Ai’s face lit up in a happy grin, and she dropped all of her ladylike composure when she ran full speed at him and literally threw herself the last bit. Ioha caught her and swirled. Partly because his overjoyed brain revelled in it, and partly because the still functioning parts had the sense to lessen the impact of her body flying into his. Then he swirled a full turn more and was rewarded with her arms around his neck. She kissed him briefly before he let her down. The no-touching part had been relegated to the past.

  “Shall we?” he asked, still a little uncertain about the level of politeness appropriate for a date like this. His was not a dating culture, and whatever he knew came from stories and what Ai told him while they were still university students back on Earth. While she did come from a dating culture, she always left him with the impression that her knowledge was mostly second-hand.

  He had, as had she, fleeting experiences from relationships, and while they belonged to a time when each of them mostly still looked the age they now did once again, his hadn’t been too serious, and neither, Ioha suspected, had hers.

  He took her hand in his, a little scared she’d pull it back, and tried a few probing steps in the direction of the red iron gate defining the border between their current world and the world outside. She clasped his fingers to show his worries were unfounded, and matched his gait as well as her shorter stature could handle.

  “Sorry,” Ioha said and slowed down.

  He received a grateful smile in return. “It’s cool. No problem.” She snuggled closer to him. “Schooltown, I guess?”

  There weren’t exactly an abundance of places to visit for a date. Even a picnic created a problem, the cold autumn unaccounted for. This was farmland, even if of awful quality, so there weren’t really any scenic spots. Flat was the word he would have used if forced to describe the place in a hurry. That left Schooltown, half an hour's walk away from school, ten minutes if you ran or applied the physical aura extensions they’d learn next year.

  “Know what?”

  Ioha bent his head and leaned on hers. “What?”

  “I just can’t get used to your blonde hair, but I like it.”

  Blonde hair? I’m almost half again as heavy as before, and she notices my hair? He turned his head and buried his nose into hers. In this world, she smelled different from before. Then why not? She wasn’t the petite woman he fell in love with. Maybe he wasn’t all that much larger in her eyes. “If you like it, then I like it as well.”

  On the other side of the gate, the avenue turned into a dirt road and would stay that way until someone decided the main road needed a little paving. When he arrived here late summer, work on claiming a little extra road for extending the main street was ongoing. From what Ioha understood, each year saw the street longer by a house or two.

  “You’re silent.”

  He hugged her closer. “Sorry, mind wandered.”

  Ai pinched his hand and grinned. “You know, a lesser girlfriend than me would get angry with you for being uncool?”

  “Sorry for being uncool.” He was. The cool guys might be as tall as him, but they didn’t look like a wall of menacing muscles. It wasn’t that he looked like a bodybuilder. Those were considered cool among some people. He was just large and a far cry from the nimble heroes who walked with the same confidence on a training field, a lecture hall or dressed up for fine dining. Not that there was any fine dining to be found here. He, well, he had to settle for the training field. He might have the brains and academic aptitude for the lecture halls, but when he entered, he looked like he planned to demolish the place.

  “Nervous?”

  He was, but not exactly for the reasons Ai imagined. His were more general social worries. “Yeah, this is new to me.” Looking like a teenager didn’t make him one. Small half-truths had their place.

  She stepped closer into his embrace and nestled under his arm. “Me too.”

  Her warmth spread under his cloak. With her this close to him, it almost wrapped around them both, and an unwelcome picture suddenly flashed through his mind. “You know that night, how did you get away?” Cloak had been the right decision. Dates weren’t occasions when you bled aura for the sake of flamboyance. Then it dawned on him that his chosen topic of conversation wasn’t appropriate for a date either. I’m an arse. Learn to shut up, idiot!

  “He’s a knightage student. Strong. Not as strong as you, but strong.”

  You don’t have to talk about it. Damn, I’m stupid!

  “Don’t worry, I’m fine, I really am.” She stopped and pulled him close. Suddenly lips and tongue were all over his mouth and inside it. A clumsy lover, just like him. “Told you I plan to become an adventurer. A few of us learn offensive magic, like magic arrows,” she said as soon as they disentangled. She fell silent while they tidied their clothes and resumed walking. “I’m really bad with aura extension, but there’s this long-distance attack I’ve learned.”

  To his surprise, he listened with honest interest. Independent magic? For a healer?

  “I can’t throw a fire arrow, or a lightning bolt or anything like that, but I can throw…” She hesitated. “Maybe more like move. Whatever! I can throw an arrow filled with my health, OK?”

  It wasn’t OK. Ioha didn’t understand a thing.

