I was still breathing hard when I forced myself back onto my feet.
My legs felt loose and useless at first, like they belonged to somebody else and had only just remembered they were supposed to support a body. I stood there for a moment, bent slightly forward, one hand on my knee, while I tried to get my lungs to stop burning. When I finally straightened, the first thing I noticed was how open everything looked.
The field stretched out in front of me with wide patches of grass and only a few trees breaking up the space. It was calmer than the obstacle course, but that somehow made it feel more serious, not less. Under the nearest tree, laid out in a wide spread, was an arsenal of training weapons. Spears, swords, axes, daggers, clubs, even a few things I could only describe as unusual wooden practice weapons that looked like they had been chosen by someone who wanted every possible fighting style represented in one place.
Auri stood beside the tree, as she belonged there more than the ground itself.
"Pick one," she said simply. "You'll be sparring with me."
I stared at the weapons, still trying to recover my breath. "Can you go easy on me at least?"
Auri looked at me like I had told a joke. "No."
That was encouraging.
I walked over to the pile, still feeling sore all over, and looked down at the weapons with the full expectation that one of them would catch my attention. I wanted something that felt right. Something that looked strong. Something that, at the very least, didn't make me feel like I was about to lose embarrassingly in front of an audience.
My eyes passed over the spear first.
It looked too plain.
Too basic.
A stick with a pointed edge. That was really all it was, and I couldn't shake the feeling that it didn't look heroic enough for someone who was supposedly going to be a weapon for the hope of humanity and the heavens. I didn't want to step into a fight with something that made me look like I had wandered away from a fishing trip and never found my way back.
I kept looking.
The sword looked too standard. The axe looked too heavy. The staff felt too passive. One of the larger wooden blades looked like it would take both hands and a prayer just to hold properly. None of them felt like mine. None of them gave me that little spark in my chest that told me, yes, this is the one.
Then I saw the dagger.
It was only a practice dagger, wooden and unremarkable to anyone else. But my eyes lingered on it longer than the others. It was smaller, faster-looking, land ess obvious. There was something kind of cool about the idea of not using the weapon everyone expected me to use. A dagger wielder felt different. Sharp. Agile. Dangerous in a quiet way. I could imagine it. A heroic dagger user. Not flashy, but clever. Not obvious, but hard to catch.
That sounded better than trying to pretend I was built to swing something huge around.
So I picked it up.
It sat light in my hand, almost insultingly light after the last hour of exhaustion. I turned it over once, then closed my fingers around the handle and stepped back.
When I turned around, I saw Auri twirling her wooden practice scythe absently in one hand as if she had all the time in the world. She wasn't doing anything serious, just fidgeting with it the way some people tapped their foot when they were bored. The motion was smooth enough that it almost looked effortless. I had the strange thought that she'd already been waiting a while and had simply gotten bored enough to start playing with her weapon.
I frowned at her.
She noticed me looking and immediately said, "I was just stretching."
The timing was so perfect it made me wonder if she had read my mind.
I pointed the dagger at her, trying to look more confident than I felt. "I'm ready."
Auri stopped twirling the scythe and planted it on the ground with a small, steady motion. Then she gave me a lazy look and said, "Come at me when you're ready."
I studied her stance and immediately got annoyed.
It looked terrible.
At least, that was my first thought. She wasn't squared up in any dramatic way. She wasn't crouched like a predator. She wasn't even doing anything that looked especially threatening. If I had seen her from a distance, I might have thought she was barely paying attention. The posture was loose, almost casual.
But something about it felt wrong.
Not sloppy. Not careless.
Ready.
That was the word that kept coming back to me. Her body looked relaxed, but her aura felt like a blade already drawn. I couldn't tell where to strike. Every angle I considered felt like a bad one because her form gave me almost no obvious opening, but somehow I still couldn't shake the feeling that every part of her was already lined up for a response.
I hesitated.
Auri brought her hand up to her face and yawned.
"Quit being hesitant," she said around the yawn. "Time is running short."
That irritated me enough to make my decision for me.
I dashed forward.
