Finally, after the passing of a cosmic age, she reaches her destination. Misery strides between the familiar silhouette of the fighting cages, circular cages of copper strips lined with holy tigereye, and holy tigereye on the base. Misery knows these cages from Rootsdown. Typhoon, one of her many bosses, had one in eir headquarters, cobbled together from stolen blueprints and salvaged mech scrap. Misery had fought a few bouts in it. Maybe a lot. To see a row of them here, deep in the duchy of Canis, sends a fist of homesickness through her chest.

At this hour the gym is deserted except for a single figure sparring with shadow opponents—virtual constructs, blows very real. Gravity on. Misery blinks: through coincidence, or something else, she’s found her true target. The Lady Lee Alodia Lightning.

The princess has stripped to a training suit, top and pants, that exposes a broad ribbon of waist. Beneath the finery and/or baggy fatigues, the Lady Alodia Lightning has the physique of a prizefighter, all corded muscle and undiluted anger. The skin of her midsection is a biome of flourishing tatts, its purposeful artistry disrupted by a thick pink scar. The kind of scar you get from a bad knife fight, the kind of scar that forms when you don’t get proper doctoring, the kind of scar that Misery is intimately familiar with. She is instantly, irreversibly captivated. Alodia Lightning fights with the viciousness Misery already knows well. Just straight-up brawling, quick and efficient and dirty. Knees and elbows and palms to the nosebridge. Fingers in the eyes. The princess dispatches one shadow in under a minute and pauses to clean sweat from her brow, torso heaving with breath. Then—a small gesture, a half-muttered word—and she summons another four rivals. Misery watches her take them down with a thrill of pleasure: lapel-grab, slamming one into a second, taking out the kneecaps of a third. This princess would have cleaned the floor with half the deadmarbles clattering around Rootsdown. Where did she learn to fight like that? Surely not in the stuffy, tiptoe-through corridors of the Capital.

Alodia Lightning turns and discovers her rapt audience. For a moment she freezes, vulnerable for a second before a curtain of rage falls. “What are you doing here?”

Misery doesn’t answer. Instead she steps up to the copper cage and hauls its door open. Silky smooth and weighty, no screech of rust. The princess hisses and arches at the threat. “Fight me,” Misery says. “I can give you a better workout than those phantoms.”

“Who do you think you are?”

Misery raises a brow. “Afraid of facing someone who’s been in a real brawl or two?”