Lots of eyes on her. Red MJ serenely ignored them all. Their collective eyes could not match up to many of the stares she’d been under during her training, and so they were irrelevant.

She picked out the Terran table easily, of course, knowing where to look, and saw them waving and shouting in support. She smiled despite herself, and noted in particular Dynamo’s highly amused expression.

Amused-? She glanced ahead, and almost did a double-take when she saw Ky’yrth’s glowing sapphire plasma sword.

It took a great deal of discipline to not grin and outright laugh at the fool. Who did this idiot think he was fighting?

He was using some sort of jet-assisted anti-grav in the form of feathery adornments, and that was some sort of duelist-class power armor. It probably had various levels of distractive surprises in it. None of that stuff was expressly forbidden by the terms of the dueling rules she had read, so she had actually been expecting it.

They were taking her skill seriously, at least. Placing in a Contest sponsored by the Champion was enough to get your name Out There.

Her Dragonmarked arm was bare today, a courtesy to her opponents. She glided across the floor, an inch above the floor, Dragonstepping, in total control of her momentum and speed, capable of inertia-ignoring changes of direction with but a thought, as well as simply incredible acceleration.

Her opponent was at least partially cybered, likely with wired reflexes to complement his dueling armor’s synthetic muscle. It didn’t bother her. He wasn’t a psi or mage, neither of which was likely to be a threat to her.

She glided to her position ten paces away from the arrogant Shi’ar. Judging by the displays of fractal feathers, the first thing he was likely to try was some sort of holographic force field imaging multiplier, and despite herself, a sound of mirth escaped her lips as she faced him.

He caught it immediately, and his coldly expectant expression instantly fell. “Something amusing you, young human?” he promptly sneered, bringing his bright blue blade up.

“I...” she brought her hand up to partially apologize, and then another guffaw escaped her despite herself, further angering him. “Yes, something is deeply amusing me. Please retain that posture, if you will.”

She kicked off, gliding closer to him, her body language inoffensive, and obviously not about to start the duel. He watched her closely, wondering what she was doing as she came in closer to his humming sword’s bright point, the field termination sending a hiss of superheated air curling from it.

She wasn’t slowing down in the slightest. Indeed, she was just raising her hand as if her arm could deflect his radiant weapon with mere flesh and bone...

His surprise when her hand flicked over and grabbed the brilliant sapphire plasmic bar there could not be feigned.

With casual ease, she closed her fist, and totally disrupted the field integrity of the latter half of his sword as she coasted in, pushing her hand down against the energy of his weapon, and only stopping when the hissing, spitting field was an inch from the crystals of the hilt he held in his hand.

“You probably should turn that off now,” she advised him calmly, her eyes still dancing with amusement.

Very slowly and deliberately, his hooked thumb came up to flick the emitter into the off position as he stared at her in disbelief.

“Would you like to cut at me a few times to confirm how useless your weapon is against me?” she asked him politely, retrieving her hand.

He looked at her, at the Sapphire Talon in his hand, and flicked it back on off to the side as the entire watching crowd went very quiet.

With casual ease, he swept it across her undefended throat. He watched the energy slide over her skin, and she might have been made of ada’man crystal for all that she reacted to the heat and pressure of the constrained plasma.

It didn’t even cut any of the strands of her hair that it met on the path of its stroke. There was only a slight redness trailing behind the point, which went away a few seconds later.

Rather automatically, he thrust the point into her throat, a full two feet. It should have been protruding out the back of her neck, and instead looked like he was holding a bright flashlight to her throat.

He flicked it off again, and there was only a slight red spot that faded away against her lightly tanned skin a breath later.

“Perhaps we can duel when you bear a real weapon,” she told him calmly, and showed him off with her eyes. “You cannot even parry a blow of mine.”

And a terrible pressure lit up in her eyes and came down on his soul.

There was a single shiiinngg, the sound of steel clearing a scabbard, and a flash of gold, there and gone, just a flicker even to his boosted reflexes.

A gouge ten feet long was scored through the rubber-padded metal of the floor, steaming with something that might have been heat or cold or something else, he couldn’t tell.

“You are done.”

And he was. He stepped back, bowed stiffly in defeat, and without even being able to show the skills that had made him famous across the Empire, turned and walked away.

There were no catcalls. They were a warrior people, and what kind of a farce would it be, engaging her with a weapon no more a threat than a flashlight? She had shown her strength and given him a chance to withdraw honorably before being totally humiliated in a sparring demonstration.

The other Shi’ar energy sword duelists looked on with eyes of disbelief as the Sapphire Talon conceded his duel with no more than a couple awkward pre-duel passes.

