So far, my efforts at flying had consisted of vigorously flapping my arms in the hope of triggering my flight muscles.

It did not.

I mean, I could move my wings without much trouble, and even flap them if I focused on it, but going from a couple of flaps to beating my wings so quickly that they seemed to melt into a blur turned out to be a lot more difficult than I'd initially anticipated.

That was one of the many reasons EUe advised me to double dip on the shields.

The arched entryway leading from the antechamber to the arena had an honest to goodness portcullis, and I made myself useful by pointing it out to EUe, who had in fact never heard of that word; he just called it "the grate" or "the gate". That vocabulary lesson was the single most useful contribution I gave to the fight waiting for us out in the arena.

We were up against a hydra; a robot hydra⁠, and a pretty darn tall one, at that. While the robot was just as sessile as an ordinary hydra, its designers compensated for that by putting laser blasters as the tips of its jointed limbs.

EUe took flight, while I raised my shields in defense. About three seconds after that, one of the hydra's beams sliced me in two. I didn't even get a chance to run away. Aside from the horrific pain, the last things I saw before our time loop reset itself were EUe's face looking down at me in slack-beaked astonishment and the lower half of my body bleeding out beside me on the floor. Then came the reset, and with it, another punch in the face.

Also, I was starving again.

EUe did me a solid by beating up the trainer who'd punched me. After another brief fight over who got to claim the shoddy nectar fountain as their territory⁠, we drank our fill to the point that I could get control over my impulses and stop wanting to tear EUe to shreds.

"Working with you is like working with a child," he told me.

"Listen, buddy," I replied, "it's no walk in the park for me either."

"Unlike the rest of the nectar supply," V explained, "the nectar available to gladiators in the arena aren't dosed with sedatives. I imagine that might be giving you extra difficulty."

"Sedatives?" I asked. (I really hadn't been expecting to come face to face with my medical pet peeve in here.)

"Yes," EUe said. "The civilian nectar supply is laced with low clinical doses of sedatives in order to reduce social friction."

"That's how the Ecumene refers to twEfE mauling each other," V said.

I shook my head. "I think this place might be even crazier than d'zd-world."

EUe flicked his wings. "Be quiet and hold out your arms."

I did.

He grabbed them and held them firmly. "Try moving your wings now."

I did, only to end up moving them in broad flaps while also flexing my chest in a really bizarre manner.

"EUe," V said, "I don't think he's getting it."

"You don't need to insult me," I said.

The little Vyx module turned to face me. "It's not an insult; it's an observation."

EUe stamped his foot in frustration. "Stop it, both of you." He grabbed my forearms and looked me in the eyes. "Try again, though flap your wings more slowly this time."

"I thought the goal was to do it quickly?" I asked.

EUe clacked his beak. "Just do it!"

I did—and, amazing enough, it worked! It turned out that, just like with slithering, the secret to flapping your wings like a hummingbird was to exploit resonance and find the right frequency, in addition to having a metabolism that rivaled someone on crack cocaine. The sweet spot of movement where my muscles buzzed was easy to find one I realized I had to look for it. Slowly increasing the frequency of my wingbeats made the flaps more and more powerful, and soon, I felt like I had a lightweight massage chair strapped to my back.

That's when I hovered off the ground.

EUe let go of my arms as I rose higher.

The sweet spot was easy to remember. Putting a little more oomph into it raised my altitude, while dialing back a tad lowered me toward the ground. When I flew, my heartbeat was a whirr buzzing at my temples.

I was practicing moving forward and back when our collars triggered and we were sent into the antechamber to prepare for the imminent battle.

"Take the shields again," EUe said, as he took the naginata off the rack.

"Can you give me any tips on fighting the laser tentacle thing?" I asked.

But EUe shook his head. "It wouldn't help. This first fight is against a random opponent, as are many of the bouts."

"That's not how a time loop works!" I said.

"Well, it's how this one does," EUe replied.

