Vigor Mortis

Obviously I pull my blow on Lyn, not wanting to hurt her or myself. I'm not moving as fast as I can, I'm not stabbing as directly at a vital as I might otherwise. Yet when my mom flashes me a contemptuous grin and easily steps to the side, I start to wonder if I'm about to once again get a lesson on arrogance.

Even with the way my soul's core grows much denser than a human's does, I have significantly surpassed the size of my mother's soul. Lyn is powerful, extremely powerful by most metrics, really, but I suspect if I really put my back into it I could rip her from her flesh with only minimal trouble. That is the skill I am best at, the skill that I use most often, and my most devastating offensive capability. As I make another lunge, which Lyn sidesteps by barely an inch without seeming the slightest bit worried, I can't help but be a little tempted to use that power.

I don't, of course. This is about landing a hit on her, and she is trying to prove that I can't. I'm not interested in just sitting back and letting someone walk over me. I have recently reached the next stage in what I sort of think of as my lifecycle, considering that the first step was hatching from a soul egg. I am a bit proud of my advancement, happy I finally get to stop using my hideous, inefficient muscles for everything. I want to prove my superiority. I want to beat her.

To my annoyance, however, it is clear that Lyn is very, very good at dodging.

"So obvious!" she taunts stepping around another stab and punching me just under the ribs.

I barely feel it, and try to grab her with my free hand only to watch her leap out of the way again, cackling all the while. Damnit! I should be stronger than her! It doesn't help that I have much less practice using a knife than I do with using my spear. Lyn doesn't even feel that fast, it's just that she seems to always be barely fast enough to avoid whatever it is I'm doing. I could maybe surprise her by suddenly using my full speed, but of course then I would have to go see Penelope to get my body unbroken again. Plus, I think there's another secret here. Despite how much I care for her, Lyn and I don't exactly talk a lot and I don't even know what exactly her talent is. Or, as I'm starting to suspect, what her talents are—the longer we fight the more I’m sure she has two separate ones. One of them she keeps on a constant low purr, ramping it slightly up in power every time I lunge for her. I don't know what it is, other than clearly not being offensive. The other just turns on and off, and I'm pretty sure that's her speed talent. Whenever she makes a little burst of movement, that one flares.

The problem is that, even though I know this in advance, I don't have any idea what to do about it. She's using both talents at once, which Capita never did, and both of them seem to be useful in a brawl. She's not trying to stab me, despite the knife in her hand. If anything she's using it as a handicap, giving her one less arm to punch with. But I am still getting my butt kicked.

"You're trying to teach me that no matter how strong I am, I lose to someone whose talent is specific to the current situation," I deduce.

"No, trying to teach you that you are slow as shit and I'm better than you," Lyn answers immediately.

Rowan facepalms, and I try to stab my mother again.

Lyn laughs, dancing around me. Our fight is indoors, and the room is not very large, yet she always seems to have exactly as much space as she needs. Can I box her in somehow? Get her into a corner? I start directing my thrusts, encouraging her to dodge closer and closer to the edge of the room. The moment I think she's cornered, though, she just vaults over me, sticking her tongue out at me as I track her through the air.

"Quit trying to fight me like I'm a monster!" Lyn says. "You know I have a brain too, right? I'm not going to move without a plan."

She dashes in for the first time and I jump back in surprise. Now all of a sudden, I'm the one cornered! It looks like she's going to punch me in the face, but she feints and brings up the knife instead, the blade barely kissing against the skin of my neck without drawing blood.

"Dead," she tells me, bursting backwards before I can stab her back.

"Does that count?" I ask, grinding my teeth. "Because if so…"

I burst forward again, lunging for another stab at bringing my tentacles into the mix as well. To my surprise, Lyn seems to notice and jump backwards, but I press the attack and soon the only place she can dodge within the small room is inside my range. She avoids five of the eight tentacles I try to grab her with, but three wrap around her and squeeze lightly.

"Dead," I hiss back. "I'm surprised you dodged any."

Lyn shudders, pawing at her belly as if trying to rub some warmth into it as I let her go.

"Danger sense, remember? I can't see any of what you do but if I listen to my instincts I can feel something is coming at me. So. Point in your favor, I'll grant you. But you still haven't touched me."

I scowl, tossing my knife to the side and flexing my fingers.

"Fine," I growl, right before feeling the snap in my right leg as I lunge at Lyn as fast as I can.

I'm not a knife fighter, as much as I should probably learn to use them a bit since I have them as a backup weapon. But ultimately, if I am going full power, I would rather not accidentally kill my mother with a blade.

