Chương 83: Chapter 82: Dual Wielding

"The System does not just reward effort. It notices capability, and it decides for itself when the two have progressed enough." - Tobrin Ashe, Recorder of the First Brain's Faction Vixen had the selection trial about two thirds built in the next couple of days. She had a pitch booked for the following week, a notice drafted that Kara had read twice and edited once, and a list of nineteen second years with a physical attribute focus, assembled from sources she declined to elaborate on.

She was reading it out on the walk over to the pitch, striking names as she went, which was a process that appeared to have some Vixen-specific criteria.

"Cut. Cut. Nope. Cut."

"Did you just randomly cut four names in the last thirty seconds?" Glasses asked.

"That still leaves us with fifteen. And no, it wasn't random. And no, don't ask." Piston was already on the pitch when they reached it, standing on the blue Anchor Zone line, and there was a girl next to him. She was small, and she was bouncing very slightly on the balls of her feet. She waved at all three of them at once from forty feet away with her whole arm.

"This is Sprouts," Piston said.

"Hi! Nice to meet you. I'm Sprouts," said Sprouts, with a big goofy smile on her face. Vixen looked at Piston for a moment with her list still open in her interface.

"Okaaay," she said.

"And?"

"And I think she would make for a good Striker." Kara watched Vixen decide not to say the first thing that arrived in her mind with visible effort.

"Piston," she said, patiently.

"I have fifteen names."

"I know."

"And I have already sent out a notice."

"I know, I know, sorry about that, but just watch... This might save us a lot of trouble." Piston was entirely unbothered.

"Glasses, can you go to the blue flag, place a couple of traps and defend? Kara, can you place the four pressure locks and also defend the blue flag?" Glasses and Kara both shrugged and went along with it.

"Sprouts," Piston said.

"Run across, don't come within range of any of the locks, avoid the trap that Glasses placed to the left of the flag, take the blue flag, and bring it back here."

"Okey-dokey," said Sprouts, and went. She was fast. Almost as fast as Piston. She deftly avoided the locks, slipped under Kara's arm, making him look like he was trying to grab empty air, jumped to the right of Glasses and turned back so fast that by the time Glasses turned, she had already grabbed the flag. Then she jumped while somehow ducking at the same time to avoid Glasses' outstretched arms, ran back and handed the flag to Piston. Vixen had her mouth half-open.

"See what I mean," Piston said.

"Wow," was all that came out of Vixen.

"There is one thing though." He turned back to Sprouts.

"Okay, now take your own flag and give it to Glasses."

"Okay!" said Sprouts, and went and took the red flag off its point and ran it the full length of the pitch and handed it to Glasses, who accepted it because it was being held out to him. Nobody said anything.

"Thanks, good job," Piston said.

"You can come back over now." She came back over, breathing slightly harder than she had been but with a big smile on her face.

"So yeah," Piston said to Vixen, at a normal volume, with Sprouts standing right there.

"She is fast and agile, which means most of her attributes are in the physical side of things, if you know what I mean."

"I know," said Sprouts, nodding along.

"Uhh, yeah ok. That's fine, we can work with that. Where did you even find her?" Vixen asked, as Kara and Glasses made their way back.

"She's been brought to the Disciplinary Committee a couple of times this semester. Once because she cut through the Lifesciences pens on the way to class because it's faster, jumped through a couple of gates, got chased by the geese and one of the goats and brought them all the way to the School of IT & Space Sciences building. To Professor Scal's class." Kara, Glasses and Vixen grimaced in unison.

"That was fun!" Sprouts added. Kara looked at Vixen, who had shut her list.

"Well, Striker's the most instructed role on the field," Vixen said slowly, mostly to herself.

"The Veil tells you where to go. The Anchor tells you what's waiting. You do that at speed and you don't need to improvise."

"That's my read too," Piston agreed. Vixen looked at Kara and Glasses.

"I certainly don't want her to be an opponent as an Anchor," Glasses said. Kara nodded.

"Do you want to play?" Vixen asked her.

"Yep, sure do," Sprouts confirmed. Vixen looked at her interface.

"Fifteen names," she said.

"You can still run the trial," Kara suggested. Vixen gave him a look.

"Seriously?" The door read his interface and opened for him, and he closed and locked it the same way from the inside. This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere. The barrier came up unlit around the perimeter. The room was exactly how he remembered it - the raised platform at one end, the desk below it, the walls with their marks from whoever had been here before. Nobody had booked it, as he'd suspected.

The side room had, among other things, boards stacked against the wall, chalk in a tin, four coils of rope and a shelf of shallow bowls. It was perfect. He took a board, the chalk, a bowl and one of the coils, and set them up. Then he put the dart in his left hand and the umbrella in his right and told himself he would start with the figure of eight. He stood in the middle of the floor for a moment with both weapons hanging and looked around, even though he knew nobody else was there. He activated Fluid State.

Nothing happened immediately. He ran the figure of eight. The left wrist did what it had done in the classroom every day for a week - at about the fourth repetition, the cord came round and caught him across the knuckle, and he swore at a room built to contain far worse than that. He pinned the elbow the way Ken had told him to and let it fail properly. He then did the rest of the exercises. Kara went most evenings after the last class and spent an hour and a half, sometimes two.

He missed two evenings in six weeks and both of them were demonstrations. The left wrist came on a Tuesday in his first week. He was eleven minutes into the figure of eight with the elbow pinned and the forearm refusing to cooperate, and then he felt something change in the left wrist and the cord came round clean for the next two rotations. He ran it for forty more repetitions to see whether it would stick. It did. The right wrist was better to begin with, but it had improved too.

