I'd had to cancel the evening training session on the arena. People who'd reserved a slot in advance had booked it solid. And this even though every tournament had long since been cancelled. Cultivators were preparing for the invasion. So I booked the nearest available date, three days out, and we spent that evening in the training hall instead, doing light sparring.

My subordinates sparred while I watched and pulled them apart whenever they went too far. Mostly that meant Mardal. Fire demanded action and kept pushing him forward. Hale, on the other hand, proved surprisingly composed and patient. Finger demanded precision and patience, which balanced out cultivation's effect on her temperament considerably.

They were all excellent fighters except Zola. Zola surprisingly sucked! She knew it too, which only made her angrier, but she didn't spill her shit onto the teammates.

After running a few rounds, I joined the training myself and put Mardal and Voss against me as a pair. I ‘took them apart’ within the first few seconds. Once I added Hale as long-range support, it got harder, but I just had to keep the closer pair of fighters between Hale and me. Adding Kon, though, changed the situation sharply. The group gained a mobile fighter and the ability to get behind me. I couldn't keep track of everyone, hold my attention on the discs, and keep someone between myself and Hale, all at once.

The fire beams that gnawed through shields and formations were fairly unpleasant, so that round went to them, and Zola got offended all over again that I neglected her. To smooth things over, I staged a scene of rescuing and stabilising a wounded man under enemy fire. I played the enemy fire; Mardal played the wounded ally. Zola was supposed to play the medic in this little scene, but without an actual injury she had nothing to show off, and it ended up looking a lot stupider than it had in my head. So we called it a night on that.

I asked every member of the team to put together for me a short compilation, a few of their best and worst tournament fights so that I could get a better picture of each of them. We watched and discussed them together the next day. I couldn't show them any recordings of my own, since I hadn't taken part in tournaments since my breakthrough, and all my recorded third-stage fights had happened in the Ka Federation. The recordings had stayed there too. And by my second year, my style had changed so much that it wouldn't have mattered much anyway.

Zola didn't have anything particularly impressive to show off in terms of fights either. Still, she gave us an excellent lecture on field injuries, complete with vivid pictures of typical wounds and footage of her sewing on someone's limb or patching up a hole.

On the third day of team coordination, I showed them the combat portals. Because I'd named them exactly that, the team initially assumed these things let you teleport around the battlefield.

I needed to finally settle on names, so as not to confuse anyone. Earlier, I'd cared more about function than name, but I figured the time had come. The main thing was not to fall into that army style of "Death, Destruction, and Vengeance…" So, the devices themselves would be Trouble Generators, given the troublesome history of their creation. Hopefully they'd cause more trouble for the enemy. And the micro-portals they generated… I could have left it at that, but since I was using them as discs anyway, and controlling them with Double Cycle, Blade's native technique, they'd be Space Discs.

Instead of a long explanation, I tossed the Trouble Generators up, and they began circling me like standard combat rings. I focused, and a black film appeared over the ring holes; I tore it free and hurled it at the nearest rock.

The Space Discs entered the rock silently, without a trace. The team couldn't even find the mark. All except Voss, whose Earth Qi told him exactly where the invisible cut was.

I repeated the trick, but this time I embedded only one disc into a relatively small rock and asked Zola to hit a projection into the other disc, whose flight I deliberately slowed and turned to face her, plane-first.

Zola drove her conical projection precisely into the centre, and gravel sprayed out from the portal membrane just before it destabilised and vanished. The rock the portal had been embedded in split cleanly in two.

Right, my team was made up of third stages, but if you drove an ultimate through the portal… Theoretically, we might even take down a Stage Five.

The team caught fire with the idea. But for that, they'd each need a compact ultimate, one that could ‘squeeze through’ a portal the size of a tea saucer.

Mardal soured immediately. He had two gigantic flaming palms. Oddly enough, Voss had something similar. Except instead of using palm projections to catch the enemy, he lifted the ground beneath their feet in two slabs and tried to crush them between them. Zola's was something else entirely, a whole cloud of conical projections, so in practice I could really only work with Kon and Hale. Especially Hale; her sniper shot was one of those mega-piercing wonders. I could even use it before my portal ended up inside the enemy, to weaken and breach their defences first. There was a snag, though, similar to what I'd run into on the fleet base: the portals couldn't withstand a hundred per cent charge and would collapse before she finished the technique.

I trained, but I didn't have the strength to hold them steady. With Kon's ultimate, it was easier. She had two of them: one built on Blade, oriented around the sword, and one built on Point, which put the spike to use and served as a powerful equivalent to Hale's shot. It struggled more against shields, but the spike didn't destabilise the membrane. We worked out two main plans for using this trick: a close-range one for Kon, timed for when Voss was covering her with a stone wall, and a long-range one for Hale.

