She laughed out loud. It carried, and his head popped back out of the window. He looked up and found her at the tree line, a dark shape against a sky that was getting lighter by the minute.
"Hey, squatter!" She cupped a hand by her mouth. "First payment's due in three nights. Bring something better."
Then she was gone, and it was just him and a lot of birds starting up.
"Something better," Ray told the birds.
He climbed the rest of the way in and looked at the bed. The rule was the floor when she was here. She wasn't here. He was asleep before he had finished deciding that it counted.
Jake woke him two hours later by knocking on the roof.
"Breakfast! You look terrible, man."
"Rough night." Ray came out onto the porch with the light stabbing him in both eyes. "Couldn't sleep. Noises."
Jake had his nose in the doorway. He sniffed once, then again, longer, and frowned into the cabin.
"Smells weird in there. Like... old apples."
"The apples are grey." Ray pulled the door shut behind him, which he could do again now that the bar was up. "Something's wrong with them."
Jake looked at the door a moment longer, then shrugged and grew to cart-horse size. Ray climbed on and did not say one word about vampires the whole way to the pond.
At the Tree Fort, halfway through his third pancake, he made the announcement.
"I'm starting a training arc."
Finn put his fork down. "A what?"
"It's where the hero gets stronger. There's usually a montage."
"What's a montage?"
"It's a bunch of short scenes of the guy getting better, with music over it."
"Can we have music?"
"I have a song for that." BMO had climbed onto the table.
That settled it. Jake agreed to be the coach, mostly because it meant sitting down.
There was a problem, and Ray laid it out on the grass behind the Tree Fort with Finn's spare swords spread in a row. He needed the lightning to go through a blade, and the lightning broke the blade. Every real try cost a sword. Finn had eight left, and Ray had already watched two good ones turn into bright little pieces.
"So don't do the thing," Jake said from the shade.
"That's actually the plan." Ray picked up a stick. "I train everything except the thing."
So he trained the stance until his thighs shook. He practiced the draw with the stick through his belt, over and over, until the pull came out of his hip and not his arm. He sat cross-legged and did the breath, slow and all the way down, and let the heat come into his legs and go away again.
Jake coached.
"Breathing? Easy. In through the nose, out through the butt."
"That's not breathing. That's farting."
"Works for me." Jake took a deep breath to show him, and his whole chest puffed up like a beach ball. "See? Stretch your lungs. I do it all the time."
"I can't stretch my lungs."
"Then eat more. Big lungs come from big meals."
"Finally, a technique I can get behind."
There was a part of the anime Ray remembered clearly, because it had been so dumb and he had loved it: the kids blew into a hard gourd until the gourd burst, then moved to a bigger one, and then a huge one, until the breathing ran all day and even in their sleep.
The Tree Fort didn't have gourds. It did have BMO's maraca, which was a dried gourd on a stick with beans inside.
"Can I borrow that?"
"You may borrow it, tall Finn. Please return it with all its beans."
Ray put his mouth over the hole in the top and blew. He blew until his ears popped and the edges of the yard went sparkly, and then he blew some more. The gourd didn't even creak. He woke up on his back in the grass with Finn fanning him with his hat.
"You were purple," Jake said. "Like, a nice purple."
He tried again the next morning and got the same purple and the same grass. The maraca went back to BMO with all its beans. 'Training arc, day one: lost to a maraca.'
The swordwork went better, because Finn took it over.
It started on the afternoon of the second day, when Finn watched him do the draw for the fortieth time and couldn't stand it anymore.
"Okay, but what do you do after?"
"After, I usually lie in a hole and can't feel my legs."
"No! What if the thing doesn't die? What if there's two things?"
Ray opened his mouth and found nothing in it.
Finn came back with a wooden practice sword for each of them. He was grinning like it was his birthday.
"First, you're holding it wrong. You're holding it like a sandwich."
"How do you hold a sword?"
"Like a sword!" Finn fixed his hands for him. "And your feet are all wrong. You stand like you're waiting for something."
Ray looked down. It was his warehouse stance, feet planted, knees locked, the way he'd stood at a conveyor for four months. Finn kicked the back of one knee gently and it bent.
For the next hour, a twelve-year-old took him apart.
Finn knocked the wooden sword out of his hands six times. He tapped Ray's knuckles, his ribs and the top of his head, and each time he explained what Ray had done wrong in a voice full of joy.
He showed him a guard, and two cuts, and how to step so that the other guy's sword went past instead of into him. He had clearly never had a student before, and he was the happiest Ray had ever seen him.
