There were no words, not even a whisper of breath as she stalked towards me, knees bent, slow and precise steps carrying that death towards me.

  Her eyes were unblinking and filled with a menacing bloodlust. The only sign that she had started her first attack was an extremely subtle shift in her front foot, now angled 2 degrees out of stride, and a dip in her shield of precisely 13 centimetres.

  That was all the warning I had that the blade was now licking out in a silent jab aimed at my throat.

  I leaned back to clear the point, and as I did, it suddenly stopped, rotated 90 degrees, and slid down towards my chest, looking to open a clean line from my sternum to my pelvis.

  Pushing off slightly with my feet, I leapt back about half a metre, but she was already following up her vertical slice by swinging her shield towards me, attempting to batter my face and chest to throw me off balance.

  I knocked the shield aside with the back of my hand, only to be met with the swiftly rising sword once again sweeping towards my chest and face.

  I was backpedalling hard, but she was pressing the charge and not giving me much time to coordinate my responses to her attacks.

  Naturally, I was engaging with her on her terms.

  This fight simply wouldn't have happened had it been an actual fight to the death. Of course, blasting her with microwaves or tearing her limb from limb with my whip-like appendages would be rather poor participation on my part.

  After the next step back, her upward swing turned into a whirling chop coming in from my left side. She had slightly overextended her leading foot to commit to the attack, which I suspected was a bad habit born from eagerness to press an advantage.

  I stepped into her guard, catching her wrist on my hip and locking it down with my left arm.

  She brought the shield to bear on me from the right, trying to smash the iron rim into my ribs.

  I batted it upwards and then extended a hand towards her throat, whisking my fingers across it before letting her sword arm go and allowing her to jump back.

  She glared daggers at me, and I simply nodded.

  She came again, in the same stance as before. This time she swept low, trying to chop my ankle out from under me.

  Normal enemies would either need to jump to avoid it, or step back to clear the range but the sweep was a feint as well, as soon as the blade started its arc she exploded upwards with her shield, attempting to catch me in the jaw with the upper lip of the shield.

  Had I been airborne, there would have been no way to avoid the attack, and if I'd chosen to step back I'd have been off balance and then taken to the ground under the shield. The only possible counter would be to commit to losing a foot by calling her bluff, and striking her in response before she launched.

  I needed to fuel her emotions here, though—keep this running and let her get immersed in the fight.

  I wanted her hackles to rise and for that bloodlust she'd directed at me to spill over into a single-minded need to kill me.

  The point was to see what her maximum was. So, I punched her shield to the right, throwing her off balance and causing her to twist slightly as she reached the apex of her lunge upwards.

  With no significant resistance, she lifted off the ground to my right and carried past me.

  As she did, however, she corrected the twist by splaying her legs out along with her sword arm to counteract the centripetal force.

  This had the effect of putting my throat once more in the path of her blade.

  I leaned back so that it would cut through the space where my neck had been, and as I did, she tucked into a roll in order to preserve her momentum.

  However, instead of committing to the roll, she absorbed the impact with the ground in her powerful arms and then pushed back towards me, tucking her legs in and then springing herself at my lowered head in an acrobatic donkey kick.

  I dropped to the ground completely, thumping my back into the dirt as her legs sailed by overhead.

  Before her entire body launched off of the ground, she reversed her grip on her sword and dug the tip through the surface of our sparring ring, effectively slowing her pounce and realigning her landing zone to my chest.

  As I rolled to get out from under her, I threw a hand down and slapped the ground with enough force to eject myself into the air, rotating myself as I flew, until my feet once more came to rest under me.

  She crouched where I'd been lying, and that was when the first sigil flared to life.

  After a hurried prayer to Dersio, a gout of flame erupted from the fist closed around the hilt of her sword.

  I noted this with interest, as the only time I'd seen someone use a sigil in this way, it had been palm out.

  So, apparently that wasn't a necessary part of the activation, just... a habit? Learned gestures?

  Very curious.

  I dodged to the right, stepping around the stream of fire, and closed on her shield arm.

  She had expected this, and with another brief prayer, a second sigil flared to life on the surface of the shield.

  This was even more interesting, as I'd also assumed that the sigil formation people used in combat had to be connected to their body directly in some way.

  But now it appeared that as long as you held the object, you could produce a sigil on it. Which made sense given items like chests could be inscribed with a sigil for remote activation.

  The one on her shield was a ghostly blue, and I soon found my feet frozen in place, ice having crept up my ankles to lock my body in position for her follow-up strike.

  Which immediately came sweeping in from my left, obscured by the tail end of her flames.

  This had been a calculated manoeuvre on her part.

