After the fight with Death’s Door Crew, the arena needed a quick maintenance pass to clean up a giant insect corpse and slimy bug guts. There was only a momentary pause after the cheering had died down, and the sound of chits clicking into the tip chutes mostly ended.
Some stadium chants and songs started up from various areas. Nothing I recognized, but I assumed it was associated with different teams or activities. Vendors came back out in force to hawk more food, snacks, and drinks.
The surreal experience was seeing work crews with all-terrain vehicles pulling chunks of giant monster off wall spikes with cranes while people ordered bags of fresh soy-chitin cracklins.
Violence was just an everyday fact of life in X-3. It was everywhere, not just in the media, but in the streets and hab-blocks. Places like Bloodsands turned it into live entertainment, but it wasn’t entirely contained to the lower levels of the city. The UBL wasn’t terribly different, just more overtly corporatized with team sponsorships.
The arena was cleared of monster chunks, a vehicle with wide arms groomed the sand, and it was time for the next fight.
Vael leaned closer to me, enough that her shoulder pressed into mine. The playful energy she’d had for most of the night hadn’t vanished, exactly, but it had gone quieter. More focused.
“This is the one I wanted you to see,” she said.
I looked from her face back down to the arena. “The next fighter?”
“Mhm.”
“You could have led with that before the giant murder centipede.”
Her lips curled into the kind of smile that had started to make me suspicious on reflex. “I did not want to spoil the evening.”
“I’m starting to think you and I have very different definitions of spoil.”
The overhead lights shifted, red and blue washing across the sand in alternating pulses. The announcer let the crowd build itself up for a few seconds before cutting in, voice booming out from every direction at once.
“Bloodsands! Our next solo bout is a prize-cup challenge!”
That got a reaction. Not the same wall of noise the Slithering had pulled out of people, but close. A sharper kind of excitement, with more betting slips and shouted odds than chanting.
“On the red side, we have tonight’s challenger! Veteran of eight open-series victories, two corporate exhibition matches, and holder of a very expensive set of reinforced spinal hardware, give it up for—CROWNBREAKER!”
The red-side gate rose.
A human man stepped out, although calling him human felt like giving the organic parts too much credit. He was tall, broad, and wrapped in a compact exo-frame that hugged close enough to make it clear he wasn’t piloting a suit so much as wearing a second skeleton. His arms were too long, his shoulders too square, and the reinforced line of his spine stood out beneath overlapping plates like someone had welded a suspension bridge onto his back.
Very reassuring.
He carried a powered poleaxe with a crescent blade on one side and a brutal spike on the other. The haft was thick enough that I would have had trouble getting my hands around it comfortably, and there were little induction rings or shock coils spaced down the length. A forearm shield sat on his left arm, not huge, but dense-looking, with anchor prongs folded against the rim.
His helmet had no face. Just a dark visor strip and too many little sensor blisters.
He raised the poleaxe overhead and stomped one foot into the sand. The exo-frame amplified the motion into a metallic thud that carried through the arena floor and into the stands. The crowd liked that, raising cheers in response.
“Looks friendly,” I said.
Vael made an amused sound. “He is not the one we are here for.”
The announcer waited until Crownbreaker had taken his place near the middle of the arena. Then the lights shifted again, colder this time.
“On the blue side—undefeated in solo prize-cup challenge bouts! A tier three User! The fighter who has sent sixteen challengers into the sand and left none standing! Tax!”
The Tokh sections around us went quiet.
Not fully silent. There were still little sounds. The creak of saddle-seats. The scrape of claws. The low rumble of breathing from bodies big enough that breathing counted as a structural event.
But they did not cheer.
That was the thing that stood out. The human sections reacted. Some cheered, some booed, some started shouting odds at one another. Somewhere above us, someone started beating a metal cup against a railing.
The Tokh did nothing.
I glanced toward the nearest saddle section. During the previous fights, they’d stomped and clapped along with everyone else. Some of them had been more into it than the humans. Now they watched the blue-side gate with the kind of deliberate non-reaction that felt louder than the cheering.
“Oh,” I muttered.
Vael’s eyes flicked toward me. “You noticed.”
“I don’t know what I noticed.”
The blue-side gate opened.
Tax stepped out.
Most of the Tokh I’d seen had been in crowds, half blocked by people, signs, vehicles, or architecture that had clearly not been designed by anyone who expected regular foot traffic from people built like industrial lifting equipment. They were massive in the same general way trucks were massive. You noticed, adjusted your path, and tried not to get stepped on. They looked like large, predatory dinosaurs from Earth’s deep past: theropods.
Tax was different. Or maybe the arena made him different. There was nothing around him to dilute the scale of what he was.
