Sami’s cheeks were burning. She never blushed. It was just something she didn’t do. She was cool. She had a poker face, a resting bitch face. No one ever suspected any emotion from her except those she wished to express on purpose, and those moments were rare.

  Had Mayumi seen? Please, let Mayumi not have seen. She’d never live it down. She couldn’t let Mayumi…

  What? See her vulnerable? Human?

  No wonder why she’d left. Sami had learned all the wrong lessons from her parents. She thought she’d been smarter than that. But no, she couldn’t be more of an Asian stereotype if she tried, despite her attempt at rebellion.

  Always trying so hard, always striving for absolute perfection, always seeking control, over both herself and those around her.

  Well, no point in moping about it. She just had to do better.

  She checked her surroundings, doing a quick perimeter sweep around her small camp. She’d set up under a rock that was in a lean-to formation, which gave shelter from the sun and constant wind, which blew in from the west. In the distance, she could hear some kind of gull crying.

  She wasn’t too far from the ocean now. But the question was, how would she cross it? Even if this area had trees for wood, which its sand-bsted ndscape indicated that it did not, she wasn’t exactly a shipwright. Or even a carpenter. Everett had some ability in woodworking, but not enough to make anything seaworthy.

  By their estimates, he had to be only a day away. She wasn’t exactly a Geoguesser pro, but she knew enough to be able to do some mathematical calcutions based on shadows observed from his location and her own. And while there weren’t a lot of ndmarks in this area, there was a mountain range to the northeast, and another to the south that they’d been able to use to narrow things down.

  She took a swig from her waterskin, savouring the little she allowed herself, and went to rehook it to her belt. Her fingers fumbled the simple csp, and it fell from her grip. She tried to catch it, failed, and it hit the ground, the stopper popping off as it impacted, water sloshing out onto the ground.

  Water was the only currency in this wastend, if anyone were willing to trade her, and the small amount that spilled was worth a fortune. She silently berated herself and bent down to pick it up, affixing the cap back on, and that simple action saved her life.

  Something pinged against the rock behind her. She didn’t know what it was, but she’d been forced to learn the hard way that noise in this wastend meant either danger, or food. Usually the former, but she always had to be on alert to take advantage of whichever it was.

  She left the waterskin where it y, and set herself in a crouched stance, ready to pounce, a rock on either side of her to give cover.

  She didn’t look to the source of the noise. It’d been a projectile, some part of her brain communicated to her. Which meant that the noise wasn’t the problem, it was where it unched from.

  Her eyes scanned the horizon. The sun was in full dispy. She looked for broken shapes, things that didn’t belong. Things a little too round, or too straight. Some previous attackers had come at her from stealth, and while she didn’t have Il-Su’s talents as a scout, she was still good. Throw in the added Awareness stats she’d been focusing in, and it was easy enough to spot out her quarry.

  Three figures were prone, not moving, but readying hand crossbows to fire. She’d manage to pick up one of those herself from earlier fights, but had long since wasted her bolts trying her hand at hunting. The wood they were fashioned from was weak, tending to shatter under the impact against stone. Given they were in a desert, it was a simple matter of beggars and choosers. There probably wasn’t anything better avaible.

  Well, she had a knife she could throw. Not ideal. It wouldn’t have as much range, would be slower in reaching her target, wouldn’t have the same penetrating power, and there was only the one. Still, it was better than nothing.

  She peeked over hey cover once again, but none of the figures made to loose a bolt at her, or reposition themselves for a better angle. Why wouldn’t they be doing very simple tactics?

  Easy. Because they were a distraction.

  Her brain ran through the scenarios, and before the solution fully formuted itself in her mind, she threw her dagger at a spot above her where her peripheral vision alerted her to a shadow.

  A man fell from the rock she’d been using as a shelter, colpsing in a boneless heap, dead the moment the bde took him in the eye. Lucky. Probably a younger fighter, someone who hadn’t acquired any soul crystals to empower his Tenacity, or his stat had been so low that she’d been able to hammer through it in one hit.

  Someone in the distance swore, and she heard the sound of a ropey twang as a crossbow bolt was loosed at her. It missed, having been fired in a moment of panic, and she’d barely been out of cover.

  Now, she had a choice. Get back to cover, and wait to be outfnked and then filled with bolts, or take the initiative.

  She drew her sword and ran out, crouched low and ready. Another crossbow fired as she did, and she saw it coming. Her sword swiped, cutting it in two, and then her body jerked to the side as something impacted with her shoulder.

  Her Tenacity bar depleted by half. An acceptable trade. Even hand crossbows took a moment to reload, and in that time, she was on them. The first of the three took too long to discard his crossbow and take up a new weapon. Two strikes knocked out his Tenacity shield, and a third opened his throat.

  He tried to scream. It came out as a wet gurgle. Sami tried to not let that bother her.

  Some part of her had known this game was real after her first fight. Otter and Rua’s confirmation of that fact had settled the truth about her shoulders, and instead of it being a warm cloak as she so often wished the truth to be, instead it was damnation.

  To her, martial arts were initially for meditative peace of mind. Later, they became a challenge, a physical puzzle she could solve. Every fight in Galnt Stand had been a problem to solve. It hadn’t just been recreation, or a job. It was a way to stimute her brain. It was like chess, but more intense.

  She wanted to look at this fight as another problem. But it’d been tainted. Now there was no clean solution, no perfect path to take. It all led to violence, to actual harm.

  Two men left. One redheaded, with green eyes. The other darker, skin that had known the sun and the wind. She’d been talking to enough people to get a y of the nd, and its people. The first would be a Criobani, the second Sassian.

