"Alright."
I looked down at myself and only then noticed I was wearing nothing but a thin white sheet, my bow gone, the Veiled Plate gone, everything I'd carried into that blast apparently spent along with the rest of it.
"Start me with something I can at least get clothes off of."
My first opponent was a slime, and it took me four separate attempts, the better part of a day by the ache already settling into my legs, to put it down clean, because every attempt before that ended with me either too slow, too careless, or simply too exhausted from the last attempt to finish the current one. Yomi didn't let me rest as long as I wanted between tries.
"That's not how it works out there either," she said, when I complained about it, and I couldn't find a hole in that argument no matter how much my whole body wanted one.
The imp that came after nearly opened my forearm to the bone on my second try, quick with its little dagger in a way the first slime never had to be, and I spent a full night, or near enough by the stiffness waiting in my back come morning, sleeping on the flat blank ground with the wound bound in strips torn off my own borrowed sheet before Yomi would let me back up on my feet to try again. When I finally beat it, on my fourth attempt, I took its armor as spoils, and most of it was too small to be any real use, but the belt and breastplate served well enough as a makeshift skirt that at least kept the wind off.
The goblin took me six attempts, and I want to be honest about every one of them, because I think it matters more than the eventual win did. The first three times it read my footwork before I'd even finished the movement and put me flat on my back with a blow from the flat of its axe that left a bruise the exact shape of the weapon across my ribs for days after, in a place that still hasn't fully stopped aching even now, months on. On the fourth try I nearly had it, feinted left, drew its swing, went in for the kill, and it caught my dagger arm with its shield hard enough to numb my whole hand and send the blade skittering off into the grid-lined dark somewhere I never did find it again.
Fifth try, I lost my nerve at the last second and it cost me a shallow cut across my collarbone that Yomi had to seal up herself with something that crawled cold and static under my skin, because there was no healer in this blank little pocket of the world besides her.
The sixth time, I finally read the trap it was setting before it sprang, feinted the feint, and put my dagger into the gap between its shoulder plates while it was still overcommitted to a swing that never landed.
It looked at me while it died. I want that on the record, because it matters to everything that came after. It had small, dark, deeply frightened eyes, and it looked straight at me the whole time, and I did not look away, and some part of me that had spent seventeen years being proud of never looking away from that exact moment for the wrong reasons went strangely, coldly quiet as it happened, instead of doing whatever it was supposed to do.
"You didn't flinch," Yomi said afterward, watching me clean the blade with something that sounded, from her, almost like admiration.
"No," I said, and heard how flat my own voice had gone saying it, and didn't much like the sound of that either.
"Is that bad?"
she asked, tilting her head, genuinely curious in the unbothered way only something that had never had to look anything in the eye itself could manage.
I didn't have an answer for her. I still don't, most days.
The goblin's armor fit well enough once I'd cinched it tighter, and I faced down ogres after that, and orcs, and a trio of lizardmen that nearly got the better of me two attempts running before I learned to keep my back to the one wall Yomi's grid actually offered instead of trying to fight all three in open ground. Every fight cost me something real: a mistimed dodge against an ogre's club left me with a swollen eye for two full days that Yomi couldn't heal any faster than my own body wanted to, a lizardman's spear opened a shallow line along my thigh that ached every time I bent that leg for a week after, and more than once I simply had to stop, sit down on the flat gridded ground, and let my hands shake themselves out before I could pick anything back up at all.
Yomi kept the pace, but she wasn't cruel about it. She rationed my rest the way a strict tutor rations praise, never quite as much as I wanted, always just as much as she judged I could survive without. Between the orcs and the lizardmen she let me sleep two full stretches running, and brought me what passed for food in her blank little world, flavorless grey bricks that filled the stomach without ever once tasting like anything at all, and sat cross-legged across from me while I ate, asking small, oddly childish questions about Hallowmere, about Abigail, about whether farms smelled the way she imagined they did.
I answered what I could. It was the strangest kind of company I'd ever kept, an AI built to fill in unimportant background details, homesick for a world she'd never once been allowed to actually stand in.
Nobody handed me a montage. I earned every scrap of it the same way a farmer earns a harvest, one exhausted, aching, unglamorous day at a time, except that the harvest here was bruises and the particular hollow-eyed steadiness that comes from doing something terrible often enough that your body stops treating it as terrible.