“Slow down Miss Kat,” Dorrik said evenly, one of their blades flashing through the air to slap her spare dagger out of her Pseudopod’s grip. “You only have a week or so of experience with the Dancing Blade specialization. Your skill with a second knife is improving, but you shouldn’t try to force it. Right now you’re trying to pattern your attacks at the same speed you would a knife in your hand. At least for the moment, your reactions are insufficient.”

“I know,” Kat replied, stifling a sigh as she adjusted the blindfold over her eyes so that she could see Dorrik once again. “It’s just so weird to fight without using my eyes. I get that Dancing Blade is using my combat training and reflexes to simulate ‘what I would do’ if I were the one actually involved in the fight, but it feels strange. Like I’m watching grainy black and white footage of our duel on a five second delay. By the time I actually know what’s happening, the knife has already reacted without me.”

Distantly, Kat heard the cry of ocean-going birds as the ship’s deck rolled beneath her. Even without her eyes, years of training and her agility stat let her maintain her balance effortlessly.

“It is my understanding that Dancing Blade can be a difficult specialization to master,” Dorrik agreed, reaching down with one of their lower arms to pick up Kat’s discarded knife before pressing it back into the grip of her Pseudopod. “Some races, especially those that operate without their eyes or with a decentralized awareness have an advantage in picking it up, but for most beings, splitting your concentration is difficult.”

“For some time you will have to rely on the specialization itself,” they continued, taking a step back. “It will not fight with the same skill or intelligence as a trained warrior, but it will act within its limits. Once you learn to relax and trust your blade you will begin to gain the familiarity you need to properly split your focus.”

“I suppose,” Kat replied, slipping the blindfold back over her eyes. “For right now all its really good for is distracting a much weaker foe or surprising someone that I am fighting face to face with a knife in the back. Still, it's not like those are useless skills. Either one gives me a fairly powerful tactical advantage in a fight, and beyond the pittance of mana I spend on the Pseudopod, it’s not like Dancing Blade uses any of my resources.”

She let Pseudopod lift the blade into something like a ready position. A shift of Kat’s feet to help her counterbalance the constant rocking of the ship as it passed through the slightly choppy surf later, and she nodded at Dorrik.

“Again.”

The second she said the word, Kat felt Dorrik’s blade in the air. It was a strange sensation. She clearly couldn’t see the attack, but somehow she knew it was coming and reacted before the sword actually came near her.

Her knife blocked, the motion clumsy and awkward compared to Kat’s usual fluid actions, but more importantly, her Pseudopod didn’t lose its grip on the weapon. With the clear ring of metal on metal, her dagger was forced back slightly, unable to match the sheer force behind Dorrik’s strike.

“Good parry Miss Kat!” The lokkel said enthusiastically. The minute they halted their attacks, Kat lost all sense of them beyond the vague feeling that there was a ‘potential target’ in front of her. “Trust in the skill. It cannot yet handle your full strength or speed, but with time that will change. I am about to attack twice. Please be ready for both strikes.”

Before she could reply, Kat felt a rush of danger a half second after her knife jerked to the side to block a slash from Dorrik’s sword. The sudden action almost wrenched the weapon from her spell’s grip, but Kat recovered in time, slowing its movements just enough to allow the skill and magic to sync up once again.

Metal clanged against metal once again, and Kat ground her teeth together. She couldn’t see what was happening, but through the skill she could feel her dagger being pushed back. Once Dorrik’s attack had been deflected just enough, she pulled her knife back. Barely a half second later, the lokkel’s other sword slashed in from the left, once again triggering a flash of danger.

This time Kat let go, letting her instincts act on their own without pushing or trying to force them to perform a maneuver beyond their abilities. At the last second, the sense of danger coalesced into the blurry image of the lokkel’s sword just as it crossed with her dagger.

Her Pseudopod flowed backward, unable to match Dorrik strength for strength but more than sufficient to blunt and redirect their attack.

“Very Good Miss Kat!” Dorrik exulted. “One more. I think you’ve figured out how to properly use the skill, but this time I will be moving at full combat speed. Be careful.”

She blew out a breath, willing the Pseudopod to weave side to side as she waited for her skill specialization to-

There! Kat felt the spike of danger from her left, overwhelming the vague feeling of Dorrik in front of her. She willed the knife to parry the attack, biting her lower lip as it took everything in her to not try and push the weapon to move faster.

It made it, barely, intercepting the lokkel’s blade at the last second. Her knife angled itself on its own, not actually blocking the sword, but instead shunting it to the side. If Kat had been standing closer, the attack would have missed by a hair’s breadth. A near thing, but at the end of the day a wild swing and a near miss cost her the exact same amount of hit points.

“That’s enough Miss Kat,” Dorrik said contentedly. “I believe you’ve mastered the skill as much as possible in the short time allotted to us. It would be best for you to take off your blindfold and relax for a while. We should be less than a half hour out from the stallesp base. That only leaves a little time for us to get prepared for the battle. After all, we might arrive a bit early or trip an alarm on our way in.”

