There were only five of the original twenty eight girls in her group left, and today that number would be rooted down to only two. She dressed herself in her sturdiest clothing and put the shank she had sharpened down against the wall from a spoon in her sleeve, as her instructor had provided tell that there would be no punishment for outside weapons if she was clever enough to bring one into the initiation room. She secured her hair up into a knot with a small pick, her one allotted "non-necessary" clothing item, and double checked the straps on her shoes before meeting her instructor, a new, younger man than her old one, whose hair was almost as long as Vasilisa's, on the other side of the dorm door.
In the room, the oldest instructor, diana's instructor, laid out the only rules to the five girls in front of him : it's a fight to the death, and if you get so wounded you can not continue, you will be eliminated. The men stepped out into the windowed room and as soon as the door shut behind the last one, vasilisa lunged for her.
She dodged the punch easily, but was pulled down with a sharp kick in her knee. Vasilisa climbed on top of her, and Natalia took her move. In one swift motion she had freed her weapon from her sleeve and stabbed it through the side of the other girl's neck just as she was rearing back to punch her again. She tugged it free and spared only a fraction of a second to see the blood fountain out of the soon dead girl's neck before shoving her off and backing to the wall. Diana, who had smuggled in a similar weapon as her hair stick yanked it backwards out of Anastasiya's head, and shook the eyeball hanging off it off, sending it flying into the window. Vera lunged toward Natalia, who was still against the farthest wall from diana, and tried to yank the weapon out of her hands. Natalia shoved her elbow into Vera's face with such ferocity that a tooth lodged itself into the skin of her bicep, and with her good leg swept the girl off her feet and tackled her, shoving the heel of her hand into her nose, breaking it in an attempt to kill her with her own nose bone. Vera swung blindly, and kicked her legs wildly, trying to buck her off, but she brought the end of the shank down in such an angle that it slashed across her throat, and sliced her jugular vein, ending both Vera's life, and the fight in a wide blood spray. The door to the windowed room opened just as she stood up and both her and diana fell in line in the middle of the room, stepping over the bodies of the other three. diana's instructor stepped forward and took the weapons from the both of them, taking them back to the other instructors, who held them up in scrutiny, inspecting each girls method.
Now that she could see diana's more clearly, she could appreciate the simplicity. it was a knitting needle, probably filched from an assignment, with a small adornment attached to the top. Her own looked crude and rough-hewn in comparison, but as she caught sight of both her and diana's reflections in the window, she could see the opposite in their bodies. Her hair was still up, clothes immaculate except for a small blood spatter across the sleeve of her right arm, skirt and shirt still tucked. Diana's attire showed nothing but sloppy form; she had a large bloodstain on her chest, and spatters on both hands, and her hair was a mess, no doubt from using her only jewelry item as a weapon. Her shirt was halfway out of her skirt, and the heel of one of her shoes was sat across the room, busted off in a high kick, no doubt. Her instructor left the room into the hall, and came back with a cart that he handed off to her before telling both natalia and diana to clean the room, and dispose of the bodies into the back room, just leave the cart, and wait in the hall when you are finished.
Her and diana hauled the bodies of Vera, Vasilisa, and Anastasiya onto the cart, and used the dead girls' clothes to clean up the majority of the blood. Diana pulled the tooth out of natalia's arm for her, and they tossed that in the cart as well. Diana wheeled the cart into the back room, another door off of the initiation room, and joined Natalia in the hall where they waited. And stood. And waited. They waited until the blood had dried and flaked off of both of their skins, and Natalia's knee had swollen and become a purple-black color. Then their instructors returned, carrying heavy dark clothing and two trays of food, in what Natalia expected to be the last trade-up the two would ever experience, either way. They showered quickly in one of the rooms across the hall, and ate their food standing, with towels on their hair, before hanging the towels back, and each following their instructors down separate halls, Diana back to her dorm, and Natalia to the medical room, her fate hanging on the kick dealt by Vasilisa.