I was still reeling over how easy it had been to get testosterone a full week later when Magista, triumphant over being accepted into the Amazons, took me to a pit comp. We didn’t go alone; both Magistus and Kylie also decided to come, and Magistus took a tall, weedy guy I didn’t know called Trevor, and we got ourselves an okay spot about midway down the rings of stone seats surrounding the Pit. I promised myself that I wasn’t going to try to find out if Trevor was a friend or a partner, because I didn’t care. And if they were together, I wasn’t going to be weird about it. I was the one who’d broken things off with Magistus; if he was seeing someone else, that was his right. It shouldn’t bother me. It didn’t bother me. I was probably getting bad vibes from Trevor for completely different reasons.

The pit comp involved two teams of ten people each, called Cielo and Heartfire, handily distinguished by coloured armbands. Today, according to the schedule, they were playing Capture the Flag. Their clothing (all red, orange and yellow; perhaps higher level students had a different competition bracket?) suggested that they were expecting to be pretty active today, and as they walked into the Pit, magically constructed weapons materialised into their hands. Each player was equipped with what looked like a staff, maybe a metre and a half long, and a long cord with a pouch on it. I couldn’t tell what that was supposed to be until I saw someone drop a little ball into the pouch and take a practice shot – it was a sling.

A couple of the competitors had animals with them. Familiars, I had to assume. A boy on team Cielo had a golden retriever on a lead; a girl on team Heartfire had a snake in a little bag at her waist. Hang on, I knew her! I hadn’t seen her in athletic gear with her hair wrapped back before, but that was definitely Terry! Huh. I hadn’t known she had a snake familiar.

The team captains stepped forward and bowed to each other, and then, the Pit changed. The space the size of a small city block suddenly housed a small town. (Or, as someone from a country that had an actual sizeable population might put it, about ten blocks. But to me it looked like a small town.) Everything was the size it was supposed to be, but a lot more of it fit into the space than it should. It gave me a headache just looking at it. Like most of the audience, I pulled out my tablet and poked around with the viewing options on that. Apparently I could watch specific players so, using the age-old metric of ‘I will root for the team with a person I recognise on it’, I decided to just follow Terry.

The buildings of the town weren’t anything you’d find in Australia. I wasn’t good enough with geography to know where they were from. They were boxy stone and plaster houses, one and two story affairs, with thick stone staircases and flat roofs that people could easily walk or run on. Apart from the competitors, there didn’t seem to be any people in the town, or any signs of life; no washing on clotheslines, no rubbish or toys, even the rooms of the houses looked empty. Terry and her teammates stood on a roof at one end of the town under a pale lavender flag; off in the distance, I could just make out the navy blue of the opponents’ flag.

“Okay,” their team captain (a tall, pudgy young man with an unkempt beard) announced, “just like last Friday. Simone, you’re our bearer today?”

“Sure am, boss,” said a tiny, thin girl, immediately lowering their flag. While the captain talked, she folded it into a long strip and tied it around her waist.

“Adhira, Garrett, protect Simone at all costs. Scouts, ready for the bell. Strikers, back ‘em up. We’re going to start this semester with a clean win.”

A bell rang somewhere, and everyone was moving. Simone dropped off the edge of the roof, followed by her guards; two other team members ran full tilt for opposite sides of the roof and leapt through the air to land on neighbouring buildings. There had to be magical protections or something in the Pit because there was no way this school was sanctioning jumping between buildings like that without some kind of safety net.

Terry, along with half her team, took the stairs down to street level. She held her staff in both hands with the confidence of someone who knew how to use it and slipped an earpiece into her ear. I couldn’t make out what the person on the other end was saying, but they were talking pretty constantly.

My tablet provided me with a top-down map of the arena, marking each player’s position and the two flags. Heartfire had, as I’d seen, had given their flag to a bearer and a couple of guards, presumably trusting them to keep out of the other team’s way and defend themselves if they were found; Ciero had simply lowered theirs and abandoned it inside an apparently random building, freeing up all ten of their players to scout for opponents. I guessed they were probably banking on Heartfire not happening across the flag before Ciero could take out Heartfire’s flagbearer.

