Early morning, Sunday, May 21, 2022 Aqrabuamelu compound; Flushing, Queens, New York, United States

Ella intercepted the punch with her left forearm and then pulled down hard, Adra stumbled forward and she snuck an rising elbow under his guard. He staggered back.

“That’s it.” Zaidu announced. “You should be ashamed Adrahasis. You’ve trained your whole life, and this is what I see?”

Ella ignored Zaidu, as usual, and went to check on Adra, “Are you okay?”

“Yeah… you just rung my bell a bit.” Adra shook his head and stood back up straight. “Thank you for the honor of the fight, Blessed Innana.”

Ella was suddenly struck with doubt.

“Are you going easy on me?”

Adra refused to meet her eyes.

“Zaidu, we need to talk. I can’t spar with people who aren’t going all out.”

“That won’t be a problem,” Zaidu hissed at her. He spat to the side. Ella supposed being a goddess meant that at least he didn’t almost spit on her foot three times a day.

She became more alarmed when he started wrapping his hands.

“Aren’t you going to have the same problem?”

“No. Because even if you happen to be vermin, you need to be prepared for battle. So I’ll do my best to hurt you badly instead of kill you.” Zaidu almost seemed positively cheerful at the chance to beat her up.

So much for the benefits.

Adra perked up too, “I think that might work for me as well.”

But Zaidu stopped him, “You had your chance. My turn.”

They faced off and bowed and slipped into their fighting stances. Ella kept her focus and started edging in. She usually was reactive, but Zaidu had seen all of her training, she needed to surprise him.

He darted in what Ella thought was a feint. Except it wasn’t and he hit her with her own gloved hand right into her face.

“Your hands should be tighter in unarmed combat and further out in weapons combat,” he grunted.

She edged in further. He kept his range, steeping back to take advantage of his longer arms’ length.

She flicked a quick kick at his knee when he moved in, but he tanked it, and she got pushed back.

“You may be strong, but your weight is still that of a small girl,” and to emphasize that, he stiff armed her as she was off balance, and she fell back. She turned the fall into am oblique roll, came back to her feet and instantly launched forward into a hard cross counting on him having followed her.

He had followed, but had accelerated through when she went off to the side.

Which meant her hard cross committed her to an attack behind him. She tried to adjust her strike but that left her right arm out wide which he grabbed into an armbar and used to pull her down, kneeing her hard across the ribs and sending her to the floor to gasp for breath.

“You think too much. And think you are smarter than everyone else.”

“Adra, get back in here while the human recovers. I won’t have you betray our goddess with poor combat training.”

Adra looked very reluctant but stepped forward and bowed. Ella was still on the ground gasping and literally rolled out of the way. Strange as it might be she actually missed Donna at that moment. At least there was music.

Zaidu put Adra into the ground twice in fast succession. The first time he slipped to the outside of Adra’s flick jab as if it was a fully committed punch, dropped a rabbit punch to his exposed ribs and then gave him a shove to the ground.

The second time he let Adra punch some more, and Ella, who had recovered enough to watch carefully, wondered what Zaidu was waiting for. Until he did a forearm block of Adra’s cross and pulled down to bring him off balance and put an elbow across Adra’s face. Hard.

Adra fell back and spat out some blood.

“Good sequence,” and he nodded to Ella. Which almost made her panic more if he was going to give her compliments.

Tauthe stepped in the ring. Her head was mostly recovered, she had a titanium plate where her skull had been shot through. And a pirate eyepatch over her left eye which looked badass as hell.

Ella wondered what would happen here. Tauthe’s head wasn’t fully healed so no strikes there. She was the first to carry a pure Aqrabuamelu baby ever, so no body strikes. When she had shown up at practice, Ella had wondered why nobody had said anything.

Tauthe was good. She was tough. She stood zero chance. She threw a simple one-two, and Zaidu pulled her right arm to lever her forward and swept her right leg to trip her. And then Zaidu caught her before she actually landed and eased her back up gently.

She didn’t let that stop her. She launched a low kick at his leg the moment she could, it flew hard and accurate at his right foot. Zaidu knelt forward, caught her thigh in his arms and pushed his shoulder into her hip, causing her to fall backwards, but he even made that gentle, his arms wrapping her to ease her back.

Tauthe didn’t wait, from her back she kicked directly at his lowered head forcing him to bend over to the side at the waist and catch himself on his right hand in a tripod, she kipped up and tried to kick him. He rolled forward into her other leg hard and again managed to catch her from falling which Ella couldn’t even figure out how.

“Enough. Good job, your natural aggression means that you can help prevent them from capitalizing on your visual deficit. Press hard all the time.”

Tauthe said nothing and stepped away. She was panting.

Davcina was next and she kept her distance. She and Adra were just that bit taller and lankier than Zaidu, so she kept her range, trying to avoid letting Zaidu in that critical range.

Zaidu let her play it out and eventually she misjudged a little bit and he punished her brutally with a straight cross that slipped through her guard.

The second time he let her work her range and she managed a bit longer and then he threw his first real kick of the day, a push kick that caught her in the midriff and he almost gently followed that with a finishing blow.

There was a brief pause after she stepped back and perhaps Etana’s absence was felt then.

Ixus Capital, Midtown, Manhattan, New York, United States

Ella got to Ixus just by six a.m.

She had spent the previous night thinking about a focus, a way to limit her magic conceptually. But she needed that concept to still not limit her flexibility. She was considering some sort of quantum superposition-collapse framework since that is already how she was thinking about magic. It would be very her.

But for now she was focusing on calming and controlling the turbulence of her magic.

She and Xu sat in his office looking at the digital whiteboard.

Xu drew one circle and wrote the words “Royal Magic”. The an arrow off to the side and wrote “Ekerri.”

Her crown was a lesser manifestation of Ekerri’s. So she was drawing from his well of magic with it. He had externalized his magic to avoid the exact problems that Ella was dealing with.

Next, Xu drew a jagged circle and wrote, “Tooth Magic.”. He frowned at the terrible name but left it.

Ella had identified the bear that had given her the tooth as the one in Lenape Native legend. The first tooth it had given had been powerful enough to cause fights over it. But Ella had somehow absorbed it

Xu, ever reassuring, had mentioned, “They will have to probably take your skull and maybe all of your bones, if they want that magic.”

Between the two circles Ella drew a squiggly line between them.

“It is not quite that. Basically you want to channel the magic out, but it so too turbulent to get control of. And there is so much, it all tries to go through that channel at the same time, and so blocks everything,” Xu sat down and steepled his hands, “The metaphor is imperfect.”

Ella wrote “turbulence” and “interference” between the two circles.

And then Ella got to surprise Xu. From the “Royal Magic” circle she drew a line downwards to connect to another circle. She wrote “dagger” in there.

She pulled the sheathed dagger out from under her jacket and placed it on the table between them.

Xu took a sharp look at it, looked away and then, reluctantly looked back and stared at it, “Put it away. It is very uncomfortable to look at.”

After she did, he relaxed a bit and continued, “So you have the Dagger of Veils… I haven’t seen it before. But in principle you should be able to channel its magic as well. Just don’t, not yet. You have too much going on right now anyway. You’d probably explode, and blood would stain my tapestries.”

He looked at her, “So what does it do?”

She thought about bluffing a bit but she had resolved to be honest with him, “No idea,” she admitted.

They got back to conceptualizing magic.

Ella needed to first calm the competing magics within her. Then she could work on her magical paradigm and, as a last step, create external foci to reduce the strain on her.

Before she left, Ella walked back to the whiteboard, rubbed out the word “Tooth” and replaced it. “Wild Magic” just sounded a lot better.