He was tall, taller than the human in the exoframe, but I felt like he was shorter than other Tokh I’d seen. His body had the heavy, latent power I’d started associating with Tokh, all thick chest, long arms, and a lower body equally capable of distance running as it was power lifting. His skin was an olive color and pebbled, more like worked leather over stone than anything reptilian. He had black quills around his eyes, similar to human eyebrows in form and function, and more on the sides of his head like sideburns.
His armor was half-plate, Tokh-fitted, and thick. It covered his chest, shoulders, upper arms, thighs, and the forward line of his shins, leaving enough gaps that he could actually move. The plates weren’t polished. They were dull, scarred, and practical, strapped over dark underlayers with enough buckles and reinforcement points to rig a cargo hauler.
Then there was the sword.
Calling it a claymore felt technically correct in the same way calling the Slithering a bug had been technically correct. The weapon was longer than I was tall. Not by a little, either. Its grip was scaled for hands with too many thumbs and enough leverage to lift small vehicles. The blade itself was broad, straight, and undecorated except for wear marks along the edges.
He carried it low in one hand as he walked.
One hand.
“Fuck off,” I whispered.
Vael’s tail flicked against the side of my leg. “He is very good.”
“That sword is bigger than me.”
“Yes.”
“That wasn’t me asking for confirmation.”
Tax reached his starting mark and stopped. His tail settled behind him in a long, heavy curve, not idle exactly, but quiet. Balanced. His head turned slightly, and for a moment I caught a glimpse at his eyes.
They were violet.
Not blue, not purple in the cheap LED sense, but a deep, strange violet that seemed to sit wrong against the rest of him. User eyes glowing from within, colored by aspect.
I searched my memory, mentally flipping through old WoD tables, aspect charts, forum arguments, and half-remembered build guides written by people who got very intense about color theory.
Violet was rare.
Gravity, maybe? Something adjacent? There were a few high-tier weird ones that used violet markers in WoD, but those were game abstractions, and Vael had already warned me more than once that I needed to stop expecting the universe to be balanced by patch notes.
Still.
Rare aspect. Tier three. Undefeated solo killer. Giant sword. Crowd acting weird.
Great. Perfect. No notes.
The buzzer sounded.
Crownbreaker moved first.
That probably said something, but I wasn't sure what yet.
He closed the distance between them in a direct line, leading with the forearm shield, angling the poleaxe across his body for a sweeping blow that had enough induction coil charge behind it to leave a contact burn on plate steel. It was a solid, professional opener. The kind of thing you practiced until you didn't have to think about it.
Tax let him come.
The sword moved. That was the thing. It moved before Crownbreaker was close enough to make contact, cutting a long, gentle arc from low guard to a position I didn't have a word for but my WoD-saturated brain filed under what is that.
The poleaxe connected with his shoulder plate.
Nothing happened.
I don't mean it glanced off. I mean the contact didn't register on Tax in any way I could see. No shift in footing, no rebalancing, nothing. He continued the motion he'd already been in as if Crownbreaker had attacked the air slightly to his left.
"Is he—" I started.
"Use your senses," Vael said, without taking her eyes off the sand.
Right. I pulled my focus inward and let my aura vision bleed into everything. Crownbreaker's exo-frame lit up like a schematic, all active muscle groups and electrical impulse, a man and a machine arguing about who was doing the work. Normal.
Tax was harder.
There was something there. I could feel it the same way I could feel a sound just at the edge of hearing—more aware of the absence than the presence. His aura sat strangely, like it was a half-step off from where it should have been. It didn't look wrong, exactly. It had a quality to it that I couldn't name, like a color that slightly didn't match the context of everything around it.
I watched his arm move and tried to feel it.
Nothing. Or almost nothing. A faint density around the line of the blade. Maybe.
Maybe I’m imagining it?
"What's his aspect?" I asked.
"What does it feel like to you?"
I was developing a genuine dislike of that answer. "Something. It feels like something."
Vael's tail curled at the tip in what I was learning was quiet amusement.
On the sand, Tax pressed forward.
That was the word for it. Pressed. Not charged, not attacked. The sword described a path through the air ahead of him that happened to intersect with wherever Crownbreaker needed to be to stay in the fight, and Crownbreaker spent his energy responding to it. Every time he tried to reset to something that looked like advantage, Tax adjusted and the blade was already somewhere that made that less comfortable.
The shield took a hit. Tax barely slowed.
Crownbreaker was good. I kept having to remind myself of that, because it was easy to miss watching Tax systematically unmake everything the man tried. The exo-frame was doing its job—augmenting reaction time, soaking some of the impact math—and a couple of Crownbreaker's strikes had gotten through to land real contact. Tax let them. I was almost certain of it. He absorbed the poleaxe spike against his pauldron with the unhurried acknowledgment of someone who'd already evaluated the exchange and found it acceptable.
