numb from the impact through the guard I’d thrown up. Sabine had warned me about this. Coating makes a hit survivable, and the real skill is putting it back on faster than the enemy can hit you again.

So I put it back on.

For the next minute and a half, neither of us did anything clever. She swung, I ate it or moved, I got inside, I hit her, she laughed. My ribs took two. Her nose was bleeding by the end of it and mine was too. Somewhere up in the stands somebody was screaming my name and I’m fairly sure it was Marisol.

Then Fenna went for the finish.

She telegraphed it. She got her feet planted and hauled that greatsword up over her shoulder for the same overhead she’d opened the match with. But, she was so worked up by then that she never checked her footing.

[Weasel. Now!]

LIGHT went off an inch from her face.

My level had gone up eleven times since I contracted the little guy, and Fenna’s eyes were wolf eyes. She flinched, blinked, and her chin came up.

I Snapped low, hooked my leg behind her ankle, and shoved.

She’d already committed to the swing. All that weight went up and back with nothing under it, and Fenna Greywild went over backward and hit the stone outside the white line.

"OUT OF BOUNDS! MATCH TO SAKANA!"

The arena lost its mind.

I stood there wheezing, with my knuckles hurting and blood coming out of my nose, and it took me a second to work out that I’d just won.

[Holy shit. HOLY SHIT!]

I walked over to the edge and looked down at her. She was lying on the stone with her arms out, staring at the ceiling and breathing hard, so I put my hand out.

"Get up, you maniac!" I said, and hauled her to her feet. She was heavier than she looked. "Listen. Listen to me!!! I’m going to say something and I need you to really hear it! You went straight from ’hello’ to ’five children.’ There’s a whole middle part where you buy someone food and ask them questions about their life and find out whether you even like each other. Would that kill you? Try dinner first, and then we can talk about your five pups, all right???"

Fenna didn’t answer for a moment.

Then, she asked:

"... Dinner?"

[Why’s she looking at me like that?]

"Y-Yes, dinner. Like normal people do it!"

"Understood," Fenna got up and bowed. "I will court you properly."

[WHAT?]

Then, I remembered something.

Originally, Fenna loses one duel to Lily, Lily gives her a hand up out of the dirt, and Fenna spends the next four hundred pages as the most loyal woman in the novel, following her around, telling anyone who’ll listen that Lily Everdawn is the greatest swordswoman of the age.

I wrote that scene. I wrote it because I thought a devoted wolf girl was cute.

But in this situation... the context had, uh, changed a little.

I groaned.