Unfortunately, a genuinely long-range strike was still out of my reach. I could confidently control standard physical discs at a distance of twenty metres, thirty if I pushed myself to the limit, but for Space Discs, twenty was already a stretch. Which gave me forty metres at best, if the discs sat at maximum distance from each other and I was positioned right in the middle.

But when did fights ever go according to the best-case scenario?

At least there was one bright spot: after a few days of taking essence, I could now squeeze five or six activations out of the Trouble Generators without strain. Creating and holding the Space Discs was surprisingly energy-efficient, which was more than I could say for my Misty Step training and my attempts to wring more out of the technique than it was built for.

I went back to my sand training, which had been so inconveniently interrupted first by preparing the trap for Johnson, and then by his death.

This time I poured the sand onto something other than bare skin, using the cheap plastic training gloves I'd bought back in my first year. I risked fusing them to my hand, as it had once happened with a trainer sole, so I cut the fingertips off and used only one finger-cover at a time. That way, there'd be less to cut away if I got hurt.

And so I didn't have to hack away at my own hand with a knife the way I usually did; I kept Zola close by. She grumbled about it, of course, but she was clearly eager to show off her skill and prove she wasn't a liability.

To some extent, she hoped I'd fail.

Well, failure caught up with me on the very first go. I poured sand onto a pinky finger I'd dissolved. The sand fused with the plastic, and the plastic fused to my flesh.

I sighed and held my hand out to Zola.

She smiled smugly, ran a scanner over it, told me not to move, set a bowl of sand beneath my finger, and theatrically raised her hand toward my pinky, fingers spread out like a classical pianist. Her face turned just as serious and focused. Her fingers began to move, executing some extraordinarily complex technique. I felt a wild blend of Fist, Point, and Blade. Her fingers were covered in that familiar silver qi with barely visible blue and red undertones. The technique slowly reached towards my finger.

The plastic shell around the finger lit up in that same silver, shuddered, cracked, and the skin flared with a slicing pain.

I flinched involuntarily, and the plastic crumbled into separate fragments in the bowl. My finger had turned pink, as if fresh out of a regenerator, except that after a regenerator, blood doesn't show through the skin. Zola had shaved off the top layer of my finger without even touching it.

The pain was far less than when I'd hacked at myself with a knife. And the nail stayed intact, though it had thinned by at least half.

The technique she'd used was extraordinarily complex. She had every right to be proud of herself, though voicing that would have been redundant; she was already puffing her chest out with pride.

"Right, right," I said, "you're skilled. I know it."

"'Thank you' would be an appropriate way to say!"

"We won't have time for thank-yous on the battlefield," I said.

Her eyes went wide, and she spread her arms, gesturing at the walls of my room.

"Thank you," I said.

"Fake." She shook her head.

I didn't feed her ego; I pulled the finger-cover onto my ring finger, held it over the bowl of sand, dissolved it, and started pouring.

"I haven't scanned the result yet!" she said.

"I can feel you shaved off everything that needed shaving," I waved her off.

"The pinky would do better with foam treatment," she insisted, right as a second failure hit me.

I tried again, but the result was the same. So I sighed the same way and held that finger out to her too.

"We'll treat them all together afterwards."

By the end of that evening, six fingers had suffered in total. They still worked, but were very sensitive. I'd left my index and thumb fingers untouched, just in case. I used those to control the discs, so I didn't need extra sensation.

The team quickly noticed that some of my fingers were a different colour, and I didn't bother hiding the reason. Under other circumstances, I might have kept this trick to myself, but right now it worked in the team's favour, especially when I demonstrated Zola's work on peeling off fused plastic. The fighters finally understood that they were in reliable hands, her temperament aside. They even started sharing their own ideas and combat schemes. We worked through a few of them.

When fifteen days remained before the invasion, three important things happened at once. We were issued evacuation portals. 49 seconds, Pascal couldn’t squeeze more. We’ve got an operating and recharging manual, and a list of addresses for prisoners, the wounded, evacuation, and calling reinforcements. Novak also gave me an address to summon him specifically. My master, as ever, never doubted my ability to draw the attention of the single nastiest bastard on the entire battlefield.

He also handed me the third pair of gauntlets, fitted with Space formations, and that turned out to be the trigger for a genuine leap forward in my sand training. I didn't risk using the actual gauntlets themselves, but a hastily sketched copy of the formation on plastic let me solidify first a finger, then my whole hand, beneath the sand stream.

I still hadn't managed to lay my hands on a portal and make it truly my own, but overall, I was as ready for the invasion as I could be.