RVR4|Chapter 7: Grinding (Patreon)

Petra -- Tertian Estate

The old vibroblades hummed. Low, down in the grips, a frequency Petra felt in her back molars when she let them drift too close to her face.

She wasn't letting them drift anywhere. Guard position, both hands, the faint ghost-flicker of the blades riding a forearm's length out from her body. The windows held the particular blue of an hour no sane person claimed. Her forearm plate sat on the bench. The burn beneath it had graduated from a line to a proper stripe, and it tugged every time she rotated her wrist.

One. Rising cut, right. Two. Pivot, bring it across the chest line, left. Three. Step back, sell the low feint, return to guard.

On four, she lunged.

Her front foot flagged the problem before her brain did. Weight leaking past center, shoulder committing half an inch more than the cut required. Chasing reach. Reaching was the mistake.

You're trying to kill them before they've decided to fight you. Don't. Be there when they get stupid. Yuki. Over noodles. Delivered like it wasn't the most infuriating advice ever given.

She reset and pulled up her sheet.

·········································LEVEL: 9CLASS: Blade DancerProgress to Level 10: 89.2%·········································

Today that number would finally move. She blinked it away and found position one again.

The door opened at twenty past five. Mikhail came in with his bag over one shoulder and the MK-IX emitter already riding his harness, undersuit zipped to the chin. He had the complexion of someone who'd trusted the vending machines in Sector 7.

"Warm up?" he asked.

"Ten minutes." She held her guard and finished the count silently.

"Yuki wants us at the doors by seven. Papers, registration, the whole bureaucratic morning." He dropped the bag by the wall and pulled a baton off the rack. Plasteel, deliberately blunt. Petra's body had a filing cabinet of bruises catalogued under that baton. "That gives me thirty minutes."

"Three losses."

He nodded once. "Touch is a loss."

Mikhail stepped onto the mat and settled, shield envelope shimmering up in a thin blue skin, baton low. Eighty kilos informing the room that his one square meter of it was non-negotiable. Petra grinned at him.

"Go."

She went low and fast at his left, and her blade cracked against the envelope and sprayed sparks across his chest. He turned his shoulder maybe four degrees and her follow-up carved the floor. The baton swept back short and flat at her ribs; she ducked under it, pivoted on her left toe, and tapped his shoulder through the shield. "One."

"You handed me the high line." He rolled the shoulder out and reset his feet.

"I was testing the pivot. You lean when you swing. Too hard."

She pushed the second exchange. Feint high, watch his eyes travel with it, drop and sweep at the lead knee. He stepped into her blade instead of away, ate it on the envelope, and his mass simply walked her back two squeaking steps. She rode the rebound around his guard and touched his hip. "Two."

"Sloppy on the break." He walked back to his mark. "In a corridor, that ends with you in the wall."

"We're not in a corridor."

"We will be," he said, and stopped himself there, and adjusted his suit. "Third."

This time she committed. Three quick jabs into the shield, left, right, left, spreading the envelope thin, and on the fourth she put her shoulder behind the right side and drove for the soft spot that always opened under his arm when the field got overworked.

There was no soft spot.

The envelope gathered, dense and instant, exactly where her blade was headed. A blue disc the size of her palm. Shock jumped into her elbow and the weapon left her hand. The disc flashed amber; the blade clattered across the floor. Her follow-through, suddenly unemployed, carried her three paces out. She stood there shaking out a stinging wrist and staring at his shield.

Mikhail grinned.

Petra circled her wrist slowly. "What in the Founders' fuck was that?"

He shrugged. "Tess doing Tess things."

"I watched her work on it. Nobody told me it was going to do that."

"It picks its moment." He thumbed the shield and glanced at the casing she'd watched Tess reseat with her own eyes. "That kind of upgrade at the higher levels is going to be crazy."

"It felt like hitting a wall. An actual wall." She shook her arm out and retrieved her sword.

The curve of his lip caught her eye. "Felt fine from here," he said.

