It wasn’t long before he was wheezing at the effort of trying to get the bag to turn red.

He braced his gloved hands on his knees. He was hitting the damned thing as hard as he could.

No, he was hitting as hard as he could muscularly. Magically, he should be able to hit it harder.

But he didn’t want to shoot his little green bouncy balls of doom across the room. If he could add his will to his muscles with magical stuff he threw, why couldn’t he add his will to his muscles?

He remembered the wights in Garriston, leapfrogging from roof to roof, shooting luxin downward as they jumped, using the back kick to extend their jumps. It was the same concept that worked for Gavin’s skimmers and the sea chariots. But both of those interacted more externally. They didn’t have to, did they?

Kip drafted a shinguard, then kicked off his shoes. This next part was going to hurt. It always did. He began kicking the heavy bag to warm up for it. He’d been shown how to put power into kicks a dozen times, but it hadn’t settled into body knowledge until today somehow. Maybe losing some weight had helped. He swung both arms in a guard to the left, letting his body stretch, his left foot turning until it pointed backward, hips opening, then jerked his arms back in, the torsion providing power as his right leg came up and pounded the side of the bag and set it swinging. That bag weighed two sevens. Not bad. He repeated it, not quite as successfully, from the left.

Enough warm-up. He filled himself with green luxin, then stabbed a bit of it through the skin at the back of his right heel. He winced, cut it wider.

Here goes nothing. He stood with his right foot back, twisted, snapped, and as his right foot came up, he shot green luxin out of it.

The sudden transfer of weight from his body into the air, but this time not opposing his body but aiding it, threw Kip’s foot forward at tremendous speed. He kicked the bag so hard that he lost traction on his left foot and fell heavily on his side.

Laughter burst out from the door.

Kip popped to his feet in an instant, mortified. It was half a dozen members of his Blackguard class, led by Cruxer, who was grinning big. If it was possible, it seemed like the young inductees had changed in the weeks Kip hadn’t seen them. Cruxer was bulking up, his tall, lean frame looking more muscular by the day. His eyes, though, looked five years older, either from the death of the girl he’d loved, Lucia, or from being in the Battle of Ru. Affable Big Leo’s arms of banded iron looked even bigger. Gross Goss wasn’t picking his nose, but he was itching it with a big thumb. Tiny Daelos didn’t look any bigger, but he was beginning to look reedy and not just skinny and small. Ben-hadad still had spectacles with flip-down lenses, but he’d reworked them. These didn’t look thrown together with string and glue; they looked a masterwork, a perfect complement to the burning bright intelligence in his eyes. Only Ferkudi looked the same, the craggy-nosed dope. Actually, that was deeply reassuring.

“Good thing Breaker fights better than he … uh, kicks,” Ferkudi said. “Kicking is part of fighting, though, isn’t it? Ah, that’s a real flesh protuberance.”

The kids laughed.

“Shut up, you nunks,” Cruxer said good-naturedly. He led as naturally as the first-place Blackguard in the class should. He bowed his head to Kip. “Godslayer.” He delivered it flat, so it could have been teasing or not. Or knowing Cruxer, he meant those who wished to take it as teasing to be able to do so, but he really meant it.

Son of a … Kip thought that nickname had died when he nearly had on the ship. “Crux. Wh—what are you doing here?”

“In the Prism’s practice room, you mean? They got so many recruits for the war training out in the yards, we Blackguards have been pushed into storage rooms and side rooms everywhere half the time. Teia somehow got us permission to use this one when the yards are full. I was going to cut her from the squad before that. She’s not so good, but after she got us this place—”

“Hey,” Teia said. Somehow she’d lifted a blue luxin dagger from Ferkudi and was now pressing the point to Cruxer’s kidney, smiling sweetly.

Cruxer grinned. “The insubordination around here.”

“I thought you’d—I thought you’d think I was a traitor,” Kip said. That was it, that was why he hadn’t been able to bear going out to them. These were the only people in his life who had made him feel like he belonged, and he thought they would have looked at him as an outsider, a traitor.

“Breaker, you’re impulsive, but you aren’t stupid. We didn’t believe for a heartbeat that you’d try to kill the Red. It’s ridiculous! You’re trying to become a Blackguard! Protecting Colors is part of what we do. You wouldn’t throw all that away. But if your father fell overboard, you jumping in after him without a thought? That’s you. Completely.”

Ouch. “How’d you … how’d you hear so fast?”

“Teia. Big gossip.”

“Hey,” Teia said. For some reason, she’d been glowering at Daelos, but she said nothing more.

Cruxer grinned again. “Commander Ironfist thought you’d be here. Said sometimes those who’ve been in battle are a little reticent when they first come back.”

“You weren’t supposed to share that last part, you oaf,” Teia said. “What were you doing there, Kip? With your foot?”

She looked eager to talk about training. Well she might, he supposed. She and Kip were going to talk about her being all bloody in town. But not now.

“You’re bleeding,” Cruxer said.

“Just an experiment,” Kip said.

They gathered around him. “Go on,” Ben-hadad said. He’d seemed uncharacteristically nervous until now, when his eyes lit up at the possibility of a new discovery.

So Kip explained, and then he kicked the bag again, showing them. When you used luxin from one site repeatedly, the body eventually adjusted and there was little blood. But the first few times, it acted like any mundane cut. A cloud of unsealed luxin and blood both shot out of his heel like smoke out of a gun barrel, and this time he didn’t lose his footing. He did nearly wrench his knee, though. The power was incredible.

But the bag lit up. Red.

Everyone stopped and looked at Kip.

“You could, uh, use this lots of ways,” Kip said. “You’d have to, um, figure out your own center of weight and everything, but if you shot some from your shoulders when you ran, you’d run faster. Or when you jumped, you could shoot some—”

“From your ass! You’d be the fart flyer!” Ferkudi shouted. He reminded Kip of an excitable puppy.

They laughed, but only briefly. They were all captivated by the thought of it.

“I was going to say from your hips,” Kip said. “I mean, if you did it from your feet, you’d probably flip over and fall on your head.”

“But you could do it from your ass if you want to, Ferkudi,” Teia said. “Might as well have a wide platform.”

They laughed again, then quieted.

Big Leo turned to Cruxer. “I’ve never even heard of anything like this. Is it forbidden?”

Cruxer shook his head. “It isn’t incarnitive, so I don’t see why it would be. On the other hand, if you were doing it all the time, you might burn through your life in no time.”