Now, theoretical tests were all well and good, and so were practical ones. But tests and practice still paled to the real thing. At some point, it was time to test things live.

Frank had been embarrassed by the ironsoles. He knew what a four in an Ability was. The limit of mortal flesh. Agility four, Skating four was an Olympic figure skater medallist back home. At five, things started getting inherently supernatural, if not magical as well. That was normal here.

But he’d forgotten to apply it to her title, to the ice. And the Bones.

The Skeleton gave him a nice chance to nail him and clear the back, so Frank did. Instead of aiming for the fuck off shield, he threw the fire ball/orb? “I need to come up with proper nomenclature for my spells.” Frank threw the fire balloon behind him and forced the ugly thing into the open.

“No, that doesn’t work either. I guess I’ll stick to ball for the airburst, and shells for the balls, even if the balls are more like actual balls. They’re the ones that roll.”

At least most of the other shapes weren’t giving him problems.

Frank ran after Deli but nowhere near at her speed. As a group of Bones tried to intercept her, he peeled off and charged them. He wasn’t sure if they were blind, arrogant, or just dismissive of him, but they ignored him to go after her. Well, ignored him right up to the point where he crashed into the two of them.

“Or do they have low Reaction? Bad senses, maybe?”

Whatever the case, he crashed into them staff first. Maybe throwing himself into a tackle wasn’t the best tactical option, but it was the one most likely to actually stop them. And end them, as he landed on top of them with his full weight, his staff pressing into their bones. Multiple ribs and a leg cracked, and while both Bones clawed all over his pants and stomach?

He had Medium Armour on. Furs, not just from an animal, but a monster, and in full coverage. As Strength one and with him on Skill two in Medium Armour? They did nothing. They could not get at the straps, if it was used properly, not in the time they had.

As they started working on his belt, he slammed the staff pinning them below him several times against the floor, breaking more bones until they sparked and stilled, only to hear Deli shout a formal challenge:

“By ancient law, through Godly Oath, I offer you the Duel of Life, Wayward Soul! Vanquish me and be free! Or fall to my axe, and feed my growth. I am a daughter of the Tree of Life, and I answer the Call! Come forth, servant of Restless Death!”

“Deli, you can’t issue a formal challenge to the dead, they don’t have gods to back them up.”

“Let us play your favourite song.”

She slammed the butt of her staff against the floor, no doubt mimicking some old tale someone had told her. She really needed to learn the difference between story and– the Duelling Arena started forming.

“Deli? What?” burst out of him. “You’re kidding me! The dead have gods of their own!? Why? HOW!?”

Unfortunately his existential and scientific crisis was put on hold as two more Bones slammed into him from behind and forced him to the floor.

“Fucking heavy bag of bones, get off me!”

The claws on his back didn’t hurt, but it only took them a moment to bite down on his shoulders, and those did.

It was time for a practical demonstration.

The thing about spells? They worked through his gloves. And armour. There was no actual limit that made him fire from his hands. It was just easier, more natural, and gave him better visualisation, focus.

He had focus to spare.

Frank wrestled with them for several ticks, breaking some finger bones in the process, before his current breath ended. As the next one began, he called the fire.

“One.”

He clamped down on it, not completely, but pretty hard, hearing more Bones approach. As two more Bones seized his hands? An arc of fire burst from his back and blew all four away. The arc couldn’t do full circles, but half circles were A-OK. It didn’t quite finish them, but it got them off his back and got him space to get to his feet.

Of course, at Agility four, by the time he was on his feet, he could already hear them right behind him. He’d kept his back to them. The angle was fixed. Once held, the mana was committed. A second burst fired behind him.

It was kind of disappointing. With the cap, Armour and magic, he couldn’t look. Radically altering his body’s relative position did weird things to held magic. It was best, safest, Frank had found, to return to the same position as last time, for each firing. At least for the body part doing the firing. So palms and hands were useful for that.

He could move between them just fine, but to fire he had to take the same pose with his back. Which could be embarrassing if the first burst had been with him on the floor. It was like there was an invisible mugger holding him up, while he blasted his enemies.

Frank would have liked to watch.

With the second blast over, he turned around to see the Duelling Arena walls going up.