Her eyes narrowed. "You don't have to enjoy it quite that much. I could have you fired, you know."

"I would genuinely like to watch you try." He thumbed the shield again and clicked it off.

"If you two are done canoodling," Yuki said from the archway, "the clerk opens at seven and I want us bored in his line before seven."

She had a mug in one hand and a biscuit in the other, leathers on, harness cinched, hair pinned for the day. Neither of them had heard a single footstep down the hall.

"Asha's making breakfast, if anyone's interested," she added.

"Pass," they said together.

Yuki shook her head and drifted to the edge of the mat, studying the scuff marks where Petra's heels had skated. Petra reset to guard. The next two passes came out faster, and she hated knowing exactly why.

"You don't need to be fastest," Yuki said. "It's timing. Not speed."

Petra sheathed the vibroblades and gave her a bow of pure theater. "Yes, thank you, Shifu."

Yuki snorted. "I'll be here all week. Literally. I'm sure your mother has meetings planned."

Mikhail checked the wall clock, grabbed his bag, and tipped his chin at Petra on the way past. Yuki drained the mug and followed him out.

"Two days," she said. "Then we all go in together."

Petra sighed into a stretch. "See you two soon. Try not to have too much fun without me."

"Don't worry, Petra." Yuki made it sound almost idle. "I'll keep him safe."

Petra levelled her very best stare at her. Yuki was gone up the hallway.

Asha came for her that afternoon.

She said nothing the whole way down to the staging area. Kit slung, one of Yuki's sidearms riding low on her hip, eyes at half-mast, a woman who had made this walk a thousand times in a previous life.

"Rules," she said, as the doors opened onto Floor 2's yellow light. "I hang back. You work. Small batches of drones, so nobody comes home leaking, yeah?"

"Got it."

The air down here was thicker and tasted faintly of metal, and the walls grew ribs. Cici had gone ahead an hour before, and her report was still sitting fresh in Petra's ear. Two wild units working the collapsed gallery past the second junction. Patrol lanes quiet. I have routed myself somewhere dignified.

The first contact went the way the last several had. Two drones peeled off the gallery ceiling in a shallow arc, and Petra moved to meet them. The gallery floor was crystal, and her boots skated on it the way her heels had skated on the mat. She got the first one anyway, both blades scissoring through its repulsor ring in a shriek of ceramic, and ate a plasma scorch across the shoulder plate from the second. Asha's pistol barked twice behind her, unhurried as rain, and the second drone came down in pieces.

Asha holstered, shrugged, and produced a solvent wipe for the armor.

Twenty minutes later, at the mouth of a wide antechamber, Petra picked her ground before anything else. A doorway with a lip of genuine ferrocrete, rear heel set against it. Three drones this time, wild ones, ragged in their spacing where the TK-11's units flew like a drill team. She let them commit. The first overshot the doorway and she took it during the correction; the second came in low and arrived to find her already there. When the third drone dropped, Petra's feet were half a step from where they'd started.

"Slick," said Asha. From her, a parade.

"Your reaction time was 170 milliseconds faster than average," Bee said in Petra's ear. "There is a third group ranging two junctions east, if you want them."

Petra looked east, down a corridor where the rib-light staggered and thinned to nothing. Her sheet had the right number on it for Yuki's plan.

"No," she said. "We go up."

Asha was turning away. "First runner I ever worked with who quits while she's ahead."

On the lift, Petra checked the sheet once. 91.9%.

For two days they settled into a rhythm. Yuki and Mikhail at the front doors at seven, eight hours of Floor One spawns under the clerk's stamp and a walk-out at three. Underneath it ran the other ledger: pairs riding the elevator down at odd hours and back at odder ones, and Petra taking a handful of Floor 2 drones with Asha each night.

Cici scouted ahead of every pair.

"The drones at this junction are all a little slow to react to everything. I have named them all Carl," announced the training room speaker the next morning. "Oh, this one patrols a forty-second loop and never once looks up this hallway. This one is Larry. I am extremely good at this."

