Magic Under Construction: TOMU 2-9

[alexandraerin]

Started: 4/25/2011
Status: In progress.
Last Updated: 5
Word Count: ~3400
Hours Writing: 3.




[3 hours in. There's a good "stopping point" I could have ended it on in here, but I'm going to keep going a little bit further. This is the last draft post update I'm making to it, though.]

"Here's the deal, kiddies," Callahan said as we formed up in a circle around her, maybe about thirty feet or so across. She moved into the center of us and spread out her arms, pointing a finger on each hand in opposite directions. "When I say 'go', you and you are going to come into the middle, and one of you is going to hit the other in the head as hard and as fast as you can, hard enough that the other one can't get back up. When that happens, you both take your place back in the circle, and the person to the left of you will come forward."

She walked backwards out of the circle, keeping her fingers pointed at the two people she'd singled out without looking, both of whom looked around at the people on either side of them as if they were testing out the idea that maybe someone else had been picked to go first.

I could understand the impulse... I was pretty grateful to find myself about halfway in between the two initial combatants, meaning I wouldn't have to be among the first few people to step into the impromptu ring.

It wasn't so much that I wanted to put off the fighting part of fighting class for as long as possible. There's just a certain awkwardness and uncertainty in going first. Callahan's instructions had been simple and straightforward, but by the same token they'd also been short. When there aren't a lot of details, it could be that the instructions were self-explanatory or wide open for interpretation, or it could be that the person giving them thought they were self-explanatory but there was plenty of room for wrong interpretations.

"Yes, you with the morning star and you with the incredibly gay ponytail," she said as she reached the edge of the circle. "Go!"

"I'm a girl!" a not-at-all-boyish and not even particularly androgynous auburn-haired girl with the ponytail said.

"Yeah, well, your ponytail isn't and it sucks cock in the men's room for coppers when you're asleep," Callahan said. "I can tell these things. Now you can keep pretending you don't know I was talking to you or you can fucking go before your opponent wins by default, and by 'default' I mean by driving the iron nails sticking out of the end of his big weighty bludgeon directly through the roof of your skull while you're staring at me with your upper vagina gaping at me."

Though her opponent had taken about three steps forward into the ring, he wasn't any quicker about rushing forward and attacking her than she was about attacking him.

I really did identify with both of them. When you're not quite sure what was expected of you, it often seems better to do nothing than to do the wrong thing... but Callahan's requirements really were as straightforward as she'd made them sound, and doing nothing was the wrong thing when dealing with her.

"We have forty-five minutes left to get through eighteen pairs of fighters," Callahan said. "I plan on getting everyone through the circle with at least twenty-five minutes to spare. Your grades for the day will depend not on how well you fight or how many heads you crack, but entirely on how much or how little you help me in this plan."

The girl with the ponytail kind of ducked her shoulders like she'd been sent up to the blackboard to complete a problem after being caught not paying attention in class. She shuffled forward a bit, taking her mocked handaxe off her belt by grabbing the haft just below the blade, then raising it up and adjusting her grip further down the handle.

"This is not a fencing match!" Callahan barked. The girl with the ponytail flinched, though was directing her commentary to the guy with the mace, who was still standing there, waiting and watching the girl. "You don't wait for your opponent to get ready. You don't square off. You should have splattered her skull by now."

The two reluctant combatants stepped forward. I wondered at the wisdom of doing this as a group activity. I didn't know that they wouldn't just be circling around each other half-heartedly even without a sea of eyes around them, but the audience couldn't be helping things.

The girl lifted her axe up high as she got near the guy with the spiked mace... not near enough to hit him, just nearer than she had been. He raised his own weapon and she jumped back, then seemed to suddenly remember the round shield hanging on her back. She fumbled it off and got it on her arm.

"Again, you could have killed her while she was doing that," Callahan said. "It's not the exact kind of opportunity you will have often in a real fight, nor will you see it very often in this class... but you should be looking for those opportunities and you should be taking them. You're both dead three times already... you for letting your guard down, you for being too reluctant to strike a fatal blow. In thirty seconds the day's exercise changes... if you're not going to fight, you can be target dummies for people who will."

That got them moving. The girl stepped forward, with her shield up at a level that would have probably have been unwisely high if she'd been in a real fight... since she knew her head was the target, she was only protecting her head.

She made a few downward chopping swings at the guy's head. They weren't exactly half-hearted, but they didn't seem to have a lot of strength behind them... it was like she was used to fighting to first strike or a certain number of hits, where the only goal was contact between her blade and her opponent, with the level of force not mattering. Her opponent was able to step aside from one and then bat the axe away on the second swing. He followed it up with a bash of his own, which she took on the shield.

"Better, but you're not counting coup," Callahan said. "The goal here is to take your opponent out with a single blow to the head. We're starting with the head for a few different reasons, but among them is not the fact that the head is a particularly soft and vulnerable target. I have seen human warriors fighting with an axe that size embedded in their skulls. Don't just try to bring your axe down on his head. Bring it down through it."

I recognized the reluctance on both participants' parts to do just that. They were probably both okay with swinging weapons at each other, fighting to win a fight even to the point of simulated death... but somehow there was a difference between the kind of swings they thought of as "fighting" and very deliberately hefting their weapons and trying to beat the other's person's brains in.

Knowing Callahan, I figured that was why she was doing things this way... spending the first day making us fight in front of the group and focusing on head shots. In every way except the purely literal, it had to be one of the most visceral ways to end a fight... you took aim at the thinking part of your opponent, the part that could look at and talk to you, that could laugh and joke or beg and plead and cry and you hit it.

"There is no sense pulling your blow any when you aim for the head," Callahan said, as much to the whole group as to the current combatants.. "There is no point in aiming for someone's head if you aren't willing to kill them. Forget what you see in the television... if you hit someone in the head with a blunt object hard enough to knock them unconscious, you have hit them hard enough to kill them. In the heat of a battle you might not have any idea which one you've done, which is why you don't go for the head if you care about anything besides stopping your opponent right now."

The fight didn't last much longer, though it was probably too slow for Callahan's preferences. The girl made a few harder swings at the guy's head, but the fact that she was almost literally hiding behind her shield meant her aim wasn't that good. He tried bashing it down a couple of times. The girl cried out when he got the head of his weapon stuck on her shield, some of the spikes sticking through in a way that they had to be at least poking her arm. He was able to force her shield down, but he had to unstick his mace in order to take another swing at her, and she got her shield up.

