Chapter 7

Ms. Lopez clicked her tongue as she surveyed the sword, Haldar, and Arthur. “No fighting,” she said. “This is your only warning. Now get to class.”

“Short and sweet!” Arthur said, “I love that.”

“Mr. Hall, while your backchat is indeed a stark contrast to your mostly silent peers, it is not a welcome one. Kindly shut up.”

Ms. Lopez pulled one of her glossy magazines out from her bag, flipped it open, and started to read.

The discussion was over. Haldar left first, melding into his waiting group, which soon boomed with outrage about what had just happened.

The sword and Arthur walked together.

“Why did you say it was a mistake?” The sword asked.

“Becuase it was, dingus,” Arthur said. “I was going to be unpopular no matter what I did. You just tied yourself to me.”

“Oh,” the sword said. “I don’t care about being popular.”

“Yes you do,” Arthur said. “You care about getting a wielder don’t you?”

“Of course,” the sword was surprised Arthur even had to ask.

“Well, it’ll be much harder to get a wielder now than it was before. I’m guessing everyone thought you were the silent type, but there are a lot of silent types at Crossroads, for all they knew you were the silent cool type. You know, the kind that gets laid.

“Now they know you’re a silent creep who defends [Demon Lords]. Every group needs an outsider, and when everyone is as screwed up as this class is, they need an outsider real bad. You just nominated yourself in a big way.”

The sword was disturbed. He hadn’t considered the possibility his being able to get a wielder would be tied to his social status. Swords didn’t usually have social statuses.

But he understood Arthur’s argument. Understood it, and wanted to object.

But aside from the two repeaters, no one had talked to him in a whole week, Arthur might be right. None of the wielder candidates had even looked athim.

What was he supposed to do now?

“Why’d you bother, anyway?” Arthur asked.

The sword didn’t understand the question and didn’t respond.

“I mean, did you really think Ms. Lopez wasn’t going to stop him?”

“I guess I didn’t think at all,” the sword said. “I didn’t think he should punch you.”

Arthur blinked, then said, “Yeah, it was pretty obvious you weren’t thinking. That’s probably your favorite state huh? Just being as close to a mindless hunk of metal as possible.”

“Well…yeah,” the sword said.

“This school is so screwed up,” Arthur said, and then they were at the classroom door. They could sit wherever they wanted to in mathematics, and Arthur followed the sword to the row nearest the window, and took the seat next to him.

The sword, now that he was watching for it, did notice that the rest of the class looked at him more now, and not in a friendly way.

Arthur had found a table by himself, which the sword sat at. Arthur shot him a look of disgust when the sword sat down across from him, but didn’t tell him to leave.

This seemed to cause more glances from the others, which continued as they went to their afternoon class.

This afternoon would be a physical lesson day, which the sword preferred marginally over the practical life lessons. They were with Ms. Lopez again for the physical activity lessons, she had changed from her neat suit into her matching sweats and hoody. But instead of stopping at the green as they normally did, she led them around behind the main building to a large fenced in rectangle of bare ground.

“Now that you’re a little more used to these bodies, we’re going to change things on you again,” Ms. Lopez said. “The regular exercise days will continue, but they’ll be interspersed with days here on the court, where we’ll have you work with your skills.”

A murmur rippled through the class. They’d been told expressly that using skills was not permitted on the campus.

“This is the only space where you will be allowed to use your skills,” Ms. Lopez said. “But we would like you to get used to using them in your current bodies, mostly so that you never use them on accident. That is the sort of situation that leads to catastrophe in the wider world.”

Their first task was simple. Ms. Lopez set up a wooden dummy. They would use whatever skills they had on the wooden dummy.

“I don’t care if you’ve got healing, fireball, double strike, or illuminate. Just use it on the dummy,” Ms. Lopez said in her bored tone.

Despite what she’d said, when it wasn’t your turn for the dummy, they were supposed to be alternating running and walking laps around the fenced in area.

Predictably, Haldar’s group volunteered to go first.

The rest of the class began a reluctant jog to the sounds of mighty grunts and battle cries, occasionally prematurely cut off by less than manly squeaks. While they started in one large group, it quickly began to disintegrate, as the more athletic pulled ahead, and the less athletic drifted apart into groups of four or five, interspersed with loners and pairs.

The sword and Arthur were one such pair, near the very back.

“You moved so quickly the other night, I was sure you’d be better at this,” Arthur observed between puffs.

“No stamina,” the sword said, even a few steps in and he was sweating. Truly, his least favorite part about having a body was the sweat.

Arthur didn’t seem to be doing much better.

They reached their first lap and switched to a walk, giving the sword time to catch his breath and look at the center of the court where the dummy was. Most students either had some kind of basic magic skill, a weak fireball or water shot, or a basic weapons skill. For the weapon skills, Ms. Lopez had provided wooden weapons, really just long poles with tape at one end for grip. Variations on cleave for the most part, with one or two quick shots, awkwardly demonstrated by throwing one of the wooden poles, when really a bow and arrow was probably what was needed.