Terry jogged about a block and a half before pausing at a command in her ear, changing direction and creeping forward more stealthily. It quickly became apparent why; an opponent was at the end of the street, and he hadn’t seen her.

She shouldered her staff and drew her sling. Just as the boy started to turn, she slung a pellet at him, it hit him across the shoulder and he spun, eyes locking on her. Terry swore and ducked into the nearest building as he returned fire.

A sling needs a lot of space to use properly. Once inside, Terry put hers away and drew her staff. The building she was in was one story, without any stairs to the roof. She dashed for the back door, having to duck suddenly as she rushed past a window and a sling shot sailed through the space her head had been moments before, but then dropped to the floor and quickly crawled back to the door she’d entered through. She took off her little bag holding her snake, tucked it into a corner, and stood against the door.

Two people were converging on her location; the man she’d shot at must have alerted his team. He approached the building at a jog, his left arm – the one she’d hit with her own sling – unmoving. He clearly thought she’d fled the house, because he tried to race straight through and seemed totally surprised when her staff cracked across his face.

I nearly dropped my tablet. That blow should definitely put someone in hospital, if it didn’t outright kill them. But the staff just knocked him back a little before moving straight through him; he dropped to the floor, but seemed more surprised than anything. His dot vanished from the map and after some bewildered blinking, he got up, gave Terry a respectful nod, and dropped his armband on the floor before turning to walk out of the field, rubbing life back into his left arm.

Terry didn’t stick around. She picked up her snake and climbed out of a window and up onto the roof. The other opponent that had been converging on her location was on the ground, and she spotted him moments before he spotted her. She backed up to use the building she stood on as cover; he slipped partway behind a wall. They both readied their slings.

Both of their first shots missed completely. On a second try, Terry hit her opponent’s leg, and his knee buckled, but not before hos shot hit the arm she’d raised to protect her face. Unable to walk, her opponent vanished behind a wall; Terry hesitated for a few seconds, clearly pondering whether to press the fight, then headed in the other direction. Dropping off the roof one-handed was a little clumsy, but she managed it, and took to the street once again.

I checked the map. Both sides were down three players, with nobody near heir opponent’s flags. Since Heartfire were devoting three players to protecting their flag, this meant that they had four players actually out and about compared to Ciero’s seven, which seemed like a big disadvantage to me. Two of those players were the scouts, flitting about the rooftops searching for the flag and marking the positions of opponents, which left Terry and one other person as Heartfire’s main actual combatants. I took a quick look at all the players one by one to see how injured everyone was; the man Terry had shot on team Ciero couldn’t walk and one was down an arm, while one of Heartfire’s scouts had also lost use of an arm and Terry, of course, had lost a hand. Heartfire’s flagbearer and her guards were fine, having stayed away from as much combat as possible. Perhaps Heartfire still stood a chance?

A murmur of excitement swept through the audience, and a quick glance at the map revealed why; one of the Ciero players had found Simone. The Ciero player was dispatched quickly (it was three against one), but she must have given the location to the rest of the team, because all of team Ciero started converging on the corner of the field where Simone and her bodyguards lurked.

I nudged Magista. “So the win condition is just getting the opposition’s flag on your flagpole?”

“That, or eliminating all the opposing players,” she said. “It’s considered a foregone conclusion that you’ll get the flag if there’s nobody left to stop you. If Heartfire can pincer Ciero between the flagbearer’s group and the remaining strikers and scouts, they might be able to take them all, but I don’t think they have enough left. Look; they just lost a scout.”

The man Terry had injured had gotten himself to a good vantage point and had managed to shoot one of their scouts in the head. Ciero had five people converging on the three Heartfire members guarding the flag, and the three remaining Heartfire members probably weren’t going to be fast enough to catch up, especially since they were having to skirt around the injured slinger who’d just taken one of them out.

Simone and her guards were on the move, trying to get around the approaching Ciero members, and they might have been able to if the boy with the golden retriever familiar wasn’t still in the game. As they tried to creep around a building, the dog pricked its ears up and barked. Its owner followed its lead, chasing the fleeing Heartfire members.