He looked at Callahan with an "Oh, come on." look. She just looked back.

"Can I hit her somewhere else?" he said.

"The goal is defeat her with a head shot," Callahan said.

I couldn't help noticing that wasn't a no.

The guy scowled, but only for a second as it seemed like he parsed that, too. He swung his mace at the girl's unprotected stomach. She was slow to react, and she did so by trying to bring her shield down instead of stepping back out of his weapon's arc. The phantasmal spikes ripped right through her t-shirt and the unprotected flesh underneath. Callahan had been right about the realism of the red box mockeries... her clothing actually appeared to tear. She doubled over and fell to the side, her axe flying from her grip. A few people had to duck as it sailed outside the circle.

The guy looked down at his fallen opponent, then at Callahan.

"You're not done yet," she said.

By the time he was done, the results weren't pretty. The girl had clutched the side of her stomach and was starting to get up when the first blow hit her head. He was still a little reluctant, and it showed. It was a brutal hit... a spiked mace to the head can't be anything but that... but it was more like the sort of impact she might have had if she'd stood up too quickly underneath one hanging on a rack than the sort that would result from a reasonably strong man driving one into her skull.

"Not there yet," Callahan said. "You'll know when you're there."

His second attempt drove a spike into the side of her skull. He let go of the mace and she fell over again, with it still stuck.

"Believe it or not, that's not a fatal wound," Callahan said. "Not an immediately fatal one, anyway. If she were on her feet and had a weapon, she'd still be able to take a swing or two at you. The red box settings mean that when she's completely disabled, she'll go red. Keep going!"

He didn't have to go far. She "went red" as he retrieved his weapon from her, a messy operation that I could barely stand to watch and won't be able to describe. Mercifully, the illusionary damage and all the splatter and debris vanished at the same time that the red aura enveloped her whole body.

"When that happens to you, you'll know because you'll see a reddish haze over everything," Callahan said. "And because all illusionary wounds on you and the person who 'redded' you will heal, you can always get back up and do it again but there's no stupid arguments about who tagged who last. You two clear out. Next two, up!"

The next pair were a little more willing, or a little less hesitant. It was a guy with a great big broadsword and another one with a lighter looking blade. Neither of their weapons really struck me as being natural headcrackers, but I figured the guy with the heavier blade had the advantage. They both seemed to know their stuff, though, and my eye for action isn't anywhere nearly good enough to sort out exactly how the guy with the thinner blade turned it around... but he managed to get in close and crack his opponent over the head with the hand of his sword.

Hilt? Pommel? I guess it's all the hilt, below the blade... I'm pretty sure the bottom of that whole part is the pommel. Anyway, that's what it looked like inflicted the "reddening" blow.

"The red lasts for about fifteen seconds," Callahan said. "When you're red, you're dead... or close enough. In any case, red means the fight is over. Your own weapon won't do shit when you're red, and neither will another red boxed weapon do anything to you. Now, when someone goes red during a repeated one-on-one exercise, there will be no bullshit taking advantage of the quick regen or the enforced helplessness to score a quick point. There are no points in this class. There is only the point, and the point is to learn how to be the one who survives a real fight, and you don't do that by figuring out how to game the mechanics of the simulation we're using.

"Seize every advantage that comes your way. Take all the cheap shots you can... they're called cheap because they don't cost you anything. But the purpose of this class is not to learn how to get really good at defeating the same opponent again and again using quirks of the red mockbox."

The next few bouts were all over pretty quickly, some after an exchange of almost-blows and some with a single swing or jab. In a few cases it really was hard to tell if it was a mock-killing blow or not. In others... well, it was brutal. Some people really took Callahan's message about bringing their weapons through their opponents' skulls to heart. Luckily the dead-red glow erased the gore almost as quickly as it happened, but it was tough to watch.

"This class is about how to end a fight quickly," Callahan said. "But there are two 'hows' there. There is the practical how, which we'll get to later, and the what I'll call the moral how, for lack of a better word. We're starting with the head not because it is the be-all, end-all of fight-ending targets... it isn't. We're not focusing on the techniques you would use when you aim for the head, though we will and I can see that it's needed.

"Most of you have had some kind of fighter training before. You've probably 'killed' someone in mock combat before. That's good. That experience will help you today... not so much the techniques you used but the experience of swinging a weapon into another person's body and bringing them down. But there's a difference between those fights, those tests of combat skill, and setting out with a deliberate and focused intention on ending a fight... which is to say ending a fighter. We don't 'spar' in this class. We don't 'skirmish'. We strike.

"You can get through most fighting classes without ever learning how to smash someone's head in without hesitation or pity. You can have a career on the Skirmish hex or in the pits... not my pit, but in pits... without ever learning this. Here, it's the first and most important thing you will learn, before you even learn how to do it right. There's no point in learning how to do it right if you're going to hesitate to do it at all."

Some of the match-ups lasted longer than others, but none of them lasted nearly as long as the first one. I doubted any of them even took a minute. My turn came way more quickly than I'd expected. Having watched the girl with the ponytail fumble with her gear, I canceled the shrinking on my staff as I was stepping forward.

It wasn't the best move... all of a sudden I had a great big staff in front of me at a time when I was more focused on the person in front of me than the placement of my legs. I tripped. It was only a minor stumble, but I had the bad luck of being paired up with against one of the elves. They darted forward, there was a probably almost literally splitting pain in my skull. All control of my body vanished and the world went red as I hit the mat.

That was my first fight in Callahan's class... tripping myself up with my own weapon and getting "tagged out" immediately. I didn't even see the weapon the elf had used until we returned to the circle... it turned out it had been a large dagger or small sword. While the curved and toothed blade looked plenty wicked, the thing looked like it had more weight and damage potential in the spiked handguard. I was pretty sure that was what had hit me.

"Good hustle, Frybaby," Callahan said. "You're still dead, but you're promptly dead. That counts for a lot. Not for you, of course."

We did make it through the whole circle in under twenty minutes, after which Callahan told us to split up and partner up... those who'd lost our matches go to one side of the room and pair up with another loser, while the winners went to the other side and paired up.

"In a real fight," she announced, "the penalty for hesitating or screwing up or even doing everything right but being less good or less lucky than the other guy is that you die, or you end up under their power, or you get a lot of painful injuries that don't fade like a bad dream. The avoidance of these things are a powerful motivator that can sometimes be enough to make you snap into action. The problem is that you don't get to find out how well that works for you until you're staring it in the face.