He's keeping score of something. And he's not sharing the rubric.
The sword didn't stop moving.
That was what stuck with me. Most fighters I'd watched—in WoD and tonight—had rhythm to their offense. Committed strike, recovery, reset. Tax's blade seemed to operate on a different principle, always in some phase of threat, some position that needed a response, never quite extended enough to create an opening but never so withdrawn that it stopped being a problem. It was exhausting to watch. I couldn't imagine what it was like to be across from it.
Crownbreaker was starting to show the effort. His shield arm was coming up slower on the left side.
Tax noticed. He didn't immediately exploit it.
He's toying with him.
The thought arrived with some discomfort, because it wasn't cruelty, exactly. It was more like he was finishing a calculation and waiting for confirmation of the last variable.
Crownbreaker made a decision, the desperate, committed decision of someone who knows the math isn't working. He put everything into an overhead strike, both hands on the haft, leaning his entire body weight into it, the exo-frame compressing like a loaded spring. He probably could have cleaved a car in half with it.
Tax stepped inside it.
One motion. The sword came across low and then rose, and the arena went quiet in a way that was somehow louder than the cheering had been.
Clean. Anticlimactic, even. The decapitation had the same efficient quality as the rest of the fight—something that had probably been possible a dozen exchanges earlier and had simply been waiting for Tax to decide it was time.
The Tokh sections remained silent.
Everyone else went insane.
I sat with the particular feeling of having watched something very competent operate without ever quite understanding the mechanism behind it.
"Right," I said. "Okay."
Vael stood and looked down at me. "Ready?"
"For what?"
She held up two small cards. Backstage passes, embossed with the Bloodsands torch-flame logo.
I looked at the sand, where work crews were already moving out with their equipment.
Then I stood up.
***
There was no line at Tax's door.
The DDC had drawn a crowd outside their greenroom—people with embossed cards, arena staff, someone in a media jacket trying to look smaller than their equipment. I watched the whole cluster from down the corridor as Vael guided me past it to a door that looked identical to every other door but had exactly no one in front of it.
She knocked twice.
No answer.
She knocked again.
Still nothing.
"Should we—" I started.
The door unlocked with a heavy click and swung inward a few centimeters.
We went in.
The room was a changing room in the same way a military depot was a storage closet. Functional, bare, lit with overhead panels that didn't flatter anything. Hooks on one wall, a bench along another, and a long table claimed by a systematically arranged set of armor plates, padding, straps, and tools. The air smelled like metal polish and something organic I decided not to examine.
Tax had his back to us.
He was removing the last of his arm plates with the unhurried economy of someone doing something they'd done ten thousand times. His underlayers were dark and close-fitted, and his build without the plate on top was something I processed in portions because taking it in all at once was a bit much. Bulging muscle everywhere. There was a translator unit at his throat, a polymer box with a mesh speaker panel and a small input array, the kind of thing that probably worked fine and had clearly not received a lot of attention from a customization standpoint.
I cleared my throat.
Nothing.
I tried a small wave, which was obviously useless, and converted it mid-motion into scratching the back of my neck, because at least that was purposeful.
"Hi," I said. "I'm—"
Tax placed a pauldron on the table with a specific, deliberate motion and picked up the next one.
Vael touched my arm. Wait.
I waited.
It took another four minutes. He finished removing the armor, laid each piece in place with what was very clearly a specific system, and then wiped his hands on a cloth before turning to face us. His violet eyes moved between Vael and me once, and settled on Vael.
When he spoke, the translator spoke a half-beat behind him—synthesized male voice, flat, the kind of software that had been installed and never adjusted. Some of his vowels ran just a touch long. The double-l in well came out as two distinct sounds that didn't quite belong together.
"Well-l," the translator said. "Sul'Vethik."
Vael inclined her head. "Tax. You fought well tonight."
His eye quills shifted. Not dismissal, but not engagement either.
"We'd like to speak with you about joining a Dive team," Vael said, with the precise cadence of someone departing from a rehearsed opening line. "We are assembling a small and—" she glanced at me with the kind of deliberate sidelong look I was already not enjoying "—newly formed group. This was not my idea. You should address your questions to the team lead."
I became very aware of my own face.
Oh, you absolute bitch…
"Ah," I said, demonstrating my very considerable people skills, and scrambled. "Right. Yes. We're building a Dive team." I squared my shoulders. "I'm Kiera Voss. We're looking for a front-liner, and I've been told you're worth talking to."
The violet eyes moved to me.
They stayed there.
