The thunder of funeral drums drowned out all else. Around us, men and women of lesser constitution cried out soundlessly, gripping their ears and collapsing in the streets. It was a pitiful sight. Idly, I dragged two fingers across my right ear, frowning when they came away bloody.

“This seems excessive,” I told Scythas. He looked at me like I was simple, waving his torch at his own ears and shaking his head. “What sort of worthless cultivator can’t read lips?” Scythas gestured at his ears again, frustrated.

A calloused, marble-white hand planted itself against my chest, and the woman I’d been in the process of greeting shoved me aside. I felt the stone of the street crack beneath my feet, Scythas sent staggering as I went skidding back. The cultivator walked right past us, mouthing something to Scythas. He couldn’t read lips, of course. But I could.

Out of my way, trash.

I couldn’t physically hear the crack of my pankration hand slapping her face, but my imagination filled in the gap.

The woman went deathly still, her face turned only a fraction to the side by a blow I had used to throw a pirate clean off his ship days prior. Scythas looked between us, leaning on his back foot and gripping his torch so tightly I could see the shaft of it splinter. The drums changed their cadence as if by my own design, rising to a kinetically charged pace. Boom, da-da, boom, da-da, boom da da da boom.

You dare? the woman mouthed. Something told me that even if the drums were gone, it would have been impossible to hear her. It was that sort of deadly whisper.

The Heroine finally gave me her full attention. She was marred by deep scars, from her sandaled feet to the tips of her seemingly delicate fingers. They were a shade lighter than her skin, which itself was marble-white, to the point that they looked nearly translucent. Each scar was a smooth line without any jagged edges. One, curving from the nape of her neck up to the bridge of her nose, was currently creased by a furious expression.

I felt danger as she advanced on me. Her eyes were the color of desert heat, an earthen shade approaching orange that was backlit by the flame of her soul. Her Heroic spirit was raging.

I strode forward to meet her. She tried subduing me with her presence alone at first. Two of my pankration hands struck out at the eddies of her influence, parting them like a swimmer parted the waves. The fire in her eyes rose, and her left hand settled on the pommel of a blade that hung naked at her hip, made entirely of bronze.

No, I spoke, silent beneath the drums. Furious desert-flame eyes read my lips. You dare. Laying your mongrel hand on me as if you were worth the time it would take to kill you.

Her grip on her sword shifted. The hairs on the back of my neck rose.

You don’t know who I am, do you? she asked. As if it was the most natural thing in the world that I would. We were close now, at her preferred sword striking distance if I had to guess. I leaned in, staring her down. I whispered an oath in the mad thunder of the funeral drums.

You’re the woman who ruined my favorite shawl, I told her. You could break your back working for the rest of your miserable life and it wouldn’t amount to half this relic’s value.

The Heroine looked down at the golden shawl that an old woman had given me an hour ago. There was a small tear in the fabric where her nail had caught while shoving me. She stared at it for a moment, and I felt the currents of her influence ripple around it, examining it.

It’s a rag, she said confidently. It only took her most of a minute to realize.

I sneered. You have eyes. Tell me, then, where is Olympus Mons?

I noticed Scythas backing away in my peripheral vision, his eddies pressing against me in a wordless warning. I shrugged it off as I had before. On the other hand, Sol’s influence was not so easily shaken—more riptide than current. I forced it away with a few hands of pankration intent. Obnoxious Roman, I could handle myself.

In the moment between drumbeats, the Heroic cultivator drew her blade and lashed it at my face.

I caught it with nineteen overlapping hands of pankration intent, and even so, it almost killed me. My eyes crossed, heart hammering in time with the funeral drums as I watched the bronze edge quiver just short of my nose. My pankration arms couldn’t be cut like true flesh, but the blade bit into my soul. I tasted the blood that hadn’t been spilled.

A flicker of something other than rage appeared in the Heroine’s expression. That same intense appraisal she’d focused on my shawl she now focused on me. She considered me, not withdrawing her blade or the force behind it. Her head tilted, chestnut ringlets of hair falling across her face.

Is this your limit? she mouthed, the ghost of a challenge.

Smiling, I slapped her with my twentieth pankration hand.

Several things happened at once.

All eight funeral drums boomed simultaneously, with powerful finality. Every torch in the agora flared up, from those held aloft like Scythas’ to those guttering out on the stone streets, having been dropped by the weaker attendants when the drums first started beating. Smoke and embers whirled into the air, flowing in streamers overhead to coalesce in the center of the agora, only a short sprint away from us. We’d gotten closer than I thought.

At the same time that every torch in Olympia gained second life, so did the fire in the Heroine’s eyes. That sense of danger doubled and redoubled, confirming what I’d suspected the moment she struck me with her blade. She had only been feeling me out before. Attempting to confirm or deny my standing among heaven and earth.

I’d performed well enough to throw it into question, and then I’d slapped her across the face and all but dared her to give me her best. And now she would do just that. It wasn’t the brightest thing I’d ever done. A wiser man would have ignored the perfect opening she’d presented and deescalated a violent situation with a clearly superior opponent.

I am who I am.

