We squared off against one another, Finanda giving her briefing while we locked eyes. It was strange to stare down a young teenager, but Sandent showed no sign of being intimidated. A hint of pride perhaps, in the tilt of her jaw just slightly towards the sky, but that could equally have been because I was a good foot taller than her.

She was… calm. Composed, focused, and ready to fight. I was glad to see that, because no matter her age or stature, I would be bringing the fight to her from the start. I didn't know much about her class, but it was clear she had an affinity to ice, and when combined with her slight frame, I guessed that she was dangerous because of her prowess with the arcane rather than any surprising physicality.

She carried a short sword in one hand, more of a knife really, hooked at the end but otherwise unremarkable. In her other, she carried a length of knotted rope. I frowned at that, unsure of its use, but of no doubt that it had one. Given her composure and reputation, there was no chance she was playing around with useless gimmicks.

When the fight began, I closed on her immediately. I fancied I could feel a tiny pebble beneath my back foot crushed to sand from the force of my charge as I pushed off, and despite standing at least two dozen feet away across the dais, I closed on her within heartbeats.

It didn't matter.

Even as my spear darted out towards her, the arena froze. The ground beneath my feet turned to ice, one moment rough marble, the next covered in an inch of solid frost. She slipped to the side of my charge, and I kept going, sliding towards the edge of the raised dais on which we fought. I almost slid straight off, but Check-Step gave me enough time to sink my shield into the ice and whip around to face her once more.

I looked up in time to see a spear of frozen water already spiralling through the air towards me, but this was something I could fight. My shield was down, but my spear punched the projectile from the air with unerring precision, and I was back up, sliding towards her rather than running. If she wanted to rely on treacherous footing, she was welcome to try. Mountain-Born didn't seem to give me any preternatural balance on ice, for now at least, but I was still athletic, and now that it was no longer a surprise, I wasn't so helpless.

Jorge had once told me the maxim; 'the master's tools can never be relied upon to dismantle his house', and I had thought I'd understood the lesson he had being trying to impart. Where Jorge had failed in his instruction, Sandent Varselli did not. I was close to reaching her once more when the ice beneath my feet vanished, and the sudden reappearance of friction made me stumble.

Her hooked knife came scything towards my chest, and I twisted, turning my stumble into a diving roll beneath her weapon. The impact stung my shoulder, but I wasted no time, spinning to one knee and hurling my spear at where I knew her to be. It was a desperate gambit, but I couldn't trade blows with her as I was. She was dictating the fight, and I was losing. Badly.

As my spear sailed through the air, on course to punch straight through her chest, I knew it was too slow. She saw it, and she was ready. I was now confident in my initial assessment – she was more of a mage than a warrior – but that didn't mean she had no training or instincts for a physical fight. The spear closed in on her, and she slapped it away as she slipped aside. My spear shot past her and knew I would be fighting the rest of this battle without it. I had to dive aside again to avoid another volley of icy spears, and at some point during that mad dash I heard the crack of my spear hitting the far wall, well beyond my reach and out of bounds of the dais on which the competition took place.

I spat blood from an impact I'd taken to my mouth during the last few seconds of hectic struggle, and seeing the bright crimson colour of it standing starkly out against the hoarfrost on the ground before me lit a new fire within my breast.

This was an embarrassment. She was toying with me. Like… like… like prey. A cat with a mouse, or a hawk with a mouse, or a snake… with a mouse. Fuck, but I couldn't take that. I was no mouse, meek and feeble before the will of a greater predator. I was no easy prey. I was indomitable, I was–

I realised with a start that my pathbound aura Skill had flared. Sandent was frowning, a moment of hesitation preventing her from following through with her latest attack, and Finanda was watching me carefully. A quick check showed my core dipping dangerously, near half my mana gone in an instant to feed the ravenous Skill that blazed ever brighter in my soul-space. My blood sang and my breath was ragged, though not from exertion. The thick saliva in my mouth and the copper taste of my own blood served only to stoke those flames further.

I looked at the face of the young girl before me, and then behind her to the face of the cliff, windows in the rushing water holding tiny people, their arms raised and mouths open as they shouted and screamed at the unfolding match. This wasn't a life-or-death struggle, this was a tournament. This girl was my opponent, not my enemy, and there was a difference there.

