“Okay, okay, that’s enough,” Taaznay called out, calling off the spar. Raav was absolutely seething after being beaten over a dozen times in an hour, each time without me needing to use more than a twinge of magic to help maintain my footing or heal myself. We both knew that I could easily beat her if we both went all-out, a fact which only seemed to frustrate her more.

“He’s not even trying to take this seriously,” she growled.

“Yaet, we’re going to go meet up with Vaalz now,” Taaznay said. “He’s the one you shot in the throat with the rock.”

“I remember,” I replied.

“Good, because you’re going to…” he said, flipping a coin and checking what side it landed on. “…lose the fight. I suppose we’ll start inside then, and move out if it gets too stuffy.” The words hung in the air, then Raav started to cackle, her mood completely inverting.

“Can I watch?” she asked.

“If you want to,” Taaznay replied with a smile. “I trust there isn’t a problem with this, Yaet?”

“No, but-” I began, momentarily at a loss for words. “He’s only as strong as Shayng, I’m not sure that I can make it convincing. I assume that’s what you’re looking for.”

“It is,” Zhoyl said, taking over the conversation. “I will be grading you on how the fight looks to an observer. The fighting with Raav was just to make sure that you could control yourself and wouldn’t accidentally blow our whole scam or kill someone. She’s much better qualified to survive a ‘real’ fight with you than Vaalz.” Again, I was at a loss for words. Raav wasn’t particularly strong either, even with internal force magic factored in. Her maximum output only gave her physical strength roughly equivalent to what I had without magic, perhaps a tiny bit higher.

“Wouldn’t it be better to use someone more average for the competition?” I suggested.

“Vaalz participated in the last three events,” Zhoyl revealed. “He won five of his eight fights, though one was extremely close.”

“He what?” I blurted before I could stop myself. Someone that weak has an above-average record? I thought in total disbelief. “Then, Raav-” I began, gesturing to the woman, who spoke up as soon as my eyes met hers.

“Out of the last… fifty fights I’ve had in these things I’ve lost six,” she replied with a smirk. “It’s to the point that I don’t even participate anymore because there are only a few other people in the nearby gangs that are any fun to have a match with. Can’t throw fights with weaklings either, would be too obvious from my record, hence why we’re using you to screw the betting odds.”

“I… see,” I muttered, processing the revelation. “Let’s find Vaalz then.”

Losing the fight ended up being far more of a challenge than I expected, and losing it convincingly took several more hours. Near the end of the practice we left Vaalz’s room and fought in a nearby alley, allowing a few non-gang members nearby to see the exchange before walking off.

Over the next four days of practice, I cycled between what were essentially combat-oriented acting lessons and testing out the limits of my magic. The former were simple enough in theory but required a good amount of time to gain proficiency in, while the latter ended up being quick at first but then grew massively more complicated as I began to examine the implications of what I learned. Taaznay provided the materials I needed, just as requested, and nobody came to bother me once I was done with fight practice for the day. Still, even though the lock on the door turned out to be pointless I felt better with it being there.

From what I could tell, the main change that had been made to me was an enhancement to my ability to “push” an effect to happen using my intent. It wasn’t the same thing as adding more energy to an effect, as I realized when trying to light a small fire on a piece of wood in a more “human” way than simply increasing heat until it happened: the amount of “push” I needed to use was far more than the energy required. My initial idea of how magic worked through connecting a visualization and intent with energy wasn’t entirely incorrect, but it turned out to be far from complete. A better way to phrase it would have been “concept, will, energy” but even that wasn’t really descriptive enough.

Visualization was obviously not something strictly needed for magic, as evidenced by the ability to activate it reflexively and even more by the ability of people like Vaozey to learn it. In actuality, it seemed that what was required was more of a “concept” of what was being done than a strict guideline. As best as I could figure the concept was made of two main parts with a third that came later. Part one was conscious information: visualization in my case. Directly, consciously directing whatever mechanism magic used to produce its effects was the most basic form of a concept in the magical sense. The more conscious the concept, the less “push” needed to be used, in general at least. Accuracy was also a factor, but that was where the second part came in.

