Chương 35: Weapon Selection

The unique thing about the exotic animals community is that you have folk from all walks of life as part of it. It's like a random mishmash of people with nothing in common except for the fact that we'll kick anyone's ass if they try to steal one of our partners. There are students, professors, council members, tribe leaders, Task Force members, and even people like me.

- Graceless Abram, 26th Universal Leader of The Freeks The last few days had been quietly eventful, the way the things that mattered often were, arriving without announcing themselves. The tagging had taken ten minutes and produced no fanfare whatsoever. Two interfaces, a confirmation, and then Vixen pocketing her hands and telling him that was that. He had expected something more ceremonial. He had not said this aloud. What he had joined turned out to be a fact about the world that now applied to him.

There was no forum, nobody to meet, nothing to attend. Members recognised each other at close range and otherwise left each other alone. If a partner was taken without permission, an alert went out with a last known location, and the whole community would converge to either find it or take revenge.

"There are people in it who'd kill each other on sight," Vixen had said, in the bright tone she saved for her worst information.

"Nothing to do with the animals. Old business, family business, faction business. Doesn't matter. Everyone's a member in exactly the same standing, and nobody does anything about it." Kara turned that over.

"So if two members of opposing factions meet?" She shrugged.

"It's happened. One of them walks away." A beat, and something in her voice flattened out.

"If the partner's still alive after that, it goes to a sanctuary." Kara had thought about this for a while and concluded it was still better than the alternative. Vixen had been more useful on the practical side. Tips on feeding schedules, on reading distress signals in young animals, on what counted as normal development for creatures with no documented normal.

He had been reaching out to her regularly, perhaps a little too regularly, and had recently noticed her replies getting a little clipped, still helpful, but starting to count the questions. He had resolved to lay off for a while. He was confident enough with Waggy now to manage without a consultant on call. Waggy, for his part, was thriving by any measure Kara could apply. The sharp stub had grown another half-inch. The blunt one was catching up. The ridge pair remained dormant and mysterious.

He ate anything placed in front of him, slept in elaborate configurations, and had recently begun making a sound that was not quite a growl and not quite a purr but seemed to function as both depending on context. The bond sat warm and steady at the edge of everything, which Kara had stopped noticing the way you stopped noticing your own heartbeat.

He was on the stadium grounds for his first practical class of Weapon Arts when the question of what he actually wanted to do with a weapon presented itself as a problem requiring a real answer. Instructor Ken Sugihara had asked everyone to choose their preferred weapon. This had seemed straightforward until Kara stood in front of the options and realised he did not have one.

He had trained for three years in an environment that was trying to kill him in a variety of creative ways, and the solution in every case had been his body - faster, more adaptive, better at reading what was coming. Weapons had not featured. He was beginning to feel this was a gap. He walked the length of the available options while the students who knew what they wanted collected their choices and the instructor circled the grounds. Swords, spears, staves, knives, various configurations of ranged equipment.

All of it equally unfamiliar, equally neutral in his hands when he picked things up and held them. He did what he usually did when facing an unfamiliar problem: he thought about what he actually wanted. Ranged damage dealer. Obviously. He wanted to hit things from a distance, which was a position that had the considerable advantage of not being near the things he was hitting.

This was the kind of strategic thinking that three years of near-death experiences had refined into something very clear and simple - getting hurt was bad, and distance was the primary tool for not getting hurt. He held this thought for approximately four seconds before his own recent history assembled itself in his mind and gave him a look.

He had survived a Jupine constrictor, a Martian porcupine spike through the forearm, a broken ankle courtesy of two D-grade jackals, and a dungeon that his own mind filed under "formative." In none of these situations had distance been a reliable option. He had, if anything, demonstrated a remarkable talent for being immediately adjacent to the thing that was currently trying to take a pound out of him. The ranged damage dealer logic was not wrong exactly.

It was just possibly optimistic about his ability to maintain range. He kept walking. He almost passed it. It was sitting at the end of the shield section, which was where he had been heading before he dismissed shields on the grounds of being clunky and poorly suited to covert movement. The item in question was not a shield. It had an unusual handle extending perpendicularly from it, long and slightly curved, and the material of the canopy was leather-ish rather than reinforced plate.

The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon. An umbrella. He stopped and picked it up. It was lighter than it looked. The handle had good grip, the kind that came from design rather than accident. He turned it over. Whatever the leatherish material was, it was not ordinary leather. It had a faint structural quality when he pressed it that plain leather did not have. He was still working out what to make of it when a voice arrived from behind him.

"An interesting choice." Instructor Ken Sugihara was a compact, bald, well-built man of middling age with an Area 10 accent and the settled bearing of a man who had decided long ago that no situation was worth rushing. He was looking at the umbrella in Kara's hands with an expression that was either professional assessment or restrained excitement. Possibly both.

