-Ari-
It was an easy, but long, run for Ari to arrive at the J’alyr Headquarters. She thankfully caught a good cycle with the lift, and had no obstacles or interruptions. Until she met Oroske in the small plaza in front of the office building.
He was relaxing on a bench, and raised a single hand in casual greeting. “Hey, Ari. Here for Ensaru?”
“That’s right. Got a problem with that?” She bit. She knew he’d try to fight her. And she knew to expect Oroske, instead of Kuro. Xeron found the boy prowling around the day before, and concluded he would likely be the one to go on the offensive. She felt like she could take on Kuro and probably win, but Oroske… Oroske was another story entirely. She doubted he would her, but based on some stories Xeron and Orun told her, she couldn’t be entirely sure.
She clenched her jaw as he stood up, rolling his shoulder and stretching. “Not really, but it my job to defend him.” He said. His calmness was chilling, he didn’t seem to care whatsoever that the two were about to duke it out. His posture and body language was overly relaxed as he summoned his weapon. He chose a simple shortsword to start out with. Ari was familiar with how Hunters typically approached combat, and it seemed Oroske was content to take that approach himself.
Despite having plenty of time to formulate a plan of attack, Ari didn’t have one. No ideas she came up with seemed particularly good. She never was good about planning out her fights, instead preferring to fly by the seat of her pants and improvising. It had worked out well for her, so far anyway.
She summoned her own weapon, a modest hand-and-a-half sword. Ari knew that Oroske specialized in greatswords and scythes, while she specialized in swords of various sizes and shapes. She was with polearms, and didn’t have the strength to proficiently use greatswords like Oroske did.
Her opponent was tall, and had a very muscular build. Not as tall as her brother and mentor, but much bigger in other areas. She’d seen him swing around his greatsword one handed as easily as she’d swing around the shortsword he held now.
The only advantage she could even imagine she had was that her small size allowed her to be agile and move around easily. Truly, a fight against Kuro would have been much more fair.
She sunk into a stance, and began slowly closing the distance between her and her prey, sword held in both hands next to her head, tip pointing out in a way that would allow her to strike or defend easily. Oroske simply sat there, watching her, spinning his sword in his hand idly at his side. It was frustrating, but she swallowed her annoyance and remained patient.
Once she deemed she was close enough, she made her first strike. Keeping things simple, she stepped forward with a small Acceleration, and made a downward strike. He’d easily dodged that with a small step back, seeming to match her level of Acceleration with ease. Or rather, it seemed to her on closer inspection, he was at that small level from the moment she’d arrived.
He didn’t retaliate. Ari had allowed him to step into a role of pure defense by being the first to attack. She didn’t mind, as that meant she controlled the tempo of the battle.
She fluidly moved her sword around as she stepped forward again, striking powerfully at his side with a horizontal swing from her left. She expected him to block with his sword, but instead, a small wall of water deflected the blade. He’d made the first move to escalate the difficulty level of the fight.
Ari remained patient, focusing on her footwork and positioning as she continued to attempt to strike him. On every other blow, she’d increment her Acceleration slightly, allowing her to seem like she was increasing her pace without actually doing so. A battle against the so-called “strongest Hunter” wasn’t going to be won with her going full force from the get-go. She needed to remain patient, and play her hand well if she wanted to even land a hit on the man.
Stolen novel; please report.
After a handful of swings, she played the first of these ‘cards.’ She began to add in an unaspected ‘ari’ to her swings, delayed ever so slightly to create the effect that she’s swinging twice in one movement. This managed to catch him off guard, as when she broke through his water shield with the first swing, suddenly a second, nearly invisible, slice came through. He was able to dodge just in time, and it barely nicked the cloth on his coat. Had he not dodged, it would have hit him square in the right shoulder, and been a tough blow for this early in their fight. For the first time since he first spotted her, his expression changed: his lips formed a small, almost imperceptible, smile.