The second half of the concept was “subconscious information”, or at least that was the only part that made any kind of sense. By “pushing” a little bit harder or just training and practicing, magic could be made to fetch the requisite information for an effect from outside of what was inside the brain’s immediate thoughts. This was the mechanism that enabled reflexive and combat magic to exist; Repetition and practice decreased the effort required to connect a simpler conscious concept to its subconscious information and increased the efficiency of the process. That was why my proficiency with various kinds of magic increased even though my understanding of them remained the same.

The tricky part, however, was that there was a second subconscious factor that I didn’t consider until my recent use of cooling magic in a way that shouldn’t have worked: It was somehow possible for magic to use the wielder’s understanding of a subject to manifest an effect even if the first half of the concept was poorly formed if the wielder “pushed” hard enough. This reduced efficiency massively, of course, but it was the reason I could freeze a ball of water now even though I didn’t truly know why I could. It was also, apparently, how humans used nearly all magic as far as I could tell, which revealed another fact that shocked me.

I likely had low magic capacity, as I found out. Using my normal heat magic to light a fire used so little energy that I couldn’t even detect the expenditure without my heads-up display, but doing it the way a human would do it by just thinking of a fire and “making it happen” required much more effort and at least ten times as much energy. It still wasn’t much in an absolute sense, but I felt it and I knew that if the relation between fire and force magic’s expenditures were the same for human magic as my magic I would barely even be capable of the latter after a few minutes of normal usage. With this new knowledge, the humans’ issues with learning and using magic started to make a lot more sense. It was as though both of us were trying to lift a rock, but I was given a lever or a pulley and they needed to use their bare hands.

The final part of the magical process, one that I knew about before but was now more concerned with, was something I thought of as “error correction” or “approximation”. It wasn’t as though a concept could be one hundred percent accurate to the reality of the magical process, so at some point the magic had to just be making a best effort, which affected efficiency. A few tweaks to my “human-style” fire magic confirmed this, as I brought the concept closer to the chemical process of combustion and heat discharge the magic required less power and less of a “push” to work, eventually becoming so easy that it was indistinguishable from my heat magic.

I was inclined to categorize this process as a part of the “will” section because of how it changed the requisite mental effort, but as I considered how it had to work “under the hood” I couldn’t be sure. It’s like it’s doing a database lookup, I thought, if I think of the rest of the concept like a description for the desired effect, this step would be the part where that description is used to find the actual “result”, the real instructions to create the desired effect. I knew it was just an analogy, even if magic was technological as the operator suggested it probably wasn’t so simple, but it fit well into my mental model. I even put it to the test, to decent results.

On day three, just before bed, I managed to make a laser pointer. It wasn’t strong, maybe equivalent to a few milliwatts, but the red dot on the wall across from me was something I had tried and failed to make many times. The only reason I even managed to produce it was that I could “push” an effect much harder than before, but even then it was hard to maintain, and not just because of the mental effort. The dot drained my magic fuel almost as fast as trying to levitate myself off of the floor like R’vaajh using force magic, and trying to increase the power output caused the effect to short out when all of the fuel in my hand vanished at once. And that’s even with the core exercises I’ve been doing for the past few days, I sighed. At least I could change the color and even shift it into infrared, making it not totally useless.

I couldn’t figure out why the operator would have limited my magic so much at first, considering how even making a simple laser took more power than cooking a brain, but when I used a bit of reasoning that would have been circular for a human I started to understand. Not only did having a weaker “push” ability force me to come up with much more effective and powerful magic than the human variants, the limited set of effects I could make ensured that I wouldn’t cause harm to myself by accident. Humans couldn’t make a laser pointer, the magic had to be drawing on my subconscious and doing a fair bit of its own reasoning to get it working, which meant that other things I knew about but humans had no knowledge of were also likely possible. Considering that I was also doing core manipulation by accident at times it wasn’t unreasonable to think that I might have accidentally done something like drain my whole reserves creating a gamma-ray burst and then die from self-inflicted cell damage, assuming such a thing was possible.

I hate that he was probably right, I sighed again on the night before the fight event, I did need training wheels, at least if he wasn’t going to tell me anything. I made a small magical hologram of a human run through a few boxing moves in the palm of my hand, then banished it and went to bed. Best to be rested, I thought, it’s going to be difficult to make sure everything goes well tomorrow.

