We take a moment to collect ourselves, but before long we’ve changed into more practical clothes—somehow I’d managed to forget that I was dressed for a low-key assignation, not the formal visit that the event had turned out to be—and in the public eye again, making our way to the training facilities where we would meet up with Khalal.

It’s not particularly far from our quarters, but the fast way there is through the Low Roads, as Khetzi explains, walking through the crowds in the wide, wet corridor that’s apparently called the Tethan Market. The path, the Low Road proper, meanders and wanders a bit; it’s made up to look like slippery rocks haphazardly poking out of a river, the river that is the Tetha on our left and our right through the hundred meters of storefronts both underwater and on the surface. Haphazard though it looks, there’s always firm footing, even if I can’t tell how that works out, and we don’t actually have time for me to analyze the magic of it and figure out how it works.

Besides, even if we did have time, the crowds are… present, and pressing.

Down in the water, there’s a sort of eye-tearing spatial overlapping effect where my eyes can sort of cycle through superimposed, non-overlapping space that hundreds of aquatic people of visibly a dozen different ilks are traveling through. They’re traveling incredibly fast, for the most part, and in ways unrelated to how fast it looks like they should be traveling—the short, fat, stubby-wing-armed ones go fast enough that I can’t even follow their paths with my eyes, fast enough that the Visor only gives me probabilistic vectors—but there’s also congregations of them at just about every brilliant splash of color that surrounds the inset tunnels going upwards.

Those are the crowds we can only catch glimpses of. Up on the surface, it’s a surging stream of not-exclusively-humanity that we weave through with varying degrees of effort. People are peeling off to both sides every now and then, but mostly this is the kind of crowd that’s going somewhere and wants to be seen and to see people while doing it.

They give us space anyway. Not too much, but just enough that the itch in my shoulders doesn’t get bad enough to translate into the twitchy hyperawareness that made even my Motes an extension of my flinch reflex, turned now into a barrage of amplified prevengeance.

Not that I would, here, under Lily’s aegis, in the domain of Lady Sheid.

Probably.

Amber’s touch on my arm brings me out of what I realize is something of a fugue state, and I nod at her in gratitude. In appreciation, too, but the smile is from a different kind of appreciation, and maybe it’s more of a leer as her smirk widens fractionally and she tucks her arm into mine.

We’re still moving fast, and we’re still moving in the midst of a crowd of strangers, but now we’re promenading, and that makes a great deal of difference. It makes the stares bearable, because instead of them being stares at me, it’s stares at us; and frankly, I don’t know why anyone wouldn’t stare at Amber, so it’s a simple twist of thought to interpret them as a kind of reinforcement, a statement of my luck and Amber’s glory.

Past the Tethan Market, past the soft brown-grey stone facades and the jagged, angular artwork and lettering that marks the shops of the Quarry Lane Market, loop back around—without changing elevation, so there’s obviously some sort of spatial shenanigans going on—and find ourselves past the crowds and into quiet, small-by-these-standards corridors only about three meters tall and six wide. Doors dot the corridors on the left and right as we walk, placed at irregular intervals never fewer than seven meters apart and never more than seventeen, each with between three and five glowing gems in a variety of colors socketed in seemingly-random places.

Vonne explains the schema as we walk. The colors represent availability, the location on the door a sort of mapping to what kinds of facilities you can find through that door, and the nature of the gemstone is an entire treatise on the resource budget allocated to that room and what kinds of people are permitted access, and at what costs.

The room we fetch up at isn’t, by the standards of the corridor, particularly expensive, not that we’d be paying anything for it. When Khetzi touches the gem and opens the door, there’s a simple, level field of sand in a circle with a diameter of a hundred meters.

Khalal is sitting in the middle of it, legs folded under xir. Xe stands as we approach and the door closes behind us, and, with the socially-appropriate but entirely pro-forma apology and the expected brushing aside of any transgression we might have committed by lingering with Lily Sheid, we got to work.

And work it most certainly is, but it’s more than that.

I’d mentioned to Amber back in the first day of… of our having met, I suppose, that exercise wasn’t exactly my favorite pastime. I did some degree of martial arts as a way to stay in shape, because tending the body was absolutely necessary in order both to hit and to maintain the Voidsight state, but it was a chore, and it’s a chore that I hadn’t been attending to in the past few days.

The practice field pits us against a wide variety of opponents, and we fight until we die, over and over again, and I find myself grinning ear to ear as over and over again I’m the last one standing, backpedaling frantically while I throw myself to the side to avoid a sword-stroke, buying time for just one more Mote, one more spell unwoven and turned against the wielder, one more panted breath before defeat.

