One Piece: Lust Haki

Isuka's rapier caught me in the ribs on the second exchange and the practice edge hit bone through the padding vest and she didn't apologize.

She'd been pulling her strikes for months. Our daily spar had a ceiling where the hits were real enough to learn from and measured enough to train again tomorrow. Isuka knew where that ceiling was because Isuka was precise about everything she did with a blade.

She was above it today.

The next exchange came fast and I barely got my guard up and her rapier slipped past it and tagged my shoulder and the sting went through my shirt and she was already resetting, feet squared, jaw set, the bandage on her cheek tight against her skin. Her brown eyes were focused but the rhythm was faster and the space she usually gave me to recover after a hit wasn't there.

"Isuka."

She came in again. Rapier low, feint high, the doubled-back pattern she'd been developing for months except the transitions were sharper and the finish was harder and when the rapier found my guard arm I felt it in the elbow.

"Isuka."

"What."

"You're trying to hurt me."

"I'm sparring. You said go harder."

"I said that last month. This is something else."

She reset. I reset. She came in. I read the opening, sidestepped, threw a counter that should have pushed her back, and she ate it on her forearm and drove forward and her rapier cracked against my sternum and I went back two steps and my heel caught the sand and I went down.

She stood over me. Breathing hard. The rapier at her side. Her hand tape was already fraying on the right and we were ten minutes in. That usually happened after thirty.

"You okay?" I said. From the ground.

"I'm fine."

The angle of her jaw. Her grip on the rapier handle, tight, the knuckles pressing white against the tape.

"Again?" she said.

"Yeah."

She won in thirty seconds. She didn't offer a hand.

She snapped at a recruit who bumped her shoulder in the corridor after the mess hall. The kid was carrying manuals and clipped her as he passed and she turned and said "Watch it" in a voice that made the kid drop one. He picked it up and kept going without looking back. Isuka stood in the corridor after, hand on her rapier, jaw working. She looked like she'd heard her own voice and hadn't expected the volume.

At lunch she sat across from me and ate fast and didn't talk. Her eyes moved. Her food, then the officers' table where Gion was eating with the commandant, then back to her food, then to me. She did it three times before she finished her rice and left without a word.

Tashigi was beside me explaining how a tactics exam that morning had an error in the terrain overlay that nobody had caught except her, and the specific wrongness of the elevation gradient on the southern slope was the kind of detail Tashigi would carry for days. She was explaining it with her glasses slightly crooked and her hands moving.

I was eating and listening and watching the door Isuka had walked through.

She'd noticed. I didn't know how much. But Isuka sparred with me every day and she'd feel the difference in my guard, in the attention that was elsewhere when it should have been on her rapier. I was different after sessions with Gion. Looser in the shoulders, slower to refocus. It took an hour to fade and Isuka stood close enough in sparring to read all of it.

And the lipstick. I'd been careful about wiping it off after the corridor, but Gion's lipstick was waxy and faintly floral and Isuka's nose was six inches from my collar when she had me pinned.

"Vance-san?"

"Yeah."

"You're not listening."

"The elevation gradient was inverted on the southern slope and nobody caught it except you."

"That's the second scenario. I was on the third." She adjusted her glasses. "Are you okay? You've been quiet."

"Thinking."

"About what?"

About the girl who sparred with me every day being angry for reasons I couldn't explain without opening my boot and handing her a piece of paper that would end everything.

"The exam," I said. "What was the third scenario?"

Tashigi told me. A junior officer at the next table was eating noodles with the focused speed of a man whose lunch break was ending in two minutes. The officers' table was across the room and Gion was gone by the time I looked.

I found her after dark.

The yard was empty except for the lanterns along the perimeter and the training posts in a row along the west wall. The sand was cool. The moon was up.

Isuka was at the post on the end. Hitting it with her fists.

Her rapier was on the bench ten feet away. Her jacket beside it. She was in her shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbows, alternating hands, right left right left, steady and hard. The sound carried across the empty yard. No tape on her hands.

Her knuckles were split on both hands. The blood was on the post and on her fingers and she was still hitting. The impacts were wet.

I stood in the doorway.

She'd been out here a while. Tape marks on the post at different heights, the pile of used wrappings on the bench beside her jacket. She'd started with tape and gone through it and started again without.

The bandage on her cheek was fresh. White, new tape, straight edges. She'd replaced it before coming out here.

Her vermilion hair was dark with sweat at the temples. Her breathing was hard but controlled. Right, left, right, left.

I should have gone in. I stood in the doorway with nothing to say that wouldn't make it worse. The truth was in my boot. Anything short of it and she'd know.

Footsteps behind me. Quiet.

Tashigi was in the corridor, Shigure in her hand, glasses catching the lantern light. She looked past me into the yard. She saw Isuka. She saw the blood.

Her mouth went thin.

"Go," she said. Quiet. The -san was absent.

I looked at her.

"She doesn't need you right now."

She stepped past me into the yard.

I stayed in the doorway. Tashigi crossed the sand toward the training post. She didn't call out. She didn't tell Isuka to stop. She sat on the bench next to Isuka's jacket and drew Shigure and placed the blade across her knees and took out her sharpening cloth and began working the edge.

The stone on the blade was quiet and steady and it joined Isuka's fists on the post. The hitting and the sharpening. Neither of them spoke.

Isuka stopped. Her hands at her sides, dripping, her shoulders rising and falling. She stood in front of the post for a long time. Then she sat on the bench next to Tashigi. Tashigi didn't look up from the blade.

After a while, Tashigi reached into her jacket pocket and held out a clean bandage roll. Palm open, eyes still on Shigure's edge.

Isuka took it.

I left the doorway. Walked back through the corridor. The tile was cold under my boots and my sternum still ached and my ribs were bruised where her rapier had found them that morning.

A gray cat was sitting on a windowsill at the corridor junction, cleaning one paw. It looked at me. I walked past.

My bunk. The ceiling. The lamp from the recruit upstairs making a circle of yellow on the wood.

She doesn't need you right now.

The cat probably had a better night planned.