“Well, at least I don’t have to worry about her getting swarmed anymore. But this is the sort of thing you might have thought to mention when we were talking about this.”

He wasn’t angry. Ok, he was a little bit angry. Mostly he was disappointed. At himself and her. That they were still tripping on things that were obvious to the other, so they were never mentioned, explained. Just assumed to be known.

That was irritating, but that’s life.

Frank looked around himself. He’d really expected to get swarmed by now. It’s not like he thought at the speed of light.

“Well, I do, but that’s not what- never mind.”

More than a dozen Bones were around him. A deadly threat before he broke through to Channel two. Still something of a challenge now, but he’d expected more of them. Or to be attacked by now.

They were keeping their distance. “Right. Bones are not Shades. They can learn, remember. Probably. The Skeleton certainly can, if he’s fighting with weapons. He might know how mages work.”

And still they waited. He’d expected some of them to burst out of the loose rubble by now, like extras in a zombie movie.

Looking past them at the circle and wall, Frank noticed more coming from cover. A lot more.

“Oh. I guess I better start thinning the numbers down.”

***

“You know what’s one of the most irritating things in the world?” Frank complained to any god listening.

“Trying to chase down figure skaters on ice, while you’re wearing spiked shoes.”

He just couldn’t catch them.

Instead, every time he turned, two more Bones would come at him from the back, and tackle him, start clawing at his head. He fought them in twos and threes in the open, and it wasn’t working. His Health was steadily ticking down, and he’d lost another point of mana dealing with a particularly irritating quartet.

It was time to step it up. They thought they had a handle on his reach, judging how they were maintaining the same distance. So the next time he had a moment to breathe, Frank threw out his hand and staff to each side. They recoiled, ducking away from the perceived threat.

It gave him space to charge at one of the broken stalagmites. While most of the circle scattered, there were more of them on the other side. And they hadn’t seen him coming as he charged around it and into them. The ones that did and tried to retreat got tangled up in the ones that couldn’t see him. It let him reach all of them.

He still didn’t use mana, instead swinging his staff like a baseball player, breaking skulls and ribs left and right while they tried to untangle from each other.

Something finally gave in, in the swarm of Bones, and they piled on him, pushing his back against the stone spike. As they clumped up and pinned him against the stone, two skulls biting on his cheeks, he smiled a grim smile.

Frank freed one of his hands enough to twist it to point to the left, calling on the fire, feeling it fill him. Then he swept it right, releasing four lines of fire as he went. The lines went right through the Bones, regardless of their numbers. A spreading fan of fire that cleared enough space for him to breath as those broken by the burns collapsed. Taking a moment to look at the holes made in their ranks he judged them a 2,2,2 and 3 spellmarks at a glance.

Counting the number of burned Bones was beyond him, in the instant before they pelted him with rocks and lumps of ice.

“Ok, I don’t appreciate the new tactics.”

He charged them, which wasn’t easy without a shield, but he did it anyway. Several rocks hit his head quite painfully, even with the cap guarding it. The trouble was, they couldn’t take stances to throw effectively and run. Half did one, half the other, which meant he reached the three Bones in front mid grabbing more ammo.

Frank smashed one with his staff, and crashed into the other one with his shoulder. Armour was more than protection, it was a weapon too. The ribs on that thing would have stabbed into him unprotected. Now the cracks of them breaking against his shoulder were merely unpleasant.

“Come on! Is that all you got?” He taunted them.

And while a lot of the Bones started throwing again? More than a dozen came for him, from all sides.

Laughing with the adrenaline of the fight rising, Frank charged them back.

The first thing he lost in the scrum were his ironsoles. That was the thing with Bones. Hit and run and fighting to exhaustion. Trying to disarm their enemies and running if they saw no chance. Sneak attacks. Only reason they didn’t run from Deli was, she’d just catch them from behind and break them.

But they were also trapped down here, with him as their best chance to become Skeletons. So they came at him.

While his delay lost him the spikes, it made for a pretty fire when he released a fireball into the mass and ducked. It still caught him as well. Being burned and thrown by his own flames?

“Not great, would not like to repeat it.”

