Zidian flashes through the air and now Jiang Cheng has a ring again.

That was really cool! ....Also Masozi would like nothing else startling at all to happen until they're safely in Jiang Cheng's warded room. 

They can do that!

Jiang Cheng doesn't really talk because English is... not... his strong point.

Masozi is fine with no talking! He's busy mulling over allowed fighting moves. Surprise-kissing people is NOT an allowed fighting move and also it probably wouldn't work nearly as well to distract Jiang Cheng as it did to distract Lan Wangji. 

Once they reach Jiang Cheng's room, he stands there awkwardly for a few seconds. "...Okay. How should we do this - do you want to make there be rules...?" 

"Do you know how to fall? I not spar you if you do not know how to fall."

Masozi stares blankly at him. "Is that something you're supposed to be taught?" What would that even mean. The concept of falling lessons is baffling. "I don't know if I do! I usually hurt myself if I fall, if that's what you mean, I'm not worried about that." 

"You fall wrong and break arm, then you die. Watch me." He kneels and demonstrates proper forward falling technique, with his forearms and palms striking the ground simultaneously. 

In the last six months Masozi has:

- Fallen off a roof that he was trying to climb to get clean rainwater he was collecting in a bucket. (It was unexpectedly slippery.) 

- Fallen out of twice while trying to pick fruit for his sister to eat. One of those times it was after having climbed over a fence to sneak into a rich person's yard and he landed in an ornamental fish pond and had to climb back out soaking wet. 

- Fallen into a river, he can't even remember why this happened. 

- Been knocked over or knocked flying by bigger mals on at least eight occasions? They sort of blur together. He wasn't ever getting more than two hours of sleep at a stretch, at the time, and he learned to maintain situational awareness through that but he doesn't remember it very well. 

He has never once broken his arm doing this! He's also...basically never consciously thought about how falling has technique. Of course it does, in hindsight? Walking has technique. He watches Jiang Cheng closely and imitates him, and then sort of tries to reverse engineer what he usually would do.

"...I think a thing I do is turning sideways and scrunching a bit so that if I were going to hit my head then instead I won't and I would sort of roll over my shoulder? And if I fall over backward I think I do a different thing again but I never thought about it before." 

"Fall. I watch you."

Falling on purpose is kind of weird to do but sure, he can demonstrate falling-and-rolling, and falling backward, and he's really not doing it with elegant technique but he obviously has some existing reflexes for avoiding injury. 

He's more used to dirt or grass than the very hard floor, though. He's fine, he's not actually hurt, but he's definitely going to have a bruise on his shoulder and probably also on his butt, and now his forearms are stinging from the slapping-the-floor thing. 

Jiang Cheng corrects his form with terse monosyllables and demonstrations and makes him practice it with better form. 

Masozi is really happy about getting INSTRUCTIONS on how to do this! They're a little hard to follow because of the terseness and Jiang Cheng's questionable English proficiency - and he still doesn't actually speak enough Mandarin to manage switching to that - but they're actually pretty helpful instructions! He listens so attentively and practices very very diligently. 

"Practice tonight to build mana. You is good enough I is not going to hurt you when sparring, I think. Want to try?" 

"Okay!" 

Masozi...is really not that used to fighting humans? It's a stupid idea to fight adults, as a kid, so he relied a lot harder on noticing in time if someone was about to mess with him, and then running away very fast, and then eventually he got good enough at the mind-nudging on mundanes that he could manage it once or twice a day on his own mana, and he only pulled malia for it later on, when he was alone and much more obviously - or so some people thought - an easy target. And at that point he had a knife, too, though not a very good one and not magical and he didn't have any weight allowance left to take it into the Scholomance. He mostly fought other children, at that point, because sometimes children would try to steal his food, and it wasn't 'sparring' so much as a few seconds of frantic scuffling and elbows and knees rammed into sensitive places and usually quite a lot of scratching and biting and hair-pulling. Not that he has enough hair to grab, right now; it's just starting to grow back in but there's still only a fine layer of fuzz. 

He stands up from the floor and places his feet to make sure his balance is solid and eyes Jiang Cheng as though Jiang Cheng is some kind of exotic and until-now-unknown species of mal. 

"I pull punches and try not to hurt you," he says, and then aims a punch lightly at Masozi's shoulder.

Masozi isn't about to just stand there and get punched! He starts moving back almost before Jiang Cheng does; having his affinity mind-sensing up is helpful when it comes to perceiving that people are about to move, even if he can't tell what they're going to do until he sees it with his eyes. 

....It's really weird and unnatural-feeling not to just run away? There isn't very far to run, though, so he just sort of ends up at the other end of the room, catches himself, realizes it would be really easy for Jiang Cheng to just chase him and corner him here, and tries to dart to more open floor before Jiang Cheng has time for chasing. 

He's going to just sort of test out Masozi right now-- how does he respond to a throw?

Masozi is pretty hard to get close enough to for Jiang Cheng to try to throw him! He gets out of the way the first time by dint of diving onto the bed, rolling and thumping into the wall, and tries to throw the blanket at Jiang Cheng to distract him while he jumps off the other side. This works less well than throwing rocks or sticks at mals, the blanket just sort of flutters down

The second time, when Jiang Cheng actually manages to get him close enough to the corner that he can't dodge, and Masozi realizes this, he realizes this and a very fast flicker of calculation shows in his eyes and then instead of trying to get away, he pushes off the wall so that he sort of collides with Jiang Cheng, and then becomes a flailing tangle of knees and elbows and also teeth, which he manages to get into Jiang Cheng's arm before he's actually on the ground. (He remembers just in time not to bite hard because this is only sparring for practice.) 

Not bad, not bad. Kid's instincts are good even if his technique isn't.

Jiang Cheng yanks him around and pulls him into a choke. 

Masozi tucks his chin in as tightly as he can against his chest, so that Jiang Cheng can't actually succeed at cutting off his air, and he spends a second trying to get his feet under him again - fails at this, he's taller than Jiang Cheng but apparently Jiang Cheng is a lot stronger than him and can, in fact, just yank him around - 

- can't reach his eyes either, and he can't bite without leaving his neck vulnerable to choking, but he's at an angle where he can at least try to jab his elbow into whichever part of Jiang Cheng is closest behind him (approximately his solar plexus) -

Jiang Cheng has had a lot of practice in continuing whatever he's doing while he's in sudden and surprising pain, so this doesn't actually phase him, but he deliberately loosens his hold on Masozi anyway to see what Masozi would do with it. 

Masozi has clearly never learned any techniques for getting out of a chokehold, but he notices Jiang Cheng's grip loosen and is immediately wriggling and kicking and flailing; to the extent that any strategy at all is apparent, it mostly seems like he's attempting to distract Jiang Cheng or cause him enough pain that he drops him. 

Jiang Cheng punches Masozi a couple of times, then yanks him down to the floor.

The punches don't seem to cause Masozi any distress whatsoever.

He does not at all like being pulled down to the floor, but rather than trying to get his feet under him, he tries to fall harder, and twist around so that he'll be pulling Jiang Cheng over and into the wall. 

Jiang Cheng goes along with this and is slammed to the wall. He twists so his fingers brush against Masozi's eyelids.

"Eye gouge."