Captain grinned, tossing the waterskin towards the wall and rolling her shoulders.

“Let’s have a bout, then. You’ve been putting the girl through the mangle, so at least show her what she’s headed to.” The gargantuan woman pulled the war hammer hanging off of her back, twirling it one-handed like she was holding a twig instead of a massive wrought steel bar. “Been a while since we had one, anyway.”

Well now. That sounded like it had potential. Seeing the Knight getting smashed by that hammer a few times would do wonders for my mood. The green-eyed man snorted.

“Fair enough. Terms?”

“Let’s keep Names out of it,” Captain replied. “Would defeat the point to go all-out.”

...

“On my mark,” she announced. A heartbeat passed, then she brought down her hand.

I blinked – probably because the lieutenant had brought it up in the first place – and in the fragment of a moment where my eyes closed, Captain crossed half the field. She left behind foot tracks and a spray of dirt where’d she been standing an instant before, barreling through the distance almost faster than I could see. Black had not yet moved, standing still with his shield up and his sword in mid-line, but the moment Captain got close enough to bring her hammer down he calmly sidestepped around the strike and pivoted so he’d be facing her back. The armoured woman’s weight and momentum carried her forward even after she landed on the ground, carrying her a few feet further down the field as she turned to face the Knight.

“Shit,” I whispered. “Did she really just jump thirty feet forward in heavy plate?”

“Quick on the offensive, today,” Abase noted, unruffled by what we’d just witnessed. “She must have been getting bored.”

“Weren’t they supposed to not use their Names?” I asked him. “What she just did is, like, physically impossible for a normal person. Just seeing it would give my numbers teacher a headache.”

“They’re not using them actively,” the lieutenant clarified. “Lord Black’s shadow isn’t moving and Captain is, well, still using her hammer.”

He didn’t elaborate further on either of those interesting tidbits, and I decided not to press him any further – not because I wasn’t curious, but because what the people in question were getting up to had claimed my full attention. Captain was attacking relentlessly, swinging the two-handed war hammer like she couldn’t feel the weight of it at all. And yet, she wasn’t the one controlling the flow of the fight. Black moved little and carefully, rarely more than a step at a time: he stepped barely out of the arc of her strikes and then swung around so he was facing her back. He’d yet to attack, but just the threat of him doing so was forcing Captain to keep moving. The sight of them was almost comical, from where I stood: the two of them were dressed in similar-looking plate, sure, but the olive-skinned woman stood at least three feet taller than him and had broader shoulders to boot. Neither of them wore helmets, so I could see that while a faint smile tugged at Captain’s lips my teacher’s face was expressionless. His pale skin made it creepy: he looked like he was wearing a mask made of marble. After another miss, Captain took a step back and raised her hammer high.

“That should do for the warm up,” she grunted before striking the ground.

There was a dull boom and the ground shook like it had been hit by a catapult stone: dirt sprayed everywhere, clouding my sight of the battlefield for a moment. When they came into sight again, Black was ducking under a vicious-looking swing. He ventured a kick to her knee but Captain danced back, the hammer coming back to swat him on the backswing. His shield came up to take the hit but the metal crumpled under the force and the impact was enough to throw him back a few feet.

“You’re getting slow in your old age,” she told him.

The dark-haired man shrugged and discarded the now-useless scutum. “You’re getting mouthy in yours,” he noted amusedly.

And then he went on the attack.

I’d seen him move like that once back in Laure, when he’d decided that stabbing me in the chest was an acceptable way to end a conversation, but seeing it from a distance was an entirely different matter. When Captain was at her quickest I could still make out a blur, but with him it was like he just… appeared in another place. Stepping inside the warrior woman’s guard almost absent-mindedly, he swept his blade across the space where her throat had been a moment earlier: if she hadn’t taken a step back at the last moment, her blood would have been spilling in the dirt. She brought down her hammer’s handle on his shoulder, but he spun around and smashed the pommel of his sword into her elbow. She grunted and the impact loosened her grip, but Black was already moving again. He spun again and stomped down on the back of her knee, forcing it down as his blade went for the side of her neck. Captain managed to bring up the hammer’s handle at the last moment and block it, but hers was not a weapon made for defence and it showed. Not that it mattered, given their difference in strength – the instant she got her footing back, Captain pushed him off without any visible effort.

It was what he’d been waiting for, unfortunately for her.

He drew away as she pushed, letting her pass through and steadying his arm in the high-line guard he’d spent half an hour showing me earlier: he thrust straight into the back of her neck. It was a killing blow, or it would have been if he’d pushed it all the way through. Instead he stopped after pricking the skin, stepping back and sheathing his sword with a flourish as Captain cursed in Taghrebi. I recognized the plural of goats somewhere in there, and to be honest I was kind of glad I had no idea what the rest of it meant.

“And that’s a kill,” Black spoke, the lack of smugness in his tone so flamboyant it looped around back to smug.

- Book 1, Chapter 7: Sword