  “Look, he grabbed me, he’s strong, he broke my arm. I threw that broken arm back at him, and he let go.” She growled, a deep predatory sound rumbling up her throat. “That makes me cool and dangerous.” She smiled.

  Ioha winced. “You can return all injuries like that?”

  Her smile widened to a grin. “Damage, not injury.”

  He bent down and kissed her. While he truly wanted to know more, he still refused to turn their date into a lecture. “OK, damage, not injury.” He didn’t get the difference, but it wasn’t important.

  Ai shot him a few strange looks as the village grew closer. “Not cool. You didn’t understand, right?”

  With a nod, Ioha admitted she was right.

  “Pinch me!”

  “What?”

  “Pinch me, hard!”

  He’d heard that tone before. You either did as told, or she refused to speak with you for a week. He pinched her hand, hard. She blinked. He doubled over in pain.

  “See, damage, not injury.”

  It took three tries to stand up. His jewels still throbbed when he finally got upright. To her credit, Ai never let him go. She did snort, but he remained in her embrace throughout the entire ordeal. “You smell fantastic!” he said when the pain subsided enough to return him the use of his feet.

  “I know. Always did, you know. You were just too chicken to find out.”

  Ioha’s cheeks turned a deep red. He already knew her scent from the first time they tried out a bout on tatami mats several years earlier.

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  Ai looked at him with confusion in her eyes. Then something clicked, and colour rose in her face as well. “Oh,” she said in a small voice. Then a short burst of rain cooled them down and forced them both under Ioha’s cloak.

  They were almost at the town outskirts when she suddenly swore.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” she started. “I just wish I were better at extending my aura.”

  Ioha looked at her. Healing worked by touch, so he didn’t see the benefits of aura extension. “Why?” Better to let her tell him herself rather than leave the silent question unasked.

  “Touch only. Sure, maybe a quill’s width, but that counts as touch. Seriously uncool.”

  “And?” he nudged. She had something she wanted to say, and she clearly wanted him to dig it out. They passed the last farm while he waited for her to continue.

  A cow voiced its displeasure with the weather when Ai found her voice again. “I can reach almost across the school yard when, you know, what happened to your…”

  “When you smashed my balls?” he helped.

  She reddened briefly. “When you, you know…”

  “My balls got hammered?” he said.

  “You’re uncool!” she protested. “A strong man like you…”

  “Has no muscles in his balls,” Ioha corrected her. She was not getting away with this. He had way too fun right now.

  “You really… whatever!” She gave up. They knew each other well enough for her to know he never let go when he had the advantage during verbal fencing. “When I heal, I have to touch. So I sometimes have to rip open armour to reach the wounds.” She shuddered. “I don’t even remember how many times I’ve cut my hands open any longer.” Then she shrugged. “At least I’m super fast when I heal myself.”

  “You can heal yourself?”

  “Of course! That’s like super easy. Only have to imagine myself healed.” She tilted her head the way she always did when something almost occurred to her. “You know, it’s like I don’t even need to touch myself.”

  No hands needed? “Can you teach me?" Memories of smarting hands from the evenings flooded him. If he could heal that while sparring, life would get so much better.

  “I guess.” Her head tilted to and fro like a flagpole on a windy day. “Probably.” That meant she’d find a solution, one way or another. She always did.

  He swept her inside his cloak, both for warmth and to make her keep that promise. Most for warmth, and to feel her close. She was warm and soft in all the right places, and her scent mixed with wet wool made him dizzy. They shared another kiss, and the taste of her lips still lingered when he looked up and wiped raindrops from his face. Ahead of them, what passed for a restaurant rather than a tavern, waited with double doors facing a small square.

  “Dinner?” he mumbled after he ducked inside his cloak again. So she can reach across this with her magic? The thought came unbidden to his mind. You suck at romance! “You know,” he mumbled again, “wouldn’t it be nice if you could just shoot a magic arrow filled with damage from your patients to yourself?” he added and nudged her for another kiss.

  Ai froze. Ioha felt her stiffen at his side, then she yanked the cloak from them both. Seconds later, she quite literally climbed up his body and locked her legs around his back. “You!” She grabbed his face with both hands and gave him a wet kiss. “You oaf!” And another. “You wonderful, wonderful big oaf!” And a third. “I love you!”

  What? He didn’t complain. Kissing was nice, after all, but Ioha wondered what he had done to deserve them all.

  She climbed down, but even as they entered the open dining hall, he felt her giddiness from the hand he held.

  “Table for two,” he told the waiter. This was very much nothing that had any right to exist in a place this size, but then again, that went for the stone-paved square outside as well. Spellsword Academy had a supporting town attached to it, not a village. Their rain clothes vanished together with a servant, and he soon found himself facing Ai and most of the dining hall from a corner. Maybe not the best spot, but it was cosier this way. With a laugh, Ioha prepared himself for Ai’s verbal onslaught. She was hardly able to sit still in her chair, but first, he allowed himself to bathe in her bubbly happiness.

