“There are always obstacles which appear before us in life, particularly when we have the least time to deal with them. This is, occasionally, the work of some clever adversary or another, but most often I find it to simply be life itself which enjoys tormenting us at every possible opportunity.”

– Xindir Harshel Doxle of the First Flame

Say what you will about fire, it’s hard to deny that it’s an excellent motivator. One minute the hidden prison until the Academy’s stables was quiet and calm, the next smoke was pouring into the Reaving Beast Restraint Area and guards were fleeing hither and yon. 

I could have waited until they abandoned the Beast Stables but I had no idea how well our plan was going to work or for how long.

“If this goes wrong, run,” I whispered to Mellina and crept through the thick smoke to the first Beast Pen. 

Or I tried to.

There was only one small problem.

In place of an all-concealing cloud of smoke, a small area in front of the first pen had a fan blowing in front of it.

A fan of conjured spears magicked into a spoke-like formation which were twirling fast enough to push the smoke away.

Standing in the center of cleared out area a girl stood with her back to me.

“You came to inspect the Reaving Beasts before we faced them too?” Idrina said without turning around.

I tapped Mellina on the shoulder and gestured for her to step back.

Idrina was not her problem.

“Something like that,” I said, stepping forward into the clearing in the smoke.

“The smoke was Ilyan’s idea wasn’t it?” she asked, glancing over her shoulder.

“He wasn’t opposed to it,” I said.

“They’ll catch you for this,” Idrina said.

“They might,” I admitted, since she was almost certainly right at this point. “Still worth it though.”

“I didn’t think you would seek to excel at the fighting evaluation?” Idrina asked. 

We were not having a friendly chat. She was sizing me up, the same as I was her. That she was managing to do so while maintain a spell like the spear fan over our head filled me with both appreciation and a fair bit of dread.

“That’s not why I’m here,” I said. I figured the truth would be more confusing for her than anything else and a confused and questioning Idrina was an Idrina who didn’t have her whole head in the game when it came to stabbing me.

“Because you don’t think you need to understand your foes?” she asked with just the hint of insulted pride in her voice.

With the smoke in place it was more difficult to pick out olfactory cues than normal but I could swear I was catching hints of sadness from Idrina, which did not add up at all.

“Because I don’t want them to be my foes,” I said. “I don’t think we should be fighting them at all. They didn’t agree to this and they don’t deserve it.”

The fan blades slowed noticeably as Idrina tried to absorb my words. 

“And how would you accomplish that?” she asked at last. “Talk them out of it?”

“Something like that,” I said. In truth it was something exactly like that plus some spell casting that I probably shouldn’t be attempting. In my defense though, it was the Academy’s fault for giving me both a reason to attempt it and a template to build the spell around. 

“I believe I’m supposed to stop you then,” Idrina said. “Interfering with official Academy evaluations is explicitly forbidden in the by-laws.”

I can’t say I was surprised either by her knowledge of the rules and regulations, or that she’d chose to stand in support of them. Maybe a tiny bit disappointed but since there had been no rational reason to assume Idrina would do anything but oppose me here I kicked my feelings aside.

“We could do a lot of damage if we fight here,” I said which seemed like a sensible counter argument to her opposing me, except for the part where I didn’t have the time to take our fight anywhere else.

“Fists only,” she offered. “No weapons. No spells.”

I blinked and caught myself from rocking back in surprise.

“That would be acceptable to you?” I asked. Given that she had an active buzzsaw of blades hanging over our head, her offering to forego her best and most comfortable options was almost sweet.

Or the smoke was getting to me.

That was also a possibility.

“No spells and no transformations,” she amended, which was what I’d understood her to mean in the first place but it occurred to me that she probably couldn’t be sure yet exactly how my magic worked, and being specific was definitely the wiser course of action.

“What would you prefer as the end condition? Unconsciousness?” I asked.

“Or submission,” she said. “We still have the evaluations to do get to. Don’t make me damage you.”

“I can heal,” I said, not relishing the prospect at all. I could have made a similar demand of her but given our relative levels of skill that seemed like an overly prideful claim for me to make.

Idrina nodded, and settled into a loose fighting stand. “When you’re ready.”

As though I would ever be ready to fight someone who’d spent their whole life studying combat and refining themselves and their techniques.

I feinted that I was as close to ready as I was going to get and that was all it took.

Even without her magics Idrina was terrifyingly fast. She hit me with a punch in the stomach and one under the jaw before I fully processed that she was attacking me. 

I brought my arms up to protect my head from any more blows and she rabbit punched me in the ribs about a dozen times which hurt a lot more than it should have from someone her size and weight.

