A week. A week of constant ass kicking, three days of the group fights alone, then four more days of group fights while Abel did his best to actively distract us. That week got me seventy points, as well as seven attacks to stockpile. Thirty five wishes. The seventy points were distributed to my stats mostly evenly. Fifty to Fantasy, bringing it up to a hundred and one, and then ten each to Perception and Creation bringing them to one hundred even and one hundred and two respectively.

Knowing I could get to that point without dedicating every wish to stats, we started letting Callie make the two remaining wishes after the contractually obligated three for the Beast Lord Garden for the last two days, as well as giving her one for the third to last. The seven shadow attacks brought me to an even ten, and Callie dumped all thirty five points into Fantasy as she'd been considering bringing her to an even hundred and twenty.

It was a truly staggering windfall for us, rounding us out in multiple important ways, and we saw the benefit of almost none of it during our training. Abel refused to let us use Skills, and had made sure to engage suppression to prevent us from abusing our stats to compensate for the numbers, so while we were growing more powerful, it didn't have a pronounced effect on our combat abilities as it happened.

That wasn't to say our combat abilities didn't improve. They definitely did. Even with the suppression, our cooperation grew smoother and more intuitive as we went on. As we progressed, Abel started throwing us curve balls to distract us. Making us switch to fighting alone against half the attackers, then staggering the numbers, and at one point throwing ACTUAL curveballs at us from behind when we were mid battle to try to ruin our focus.

We reacted to all of them as seamlessly as possible, making some mistakes at the beginning, but slowly growing more comfortable slipping into our 'teamwork trance' and then back out of it. Even the curveballs weren't landing by the end of the week, Callie and I able to defend each other even from Abel's absolutely monstrous sense of spatial awareness and eye for weaknesses. He wasn't using his power to attack us or anything, but we had definitely come a long way and I was proud of our progress.

Which is why I was deeply concerned when we showed up to the Pavilion and I found not ten people, but two, standing in the circle of dirt waiting for us. Mel and Abel were standing relaxed, seemingly unconcerned with our arrival as they waved us over without looking up from a game of chess they were playing at a small table. Abel held up a finger to ask us to hold, and then continued the game, effectively ignoring us for about twenty minutes as the two of them finished up their game, not appearing to hurry at all.

When they finished, I expected them to stop, but again, I was thrown for a loop as they reset the pieces. This time though, Abel began to speak. "We've been working with you for a bit over a week now, and you've gotten much better about your awareness. Your instinctive grasp over each other's position is passing now, at least when you try. In the process of that, however, your combat styles have both changed from what they were. The version of you that fights next to your partner, and the version of you who fights BESIDE them, react to things in different ways."

He made a move, and Mel clucked her tongue in annoyance before picking up the thread of the conversation. "What my cryptic ass of a boyfriend is trying to say, in the most pretentious way possible, is that you need to relearn each others habits. You know how your partner fights, but that's changed. Proper cooperation is built with trust, and trust is built with knowledge and communication. The better you know someone, the more at ease you can feel when putting yourself in their hands."

I raised a skeptical eyebrow behind my mask. "So...you want us to play chess? I assume that's where this is going and that we aren't just here to spectate your own games? Because I don't think even you two can convince me that watching you play a board game is a viable training method for team combat." Mel glanced over at me with a chuckle, which faded into a curse as Abel made another move.

"No." She said. "You will be playing. As for the reason...well, chess has lots of correlation with real battle. It's limited and constrained enough not to be a great representation of combat, but that serves our purposes perfectly here. We WANT limited and constrained for this part. You need to build your understanding of each other back up slowly. Of course, you aren't going to be playing to a win. Beating another person is easy. Fuck, who uses an en passant anymore?" She cleared her throat as she realized she'd trailed off. "Sorry, as I was saying, easy. What we want you to do is play to a stalemate. Well, one of you. The other one will be trying for a win. That'll alternate."

That was...harder. I knew the rules for chess, my dad had taught me as a kid. He hadn't exactly been around, but he sent tasks for me to do and contacted me remotely often enough as a child. Chess was easy to play over long distances, and it fit well with his mindset. Still, she was right. Winning a chess game was MUCH easier than trying to force a draw. At least against an opponent trying to beat you. I could already see how annoying this was going to be. Still, I saw the logic at least, and I was pretty sure Callie did too.