"So in this class, there will be penalties for hesitation and there will be penalties for losing... not my preferred motivators, but the best I can manage under the circumstances." She looked at our group. "You guys... you don't fight. You take turns hitting each other in the head. You don't fight back. You stand still for it. When you've each done it three times, you go over and join the other group."

She looked at the other group.

"You keep doing what we've been doing. But switch partners. When one partner goes red, you both switch partners with another pair. Keep it diverse, too... I want to see boys fighting girls, I want to see big hulking brutes fighting little shrimps, I want to see everybody taking on all comers without hesitation. Those are our keywords for today: without hesitation. Our enemies for today are hesitation, pity, and mercy. We will slay them, even at the cost of at least wounding caution. Don't avoid a fight because you're afraid of losing. Throw yourself into it! We're past the penalty phase for the day, at least when it comes to losing fights."

[2.5 hours in. Word count didn't jump much, but I cut several hundred words and reworked a few of them]

"Here's the deal, kiddies," Callahan said as we formed up in a circle around her, maybe about thirty feet or so across. She moved into the center of us and spread out her arms, pointing a finger on each hand in opposite directions. "When I say 'go', you and you are going to come into the middle, and one of you is going to hit the other in the head as hard and as fast as you can, hard enough that the other one can't get back up. When that happens, you both take your place back in the circle, and the person to the left of you will come forward."

She walked backwards out of the circle, keeping her fingers pointed at the two people she'd singled out without looking, both of whom looked around at the people on either side of them as if they were testing out the idea that maybe someone else had been picked to go first.

I could understand the impulse... I was pretty grateful to find myself about halfway in between the two initial combatants, meaning I wouldn't have to be among the first few people to step into the impromptu ring.

It wasn't so much that I wanted to put off the fighting part of fighting class for as long as possible. There's just a certain awkwardness and uncertainty in going first. Callahan's instructions had been simple and straightforward, but by the same token they'd also been short. When there aren't a lot of details, it could be that the instructions were self-explanatory or wide open for interpretation, or it could be that the person giving them thought they were self-explanatory but there was plenty of room for wrong interpretations.

"Yes, you with the morning star and you with the incredibly gay ponytail," she said as she reached the edge of the circle. "Go!"

"I'm a girl!" a not-at-all-boyish and not even particularly androgynous auburn-haired girl with the ponytail said.

"Yeah, well, your ponytail isn't and it sucks cock in the men's room for coppers when you're asleep," Callahan said. "I can tell these things. Now you can keep pretending you don't know I was talking to you or you can fucking go before your opponent wins by default, and by 'default' I mean by driving the iron nails sticking out of the end of his big weighty bludgeon directly through the roof of your skull while you're staring at me with your upper vagina gaping at me."

Though her opponent had taken about three steps forward into the ring, he wasn't any quicker about rushing forward and attacking her than she was about attacking him.

I really did identify with both of them. When you're not quite sure what was expected of you, it often seems better to do nothing than to do the wrong thing... but Callahan's requirements really were as straightforward as she'd made them sound, and doing nothing was the wrong thing when dealing with her.

"We have forty-five minutes left to get through eighteen pairs of fighters," Callahan said. "I plan on getting everyone through the circle with at least twenty-five minutes to spare. Your grades for the day will depend not on how well you fight or how many heads you crack, but entirely on how much or how little you help me in this plan."

The girl with the ponytail kind of ducked her shoulders like she'd been sent up to the blackboard to complete a problem after being caught not paying attention in class. She shuffled forward a bit, taking her mocked handaxe off her belt by grabbing the haft just below the blade, then raising it up and adjusting her grip further down the handle.

"This is not a fencing match!" Callahan barked. The girl with the ponytail flinched, though was directing her commentary to the guy with the mace, who was still standing there, waiting and watching the girl. "You don't wait for your opponent to get ready. You don't square off. You should have splattered her skull by now."

The two reluctant combatants stepped forward. I wondered at the wisdom of doing this as a group activity. I didn't know that they wouldn't just be circling around each other half-heartedly even without a sea of eyes around them, but the audience couldn't be helping things.

The girl lifted her axe up high as she got near the guy with the spiked mace... not near enough to hit him, just nearer than she had been. He raised his own weapon and she jumped back, then seemed to suddenly remember the round shield hanging on her back. She fumbled it off and got it on her arm.

"Again, you could have killed her while she was doing that," Callahan said. "It's not the exact kind of opportunity you will have often in a real fight, nor will you see it very often in this class... but you should be looking for those opportunities and you should be taking them. You're both dead three times already... you for letting your guard down, you for being too reluctant to strike a fatal blow. In thirty seconds the day's exercise changes... if you're not going to fight, you can be target dummies for people who will."

That got them moving. The girl stepped forward, with her shield up at a level that would have probably have been unwisely high if she'd been in a real fight... since she knew her head was the target, she was only protecting her head.

She made a few downward chopping swings at the guy's head. They weren't exactly half-hearted, but they didn't seem to have a lot of strength behind them... it was like she was used to fighting to first strike or a certain number of hits, where the only goal was contact between her blade and her opponent, with the level of force not mattering. Her opponent was able to step aside from one and then bat the axe away on the second swing. He followed it up with a bash of his own, which she took on the shield.

"Better, but you're not counting coup," Callahan said. "The goal here is to take your opponent out with a single blow to the head. We're starting with the head for a few different reasons, but among them is not the fact that the head is a particularly soft and vulnerable target. I have seen human warriors fighting with an axe that size embedded in their skulls. Don't just try to bring your axe down on his head. Bring it down through it."

I recognized the reluctance on both participants' parts to do just that. They were probably both okay with swinging weapons at each other, fighting to win a fight even to the point of simulated death... but somehow there was a difference between the kind of swings they thought of as "fighting" and very deliberately hefting their weapons and trying to beat the other's person's brains in.

Knowing Callahan, I figured that was why she was doing things this way... spending the first day making us fight in front of the group and focusing on head shots. In every way except the purely literal, it had to be one of the most visceral ways to end a fight... you took aim at the thinking part of your opponent, the part that could look at and talk to you, that could laugh and joke or beg and plead and cry and you hit it.

"There is no sense pulling your blow any when you aim for the head," Callahan said, as much to the whole group as to the current combatants.. "There is no point in aiming for someone's head if you aren't willing to kill them. Forget what you see in the television... if you hit someone in the head with a blunt object hard enough to knock them unconscious, you have hit them hard enough to kill them. In the heat of a battle you might not have any idea which one you've done, which is why you don't go for the head if you care about anything besides stopping your opponent right now."

