…or, A History Of Violence
There was an interesting interlude at lunchtime, when the nymph with glasses led the black-haired girl past the food court in a t-shirt and underwear. Marlot sat, stony-faced, pretending not to notice.
“I’m not saying anything,” Missy said.
Her clothes did a bit to hide just how skinny she was, but seeing her without pants, I had to admit the girl had nice legs. She wasn’t quite elven slender, but she had a cute ass.
I was surprised when it appeared they were allowed to enter the cafeteria in that state, but I didn’t say anything even then.
After lunch, the first class I had was my thaumatology lecture.
“Unless perhaps you are a martial combat major, this is the single most important class you will take during your academic career,” Professor Meinke said at the beginning of it. “Thaumatology is the study of magic itself, which makes this a foundation subject for anybody who would study any other aspect of magic.”
I was sure he was right about this, but it was dry stuff, all the same. At least I’d only have to sit through it twice a week.
After it was finally over, I had to trot out to Hauldhagen Field, a broad space on the north end of campus for the class I’d been really looking forward to: mixed melee, my required weapon proficiency class.
The field had obviously been made by clearing space on the edge of the woods. It was bounded by thick trees on three sides, with a line of trees to the south screening it from view. A broad, hard dirt path connected it to the network of sidewalks on the main campus. The two towers, the dorms I already hoped to spend my sophomore year in, were visible to the southeast.
Mixed melee was a huge class. According to a blurb in the course catalogue, they’d recently combined a couple of different sections together in order to emphasize the “mixed” nature of it. As with most of the classes I’d been in, the students were largely human, though there were a few long-bearded dwarves and a sprinkling of students with obvious dwarven heredity. The proportion of those with elvenblood seemed much lower than on the campus at large.
I had an inkling that this was going to be more of a straight-up brawling class than anything else.
The instructor, Coach J. Callahan, didn’t seem to have arrived yet. People were milling around in groups, hanging out by the tables where the equipment was laid out, showing off their weapons, or even doing some light sparring. Not everybody seemed to be comfortable with their weapons. A few students, probably other freshmen, were looking around at the more confident members of the class uneasily.
I wasn’t worried, myself. I knew I wasn’t the best one on the field. I would have known that without looking. That was the point of the combined class. I could handle myself, though, and I’d get better.
Some of the more experienced-looking students fell quiet all at once and started to pay attention. I paid attention, too. Through the trees, a tall, hawk-nosed, dark-haired man was coming up the path. He wore a loose-fitting, light gray shirt, a tight pair of dark blue shorts, a whistle on a cord around his neck, and a sword on his back. He looked extremely serious.
Right alongside him was a girl I took to either be his assistant or a favored student. She was dressed in leather “barbarian chic”-type armor, with the segmented skirt and everything, and had her flame-red hair up in a spiky mohawk.
They marched into the center of the field. Most of the group had been clued into their approach by now, but the man blew his whistle to get everybody’s attention.
The girl with the mohawk stepped forward, her hands on her hips.
“Good morning, class!” she called.
There were scattered replies of “good morning” from around the rough circle, but not many. She smiled. It wasn’t a particularly pleasant smile. She had a bit of an underbite that made me wonder if she didn’t have some orcish or ogrish blood. Orcish was far more likely, considering her build and stature, though either one would have been a stretch. I would have believed elven blood before either of those, though her features were far too rough for that.
“Let’s try that again,” she said. “I said, ‘Good morning, class!’”
This time, I joined in the slightly louder chorus of voices that answered her. Not everybody did.
“You,” she said, pointing to a round-faced girl with sandy colored hair. “You didn’t say good morning. Why?”
“Um… because it isn’t morning?” the girl said.
“Come here,” she said, beckoning to the girl, who looked at the dark-haired man in confusion. He simply nodded at her, and she came forward.
As soon as she was in arm’s reach—before it really looked like she was—the girl with the mohawk punched the blonde girl in the face. Blood exploded from her ruined nose, and she went down.
“Fuck you, it isn’t,” the barbarian woman said, and she kicked the downed girl in the ribs. I spent a moment wondering why the instructor hadn’t intervened to rope in his assistant, then realized I was looking at the instructor. She put a booted foot on the whimpering girl’s shoulder and said, “Welcome to Mixed Melee. I am Coach Jillian Callahan. This is classified as an ‘immersive’ class, and you’ve just seen one example of what that means. What would qualify as assault outside my classroom counts only as a ‘learning experience’, within these four walls.”
“You broke my nose!” the downed student wailed.
“Yeah, and now I’ve broken your hand, too,” Callahan said, stomping on the girl’s hand. “This is an immersive combat class, sweetheart. Laws and rules won’t protect you here. So long as I leave you alive and in good enough shape for the healers to put you right, you have no recourse.” She’d been speaking loudly enough for everybody to hear her over the girl’s anguished cries, but now she looked up and addressed her comments to the class. “The history of the world is the story of people who possess the will and the means to fight enforcing their desires upon people who lack such means. If you work hard and pay attention in this class, you’ll walk off this field at the end of the semester with the skills you need to stop somebody from doing this.”
She punctuated her speech by kicking the downed girl again, harder than before. It was a sickening display, but an effective one. The terms for W.P. classes did waive liability for just about anything short of death. It could have been argued that she was overstepping the spirit of the rules even if she was within the letter of them, but it didn’t seem like any of us in the class were going to argue that.
It wasn’t like we hadn’t taken this class thinking it was hardcore.