----

I watched Red MJ schooling some Tranxbian cyborg who thought being half-metal gave him a chance against her, and instead was finding himself getting chopped and shocked apart by her swordplay and maneuverability, which he was astonished to find he couldn’t keep up with.

Her Vampire’s Veil was also making it nigh-impossible to use any aspect of his cyborg systems against her properly, as the machinery couldn’t ‘see’ her, meaning he had to rely on his flesh entirely to react to her, which basically neutralized any advantages he had.

Also, she’d lined up Sundering and Breaking on him in addition to Bane/Constructs, so any sweep of Sonja against him was frying his systems and causing increasing spasms in his control he couldn’t deal with. It took less than a minute to whittle him down and cripple him.

He probably didn’t want to know that she could have just chopped his sword apart and him with it, but discretion, grasshopper. She was here to make an impression, and she was.

“MJ’s really good, isn’t she,” Peter murmured, watching her perform.

“She’s got an old soul inside her, which some would call cheating. I call it freaking awesome!” Also, Sama had totally loaded her up with all the bells and whistles, and that included the Ritual of the Burning Heart and the Ceremony of the Frozen Soul.

============

Months before...

“Something for me to defeat here, Teacher?” MJ asked calmly, neither confident nor afraid, only looking at the molten lava in the center of the volcanic crater below.

“A test of worth. The ones who watch over this place are some conservative arseholes who don’t believe in my ability to assess worthy people.” MJ half-smiled at the unsaid SO YOU BETTER DAMN WELL PROVE YOU ARE WORTHY TO THESE BUTTWIPES! “Feel the pyromana?”

MJ closed her eyes and carefully felt the currents of mana actually billowing against her Null. It wasn’t something she’d notice or even feel without paying attention to it, but now that she focused on it, the scorching sensation was easy to feel. “It’s quite violent, and... streaming past us, rather than circling or dissipating like it tends to elsewhere. A ley line node?” she asked reasonably, her education in a lot of matters having increased at incredible, telepathically-taught speed.

“Actually, the biggest active Fire Node on the planet’s surface.” Sama gestured behind them, her dark hair, like MJ’s, not moving an inch in the stiff and rather foul wind. “Those salt plains down there behind us are some of the driest places on the planet. While we could go diving under Yellowstone for excitement, this is the Summerheart, the largest and purest Fire Node on the surface of Terra.”

MJ tilted her head. “That... posits a Winterheart, Teacher?” she asked reasonably.

“Antarctica. We’re going there next. Now go down there and defeat that guardian, and we’ll get this over with.” She paused a moment. “Don’t use Bane, and don’t use Cold.”

Totally unafraid of what she might meet, MJ promptly jumped right over the edge of the cliff.

Her Vajra cut through the wind, so she wasn’t going to be dashed up against the razored frozen magma here, and she could arrest her fall at will via the Tats of the Cloudstepping Sandals on her feet.

A warm feeling came through her whenever she thought about the care she was being given by Sama. The woman was unbelievably busy at all times on a mental level, but her physical time, her body and hands, was being given to her, her newest student, because of a promise she’d made in a whole other life.

She was doing the things that had awed Red Sonja back then when they’d met, and the sheer joy of being able to do this, of walking past the limits of being a mortal and facing things that gods might fear just buoyed her soul as nothing else she might expect.

She bounced off rock formations, jagged spears of obsidian and wind-swept stone, slick slopes and slides of scree, and entered the level ground area.

The air here was foul and poisonous, but her Vajra didn’t care. The ground was razored, unstable, with magma churning not that far below, ready to erupt up randomly, or if she put too much weight on the wrong area.

She put weight on no areas, and came forwards.

The creature that arose from the caldera’s lava ahead of her didn’t even slow her down.

Some form of magma elemental, she considered with detachment. Powerful, but slow for its size, nearly twenty feet tall and quite bulky, almost round. Extreme natural armor, fire around it, dangers from the lava and environment.

Her Focus slid into her hand, and Sonja came out with the shrill shriiiing of metal clearing a scabbard, pure and ringing. It cut through the wind, and she saw the elemental pause, the burning eyes widen and focus on her as she came in, her walk as fast as a normal man running.

Sonja was silent thereafter, but the coppery metal at her core, edged in blue-black and golden veins, was wreathed in hard, ready gold, a soulsword ready to strike... and a moment later it flared to solid gold, glowing like a bar of the sun in her grasp.

The Dragonslaying enchantment, Sama called it. Brilliant... ignore all natural armor of your target. It was next to useless against humans, who had no such ‘natural armor’, although there were Powered who definitely did. But against monsters, especially BIG monsters, it sheared through their hides like a hot knife through warm butter.