It took about a half hour for the game to finish and when it did they stood up and gestured to us to sit down. "Ok." Said Abel. "Solomon is up first, you're going to be the one trying for a draw. Let's see how well you know Nightstrike. Pay close attention to her play style and how it compares to the way she acts in combat. Learning the way that kind of thing translates is the key to being able to predict her moves. If you can't learn to do it with something as structured as chess you have no shot in a real fight."

I sat down and started to play, going slowly and taking my time. Unsurprisingly, Abel didn't stop talking as we had our game,continuing to wax philosophical. "If it helps, this isn't just a benefit to combat. It's really good for your relationship to learn how the other person thinks. Being able to intuit your partners emotions is the key to a successful courtship." His tone was distant in a way that implied he was trying for wisdom, but it was cut off by his ear being grabbed roughly. "Ow, ow, ow Mel that hurts!"

The red masked woman was glaring down at her boyfriend. "Are you really in a position to be giving these kids relationship advice after running off on me for years? If so, maybe you can educate me too. Tell me, what kind of emotions are your intuition picking up from me right now?" The half of Abel's face exposed by the mask paled as his eyes widened like a deer in headlights. Seeing a guy that powerful cowering like that was pretty sad. I would have laughed at him for it, but I felt like Callie might get upset at me for being petty.

I very deliberately ignored the irony as I chose to focus on helping Abel out. "So, is this the last step in this hare brained training you have us doing? Because I'm anxious to get to the point where we can train with actual Skills." I was lucky I had so many points to give to Callie actually, because I would need a LOT of shadow attacks for all the training we were planning on doing. Just a shame she needed them more than the others, I really could have used some more fire attacks. I would be sure to get some from Cark before the tournament.

Abel's eyes snapped from fearful to suspicious so fast it became clear he had mostly been playing up the patheticness for Mel's amusement as he glared at me. "First of all. No rabbit jokes. You're better than that, and if your aren't, I have MUCH more intense training I can subject you to until you are." He pulled away from Mel. "Second of all. No. There's another step after this before we allow Skill use. But it's combat oriented so I'm sure you'll enjoy it quite a bit." The way he was grinning at the thought made me pretty suspicious of that prediction, but I couldn't spend too much time watching because I was busy.

The game itself ran for about an hour. Playing for a stalemate was weird. I'd learned chess with the express purpose of victory, and playing against someone to essentially make sure no one won, was a radically different mindset. Rather than playing for position, I was aiming to exchange as many pieces as possible just to free up the space to box her in. Lots of amateurs played that way even in serious games, but rapid trading was actually an incredibly stupid way to play in the early game, at least if you wanted to win.

I'd also never played chess with Callie before. Abel's nonsense turned out to be accurate again though, because when I paid attention, I COULD see similarities between Callie's play style and her fighting style, and I could somewhat reverse engineer those similarities to predict her moves. Despite how weird and absurd that had sounded, I'd neglected to remember that I was now at over a hundred Focus, meaning my brain was processing approximately a hundred times faster than even a genius mortal.

Focus was...a weird stat. It came across in the day to day as improved memory. Most of the rest of the time it wasn't really obvious how it effected you save for offsetting Perception overload. It was just a ton of raw processing power, but in the same way a scan box would have a massive processor. I didn't USE that much processing power most of the time, so it didn't have a marked impact on my daily life.

At times like this though, when I was cranking my deductive skills as hard as I could, I really drew on those reserves. It showed me more than anything how deeply stats could effect you without you noticing. There were so many aspects of stat gain that I never bothered to try to tap into, still constrained by my mortal mindset. I suspected people like Abel had a much more holistic grasp on their stats and how to make the most of every point at all times. I made a mental note to try to put some effort into that when I finally got the chance, but I knew for the moment it was just another thing on the pile.

I lost the game, and Abel made us reset. This time I was trying to win, which I did. We played back and forth for hours, constantly switching which of us would try to stall the other. By the end of the day we'd each managed at least one win, with me managing a second. Once the training was done, Abel called a stop to it and began to put away the board. As he did, he gave us both an approving nod. "Good. You learned what you needed to. I want you to keep doing that exercise nightly, one game for each of you. As for here though...well, like I said, the next step is a bit more physical. Make sure you wear your armor tomorrow." He gave us a wide grin. "It's time for me to take a...personal hand in your sparring matches."