“Fighters for the next round, enter the ring!” the extremely-loud announcer called out from the center of the ring, and Zhoyl gave me a look to tell me I was up. I didn’t need him to tell me though, I had memorized the schedule when we arrived.

The fight event was larger than I expected, but not terribly so, with an audience of about a hundred and twenty people in total by my estimation once the bet-takers were discounted. There was only one ring, drawn out with stakes planted in the ground and makeshift ropes tied between them, but it was around fifteen meters in diameter which allowed for a good variety of fighting tactics to be used. The first few fights had just been two men beating each other with sticks, but as they went on certain matches became more technical, with one particular engagement between two allegedly Dahmpiyahn men with homemade combat knives being the standout.

I stepped over the rope to enter the ring, looking at the people around me and noting the disapproval on most of their faces. Even members of the Yoyjhtkawjh, the gang Taaznay commanded, didn’t particularly like me even if most of them were aware of what I was up to. The lanky bald man who stepped into the ring opposite to me was from the Rehv-sihrayjh, a gang that mostly operated along the northern extremity of the wall according to Zhoyl. The name roughly translated as “Rehv’s favorites”, quite the contrast to the translation of Yoyjhtkawjh which was a slang term referring to the center of a circle.

My opponent sneered at me, then held his hand out and someone in the crowd threw him a homemade spear, which he spun after catching to demonstrate his skill. In response, I pulled out the lone kitchen knife I had been armed with from my waistband, taking a fighting stance. Both of us were shirtless and only had short-cut pants on, so there was very little chance of any other hidden weaponry. Just have to be gentle, I reminded myself, he has to score a few hits to make this look good.

“From the north, we have Laoter of the Rehv-sihrayjh,” the announcer yelled, his voice booming across the area so loudly that I wondered if he had someone magically enhanced it. “Any pre-fight statements while we’re taking bets?” I sighed, wishing we could just get on with the combat, but the gangs found taunting and posturing to be important so I had been given a couple of suggestions for statements of my own.

“Who the seyt is this doymztoyl and how’d he get lost so bad he ended up in here?” Laoter mocked loudly, drawing out laughter from the crowd.

“Well, he’s… Yaet, apparently,” the announcer said, turning to me. “Not affiliated with any gang, not surprising considering his appearance. Took a few beatings from the Yoyjhtkawjh if the rumors are right though. Anything to say?”

“It’s okay if I kill him, right?” I asked, playing up the fake Gwahlaob accent. The crowd was split between laughter and jeering, and the announcer sighed.

“It’s not disallowed, but try not to get ahead of yourself,” the announcer replied, looking confused by my confidence. As he stepped back to the edge of the ring, my opponent and I readied ourselves, standing just under two meters apart. I was told to win the first fight, but I didn’t actually have any plans to kill. The announcer counted down from six, and when he reached one my opponent made his move.

Laoter had some military training, that much was obvious from the stance and movements he used when trying to stab me with his spear. They were steady, the result of practice and muscle memory, and against an opponent who wasn’t me they probably would have been effective, striking me directly in the heart before I even knew what was happening. However, he was fighting me, so I used my knife to deflect the strike upwards just a little bit. I still let it nick my collarbone and draw blood, but it was nowhere near the fatal blow it was intended to be.

I had about five ways to knock out or otherwise disable the man in mind as soon as the spearhead went past me, but steeled myself and took none of them, instead opting to clumsily try to slash at his torso with my knife while stepping forward. To my utter shock, I managed to make contact and cut into his pectoral before he could step back and put some distance between us. It was barely more than a scratch, but we had both drawn blood, which excited the crowd.

The exchange went back and forth like that for a while, Laoter using fairly standard spear tactics while I tried to avoid his attacks narrowly or take the hits in areas that weren’t all that important, returning slashes in kind and deliberately avoiding anything that would really harm him. About three minutes into the fight Laoter was beginning to breathe heavily and I was mimicking his level of exhaustion even though I hardly felt tired at all. Both of us were red with blood from the neck down, mostly due to it mixing in with sweat that made it smear around. I can finish this now, but would it be too fast? I wondered, looking around behind Laoter’s head to gauge the crowd.

