It takes, of course, more than just a flying machete to kill a third-tier Mage. It even takes more than a flying machete with three more spirit machetes trailing them.

Houndmaster’s momentum is arrested as she makes the throw, feet deeply planted in the ground and body for a long moment in a dramatic frieze. Buzzsaw has, by this point, recovered from when the machetes fouled his chains, and as they’re coming back around, whirling around his body, one of the chains extends and twists into the way of the rearmost machete, knocking it off track. Houndmaster turns, plucking another machete out of thin air, and she charges into Buzzsaw’s range, trying to close the range with him and avoid the sawblades.

Eternal, in the meantime, has his hands together in front of him, and he breathes out sharply. One punch with the left hand, and he unleashes a blast of wind that sweeps across the field, catching the first machete and bringing it spinning into the shark girl’s direction. She does something that hurts my eyes, ducking somehow into shadow and avoiding the machete, but the blast of wind itself still catches her in the middle of her leap, knocking her off-course. By that time Eternal’s punched again, and a tiny shield of ethereal ice, maybe five centimeters in diameter, forms in the path of the third and last machete.

It’s just in time; the machete hits it about a quarter-meter away from Eternal’s chest, and the ice shield shatters along with the machete. His hands shake, and he’s breathing deeply, looking mostly spent, but he’s still got Motes up, and he’s still standing.

War and Joy, on the other hand, aren’t.

I hadn’t even seen them go down. War is literally pinned to a tree by a spear, presumably the spear that Node currently isn’t holding as she grapples with an enraged Flip Flop, her shield in pieces and the other woman’s gigantic sword laying off to the side. Joy is on the ground with her lower legs bound in flame that’s eating its way through her legs, still alive and still flinging waves of shadow and laying those balls of dark warped space time, and then Lord’s mantle of glass shards dips through one of the balls and takes on their dark tone and swirls towards Joy.

She’s outright gone without a trace when they swirl back.

Eternal manages a titanic blast of flame that sends the girl with the knives ragdolling into the river, but she’s still alive, and he barely seems to notice the flame sword that goes through his chest.

Moments later, when Node’s spine gives way with a sickening crack and she slumps out of Flip Flop’s pin, there are only five people left on the field. The swordswoman slams her fists together, shaking her head, and lowers her head.

The crowd goes absolutely wild as the action comes to a halt. Well, they’ve been going wild since the moment where Houndmaster and Node blasted across the river without any hesitation, but everything redoubles to the point where I can’t hear the announcer’s words, only a haze of noise. I find myself snickering as the sharky girl winces visibly, arms tensing as though she’s barely stopping herself from clapping her hands over her ears, and then my eyes catch the five corpses as they start to sort of fade and I sober up.

“Well?”

I look over at Vonne. “What happens now?” The swordswoman has taken her helmet and gauntlets off, and she’s calmly kneeling with her hands behind her back and her chin up, the sharky girl’s arms resting on her still-armored shoulders with the blades catching, and cutting, the fine hairs on Flip Flop’s neck.

“She conceded, they’re four, she’s one, they’ll take her for their fifth, this is just grandstanding until then. Did you get anything?”

Did I get anything? I hadn’t even noticed my Visor dematerializing, and I resummon it, kicking off analyses and subroutines. “Not everything,” I say by way of answer. “Only some.”

“Only some.” I can hear her amped-up frustration over the roar of the crowds. She practically jumps me, one hand on each side of my head, single tail curling around my back. “Only some! Is this what people complain about when they’re dealing with me? Spill the beans! Did it work?”

“The sharky girl, what’s her name?”

“Maestra?”

“The two Skills she used are Leap and Purge.” There’s an intense, hungry focus on her face as she sort of snaps into a silenced focus, listening to me with every bit of her attention. “I think she’s got some sort of Blade Mastery kind of thing going on, but she didn’t actually use them enough for me to tell. At least one other, passive Skill that’s about proprioception or dexterity.”

“Yes!” Vonne literally backflips off of my lap, bouncing off of her hands back onto her feet. She rushes back in to hug me, and only then does she take a deep breath and stop. It’s like she seizes her mania and opens up a drain to make it go away, and then she’s calm. “This is how you win, Adam.”

“I thought I win by overwhelming firepower and absolute bullshit, honestly.” The snark is reflexive, but it’s honest.

“You don’t get it.” She launches herself off and slaps her hands together, then puts her hands outwards. There’s a ripple of power, and the illusion of the arena tears apart, leaving the living room behind.