Her eyes go wide for an instant as I close the distance far faster than I have up to this point, but her surprise is not quite enough for me to capitalize on. I swipe at her, miss, then break my other leg performing an instant change in direction. Penelope won't be happy, but she'll deal with it. I wrap the breaks with tentacles as a makeshift splint, bearing down on her again and very, very nearly catching her. She was surprised at my speed before but isn't now, bumping up the power in her own talent to compensate. That's fine by me. She's not moving at levels beyond my perception, and I don't need to keep up with her perfectly. I just need a particular kind of opening.

If our family actually owned anything, everything in this room would have been destroyed by our engagement as we blast around, me always on the offensive. Rowan has been functionally forced out, he and many of the kids peeking hesitant pairs of eyeballs around the doorframe, trying to avoid becoming collateral damage. There's one more reason I dropped my knife, and I'm just waiting for Lyn to give me the chance to take advantage of it. She's right. She's not a beast, and I need to treat her as someone thinking a few steps ahead. If I can't dismantle her soul, I will dismantle her plan instead.

--

"What's politics like?" I had once asked Penelope.

Our team had been walking through the forest silently for a few hours, the monsters either fleeing in fear from me or dying instantly whenever they tried to engage. I was thoroughly bored and feeling safe enough to start a conversation. Penelope turned to me slowly, her languid glare and pattering soul indicating she was still a bit miffed about me telling the whole team that she had a crush on me. Still, she deigned to answer.

"Hiverock dropped an estimated ten thousand or so eggs on us," she said, which sounded like a complete non-sequitur but this was Penelope so I knew she was going somewhere with this. "The drops were all in groups, yes? About fifty to a couple hundred eggs per group. According to reports, our best guess as to what happens the moment those eggs start to hatch is that every single one of the newborn vrothizo immediately tries to kill and eat all of the other ones. As soon as I finished reading that I thought to myself: damn. And here I've been trying to go to the forest to avoid politics."

I blinked in confusion, but Norah immediately busted out laughing. Along with Mateo, of all people, though his hissy monster laugh seemed to kill the mood for everyone else.

"I don't get it," I said.

"I know," Penelope answered flatly. "But despite the laughter I do not at all mean it as a joke. Politics is about seeing how much aggressive cannibalism you can get away with in your path to power. Figuratively, I mean. While I would not be terribly surprised to learn of a noble engaging in literal cannibalism, I do not personally know of any."

"That's… good?" I hedged.

Penelope sighed.

"Yes Vita, the fact that our government does not openly engage in literal cannibalism is good. Anyway, on the subject of specifically Valka politics, I would have to describe the three major factions as the Royalists, the Church, and… everyone else, really. Let's call them the Mercantile faction, although they are—well, we are, I suppose, but if anyone asks I'm a Royalist—they are only a faction insofar as being united by a common hatred of the other two and a general desire to leech specific powers from each of them. For example, the Church de facto controls the entire metal trade due to the religious significance of metal. Because it is the duty of the Templars to prevent a perception event, and perception events can be caused by an overabundance of metal in a single place, the Church has decided they therefore possess a divine mandate to control every single gram of metal on the market and micromanage who is allowed to buy any given amount of it. And if this sounds like an open power grab more so than an actual devotion to a deity, that's because it very certainly is. And yet somehow the audacious bastards actually get away with it!”

Norah scowled, but didn't respond.

“But you’re asking about politics in general, aren’t you?” Penelope continued. “The crux of the metaphor is thus: political power is finite. To acquire it, you must necessarily take it from others. The more people with power, the less power everyone has. It is possible to increase the maximum available quantity of political power, but to do so you have to actually contribute to society and that tends to be rather more difficult than simply eating your rivals. Fortunately, or unfortunately depending on your proclivities, rather than soul-rending teeth politicians fight with schemes. To defeat a rival and claim their power, you must understand what they want, how they intend to get what they want, and how to make their methods of gaining what they want destroy them rather than help them. Considering the degree to which vrothizo are single-mindedly obsessed with constantly eating every living thing they come across, I imagine the pleasure they get from the act of consumption may very nearly be comparable with that a politician gets from twisting a former rival into a pawn by correctly anticipating and manipulating their actions with indirect levers that cannot possibly be traced back to their original source."

I blinked.

"Um, any chance you could maybe repeat all that but exclusively using words that a homeless street kid could understand?"

Penelope smiled a little.

"If you and someone else both want the same chunk of bread, Vita, true victory is not found in taking it from them, but in learning how to make them give it to you.”

She quickly glanced over at our trio of Revenants.

“…Generally without using animancy.”

--

My fight with Lyn continues, my attacks getting more and more reckless as I push to get my hands on her. Going barehanded against someone with a knife tends to be a poor decision, but Lyn has been completely refusing to cut me, leaving her as the one with the handicap. At least until suddenly and without warning, this changes.

I'm not stupid. I'll admit that I usually don't understand people very well, but a large part of that is me not putting any effort into it. Well, I shouldn't say that. It's hard to put effort into it, harder than it is to put effort into most things, and I feel very little desire to try, even if I know it would be helpful. But I'm still clever, I can still read emotions, and I'm still a trained conwoman. Lyn makes a jab towards my hand with her knife in order to force me to abandon the attack, and I barely avoid grinning in triumph.

