11. welcome to outlander school! Hisui

Once it was confirmed that we would participate in a mock battle, Connie begged for mercy at the front office, but there was none. Some outlanders were already summoning lightning bolts and fireballs. Some punched stone walls. Then we had Hisui covering the dummy in shiitake and Aoko making it rain. Yukimura, who’d done nothing but sit on a(nother) pile of shiitake, said, “You guys look like you’re gardening.”

“At least we’re doing something,” Aoko retorted.

“Yeah. Gardening.”

“How’s that thousand blades of frost attack going?”

Yukimura summoned a single flake on his hand. He looked smug about it too. “I’m a healer, not DPS. I’m here for emotional support.” I was beginning to think he’d chosen that role as an excuse and I strongly suspected I wasn’t the only one. When his TTRPG character wasn’t a genocidal barbarian, he went for supportive roles, only to never support.

Aoko rolled her eyes. “Hey, Tissu, you’ll help us, right?” Tissu nodded, hand covering her face. She did that a lot, especially around Yukimura. She kept daintily blinking too. Aoko added, “Will you be our DP… uh, attacker?”

Tissu waggled her finger.

“...wuh? Why not?”

Tissu pointed at me. One two three four five six seven eight eyes on me. They looked as baffled as I was. What did she want me to do? Stab a fireball? She punched and kicked at the air, confirming this tomfoolery.

“We’re fucked,” Yukimura said.

Connie returned with more news about our fuckery. He was hopping so fast he was buzzing. “Great news! Great news! The mock battles have been suspended for the day!” He made a little clap with his paws. I liked how the general response was relief. “...albeit this happened due to a theriantrope invading our premises. Those are the bad news.”

“Ah, I read about them on the pamphlet,” mumbled Aoko. “Are they really that dangerous?”

“To outlanders, yes, though they also have a taste for Igasu…”

“Oh, no… but you guys can just revive, right?”

Connie smiled. “You can. When we die, our souls swim back to the stream. We appear elsewhere, with a new body and different memories.”

That explained why there were so many Igasu frantically hopping around. One of them had even hidden into their shell. “I’m sorry to hear that…”

“Don’t be. We all end up the same way, anyway. All of us.”

And with that morbid thought, Connie herded us to one of the anti-theriantrope shelters, which was to say a gray half-circle where we all had to curl into a ball to fit. Aoko kept pressing her skirt to her legs lest she show anything, but to Hisui clothes and nakedness were naught but social constructs. “Why can’t dragons just eat the theriantrope?” Asked Hisui. “With the way you guys are looking for it and how you mentioned that they eat Igasu, I don’t think they’re that big.”

“They’re not,” Connie replied. “They’re a bit larger than the average outlander. Even then, dragonkin in their true form can perish from a single attack.”

Tissu pointed at her, then shook her head.

“Strength is hindered by recklessless, as you’ve demonstrated yourself.”

She pouted.

“While most hate outlanders, a few have… commuted with your kind. Crossbreeding has led to an interesting blend of hybrids with outlander bodies and theriantrope features.”

“Catgirls,” Yukimura mumbled. We didn’t even know how theriantropes looked, but that made perfect sense to me, although… while it didn’t surprise me at all that someone would want to fuck a furry, didn’t that mean that people had been getting summoned for a while know? In ‘batches’?

Come to think of it, if there were no humans before the first outlander on Korova, how could Tissu, Sen and dragonkin in general transform to resemble us? Had they learned? Had they had to learn?

While Connie described theriantropes and confirmed that they were basically furries, Yukimura viciously launched thousand blades of frost attacks to Aoko, who just wiped the flakes away from her face.

A while passed, and then another, and then a dragonkin knocked on the door to tell us that they hadn’t been able to find the theriantrope, but that it seemed to have left. Nonetheless, due to popular demand, mock battles were postponed until tomorrow anyway. “Until then,” Connie said, “We will relentlessly practice. We will exercise creativity. We shall combine wits and might. We shall not end up in last place again.”

“Again?” That was Yukimura.

Connie pantomimed a chin scratch. “Yukimuraisami, Kawakamiaoko, you will try to defend the prion. Ishidaseishin, Sakurahisui, you will try to destroy it. Please abstain from using physical attacks. The point of this exercise is to get a better hold of your magic.”