Then the portcullis raised and we stepped out into the arena. Our opponent entered shortly thereafter, waddling out from an entryway opposite our portcullis.

I immediately wished we were up against the hydra again.

This time around, we were up against a true monstrosity: a giant, hideous twEfE, maybe five times my height. A whip-like tongue lolled out from her beakless face. Her body was studded all over in tumors of muscle; her wings had been mutated into a second pair of bulging arms.

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

I'm proud to say that I did somewhat better than I had with the hydra. I was able to fly off the ground, shooting straight up right as the battle commenced. Unfortunately, I was not mobile enough to dodge the stream of fire the mutant twEfE breathed at me.

I distinctly heard the announcer describe my death as "Spicy."

Jerk.

After our next round of punch-n-brunch, EUe introduced me to the fine art of omnidirectional movement, and he was in the middle of teaching me how to turn around midair when we got thrown into the arena. To my surprise, this time, it was another battle royale. I lasted a full minute before getting stabbed in the back.

I didn't even see the face of the twEfE who did it.

I achieved full aerial mobility by our twelfth loop. The trickiest aspect of it had been learning how to turn midair, which had been a real thorn in my side until I had the happy insight to take a page from my music lessons.

It was all a matter of polyrhythms.

The fundamental principle of rhythm was subdivision. Whatever your basic beat was, you created rhythms by dividing that beat into various parts, which you then combined in a diversity of ways. The time signature of a piece told you the number of beats per measure. Assuming common time, whole notes lasted the entire measure. Half notes lasted half as long as whole notes, so there were twice as many of them per measure compared to the number of whole notes needed to fill up the same amount of time. Quarter notes lasted a fourth as long as a whole note, making for four of them per measure. Eighth notes lasted half as long as quarter notes; sixteenths lasted half as long as eights, and so on and so forth. If you wanted to use multiples of three, you counted with trip-pul-lets trip-pul-lets trip-pul-lets trip-pul-lets, and if you really wanted to get jiggy with things, you could add dots to extend the lengths of notes lengths by half—so, for example, a dotted half note was three quarters of a whole note—and include rests, in order to give a nice syncopated feel. Then, of course, you could do quintuplets and septuplets and all sorts of crazy things.

When it came time to combining rhythms, simple and compound rhythms arose when you had two or more musical voices playing notes whose values were commensurable with one another, which was a fancy way of saying that they "lined up" . For instance, if one guy was playing four quarter notes per measure and another was playing one quarter-note triplet for each of the first guy's quarter notes—with a total of four triplets per measure—the mathematical subdivisions lined up nicely. A polyrhythm, on the other hand, was when the voices played rhythms that couldn't⁠ be grouped that way; e.g., one guy was playing three notes per measure (a whole note triplets) while another was playing five notes (a whole note quintuplet). Gallstrom was particularly fond of two-on-three polyrhythms (such as eighth notes against triplets), which could create a rocking or tumbling feeling, the latter, especially, at faster tempos.

As it turned out, turning midair was just a matter of polyrhythms. As EUe explained it to me, you had to flap one wing more quickly than the other; that is, the quicker-flapping wing had to beat using a larger number of subdivisions. When your left wing was the one beating faster, you'd turn clockwise; if the right wing was the one beating faster, you'd turn counterclockwise. I could have very easily ended up overthinking it and injuring myself in the process, but I kept myself calm and focused by pretending I was just doing a faster, wingy-er version of tapping out polyrhythms on my thighs with my hands.

It was while I was practicing turning around midair that the announcer's voice echoed through the arena's halls.

"Alright folks, let's give our warriors a warm welcome, shall we? It's their first time!"

Hearing the crowd chant in excitement, I braced myself for the incoming electric shock, which kicked in right on time.

Then the grunts came and carted us off.

"Do they always knock out their gladiators like this?" I asked EUe, slurring my words.