  Force movement with the fire to reposition the enemy; if they got caught in it, great. If they didn't, lock them down in the favourable position with a crowd-control skill before dealing a critical blow.

  I marvelled at the skill on display; even under combat pressure, she was planning ahead and attempting to subvert the efforts of her enemies.

  It had made little difference to me, but these strikes were coming at an incredible pace. Even with her injured body, she was moving and reacting faster than any human I could recall.

  How she got overwhelmed by the forces that captured her was a mystery to me. I'd have to ask her about the circumstances later; there may have been some subterfuge involved if she was performing half as well as she could.

  I shattered the ice at my feet with an ultrasonic pulse and stepped out of the path of her blade.

  She'd come into the swing confident it would connect. This caused her to overreach on her swing, and I took hold of her arm, sweeping it up behind her back while pulling her into my chest.

  I wrenched her wrist until the blade dropped to the dirt with a definitive thump.

  She screamed out in pain before growling at me with a low, guttural voice.

  "I'm going to fucking slaughter you!! I'll kill you!! I'll tear you limb from limb until there's nothing left but a bloody pulp, and then I'm going to fucking piss all over it!"

  She was practically frothing at the mouth, flailing wildly against my hold. It was beautiful.

  I pushed her away, and as soon as my hands left her back, she dove for her sword, attempting to continue the fight.

  She had entered some sort of mad frenzy, and a blazing red sigil formed over her forehead. It glowed with a malignant, blood-red fury.

  I didn't know if she'd triggered this sigil on purpose, or if it was some kind of passive activation she couldn't control, but she was moving several times faster than she had been previously.

  Grunts of exertion and howls of rage came with almost every strike of her sword. She whirled and spun, effortlessly redirecting every parry I made into another attack. It was a relentless onslaught.

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  I surmised this was a form of berserk skill. Abandoning reason and calculation for outright power. Anytime I came within grasping distance, she would hurl herself away and launch into another flurry of attacks.

  They came sporadically, with no coordinated tactic or plan, but even still the grace and power being unleashed by her was astounding.

  Everything was being conducted through raw instinct, identifying weak points, manipulating her body, handling her weapon and her shield to form an almost unstoppable cascade of death.

  I struggled to imagine this woman actually losing to a group of goblins and orcs. Even the warlord wouldn't have survived this kind of vicious brutality.

  I let her continue for another minute, taking the time to analyse this state of attack before finally deciding to shut things down.

  I didn't know what kind of toll the berserk state was inflicting upon her body, or her mind, but I could guess it wasn't healthy for her.

  Shunting a particularly harsh slash, I swept around her right flank and then positioned her into a chokehold. It was like pinning a wild animal to a wall. She scrabbled, bit, screamed and flailed with every ounce of strength she possessed until finally I restrained her limbs to keep her from injuring herself against me.

  Slowly the blood and oxygen to her brain were cut off enough for her to go unconscious.

  Not that I was some sort of expert on combat, but I had witnessed a ferocity that I was convinced no trained soldier could match.

  While tactics and coordination from teammates might overcome this power in a drawn-out battle, I didn't think for a moment that Armela would lose to someone in a one-on-one fight.

  Once she came to, I would speak with her about both her battle with the caravan and her berserk skill.

  For now, I took her back to her tent and gently laid her on the bedroll.

  I produced a tendril from my finger and then split it into billions of nanoscopic strands, weaving them slowly between her cells and deep into the bruised flesh of her body.

  Slowly, I removed the broken remnants of dead cells, repaired the ones still holding on, and reconnected small vascular infrastructure.

  I removed scattered groupings of intracellular metabolites that had built up from her muscles burning so much fuel and then began to directly supplement any nutrient deficiencies her body was experiencing from the fighting and starvation.

  It was a stopgap procedure to ease the soreness and help make her rest more comfortable.

  It was also an opportunity to check which, if any, of her chemical compounds had been burned up to fuel her berserk sigil effect.

  Aside from the obvious glucose depletion, the skill had rapidly burned away a good portion of her water and fat reserves.

  It essentially put her body through three days of metabolic activity in less than two minutes.

  Odds were good that when the effect of the skill had worn off, she would have passed out anyway.

  Truly a last resort option.

  I produced a saline solution to administer intravenously and then left her to recover.

  Once again, I left my drone to monitor her condition.

  The fighting had only lasted about 15 minutes from start to finish, which in terms of duels was on the lengthy side.

  After setting her down in the bedroll, cleaning her up and stabilising her health had taken another hour, so the day had just barely bled into lunchtime.

  I didn't think she would be out for very long, so I began my work preparing her meal.

  While I busied myself gathering salted beef, mushrooms, potatoes and beans, I reviewed the footage of our fight from both my perspective, and that of my drones around the camp.