“Time to stop taking it easy on you,” Laoter growled, baring his teeth and tightening his grip on the spear. The crowd cheered and I readied myself just in case he had some kind of magic trick planned. Magic wasn’t explicitly disallowed, in fact I was sure Laoter was using internal force magic from the strength of his strikes, but it seemed most of the fighters weren’t capable of using more complex techniques in combat. Instead of something unconventional, Laoter began rapidly stabbing his spear at me, targeting a different area with each attack. For an amateur the attack might have been overwhelming, but I just suppressed a snort and stepped back out of range.

“I agree, time to be serious,” I said, reaching out and grabbing the spearhead as Laoter tried to pull it back after one of his rapid stabs. Instead of using magic to secure it, I just tightened my grip and allowed the blade to cut my hand, then yanked Laoter towards me with his weapon. Predictably, as someone with basic training, he didn’t let go of the weapon and tried to keep his grip, stumbling forward from the sudden force. While he was distracted by that, I stepped forward and shoved my knife just under his diaphragm, sinking it to the hilt, then swept his leg out from under him.

The crowd went quiet as Laoter’s back hit the ground and he finally let go of the spear, coughing and grabbing for the knife in his chest. I quickly turned his weapon around on his and held it to his throat. Laoter froze for a moment, then coughed again, reaching for the knife. In response, I stabbed him in the shoulder, making him scream out in pain.

“Surrender,” I said.

“I surrender,” Laoter gasped. “Please help me, I can’t breathe.” I blinked in surprise, my expectations thoroughly subverted, and then placed the spear on the ground and removed my knife from his chest. The crowd, who had been silent since Laoter was tripped, burst into noise. Some of it was cheering, some was booing, and a good amount seemed to come from infighting and arguments.

“Well, that’s that then!” the announcer said, stepping back into the ring. “The winner is Yaet, the method is submission! If you two would leave the ring as promptly as possible with your gear we can start setting up and taking bets for the next match!”

The second match went much like the first except my opponent was using a spiked club, or perhaps a bladed club was more accurate. Like Laoter’s spear and Raav’s macuahuitl, the weapon was produced inside the prison using the only materials available: kitchen knives and wood. The blades of about twenty knives had been driven through the wooden club, which was then bound together with fabric to keep it from breaking apart. I was also told to win the second match, so I let myself take a few hits from the weapon before breaking my opponent’s knee and stabbing him in the throat until he passed out.

According to Zhoyl’s runner that found me as I was wiping down in a nearby tub of water, I was still being too overt with my combat abilities. They had made a good amount of money betting so far, however, so they weren’t displeased. After a reminder that I would be losing the third match, the runner went off back into the crowd and I finished cleaning up. The kitchen knife I was armed with had been bent out of shape enough that it would probably break if I used it to block any heavy strike, giving me a good opportunity for my planned loss. As I watched an exchange of two more spearmen jabbing each other I flexed the knife back and forth gently, testing how much force would be needed to snap it.

“Next up, the surprisingly talented Yaet is going to be going against Shayng, of the Yoyjhtkawjh!” the announcer yelled as I entered the ring. Of course, the first fight I have to lose is to someone from Taaznay’s gang, I sighed, looking at Shayng. Spending a few days outside had made him look much more rough than he did when I first encountered him, and had it not been for the fact that he had shaved the sides and back of his hair I was sure he would have been crawling with insects. His eyes locked onto mine and he pulled out his knife, expression a strange mix of anger and fear.

“Anything to say, Yaet? Will you win a third time?” the announcer asked. And of course, he puts me on the spot like that, I grunted.

“This fight won’t go like the first two we had,” I said to Shayng directly, in case he wasn’t aware of the plan. He showed confusion for a flash, then recognition followed by a malevolent grin.

“Oh ho, confident! How about you Shayng?” the announcer prompted.

“I’ll make you suffer this time,” Shayng growled.

“That is what we like to hear!” the announcer smiled, gesturing to the crowd and getting some cheers in response. He quickly vacated the ring, then began counting down. As Shayng and I faced each other, the man leaned towards me, then hissed a few words. “Don’t even think of playing dead.”

“FIGHT!” the announcer yelled, and Shayng burst into action. I let him act as though his barrage of barely-passable underhand knife strikes were anything but a non-threat to my person, then finally stopped his last overhead strike with my nearly-broken weapon. The blade didn't snap, to my surprise, so I used a bit of force magic to keep Shayng's weapon from slipping into my hands. I expected him to withdraw, but instead his foot lashed out for my groin and I had to stop myself from catching it.