The fight didn't last much longer, though it was probably too slow for Callahan's preferences. The girl made a few harder swings at the guy's head, but the fact that she was almost literally hiding behind her shield meant her aim wasn't that good. He tried bashing it down a couple of times. The girl cried out when he got the head of his weapon stuck on her shield, some of the spikes sticking through in a way that they had to be at least poking her arm. He was able to force her shield down, but he had to unstick his mace in order to take another swing at her, and she got her shield up.

He looked at Callahan with an "Oh, come on." look. She just looked back.

"Can I hit her somewhere else?" he said.

"The goal is defeat her with a head shot," Callahan said.

I couldn't help noticing that wasn't a no.

The guy scowled, but only for a second as it seemed like he parsed that, too. He swung his mace at the girl's unprotected stomach. She was slow to react, and she did so by trying to bring her shield down instead of stepping back out of his weapon's arc. The phantasmal spikes ripped right through her t-shirt and the unprotected flesh underneath. Callahan had been right about the realism of the red box mockeries... her clothing actually appeared to tear. She doubled over and fell to the side, her axe flying from her grip. A few people had to duck as it sailed outside the circle.

The guy looked down at his fallen opponent, then at Callahan.

"You're not done yet," she said.

By the time he was done, the results weren't pretty. The girl had clutched the side of her stomach and was starting to get up when the first blow hit her head. He was still a little reluctant, and it showed. It was a brutal hit... a spiked mace to the head can't be anything but that... but it was more like the sort of impact she might have had if she'd stood up too quickly underneath one hanging on a rack than the sort that would result from a reasonably strong man driving one into her skull.

"Not there yet," Callahan said. "You'll know when you're there."

His second attempt drove a spike into the side of her skull. He let go of the mace and she fell over again, with it still stuck.

"Believe it or not, that's not a fatal wound," Callahan said. "Not an immediately fatal one, anyway. If she were on her feet and had a weapon, she'd still be able to take a swing or two at you. The red box settings mean that when she's completely disabled, she'll go red. Keep going!"

He didn't have to go far. She "went red" as he retrieved his weapon from her, a messy operation that I could barely stand to watch and won't be able to describe. Mercifully, the illusionary damage and all the splatter and debris vanished at the same time that the red aura enveloped her whole body.

"When that happens to you, you'll know because you'll see a reddish haze over everything," Callahan said. "And because all illusionary wounds on you and the person who 'redded' you will heal, you can always get back up and do it again but there's no stupid arguments about who tagged who last. You two clear out. Next two, up!"

The next pair were a little more willing, or a little less hesitant. It was a guy with a great big broadsword and another one with a lighter looking blade. Neither of their weapons really struck me as being natural headcrackers, but I figured the guy with the heavier blade had the advantage. They both seemed to know their stuff, though, and my eye for action isn't anywhere nearly good enough to sort out exactly how the guy with the thinner blade turned it around... but he managed to get in close and crack his opponent over the head with the hand of his sword.

Hilt? Pommel? I guess it's all the hilt, below the blade... I'm pretty sure the bottom of that whole part is the pommel. Anyway, that's what it looked like inflicted the "reddening" blow.

"The red lasts for about fifteen seconds," Callahan said. "When you're red, you're dead... or close enough. In any case, red means the fight is over. Your own weapon won't do shit when you're red, and neither will another red boxed weapon do anything to you. Now, when someone goes red during a repeated one-on-one exercise, there will be no bullshit taking advantage of the quick regen or the enforced helplessness to score a quick point. There are no points in this class. There is only the point, and the point is to learn how to be the one who survives a real fight, and you don't do that by figuring out how to game the mechanics of the simulation we're using.

"Seize every advantage that comes your way. Take all the cheap shots you can... they're called cheap because they don't cost you anything. But the purpose of this class is not to learn how to get really good at defeating the same opponent again and again using quirks of the red mockbox."

The next few bouts were all over pretty quickly, some after an exchange of almost-blows and some with a single swing or jab. In a few cases it really was hard to tell if it was a mock-killing blow or not. In others... well, it was brutal. Some people really took Callahan's message about bringing their weapons through their opponents' skulls to heart. Luckily the dead-red glow erased the gore almost as quickly as it happened, but it was tough to watch.

"This class is about how to end a fight quickly," Callahan said. "But there are two 'hows' there. There is the practical how, which we'll get to later, and the what I'll call the moral how, for lack of a better word. We're starting with the head not because it is the be-all, end-all of fight-ending targets... it isn't. We're not focusing on the techniques you would use when you aim for the head, though we will and I can see that it's needed.

"Most of you have had some kind of fighter training before. You've probably 'killed' someone in mock combat before. That's good. That experience will help you today... not so much the techniques you used but the experience of swinging a weapon into another person's body and bringing them down. But there's a difference between those fights, those tests of combat skill, and setting out with a deliberate and focused intention on ending a fight... which is to say ending a fighter. We don't 'spar' in this class. We don't 'skirmish'. We strike.

"You can get through most fighting classes without ever learning how to smash someone's head in without hesitation or pity. You can have a career on the Skirmish hex or in the pits... not my pit, but in pits... without ever learning this. Here, it's the first and most important thing you will learn, before you even learn how to do it right. There's no point in learning how to do it right if you're going to hesitate to do it at all."

Some of the match-ups lasted longer than others, but none of them lasted nearly as long as the first one. I doubted any of them even took a minute. My turn came way more quickly than I'd expected. Having watched the girl with the ponytail fumble with her gear, I canceled the shrinking on my staff as I was stepping forward.

It wasn't the best move... all of a sudden I had a great big staff in front of me at a time when I was more focused on the person in front of me than the placement of my legs. I tripped. It was only a minor stumble, but I had the bad luck of being paired up with against one of the elves.

[2 hours in. Shaping up. Some of the stuff from the first half hour may need to be moved around, reworked, or cut.]

"Here's the deal, kiddies," Callahan said as we formed up in a circle around her, about thirty feet or so across. She moved into the center of us and spread out her arms, pointing a finger on each hand in opposite directions. "When I say 'go', you and you are going to come into the middle, and one of you is going to hit the other in the head as hard and as fast as you can, hard enough that the other one can't get back up. When that happens, you both take your place back in the circle, and the person to the left of you will come forward."