He looked at me the way someone looks at a load-bearing wall they're considering removing. Not unkind, not hostile. Just assessing the structural reality of the situation with the dispassionate interest of someone who works in construction and has seen a lot of them.
When he spoke, the translator's voice was exactly as flat as before. "You are soft."
"Yes," I agreed, crossing my arms under my chest, a weight that was only mildly reassuring.
Silence stretched.
Well, this is awkward.
His eyes didn't move.
"I’m going to assume that is a criticism and not an observation.”
Heh. Boob joke.
“What would it take to change your mind?" I asked.
Tax's gaze shifted to the door behind us, then back to me, with a particular quality that was not quite pointing.
"Fight," the translator said. "Open series. Tonight."
I looked at Vael, who wore the expression of someone watching a chess match.
I looked back at Tax.
"Okay," I said.
The eye quills shifted again. Something I couldn't read.
"Yeah, okay," I said, more firmly, because apparently the situation called for it.
***
The registration desk was not staffed by someone who had been expecting me.
The woman behind it had a half-eaten tube jammer on a napkin and a data terminal she'd been somewhere in the middle of doing something on when we came up. She looked between me and Vael with the expression of someone running arithmetic that wasn't adding up.
"Open series registration," Vael said pleasantly.
"Right." She pulled a form up on the terminal. "Name?"
"Kiera Voss."
She started typing, then paused. "No, I mean your stage name. Your handle."
I felt the complete absence of a stage name where a stage name should have been. I had never once in my entire life thought about a stage name.
"Kiera Voss," I said.
She looked at me. I looked back.
She shrugged with the efficiency of someone who had seen stranger things at Bloodsands. "Kiera Voss it is." More typing. "Gear situation?"
Those two words made me want to sit down somewhere quiet.
The loaner armory was well-stocked, sensibly organized, and built entirely for people who were not built like me. I spent eleven minutes trying on gear that fit in approximately one dimension at a time, confirming in practice what I'd already known in theory, which was that standard fighter sizing accounted for the chest-to-height distribution of basically every sapient in the city except apparently me.
I wound up in my street clothes. The jacket stayed—ballistic-rated, fit correctly—but the rest was exactly what I'd walked in off the concourse in, down to the boots.
The weapons armory was better.
There were boar spears on the third rack, and I stood in front of them for a moment.
They weren't my partisan. Shorter shafts, lugs a different shape, balance slightly forward of where I'd have preferred it. But the basic grammar of the thing was right—long leaf blade, cross-wings, butt spike, the same two-handed logic of keep them at range and draw them onto the point. I took one and tested the weight in my grip.
Good enough.
The prep room held eight or nine other fighters in various states of readiness. Two had the stillness of people who'd done this enough times to have made peace with waiting. The rest looked more like me—varying degrees of trying not to look like they were about to throw up.
I was the smallest person in the room by a margin that, under different circumstances, might have been funny.
I sat on a bench with the spear across my knees and tried not to doom spiral.
Who am I going to be fighting?
The thought arrived uninvited and stayed. Vael had mentioned that unranked fights could be people or monsters depending on the night. Wildlife was uncomfortable but knowable. A person was something else. I'd been involved in the deaths of people before, and I was still in the processing phase on that front. I'd also killed a genuinely embarrassing number of people in WoD. Top percent server-wide for user-versus-user kills, and I'd been quietly proud of that statistic for a long time.
Virtual kills, said a very unhelpful voice in my head.
Real enough that I have techniques and instincts from it, said a slightly more helpful one.
What if my tail decides a downed human opponent smells like dinner, said a third voice I urgently needed to evict.
I looked down at my tail, sitting on the bench beside me in what it probably considered a neutral and non-threatening pose.
"Don't," I told it quietly.
It flicked once.
"I mean it."
"Kiera Voss." Someone with a clipboard appeared at the entrance, not looking up. "You're up."
I stood.
Half-prepared, weapons in hand, no idea what's on the other side of the gate. Sounds about right.
"Fuck it," I said, which had become basically my personal philosophy at this point, and went out.
***
They were not people.
The gate rose and both animals came through together, which I had not been warned about but had been quietly hoping against.
The first one out was longer than it was tall, built in a way no terrestrial predator had ever quite managed—too much mass in the chest and shoulders, limbs slightly shorter than the proportion suggested, a wide, heavy head with ears set back and eyes that caught the arena lights in a flat, interested way. It moved with the easy, deceptive looseness of something that had evolved specifically to look slower than it was. The second came through lower, flanking immediately, circling wide in the opposite direction.
Oh. Pack tactics from jump.
