Forty-nine - Summer fruits

Stacey took a slice of what looked like watermelon, had the texture of rockmelon and tasted more like strawberries. It took her by surprise.

"Mmm," she turned the triangular slice of fruit over, her eyes opening wide.

"I thought you'd like that," Mr Huo chuckled. "It's called a pink summer melon here. It's shorter name is strawmelon."

Stacey laughed at that. Strawberry. Strawmelon. What great imaginations people had.

"I love it," Stacey swallowed and took a slice of another fruit. This one looked more like a slice of orange but it was oblong rather than a wedge or sickle moon shape. Sure enough, it had a citrus tang.

"That's a thumping citron," Mr Huo informed her, lazily throwing another cube in his mouth. He pointed at a yellow-white cylinder with small black seeds splayed about the centre. "Guess what this one's called?"

Stacey tried the soft cylinder that looked and smelled remarkably like a banana.

"Is it a banana?" she asked, putting it in her mouth and then opening her eyes wide at the taste. It wasn't just banana she tasted. It was like a banana milkshake in solid form. It tasted like fresh cream mixed with banana and honey.

"That," Mr Huo put an elbow on the table to lean his chin in while he watched Stacey trying the various fruits, with a languid smile, "is a bannerberry."

"It is so good," Stacey emphasised each word.

They spent some time like this, with Stacey exploring new foods that she hadn't tried before and Mr Huo naming them for her. After a while, Stacey had to hold up her hand, despite Mr Huo's coaxing.

"That's it. I can't eat anymore, Mr Huo," she said. "Thank you."

"Mr Huo?" Mr Huo raised an eyebrow. "So formal?"

"Well, you are the big boss and everyone else either calls you Boss or Lord Huo," Stacey said. Maybe the man wasn't as scary as she first thought. "Seeing as I'm not used to greeting aristocracy, I decided to call you Mr Huo instead."

"My name's Thieren," Mr Huo waved a hand at her. "Call me Thieren - or if you'd rather, you can also call me by my Chinese name, Huo Tiren."

"Does anyone call you Tea Wren or Tyrant instead?" Stacey teased.

"Not to my face, they don't," Mr Huo gave a closed lip smile. "Does anyone ever call you Spacey?"

"Yeah. All the time," Stacey laughed and then faltered, her smile falling. "At least, they used to."

"You can call me Tea Wren or Tyrant as you please," Thieren Huo patted her hand gently and led her outside. "I don't mind. Since you've finished eating, shall we go for a walk and a chat while we're digesting? And then I'll take you to the training yard. The most important thing for you this week is to survive the battle. After this morning's mishap, my falling stock prices and all the damage control my people have to do have cost me a lot of money. If you don't survive the battle to help me earn back all the money I've lost, I'm going to be very upset."

Stacey looked down and scowled. Her bad mood had returned. He might be the big boss, but he didn't have to remind her of how much further in debt she was going to be with him.

"I'm sorry," Stacey withdrew from him and said in a soft voice. "It was an accident."

"I know," Mr Huo said, stepping around the table to pat her on the head, "or you'd already be on your way to meet your new husband so that I can cancel the battle. It wasn't all your fault. I will apologise to you in advance though. Most of your lessons this week will be taken up with learning how to fight and survive a battle. I will be doing most of the teaching and I'm probably going to make you absolutely hate me. Hate me enough to kill me, probably. There's no real way to prepare a complete amateur to fight a battle. You learn fast but not fast enough. My best option is to hope you have the propensity to become a beserker enough that you'll at least go crazy enough to be able to bypass any pain or fear and actually be able to defend yourself if you can't learn fast enough."

"You're going to work me to the bone - is that what you mean?" Stacey ducked away from him once more, putting distance between them again. She could feel her guts twisting and she wished she hadn't eaten so much for lunch. He didn't really mean he was planning to send her insane, did he?

"I've noticed in your training sessions so far that when you get scared, you tend to freeze. You lose all coordination when you try to run away. In a battle, that means you'll be dead meat," Mr Huo explained, beckoning her to follow. "But when you get immersed in something, you're hyper focused and your abilities are completely different. It's an indication that you might make a good berserker. With your current unstable mental health, turning you into a berserker should be pretty easy. It's just that the downside is the aftermath. You'll need a long time to recover afterwards. Your general health - especially your mental health may be very fragile and you may not remember anything from when you were berserking. But at least, I hope, you'll have survived the battle and not been kidnapped."

Stacey edged away from him and Mr Huo guided her around a corner of the building.

"So… What do you want me to do? What do you mean?" she asked him. It turned out that the kind friendliness from earlier had all been fake.

"What I'm trying to say is that I know you may not be a natural dancer or fighter but that this is the plan with the best chance of your survival," Mr Huo said. "I'm giving you advanced warning. I don't want to hurt you but I honestly don't think your skills are going to be up to scratch by the time the battle arrives. I want to get your permission to let me… turn you into a survivor. A fighter who can survive against a stronger enemy."

Stacey tripped over a crack in the pavement, feeling her knees going soft with fear as she suddenly understood what he was trying to tell her.

"You're going to literally drive me crazy?" she swallowed. "Send me into the jaws of insanity without any assurance that I'll be able to come back out of it."

"Only with your permission," Mr Huo said with a pained expression. "Unless you can show marked improvement in your fighting skills within the next day. Which is unlikely. Can you - will you trust me to take care of you?"