The world was still spinning pleasantly on its axis when Grisha’s hand shot out and wrapped around my neck—not violently, just firmly, with the casual authority of someone who’d decided gravity needed assistance—and hauled me upright into a sitting position with enough force to make my spine pop in three separate places.

I gasped, blinking rapidly as my vision swam and my brain attempted to remember what orientation it preferred, and found myself suddenly face to face with Grisha’s amber eyes, close enough that I could feel the heat radiating off her skin like a furnace that had recently decided warmth was a personality trait.

"Well?" she rumbled, her voice carrying that particular gravelly quality that made even casual conversation sound like a threat. "Can you feel it? Any new surge of power?"

I glanced down at my right hand almost instinctively, flexing the fingers slowly, and the sensation that rolled through me was immediate and unmistakable—like an unseen force had reached into my chest and turned a dial I hadn’t known existed, cranking it several notches clockwise.

The surge of added strength was obvious, sitting on top like foam on a wave, but beneath it was something else entirely, something deeper and more fundamental.

It pulsed at the edge of my awareness like a word sitting on the tip of your tongue, a skill I somehow knew I could access—could feel the shape of it the way you can feel a door handle in the dark before you see it—but couldn’t yet name or define. It existed in my body like inherited knowledge, instinctive and immediate, but its parameters were invisible to me.

"There’s something there," I said slowly, still flexing my fingers, watching the tendons move beneath my skin as though I might see the new ability manifesting physically if I looked hard enough.

"The strength is obvious, I can feel that sitting right at the surface. But underneath it there’s something else, something I know I could use right now if I needed to, like my body already understands it even if my brain hasn’t caught up yet. I can feel the shape of it but not the details—what it does, what its limits are, how it works." I looked up at her, genuinely puzzled. "It’s like knowing you can play a song but not knowing what instrument you’re holding."

Grisha’s brows furrowed together, deep grooves forming above her amber eyes as she processed this, and then her face split into a grin so wide and manic it showed both rows of her teeth plus the gaps between them.

Her eyes lit up with an enthusiasm that should’ve warned me immediately that whatever came next was going to be deeply inconvenient for my personal sense of comfort and dignity.

Before I could even draw breath to ask a question, let alone protest, she grabbed my wrist with the decisive grip of someone who’d made a decision and wasn’t accepting feedback, yanked me upright from the floor with enough force that my feet left the ground momentarily, and dragged me straight toward the door.

"Grisha," I said, stumbling to keep up, "Grisha, wait, can we perhaps—Grisha, we’re not wearing anything—Grisha, we’re covered in—"

She opened the door and stepped out into the corridor, and then down the stairs, completely nude and completely unconcerned, and I had approximately zero seconds to grab anything resembling clothing before I was towed along behind her into the lively chaos of the tavern below.

The jungle decorum hit me first—all those cascading vines, warm amber lighting, coupled with the smell of spiced alcohol and something smoky—and then the noise, the festive energy of a space full of beastfolk patrons drinking themselves into philosophical states of oblivion. The music was still playing and conversation filled every corner in overlapping layers.

Then we descended far enough to be visible.

The silence spread outward from us like a stone dropped in still water, conversations dying mid-sentence, glasses pausing halfway to mouths, heads turning with the synchronized precision of a crowd who’d all received the same urgent message at the same moment.

Every single patron in that tavern—and there were many of them, crowded around tables and propped against walls and slouched in corners—turned to look at us, and the quiet that followed was the particular quality of silence that contains multitudes.

The men closest to the stairs experienced the fullest version of the revelation. A broad wolf-eared man in the front actually dropped his glass, the ceramic hitting the floor and shattering as his eyes tracked down Grisha’s body with the focused intensity of a witness trying to commit every detail to permanent memory.

His companion—a shorter man with fox features and considerably quicker recovery—elbowed him hard in the ribs without taking his own eyes off the scene before them.

Grisha was magnificent in the torchlight, all glistening muscle and scarred green skin, every scar catching the warm light and turning it gold, her dark braid hanging loose over one shoulder.