They had to be a hundred and sixty kilos each, minimum. My brain did the math without being asked. Combined, they outweighed me somewhere in the range of seven times over. In my corner of the ledger: one borrowed spear, and the approximate fighting experience of a woman who had been taking polearm lessons for less than forty-eight hours.
And my circuit. And what it could do.
I kept the spear moving.
That part I'd gotten from watching Tax, or maybe from Imir's two hours of drilling the same lesson into my arms. The weapon that was still had already made a decision. I kept it in motion, low threat angle, the cross-wings readable to anything smart enough to recognize what they implied.
These cats were smart enough.
The front one feinted. It was a good feint—weight shift looked real, the head dropped like a launch, and my hands were already reacting before I caught myself.
No. That's the bait.
I checked the motion, pivoted instead, and the second cat's paw caught the back of my jacket rather than the back of my knee. Broad and heavy, no claws—I felt the impact all the way up to my shoulder, which told me exactly what those paws could do with a full-weight strike and better positioning.
My tail swung out behind me, low, and made contact.
The second cat's next approach stuttered. It had been going for my heels and found something that swung back.
I didn't have time to feel good about it.
The front one was closing, and this time it wasn't a feint.
I planted my back foot, pushed my circuit as hard as I could in two seconds, and felt the now-familiar sensation of everything getting lighter and faster and faintly on fire. The spear went forward on an angle I'd done exactly twice with Imir.
High, then drop. They're always watching the point.
I went high, the cat's weight came up to meet it, and I redirected and drove the point into the chest cavity on the inside of the left foreleg.
The sound it made was very bad.
The spear wasn't going anywhere. Neither was I, because roughly three hundred and fifty pounds of dying predator was collapsing directly onto the shaft and my grip on it, and I made a frantic calculation about what happened to people who held on. I let go.
The second cat hit me from behind.
Not with claws—still no claws—but with its shoulder, and I went into the sand like I'd been struck with a wet sack of concrete. Sand in my mouth, sand everywhere. The cat was on top of me before I'd finished processing the fall, all of its weight pressing me flat into the arena floor, and I understood with a clear, problem-solving section of my brain that this was exactly how these things killed prey that was too large or too annoying to bring down clean.
Crush. Suffocate. Wait.
I couldn't breathe.
My tail was already moving.
The loops went around the animal's neck before I consciously directed them—some combination of instinct and the tail's own self-interest getting involved—and the cat changed tactics immediately, twisting to get purchase on it with its forepaws. My ribs were singing. The sand was in my mouth and my eyes and getting into places where I was going to be finding it for the next week.
The cat's paws found the tail.
It was stronger than me. Much stronger.
But the tail was stronger than the cat.
I felt the resistance spike as it hit the limits of what it could move against, felt the moment its efforts went from working to not working, and I pushed everything left in my circuit into the grip and held until I felt the snap.
Then the animal went very still and very heavy.
Getting it off me required both hands, both feet planted in the sand, and every drop of mana I had left cooked down into one desperate push through my legs and lower back. The crowd noise climbed as I shoved, strained, and ultimately won the argument with more than a hundred kilos of dead apex predator, emerging from underneath it on my hands and knees into the lights.
I have sand in my bra, was my first coherent thought. The grit and the boob sweat have found each other and made something worse than either of them individually.
I stood up slowly.
The crowd was doing something I hadn't expected, which was being extremely loud about a fight that had not featured any of the User theatrics or mechanical spectacle of everything before it. Someone near the tip chutes was audibly arguing with their neighbor about the appropriate amount. I caught one of the large Tokh saddle sections in my peripheral vision and found them watching with deliberate attentiveness and rhythmic clapping.
I coughed and spat sand.
Winnings came out to more than I'd expected—fight fee plus tips, and the tips had been enthusiastic. I stared at the receipt for a moment longer than was probably dignified.
They were waiting for me outside.
Vael had the expression she wore when something had gone exactly the way she'd wanted and she was doing a poor job of being modest about it, with her teeth proudly on display. Tax stood slightly apart from her, and I got the distinct sense the two of them had been talking while watching, because there was the conversational remnant of something recently concluded in the way they weren't quite looking at each other.
Tax looked at me.
Not the way he'd looked at me in the greenroom—doing structural load calculations. Slower. The kind of look that had stopped deciding things and moved on to noting them. His eye quills settled.
"I will consider," the translator said. "Become more capable."
He turned and walked away with the unhurried economy of motion that seemed to be his baseline state, and I watched him go.
"Well," I said.
Vael made a sound that was technically agreement.
"He's charming."
"He warmed to you considerably," she said, which I chose to believe.
We found our way back through the corridors and out into the late-evening heat of the subsector. I was carrying sand I'd be finding in my clothing for the foreseeable future, my ribs were going to be spectacular colors by morning, and I had managed to obtain a maybe from the most noncommittal recruit in the Ark.
