allez! wipe that blood off your lip [Shrimp | WE]

A sword is a sword, not a friend or a piece of you. But you like the Collector Stoneheart—the familiarity of its weight and balance, the way your fingers fit smoothly around the hilt, the part it plays for your character—and some rowdy stranger will not walk away with it just because he decided a splash of blood gave him the right and the hard-earned skill to pick it up.

You glance to Dais, eyebrows raised. They snort—they could tell you to run your own errands—but oblige, launching a spare from the edge of the ring. Wherever they dropped their aim before, they evidently found it; the sword flies true and you snatch it from the air one-handed as you vault over the ropes, your other hand pushing solidly against a turnbuckle, grinning sharply at the flutter of lace and hair and the fresh round of gasps as you land with an unnecessary but satisfying flourish.

Someone unseen flips a series of switches; the lights over the ring stay on, but section by section the rest of them explode to life as well, lighting the way for scattering patrons and, coincidentally, yourself. Discarded popcorn crunches under your feet and scatters as you walk, largely ignoring the tacky floor and the confused crowd. Your quarry isn't hard to find, a tall man with a matching rumble of a voice—and, to your annoyance, half a clue how to hold a sword. He's unreasonably angry, too, for a bystander at an event where flying weapons are more inconvenience than catastrophe. Drunk, perhaps, or simply heady with the power of always being the largest person in a room and the inexperience to not know that doesn't matter here—or at least he seems that way until you step fluidly onto the arm of a front row seat and catch a glint of metal moving along the floor. His hems, knocked askew by the commotion, must have hidden it before: a knife, a plan traded in when a better option sliced open his arm.

Ah. Well. That's a different problem, but still nothing you can't handle.

Instead of hopping to the floor with him, you dance from arm to arm, over the back of the row to the back of the second, half strategy—he's taller; you want your high ground—and half inability to resist the image of your dark outfit catapulting through fluorescents, not quite flying but near enough to suit the theme. From there you have a clear view when the moment escalates: the man with your sword trying to make his way down a row, the spindly stranger who reaches for his wrist with just enough strength to make his balance waver, the impact as he launches an elbow backward. The kid goes down hard, one arm slumped over a seat, but lifts himself halfway as someone rushes forward from a gaggle of slightly younger teenagers who look terrified but apparently lack the sense to get out of the way.

A plant, to accelerate the fight for some goal you haven't yet deduced? A victim of happenstance? The person the man was looking for?

"Watch out!" he calls, with the alarm of someone in a situation they've never seen and the confidence of someone who thinks they're being helpful anyway. "There's a knife tied to his ankle??"

That answers that question.

"Yes," you drawl back, "my eye is on the other blade, personally." Your attention shifts. A push and a twist take you past the rest of the teenagers and back down to the arms of the front row, leading you back down to the ground floor, abandoning your even heights in favor of blocking the man's path and setting your feet back on solid ground where they can do their quickest work. He stands straddled awkwardly between rows, his balance recovered but his trajectory interrupted, and you smirk, the spare sword steady in your hands. "Has no one warned you what happens when you steal from a witch?"