“I think I have another round or three in me,” Kat replied, willing her Pseudopod to move the knife back and forth in front of the lokkel. “A half hour of practice is still a half hour of me getting better. I want to be as familiar as possible with the skill specialization by the time we hit the stallesp base. I’ve been so occupied with the real world lately, I barely had any time to train.”

“No,” Dorrik replied. They stepped away from her, quieting the vague tingle of threat that Kat had been receiving through Dancing Blade. “You might have time to restore your mana and stamina before we fight the stallesp in earnest, but mental focus is a very different beast. It might not be an element quantified by the dreamscape, but there is no question that it matters. If you are not rested, you may make a mistake, and given that a handful of the stallesp appear to have evolved classes, a mistake might be fatal.”

Kat sighed, reaching up to pull off the blindfold covering her eyes. She blinked hesitantly at the light reflected off of the roiling waves, taking a second to acclimate herself to the sudden brightness before focusing on Dorrik once again.

On the deck next to them, a handful of lokkels jogged by in standardized black and gold armor, chatting cheerfully to each other en route to one of the warship’s ballistae. Nearby, Kaleek ambled over, a large metal jug of water clutched in both of his hands like a talisman against headaches and nausea.

“I think I’m going after the stallesp ship on Earth,” Kat said, struggling to force the words out. She knew that Dorrik wouldn’t improve. The big lizard wanted what was best for her, and risking her life to seize alien salvage was far from safe. That said, they only had a surface level understanding of human politics. Someone was going to grab that wreckage, and the group that did would be in the driver’s seat for human development going forward.

“Are you sure?” Dorrik asked slowly, their crest drooping slightly. “If you encounter stallesp survivors, they won’t be concerned about plausible deniability. Their warriors will likely be injured, but at least half of them will have evolved once. Worse, they will be using modern weaponry. I do not know if there is anything in your race’s tech base that can counter a pulser or a plasma shunt.”

“Someone is going to kill them and take the ship,” Kat replied with an uneasy shrug. “NeoSyne might keep the more important officers alive, but there is no question in my mind that humans are going to overwhelm the survivors with the weight of numbers. Even if thousands die, the potential to gain access to alien technology will drive every shareholder in the area wild with greed. The only question in my mind is who seizes the wreckage. Will it be a corporation I support, a rival, or the NeoSyne stallesp puppets?”

“If it's a rival,” she continued, toweling the sweat off of her face with the blindfold before tossing it to Dorrik, “that’s not the end of the world. Tri Holdings isn’t exactly friendly with GroCorp but they can be reasoned with. Likely our execs will have to cede some land and sign some favorable trade contracts with Tri, but so long as we strike a deal that makes them more money, I doubt they’d want to do something silly like take over the world. To most of the megacorporations, land is meaningless beyond a space to put a new mine or factory. All they really care about are the profits they can derive from making and selling their goods.”

“But if NeoSyne gets the ship?” Kat asked rhetorically, a grimace on her face. “That sounds like the end. They aren’t really interested in business as usual. I’ve seen what they could do with even partial stallesp tech, and it scares the crap out of me. If they can replicate the factory I’m in, or even improve on it, it’s only a matter of time before humanity becomes just another mole colony.”

“Sometimes the odds are terrible, but you have to fight anyway,” Kaleek observed, offering Kat the metal container between his paws.

She accepted it, taking a long drink from the slightly warm water before spilling a small amount of it on her face and handing it back to the waiting otter. Kat brushed the water across her face, trying to clear off the last of her sweat from the training before a quick shake of her head flicked the remaining moisture off of her skin.

“Exactly,” Kat responded, opening her eyes once more. “I think that I’ll be able to put together a group of people armed with hybrid technology from the stallesp base. I’ll have to talk to Baker, but I think they’d be interested in making NeoSyne pay. The only question then, is what do I do with the ship once I have it surrounded with power armor and hover tanks? I have some confidence fighting against human forces, but I don’t know the first thing about combating a modern stallesp force. I know from experience that pulsers can rip the armor off of basically anything I can bring to bear.”

“I’d suggest not getting shot,” Kaleek offered sagely before taking another drink from his container. The desoph looked a lot better than he had in front of the bar, but his eyes were still slightly squinted and puffy from the last vestiges of a hangover.

“That is hardly helpful,” Dorrik responded unhappily. “Miss Kat is about to enter a very dangerous situation, and she has come to us for advice. It seems more appropriate for us to try and offer her what aid we can rather than being flippant about the danger of the situation.”

“Nah,” Kaleek said, shaking his head as he emptied the metal tin of water with one last gulp. “What I meant is that Kat has an agility build. If one shot is enough to blow up heavy armor, the answer is just to ignore using heavy armor. I doubt the stallesp will have any armor of their own unless she runs into their marines, and even human weapons can kill an unarmored mole, so Kat is basically on even footing. If she hits her target first, she wins.”