Where she had the advantage in speed though, I had it in durability. I’d built my body to be as sensitive as a normal body would be, but there were elements of how evolution had crafted the human form that I hadn’t been able to help tweaking with a few small improvements.

I wasn’t armored internally or anything like that. My organs were still soft and squishy and mostly where they should be. I’d made my bones just a bit stronger than they should have been and reinforced the connective tissues to not tear or snap under the strains a ligament or tendon could be reasonably expected to encounter. I’d even tinkered with my fat cells a little bit so that they provided extra cushioning and resilience.

All that worked in my favor but with Indrina hitting like her hands were made of solid iron it still wasn’t terribly fun trading blows with her.

So I stopped.

Punching her wasn’t going to get her to submit and with her training I wasn’t confident I could knock her out without cheating and hitting her hard enough to cause potentially fatal levels of damage. That left me with one obvious option though.

I grabbed her.

Punching is great, right up until the time when you can’t move your hands anymore.

This wasn’t a surprise to Idrina. “Grapple the boxer” is a move even small children are capable of working out. The moment I grabbed her hands (and that was not as easy as I’m making it sound), she went to work with her knees.

Knees hurt a lot when you know how to use them.

To my credit, I did to something useful in response to the hits I was taking.

I dropped to the ground.

And more importantly, I took her with me.

Idrina proved to be an excellent wrestler. Also she was bigger than me. Both of those things count for a lot. Even without transforming myself though, I was a lot stronger than she was and that counts for something too.

I also had something she didn’t to help me in our ground-level struggle – I knew human anatomy extremely well. How joints could move, how they shouldn’t move, fun combinations that they could move in, and, most importantly, the ability to move through arcs of motion that would damage me but shut off her ability to apply her strength against me. 

I didn’t like hurting myself, or her if I was being honest, but what I was trying to do was too important to go easy on either of us.

I heard a growl escape from her as she flexed against me and writhed, trying everything she could to escape. It was pointless. Unless my strength ran out first, I’d won at that point.

But she was not going to admit that.

Up close I could smell it.

She couldn’t admit to being beaten.

She would struggle till her heart exploded and then keep going until the blood in her veins stopped moving completely.

I twisted my hold, leveraging an arm against the sides of her neck.

Blood chokeholds are an incredibly bad idea.

They can kill far too easily.

Since it was that or let her work herself into an aneurysm though I went for it.

My plan was to release the hold in no more than two seconds whether or not it worked. If that was too short and she broke free then so be it.  I wasn’t going to kill Idrina in my fight to save the Reaving Beasts. 

As it turned out, I didn’t have to.

About a second and a half after I started to squeeze my arm against her, I managed to break her concentration. She wasn’t unconscious yet, but her hold over the fan of spear finally slipped.

Yeah. I might have forgotten to account for the fact that she was still maining a highly energetic spell.

The spears, for their part, did not forget about the momentum they’d been given. They only forgot about the forces which was holding them together.

As it turned out an exploding star of spears was extremely good at wrecking pretty much everything in their path.

The good news was the Beast cages were a whole lot easier to get into in the aftermath.

The bad news was that the backlash from the spell had succeeded in knocking Idrina out and the formerly caged Beasts weren’t particularly restrained anymore.

I turned to Mellina seeing precisely one chance to keep this from going completely to hell.

“Get her out of here,” I said.

“You need me here,” Mellina said. 

“I do. To save her. Trust me, I’ve got this,” I said, pleading that Mellina understand that I was telling the truth.

She looked at me in the growing smoke far a much longer moment than I would have preferred but ultimately nodded once and called forth a cloud of shadows to lift up Idrina and cloak them both.

That left me with, by a later count, thirteen creatures from seven different realms.

Thirteen very large and very unhappy creatures.

I could have stopped them from smashing the rest of their cages. I could have tried to preserve Imperial property like a proper Cadet, except for the fact that I couldn’t imagine any conceivable reason why I would want to do either of those things.

Instead I picked the nearest one, dropped my hands, inhaled deeply and let its scents fill me as I sunk deep into my magics.

My magics which were darker than I was used to, almost as though my dream from the night before was still lingering in the back of my mind.

From a human girl, I felt my body flow and change, taking on the shape of a spider the size of a large-ish horse.

“Weaver-Sister-Friend-Not-Foe,” I said in the hissing breaths and carefully positioned forelegs of the Archelletes (a species I had never heard of til now, but which the transformation told me so much about), “This is not our web. I see-spin-walk on strands which lead to home. Will you walk-hunt-abide in them with me?”

“This web is pain-hunger-death. I will walk-hunt-abide anywhere else you would take us Sister-Weaver-Food-Sharer,” Lilinelle the giant spider girl said.

And so I opened a rift to take her home.