“What do you mean, again?”

The following pause was very dramatic; Connie even turned around, paws on its back, staring at a perpetually cloudy sky. “My last party was the worst out of their batch, as was the one before that…” Needless to say, morale dropped. “...yet that means nothing. I choose outlanders the way I do for a reason. Other recruiters might cheat and give their group prodigious magic, but can those humans master it? No, they cannot; only wit and might combined can. Best to harvest real aptitude.”

…harvest, he said.

Tissu smirked behind her sleeve.

:–<> –:

The next dummy was fleshy and disturbing. Aoko gagged. “This is so Yukimuraisami can practice healing,” Connie explained. “Healing a wooden target won’t yield any results. Hopefully, it’ll also lessen the urge to use physical attacks against it.”

It really did, yeah. The dummy was pulsing. I would’ve rather screamed attack names than touch that thing. “Who starts?” Asked Hisui. “Me?” Answered Hisui. “Me! Shroombeam!”

The fleshy vessel was swallowed by shiitake. I could see hope slowly leaving Connie’s eyes. Depressingly, there were no pebbles I could use to pretend like I’d thrown one as part of my magic, and the arena seemed to be made of glass or marble or something like that. I wanted to see if I could tap into that… that thing again. First, speed. Then, strength. Now… accuracy?

One of the mushrooms exploded. “Ha! You guys thought it was just mushrooms again, but they’re bombs!” Another one followed. And that was it. “...in my defense, this is harder than it looks.”

“I get it,” Aoko said as she raised the sleeves of her tunic. “It’s like you can picture it happening in your head, but you can’t bring it to life. Like your hands and brain don’t match. Ah, like drawing!” This epiphany led to her ‘sketching’ a thin blue shield around the dummy.

Connie clapped. He was regaining hope. “Great job, Kawakamiaoko!”

Aoko gave a giddy grin.

If Hisui tried to hide the scowl, she wasn’t trying very well. “Let’s see if it can survive the attack that silenced a dragon.”

Hisui’s vines bounced off the shield.

“Pathetic,” Yukimura said, like he wasn’t the most useless out of us by far. “How are you misusing the status effect element this badly? I thought you were one of us.”

“I-I am, though!”

“No you’re not. What’s the common sense thing to do if you get the plant element? Huh?”

Status effects. Hisui looked around as though she’d find the answer written somewhere.

“Whatever.” Yukimura punted the shield. “Someone hurt this thing so I can heal it.”

Hisui didn’t ‘me me me!’ again. With the way she held her hands behind her back, I wasn’t sure if they shook due to panic or the sheer strength of her grip.

Wait, panic?

Why?

I would’ve dismissed the notion had she not turned to look at me like that–wide-eyed, pale, completely at odds with the endearingly oblivious fool I’d seen before. She’d cracked before, sure, but…

…ugh.

“Strategy meeting,” I said, then dragged her away. Nobody stopped us, so I supposed it’d be fine. The arena was suffocating, overly crowded, overly bright. It was thumb pressing against my throat. She’d flinched when I’d seized her wrist, but who cared, who cared.

There had to be a resting area somewhere, right? Anywhere.

“Where are we going?” Hisui asked.

Since I couldn’t shrug, nod or shake my head without coming across as genuinely mentally unwell, I said, “The,” then choked on a proton. The sheer amount of people was nauseating. I’d been avoiding thinking all this while, but at this rate–

No.

At this rate I’d–

No.

“Let’s use the furry shelter,” she said.

I stopped. It took a second to realize that she meant the anti-theriantrope bubble thing. “Oh, but… how are we supposed to–”

“Get in?” She smirked, though it came out wobbly. “I memorized the pattern Connie used when we got it.”

But of course she did.

The shelters were under the stone bleachers, each protected by what resembled a lock screen to an uncanny degree. The pattern for Connie’s ‘lock screen’ was a C facing the opposite way. Very nice, amazing. And then we were in, and it was dark, and small, and so quiet breathing felt like screaming.

“Do you hate me?” She asked.

“Um. No.”

“Why not?”

Oh dear.