My recklessness is real, but it's calculated. I want her to think I'm taking advantage of the fact that she won't attack with her knife, but what I actually want is for her to commit to a defense with her knife so I can capitalize it in a way I know she won't expect. I don't abandon my attack, doubling down and letting her blade impale my palm. From there I grab the hand holding the knife in my own, and it's over. She tries to squirm and escape, but while she may be faster than me I am much, much stronger. Despite the difference in size I force her to the ground.

"There," I hiss in triumph. "Fooled you. Got you. I win."

Lyn, breathing hard, glances at my hand before backup to my grinning face.

"That you did," she admits coolly. "Was it worth it?"

I blink in surprise, not entirely understanding the question.

"Was what worth it?"

"Well, you beat me in a fight," Lyn says again, and she doesn't feel like she thinks she's lost at all. "It took ten minutes of your time, plus a hand, and therefore however much effort it will be to get that healed. Assuming you don't start to bleed out."

I extract my hand from her knife, blocking off the blood vessels so my hand is barely stained red from the initial stab and nothing else. I flex my fingers.

"I'll be fine," I insist, declining to mention that I also broke both of my legs.

"So you'll be fine," Lyn says. "But was it worth it? Did you really have to take this fight? I goaded you into this. You didn't want to, but it didn't take much pushing to change that. And what do you get out of this? The satisfaction of knowing you can beat up your mother?"

I scowl.

"So… this was the lesson," I mumble. "I thought you were trying to teach me to fight better."

Lyn shrugs, getting up off the floor.

"Well if I did that, that's great too. But what Rowan and I are really concerned about is more that you keep getting into fights in the first place. You've killed thirteen people since Angelien, hon. That we know about. Have you thought about that at all? I know Rowan wants to give you the moral spiel, and I can't say I'm super happy about you using your talent that way, but I get that sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do. I've killed people on jobs before. I've hidden bodies, I've stabbed folks that probably don't deserve it. What I want to know is how much that's been eating you up inside, Vita. I want to know why you keep doing it. I want to know if it was worth it."

I swallow, chewing a little on my lower lip.

"I didn't have a choice," I say quietly. "Norah was going to forcibly take me into the church, or at least tell them about me. I would die, mom. The Templars already tried to kill me once, they're just looking for an excuse."

Lyn nods.

"What about the group that killed Angelien?"

A chill settles over the whole house, even the youngest of us icey with fury.

"Yes," I answer firmly. "That was worth it. If anything, I should have killed them sooner."

Lyn nods again.

"And the group with Capita?" she asks. "The whole fight with Capita, really. Was it worth it?"

I open my mouth and almost say yes, again, of course it was worth it, I had good reasons for what I was doing and the men I killed all pulled weapons on me. I just made a point of thinking about how I'm not stupid, however, so I think about it first instead.

"No," I conclude reluctantly. "It all made sense at the time, but in retrospect I could have avoided the fight entirely. I nearly died fighting Capita and didn't actually get anything out of it other than a bit of information, which wasn't worth it."

Lyn walks up close to me, patting me on top of the head.

"Okay. That's all I wanted to say, really. Don't forget why you became a hunter in the first place, kiddo."

What? I became a hunter to eat monster souls and become strong.

"I'm not a kiddo," I insist again.

Lyn smiles.

"Go back to your friend Penelope," she says. "There's a hole in your hand, honey."

I look down at my palm. Oh yeah. Nodding, I exit my home, lost in thought.

Most of my life, the question of ‘is a fight worth it’ has always been the same as ‘can I win this fight,’ the answer to which was almost always no, so every other aspect of a fight was obviously not worth it. I lacked power, so I could not fight. Now I have power, so I do fight. And in the forest, that's a strategy that works pretty well. Monsters need killing, and if we can kill them without being hurt we generally always should. But that's not at all how people work, is it? There are other ways to deal with people, none of which I'm good at, but it's also simply much more difficult to know if I can win the fight. Monsters are stupid, so power is everything. People are not stupid, so power is just one of many tricks in the toolbox that can be used to hurt me or the people I care about. I know this, I'm just… bad at it. I have no experience thinking this way.

I had been considering avoiding Penelope in order to try and minimize the awkwardness of… whatever is going on there. That's not going to cut it though, is it? Between how often I get myself hurt and how much I need the help of someone that can actually think about this stuff with any competence, I kind of need her, don't I? The realization doesn’t rankle as much as I thought it would, at least. I’m okay with relying on Penelope, even if she can be weird sometimes.

I sigh, opening up our lab and heading downstairs. Time to get another rant on why I shouldn't be breaking my own legs, I guess.