She walked backwards out of the circle, keeping her fingers pointed at the two people she'd singled out without looking, both of whom looked around at the people on either side of them as if they were testing out the idea that maybe someone else had been picked to go first.

I could understand the impulse... I was pretty grateful to find myself about halfway in between the two initial combatants, meaning I wouldn't have to be among the first few people to step into the impromptu ring.

It wasn't so much that I wanted to put off the fighting part of fighting class for as long as possible. There's just a certain awkwardness and uncertainty in going first. Callahan's instructions had been simple and straightforward, but by the same token they'd also been short. When there aren't a lot of details, it could be that the instructions were self-explanatory or wide open for interpretation, or it could be that the person giving them thought they were self-explanatory but there was plenty of room for wrong interpretations.

"Yes, you with the morning star and you with the incredibly gay ponytail," she said as she reached the edge of the circle. "Go!"

"I'm a girl!" a not-at-all-boyish and not even particularly androgynous auburn-haired girl with the ponytail said.

"Yeah, well, your ponytail isn't and it sucks cock in the men's room when you're asleep," Callahan said. "I can tell these things. Now you can keep pretending you don't know I was talking to you or you can fucking go before your opponent wins by default, and by 'default' I mean by driving the iron nails sticking out of the end of his big weighty bludgeon directly through the roof of your skull while you're staring at me with your upper vagina gaping at me."

Though her opponent had taken about three steps forward into the ring, he wasn't any quicker about rushing forward and attacking her than she was about attacking him.

I really did identify with both of them. When you weren't quite sure what was expected of you, it often seemed better to do nothing than to do the wrong thing... but Callahan's requirements really were as straightforward as she'd made them sound, and doing nothing was the wrong thing when dealing with her.

"We have forty-five minutes left to get through eighteen pairs of fighters," Callahan said. "I plan on getting everyone through the circle with at least twenty-five minutes to spare. Your grades for the day will depend not on how well you fight or how many heads you crack, but entirely on how much or how little you help me in this plan."

The girl with the ponytail kind of ducked her shoulders like she'd been sent up to the blackboard to complete a problem after being caught not paying attention in class. She shuffled forward a bit, taking her mocked handaxe off her belt by grabbing the haft just below the blade, then raising it up and adjusting her grip further down the handle.

"This is not a fencing match!" Callahan barked. The girl with the ponytail flinched, though was directing her commentary to the guy with the mace, who was still standing there, waiting and watching the girl. "You don't wait for your opponent to get ready. You don't square off. You should have splattered her skull by now."

The two reluctant combatants stepped forward. I wondered at the wisdom of doing this as a group activity. I didn't know that they wouldn't just be circling around each other half-heartedly even without a sea of eyes around them, but the audience couldn't be helping things.

The girl lifted her axe up high as she got near the guy with the spiked mace... not near enough to hit him, just nearer than she had been. He raised his own weapon and she jumped back, then seemed to suddenly remember the round shield hanging on her back. She fumbled it off and got it on her arm.

"Again, you could have killed her while she was doing that," Callahan said. "It's not the exact kind of opportunity you will have often in a real fight, nor will you see it very often in this class... but you should be looking for those opportunities and you should be taking them. You're both dead three times already... you for letting your guard down, you for being too reluctant to strike a fatal blow. In thirty seconds the day's exercise changes... if you're not going to fight, you can be target dummies for people who will."

That got them moving. The girl stepped forward, with her shield up what would have probably have been unwisely high if she'd been in a real fight... since she knew her head was the target, she was only protecting her head.

She made a few downward chopping swings at the guy's head. They weren't exactly half-hearted, but they didn't seem to have a lot of strength behind them... it was like she was used to fighting to first strike or a certain number of hits, where the only goal was contact between her blade and her opponent, with the level of force not mattering. Her opponent was able to step aside from one and then bat the axe away on the second swing. He followed it up with a bash of his own, which she took on the shield.

"Better, but you're not counting coup," Callahan said. "The goal here is to take your opponent out with a single blow to the head. We're starting with the head for a few different reasons, but among them is not the fact that the head is a particularly soft and vulnerable target. I have seen human warriors fighting with an axe that size embedded in their skulls. Don't just try to bring your axe down on his head. Bring it down through it."

I recognized the reluctance on both participants' parts to do just that. They were probably both okay with swinging weapons at each other, fighting to win a fight even to the point of simulated death... but somehow there was a difference between the kind of swings they thought of as "fighting" and very deliberately hefting their weapons and trying to beat the other's person's brains in.

Knowing Callahan, I figured that was why she was doing things this way... spending the first day making us fight in front of the group and focusing on head shots. In every way except the purely literal, it had to be one of the most visceral ways to end a fight... you took aim at the thinking part of your opponent, the part that could look at and talk to you, that could laugh and joke or beg and plead and cry and you hit it.

"There is no sense pulling your blow any when you aim for the head," Callahan said, as much to the whole group as to the current combatants.. "There is no point in aiming for someone's head if you aren't willing to kill them. Forget what you see in the television... if you hit someone in the head with a blunt object hard enough to knock them unconscious, you have hit them hard enough to kill them. In the heat of a battle you might not have any idea which one you've done, which is why you don't go for the head if you care about anything besides stopping your opponent right now."

The fight didn't last much longer, though it was probably too slow for Callahan's preferences. The girl made a few harder swings at the guy's head, but the fact that she was almost literally hiding behind her shield meant her aim wasn't that good. He tried bashing it down a couple of times. The girl cried out when he got the head of his weapon stuck on her shield, some of the spikes sticking through in a way that they had to be at least poking her arm. He was able to force her shield down, but he had to unstick his mace in order to take another swing at her, and she got her shield up.

He looked at Callahan with an "Oh, come on." look. She just looked back.

"Can I hit her somewhere else?" he said.

"The goal is defeat her with a head shot," Callahan said. I couldn't help noticing that wasn't a no.

The guy scowled, but only for a second as it seemed like he parsed that, too. He swung his mace at the girl's unprotected stomach. She was slow to react, and she did so by trying to bring her shield down instead of stepping back out of his weapon's arc. The phantasmal spikes ripped right through her t-shirt and the unprotected flesh underneath. Callahan had been right about the realism of the red box mockeries... her clothing actually appeared to tear. She doubled over and fell to the side, her axe flying from her grip. A few people had to duck as it sailed outside the circle.

The guy looked down at his fallen opponent, then at Callahan.

"You're not done yet," she said.

