A battle of monkeys and ducks — and into it came humans riding big macaques.

In one rush there were seventy or eighty big macaques, and under human command they formed up and penned the fat duck inside. The macaques carried huge weapons in their hands — core armaments, by the look of them, forged from jin cores.

They advanced and fell back in good order, and every pass of the core armaments left a few more wounds on the raging duck. They stood only four or five meters tall, a great deal smaller than the duck's several dozen meters, but weight of numbers, the ground they held and some very fine coordination beat back every attempt it made to break out.

The sun began to go down in the west. The fat duck had been under siege for a full hour, and its gray-white feathers had turned the bright red of metal.

For all the duck's formidable presence, this troop of macaques was wearing the life out of it a little at a time.

Shen Cong had waited an hour off to the side. The humans and their macaques still hadn't killed the duck, and he was in no hurry and had no intention of stepping in. He simply started practicing camouflage color inside the vehicle. Most of his spirit-fire was kindled by now, and with practice he was settling further into the whole new system of perception.

Sensing through the fluctuations of the Firestarter grains and controlling his body that way let him dig deeper into what it could do.

He could waggle his ears at will now, for instance, and make his pectorals dance. He could work a muscle to its limit, so that a punch went out at full force the instant it was thrown.

No more of the old business where the nervous system's signals never quite let him use all his strength, always holding something back.

In an organic form that restraint was probably right, since strains and sprains came easily. In a metal one it was pure waste. Going all out did the…