And thank the gods for that, too, because I would be dead by now if she was a true enemy. Burning half my mana just to scare a child for a few moments was an impossible waste, and even now I could see her stealing her nerves, setting her feet and preparing to unleash no doubt even greater feats of magical potential. If I wanted to win this, I needed to be smart. My pathbound Skill had roared to life in a moment of weakness to give me new motivation, but I couldn't trust it to guide me towards my goals.

After all, it was inspired by the ceaseless struggle and unending savagery of nature, and specifically the animals I had fought in the wild. What did all of those animals have in common? They were dead, by the hands of a smarter creature. I shuddered, bringing myself under control and cutting the flow of mana to Indomitable Prey. It was a useful Skill, gods only knew, but I needed better control of it. No matter. That was a priority for later when I wasn't in the middle of a fight.

I pulled my hatchet and dagger from my weapons belt even as Sandent gestured. The waterfall to our right froze entirely. A score of feet wide – hundreds of tonnes of water – held in place by simple intent. It was an awe-inspiring feat of magic and would have shocked me if I hadn't seen her do something similar upon entering the arena. She gestured again, a clawing motion with her hand ending with her pointing at me as I closed in on her, and then the hail began.

Icicles, ranging from a few inches to several feet long, detached themselves from the frozen wall and swarmed towards me. I brought my shield up to protect my vitals, gritting my teeth against the stinging welts and slashes of blood drawn across my lower legs, and slid beneath the storm.

She had moved in the meantime, darting quickly aside, but I pulled as much mana from my core as possible and shunted it into Tilt. It was brief, but I saw her stall, rocked momentarily by my disorienting Skill. She recovered quickly, detaching more ice from the wall and directing it my way as I struggled to stand.

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I couldn't see her now, vision occluded as it was by the storm of ice, but I still had mana left for a few brief activations of Faultline. It was most effective on stone, though it had worked once before on ice when fighting the Glacial Rhinoceros. But I didn't want to contest her control over the element. Her power over the ice would be far beyond my ability to influence, even for something so crude as to break it, but that didn't mean Faultline was useless.

I activated the Skill, letting my awareness sink down into the stone beneath my feet. My stone-sense gave me an idea of where she was, and while the ice on its surface was hazy and unclear in that spiritual vision, I could still make out her general position. Head down, shield held before me and teeth gritted against the pain, I lurched forwards. My hatchet was still gripped tightly in a bloody hand, the storm of icicles tearing the skin from my knuckles.

I emerged from that frozen hurricane to stand before my opponent like a vengeful red-handed god, axe already raised for a killing blow. But Sandent Varselli, despite looking like a frail young girl, was far from powerless. She met me with her own weapons raised, and even as I drew back my hatchet for a final strike, she was moving too.

Her long, knotted rope was behind her, and she pulled it forwards in a looping swing, having started the movement before I'd even appeared from within the storm. The end of that rope passed through the waterfall to her left and as it slipped through the water, it froze. When the rope emerged into the open air, it carried around it a chuck of ice several foot thick, and Sandent whipped that over-sized sledgehammer through the air as if it weighed nothing. By the time it hit me in the chest, my axe was still a foot from her chest, and my shield had barely risen to protect my flank.

As it was, I was sent flying across the dais, ice cascading around me from the broken head of the maul. I coughed, my vest having protected me from a broken… well, everything. My lungs spasmed in protest as I tried to drag air into them once more. Before I could stand, Sandent Varselli stood over me, dagger pointed my way. Finanda hovered over one shoulder, and I raised a hand weakly, trying to say, "I yield," and barely managing a whisper.

The Holder got the message though, and she gestured to the judges as Sandent dispelled her frozen storm that covered a third of the arena. I took a few seconds to collect myself before rolling to my feet, unable to supress a groan. Despite the pain though, I made sure to limp over to the young girl and pay my respects.

"That was a hell of a battle," I said. "Well done and well earned."

She didn't reply verbally, just a shy smile and nervous nod, turning to exit the arena with a slight bow to Finanda on the way. I chuckled weakly, unable to match the terrifying mage and powerful warrior with the image of the young girl I'd just seen at the end; scared to talk to adults, but happy to kick their ass up and down the arena in front of a crowd of thousands.

Gods, what a beating.

I can't say that I was pleased with the loss, but I was less upset than I'd thought I would be. Sandent was clearly a generational talent, and she had a path that was clear and well thought through, with a head for battle on top of it all. I'd been struggling for the last few fights to put my finger on why I was winning, given my lack of experience, but also why I was vaguely dissatisfied with those wins. Why did my opponents feel weak?