By the time he was done, the results weren't pretty. The girl had clutched the side of her stomach and was starting to get up when the first blow hit her head. He was still a little reluctant, and it showed. It was a brutal hit... a spiked mace to the head can't be anything but that... but it was more like the sort of impact she might have had if she'd stood up too quickly underneath one hanging on a rack than the sort that would result from a reasonably strong man driving one into her skull.

"Not there yet," Callahan said. "You'll know when you're there."

His second attempt drove a spike into the side of her skull. He let go of the mace and she fell over again, with it still stuck.

"Believe it or not, that's not a fatal wound," Callahan said. "Not an immediately fatal one. If she were on her feet and had a weapon, she'd still be able to take a swing or two at you. The red box settings mean that when she's completely disabled, she'll go red. Keep going."

She "went red" as he retrieved his weapon from her, a messy operation that I could barely stand to watch and won't be able to describe. Mercifully, the illusionary damage and all the splatter and debris vanished at the same time that the red aura enveloped her whole body.

"When that happens to you, you'll see it as a reddish haze over everything... and all illusionary wounds on you and the person who 'redded' you will heal, so you can always get back up and do it again but there's no stupid arguments about who tagged who last," Callahan said. "The red lasts for about fifteen seconds. When you're red, you're dead. Your own weapon won't do shit when you're red, and neither will another red boxed weapon do anything to you. When someone goes red during a repeated one-on-one exercise, there will be bullshit taking advantage of the quick regen or the enforced helplessness to score a quick point. There are no points in this class. There is only the point, and the point is to learn how to be the one who survives a real fight, and you don't do that by figuring out how to game the mechanics of the simulation we're using."

"The object of this exercise is not

[]

"Most of you have had some kind of fighter training before," she said. "You've probably 'killed' someone in mock combat before. That's good. That experience will help you today... not so much the techniques you used but the experience of swinging a weapon into another person's body and bringing them down. There's a difference between those fights, those tests of combat skill, and setting out with a deliberate and focused intention on ending a fight... which is to say ending a fighter. We don't 'spar' in this class. We don't 'skirmish'. We strike.

"Let's talk for a moment about the knee," Callahan said. "There isn't a lot of muscle on the knee. It's basically skin over bone. There are blood vessels in the skin there, but if you were in much danger of bleeding to death out of them playgrounds would have switched from concrete to sand or that wood chip shit a long time ago. You can fuck someone up all kinds of ways if you have leisurely access to all the real estate from their heel to the back of their knee but that doesn't happen very often in a stand-up fight.

"If you try to hit someone from the front in the knee, you are either hitting them hard enough to shatter bone, to wrench limbs, and to tear sinew or you are wasting your time," she said. "A lot of duels and private grudge matches get settled by the death of a thousand cuts, but that doesn't work so well when you're fighting someone who'd rather end things with one strike.

"Today we're going to be working on one thing and one thing only: the head," she said. "The head is not the be-all, end-all of battle-ending targets, even when you're fighting something that has a head, keeps its brain in there, and needs its brain to fight you. There will be situations when you're better off aiming lower. Each strike you learn here is nothing but a tool, and knowing how to use a tool is only half the story. The other half is knowing when and why to use it. We're focusing on the head because it's an easy target compared to some of the things we're going to work on later, and because every thing we do in this class is going to be fucking brutal, so we might as well start with the big one.


[]


Now, the best takedown target is going to change depending on what you're using and who you're fighting. You would not, generally speaking, try to bring your fist down on the top of someone's skull if you were in a head-on fight. You have to get some of your squishiest organs in all stupid close to them in order to strike what is the best-armored point on most people's body. If you use your hand to hit the crown of someone's skull hard enough to break bones, they're going to be yours... and while you're doing it, they're putting their own hand and/or whatever happens in it right in your gut, or your groin.

"If you're fighting barehanded, you go for the jaw. Go for the eyes. Hair or ears can make a good stepping-stone in a pinch. But we're not going to be doing unarmed combat today... if I had you practice battle-ending moves on each other with your bare hands, this class would have an unacceptably high death count.

"So why are we focusing on the head

[1.5 hours in. Real progress now. I know how the chapter's going.]

"Here's the deal, kiddies," Callahan said as we formed up in a circle around her, about thirty feet or so across. She moved into the center of us and spread out her arms, pointing a finger on each hand in opposite directions. "When I say 'go', you and you are going to come into the middle, and one of you is going to hit the other in the head as hard and as fast as you can, hard enough that the other one can't get back up. When that happens, the two of you leave the circle and keep practicing hitting each other in the head for whatever remains of the hour, and the people who were to the left of you will come forward."

She walked backwards out of the circle, keeping her fingers pointed at the two people she'd singled out without looking, both of whom looked around at the people on either side of them as if they were testing out the idea that maybe someone else had been picked to go first.

I could understand the impulse... I was pretty grateful to find myself about halfway in between the two initial combatants, meaning I wouldn't have to be among the first few people to step into the impromptu ring.

It wasn't so much that I wanted to put off the fighting part of fighting class for as long as possible. There's just a certain awkwardness and uncertainty in going first. Callahan's instructions had been simple and straightforward, but by the same token they'd also been short. When there aren't a lot of details, it could be that the instructions were self-explanatory or wide open for interpretation, or it could be that the person giving them thought they were self-explanatory but there was plenty of room for wrong interpretations.

"Yes, you with the morning star and you with the incredibly gay ponytail," she said as she reached the edge of the circle. "Go!"

"I'm a girl!" a not-at-all-boyish and not even particularly androgynous auburn-haired girl with the ponytail said.

"Yeah, well, your ponytail isn't and it sucks cock in the men's room when you're asleep," Callahan said. "I can tell these things. Now you can keep pretending you didn't know I was talking to you or you can fucking go before your opponent wins by default, and by 'default' I mean by driving the iron nails sticking out of the end of his big weighty bludgeon directly through the roof of your skull."

Though her opponent had taken about three steps forward into the ring, he wasn't any quicker about rushing forward and attacking her than she was about attacking him.

I really did identify with both of them. When you weren't quite sure what was expected of you, it often seemed better to do nothing than to do the wrong thing... but Callahan's requirements really were as straightforward as she'd made them sound, and doing nothing was the wrong thing when dealing with her.

"We have forty-five minutes left to get through eighteen pairs of fighters," Callahan said. "I plan on getting everyone through the circle with at least twenty-five minutes to spare. Your grades for the day will depend not on how well you fight or how many heads you crack, but entirely on how much or how little you help me in this plan."

