Nic had slept through the night; while strictly speaking he only needed to sleep once every few days, the hunt was beginning, and he felt sharper and more focused when he was well-rested. Now he stood in front of Winterhome’s trainees.

They were…

Interesting?

Everyone fought in completely disparate ways. Fire-Shards led to sharp, striking attacks. Shards that extended the range of mundane weapons into sweeping beams of light, those naturally wanted to duel at the farthest reach they could.

Nic had watched for a long while, and came to a conclusion.

You couldn’t make an army out of this.

An army was a large group of similarly trained fighters. In fact, the less they were acting as individuals and the more they fought as a single beast, the stronger the army would become. If he’d had a base of simple techniques to teach everyone, maybe he could have gone that route.

He didn’t.

What Nic had was a motley group of people who’d been blessed with Shards, giving each of them unique powers. If they wanted to learn to draw the most out of those Shards…

They’d need unique training.

Bailiff, the old soldier, had covered some simple ground. Most of the Natives had never held a weapon before, and some of the mercenaries weren’t more than a few steps better than that.

But as Nic walked among them, he started calling out names, directing them to stand aside from the crowd. In a short time he’d taken a group of forty-three trainees and broken them into eleven groups.

An army fought the same…

But small bands of warriors fought by complimenting each other’s strengths and weaknesses.

He matched people with good range with solid defenders who’d keep that distance. Fast, nimble attack Shards paired with binding Shards. As for slow-building powerful attacks, they were good in any party, but he made sure each group only had one. The others would need to pick up the slack of defending them.

For a moment Nic paused.

In among the trainees was a woman he’d seen before. She was actually one of the humans from Azmin’s camp, one of the same ones he’d fought and shipwrecked when their sandship sailed too close to his temporary home.

If he recalled, she fought by animating simple scrap-metal golems.

As he looked up at her, she raised an eyebrow. “I heard everybody was welcome, so…”

Nic nodded. He was fine with that. The humans from Azmin’s camp weren’t tremendously loyal, and with Azmin missing, there was nobody to direct them against him. They’d be fine joining Winterhome…

Actually, he’d stopped because he was surprised. She must have gotten out before he set off the nuclear fire.

Since the detonation…

Nobody had been seen coming through the portal, and Nic wasn’t willing to send his scouts in if it meant certain death.

“Alright.”

Nic took up position in front of the eleven groups, sweeping his gaze across all of them. Some puffed up their chests and tried to look military-fit in front of their leader, while others were happy to meet him eye to eye, clearly questioning whether this little pink thing was really in charge.

Nic smiled broadly. He was happy to answer that question.

Inkspur leapt onto his shoulder.

“Which group wants to fight me first?” He asked in a chipper voice. “There’s a hunt beginning soon, and I’m only taking the three groups that give me the best show..”

An awkward pause followed, before a bald, walnut-skinned man coughed into his fist and stepped forward. “Is this uh, where you kick our asses as some kind of wax-on, wax-off thing?”

Nic lifted an eyebrow. “No clue about that last bit, but yeah, that’s kinda what this is.”

The man sighed and cracked his knuckles. Behind him was a tall, slender woman with hair drawn back into a tight bun, her fingers wrapped around a long thin saber. They’d been joined by two of the mercenaries, Barnel and Raughlins, who carried quarterstaffs and wore loose, ill-fitting leather-plated chainmail.

They didn’t look like a team.

“You better do your best.” Nic slid into a low stance, casually ready to take them.

The man moved first. From his hands emerged chains of fiery orange steel, covering his arms and lashing out through the air. The strike was crude, a simple whip-crack, and he clearly hadn’t learned to wield the Shard properly yet. A better use would send multiple chains at once, cutting off escape…

Nic dodged aside, not swatting the attack away. If he just used brute strength…

The only lesson they’d learn was that they needed more strength.

The chain flicked through the air and the woman advanced, her saber cutting forward. From the edge came a dozen illusionary versions of her arm, blossoming out like a flower unfolding, creating a dozen different angles of attack. Each version of the blade dissolved into a blur of silver that cut through the air in a long stream of energy.

These weren’t as quick as some range-extending Shards, but they could bend and seek the enemy like striking serpents.

The two Shards combined beautifully. The latter gave her extremely elegant attacks that could come from strange angles, while the former created so many illusions that it would be hard to know which attack you were even meant to dodge.

But Nic?

Nic didn’t feel any pressure at all.

He slid through the storm of attacks and cast his palm out, striking the man in the chest and bowling him back. The entire training pavilion shook a little underfoot, the wooden supports creaking under the forward step he’d taken before lashing out.