"I'm twice your size," Ray said from the ground.
"Yeah, that's why you fall so loud."
Somewhere around the fifth time on the ground, Ray noticed something. A sword only broke when the lightning went through it. The rest of the time, it was just a sword. He could carry one and fight with it like anybody else, and nothing had to explode.
He got up and asked Finn to show him the second cut again.
Finn also started copying his stance whenever he wasn't teaching. He crouched next to Ray with a hand on his own gold sword, made a noise through his teeth like "bzzzt", and then ran across the yard at regular speed.
"Did anything happen?"
"Nope!" Finn came back delighted. "Again!"
In between everything, Ray lay in the grass and went through songs. He needed one for Marceline in two nights, one better than "Stand by Me".
It had to be something he knew all the words to, which took out half the songs he loved. It had to sound good with no instrument, which took out most of the rest. He hummed things under his breath until Jake asked what the noise was, and then he stopped.
...
On the third day he let himself have one real try.
Finn brought out the last of his swords that still had a scabbard. It was a short, heavy blade that Finn described as "my seventh-favorite, but it's got a good attitude".
"You sure?"
"Dude. I want to see it again so bad."
Ray picked a target: a dead tree at the edge of the field, thick as a man, with a knot halfway up the trunk. Jake went and flattened himself on the ground behind it, as wide as a rug, without anybody asking.
Then Ray stood there, not breathing yet, and thought about the toad.
Every time he had done this, he had ended up going in a straight line. At the rock wall it had been straight at the wolf. In the cave it had been straight through the tongue, and in the yard it had gone straight through the candy block.
He hadn't aimed any of those. But he had been looking right at each one, and his front foot had been pointing at it.
'So point the foot. Look at the knot. Don't look anywhere else.'
He put his left foot on a line with the knot and set his eyes on it until the rest of the field went soft. He shut his mouth and pulled the air down slowly, all the way, and waited for the heat.
"Thunder Breathing, First Form. Thunderclap and Flash."
The crack went across the field and came back off the Tree Fort.
When his head cleared, he was lying in Jake, and the dead tree was lying in the grass in two pieces. The cut was a hand's width to the left of the knot. It was black and smoking, and it went all the way through.
"Close." His voice sounded like it was coming from another room. "That was close."
"That was SO close!" Finn was already running for the house.
The sword was a handle again. The scabbard had stayed on Ray's belt, and it was fine; only the blade ever broke. Finn came back with a lump of charcoal from the stove and drew three lines on the doorframe of the Tree Fort, at his own eye level.
"One for my third-favorite. One for the Princess's. One for my seventh-favorite." He stood back and admired them. "That's three!"
"Please don't make it a thing."
"It's already a thing."
Ray lay in the grass with no legs and his hair standing up, and sparks ticking along his bracelets, and he thought about it properly for the first time.
It was one move. It cost a sword every time, and it cost his legs, and he couldn't do anything after it. The kid he had copied it from had one move too, at the start, and then he had made it faster. There had been versions: six steps, then eight. Ray wanted those. He wasn't anywhere close.
'Until then, it's not a moveset. It's a panic button.' He looked at the sky. 'So it's for when I'm panicking. The rest of the time, I hold a sword like a sword.'
...
Finn wouldn't let him leave empty-handed that evening.
He slid a long, plain blade into the scabbard that had survived. It rattled a little, but it went in. "For emergencies. Don't use it unless it's an emergency."
"Got it, little bro. Break glass in case of monster."
Jake dropped him off at the stream while the sun was still up. He said he had somewhere to be, and he looked a little too pleased about it. Ray didn't mind. He had somewhere to be as well, and it was his own porch, trying to pick a song before a vampire showed up to collect it.
He sat on the step with the sword across his knees and ran through his list. The light went orange, and then purple. Somewhere around the second verse of something that wasn't going to make the cut, he stopped singing.
The porch was shaking.
It was a small shake, the kind a truck makes passing a bus stop. Then it came again, harder, and again, in a slow rhythm he knew before he wanted to. He had heard it with his face in the dirt on his first night in Ooo.
The bush by the stream had gone quiet. The air coming through the trees smelled like a wet basement. On his first day here, he had decided the trunks around the cabin grew too close together for that thing to fit. He had never checked.
'Oh, fuck. Not tonight. Tonight I have a gig.' Ray stood up. On the far side of the clearing, the trees bent apart, and something with too many legs stepped through them and blotted out a strip of stars.
He slid his left foot back and put his hand on the hilt. He had one sword, which meant he had exactly one strike.