The girl with the ponytail kind of ducked her shoulders like she'd been sent up to the blackboard to complete a problem after being caught not paying attention in class. She shuffled forward a bit, taking her mocked handaxe off her belt by grabbing the haft just below the blade, then raising it up and adjusting her grip further down the handle.

"This is not a fencing match!" Callahan barked. The girl with the ponytail flinched, though was directing her commentary to the guy with the mace, who was still standing there, waiting and watching the girl. "You don't wait for your opponent to get ready. You don't square off. You should have splattered her skull by now."

The two reluctant combatants stepped forward. I wondered at the wisdom of doing this as a group activity. I didn't know that they wouldn't just be circling around each other half-heartedly even without a sea of eyes around them, but the audience couldn't be helping things.

The girl lifted her axe up high as she got near the guy with the spiked mace... not near enough to hit him, just nearer than she had been. He raised his own weapon and she jumped back, then seemed to suddenly remember the round shield hanging on her back. She fumbled it off and got it on her arm.

"Again, you could have killed her while she was doing that," Callahan said. "It's not the exact kind of opportunity you will have often in a real fight, nor will you see it very often in this class... but you should be looking for those opportunities and you should be taking them. You're both dead three times already... you for letting your guard down, you for being too reluctant to strike a fatal blow. In thirty seconds the day's exercise changes... if you're not going to fight, you can be target dummies for people who will."

That got them moving. The girl stepped forward, with her shield up what would have probably have been unwisely high if she'd been in a real fight... since she knew her head was the target, she was only protecting her head.

She made a few downward chopping swings at the guy's head. They weren't exactly half-hearted, but they didn't seem to have a lot of strength behind them... it was like she was used to fighting to first strike or a certain number of hits, where the only goal was contact between her blade and her opponent, with the level of force not mattering. Her opponent was able to step aside from one and then bat the axe away on the second swing. He followed it up with a bash of his own, which she took on the shield.

"Better, but you're not counting coup," Callahan said. "The goal here is to take your opponent out with a single blow to the head. We're starting with the head for a few different reasons, but among them is not the fact that the head is a particularly soft and vulnerable target. I have seen human warriors fighting with an axe that size embedded in their skulls. Don't just try to bring your axe down on his head. Bring it down through it."

[]


"The red box settings mean that when you're completely disabled, you'll turn red... you'll see it as a reddish haze over everything... and all illusionary wounds on you and the person who 'redded' you will heal, so you can always get back up and do it again but there's no stupid arguments about who tagged who last."

"The red lasts for about fifteen seconds. When you're red, you're dead. Your own weapon won't do shit when you're red, and neither will another red boxed weapon do anything to you... so let's not have any bullshit taking advantage of the quick regen or the enforced helplessness to score a quick point. There are no points in this class. There is only the point, and the point is to learn how to be the one who survives a real fight, and you don't do that by figuring out how to game the mechanics of the simulation we're using.

"The object of this exercise is not

[]

"Most of you have had some kind of fighter training before," she said. "You've probably 'killed' someone in mock combat before. That's good. That experience will help you today... not so much the techniques you used but the experience of swinging a weapon into another person's body and bringing them down. There's a difference between those fights, those tests of combat skill, and setting out with a deliberate and focused intention on ending a fight... which is to say ending a fighter. We don't 'spar' in this class. We don't 'skirmish'. We strike.

"Let's talk for a moment about the knee," Callahan said. "There isn't a lot of muscle on the knee. It's basically skin over bone. There are blood vessels in the skin there, but if you were in much danger of bleeding to death out of them playgrounds would have switched from concrete to sand or that wood chip shit a long time ago. You can fuck someone up all kinds of ways if you have leisurely access to all the real estate from their heel to the back of their knee but that doesn't happen very often in a stand-up fight.

"If you try to hit someone from the front in the knee, you are either hitting them hard enough to shatter bone, to wrench limbs, and to tear sinew or you are wasting your time," she said. "A lot of duels and private grudge matches get settled by the death of a thousand cuts, but that doesn't work so well when you're fighting someone who'd rather end things with one strike.

"Today we're going to be working on one thing and one thing only: the head," she said. "The head is not the be-all, end-all of battle-ending targets, even when you're fighting something that has a head, keeps its brain in there, and needs its brain to fight you. There will be situations when you're better off aiming lower. Each strike you learn here is nothing but a tool, and knowing how to use a tool is only half the story. The other half is knowing when and why to use it. We're focusing on the head because it's an easy target compared to some of the things we're going to work on later, and because every thing we do in this class is going to be fucking brutal, so we might as well start with the big one.


[]


Now, the best takedown target is going to change depending on what you're using and who you're fighting. You would not, generally speaking, try to bring your fist down on the top of someone's skull if you were in a head-on fight. You have to get some of your squishiest organs in all stupid close to them in order to strike what is the best-armored point on most people's body. If you use your hand to hit the crown of someone's skull hard enough to break bones, they're going to be yours... and while you're doing it, they're putting their own hand and/or whatever happens in it right in your gut, or your groin.

"If you're fighting barehanded, you go for the jaw. Go for the eyes. Hair or ears can make a good stepping-stone in a pinch. But we're not going to be doing unarmed combat today... if I had you practice battle-ending moves on each other with your bare hands, this class would have an unacceptably high death count.

"So why are we focusing on the head

[1 hour in. Getting a better handle on the progression of the chapter.]

"Here's the deal, kiddies," Callahan said as we formed up in a circle around her, about thirty feet or so across. She moved into the center of us and spread out her arms, pointing a finger on each hand in opposite directions. "When I say 'go', you and you are going to come into the middle, and one of you is going to hit the other in the head as hard and as fast as you can, hard enough that the other one can't get back up. When that happens, the two of you leave the circle and keep practicing hitting each other in the head for whatever remains of the hour, and the people who were to the left of you will come forward."

She walked backwards out of the circle, keeping her fingers pointed at the two people she'd singled out without looking, both of whom looked around at the people on either side of them as if they were testing out the idea that maybe someone else had been picked to go first.

"Yes, you with the morning star and you with the incredibly gay ponytail," she said as she reached the edge of the circle. "Go!"

"I'm a girl!" a not-at-all-boyish and not even particularly androgynous auburn-haired girl with the ponytail said.

"Yeah, well, your ponytail isn't and it sucks cock in the men's room when you're asleep," Callahan said. "I can tell these things. Now you can keep pretending you didn't know I was talking to you or you can fucking go before your opponent wins by default, and by 'default' I mean by driving the iron nails sticking out of the end of his big weighty bludgeon directly through the roof of your skull."

