We learned that the weapons come from the garter marks around our thighs, and depending on the sequence of runes that are called, the swords can have a solid blade like a typical long sword does, or the blade can break up into connected sections to become the whip sword.
Zeph and Ryn like the solid blades best, but the whip sword is the shit, in my opinion. Especially against opponents who are bigger than me, like the guys are. It gives me way more of a lethal reach, which I suspect will come in handy when we go head-to-head with the Avowed.
The swoosh blades I discovered while fighting Cree are from Treno’s marks. He calls them claw daggers, and that’s what he prefers to fight with. I’m getting better with those, but I have to be really close to whoever I’m using them against, and I don’t love that.
Okay, I kind of love it when I’m sparring with him, or Zeph and Ryn, but I don’t love the idea of fighting against an attacking stranger that up close and personal. I’m working on getting over that though, because having an aversion to killing someone is not a luxury I can afford here. I’ve developed a plan that I’m just going to pretend that everyone I’m fighting is Loa and hope that helps activate the rage. Then when I get my hands on Loa...she’s going to wish she’d never been born.
Pigeon delivers a steady thrum of satisfaction at the direction of my thoughts, and we both get lost for a moment as we trade ideas back and forth of all the ways we’re going to fuck Loa’s betraying ass up.
Maybe I’m not as squeamish about killing as I thought.
I look over in time to see Zeph slip from the place he was standing and reappear behind Ryn and Treno, ready to take them both out. Ryn feels it and slips away, while Treno calls on his water ability and shoves a ball of water over Zeph’s head. Zeph holds his breath and charges Treno, but Treno disappears and pops up on the other side of the clearing, where we’ve been training for the past four days.
I flick my wrist, and the water bubble over Zeph’s head bursts. He pops up behind Treno, and their blades clang against each other as they fight to gain the upper hand.
“Cheater,” Ryn whispers in my ear, slipping into existence right behind me, and then he twirls and brings his sword down in a deadly arc toward me.
A shield bursts from my arm, protecting me from Ryn’s hit, and I call on a spear from Treno’s rune on my shoulder blades and stab out at Ryn, forcing him to back up while his own shields activate and stop the whip of blades that I send at his other side.
I’m not ambidextrous in life in general, but I’ve discovered when it comes to fighting, I am. I can lead with either my right or left side and use different weapons to attack. I call it my secret sauce because it tasted so damn good when I surprised the shit out of the guys by being able to adapt like that.
Ryn is relentless in his efforts to get a hit in, and we look like Nightcrawler minus the blue smoke as we pop in and out of existence all over the place, striking, evading, attacking, and doing everything we can to take the other person out.
Zeph and Treno join in, which they’ve been doing all day…something about me needing to get used to fighting multiple attackers. I make my whip swords shift into solid blades as they close in on me, and we all become fluid motion, clangs of metal, exploding shields, and gritted teeth. I feign an opening, knowing Zeph will see it and step in to teach me a lesson. I activate my runes so I can slip through space away from them, but Zeph reaches out and grabs me by the neck to stop me.
He grins victoriously at me, which is exactly when I shove a pulse of Sentinel magic out of my center, and everyone goes flying back.
Wekun starts clapping and walking my way as the guys all get back on their feet with smiles on their faces. “That was excellent, Falon. You’re an Ouphe through and through; you’ve taken to this like a duck to water,” he observes and then blinks out of existence mid-step when someone throws a sword through the spot where he just was.
“She’s not an Ouphe,” Zeph growls at Wekun when he pops back into being a couple feet away from me.
Wekun rolls his eyes. “She’s like three-quarters Sentinel, dude,” he lobs at Zeph, annoyed.
“And we forgive her for that, but three-quarters is not Ouphe through and through...dude.”
The ball of water I was just about to chuck at Zeph’s head stops midair as I choke on a laugh instead of riding out my irritation about the “we forgive her for that” part of his comment.
Did he really just say dude?
I crack up, suddenly picturing Zeph, the king of assholes, walking around dude-ing and bro-ing people, while tossing out complex handshakes as he man-hugs strangers, and heaven forbid...smiles. I finish off my amusing little fantasy by placing him in a Hawaiian t-shirt right in the middle of the feminine products aisle at the grocery store, because that image feels like the pièce de résistance to this whole hilarious imaginary scenario.
Ryn bats my floating bubble of water away, and it ricochets off Treno’s shield and slams right back into him, bursting all over his face. I pause my chuckling for exactly two milliseconds as I take in that water dripping