I cycled my mana aggressively to try and expedite the recovery process and decided that counted as a win.
***
I woke up after what felt like only an hour or so of sleeping. Restless, more than a little sore, still tired. My mind wasn’t cooperating with my attempts to fall back asleep; it kept going over what Tax had said to me.
Become more capable.
It was, and was not, ambiguous at the same time. I, being the weakest link in the proposed chain, meant that the venture wasn’t worth his time. Not yet. The fact that I was the problem in the equation stung, but I didn’t get the impression when staring into those slitted eyes that it was said out of cruelty or malice.
I knew all too well what the issue was, from my countless hours Diving in WoD. Going on a Dive that was a little below your current abilities wasn’t too bad; you didn’t get as much benefit from it, but it was also easy, relative to your advancement. Lower risk, lower reward.
I was more than one tier below him, that was for certain. With larger gaps, things went from easier to trivial, and the time was simply better spent elsewhere. It wasn’t disinterested as much as it was a challenge.
Make it worth my time.
I sucked a breath in through my nostrils and sighed.
In some ways, I almost wished that I didn’t have the wealth of knowledge that I did in World of Divers. My feelings of weakness and uselessness were only compounded by firsthand knowledge of knowing what it was like to be stronger. At least, virtually stronger. As Vael had told me more than once, it wasn’t exactly a one-to-one.
I needed help. I needed to train, and train hard. I could keep doing things the way that I had been doing them, but it wasn’t optimal. As much as I didn’t want to have to attend some User school, it was almost certain that I’d be closing the gap between myself and the people I wanted to Dive with faster if I attended. I really didn’t want to have to go into debt or sign some kind of employment contract with a guild or corporation to back my funding in exchange for work.
Maybe Vael would have some better ideas.
My thoughts turned to the crimson-skinned woman. Her playful teasing in recent days lingered on my mind, as did her nibbling and licking on my fingertip at Bloodsands. My cheeks warmed at the memory. That one was going to stick with me for a good while, I could tell. There was something about the way her eyes were looking at me when she was doing it. Almost a different kind of challenge than the one Tax had leveled at me.
I was reminded of the conversation we’d had in the taxi rides to and from X-1, and I thought about what I knew about my ventures into learning their culture so far.
A thought crossed my mind, and I frowned, staring up at the dimly lit ceiling. I pulled out my slate and started searching through the ‘trix for more information on Sul’vari culture and practices.
It was hard to think about just how alien they were when they looked so similar to us. If you could see past the horns, bright colors, tails, and so on, it was easy to think that they were just people with a sort of strange skin coloration mutation.
My cheeks remained warm as I read helpful infographics and more detailed information on Sul’vari culture, sexuality, health, and anatomy. My wandering mind and curiosity took me down a related links rabbit hole of learning more than I’d intended to about interspecies relationship tips and tricks from questionable sources. A lump formed in my throat at some point. An uncomfortable realization, one that I found was more than a little distressing.
I’ve been a shit friend to her. She gave me all this help, free training and mentoring, and here I am, sleeping in her apartment and mooching off her hospitality while remaining so ignorant about her culture.
There was a melange of bundled and conflicting feelings in my chest. Fear and apprehension battled against warmth and excitement. With a frustrated sigh, I locked the screen of my slate and let it fall back to the mattress next to my pillow. The room was once again rendered in a state of dim half-light.
I closed my eyes and tried, unsuccessfully, to put the memory of sleeping between Vael and Lael out of my mind. I felt a semi-familiar sense of tension in my body, which coincided with a warmth and fullness in my lower abdomen. I let my fingertips graze the exposed skin of my abdomen and thighs. It was still surreal to me how soft and sensitive my skin was, and, if anything, it felt even more sensitive tonight. Tingles ran up and down my spine as I let my fingernails graze my skin. Nails that were getting rather long and in need of a trim.
I closed my eyes and relished the sensations coming from my body. My fingers continued to wander, one hand feeling the soft swell of my chest, the other lightly scratching at my lower abdomen.
What am I doing right now? I need to stop being a bad friend by being comfortable in my complacency.
I swallowed past the knot in my throat and slid out of bed. I was feeling jittery, nervous, and something else as I padded barefoot and silently out of the room I’d been staying in, through the living space, and to the doorway leading to Vael’s room.
I was annoyed at myself with how much I was avoiding my own feelings.
It wasn’t something else. I was hungering for contact and intimacy. It was horniness, plain and simple.
Her door was ajar, and her room had a similarly partly-lit-by-light-pollution dim glow. I hesitated another moment, then lightly pressed my fingertips against the door, which opened without protest.
