Zhang answered my call immediately. That was the advantage of the interface, no one could ignore you because they had ‘forgotten their phone.’

  “Is this something serious? Or essence again?” she asked instead of greeting me. Even so, her tone was fairly friendly.

  “Didn’t you like your share?” I asked.

  “Honestly,” she replied, “it’s more hassle than it’s worth. Now everyone thinks I do this on a regur basis and keeps flooding me with requests.”

  “Sounds familiar,” I said. “But no, this time that’s not why I’m bothering you. I need your help as soon as you’ve got a free minute, or thirty, preferably.”

  “What exactly do you need? Be specific first,” she said, wary.

  “Sparring.”

  “Oh! We are feeling cocky today, don’t we? I’m at te stage, you’re at mid. The difference might seem small, but I’ve got far more experience.”

  If we’re talking about real fights to the death, then I’m ahead, but no need to offend the girl. In the end, I was the one asking for help.

  “We definitely don’t. How do I put this… I need you to hurt me.”

  “I’m not really into that kind of thing,” she joked.

  “Ha-ha,” I replied weakly. “I need to recreate real combat conditions: danger and pressure.”

  “Mendoza’s students could give you far more pressure,” she noted carefully.

  “The gap’s too big, and they’re busy right now.”

  “All of them?”

  “I suspect so.”

  “Is something going on?” Zhang asked. “Does this have anything to do with the smashed metro trains?”

  Rumours were one of those things that were very easy to start and very hard to stop.

  “Maybe. They don’t report to me. And what’s this about the trains? I haven’t heard anything yet.”

  “I didn’t see it myself, but they say yesterday someone completely trashed several trains. It looked like there had been a fight, but no one actually saw the fight itself.

  “Are you sure you don’t know anything about it?” she asked.

  “Even if I did, I couldn’t tell you,” I brushed the question off lightly. “What were you expecting?”

  “An honest answer.”

  “You got one.”

  “You know, now I really don’t mind hurting you!”

  “Excellent! When?”

  “Right now, if you like.”

  “Perfect. Then the Armour Hall, twenty minutes.”

  “In armour it won’t hurt as much,” she noted. “Unless we go full rampage, and that could affect the armour itself. Repairs aren’t cheap.”

  “Oh, don’t worry! I’ll be without armour.”

  “I’m in armour and you’re not? Did you hit your head somewhere?” Zhang asked. “You’re taking away your own st chance.”

  “That’s the point! That’s exactly the kind of fight I want.”

  “Well… alright then,” she finally agreed.

  The Armour Hall wasn’t the rgest space in the academy. That is, if we’re talking about the main hall with the donning machines, rather than the combined total of all the facilities belonging to every structural subdivision. The Gardens alone easily surpassed it in size, and there were also training halls and enormous covered ranges, but this was unquestionably a pce that could compete with the metro in terms of sheer busyness. Three rows of ptforms, and endless queues of cadets, instructors, and technical staff stood by each individual unit.

  I spotted Zhang in one of the queues and took my pce behind her. More or less behind her, there were two cadets between us.

  She gave my armour a suspicious look, but said nothing. However, after putting her own gear on, she waited for me to take mine off. Only then did she say something that sounded very simir to what I’d already heard from Eriksen.

  “Are you sure about what you’re doing?”

  “Absolutely! A full fifty per cent sure!”

  We returned to the same hall where I had previously tried to reproduce the Chainsaw Punch. A metal floor, even reinforced walls. Essentially, it was a wide corridor, not a pce where you could manoeuvre much.

  Zhang and I took up opposite sides, then moved a little closer towards the centre. Zhang could easily reach from wall to wall with her beam, but that was too much for me. We closed the distance to about fifteen metres between us — a comfortable range for my techniques, with some margin to spare.

  I quietly removed my shield amulet and immediately informed her that I would be actively defending myself, without going into details so she wouldn’t suspect anything. Because of her armour, she perceived the session as entertainment, and for now her thoughts weren’t drifting towards the question of ‘where did these conditions come from?’

  “So, what other torture conditions are we setting? Choosing a safe word?” she joked.

  “What’s wrong with ‘stop’?” I asked seriously. She could joke around, but I needed to be as focused as possible. “As painful as possible, please. Not too traumatic, if you can help it. And start slow, then build up.”

  “Sounds like a chef’s recipe. Slowly increase the level of roasting and bring it to readiness.”

  I nodded, not sharing her mood. On the contrary, I tried to get angry at her.

  It wasn’t working very well. I’d asked for this myself. Still, the anticipation of pain was already making my nerves jittery.

  I inhaled, activated Thousand Sparks, opened FlowScan, raised my fists, and bounced a few times on my feet. I had no intention of catching lightning with my chest, so the fight itself would start with the Mad Monkey.

  “Start when you’re ready,” I said.

  The first beam, a thin purple thread wrapped in sharp, curved discharges of the same colour, tore itself from her finger. I felt weakness and danger lick at my gut and Monkey-leapt to the left, but didn’t manage to get clear in time.

  The pain was sharp and pulsing. My right side seized up in a spasm that caught both shoulder and leg. I nded cleanly on my left foot, but the right went wooden, and the next jump, which by the Monkey’s canon should have gone the other way, came out wrong.

  I pushed off with my left, slipped past the beam, but nded on the still-wooden right and smmed into the floor.

