The messages the fight picks between; the stronger the blow, the further down the table. DO_ATTACK indexes it with twice the margin, which runs from 1 to 16, so the table is read one entry late: the first message, a stagger, is never chosen, and a margin of exactly 16 takes the word after the table -- the first two bytes of ONE_PLACE's code, an address in the ROM -- and prints the ROM's bytes as a message (tried: a few garbled words).