Though her opponent had taken about three steps forward into the ring, he wasn't any quicker about rushing forward and bashing her.

"We have forty-five minutes left to get through eighteen pairs of fighters," Callahan said. "I plan on getting everyone through the circle with at least twenty-five minutes to spare. Your grades for the day will depend entirely on how much or how little you help me in this plan."

The girl with the ponytail kind of ducked her shoulders like she'd been sent up to the blackboard to complete a problem after being caught not paying attention in class. She shuffled forward a bit, taking her mocked handaxe off her belt by grabbing the haft just below the blade, then raising it up and adjusting her grip further down the handle.

"This is not a fencing match!" Callahan barked. She was directing her commentary to the guy with the mace, who was still standing there, waiting and watching the girl. "You don't wait for your opponent to get ready. You don't square off. You should have splattered her skull by now."

[]



"The red box settings mean that when you're completely disabled, you'll turn red... you'll see it as a reddish haze over everything... and all illusionary wounds on you and the person who 'redded' you will heal, so you can always get back up and do it again but there's no stupid arguments about who tagged who last."

"The red lasts for about fifteen seconds. When you're red, you're dead. Your own weapon won't do shit when you're red, and neither will another red boxed weapon do anything to you... so let's not have any bullshit taking advantage of the quick regen or the enforced helplessness to score a quick point. There are no points in this class. There is only the point, and the point is to learn how to be the one who survives a real fight, and you don't do that by figuring out how to game the mechanics of the simulation we're using.

"The object of this exercise is not



"Most of you have had some kind of fighter training before," she said. "You've probably 'killed' someone in mock combat before. That's good. That experience will help you today... not so much the techniques you used but the experience of swinging a weapon into another person's body and bringing them down. There's a difference between those fights, those tests of combat skill, and setting out with a deliberate and focused intention on ending a fight... which is to say ending a fighter. We don't 'spar' in this class. We don't 'skirmish'. We strike.

"Let's talk for a moment about the knee," Callahan said. "There isn't a lot of muscle on the knee. It's basically skin over bone. There are blood vessels in the skin there, but if you were in much danger of bleeding to death out of them playgrounds would have switched from concrete to sand or that wood chip shit a long time ago. You can fuck someone up all kinds of ways if you have leisurely access to all the real estate from their heel to the back of their knee but that doesn't happen very often in a stand-up fight.

"If you try to hit someone from the front in the knee, you are either hitting them hard enough to shatter bone, to wrench limbs, and to tear sinew or you are wasting your time," she said. "A lot of duels and private grudge matches get settled by the death of a thousand cuts, but that doesn't work so well when you're fighting someone who'd rather end things with one strike.

"Today we're going to be working on one thing and one thing only: the head," she said. "The head is not the be-all, end-all of battle-ending targets, even when you're fighting something that has a head, keeps its brain in there, and needs its brain to fight you. There will be situations when you're better off aiming lower. Each strike you learn here is nothing but a tool, and knowing how to use a tool is only half the story. The other half is knowing when and why to use it. We're focusing on the head because it's an easy target compared to some of the things we're going to work on later, and because every thing we do in this class is going to be fucking brutal, so we might as well start with the big one.

[]

Now, the best takedown target is going to change depending on what you're using and who you're fighting. You would not, generally speaking, try to bring your fist down on the top of someone's skull if you were in a head-on fight. You have to get some of your squishiest organs in all stupid close to them in order to strike what is the best-armored point on most people's body. If you use your hand to hit the crown of someone's skull hard enough to break bones, they're going to be yours... and while you're doing it, they're putting their own hand and/or whatever happens in it right in your gut, or your groin.

"If you're fighting barehanded, you go for the jaw. Go for the eyes. Hair or ears can make a good stepping-stone in a pinch. But we're not going to be doing unarmed combat today... if I had you practice battle-ending moves on each other with your bare hands, this class would have an unacceptably high death count.

"So why are we focusing on the head

[0.5 hours in. Very scattered to begin with.]

"Most of you have had some kind of fighter training before," she said. "You've probably 'killed' someone in mock combat before. That's good. That experience will help you today... not so much the techniques you used but the experience of swinging a weapon into another person's body and bringing them down. There's a difference between those fights, those tests of combat skill, and setting out with a deliberate and focused intention on ending a fight... which is to say ending a fighter. We don't 'spar' in this class. We don't 'skirmish'. We strike.

"Let's talk for a moment about the knee," Callahan said. "There isn't a lot of muscle on the knee. It's basically skin over bone. There are blood vessels in the skin there, but if you were in much danger of bleeding to death out of them playgrounds would have switched from concrete to sand or that wood chip shit a long time ago. You can fuck someone up all kinds of ways if you have leisurely access to all the real estate from their heel to the back of their knee but that doesn't happen very often in a stand-up fight.

"If you try to hit someone from the front in the knee, you are either hitting them hard enough to shatter bone, to wrench limbs, and to tear sinew or you are wasting your time," she said. "A lot of duels and private grudge matches get settled by the death of a thousand cuts, but that doesn't work so well when you're fighting someone who'd rather end things with one strike.

"Today we're going to be working on one thing and one thing only: the head," she said. "The head is not the be-all, end-all of battle-ending targets, even when you're fighting something that has a head, keeps its brain in there, and needs its brain to fight you. There will be situations when you're better off aiming lower. Each strike you learn here is nothing but a tool, and knowing how to use a tool is only half the story. The other half is knowing when and why to use it. We're focusing on the head because it's an easy target compared to some of the things we're going to work on later, and because every thing we do in this class is going to be fucking brutal, so we might as well start with the big one.

[]

Now, the best takedown target is going to change depending on what you're using and who you're fighting. You would not, generally speaking, try to bring your fist down on the top of someone's skull if you were in a head-on fight. You have to get some of your squishiest organs in all stupid close to them in order to strike what is the best-armored point on most people's body. If you use your hand to hit the crown of someone's skull hard enough to break bones, they're going to be yours... and while you're doing it, they're putting their own hand and/or whatever happens in it right in your gut, or your groin.

"If you're fighting barehanded, you go for the jaw. Go for the eyes. Hair or ears can make a good stepping-stone in a pinch. But we're not going to be doing unarmed combat today... if I had you practice battle-ending moves on each other with your bare hands, this class would have an unacceptably high death count.

"So why are we focusing on the head