I flinch at it; I’d sort of forgotten that the illusion was even there, with how totally engrossing the illusion of the fight had been, and it’s a little bit like the world itself is ripping apart. I am not in fact about to see the Void Between eat my ship, I tell myself, and focus on breathing, and then the moment passes. It leaves me sitting on the couch, looking at Vonne expectantly.

“What’s the most useful thing you can know in a fight?”

“What is the move that you can make to win it?”

“That… okay,” she concedes, “but something almost as useful is what move your opponent is in the middle of making, or getting ready to make.” She stops at that, just sort of staring at me.

I connect the dots. “Rig up an illusion spell to be an ad-hoc readout for the other three. Attach it to improved versions of the functions, trained on whoever wins out of the four teams on our side of the bracket, and it’ll tell each of us what Skill they’re activating and what their passives are.” I hug her suddenly, grinning. “We were going to win anyway, because the girls are all absolutely bullshit, maybe more than I am. But this will help.” I hum to myself pensively. “Can’t rely on it, though. That’s how we lose.”

“What do you mean?”

“You can’t just focus on the abilities coming at you and counter them one at a time. You can survive like that, at least for a little while, like Eternal did.” The blast of wind was particularly impressive; he’d managed to knock the machete away and nail the shark girl with it at the same time, which meant he’d had an eye on her the whole time and deliberately positioned himself to be able to do that. “You have to have a plan for victory, a strategy that lets you actually make offensive plays faster than you run out of defensive cards. Otherwise? Dismantled, one at a time, because you’re not putting any pressure on them.”

“Huh.” Vonne doesn’t so much as speak as give a grunting chirp of thought, which is as cute as it is inhuman and weird. “That’s the difference,” she asks, “between the move that wins the fight and the move that counters your opponent, then?”

“Yeah.”

We sit in companionable silence for a while. She futzes around in the kitchen and comes out with a thin, toasted bread covered in some sort of green paste and slices of tomato; I eat mechanically, focused on code, barely remembering to thank her. There are two more fights today, and I want to finish doing as many modifications and adjustments as I can to all the various layers before those kick off; I can tell that recordings aren’t going to be useful for this, as opposed to this sort of magical live rebroadcast. The former doesn’t have the System connections and integrations, somehow; I don’t bother even trying to speculate as to why when it turns out that Vonne not only doesn’t know the answer but doesn’t know what I’m talking about.

Identifying Skills once they’ve been activated was fairly easy, on the scale of impossible things. My Visor’s recordings of the fight I just saw don’t give me any new data, but the data already present can be integrated for people I wasn’t studying. After one activation, since it was within my vision and not when I was so focused on Eternal that his viewframe blotted out the whole battlefield, I get Lord’s Shardstorm and the Steal Aspect that it harmonizes with so strongly, and the soul-resonance and System-resonance of it lets me build a sort of predictive analyzer that, on a rerun, I’ve got a pre-image of Lord that pretty accurately predicts his moves, which is cool but useless, since there’s absolutely no way I’m relying on an overdetermined machine learning model to predict the future rather than the past.

Conveniently, the point isn’t the algorithm that my work spits out. The point is the improvement of a hundred different little bits and pieces of logic that let me build the model in the first place. I refine or replace in particular every line of the code, or Visor magic as interpreted through code, which is basically the same thing anyway, that does the Omniglot interface; I’d written it in a hurry while in an altered state of consciousness, and it showed. What I have now is by comparison a beautiful and elegant machine, moving in perfect harmony with the world and no friction, but I’m pretty sure that a week from now I’ll be staring at it like it came into my house just to shit on the floor, which is just how life is sometimes.

Not the shitting on my floor, that’s not ever been a thing; the continuous improvement and always finding flaws a week after I send the change up for comment or review.

Vonne offers to test it out. I’m aware enough of the social implications of that now, thanks to Amber’s near-breakdown in bed over my previous ignorance and also thanks to how having a sufficient model of my Paladin’s soul let me literally puppet her body around, so I initially turn her down, but she offers again, pointing out that one Skill is hardly going to be that dramatic.

I can see it in my Visor, like a little progress bar or action indicator, when she uses [Synthesize]. Smirking, she hits me with something far more complex, two Skills acting in parallel boosted by a bunch of passives maybe, and my code spits out incoherent gibberish.

Progress, but there’s always more work to do.