We start off facing a version of ourselves, just turned up a notch. Nega-Zidanya is the dire bear she no longer has access to shift into, and she crashes through our frontline even as my own shadow grows first eyes and then Motes, a barrage that has me desperately dodging and counterspelling until Khalal has to intervene to keep me alive and everyone else dies in short order. The point is driven home into me in fight after fight, until the necessary change sinks in; I’m not alone anymore, I’m not even delving with only Amber and having to handle whatever backline and flanks we’re up against while she ties up as much as she can.

I have a team, and I need to focus on doing what I’m most effective at.

On our fourth match, we take down our shadow-team and out of their shadows rise ten more people, headed by a quadruped easily twice my height at the shoulder, whose head was tipped by long, curling horns.

We manage to take down eight of them, and on our fifth match Sara figures out how to do a sort of dual-casting thing with Khalal that creates a bubble of vastly expanded space, which takes the battle-sheep out of the fight by dint of making it have to charge through three kilometers of terrain to get to us.

Our prize is a swarm of what I’m told are orcs, which turns out to be a broader word than I’d expected and includes what I’d been told were goblins. One of those gets a dagger most of the way through my spine and Amber eats a series of spells healing me and goes down hard; it’s not until the ninth match that I figure out how to use my orbs as you should dodge indicators, and at that point, with the wave of tazi that came after the orcs defeated we break for food.

Khalal is visibly astonished by how well we’re doing. Xe’s got a weird mix of deep respect and casualness for Zidanya, which I guess comes from Zidanya’s having been around the Temple for a couple millenia, but xir attitude towards Sara is nothing short of awed.

I have no idea how surprised I should be. Exhausted, I’m that, certainly; I’ve been not just sprinting around trying to dodge everything from magic to arrows and thrown knives to people swinging weapons at me for a few hours at this point, but also tracking the battlefield and picking and choosing what magic to disrupt, what spells to counter, and what targets of opportunity absolutely have to be killed, by me specifically, right now, instead of five Motes’ worth of spell counters. But I just don’t have any basis to evaluate how well or poorly we’re doing.

The others might have even less of a relationship with objective assessment, so Khalal’s astonishment is about as good a metric as I have. Zidanya’s standards were set back when she was something like an ambassador-plenipotentiary from one of the major nations of Iavshet, Amber is too utterly focused on becoming better to notice how good she is at any given point in time, and Sara considers anything short of perfect one-ness with the maximal potential of magic to be beneath her while anything unrelated to magic is unworthy of consideration.

After we eat, a meal of stew and bread that’s been filled with cheese and twice-baked and which I was almost too hungry to even taste, we start putting into words what our game plan is going to be. Khalal is our battlefield control, and between xir and Sara they negotiate a simple set of shot-calls for when xe needs Sara’s additional weight on the metaphorical lever. Sara, in the meantime, is going to cause havoc with primarily elemental magics, rotating through them rapidly to get around defensive measures and for what she calls secondary effects; a narrow beam of water can cut through steel, but conveniently, following it up with blazing heat results in the happy coincidence of flash-burning the enemy with entirely mundane steam in a move that has the potential to bypass most defenses, and so on.

While my fellow magic-wielders, and there’s an absolutely strange thought to be having so uncritically, are busy shaping the battlefield and calling down the wrath of the sky and bringing up every viciousness that grounders are terrified by out of the floor below, Amber and Zidanya are going to take their side of the fight straight up the center to wherever our enemies are. Zidanya is torn between laughing at my concern for her and wanting to brag about how absolutely her chosen shapeshift is going to stomp on the opposition, but Amber is more understanding of my nerves and worries. Understanding, even tolerant, but adamant; she waits for me to work through my nerves and my concerns in my head, mouth open to protest, and kisses me once it’s obvious I’ve accepted that I have no grounds to keep her near me where I can protect her and she can notionally protect me.

I’m terrified, on some level. We need a clean victory if I’m going to execute on my plans for a clean departure; needing to use the pylon we’re going to get as a way to bring back and re-bind in non-coercive fashion a lost party member is a looming potential catastrophe that I have plans to deal with, but they’re all suboptimal, and I don’t trust that Amber will come back the same.

I don’t say that, not in front of Zidanya. I’m not an idiot.

In the end, I kiss her back and promise, grimacing and feeling like her eyes are boring through my soul, that I won’t even prioritize her welfare over doing my job for the team. That I’ll trust her to take the hits she has to take and avoid the ones she can’t take, and focus on my job.

We have two true win conditions, Zidanya on the rampage and Sara on the warpath. The enemy will have a win condition as well, and I already know what form it’s going to take.

And I’m going to take it away from them.