She continued trying out this gambit for another moment before adding in an element to the swings. The choice was obvious to her as it was her own affinity, fyrun. She added it not only to the ari-magic fueled slice, but to her regular sword swing as well. Fyrun and orun magic had an interesting interaction when the two collided the way they were now. Most people thought of the ‘fyrun’ element as being fire, and ‘foluk’ being flame. This misconception was deepened by the fact that the most common suffix to give ‘fyrun’ was ‘‘tur,’ to give it a nice blasting quality. While it’s not inaccurate to call it fire, fyrun’s primary difference to foluk is that it is inherently more of a burst of fire, rather than a persistent flame. The way Orun had taught her to think of it was that in its smallest, most natural form, fyrun is more like sparks, and when you use it as a magic element, the reaction is as though you’d just struck flint with steel, and created the small blast of heat that creates those sparks. So, while the common expectation would be that this fire magic would be neutralized by the water magic, orun, the actual result is more like a superheating of the water, turning it into steam. With its natural blast-like properties as well, it was very effective at breaking through Oroske’s water shields, evaporating most of it, and splashing and throwing the rest out of the way.
The first time this new combination hit, Oroske’s smile widened to a full grin. It seemed he was finding this battle enjoyable. That filled Ari with pride. That someone of Oroske’s position and reputation found a battle against her interesting in the least was something that she’d brag about for years to come.
She quickly hit her cap for Acceleration increments, and began to increment her actual speed and effort. At the same time, she began introducing more slices of ari magic. The second slash she introduced was loaded in front of her actual sword, allowing her to either break through the orun barrier earlier, or get in a slash before the barrier could be formed. She also started to moderately change the angle of her ari slices to be more direct toward his body.
The next she introduced, a handful of this triple-slash combination, was the first she’d introduced that was entirely separated from the others, rising towards him when the primary slash was falling, and vice versa, coming in from the left when she swung from the right. The first one came very close to hitting him, with him barely dodging out of the way in time to get away with his pant leg being cut.
.
From here, she’d raise the intensity much more quickly. He was caught in her rhythm, and she still had one major card to play. Before that though, she’d introduced more simultaneous slashes, coming in from different angles.
Soon, he was having to block five separate cuts at the same time. Then each of those five were doubled, so he’d have to block them twice each. He had fallen into the rhythm, and got a feel for her attack pattern. Neither showed the other any signs of fatigue. It was quite taxing for Ari to manage so many slashes being created at once, not to mention affixing each one with a fyrun element, and changing up their start locations each time. She pressed on anyway, it wasn’t so exhausting she couldn’t do it for long periods of time. She hadn’t even hit her maximum yet. She’d gone on doing this for over an hour, with seven simultaneous slashes, all with delayed second hits.
Once she was positive her opponent was caught up in the rhythm enough, she prepared her final trick. It was a dirty one, but one that had won her many fights in the past. One final slash, that started behind her opponent, and had a different delay timing than the rest of the slashes. In her brief experimenting, she found it most effective when it was completely incongruous with the rhythm of her other attacks. Once she had the commands prepared, and the spacing figured out, she unleashed it.
In the blink of an eye, just after she heard the fyr’ari connect, and felt the heat rush towards her instead of away like the rest of her blows had, her arm was suddenly stopped by a hand. The slashes of ari magic, not actually tied to the actual swinging of her sword, hit a solid wall of orun, which dissipated to reveal nothing but a large cloud of steam.
She looked up behind her, and saw Oroske, holding her back with a bloodied arm. He gave her a kind smile. “You’ve become an impressive fighter, Ari. You should be proud of yourself. Had that been anyone else, you likely would have killed them with that move.” He dismissed his sword into his Demon Sheath, and raised his now free hand, “I declare you the winner of this battle. Congratulations, you deserve it.”
“I- What?” Ari stammered, stunned by how fast he was able to move, and his declaration.
“You landed a blow on me. A good enough blow to draw blood, at that. There aren’t many who can claim that, you know.” He let go of her hand, and began walking to the J’alyr’s front door. “Come on, I’ll take you to Ensaru.”
After a stunned moment, she ran after him. “Are you sure about that? He’s your employer, and I’m here to him.”
“Of course I’m sure,” he said, his grin having never left his face, “I think you won fair and square, and deserve the chance to do your job.”