This hurts more than I remembered, I thought with a grunt as my entire body tried to recoil from the shock of the strike. The crowd cheered, though there were some boos mixed in, and Shayng grinned at me again. Is that how it’s going to be? I asked myself, returning the grin in kind. Doing what was probably the exact opposite of what Shayng expected, I pushed forward, allowing his knife to pierce me through the left of my collarbone and pulling him into a bear hug. My weapon went straight for the liver from behind, and Shayng’s breath caught in his throat from the shock of the pain.

“I’m going to lose this,” I whispered in his ear, “but Taaznay and Zhoyl didn’t tell me to lose easily. In fact, they told me quite the opposite all during practice.” I couldn’t be sure over the sound of the crowd, but I thought I heard a whimper from Shayng before I withdrew my knife.

I lost the match as planned, but not until I made Shayng endure a brutal ten-minute duel in which I gradually pretended to become exhausted while Shayng was slowly worn down to the point of near collapse. It was still tiring and I lost a fair amount of blood, but I was nowhere near my limit when I finally blocked a strike in such a way as to break my knife. Fake-gasping for air and clutching at my chest, I surrendered, and Shayng almost collapsed right in the ring from relief. Cheers abounded once the match ended and the Yoyjhtkawjh carried their fighter out, tossing him into the air jubilantly.

“Good job,” Zhoyl said quietly as I wiped myself down in one of the nearby baths. Looking around, I saw that nobody was paying much attention to us, and Zhoyl had a hood on anyway.

“I assumed you would be more upset, considering,” I replied.

“No, he was being an arrogant little shit,” Zhoyl shrugged. “If anything, that fight made us look better than I thought it would. Did you know he would last that long?”

“I just fought until he looked like he was going to collapse,” I said, and Zhoyl held out a small waterskin and a new knife for me. I took them, gulped down the water, then stashed the knife in my waistband.

“Lose the next two,” Zhoyl instructed. “Then we’re done.”

“I was supposed to win the fourth,” I reminded him.

“You’re not too tired?” Zhoyl asked. “You looked exhausted in the ring.”

“I’m fine,” I said. “A little bit fatigued but nothing close to exhausted.”

“Can you win without magic though?” Zhoyl asked.

“Depends on who I’m fighting, but assuming they’re not massively stronger than the first three, yes,” I answered.

“Awvjheyl, the man you’re fighting next, lost to Shayng in the previous event,” Zhoyl said.

“Then I’ll win, but I’ll make it look like I’m almost too tired to continue so I can lose the fifth match quickly,” I replied.

“Understood, I’ll inform Taaznay,” Zhoyl nodded. “You’ve done an excellent job so far, we’re getting your reward ready so you can claim it as soon as the event is over.”

“You’ll have food ready too, right?” I asked. “I lost a lot of blood, I’m quite hungry.”

“The food’s on us until you leave,” Zhoyl smiled. “Or, to be more accurate, it’s on the gangs we just took for a ride today. You’ve created a minor upset in the power balance with how much you’ve allowed us to rob them.”

It was only once I was getting ready for the fifth fight that I figured out what happened if one of the competitors was killed before they could complete all of their fights, or injured too badly to continue participating. My opponent, who was from a gang that was supposedly allied to the Yoyjhtkawjh, had managed to lose a hand in his previous fight. Since he didn’t know he could re-attach it with magic, and I wasn’t about to reveal that I knew how to do it, I was given the choice of fighting a different member of his gang or allowing him to automatically forfeit. Either way, there would be another round of betting, so I chose the former. After fighting a man around Aaljh’s size as a replacement and losing gracefully, I took a long and drawn-out route back to the Yoyjhtkawjh base, skipping the final two fights of the day.

There was a bit of a party going on when I got back. Plenty of food, lots of noise, and once Raav explained why I was allowed to attend everyone was quite friendly. I overheard a conversation about the old woman’s body being found, but nobody had connected it to me. Things turned into a blur pretty quickly. By the time I finished eating and Zhoyl directed me back to the new room I’d be staying in until I left, I was so tired that I just flopped onto the bed and went to sleep immediately.