“Wrong order, wrong timing. You-” He nodded to the woman. “Attack first, because you cover more ground. Big guy, your attack is slower, so you don’t lead. You catch me when I try to dodge away from her.”

The big man was slowly standing up, his face red as he wheezed for air. Sweat dribbled down the bald crown of his head, but he gave a thumbs-up. Nic suspected sarcasm.

“And you two!”

The two mercenaries looked at each other with embarrassed grins.

“Do something. Next person to sit and watch while their teammates take a beating gets thrown in the lake!”

Calling out through Inkspur, Nic retreated, waving for the group to step forward again. “I’ll give you two tries.” His logic was simple. The best groups aren’t the ones who put up the best show. It was the ones who improved most between those two tries.

Once again, they rushed him. This time they followed the script.

The woman’s saber cut through the air, exploding into a wide swathe of attacks that curved through the air and cut down at him from all angles. She’d purposefully diffused the illusions to cover more space- and Nic obligingly pretended he couldn’t use the Eight-Eyed Mantle to sense the real strike, dodging all of them in quick, weaving steps.

The man was on an intercept course. His chain shot forward, and this time he brought out his other Shard. A third eye opened on his forehead between his horns and for a moment, Nic felt himself slowing, as if an invisible weight was pressing down.

Breaking through only took a moment.

But in that moment the fiery chain whipped out, snagging around his right arm. Nic stomped down and rooted himself in place, binding his backfoot with sticky aura. His left hand shot forward and slammed into the man’s guts.

But his third Shard finally came out. His entire body warped under the blow so violently that Nic had a moment of cold terror thinking he’d killed the man- but no, he’d simply turned himself to something pliable and soft, and as ripples flooded through his body his caved-in chest popped back out like rubber.

It was a useless power when Nic could just knock him away endlessly, but now that they were chained together?

The man was knocked off his feet and sent skidding across the ground, but managed to hold on tight. The blazing chain wound higher and higher up Nic’s arm, grasping for his body.

At the same time the woman struck again with her saber, a razor-thin ray of light arcing for his foot. It was a good choice. Nic respected that she’d avoided his throat, and aimed for the leg on which he’d put all his weight in a straight beam, making it hard to shift.

Fighting like this…

Moving at their clumsy pace made everything slow and deliberate, Nic letting dozens of opportunities pass him by. But because of that slow pace, he saw every move with cold clarity, rather than relying on hot instinct to carry his body faster than his mind could follow.

Every mistake.

Every merit.

He saw himself reflected in choices they made, even though they were far below his level. Many of the fundamentals they needed to learn, he needed to remember.

Nic smiled. He could get used to teaching.

As he released the aura anchoring his foot and threw himself forward, towards the man trying to lock him down, the mercenary pair shouted- “Now!”

The first of the mercenaries, Barnel, slapped his hands together. All the lights went out, a zone of darkness expanding like a bubble of total black from where his hands connected. The second mercenary, Raughlins, was already in motion weaving past the woman with his staff raised. With each step he was getting bigger and bigger. A secondary set of arms appeared behind him, made out of golden light.

With all four he grasped his staff and infused it with a violet flame before swinging down towards Nic.

Even in the dark, Nic could sense the blow approaching. He rolled forward, grasping the chain-wielder as he lay prone, and with a smooth motion flicked the chain binding their arms together into a loop that he swung over the man’s neck. Knee on his back, he kicked against the boards and flipped the grapple over-

Putting the man’s body, bound and unable to escape, between him and the falling staff.

There was a brutal collision. The platform shook, and in the moment of impact, someone in the dark screamed.

When the lights came on again, there was a cratered hole in the center of the floating platform. Broken planks of timber floated in the unsteady water below. The giant stood there gasping, his staff in hand, his right foot punching a smaller hole through the boards underneath him. As he shrank down to size and the violet flames on his staff dispersed, he was left waist-deep in the choppy lakewater.

And then something grabbed him from below, and he had just time to enough to scream before he vanished.

Seconds later, Nic popped up, spitting a stream of water at the back of the remaining mercenary’s head. As he clambered up, he dragged the boy in one hand and the bald man by the cuff of his collar. Despite his rubbery body, the poor baldie had been knocked unconscious by the staff blow.

Nic laid him down, hooked his arms under the man’s shoulders in a loop around the chest, and squeezed until he spat up a mass of spit, water, and algae-slime that had filled his lungs. As the man coughed and wheezed, Nic prodded the boy awake with his toes.

“Welllll…” Inkspur fluttered down onto Nic’s shoulders. “When I said ‘do something’ I didn’t mean, ‘nearly kill your teammate.’ But other than that? Good first try.”