By the following night Petra's armor needed a repair and her undersuit needed a wash. Harlen, an Artificer who had cleared floors for Petra's grandfather and now walked on a hip that clicked, sat at the zinc table between the washing machines with a solvent can and a stiff brush, de-slagging Mikhail's breastplate the way other people did dishes.

"Plasma bolt," Harlen said, tilting it into the light. "Two fingers wide. Dead-on, like he was standing still for it."

"He does that," Petra said.

"Tell him to stop." Back to the brush.

"Told that man I was your trainer," Asha said, balancing a basket of dirty laundry. "Nothing in the job description about hauling your clothes around."

"Armies run on socks," Harlen said. "Seen more than one war lost to bad laundry."

Asha could only blink at him.

Bee read the numbers aloud in the evenings, in the training room, because that was where Petra lived now.

"Mikhail is at ninety-four point six. Yuki is at ninety-two point one."

Almost time.

The second night, the rhythm broke.

Petra was in the archive with her mother when the communicator went twice, and she was in the storage room before the lift finished settling. Asha came out first with Yuki's arm hooked over her shoulders. Yuki's face was grey under the stone dust, her left arm strapped flat against her ribs.

"Section Five, outer wall," Asha said, setting her down on the bench. "Strut gave. Lane sealed itself behind us."

"Spawns?"

"No spawns." Yuki said it through her teeth while Asha cut the sleeve off her. "A lot of crystal ceiling let go. The whole section is coming down."

"Collarbone." Asha's fingers were already on it. "Cracked. No deep breaths. Don't move."

She worked for twenty minutes without another word. [RAPID MEND], bone knit, a wrap that smelled of bitter root, a strip of tape across the laceration that she pressed down with her thumb and held. Petra held Yuki's rifle and stood where she could be useful and wasn't.

"He finished the sweep alone," Bee said from the ceiling. "Mikhail is at ninety-eight point four."

Petra's class was Rare, and she'd never found a record of what Blade Dancer became. Whatever Blade Dancer turned into could make her the strongest Tertian since her grandfather. Or since Great Aunt Cici.

And on the morning she was going in, her mother chose breakfast to raise it.

"I can tell you what your great-aunt Cici's class evolved into," Sara said, with the sigh of a woman thoroughly finished with her teenage daughter's brooding. "If you want to know."

Petra considered it for exactly as long as it took to pick up her cup.

"No. I'd rather find out today."

Her mother nodded, passed her the coffee, and went back to a datapad.

Petra carried the coffee down to the training room, where Mikhail was already warming up.

Twenty minutes in, she hadn't lunged once. He probed her guard with a straight jab and her footwork was immaculate. Half an inch left, rear heel planted, and she let the baton pass her collarbone near enough to feel the wind of it. When his weight arrived behind it she dropped, slipped her right hand inside his arm, and put the heel of her palm into the meat of his shoulder.

He went two steps past her and caught himself on the wall.

"Point."

Her chest went warm as she looked down at where she stood. Which was, exactly, where she'd started.

·········································LEVEL: 9CLASS: Blade DancerProgress to Level 10: 98.9%·········································

Right where she'd left it, coming up the lift.

The sheet closed and she went to the bench. Mikhail followed, racked the baton, and started on his harness. Shoulder buckle. Pin. Loosen. Shoulder buckle again. She tried not to watch.

"Nervous about the evolution?" she asked.

"I'm not nervous... I just... wish my dad was here to see it."

"Mikhail."

He let a breath go through his teeth and sat, elbows on knees, eyes on the floor between his boots.

"Your father spent his whole life in service to our military," she said. "He'd be proud of what you're doing for our world."

When he looked up, his jaw had loosened a fraction; he gave her a single nod, stood, and shouldered the bag. "I know." A glance at the wall clock. "Yuki's in the hall. Doors at seven."

"Go. I'll be in the line at three."

"Don't be late."

"It's my name on the book now." She picked up her coffee. "I'm never late for my own paperwork."

The corner of his mouth moved, and he went.

The house was strange with two of them out of it.