  The multiple angles made it easier to observe the entire chain of events unfolding. Loop after loop played back at incredibly fast intervals while I poured over them.

  The steaks seared over the fire, the mushrooms and beans soaking up the rendered fat and sauteing nicely. The salted beef would need to be diluted with something, so after the items had finished searing, I added water and some flour I'd located in a sack along with the other food items.

  Reducing that down, I made a rudimentary stew. Really, it was more of a hunter's sauce, just really light on the sauce.

  While the potatoes would do a decent enough job of cutting the salt, I didn't want to carb load the woman too heavily. Ultimately, it was hearty enough, but the lack of butter was hurting our culinary experience here.

  I concluded she possessed the potential to be an incredibly devastating warrior.

  While I did not know about the median skill or power on this world, I was certain that she could, at the very least, defeat the warlord. That had seemed to be the largest threat in this area, so it stood to reason she was fairly powerful.

  There was a massive difference between her regular and berserk state, though.

  Almost two entirely different beings.

  If she was going to fully harness her potential as a warrior, then she would need to be able to operate on the same level as the berserk skill at all times.

  This meant two things: either we somehow offloaded the power draw of the skill from her body, or she got a new body.

  I supposed we could try projecting the sigil onto a pile of raw materials for it to consume while in use, but would that just serve the purpose of enhancing the pile of resources with the skill?

  She couldn't physically pile enough nutrients into her body to sustain it. She would need several times her own body weight in food for any single use.

  Impractical.

  And anyway, she wouldn't even really need the skill if her body were enhanced enough to compensate for the lack of raw aggression.

  While the skill afforded some significant physical benefits, the loss of planning and coordinated, rational thought ultimately hurt her combat prowess overall.

  She would fall to enemy tactics if the fight were prolonged enough for them to counter her in any way.

  No, she needed to maintain her wits while still gaining the power and speed of the skill. Which rendered down to one solution.

  Altering her body.

  I plated up a generous portion for Armela and brought it into the tent.

  The moment the odour from the food wafted past her nose, she groaned and put a hand to her forehead.

  Before the realisation of what her final moments had been, I spoke up to head off her confusion.

  "You're fine. Everything is fine; just relax now. Take it easy."

  Her eyes flung open at the sound of my voice, and she whipped her head to face me.

  Apparently, even the placating tone I tried to use wasn't enough to keep her from being caught off guard.

  Her sudden movement turned out to be quite the mistake, as her pained wince told me the splitting headache coursing its way through her brain hadn't quite let up yet.

  "Ohhhhhh... my fucking heeaaadddd."

  She whimpered like a struck puppy, attempting to curl into the fetal position only to encounter the resistance of the I.V. line I'd hooked into her arm.

  She panicked, and I reached out to still her arms from flailing at the tube to dislodge it.

  "Eaaasssssy Armela, you're ok. I put that into your arm to help you get better."

  I settled her arm back down against the bedroll and released it.

  "It's a medicine you wouldn't be familiar with, but it isn't there to hurt you. Just lay back and breathe for a little bit, alright?"

  I gently placed a hand on the centre of her chest and pushed.

  She relented and laid her head down on the flax pillow she had tossed across the tent the night prior.

  "What happened?"

  She had calmed down, but was still concerned.

  I countered her question with a question.

  "How much do you remember?"

  She closed her eyes and thought.

  "I remember up until you made me drop my sword... everything after that is so... hazy."

  Her eyebrows drew together as she attempted to make sense of what she was experiencing.

  "It's funny... I get an impression of emotion from that time... I can tell how I felt. But I can't remember what I did, or what happened."

  She shook her head in frustration.

  "I just remember feeling... rage. Nothing but... endless rage..."

  She trailed off.

  So her memory of the events cut off right before, or during, the activation of her berserk sigil. Interesting.

  "Has something like this happened in the past? Have you ever woken up feeling like this when you haven't been out drinking? Or maybe there are some battles you've fought that you can't remember portions of?"

  She was once again lost in thought, though now her forehead was creased in remembrance instead of frustration.

  "Now that you mention it, yeah, there was one time for sure that I can recall."

  She nodded to herself as she recalled her memories.

  "Back when I threw my lot in with this shitty mercenary band roaming the western border. We had stopped in at Tralren to bunk and resupply."

  She glanced down at the plate of steaming stew I'd brought into the tent.

  "I guess the city council caught wind that we had come to town, so they offered us a sizable commission to help 'resolve' a minor border dispute with a disgruntled Nobel laying claim to part of Tralren's land."

  She looked from the food to me and I nodded in understanding.