For a moment he’d been back at that damn field again. “We’re not doing that again.”

Frank was keeping his ace hidden, for now.

The main problem was, they were much better at coming to him then he was at catching them. If he wanted to deal with these numbers, he needed them to clump up. He’d already gone through something like thirty of them, with three mana. He still had five more. A Skeleton wasn’t supposed to have more than eighty Bones with him, max.

“So I’m mostly on track.”

Then his little break was over and the Bones came again.

The worst part was, they kept going for his face, and the scratches there burned. Without his ironsoles, his boots were slipping on the ice. It wasn’t everywhere, but patches of it were. As he looked around, he didn’t see another forty Bones. He saw at most twenty. So where were the rest?

They pelted him with stones again. Frank covered as best he could, looking for them. He found them on the ice hill at the entrance. They were coming down the god damn wall above it like freaking spiders.

A large group hidden in the shadows above the entrance, ready to drop down on archers, or ambush a party that advanced into the cavern. And they were landing and heading his way. He protected his face as best he could, relying on the armour to take the blows. Even thrown, the rocks were still Strength one. They weren’t that big and heavy. Most hits were only jarring, not painful. Only hits to his knees, hands, elbows and face actually hurt. That and his feet.

As the new group came in, they bunched up on that side. Hearing the bell for the Duel’s end sounding, Frank decided it was time to end this before Deli got caught up in it. Since he was hearing bells and not some dead god’s laughter, he figured she’d won. The Miasma disappearing was another clue.

Filling his voice with arrogance, he shouted “Now, you will all perish!”

He had five mana. He fed two of it into a comet and launched it into the crowd. Bones could dodge, they were fast enough for it.

A comet was practically a bullet.

There was no dodging that.

The empowered comet slammed through multiple Bones, at least a dozen of them, before blowing up and taking out another large chunk of them.

“Looking at the blast, I’d say that’s elongated. So not a circular explosion, but what, an ellipse?” Frank mused out loud, his voice irreverent, mocking.

“What do you think?” He asked the Bones with a smile.

Faced with a choice to let him keep blasting, or attack him, they attacked. He didn’t know what condition Deli would be when she got out, but anything short of dead was bad for them.

He couldn’t put three mana in a spell, so there was no reason to hold back. He put his sixth point into an arc and pressed it down, releasing it in burst that threw the Bones back and tangled them. With his back to the wall, it was remarkably effective.

The first burst caught and threw back six and they were stomped and broken by the Bones coming behind them. The second caught another seven, and Frank started laughing.

They were all coming, coming to die! He felt powerful, strong again!

The third blast fizzled out barely a spellmark from him.

Frank still couldn’t tell how much he was putting into each, or how much was left.

The wave of Bones buried him. About the only thing he managed was to hold onto his staff. That was critical to the plan.

For more than thirty Bones, it really didn’t take them long to pile on. Not that he could tell, from the bottom.

“They’re fucking heavy, piled on.”

Breathing was hard. So was moving. Even the Bones right against him were having trouble actually hurting him. Well, except the ones gnawing on his head and knee. That was really unpleasant.

He had no way to tell when they’d be done trying to kill him.

But he did know when the clock ran out.

Even buried in Bones, he heard Deli call out: “Hey Frank?” and knew his time was up.

His Health was low, but not critical. Still, he wouldn’t do this normally. Not after what the fire ball flames felt like.

“But it’s not like that, is it?”

The thing about a fireball was, it was like an arc. Stopped by the first thing it hit. It lacked the penetrative power of the comet or the line, but had the same push, the force of an explosion.

A shell? A shell burned everything in reach. It was pure fire, like the lines. He’d tested it with a tree. Magefire. Nifty thing, when it ignored common-sense limits, like physics.

Really, all that was to distract him from the shell he’d formed, at the tip of his staff. That was the trick. The Eternal Tree was a Tree of Life, as they said. It knew Life from Death.

And the fires channelled through a staff made from it?

They knew them too.

“Friend or Foe, fuckers.” he laughed, and laughed and laughed. ”Now burn.”

*

The world was fire and none of it burned him. “HahahaHAHAHAHAHA!”

He was its master.