  “OK, shoot,” he said when he was satisfied.

  “One of our teachers told us it’s possible to have things sent to oneself with magic.”

  Ioha nodded. He knew nothing about it, but the strategy and logistics students learned far more magic than any of the armed combat students, and for rather obvious reasons. He reached out with his hands across the table, and she placed hers in his. They were warm to his touch. “Like with a rope?”

  She shook her head. “No, that’s impossible. You can’t extend your aura very far.”

  It made sense. When he ripped Canadena’s weapons from her hands, her hilt was all but locked with his sword. “Then how?” He loved how eager Ai was to explain.

  “It’s more like throwing a mousetrap. When it lands, it springs.”

  Ioha tried to wrap Ai’s explanation around his head. The closest he got was throwing some kind of spring-loaded mechanism behind a target, and then it released and threw the item at the spellcaster. Whatever way it worked, it wasn’t anything he’d ever be able to learn. The gifts granted by the gods came with limitations as well. She’d never be able to create a magic shield the way he did without even having to consciously think about it these days, and her inability was absolute. She could try all day, and she would still fail. “I honestly don’t get it,” he admitted.

  “You finally solved my healing, and that makes you super cool, and I love you.” Her hands shook in his. “I can’t heal at a distance, but I could transfer injuries as damage to me and heal myself.”

  He shuddered. Why would anyone deliberately inflict damage on themselves?

  “Look, Ioha, I’m the strongest self-healer in my class, probably in the entire school, but I always thought that ability was pointless.” She squeezed his hands. “When you told me about fetching injuries, my status display started ringing like mad.”

  Ringing?

  The menu arrived.

  Ioha picked something with lots of meat and almost made the mistake of ordering strong beer to go with it. Instead, he settled for watered-down cider. Ai went halfway. Meat, but also plenty of vegetables, the way she had always done whenever she could. Pubs weren’t big on veggies, and Gothenburg made a serious attempt to compete with English cities for the number of pubs.

  “Ringing?” he said after the menu vanished. “You hear sounds when your abilities change?”

  “Sure.” She looked perplexed. “Don’t everyone?”

  Ioha shook his head.

  “Strange,” Ai said. “Whenever my skill tree changes, there’s a ringing sound in my head.”

  Skill tree? Ioha forced his display to public. “What do you see?”

  She stared at him. “Your skill tree, of course. Mine’s a lot cooler, but yours is nice as well.”

  He shook his head again. Everyone sees displays their own way? Why? His were neat tables with numbers, numbers and even more numbers. “Mind if I look at yours?”

  Ai shrugged. “Sure.”

  There were lots of numbers. “It’s… nice,” Ioha said. He’d always preferred raw data. Ai, he knew, thought in terms of beauty, ease of use and, of course, coolness. I never knew. More scared than he wanted to admit, he shrank back into his chair. The displays mirror our souls. Maybe this world was where each of them came true, at least more so than on Earth.

  “Nice?” Ai frowned at him. “My tree is the coolest in the school!”

  Perhaps it was. If she said it was, then why not? From what he gleaned when he glanced at her display, her aura was stupidly strong despite her poor reach, at least compared to his. If he could have applied to one of the magic schools around the capital, then Ai probably could have blown it up. In his personal world, abilities ranged from zero, where you weren’t even aware of the existence of an ability, through the low teens when you could make an arse of yourself, to the thirties when you occasionally succeeded, over the fifties, where it became perfectly useful and up to eighty when you were rightfully seen as seriously good at it. At one hundred, you needed to either reconsider having a social life or start competing internationally. The reason for Ai’s aura to blow way past three hundred was beyond him. He didn’t lack for magic, but four times his own number?

  He looked at her. “You’re quite good at self-healing,” he croaked. Her intestinal self-repair ability had four digits. Ioha doubted anyone in the world could match her. Sure, there were other self-healing categories in the high two-digit area, but if she could hike one of them to a godlike level, then she would push all of them there eventually.

  “Yeah, cool, isn’t it?”

  He suddenly felt very cold. “Yeah, very cool.” Gods, I hope you don’t grow too strong, so you lose the ability to die. No one should be denied death. “If you train a lot, you’ll get even stronger.”

  “I know,” she bubbled and almost jumped in her chair. “I’ll be the happiest and strongest adventurer healer in the world, and I’ll always keep you healthy!”

  “I’m sure you will.”

  Their food arrived.

  It tasted like cardboard.