  "It seemed like a pretty straightforward contract for us, but by the time we'd arrived at the area described in the request... things had escalated into a full-scale family war between two houses..."

  She sat up a bit, adjusting her pillow as a lower back support and resting her shoulders against a thick beam of wood like I had the night prior. I handed her the plate of food, and she marvelled at it for a moment before continuing.

  "Anyway, our little band of money-makers ended up getting dragged into that horrible mess of a battle. I remember one member of our band, Darlow, was fighting just a few metres from me."

  She smiled faintly at his memory before it faded from her face.

  "I could hear him shouting over the din of battle, and I'd been trying to work my way into his area, but the enemies were too many, and I had to listen to them slaughter him. They took their time with it. There were so many of them on the field by that point, we all knew it had become a loss for us."

  Her eyes were glassy as she continued. The food gently steamed on her lap as she spoke.

  "He called out to me... for me to help him. I could hear him begging as they took his hands. There were four of them around him, kicking and screaming at him."

  A hint of despair and sorrow crept into her voice, despite her efforts to stay conversational.

  "Next, they took his feet. I was getting desperate to get through to him. Because he was right. Fucking. There. I could see him. Hell, we even locked eyes briefly as I felled the man before me."

  She mimicked the motion of a sword chop using the spoon in her hand.

  "He was terrified, in pain, but two more assholes popped up in the space I'd cleared, and I think I started seeing red. Deep in my core, I could feel this... rage bubbling up in me."

  Her fist curled around the spoon in her hand until the wood creaked.

  "I took the first one between the eyes with the tip of my sword, and the second fell to a slash across his gut. But by then it was too late."

  A sigh of resignation escaped her.

  "I glimpsed Darlow being speared to the ground with four swords and that was it... I came-to on the outskirts of the battle late that same night."

  She dropped the spoon on the plate and hung her head.

  "I'd thought one of my allies had dragged me from the field. Maybe I'd been struck on the head while I was preoccupied or something. But the members of my band never came for me. I don't even know if they lived through it."

  A tremble ran through her as the first signs of crying appeared.

  "Eventually, I made my way back into Tralren and learned of the outcome."

  A single tear fell from her cheek onto the platter of food resting on her lap. It had stopped steaming.

  With a loud sniff, she cleared her throat and wiped at her eyes.

  "That's in the past though. Those idiots died, and I lived. That's really all there is to it."

  She tucked into her food, and I let her eat in silence.

  It didn't take her long to finish up, and I took the platter from her. She thanked me and then crossed her arms over her belly, waiting for more questions.

  "First, I'll apologise for bringing an uncomfortable memory back for you. Regardless of how well known they are, it's never easy to watch an ally die."

  I didn't want to sound too sincere to the point of being patronizing.

  "I'm sorry you had to go through that. I won't pretend to know what it's like, but for whatever value it may have to you, you have my sympathy."

  She was shaking her head now, a small smile on her lips.

  "I don't need your sympathy, Vita. The memories are painful, and I've gathered quite a few of them. But I've made my peace with these events. And I don't want to feel pitied. I appreciate the sentiment, though."

  I nodded. Even though she rejected the statement, she accepted the courtesy. This was good enough for now.

  "We're going to spend quite a bit of time talking now. There is much I need to discuss with you, and many things I'm curious about."

  She itched at the small needle in her arm.

  "Do I still need... this?"

  I shook my head and removed it, once again dismantling the material and subsuming it into my body.

  "Did you need some water? Another plate of food? How's your head feeling now?"

  She smiled more widely than she had when I apologised.

  "I'm fine, Vita. Thank you for looking after me like this. It's... been a long time since someone's taken the time to... be with me..."

  The tenderness in her voice was thick. She'd obviously spent a long time bouncing around from place to place, never getting to know someone for too long. Spending her nights alone or with her guard up.

  "I know we haven't known each other long, but I do genuinely want you to be happy and healthy. I value your company more than the skills you have or the knowledge you hold, and I hope that's been coming across in my actions."

  She nodded before responding.

  "You really are quite the smooth talker, aren't you? If I didn't know any better, I'd think you might be buttering me up... but yes, that has been coming through."

  I chuckled softly.

  "I don't know about being a smooth talker; I've just got an awfully bad habit of speaking my mind. It gets me into trouble more often than it gets me out, and you strike me as plenty of trouble."

  Her eyes widened slightly, and she laughed.

  "Honest to a fault, aren't you, Vita? Well, you keep wagging your silver tongue at me like that and I might just end up taking it from you..."

  She bared her sharp teeth in a wicked grin.

  The meaning was clear enough, and I could feel a familiar heat kindle between my legs.

  "Well, let's get through the wagging and see where we end up, then."