I could see the light partially defining the soft contours of her nude body. She was sleeping on her back, the tip of her tail twitching where it was peeking out from under the sheets that only partially covered her lower body.
My heart was pounding in my chest as I approached.
It’s not too late to back out. She’s still asleep.
Fight or flight was tugging me in different directions.
Fuck that.
I noticed that her room smelled lightly of spice and incense as I slid into bed next to her, as carefully as I could. My desire not to wake her was still guiding my instincts.
I gulped as she shifted and stirred some.
She’s your friend, not a portal guardian.
Her glowing orange eyes blinked and opened, and I woke her up when I climbed over her prone form and straddled her lower half.
”Kiera?” She asked,
I gave her the line I’d looked up on my slate for this moment.
(I want to share closeness with you.)
Her bright orange, glowing eyes grew as wide as saucers underneath me, and she went completely still. Her chest heaved once, then twice, and she made a strained choking sound.
Then she burst out loud with howling peals of laughter.
My inexplicable confusion slowly morphed into a dawning realization that I’d made a total fool of myself. My cheeks burned like embers, and I went to shift off her. Her hands circled my wrists, positioned on either side of her, and stopped me.
She fought to regain her composure. “No, please. Don’t go. I’m sorry for laughing, it was just a very funny mispronunciation.”
I looked off to the side, still feeling ashamed of myself.
Vael cleared her throat and said what I thought I’d said.
(I want to share closeness with you.)
I repeated it back to her, as we’d been doing.
”Perfect!” She beamed up at me, the corners of her eyes wet and glistening, and a wide smile exposing her fangs.
”…What did I say originally?”
Vael chuffed and chortled a few more times. She took several deep, deliberate breaths before answering.
“It doesn’t translate precisely, but it was essentially ‘let’s make fucking.’”
Now it was my turn to go still. I felt a sense of growing dread.
She smiled up at me. “It was just a mispronunciation; they’re related words.”
My heart was racing in my chest. I was focusing my attention not precisely on her face, but on her aura surrounding her face. It was swirling with color-scents, some that were somewhat familiar things I’d noticed in recent days. Her thumbs rubbed the insides of my wrists softly.
Slowly, but insistently, I pulled my wrists away from her grip, and I saw a flicker of emotion—regret, maybe—flash through her face. I repositioned my hands up higher, leaning over more and bringing my face down closer to hers. My still-sore ribs hummed in protest. I could feel the tip of her tail flitting back and forth rapidly against mine. My stupid chest made contact between us well before anything else did, and only the thin, stretchy ribbed fabric of my tank top separated the two of us.
She was once again looking up at me, wide-eyed, and it was hard to tell in the poor lighting, but I thought she might have been blushing quite intensely.
”I’m sorry that I’ve been a bad friend to you, Vael,” I whispered to her.
”Kiera, you know that doesn’t both—“ she started to protest.
I silenced her by placing my lips on hers and taste greeting her, softly at first, then with building intensity. With my chest mostly propped up by the mass of boob piled between both of us, I shifted my weight off my hands and onto my chest and elbows. It allowed me to bring my fingers up and tease at the ridged length of her long ears.
She shivered under me, and the synesthesia I was learning was my mana sense fed me strange sensations from Vael’s aura. The scent-taste of damp air after a heavy rainfall. A pressure pulse of a heartbeat that I could feel in my jaw muscles. A metallic flavor, subtle, but not unpleasant. I noted that it spiked and intensified when I did certain things.
A caress to the earlobe. Grazing the nape with my teeth. Intertwining fingers and holding hands palm-to-palm. Nibbling the tip of her nose. It also intensified when she did things, too. Gripping my hips and squeezing, or when she sank her fingers into the soft, yielding weight of my chest.
There was a moment when I was on top of her, after the sensations of apprehension and nervousness had faded, and after the feeling of uncomfortable fullness shifted into one of sparking, pleasurable tingles coming from my lower belly and groin. She was once again under me, and I was riding her while we held hands with our fingers interwoven.
I felt her mana pulsating through her circuit, like a drummer beating a rhythm against the membranes of her palm locus points. I could feel her mana, just on the other side of my own, hot, nipping at nerves in a way that edged on burning. Powerful in the sheer volume and intensity.
I had an idea in that moment that popped up unbidden into my head, and being as helplessly into the moment as I was, I decided to act on it without giving it any deeper thought. I pushed and guided a powerful gush of my mana down my right arm, up against my palm locus, and then—against Vael’s palm, and her locus.