"Only unproven runts like us," he replied. "Or troublemakers."

A minute later, I got chucked out into the arena for the thirteenth time. (fourteenth, if you counted my initial arrival.)

Both EUe and I grunted as we pushed off the antechamber's floor, shook ourselves out, and grabbed our weapons.

This time, EUe urged me to pick up a pair of daggers.

"You think I can do it?" I asked.

"It's what I've been training you for," he said.

"But we've only gone over the basics," I said.

"Yeah, and that's all you'll need." He nodded. "Still, you should be focusing on surviving, not on fighting. Remember, I start the loop borderline exhausted. If I hadn't, I'd use communions to take out our foe."

The portcullis rattled against the stone as it slid open.

We walked out into the arena.

"C'mon everybody," the announcer said, "let's give the fresh meat a good cheer."

The crowd roared.

"Is it just me," I asked, "or is the announcer kind of a jerk?"

EUe spread his wings and flapped them once. "Even though it resets the loop, every once in a while, I break out just so that I can gut him." He nodded happily. "It's worth it, every time."

One of the portcullis-barred tunnels on the other side of the arena slid open, letting a massive creature lumber out of the shadows.

Its moments made bits of broken stone on the tiles quiver.

"—Oh, it's the gU-lUte," the announcer said. "A classic!"

The six-limbed beast hailed from that uncanny valley between nightmare and biology. It was a fleshy thing—an amphibian, only without the moisture—with a tough, purpuric hide and sharp claws on its flabby paws. Tubercles stuck up like ground-down horns between the narrowed, slit-pupil eyes on its crocodilian head, while saliva dripped through the gaps between its serrated teeth. Someone had even gone to the trouble of painting white, curving, vine-like forms across its body in a dense assemblage.

It looked like freaking war paint.

"Watch out," EUe said, "it's got a venomous breath attack. If the stuff touches you, you'll be paralyzed."

I clenched my hands around my daggers' hilts.

"I almost wish you hadn't told me that," I said, in a sardonic mutter.

Thumping its tail on the ground, the gU reared up, opened its mouth, and breathed in deep. Then it started making pained, hawking noises, and I realized what was about to happen.

It was my cue to get the heck out of there.

Beating my wings like mad, I pushed off the ground with my feet. I was moving more quickly than ever, yet EUe still shot up like a rocket in comparison, tightly gripping his naginata. The gU-lUte breathed out an acrid-scented, dark blue-green cloud; the two of us spread out in opposite directions. I had to draw from everything I'd learned about flight so far to dodge the paralytic mist, but I made it.

Yes!

I flew up and around and over, and then, finally, found somewhere to land. It was atop one of the platforms jutting out from higher up along the arena's walls.

My wings sputtered as I settled down, though I almost didn't want to stop.

twEfE flight was exhilarating; it was such a rush. My wingbeats, snarling like chainsaws. The fiery tickle of my flight muscles contracting against my keeled chest. The caress of the air as it winnowed through my wings. It was visceral in a way that wyrm flight wasn't, and never could be.

Fortunately, with me doing a decent job of staying out of the way for once, EUe was finally free and clear to take out our opponent and get us the heck out of this leg of the loop.

I looked down over the edge of the platform. A forcefield glowed into being in front of the frontmost rows of the stands whenever the venom clouds threatened to leave pass onto the crowd, though the stuff inevitably settled into ichorous pools atop the arena's stone floor.

I watched EUe twirl around mid-air and dive down at the gU-lUte with his naginata's blade pointed downward. It was a direct hit to the top of the gU's skull.

Yet, as the blade made contact, there was a slight shimmering in the gU's hide. Suddenly, the direction of the blow was reversed, sending EUe and his weapon flying back the way they came. The twEfE knocked into the barrier at the edge of the arena, which sparked at their touch, leaving them smoking and browned as they fell to the ground.

EUe ripped back into the sky, wings a-roaring. "Shit!"

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