We decide to work on remedying our inability to fight effectively. If we’re going to go fight the slavers, we should at least be able to fight a bit when we get there. We also have to get Mu’s magic skilled up.

We end up in a routine where we travel for half the daylight, dawn until early afternoon, and then we camp and practice combat. Our first practice attempt has me fighting Mu. It’s a disaster. Mu opens portals and effectively teleports around the field. When he’s teleported around the field, he then opens little portals to try to hit me with rocks.

I sear and move a lot faster than Mu does. When he teleports across the field, I find him, and get to him pretty fast. His range is close to 200 yards, but my sprinting pace is 200 yards in about four seconds. Heck, my walking pace gets me there in fifteen seconds. That means that he doesn’t really have time to do anything when he gets somewhere. He can open a portal, step through, close it, and then he has to open another portal, and step through that one.

Occasionally he gets two seconds free when I’m just jogging. When that happens, he opens a mini-portal and throws something at me. I always dodge, because he can’t surprise me with a portal. I sear everything near me, and he can’t throw fast enough to bother me.

We have some variations on the game, with me sticking sticks in his portal before it finishes closing, then chasing him, with his portal stuck. Then he pushes them out and finishes the close. Seeing my stick stuck in mid-air, portal mostly closed around it is funny. But then I’m stuck on one side of the portal, he’s on the other. He can’t really take the stick, or do anything with it, and I can’t do anything to him from far away. His portals will close until they hit a solid, so they don’t stay big enough for me to get through. Also, I can’t pull or pry them open. I try with sticks. I don’t try with my hands, because I don’t have Piyu here to re-attach my fingers if there’s a problem. The portals don't cut the sticks, but they won’t open to be bigger than the stick either. If I put the stick in sideways, the portal just shrinks around it. I wonder what would happen with the hole if I stuck a loop in. I think that’s a mathematical topology problem, and I don't have a good loop anyhow.

My next trick is to throw baseballs. I throw them really fast. Even my old, lame sixty mile-per-hour fastball in the old world has my eightfold speed increase applied to it, and moves at five-hundred mph. It’s really hard to even see the ball before you get hit with it. On the other hand, with different momentum rules in this dimension, it doesn’t hit any harder than it used to. It’s just hard to follow because it’s so fast, and it doesn’t really damage you just hurts.

On the third hand, my tail, my aim hasn’t gotten much better since I was missing the monkeys a couple years ago. Also, Mu is further away and even with the ball traveling eight miles a minute, that’s a full second to go the 200 yards between his portals, which means he has time to dodge. Worse, throwing while running pretty much guarantees a miss for me, and hitting a person sized-target at 200 yards is about 64 times harder than hitting the person at 25 yards, which I wasn’t too good at before. Maybe it's like 200 yard firearms while running.

The end score is that I throw my full supply of a hundred baseballs and hit him exactly zero times. After an hour of “sparring”, where no one hits anyone, or even really comes close, we call a stop to the silliness. Having demonstrated that we are both very good at escape, and very poor at attack against one another, we change up our practice to go against Danae instead. That is a different kind of disaster.

Against me, Danae is four times slower, but a much better fighter. If I run away, she can’t really catch me, except by throwing hair-loops and controlling them. It doesn’t take long to determine that if I need to, I can escape from Danae.

On the other hand, if I’m not escaping, I have very little chance to hurt her. My moving at quadruple her speed with three attacking limbs pushes her a little bit when she’s running a single two-handed lasso, but when she switches to double whip, I’m just outclassed. Her range is thirty feet from her hands, while mine is thirty inches. More than that, with her malliamancy--that’s hair-mancy--she’s super dangerous. She wields her hair like a combination of a thirty foot spear, combined with a nunchuck or something. It turns and weaves when we fight, so even blocking it is difficult. Also, her hair-magic lets her throw the hair stronger and harder, and at least one of my ten sticks now has a crack in it, because her hair is a lot stronger/harder than steel.

She doesn’t hit me that often with her hair, because my speed and ability to block with three limbs isn’t horrible. On the other hand, once a minute for the sixty minutes before I can’t stand up any more isn’t great either. I have two years of endurance training and escrima practice, and a lot of speed. She is a championship athlete who’s been playing with rope since she was knee-high to a grasshopper, and has hair magic to boost her.

I hit her twice in sixty minutes. Early on, I use a sound-bomb stun to give myself three quarters of a second to dodge around her ropes. It works once, and even then, I tap her on the side, and find that she wears a hair shirt that is like hitting rock.

We test further against my sleep magic. Again, it works once. Her absurd natural athleticism means that after the first time, when I start playing the tunes, she jukes and turns and moves about and I can’t actually keep her head getting paired beats. The final score was two to sixty two. I didn't win.

Against Danae, Mu just loses. He hits her a couple times with rocks as he opens a portal and throws a rock through, but those mostly hit her hair, which is basically impervious to anything he’s got. He has no special attacks like sound-stuns or sleep, so that doesn’t work for him. Worse, he can’t open a portal within ten yards of her, because she can throw a rope through it faster than his reaction time, and then control the rope to stay there. Then he’s stuck fighting and he doesn’t even have a good weapon. He just throws rocks. It takes him about twelve minutes to lose convincingly.

After our respective beatdowns, we take some time to figure out what solutions might make us more effective. With Mu, the solution seems to be easy. He needs a melee weapon, preferably something pokey. Given that he can make small portals, it seems that using a spear would be an optimal choice. He could make a two inch diameter portal, then stab someone through it. Only issue would be if the spear got stuck. Even then, both pushing and pulling should be options, as well as breaking it, and closing the portal.

Also, he just needs combat practice. He’s had a lot more practice running away than he has had fighting.

Figuring out what to do with me is a bit harder. Against weaker, slower enemies, my speed in and stick them moves are very powerful. Against humanoid enemies with long weapons that don’t move like snakes, again, the move seems to be get close using my superior speed, and hit them 42 times before they can react.

However, against armored enemies, or moderately fast enemies who are combat experts, I’m pretty much useless. I have my baseball bat, which is what I use when my little strikes aren’t hurting the thing. I have a knife, which I can use to stab up real close. I also have my oversized monkeybone marlinspike, but don’t know a thing about how to use it.

To save on complexity, we decide that both Mu and I will start spear practice. My marlinspike gets lashed to one long stick, and a dagger that Mu had gets lashed to another. Turns out that our girl Hairy has all sorts of utility. Then we start spear practice.