It shouldn't have been. They'd been out of it every morning for three days. But this morning she had nothing to plan: a countersign due on the rotation sheet, a stack of House correspondence her mother had left in the archive with a note reading yours, and nothing on Floor 2 until three o'clock. She did the correspondence. It took an hour and she retained none of it.

Asha was in storage room three when Petra came down, kneeling in the lift's open doorway with the kit bag between her knees, packing.

"Powercells," Asha said, and pointed her chin at the crate.

Petra handed them over one at a time, and Asha packed them in an order she didn't explain. Six cells, two hypos of [PURGE] in their sleeves, dermal patches, a tin of the bitter-root wrap, rations. Asha's rations. Petra looked away from those on principle.

"Me and Tess go down the back way when the doors shut on you," Asha said. "Cici ahead. We meet you on the way." She cinched the bag and stood, and her knee cracked. "You just get there, yeah?"

"I'll get there."

"And on the books." Asha almost smiled. "Paper says I train you. Paper's finally right about something."

Cici was sitting in the corridor outside, spine perfectly straight, in the exact posture of a dog who has been told no.

"I have raised a grievance," she said, as Petra stepped over her.

"Noted."

"A mechanical dog walking through the front doors is a pattern. I understand this. I am filing the grievance anyway, on the record, so that it exists."

"It exists." Petra crouched and put a hand on the dog's head, which she almost never did. "Scout well."

"I am extremely good at it," Cici said, with dignity, and her tail hit the wall.

At two o'clock she walked down to the Guild in street clothes with nothing on her back.

The steps were empty. The line hadn't formed yet; the big plasteel slabs sat shut with their warning stencils and their Network seals catching the afternoon light. She went to the registration desk.

The guild clerk didn't look up from his terminal. "Lady Petra. I've already sorted it with Jeremy, your party's registered. Bloody crazy, those two, going in back-to-back. Glad you're finally joining them."

"Somebody has to keep them honest."

"That'd be a first." He stamped the papers, slid them across, and she signed beneath two names she could have written asleep. Tertian party of three, the three o'clock doors. "Five-minute window. Don't miss it."

"Thank you, Dalton."

"Anytime, Lady Petra." He leaned in and lowered his voice. "Good luck."

She went home for her blades.

Her armor was laid out on the bed the way she'd laid it out before her first floor: undersuit, plates in the order they went on, harness, the old MK-VII emitter in its cradle on the strap, the vibroblades last. She had the undersuit zipped and the first shin plate on when Bee spoke from the wall.

"Yuki and Mikhail's channel is open, if you'd like it. Listening only. I won't add you to the session."

She should have said no. But.

"Yes," Petra said.

Floor One arrived mid-sentence. "...who even uses the word vermin anymore?" Yuki, in the voice of a woman parked comfortably on a crate. "Left side." Shell cracked on the envelope, and Mikhail's breathing, even and unhurried. "Got it." "Stop saying got it and just go when I say."

Buckling plasteel on was second nature. She fumbled the straps anyway, more than once, and it wasn't nerves.

"Tell me a story," Yuki said in her ear.

"No," Mikhail said.

"Oh c'mon, you're no fun. When we hit ten," Yuki said, "I'm sleeping for a week."

"Do you even sleep? You sent me a feedback report at four in the morning."

"I'm just efficient. Hang on. To the left, go high!"

A crack, Mikhail's shield was catching something, then Yuki's laugh. Petra seated the second forearm plate over the burn's stripe and pulled the strap to the third hole, where it had always gone. The chest plate. The harness over that, the MK-VII's cradle settling onto her shoulder in the spot it had worn hollow for itself since Mikhail handed it to her.

One gauntlet on, the other still in her hand, when Bee spoke over the fight.

"Mikhail just hit Level 10," Bee said, only to her.

On the channel, Yuki was still talking. He hadn't said a word. He wouldn't—not for a while. Petra stood in the middle of her room with the gauntlet in her hand and let the breath go out of her. The doors were an hour away.