“You are your only recourse. If you don’t want to be punched in the face or kicked in the ribs, if you don’t want to be called a fucking pansy or a useless cunt, if you want the privilege of disagreeing with a tyrant who tells you it’s morning when the sun’s in the western sky, you have to be both willing and able to fight.” The girl was pushing herself up onto her knees with her uninjured hand. For a second, I thought Callahan was going to attack her again, but instead she turned to her assistant and said, quietly, “Take her over and give her the potion,” then resumed her speech to the class. “I know you think it’s not like that in the real world, that ‘Oh, we have laws and rules and civilization’ now, but the only reason those laws work at all is because somebody is willing to use violence to enforce them. When push comes to shove, it’s the side that pushes harder that wins, every time.”
The man helped the girl up and led her over to the equipment tables. There was a single blue glass bottle. It seemed to be the only one. It was pretty obvious that Callahan had planned the demonstration out in advance. That actually made me feel better about the whole thing. It was shocking violence, but it was controlled. She was doing a good job of looking like she was out-of-control, but that much of it was an act.
“Now, we’re going to get things moving by getting you sorted into two groups: hopeless and less hopeless. Anybody who’s on the skirmish team, go over to the east side of the field. Anybody who has at least six credit hours of combat classes that don’t include the word ‘basic’, east side. Anybody with a beard down past their navel, east side. Anybody whose name I read off, east side.”
She started rattling off a series of names. She stopped when she got to “Johnson, Steffain” and nobody hurried over to the east side. She looked around the field and repeated the name.
“That little faggot,” she said, shaking her head.
As much as I reflexively froze up at that word, part of me wondered if that was just her preferred insult for men, or if she had used it for a reason. I was thinking of the Steff I’d met at the Prism Pride table. “Steff” could certainly be short for “Steffain”.
She resumed reading the names, finishing the list in short order. About a quarter of the class was now in a cluster on the east side of the field. “Right. Dobbs, get them mocked and start them working in groups. Break up the cliques. Don’t let the skirmishers all fight each other. The rest of you? Anybody who knows they don’t belong on the east side, stand back a ways and get ready to watch. Everybody who thinks they might, go put your weapons in the mockbox and report back here. If you don’t know how to use a mockbox, go join the watchers.”
I followed several other students over to the tables. The mockboxes were very similar to the ones we’d had at Agora High: leather-bound wooden cases in varying sizes. If you closed them with an object inside, its mirror image would be laying atop it when you opened it. The spectral weapons felt solid, but it was an illusion. They could inflict no real harm.
Spectral weapons were one of my favorite pieces of magic, because you could do whatever you wanted with them without risking death or even temporary disfigurement. I’d have been less cavalier about learning to throw an axe around if I’d had to worry about stray hits.
“Make sure you leave your real weapon on the table and take the copy with you,” the man called Dobbs told his students, who looked resentful of the condescending instruction. “If you can’t tell which is which, hold it up to the sunlight.”
Once we’d all gotten our spectral duplicates made and re-assembled, Callahan addressed us.
“Right, I’m going to call you two at a time and have you face off,” Callahan said. “If I tell you to join the east group, go. If I tell you to join the west group, go. If I tell you to switch partners or to keep fighting, do so. Winning does not mean you go east. Losing does not mean you go west. I will be watching what you do and how you do it.
“If you haven’t been called to fight, you can take the time to warm up, if you feel like it, but you will start fighting when I tell you to. Oh, I know what your other coaches have told you. It’s dangerous to fight without stretching first. You’ll hurt yourself. You should never do it. Well, guess what? Fighting is dangerous, and if you don’t know the limits of your body under all sorts of conditions, you’re going to get hurt worse someday. It’s better to pull a muscle here on the field where you can call time out and go to the healing center than it would be to pull one in the middle of a real battle.”
She started off by creating four pairs of fighters one by one, setting them up facing each other and then signaling for them to start. Once all four were going, she moved around them, watching them as they sparred with each other.
We watched along with her as a man with long arms and a flail clobbered another student who was armed with a sword. She had them trade partners, pairing the swordsman off against a woman with a sword and the flail-wielder against a guy with an iron-banded staff. The flail-wielder was knocked off his feet after trying to entangle the weapons and having his wrenched from his grasp.
The stickfighter was sent east. The flail-wielder was pitted against another student.
Callahan sorted two more into the west group and another into the east. She kept mixing the pairs up, to make it more clear when somebody’s weapon or style was giving them an advantage.
“You’re in, Blingy,” she said pointing to the axe in my hand. She pointed to another student with a sword and shield combo. “And you. Face off.”
My opponent was a heavy guy, with the mixture of muscle and fat that often makes somebody look softer and slower than they really are. He held his weapons like he knew what to do with them, but he looked to be fully human. I doubted he could match me when it came to reflexes, but he could probably bash the hell out of me in close.
As we squared off, I had an idea. I doubted many teachers would consider it “playing fair”, but I doubted Coach Callahan gave a damn about that.
Callahan had raised her hand. She dropped it and yelled “Fight!”
I raised my arm, cocked it back, and threw the spectral axe at my opponent’s head. It was a gamble, but I was betting he couldn’t get the shield or sword up in time. If I was wrong, the axe would still come back to me.
I wasn’t wrong. The stunned fighter went down, the illusory weapon stuck in his forehead. It pulled itself free with a lurch before he’d even hit the ground, and flew back to my waiting hand.
“Impressive stunt,” Callahan said. “East side, but don’t get cocky.”