“I do have a pulser,” Kat replied thoughtfully. “If there are only a couple stallesp, I don’t see why fighting them would be all that much harder than fighting humans. They might have abilities from the Tower that let them move faster or do strange things, but it’s still just a matter of seizing the initiative with magic and shooting first. That’s pretty much how I fight samurai right now.”

Dorrik sighed, pressing their face into their upper pair of hands while their lower pair crossed in front of their chest. A moment later, they picked their head back up and locked eyes with Kat.

“I can’t believe I am encouraging this foolishness,” they began, shaking their head, “but most of stallesp marines died in an attempted teleportation boarding action on my vessel months ago. They were forced to retreat before their home ship could retrieve them, and the survivors fought to the death. There will likely be survivors, but none of them should have access to military grade equipment. Just environment suits and their sidearms. If you have a pulser, that should be more than enough to defeat their defenses.”

Kat nodded as Dorrik confirmed her thoughts. Any stallesp she encountered would likely be higher level than her. Hopefully the crash had left most of them disoriented, injured, and unarmed, but that didn’t mean that they were helpless. Her iron tier abilities were noticeably more powerful than anything she’d learned at the wood tier, and that would probably be baseline for any of the aliens she encountered.

Hell, it wouldn’t be too much of a surprise if she ended up clashing with a stallesp with an evolved class and silver tier abilities. If she moved fast enough and hit hard enough, Kat could probably take a decent number of the moles so long as she hit them one at a time, but she wasn’t sure that the same could be said for the rest of her battle group.

As good as Davis was, his skillset was focused on defense, using his Tower abilities to enhance his defense while tearing enemies apart with heavy weapons. Emma was a scout and a spy. Kat was pretty sure that the girl had some sort of enhanced senses that she wasn’t open about which made her ideal for that role, but it would take months of training with her batons before she would be a serious threat to a samurai let alone a level eighteen stallesp using Consensus technology.

Whip? Kat paused for a moment trying to parse her feelings for her friend. Whippoorwill could stay out of sight in a gunfight, but Kat didn’t want her there, risking herself. Really, it was much better if Whip could provide assistance offsite, where Kat wouldn’t be distracted by the prospect of the girl getting hurt.

“If you hope to succeed,” Dorrik continued, sheathing both of their swords, “you will need to gain access to their ship’s internal computer network. Technically, my people cannot assist yours, but it seems foolish to keep our claws tied as we follow the antiquated rules that the stallesp so willingly ignore. I am friends with the lokkel that is handling our taskforce’s electronic warfare suite. She is in the process of breaking into what remains of the crashed ship’s network. Before I went to sleep, she indicated that it didn’t feel like there was anyone on the stallesp end slowing down her hacking attempt.”

“If the network isn’t actively being defended,” Kaleek interjected, “it shouldn’t be that hard for her to break in. Automated systems really can’t measure up to an intelligent being with access to modern cracking equipment.”

“Correct,” the lokkel acknowledged. “I expect her to be done by the time we wake up. Once she is, I can post a copy of the cypher on the Chrome Cowboys message board, disguised as a fan-fiction novel. That way, when you reach the stallesp vessel, you should be able to gain access to any of the systems that are still functioning. With any luck this will allow you to pick your battles, or even avoid them entirely if you are able to gain control of the ship’s internal defenses.”

“That would help a lot,” Kat replied, perking up at Dorrik’s suggestion. “I’ll need it in some sort of format that Whippoorwill can use. A pile of passcodes that can only be run from a lokkel computer is hardly helpful, but if I have access to the stallesp network, I think I’ll have a real chance at this.”

“Just remember,” Kaleek said, cradling the water jug under one of his furry arms. “As much as I enjoy encouraging people to do reckless things, your life isn’t worth this mission. Even if the humans affiliated with the stallesp win, things will be bad for a while, but there is a larger fight going on off of your planet. So long as you survive, Dorrik and I can send help for you. Just keep yourself alive.”

Dorrik simply nodded. Their crest stood on end, stiff and unmoving, a severe look on their face as they agreed with the normally jovial desoph.

“Miss Kat, please use the codes before you attack the stallesp ship.” Their voice was heavy with concern. “If there are more than a half dozen stallesp still standing, please rethink fighting them. The battlecruiser crashed down hard enough that their inertial field failed. Only a handful of the moles should have survived, but if I am wrong, you will need overwhelming force to deal with them. Please do not put yourself at risk by being a hero. Aircraft and missiles are a much better option than confronting an armed but injured stallesp warrior directly.”

Before Kat could respond, a bell began clanging from the galleon’s crow’s nest. Almost immediately, lokkel began shouting around them as they grabbed bows, spears, and nets from weapon racks en route to the front of the ship.

Dorrik cocked their head, squinting as they looked off into the glinting waves ahead of their vessel.

“Come,” they finished. “Prepare yourself while I take another draught to protect against sea-sickness. It appears that the stallesp have found us before we could surprise their base.”