I had noticed a few of them, even up from the stands, as being slow, but when facing them on the stone, I quickly realised that was just a question of lower attributes than I was useful. Given that I had been limited to roughly their level in each fight, it shouldn't have really made a difference, other than some mild cognitive dissonance of knowing I could move and react faster if it wasn't for the damned amulet.

Facing the young ice mage had confirmed the reason though. The others I'd fought lacked a coherent path. Sandent's Skills complimented one another, and she knew how to use them. If Skills were tools, it felt like the others had simply rushed through a workshop, grabbing handfuls of random gadgets and widgets and throwing them haphazardly into a sack. When it came down to the fight, they would stick a hand in and wriggle it about, looking for something that could be used to fix the next immediate problem, but they were doing it blind, and would often come up with the wrong one.

Sandent, meanwhile, had entered the arena with a wax-wrapped tool belt that she unfurled at the start, running her hands lovingly over the engraved and polished heads of a small number of carefully chosen tools. Did she need the flat-nosed chisel to break stone? The level? The saw? She knew where each was and knew when to use each one.

It wasn't a matter of breadth or specificity, or power either. Sandent's Skills were clearly higher levelled than my own and so consequently more powerful in their effects, not to mention far less mana-intensive to use than they had any right to be. But she was still, in this analogy at least, a stone mason. She would struggle against an implacable warrior with powerful defence and higher strength and speed. It wasn't that her Skills were better than everyone else I'd fought, per se, but that they were coherent, and they formed a path with a shared purpose.

That was also true of my own Skills. I knew each class offered specific Skills that would align with its purpose, but most people ignored a few in favour of their general Skills that they'd spent longer working on. It was hard for a warrior to make sure each Skill they had aligned with their future path – indeed, most didn't know what their future's would bring, and how they would seek to approach it even if they did know.

I had an advantage in that each Skill, class or general, was gained during a single period of struggle. They were unified in their purpose; survive the mountains, and so my pah was clear. They certainly weren't optimal for every situation, and they definitely weren't the best. I had no real way of attacking from range, no finishing Skill, no way of controlling multiple enemies. I was just a solid, fairly rounded fighter, with an emphasis on controlling the environment. A skirmisher, really. And yet my Skills were, one and all, geared towards that.

I wasn't half a mage, half a warrior, with a confusing mix of the two. I wasn't just an implacable shield-bearer that could also throw lightning, as frankly awesome as that was. I didn't know much about this Blending, or fighting amongst the sentient races in general – I was more of a wild hunter, after all – but I suspected the warriors that placed highly in this competition would be ones that had a unifying style and purpose to their Skills, and not necessarily the most talented, or the most powerful.

I considered all of this as I trudged through the waterfall, barely feeling the weight of the water on my back, through the long, winding hallway, and eventually into the barracks where people waited impatiently. I searched for Nathlan's gangly form in the jungle of people. He stood alone at one edge, slowly moving through forms with his blade sheathed, clearly aware of the many moving people nearby. I wandered over, making sure to move into his way just a little so he'd have to adjust his practice.

"Gods Lamb, were you always so clumsy? Did you get dropped on your head as a babe?" he asked.

"I'm not sure, my friend. I can't remember." My answer shut him down for a moment, and he huffed quietly.

"You understand that you cannot simply use that as a shield all the time?" He said, and I just grinned at him in response. "Anyway, how did you get on? I assume a rousing success from your lack of bleeding?" He asked.

I shrugged my heavy scale vest off and hung it up on the nearest rack as I explained the fight and my loss, and my revelation at the end. He was a good listener, and despite my acceptance of the loss, it was still nice to talk about the disappointment to someone who understood.

"I am sorry for your loss, Lamb," he said quietly, then brightened. "It may be good news though. You were getting far too cocky and needed the humbling – I was afraid I would have to do it for you if you did not lose soon."

I laughed and clutched at my heart dramatically. "Betrayal!"

We were discussing his approach to his next bout when an older man came to escort him out to the arena once more. He eyed me over for a few moments before dismissing me and turning towards Nathlan.

"Come. Follow."

His voice was clipped and his manner brief, but Nathlan rose without complaint and followed along dutifully. He gave me a final nod, and I watched him once again don the mantle of proud warrior over his true identity as just a lanky scholar, infinitely curious about the world.

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