He could now do the figure of eight fairly consistently on each hand with both weapons, though doing them together in opposite directions was still a bit of a challenge. The other drills came at different speeds. Recovery he could do with the umbrella by the end of the second week - the canopy stopped inside one beat on a hold called at random by his own interface, which he had set to fire on intervals he could not predict. The dart refused.

It went where he had decided to send it, but stopping it in its tracks mid-air was a different question entirely, and he got it perhaps seven times in ten and never knew which three were going to fail. The bell he did not get at all until one day he did. Ken had said it would be impossible for about six weeks and then easy, with very little in between, and Kara had filed that as the kind of thing instructors said.

On the Thursday of the fifth week he struck it on the return three times in one evening, and then twice more, and he had no idea what he had done differently. He sat on the edge of the platform afterwards and looked at the bell for a while. The chalked ferrule got worse for three weeks exactly as promised. He would stand with his eyes on the mark in front of him, put the ferrule against the board behind, and turn round to find the chalk two hands from where he had been certain it was.

Then slowly, it started closing and by the fifth week the distance between the target in his mind versus where it actually hit was down to three fingers. The water bowl he started in week four and it went about as badly as he'd thought. Maybe a little worse. Sighting the target in the surface of an angled bowl meant reading an image that was reversed and he had to know exactly where he was and where he wanted the dart to go. By the end of the fifth week, he landed it occasionally.

He wasn't sure whether that was luck or talent. The SDC ran two demonstrations in those weeks and both of them went fine. Almost. In the second one, the demonstrator arrived half an hour late with a rig that needed fifteen minutes to set up. He asked them for help in setting up quickly and Tinder told him in his face, as pleasantly as she could, that he should have thought of that before arriving late.

The man laughed it off and got on with it, which Kara privately put down to the demonstrator being better natured than most. He had a quick word with her about it while the man was resting up in the backroom after the demonstration. She listened, admitted she had been wrong, and then asked whether she should say something to the man. Kara said yes. She had already turned round by the time he finished saying it. Symbiotics went better than his initial predictions had said it would.

The geese took till the third week. Waggy went for them twice on the first day of it and came off them on the second call the day after, standing in the middle of the course with his ears flat and his whole body arguing, and then coming back. A week and a half later, he did the entire course without getting distracted. That evening Kara got him a bonus munieru, on top of the ones he had been giving him every week. Waggy followed him like the most obedient child in the world the rest of the day.

Peaches moved them to the farm the following week. He was the first of the others to get there. Vixen and the two others had been on it since the start of the semester, and the ones remaining were still on the laid course with their announced distractions on flat ground, and Kara had a week of feeling reasonably good about himself before the farm sat him down. The farm did not have just four distractions. It had every distraction, all the time, arriving without warning and from directions he could not watch.

On the first session of the sixth week of the semester, Kara took Waggy out on a drawn path that started at the feed shed, ran the length of the pens, turned at the water tank and came back along the fence. He had walked it himself twice that morning. It was not a complicated route. Waggy held the first third of it properly, which he had done by the end of the previous week. He held it past the pens, which was new, past a hen that came out sideways in front of him and went back in again, which was extremely new.

Kara felt his back straightening and a small smile forming on his face. Then a cow on his left farted, a horse on his right snorted and a couple of sheep got into it in the third shed to his right. Waggy's head went round and his shoulders followed and he was in the doorway of the shed with his front half inside before Kara had got the first syllable out.

"Waggy." He came back. That was what had changed these past few weeks. He came back immediately, at a trot, with an expression of enormous innocence, and sat, and looked up, and waited to be told what a good decision that had been.

"No, don't look at me like that. You know what you just did," Kara told him. Waggy looked at him with total incomprehension and complete goodwill. They ran it three more times. Three more times Waggy held around half the route and came apart at something he had heard or seen, before coming back on the first call. It was good progress, Kara had to admit. He gave him a treat. He was crouched at the fence with a hand under Waggy's ears when the applause started.

Vixen was at the far end of the farm route with Vitaly sitting at her feet, and the rest of the class had stopped where they were. Peaches was walking toward her with Bramble following, his bristles a settled warm amber. She had taken Vitaly across the entire farm and covered the entire route with Vitaly right by her side. The first person in the class to do it.

Kara clapped along with everyone else because she had earned it, and then watched her accept it with the modest little nod she kept precisely for occasions such as this. He knew what was coming next, and it came as soon as the applause stopped and people were starting to turn away - a look aimed directly at him across the full length of the yard that contained nothing but pure and unbridled smugness. He raised his eyebrows at her. She raised hers back. He knew what had happened.

She had been stuck on the farm for four weeks, with very little progress. On the first day she and Vitaly had done a third of the course and since then, they had done a little more than half of it. He had arrived on the farm a week ago. Somewhere in that week, her intensity had gone up and she was probably putting in extra hours after the class apart from what she practised together with Kara and Glasses, and now here she was. Every time he thought he would catch up to her, she got further ahead.

He looked down at Waggy, who had found something interesting in the grass by the fence post and had entirely stopped participating in the moment.

"More to catch up," Kara sighed. The combat arts hall the next afternoon was too warm, and half the sword group had moved to the doors end to get away from the wall vents. Kara ran the figure of eight in his corner with the cord in his left hand and the umbrella in his right, both hands going in opposite directions. It was working, more or less. It had been working for about a week now. He swapped the weapons and ran it the other way, which was still the worse side, and got through it on his second try.

His interface put up a notification. He very nearly dismissed it without looking, as he tried to do the exercise again. But something about the notification was different. He opened it. Skill acquired: Dual Wielding (Uncommon) - Rookie Grants independent motor intent to each hand. Effect scales with the dissimilarity of the weapons carried.