And then their eyes found the addition—the cock that hadn’t been there when she’d walked up those stairs earlier in the evening—and the silence developed a new texture entirely.

"Is that—" someone whispered from a back table, the words carrying with perfect clarity in the hush.

"It is," someone else confirmed in a tone of quiet reverence.

"How—"

"Don’t question it."

A beastfolk woman with leopard spots and considerable personal confidence leaned toward her companion and murmured something that included the words "absolutely enormous" and "I need a moment."

Her companion, an older woman with silver-streaked deer antlers, simply stared with the blank expression of a person whose brain had presented them with information it didn’t have adequate filing systems for.

The whispers built slowly, spreading from table to table like a particularly compelling rumor, containing variations on a limited number of themes—shock, admiration, speculation about logistics, and in at least two cases that I could identify, immediate and sincere religious questioning about whether the gods had favorites.

Grisha didn’t spare any of them a single glance. Her amber eyes were already fixed on the fighting ring in the center of the tavern—the small circular area encircled by guttering torches, its sandy floor currently occupied by two competitors who had, at some point in the recent past, been engaged in enthusiastic violence but had now stopped completely and were staring at us with blood still drying on their faces and bruises still forming on their knuckles.

Thorn materialized from somewhere behind the bar with the weary efficiency of a man who’d seen enough unusual things in his establishment to have developed a very high threshold for surprise, his massive frame cutting through the crowd as he approached us with a questioning expression and the particular energy of an arbiter deciding which of several available problems to address first.

"Everything alright?" he asked, his deep voice carrying genuine inquiry beneath the professional neutrality.

Grisha walked directly past him without acknowledgment, towing me through the parting crowd toward the fighting ring, and I caught Thorn’s expression shift into something I could only describe as resigned familiarity.

He exhaled—a long, slow breath that contained entire paragraphs of unspoken commentary—then turned and walked back to the bar, picked up a glass, and began washing it with the methodical focus of a warrior choosing sanity over curiosity.

I gave him a nervous giggle and a shrug that tried to communicate "I’m sorry, I have no control over this situation" as I was yanked past him, which he acknowledged with a single nod that somehow conveyed "I know, nobody does, that’ll be three crowns."

The two competitors in the ring took one look at Grisha approaching with naked purpose, exchanged a glance that contained a complete and wordless conversation, and retreated into the crowd with impressive speed.

Grisha stepped into the ring and released my wrist. I stumbled forward a few paces into the sandy circle before catching my balance before she moved to the opposite side—maybe four meters away—and the crowd, sensing something genuinely interesting was about to happen, began closing in around the torches with drinks raised and eyes shining bright.

She dropped into a fighting stance that was beautiful in its economy of motion—weight distributed with geometric precision, center of gravity low, that new addition shifting slightly with the movement in a way that made several audience members audibly react.

Her eyes fixed on me with the specific focus of someone who was going to enjoy this regardless of how it ended for me.

"To draw out the innate power of the skill you’ve taken," she said with a smirk, "sparring works better than any explanation. Your body will find it when it needs it. That’s how this power works—it doesn’t respond to thinking. It responds to necessity."

I held up one finger in what I hoped was a reasonable gesture. "Or," I said carefully, "you could just explain it to me? In words? While we’re both seated comfortably? Perhaps with a beverage? I feel like I could grasp the theoretical framework of whatever power I’ve absorbed through a civil and informative conversation rather than—"

I looked at her eyes.

The amber there was warm, yes, but it was warm the way a fire is warm—inviting until you got too close, at which point it became something considerably less comfortable.

She wasn’t doing this to teach me. She was doing this because she wanted to hit me and this was the most socially acceptable framework for that desire currently available.

I sighed, dropping my raised finger. "Right," I said. "Okay. Fine."

I settled into my stance—the one Iskanda had drilled into me through repetition and the occasional arrow to the vicinity of my skull—and the crowd reacted immediately.

Coins materialized from pockets and pouches as bets began circulating through the assembled patrons with the speed of gamblers who’d recognized an opportunity when it was standing naked in a fighting ring in front of them.

