Masozi is very much not thinking about the fact that, while he's seen Lan Xichen many times since Thursday work period, he has not had any opportunities to talk to him alone. This...is probably just because Lan Xichen is in charge of running the enclave and is obviously very busy?

(And because Masozi is not even slightly going to ask him outright, and keeps hopefully waiting for Lan Xichen to show up and help him practice Mandarin again....) 

"- Yeah, okay!" 

"Where should we do it? We can't use gym because of mal."

Masozi considers this. "If we're doing it with no weapons then - probably we can just use one of our bedrooms? Or the reading room, but that might upset people if they want to use it study. Or.....the cafeteria? That'd have more space but also there would be a lot of people watching." 

"My bedroom sound good. --I can tap people on Zidian."

Masozi isn't totally sure what this is apropos of. "...Um, I don't have a weapon to fight with, if you're going to use Zidian." 

"Fair enough, that should wait until you get weapon."

They can start heading to Jiang Cheng's room. 

"Well, if Lan Xichen lets me go to shop again then I can finish my knife. It's not going to be very good though. How do people normally get magic weapons, here, do you have to know enough to make them?" 

"Make or trade or if you're enclaver someone get it for you on some point."

....He is not going to consider trading sex for a weapon but it's a little tempting, it's not like he has much else to trade. 

"Okay. ...Are there any classes in how to fight with weapons? I only know how to fight with a knife, and - not very well, nobody taught me or anything. Maybe if I made a sword I could ask Lan Wangji to teach me?" 

"Oh, yeah, she love to, she love teaching."

"Oh good!" Masozi bounces a little. "I think probably learning how to use a sword is easier than learning to use a whip like your one, and it's more like the knife project so I could probably learn enough to make it in shop sooner?" 

"Sword is easier than whip unless you have Zidian which is"-- he visibly hesitates, corrects what he was going to say, and twirls his ring-- "very good whip, much better than all other whip, with bunch of wonderful magical power anyone want to use."

Masozi fails to notice the hesitation at all. "That's really lucky for you, then! Where did you get Zidian from?" 

"It is my mother's."

Masozi nods, and tries to smile at Jiang Cheng rather than feeling intensely jealous, and then does a quick scan for mals and picks up on a small multilegged skittery thing hiding just around a bend in the hallway and informs Jiang Cheng of this. 

He flicks his hand and then there's a bright purple line of electricity lashing out from it and then it wraps around the skittering thing and then there is a small pile of skittering thing on the ground and Zidian is a ring again.

That is SO COOL! Masozi lights up and bounces in sheer delight! 

"I can show you more but I do not have anyone to show it for except you."

This is again slightly hard to parse and Masozi frowns. "You...mean you don't have anyone to hit except me? Does it hurt a lot to be hit with it?" 

"No! No. I hit very lightly."

He's actually very curious. "Okay! You can show me then." 

There's another flash of electricity and suddenly Zidian is wrapped around Masozi's torso, pinning his arms to his sides.

It feels odd and sort of buzzing, like static electricity.

Whoooa! That's so cool. Masozi beams at Jiang Cheng, and then experimentally wriggles to see if he can extract himself. 

No matter how much he wriggles, Zidian stays firmly attached around him. 

"That's really impressive! Wow! ...Okay you can let me loose now. Please?" It was fine for ten seconds but actually being confined like this is pretty nervewracking. 

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."

Masozi sees him start to move but doesn't quite have enough time to actually get out of the way, since he's at this point fairly pinned; the best he can do is half-turn his head so that, if Jiang Cheng were actually eye-gouging him, he would at least have a slightly less good angle for it. 

- oh that's a good idea, doing the fighting but in a pretend way that doesn't actually hurt people. Though it makes it hard to accurately guess how incapacitated he would be if Jiang Cheng had eye-gouged him for real? 

"I dunno if that'd hurt me too much to keep fighting?" he admits, slightly out of breath. 

"Probably, but we keep going? Unless you need break."

"No, m'fine." Priority one: try to roll or squirm into a position where his eyes are out of reach. And also try to knee Jiang Cheng in whatever places he can reach and get enough leverage to hit. 

Trying to knee Jiang Cheng is a great way to have him grab your leg and drop you to the floor.

Masozi is kind of running out of things to try now! Short of 'using magic', which would waste mana and is also probably kind of against the rules when you're sparring for practice. 

...If he goes totally limp and stops doing anything for a second or two, is Jiang Cheng going to react to that in a way that helps him? 

Jiang Cheng is going to look very upset, kneel, and start to check his pulse!

Doing that tends to work better when you're fighting humans - especially adults - than when you're fighting mals, but Masozi is still very surprised at how well it worked this time! Not so surprised that he forgets to take advantage of it, though - he rolls away and gets his feet under him and sprints to the opposite side of the room to lurk behind the bed. 

"That is unfair! I am worried about you!"

"- Why? You hadn't even done anything that would've hurt me right then. ...Sometimes if a grownup grabs you and you do that then they'll be surprised and let go." 

"I do not know! You are sick maybe!"

"....I'm sorry I made you worried?" Masozi makes a face. "I didn't mean to." He's also in fact pretty out of breath, now. "I - maybe need a break now?" 

"It is good technique," he admits grudgingly.

"I didn't think it'd work that well!" Masozi admits. "I just kind of ran out of ideas for things to try. ....That weren't mind control." 

"Mind control is allowed in sparring if you say ahead of time. But it isn't good idea most of the time I think? Because it uses up mana."

"Yeah. That was what I was thinking too. ...Can you teach me what you would've done instead of the things I actually did?" 

"Yes. But first you practice falling. When you is good at falling, I teach punching."

"Okay. How long do you think I need to practice falling for?" 

"I teach you again in week? You practice every night. I see how well you do."

Nod. "Did....I do okay today?" 

"Good instincts. And you fight like you want to kill someone. It is good."

Masozi looks so happy and delighted at hearing this!