She still looked half asleep, and I took that as my chance. I told myself she had left herself open on purpose. I told myself she was underestimating me. The distance between us closed quickly, and I angled the dagger toward her neck with the controlled confidence of someone who knew how sparring usually ended. Not a real hit. Just a clean stop. A point is placed a few inches from the right spot. Enough to say I had gotten through.
That was the plan.
Auri pivoted the scythe in the blink of an eye.
The wooden blade slapped my dagger off-line so fast I almost missed the motion entirely. One second, I was sure I had her, and the next, my weapon was knocked aside, de and my entire arm had been redirected with it. I stared for half a beat, completely thrown by how fast she'd moved.
She had been yawning a second ago.
Now she was perfectly in control.
I immediately tried to recover by circling behind her. If I couldn't get through the front, I'd force the issue from the side. My feet moved faster than my thoughts, and I cut around her shoulder with a burst of speed, keeping the dagger tight to my body. I was thinking in angles now, trying to find a gap she couldn't cover.
But Auri never looked hurried.
That was the most irritating part.
She moved with the smallest possible motions, never wasting a twitch. Her feet shifted only when they had to. Her shoulders rotated just enough. Her scythe followed her body like an extension of her balance rather than a separate weapon. Every time I committed to a direction, she had already adjusted to meet it. It was like she was building the whole fight around where I was going before I even got there.
I fought like I had to win with momentum.
She fought like she was saving energy for the exact moment I made a mistake.
I went in again, this time aiming lower. I expected her to block with the handle of the scythe, so I planned for it. I let the dagger glide under where I thought the handle would meet me, trying to slip past the block entirely. If I could undercut her guard, I could land a clean hit before she reset.
For a second, I thought it worked.
Then the blade entered her space.
And suddenly her scythe was no longer just a weapon in her hands. It became a trap.
Auri twisted the handle at the exact moment my arm came in, and the motion caught my wrist and forearm so smoothly it almost didn't feel like a counter. My attack was redirected, locked, and pinned before my brain fully understood what was happening. The awkward angle of my own arm gave her all the leverage she needed. I tried to pull back, but the position was already gone.
At first, I had thought her stance was full of openings.
Now I realized every loose angle had been bait.
Every relaxed shoulder, every lazy shift, every casual-looking motion had been a lure meant to drag me exactly where she wanted me. I had been stepping into a trap the whole time and congratulating myself for not falling for it, only to learn I had already walked straight into the center of it.
Auri didn't even look strained.
She locked my arm tighter, then swept my leg out from under me with a clean, brutal kick.
The ground rushed up.
I hit the grass hard and ended up flat on my back in front of her, the dagger knocked loose, oose and my arm pinned in a way that made my whole shoulder ache instantly. The breath left me in one ugly burst. I blinked up at the sky for a second, stunned by how fast the fight had turned.
Auri stood over me with the wooden scythe angled down and said, "You lose."
I stared at the grass for a moment, then sighed and said, "I lose."
Not my best moment.
I pushed myself into a sitting position, rubbing the back of my head as frustration started to replace the initial shock. Auri, meanwhile, had already let her posture loosen again as if she hadn't just dismantled me in a single exchange.
She scratched her head and looked at me with a very particular kind of confusion. "What was that?"
I frowned. "What was what?"
"That," she said, gesturing at me like the answer should be obvious. "You fight like an animal."
That made me blink.
Auri went on, still looking at me like I was a puzzle that had offended her. "You fight like somebody with nothing left to lose."
I didn't know what to say to that.
I looked down at the dagger in my hand, then back at her, then out across the field as if the answer might be written somewhere in the grass. I had not realized I fought that way. I hadn't really thought about fighting in any style at all. I was just trying to move fast enough not to get hit and strong enough not to die.
"I don't know," I said at last.
And that was the truth.
I really didn't know.
I didn't know why I moved like that. I didn't know why my body seemed to go straight for the throat even when I wasn't sure what I was supposed to be doing. I didn't know why the whole thing felt less like sparring and more like survival.
I just knew that when the fight started, something inside me stopped acting civilized.