  Zhang didn’t finish off someone who was down.

  “Is this ‘stop’ already, or not yet?” she asked.

  “This is a pause!” I barked back and slowly got to my feet.

  The first thing I did was check Thousand Sparks and FlowScan. The st thing I wanted was to add brain damage on top. That was entirely possible if, during electrocution, I were to interrupt Thousand Sparks.

  That danger added the necessary edge to the training. The risk became more real.

  I bounced a few times and gave the bracelet the command to inject stimunts. I didn’t tell Zhang about that.

  “Again,” I said, Monkey-leapt to the right, and unleashed a hail of cssic Chain Punches at her.

  The projections drummed against her protection, against the yellow mesh of the formation. Hexagonal segments burned out instantly under the detonations, only to restore themselves before the next impact.

  “Oh, you little!..” she took offence at my not warning her. Not seriously, though, her voice was lively, full of excitement. She used a dodge technique herself and shifted left, leaving a spray of sparks behind.

  Beams and projections filled the space. Several times they met and neutralised each other. My projectiles, while not what I was aiming for, worked as a kind of shield, covering me with the sheer volume of mass I was throwing out.

  It only took Zhang a second to adapt. Shifting her stance and moving her hands further away from her body allowed her to bypass that pseudo-defence.

  Because of the unusual hand positioning, however, the beams became weaker.

  The first one hit my right shoulder, spasming the deltoid and part of the neck muscles, but I forced through it, continuing to windmill my arms like a madman.

  Still not it!

  The next beam caught my leg and nearly took me down.

  Then the stomach, a few centimetres above the groin, which triggered not just a spasm but a massive adrenaline dump as well. The possibility of an electric beam hitting my bollocks scared me no less than a Third Stage with a sword.

  But the next beam was already stronger. It hit left forearm. Zhang caught the moment and executed the technique properly. My arm went completely numb, sagged uselessly, and the technique glitched. I couldn’t form the next projection with my left.

  The right, however, still fired as it should.

  My left side was left without the protection of projections. I was still hopping side to side like a grasshopper, of course, but compared to Zhang’s speed that wasn’t enough. Her formation allowed her to ignore defence and focus on offence. That meant when she jumped, it wasn’t to avoid projections, but to get a better line of attack.

  Yes, I’d removed Novak’s amulet for better stimution, but without a shield I wouldn’t achieve anything either!

  My right arm was still moving, so after firing a projection, I pulled the shield wall towards myself with the return motion. But instead of the familiar solid pne, I touched sharpness.

  There was no dull impact like the one back in Rene’s hall, when I’d first formed the shield incorrectly.

  There was a sharp, cold sensation that ran from my hand all the way to my tailbone. My fingers flew apart.

  Blood spshed first, and only then did the pain arrive, yet my arm kept moving, as if on rails. The pain unlocked something in my brain and body. The left rose into guard and straightened forward.

  The sensation of cold and sharpness that had touched my tailbone surged forward with it. A vertical silver strip smmed into Zhang’s formation, tearing a gap in it that was far too wide to close instantly.

  It worked!

  My confused brain was receiving contradictory commands, but the stimunts, adrenaline, and pain, together with dozens of tournament and other fights, spilled over into a strange reflex: see it through to the end.

  My right, the stump of my right with the fingers severed, also completed its arc, and from it, along with droplets of blood, tore free a projection of an ‘incomplete’ fist. The shape precisely mirrored the mutited hand.

  That projection flew into the gap in Zhang’s defensive formation and burst against her armour a moment before the formation closed.

  Left — bde, right — projection.

  “What the hell?!” Zhang shouted and sprang back in two jumps, almost to the wall, beyond the effective range of my techniques.

  Left — bde, right — projection. Left — bde, right — projection.

  What was wrong? How do I make…

  “Your fingers! Can’t you see them?!” Zhang shouted at me.

  But I couldn’t stop. I was one step away from understanding!

  That sharpness I felt with my right, it was being transmitted through the left. I had to touch it with the left in order to transmit it with the right.

  My fingers?

  I pulled. Carefully, just a little…

  Pain sliced through my fingers, but they didn’t fly off. A bde tore free from the stump of my right.

  Left — bde, right — bde. Left — bde, right — bde.

  A series of beautiful silver bdes, slightly tilted along the vertical like the teeth of a real saw, flew forward one after another, one after another.

  “Will you fucking stop right now, or I’ll do it myself!” Zhang threatened.

  “One second!” I begged, and turned my attention to FlowScan.

  The recordings! As long as the recordings survived!

  “Now!”

  A thick, furious beam fshed past my right ear, licking it with sparks.

  “That’s it!” I stopped and raised my hands.

  “You’re a bloody maniac,” Zhang decred. “Cmp your hand! Stop the bleeding! Never ask me to help you again!”

  “Oh, don’t make a scene. They regrow hands here! What’s sewing on a few fingers to them?”

  Though, honestly, it might be time to inject some painkillers, because I wasn’t feeling too great.

  Oh. Yes. That’s much better.

  I looked at the blood-spttered floor and involuntarily caught sight of my stomach. The yellow jumpsuit was spttered too. The stains formed a vertical pattern: less concentrated lower down, and much denser around the chest.

  Oh. So my face is spttered as well. I must look like something else entirely.

  MaksymPachesiuk