"Do you have experience using umbrellas?" Kara opened his mouth, and what came out was, "It rains quite a lot where I'm from." He paused, thinking over what he had just said.

"Gets very sunny too," he added, deciding that momentum was the only weapon he had available at the moment.

"So most people carry one when they go out." He heard how this sounded. He was fairly certain the instructor had been asking about combat applications. He was composing a follow-up when Instructor Ken laughed - a full, emphatic sound, three syllables, hua-hua-hua - and waved a hand.

"I suppose that's as good an answer as any. I was hoping for someone this year, but looks like I'm out of luck as usual." The smile remained but sharpened slightly.

"Umbrellas are difficult to master. Not much direct use at this level against heavy hitters. But you should see what they can do at higher grades. Very versatile, offense and defense both." Kara looked at the canopy. He remained unconvinced.

"I don't really see how this would hold up against anyone serious." Instructor Ken picked up the umbrella.

"A fair concern. Let me show you something. Give me your hardest punch. Any angle." This was an unusual request from an instructor, but Kara had received more unusual requests from people with authority over him, and he had learned that going along with demonstrations was generally more informative than declining them. He wound up and delivered a solid punch. His fist connected cleanly. The umbrella gave. He felt the impact transfer completely, the canopy folding back under the force without resistance.

"Again," said Instructor Ken. He punched again. Same result. The instructor repeated the instruction. Kara repeated the punch. This went on for a dozen repetitions, and at no point did it feel like anything was being achieved. His knuckles didn't hurt. The umbrella kept giving. He was not reaching the instructor. He was also, he noticed, getting tired.

"Has your opinion changed?"

"No," Kara said honestly.

"I've connected every time and I feel fine. I don't see what I've accomplished."

"Good. Now look at my feet." Kara looked. Plain ground. Unmarked, undisturbed, the instructor's feet exactly where they had been at the start of the exercise. He had delivered twelve solid punches and the man had not moved a centimetre. He looked up. Instructor Ken smiled.

"The umbrella is not meant to cause direct harm. What it is meant to do is to redirect force, occupy attention, and create openings." He turned his other hand over. There was a marker. Kara looked at his shirt. There were twelve small marks on it, distributed across points he had not noticed being touched.

"If I had a blade, that is twelve separate opportunities." He had not noticed any of them. He had been entirely focused on his own punches and the umbrella's canopy. The umbrella had run his attention the way a good sleight of hand runs a mark's. He was, he admitted internally, fairly close to convinced. Instructor Ken walked him through the rest - the offensive configurations, the higher-grade variants, the option of dual wielding given the weight. He did not oversell it.

He reminded Kara once more that he was not a master of the form himself, and said it like a man who wished he were. Then he walked away to let Kara think. Kara thought. He was going to travel. He was going to be in situations where carrying obvious weapons would create problems. He was going to need something that did not look like what it was until it needed to. And he was, apparently, constitutionally incapable of maintaining the kind of distance that made ranged weapons the primary tool.

He told Instructor Ken his decision when the instructor came back around. The man's expression did not change dramatically, but something in it settled, a long-held hope finally being rewarded. The rest of the class was dedicated to finding a second weapon. Kara worked through the options methodically, which was how he approached most things when instinct failed to produce a clear answer. Sword - functional, nothing that felt aligned. Spear - interesting reach, awkward to carry. Staff - similar problem.

Knives - light, portable, the right profile for someone who moved rather than stood, but none of the ones available quite resolved into a preference. He tried the ranged options next, which was where his original plan had started. Various firearms, various configurations. He settled on a revolver that fired compressed water spikes - lighter than most, good impact at close range, no ammunition he needed to carry separately given where he trained and lived. It had a clean, practical logic to it.

He was aware, even as he chose it, that it was a transitional answer. At D-grade the auras started. At the grades above that, the armour quality shifted in ways that made compressed water spikes a historical curiosity. But he was G-grade and this was now, and a weapon that worked now was better than waiting for the perfect weapon later. For the melee option he went with a long knife.

Instructor Ken gave it a considering look when Kara presented his final selections - umbrella, revolver, knife - but said nothing beyond noting that the next class would pair students with specialists for each choice. Different instructors, different sessions, the specialisations beginning in earnest. Kara turned the knife over in his hand on the walk back. It did not feel like a final answer. It felt like a placeholder, which was fine. Placeholders had their uses.

The umbrella was the choice he was fairly sure of, and that was enough to start with. He thought about the twelve marks on his shirt, distributed across points he had never seen coming, and decided he could work with that.