“Is that allowed?” I asked Magista. “With the dog?”

“It’s his familiar,” she said.

“Yeah, but it has to be an unfair advantage, right?”

Magista rolled her eyes. “No more than being born with an athletic body type is an unfair advantage, or having a good spell in a duelling competition is an unfair advantage. People are allowed to be better at things.”

“I… suppose so?” It sounded like a pretty unfair advantage to me. What was to stop a bunch of people with good familiars from teaming together and bringing them out onto the field? The way mages thought was confusing sometimes.

The fight between the three Heartfire players guarding the flag and the five Ciero players was quick and brutal, and I had difficulty following it. Simone almost got away while her guards kept the others busy, but there were too many of them; she took a slingshot to the back while dashing across a street. Ciero had lost two players in the fight, having three left to retrieve the flag just in time to run into Heartfire’s remaining three players.

Ciero tried to split up, letting a long-legged girl snatch the flag and run for their flagpole on the opposite end of the field while the other two delayed the attackers, but they were tired from the previous fight and none of them had all their limbs. Terry kept pace with her while the others neatly dispatched each other. Now, it was a two-person race – could the Ciero flagbearer make it across the play field and clip the flag in place before Terry could take her out?

The flagbearer rand in a nearly straight line across the roofs, which seemed to me like a bad way to run from someone who had a slingshot, but I’d seen Terry miss easier shots when she wasn’t running full-tilt with a paralysed arm, so maybe it was worth the gamble. Terry fired a shot, which went over the woman’s head, then another, which hit her leg. She stumbled, turned, drew her own sling.

The two exhausted women eyed each other. Then, slowly, the Ciero player dropped her sling and unshouldered her staff instead. Terry, with a tiny nod, did the same. The Ciero player waited while Terry leapt onto her roof and approached.

“Oh, bad decision on Emilia’s part,” Magista muttered. “She’s much better with a sling than Terry. Should’ve taken the chance. That leg’s going to hold her back a lot more than Terry’s arm in a staff fight.”

“Maybe they thought a staff fight would look more awesome?” I suggested. It hadn’t been lost on me that a lot of the things the players did were more showy than practical. They didn’t really need to do so much leaping across rooftops.

“Oh, definitely. But it’s going to cost Ciero the chance at a win.”

She was right about Emilia’s leg. Terry dispatched her quickly with some fancy one-handed spinning staff moves, then raised her arms above her head while the audience erupted in cheers.

About two thirds of the audience, anyway. One third were still staring, tense, at their tablets. I glanced at the map and saw why – there was still a dot for an active Ciero player, very close to Terry. It was the guy she’d shot in the leg earlier, and coming forward to staff fight Emilia had put her directly in his line of sight. As she slung Heartfire’s flag over her shoulder, he shot her directly in the back of the head, taking her out of the game.

Now the whole audience properly erupted in cheers.

As soon as everyone was safely on the ground, the playing field dissolved, leaving the bare stone of the Pit. The teams headed off to… shower and get changed, I guess?… and my tablet helpfully informed me that Ciero had won the match and detailed me this affected the rankings of both teams and each player on the teams, which I didn’t even bother to try to understand.

“So,” I said as our little group headed back towards our dorms, “that’s what you’ve signed up for with the Amazons, huh?”

“Sort of. That was a fourth-tier mid-scope spell-free Capture the Flag comp with the old weaponset, whereas I’m more interested in single to small-scope full-spell duelling freehand or with hand weapon sets – ” as Magista’s jargon started to get more complicated, I nodded along, trying and failing to understand basically any of it. I caught the end of her explanation, several minutes later: “ – of course, I won’t qualify for that sort of thing until I get my ranking up, so I need to start those sorts of team strategy games and Capture the Flag has enough fifth-tier matches that I’ll probably have to play.”

“You’ll do great,” Trevor said. Magistus gave him a fond smile that I tried not to read too much into. Not that it mattered if it was something. Magistus was free to do whatever he wanted.

Maybe I should look into this pit comp thing. It could be fun.