All twenty of my pankration hands fanned out in front of me, moving far too slow in comparison to the technique the Heroine was preparing. In the clarity of an instant, I knew that I wouldn’t be able to predict the trajectory of her attack quick enough to react with full force. I also knew that even if it was only as powerful as the first cursory blow, I wouldn’t be able to divert it with anything less than the full force of my pankration intent.

Unbidden, I remembered something my father had once told me. An offhand comment, made in that courtyard with its filial pools on an innocuous day of my childhood. I’d done something ill-advised again, though I couldn’t remember what it was now. In place of punishment, he’d passed on an old mentor’s words to me—like a curse.

There is no great genius without some touch of madness.

I lunged into the Heroine’s strike. Her sword, an uninterrupted blade of forged bronze, weaved effortlessly through my pankration hands. She tied knots in the air with a single strike that took less than a heartbeat, and this time when the blade found my face there were no pankration hands to stop it.

But I still had two more hands.

[The sun rises.]

Searing heat lashed through my right cheek. My true hands surged up, alive with the light of the sun, and struck the flat underside of the blade. In the dusk that precedes the dawn, with both hands ascending, the technique was nearly as powerful as it could be. It knocked the blade up off its trajectory, tearing it out of my cheek before it could do more than cosmetic damage.

The scarred Heroine easily compensated for the interruption, pivoting on her feet and bringing the blade back around—

[The dawn breaks.]

Twenty hands of pankration intent became visible to the naked eye as the light of the Rosy Dawn ignited along their edges. The Heroine’s eyes widened, desert-flame flickering as she transitioned into a defensive technique. All twenty rosy fists hammered into her from different angles, and all twenty were deflected by shimmering bronze.

The twenty-first hand, one of real flesh and blood, caught her sword as it whipped around. I grinned savagely when it only cut shallowly through the light of my technique into the flesh of my hand. I’d watched her move through her defensive sword form and picked the motion with the least stability, the least power behind it. For a cultivator of her standing, it was like predicting where a raindrop would fall. But I’d done it. And I’d been right.

I twisted at the waist and gave her the twenty-second palm.

The palm strike hit her in the center of her chest, sending her skidding back. Her feet dug furrows through the stone. Her teeth grit, realization in those desert-heat eyes. I’d given her first careless shove right back to her. Heroic pneuma rose. I inhaled deeply, blood thundering through my veins.

Sol struck her with Gravitas, and through the lens of my new Sophic sense, it was like a tidal wave simply washed her away. She went flying through the crowd, howling a curse that I suddenly realized could be heard in the absence of the drums.

For a moment I didn’t move, frozen in my stance. I felt eyes on me, but not as many as there might have been. The drums had stopped, but most of the people around us were still dazed in their absence. Overeager Philosophers and arrogant Citizens who had flown too close to the sun huddled on the ground, hands clapped over their ears in agony. I straightened up, exhaling slowly. I felt good.

I threw Sol a sly grin as he walked over. He had that storm in his eyes, the one that meant something exciting was coming.

“I thought I’d have to twist your arm,” I told him, swiping a thumb across the cut on my cheek. It wasn’t deep enough to scar. Somehow, that was disappointing. “But you’re starting the fights for me.”

“I’m not the one who slapped her,” he said, annoyed. His gaze was distant, focused on things I couldn’t see. “For this next one, there’s a new technique I want you to practice.”

“Ho? By all means, master. This lowly sophist is here to learn.”

“It’s an ancient virtue, passed down to me from my father, and to him from his father.”

Despite myself, I was interested.

“This one awaits your wisdom,” I said formally. Sol hummed, measuring his next words with that riptide gravity.

“It’s called diplomacy.”

I snorted, shoving him away from me. He glanced at me with storm-gray amusement before focusing fully on the cultivator currently approaching us. The Hero wearing the crocodile. I flexed all twenty-two of my hands. The two flesh hands stung, bleeding slowly from shallow cuts. The twenty of my soul’s intent stung too, and I spat the taste of their blood from my mouth.

“You didn’t draw your sword,” Scythas muttered. He was looking out over the crowd, in the direction the Heroine had been sent flying, but the words were for me.

“Of course not,” I said, ignoring the fact that I’d almost died three times. I laid a bleeding palm on the pommel of my uncle’s blade. It hummed like lightning. “She wasn’t worthy.”

The giant of a Hero emerged from the crowd, stepping over a cringing family of cultivators all wearing matching indigo tunics and huddling away from the lingering echo of the drums. His skin was lightly tanned but weathered. His jaw was square, chest broad and strong. His hair was nearly as dark as Sol’s but longer and shaggier. He wore ocean-blue robes beneath his crocodile cloak, bleached nearly white by the sun.

Unlike the Heroine, he made no move to attack. He considered Sol and me, and Scythas beside us.

“It’s rude to start fights during a funeral,” he finally said.

Sol and I shared a look. He mouthed ‘diplomacy’ as if I’d been the one to call them to us.

“Agreed,” I said, offering him a bloody hand. He took it. He was only about a head taller than Sol and me, but his hand dwarfed mine. And the strength of his grip matched the size. I matched him grip for grip, smiling cheerfully through the pain.

“My name is Griffon, and this is Sol. What’s yours, friend?”

A chant began in the center of the agora. The smoke and embers gathered there rose into the sky, taking the form of colossal fingers. An ashen hand reaching futilely up to heaven. The funeral entered a new phase.