  The majority of Sassian fighters she’d come across had been reckless, sloppy. No discipline, all banditry. From what she’d heard, Criobani were another affair. Born cavalrymen, riding flightless birds that resembled ostriches, or maybe cassowaries without the horn. Apparently they had the temperament of the tter, vicious and territorial. Fitzkim apparently had gotten mauled by one on his second day in the game after trying to pet it, and was too scared to go near another ever since.

  Too bad for the Criobani. She didn’t see any mounts to ride.

  The two circled around her, one to either side. She shifted her stance, and drew her second sword.

  The Criobani tried to move behind her, but she circled, trying to keep him in her view while focusing on the Sassian. He had a cocky expression, even if two of his allies were dead. He thought he would win.

  A possibility. Sami wasn’t so overconfident as to believe herself unbeatable. She’d learned the hard way over the years she wasn’t truly unstoppable.

  The Criobani made a strike at her, thinking her focus too firmly directed at his ally. A half-beat ter, the Sassian joined in with his own attack. She parried his, and stepped into his defense and away from the Criobani’s bde, locking their swords together and then with some good footwork, managed to set him between her and his ally.

  That should get the Criobani to ease down on his aggression and–

  He stabbed over his ally’s shoulder, clipping the man’s head briefly and damaging his shield, but getting a solid angle of attack at Sami. The bde stopped a bare scant few centimetres from her skin, stopped by her shield and sending it into the red. Another hit, and it’d be gone.

  She struck the Sassian in the gut with pommel of her sword. His shield blocked the hit, but shattered. The Criobani had been using his ally’s shield to leverage risky attacks. Logic dictated, he’d stop.

  But she wasn’t so foolish to make the same assumption twice.

  She kept both her swords locked on the Sassian’s, making him unable to disengage without forfeiting his weapon. When the Criobani moved to strike at her again, using the same avenue of attack, she shoved her shoulder into the Sassian. It wasn’t a hard hit. Not enough to even knock the breath out of him, or significantly stagger him. But it was just enough to move his neck in line with the Criobani’s sword.

  She disengaged even as the man fell down, clutching at his neck as his life’s blood spilled from him, and moved on the attack.

  A two-sword style was viable in real life, but honestly, not worth the effort of the drawbacks. You could too easily get two swords tangled up with one another, even if you were ambidextrous. Better to use a long bde and a short one, or better yet, two short bdes, to mitigate the risk. There was also the exhaustion factor. It was an effort to swing a piece of steel around in violence. It was doubly so when wielding two.

  But inside a virtual environment, where exhaustion was determined by stats, and not your body’s physical capabilities, something that was only kind of viable became the meta.

  Sami shed out in a series of strikes, coming high and low simultaneously, left and right, driving her opponent to defense. Or, that was the theory. He realized what she was doing quickly, and abandoned defense in favour of aggression of his own.

  The Criobani gdly allowed her attacks to go through, deflecting harmlessly off his shield, and stabbed at her leg. Her shield shattered, and the bde bit into her. She withdrew, managing to maintain her footing, even if her leg wobbled.

  Pain. It wasn’t a simution, she knew. If only she could trick her brain into thinking that. But no. This was the real thing, because somehow, this was her real body. Or a close enough approximation of it. The implications of that had been bothering her. Were they transported into this world via their minds, or were they physically here? What did that mean for people like Everett, who had drastically altered their appearances? Was he safely in a chair somewhere, hooked into the game, or was he physically here, and transformed into a dragon person? Would he be able to change himself back?

  She shook that thought off. Focus. Her brain had a habit of doing this when it was tired, and with poor sleep, stress from helping Rua and Otter, and now the fight, her brain was trying to flit about from thought to thought.

  For now, there was only herself and her opponent. Her two swords, and his one.

  He came at her again. His form was clean, practiced, but aggressive. She came out the better in every exchange, but her swords cshed harmlessly against his Tenacity every time, and he was happy to leverage that to his advantage. A tank build then, hoping to wear her down physically, and win the battle of attrition.

  It was a tactic she was familiar with. The best way to win was to disengage, get yourself a breather, but there’d be no such reprieve to be found here. She needed an advantage, a way to divert her enemy. Get him distracted by something, but his goal was clearly victory. He cared for nothing else. Not even his own allies.

  What could she distract him with? What kind of feint could she draw him into?

  And then she remembered her own earlier mistake just moments before, and how that’d made her react.

  She sshed at his hip, not at him. Deliberately not at him. Her bde came bare centimetres from touching him. His Tenacity didn’t activate. There was no part of him for it to defend.

  But his waterskin, sitting at his hip, was cleaved cleanly in two.

  Water sloshed along his pants. Lifesaving, necessary water.

  It didn’t matter that his allies had their own skins he could loot ter. Or that she had one. He reacted, instinctive. It’d likely been a lesson he’d learned repeatedly in the desert, to always treasure what water you had.

  And in that moment of carelessness, she disarmed him, one sword coming in and hitting low on the Criobani’s bde, the other coming in high, and then leveraging it out of his hands.

  To his credit, he tried coming at her anyway, drawing a crossbow bolt from a hip quiver and trying to stab her with it, but the fight was mostly academic at this point. She chopped the offending weapon in twain, and used her other sword to trip up her opponent’s feet. Normally such a move would damage the flesh, but with his shield, she’d have to settle for knocking him on his ass.

  He fell with a thump, and stared balefully at him. She maintained a calm demeanor, her cssic resting bitch face, but inwardly she wanted to smile.

  She pointed a sword at his chin. “Can you by any chance read, Criobani?”