She shuddered underneath me and cried out, an unfiltered exclamation of ecstasy. I felt a sense of acceptance, and my mana started to freely flow into her circuit through our clasped hands, and a moment later, I felt her burning hot mana pressing against my left hand. I relaxed and let it enter me, and it gushed into my circuit.
It was a powerful flow, searingly hot, like the sensation of basking in the warmth of the campfire in my first dive. It flowed up my arm and into my torso, where it seemed to concentrate in my chest and lower belly. That area was already brimming with sensations that were driving me a little wild beforehand, and the influx of Vael’s mana in the same area just amplified and intensified the sensations.
I got an astonishingly potent wave of sensation from her through my aura sense, and it clicked.
That’s arousal, or maybe more specifically, sexual pleasure.
I did what anyone would do, and I tried my best to maximize that sensation in Vael, as often and intensely as possible.
We got very little in the way of deep sleep that night. Short naps between repeated, insistent, and near-frantic bouts of pleasure sharing.
I learned a whole lot of things. About Vael, and about myself, too. I learned that there are a lot of creative uses and applications of inhuman anatomy, like tails, and that Sul’vari refractory periods were more of a suggestion to alternate methods of sharing pleasure than an enforced time out. I learned the pleasure of a woman is unlike the pleasure of a man, different, better in some ways, worse in others. The fact that there wasn’t simply an off switch after completion was both amazing and problematic, because it could just… keep going. Over and over again.
I also learned that there’d been a sensation I hadn’t quite pegged simmering in my body, and I knew what to associate it with now. I had yet another form of hunger, and like my tail’s hunger, it was also powerful and insistent.
After passing out after losing count of individual instances of sharing pleasure in the small hours of the morning, both Vael and I slept soundly wrapped up in a tangle of limbs and hair, tails and claws.
I awoke to the scent of delicious food and a moderate amount of soreness in several specific areas. I started cycling my mana within my circuit and pressing it out into the areas that were protesting. Then I climbed out of bed and tried to find my clothing. My shorts were in the tangle of sheets and blankets at the foot of the bed and partially on the floor. My tank top was hanging from the headboard. I couldn’t find my underwear, but I had the feeling that I wouldn’t want to put those back on, anyway, so I just went commando after a visit to Vael’s bathroom.
When I came back out, scratching at my scalp and yawning, I realized something that I’d seen at some point, made a mental note of, and then promptly forgotten about.
Vael had a fucking stripper pole in the corner of her bedroom with plenty of space between it and the two nearest walls, and there were waist-high railings on the walls, both of which had two-meter-wide mirrors on them.
I suppose she is a sex worker, but still…
I made my way out into the living area, guided by the heavenly scent of freshly-brewed coffee.
Vael was in the kitchen, and she was practically glowing. I don’t think I’d seen her as peppy, vibrant, and happy-looking as she was now.
”You seem awfully pleased with yourself,” I commented, following up with “And you never mentioned having a literal stripper pole.”
She turned around, clad only in an extremely flattering thong and tee, holding a coffee cup in one hand. She held up two fingers at me.
“Two things. One, it’s not what you think it is. I do know how to pole dance, but I have it mostly for training purposes. Two, I’m not pleased with myself, you absolute idiot.”
I was momentarily taken aback. She slapped a palm to her face and groaned, mumbling something about her not being awake enough for this.
I felt quite lost at the moment.
She huffed and gave me a look. “I don’t know how you can be so completely unaware of things like this. Sometimes it’s cute, and sometimes it’s frustrating. Let me spell it out for you.”
She put her coffee cup down and approached at a rapid clip, like she was going to grab me. I took a step back, then two, as she loomed over me, and my tail and back collided with the wall behind me. Her palms slapped into the wall on either side of my head, and she was leaning down to be eye level with me.
”For someone who had their first experiences as a woman last night and this morning, I have to say I find it extremely annoying,” she growled at me. I swallowed hard.
“Do you understand what you did? Do you have any idea?”
I shook my head, fractions of a centimeter from side to side.
That got another growl out of her, and a display of fangs dangerously close to my face. “You’re a disaster. A menace. It’s good that you’re going to become a Diver because there’d be trouble, otherwise.” I stared up at her glowing eyes.
”How do I put this? I’m not pleased with myself, you made me orgasm my brains out and somehow pushed most of my buttons on the first try like some kind of cosmic accident.”
I didn’t think my face could get any hotter than it was right now; it felt like Vael’s fire-aspected mana was roasting me from the chest up right now. Sort of like it had last night, come to think of it.
I didn’t know what to do; my mind said one thing, my gut said another, and I wound up going with my gut. So I closed the centimeters between us in an instant and stuck my tongue directly into her mouth.
She tasted of freshly-brewed medium roast, and she didn’t seem to mind the invasion.
Not one bit.