The energy in the room shifted from voyeuristic interest to participatory excitement, voices layering over each other as odds were debated.

"No tricks," Grisha said. "No disappearing. No Excarnic spells. Pure Incarnic enhancements only. Let’s make this a fair fight."

I nodded once.

Then she moved.

The thing about Grisha that I’d observed from a safe distance was that her size was deceptive—you looked at seven feet of muscle and assumed "powerful but slow," which was exactly the assumption she’d spent her entire fighting career using to end fights before her opponents finished making it.

She crossed the distance between us in two steps that seemed to defy the physics of the space available, her right fist coming at my face with enough force that the displaced air alone made my eyes water.

I dropped, flooding my legs with enhancement and letting my body fall below the strike before driving upward with an elbow aimed at her solar plexus.

She caught it on her forearm—the impact rattling up through my arm into my shoulder like I’d hit structural iron—and used the contact to push me sideways, sending me staggering into the ring’s sandy perimeter.

The crowd roared their approval.

I shook the numbness out of my arm and came back in faster, using enhanced calves to eat up ground, feinting left before cutting right with a strike aimed at her ribs.

It connected—I felt the satisfaction of impact—and then she grunted, which was probably the highest praise she was capable of delivering. However, her counter came immediately after, a backhand sweep that caught me across the cheekbone and sent white light flooding across my vision as I hit the sand.

The world tasted like copper and grit. I spat once, pushed up, then made a mental note that being hit by Grisha was an experience I wanted to repeat as infrequently as possible.

She let me stand—which I understood was courtesy, not weakness—and I used the moment to actually think instead of just reacting.

She was using enhancements too, I could see it in the slightly unnatural speed of her movements, the way her strikes carried weight beyond what even her considerable mass should have generated. She was enhanced at the arms and legs, the classic configuration of a fighter who trusted their offensive power, which meant her core absorbed impact without enhancement, which meant—

She charged again, and this time I didn’t run from it. I enhanced my forearms and met her strike with a block that made us both grunt with effort, the force reverberating through my bones, and shoved back with everything I had.

She skidded half a step, surprise flickering briefly across her face as I pressed forward immediately, driving combinations at her torso that forced her to actually engage defensively rather than just steamroll.

We traded ground back and forth for what felt like hours but was probably minutes, the crowd’s noise building with each exchange, bets being revised and revised again.

My cheek was swelling where she’d caught me, and I was fairly certain two of my ribs were having a serious discussion about their structural integrity.

Blood ran freely from a split above my eyebrow that I didn’t remember getting, and my arms ached with the cumulative impact of blocking strikes that each carried the approximate force of a small meteor.

But somewhere beneath the exhaustion and the pain, I could feel it—that nameless thing, that stolen skill pushing at the edges of my awareness with increasing insistence.

Not loudly, not with dramatic fanfare, just a quiet and growing pressure like water finding a crack in stone. Each time I took a hit, each time my body’s resources stretched to compensate, it pulsed a little stronger.

Grisha landed a kick to my side that folded me briefly, and I went down to one knee, gasping, sand pressing into my kneecap as the crowd’s volume peaked. I breathed through it, one second, two, and felt the hidden power surge hot and urgent through my chest like a second heartbeat finding its rhythm.

I stood.

She was breathing harder now too—not labored, but present, her massive chest rising and falling with the honest effort of a genuine fight rather than the casual exertion of someone toying with prey.

Sweat cut tracks through the dust on her green skin, and her eyes were bright with something I recognized as the specific pleasure of a person who’d finally found a worthy enough reason to stop holding back.

She rolled her neck, the crack audible across the ring, and set herself again.

And that’s when I saw it.

A gap in her stance, there and gone in a quarter second, created by the particular way she loaded weight onto her back foot before a front-driving charge—the same opening she’d given me three exchanges ago and twice before that, a rhythmic habit she probably didn’t know she had. She was about to come straight at me, full force, with everything she had, absolutely committed to the forward momentum.

And I knew then, with the absolute certainty of the thing awakening in my chest, exactly what to do with it.