“Walked far?” she asks. Her voice rich with relief.
“Aye,” I say. “Needed to hear silence.”
She doesn’t ask more. She never needs to. She wraps an arm around me, and I rest into the warmth. Home feels real in that moment.
I don’t know why I let ‘em talk me into this.
Burnout and Booger stand on the rec field behind the library, bare-footed, shirtless, already glistening with sweat and grinning like fools high on adrenaline and dumb ideas. The morning sun climbs lazy and gold, baking the grass flat and dry. Dew’s long gone—burned off under their stomping feet and the sheer force of chaos they generate by simply existing.
“Alright,” I say, voice gravelly from sleep and pollen. “You wanna learn orc-style combat, you learn all of it. That means stretches. That means pain. That means breakfast comesafter, not during.”
Booger salutes like a soldier. Burnout’s already attempting some kind of forward lunge, groaning like a dying goat.
“You said stretches were just ‘limbering your rage,’” Booger wheezes, reaching for his toes and only making it halfway before he tips sideways into the dirt.
“They are. But your rage ain’t useful if you tear your hamstring mid-fight.” I grin, walking the row of their sweat-streaked shadows like a drill master. “Now. Down. We begin with the Split of Sky and Earth.”
“The what?” Burnout yelps.
“Down!” I bark. “Wider stance. Knees. Arms up. Touch the gods and the worms at the same time!”
They groan, wobble, stretch—and then it happens.
Booger makes a sound like a hiccup and a scream at once and stumbles back behind the tree line.
Then Burnout dry heaves and coughs something into his hand.
“Gods above,” he sputters. “Mylungsare on fire. Why is stretching worse than punching?”
“Because pain is honesty,” I tell him, handing him a skin of water. “And you two are the biggest liars in this town when it comes to body awareness.”
When Booger returns, face green in the wrong way, I nod.
“Good. Now we warm up.”
Burnout looks betrayed. “Thatwasn’t the warm-up?!”
Hourslater—after bear crawls, rolling over thistle bushes, grappling with each other until they collapse in a pile of bruises and laughter—I call it.
“Enough,” I grunt. “We don’t want to tear too many important tendons in one day.”
Burnout falls flat on his back, arms splayed. Booger’s face is mashed into the grass, mumbling something about seeing colors that don’t exist in the normal spectrum.
“You know what?” Booger mutters into the dirt. “We need a name.”
Burnout lifts his head like a prairie dog. “What?”
“A name. Like a unit. A title. A brotherhood forged in puke.”
“You’re delirious,” I say.
“No, he’s right,” Burnout wheezes. “We’re warriors now. Warriors need identity.”
Booger sits up, wide-eyed, grass in his hair like a crown of leaves. “Green Brigade.”
Burnout whoops, then winces. “That’s it. Green Brigade.”
They both turn to me like worshipers waiting for divine approval.