The problem with lines and shells? They were heat, not pressure. That’s why they went right through, probably.

Frank made one little mistake though. He forgot he was still buried under several hundreds of bones. Bones that were now hot enough to scald.

A lot of them fell apart without the Bones energies to hold them together, but he was still buried under more than a hundred kilos of painfully hot remains.

Frank hissed from the awful heat pushing down on his face, and tried to move but couldn’t. It was too heavy.

“Frank!”

“Down here!”

There was a burst of noise from outside, as his already low Health kept ticking down. The sound of breaking bones followed. Then some relief from the weight on his legs. Hands roughly grabbed his feet and pulled on him so hard it hurt. He went nowhere at first. There was more noise, from above him, while Frank did his best not to distract her by screaming.

The pain was getting worse, and his Health was still draining.

The next yank on his feet was just as painful as the first. But at least it got him out of there, the bones scattering to the icy floor all around him. As soon as he was out, he pressed his face against the ice for relief.

Deli ripped him up to his feet.

“Don’t do that fool! Your face will freeze to the ice. How do you not know that?”

He didn’t care. “Water!” Frank cried out.

At Agility four speeds, a water bag was emptied on his head.

“Oh sweet, merciful relief.” He praised.

“Oh don’t be a child.” Deli admonished him. “You still have Health, right?”

Checking, Frank found that he did, in fact, still have Health.

Health = 8/42

Mana = 0

No mana, but he did have Health.

“Only eight.” He complained.

“See, you’re fine.” She told him, brushing ash off his furs. His were singed all over. Hers looked fine, apart from being crumpled in places. That and the patches of frost.

“What happened to you?” He asked, pointing it out. Deli looked down at her chest, where the biggest one was.

“Skill, or enchanted club. I’m not sure.” She shrugged, and Frank perked up. Magical loot? Now she had his full attention.

“The furs helped.” She went on, “but that Skeleton hit hard. Strength four.”

“Nasty.” Frank agreed. Looking around them, nothing was moving.

He could ask about the dead Gods thing when they were out of here. Now came his favourite parts.

Loot and progress!

Well, after the fighting itself.

“But first…” His hand landed on her shoulder, hard enough to smart.

“Congratulations. The first time is always a rush.”

One she’ll never forget. He never did.

Deli’s returning smile was blindingly brilliant. She was radiant, beautiful.

“Only thing missing is our adoring fans.” Frank said, laughing at his own joke while looking around, away.

Deli got this twinkle in her eyes that drew him back in.

“I know the kind of fans you want Frank.” She said in a low rumble. Suddenly she threw her hands around his neck and laid a solid kiss on him.

Frank froze up for a moment, before enthusiastically returning it. But before he could get carried away, she pulled back, and the twinkle in her eyes grew wicked.

“Now, I don’t think it’s fair that I’m putting all this strain on you. Leadership, training, I should pay you back somehow.” She told him, laying her hands on his chest and leaning in, her lips on his ear, her breath hot as hell.

Frank was ready to go. Hell, even with this bloody macabre environment, they could get to some clear space and have some hot, sweaty fun.

She whispered in his ear, low and seductive: “Consider this my payment and payback in one, Frank. Enjoy the Will training, my good man.”

And then she walked away.

No, she strutted away, her hips rolling side to side as she did.

Frank was painfully hard.

He was also frozen in place.

“That’s just cruel.”

Worst part was?

She wasn’t even wrong.

All he had to do was order it, and she’d be on her knees, sucking him off. Or on her back, or on all fours, or in any other position he could imagine.

In the moment, he was actually tempted.

And that made it real training.

“I fucking hate you, you know that? I hate you, and I hate this idea.” he told her flatly.

Her wicked smile dropped. “Should I stop?” Deli asked, concerned.

“Fuck. Shit. Fuck me. Except she would. I can’t even curse. Scheiße!”

He forced a smile. “We’ll talk about it.”

Because if they were doing this, if he was even going to entertain the idea of doing this, he needed to set some ground rules when he wasn’t half drunk on victory.

Her smile came back, if smaller, less wicked. More… teasing.

“That’s not a no Frank.”

Frank groaned.

“She’ll be the death of me, I just know it.”