Most of the students missed the target, which surprised the sword. “Shouldn’t they be able to hit a wooden dummy?” he asked Arthur. “It’s not like it’s moving.”

“Who knows,” Arthur shrugged. “Maybe they’re all just used to having heroic buff their skills. I bet half of them never even had to use whatever piddling little thing they’ve been left with. I don’t know how it was for you, but I felt like it was almost every six months a new [Hero] would show up at my castle swinging around celestial storm and inferno like they their dicks just doubled in size.”

As always when it came to discussions of time, the sword had nothing much to contribute. But it seemed plausible. From what he had gleaned, it did seem most of the students had been [Heroes] in addition to their other classes. He had known in a vague way that being a [Hero] meant you had other skills, just like any other class, but he hadn’t realized how much of a benefit it was, if it also meant you unlocked other skills faster as well.

He couldn’t help but pay special attention when the wielder candidates took their turns. The boy, the strongest one, muttered something under his breath that no one could hear, and was wreathed in shadowy fire that licked up and down his body. He didn’t even take his hands from his pockets, but the head of the dummy burst into dark flame anyway. Without looking, Ms. Lopez raised a small fire extinguisher to douse the flame, and waved him away.

The laughing girl was one of the weapon users. She picked up the biggest pole in the pile, swung it, and laughed at herself when she was too weak to hold the thing upright one handed. She was still laughing as she rushed for the dummy, supporting the pole with both hands. The sword and Arthur happened to be passing by, but even so, everyone heard her cheerful invocation: sever.

Very few, based on the gasps, were able to track the pole as she swung it into the dummy, separating the head from the rest of it. The head thumped into the ground a few feet away. Ms. Lopez looked at it for a moment, then turned to the girl. “There’s a spare dummy in the shed. You can run for it.”

The girl laughed to herself as she went to the little shed in the corner of the yard at a slow jog.

When it was her turn, the girl with amber eyes, Mei, walked slowly up to Ms. Lopez, whispered something in her ear, then stepped back, waited.

“Really?” Ms. Lopez asked.

The girl nodded her head earnestly.

“Alright, next!” Ms. Lopez said, and dismissed her. The girl with amber eyes returned to the middle of her pack, walking even though this was supposed to be one of the running laps.

And then Ms. Lopez called out “Mr. Smith,” for the second time, and the sword remembered that that was his name. Arthur waved cheerily at him as he left, which the sword didn’t respond to.

Ms. Lopez looked at him warily as he approached the wooden dummy. “I’m guessing you don’t want to do this. It’ll be fine with me if you don’t. We aren’t having Mr. Hall do it either, but Ms. Huang also didn’t, so at least it won’t just be the two of you.”

“No, I can do it,” the sword said. Ms. Lopez looked at him again. “Are you sure?”

“Yes,” he’d remembered, fighting the lizardman, that he had skills he used independently anyway. It would not be so unnatural. And besides, if the others saw him, they might be more interested in becoming his wielder. It had occurred to him watching all of their weak skills that perhaps none of the other candidates had an appraiser skill like Arthur’s, they might not know what he was. And, with their weak skills, they would be even more interested in what he could do.

This was his chance to show them.

He stepped a little ways from the dummy, and invoked snuff, stretching out his hand in the direction of the school building. They were far from any obvious light sources out here, but he should be able to grab some of the lights from the nearer classrooms.

Several windows facing them went dark, triggering shouts of surprise from inside the building.

It was much more light than he’d been expecting.

It gathered in his palm, growing larger, and larger, until it was nearly the size of the dummy, whirring in a way that generated a gust of wind that rippled out from him as the ball turned to its usual black color.

One of the students screamed.

The ball kept getting larger. More yells from the school building, shouts of “What’s going on out there!” and “Someone turn the lights back on!” So much yelling, couldn’t they all stop yelling? Then the sword would have the time to figure this out.

“Just throw it, door boy!” Ms. Lopez roared over the cacophony of sound.

A clear command.

He flung the ball in the direction of the dummy, only Ms. Lopez was now standing in front of it, her face grim, both hands crackling with golden light.

She punched the black sphere, releasing that golden light in crackling rays across the surface.

There was a huge explosion. Dust and splinters of wood went everywhere, slicing the sword above one eye, and blasting the other with grit and dirt.

When he could see again Ms. Lopez was still standing, her neat hair slightly askew, a single long strand falling in front of her face. A quick glance showed students similarly disheveled, but no one badly hurt. The lights were all back on in the main building, though the windows were now crowded by curious faces trying to see what had happened.

“Well you failed that test,” Ms. Lopez said to the sword. “Now you’re Cadmarius’ problem.”