No Need For A Core?

Fuyuko found herself very excited for the upcoming fight with Amrydor, far more excited than she would have been for a normal spar.

It didn’t take long for her to puzzle out the reason — it was, after all, something she’d already been reluctantly beginning to understand about herself. She enjoyed the violence of a fight. Making the fight more dangerous made it more exciting.

This made her feel guilty; after all, that was the sort of thinking usually associated with bad people in stories. It wasn’t the same thing as what Papa and Mama M said they liked about sparring, though there was some overlap. She did like the contest of skill and pushing herself, but knowing that she and Amrydor would be shedding each other’s blood made this upcoming fight better than a safer spar would be.

Not that she would have agreed to any form of live steel hard spar outside of Azeria. The risk of Amrydor dying, of actually killing him, was unacceptable, and that would hold true of almost anyone.

But here? In this arena, where she knew he would be safe and his soul returned to a new body in no more than half a day? Well, Fuyuko found that she’d almost have preferred this to be a battle to the death. What kept it from being a clean preference was knowing that Amrydor was right: fighting this hard while deliberately refraining from killing your opponent — aiming to physically disable their ability to fight — was much more difficult. That extra level of required skill mostly balanced things out.

Fuyuko had plenty of time to figure all of this out as she and Amrydor waited — it seemed that they were going to have a fairly large audience, and there was further chaos when Mama K decided that Gemeti should sit next to her. Fuyuko had the feeling that talking to each other was going to be an excuse to not watch the fight too closely. While Gemeti wasn’t the same sort of sensitive that Mama K tended to be, she was pretty new to any sort of real violence.

Now that Fuyuko understood how much she was going to enjoy this fight, she was nervous about her family watching it, but there was nothing to be done about it. Even the idea of trying to hide her reaction had to be discarded. If she wanted to have a hope of winning, she was going to have to be entirely focused on the fight. If either of them got distracted, that person was going to lose.

Finally, everyone was settled, and it was time to begin. Bellona had taken it upon herself to be the referee an d announcer, and she started with: “This fight will be a live-steel spar between Princess Fuyuko and Lord Amrydor.”

Lord? Fuyuko frowned and glanced at Bellona at the same time Amry did. With a mischievous smile, the orc woman tapped the back of her hand where her mark from Kuiccihan was glowing. Amry nodded and sighed, then sent, ‘I forgot: receiving the mark comes with the title of lord. No land or anything, just the basic title.’

Oh, well, she supposed that made sense. ‘Good; it’s better for a princess to have a lord as her servant than just a commoner, don’t you think?’ She was rather proud of managing to maintain her ‘princess voice’ through the mental communication, with haughty overtones added too, and she grinned at him when his eyes narrowed.

Bellona continued on and listed the rules for the audience, and Fuyuko hid her hands in the shadows of her cloak while growing her armor over her head and most of her face, with hardened layers wherever she could afford them. She left her ears mostly exposed, with a simply half shell over each ear to protect from overhead strikes. Anything else deadened her hearing to an intolerable degree.

Amrydor closed the visor to his helm and settled into a calm ready stance, about fifty feet away. The feel of serene death in his aura now only invoked a tiny trickle of fear in her; just enough to get her blood heated even more.

‘Amry, I’m not going to be playing nice,’ Fuyuko sent, along with her excitement at the upcoming violence. She wanted it to be fair, and she wanted it to be a good fight, and she honestly couldn’t have said which was more important to her right now, or even if there was much of a difference. Then she tightened down on the empathic bond again, as she didn’t want it to accidentally play a role in their fight.

She received calm acknowledgment from him in response.

“Ready!” Bellona called, then, “Begin!”

They both charged, with Fuyuko whipping out pairs of daggers as she ran. To each dagger she attached a thin tendril of shadow, allowing her to alter their trajectory as they flew at Amrydor.

In two swift strikes, he deflected two of her daggers with the flat of his war scythe, and somehow simultaneously cut another two in half without touching them. For the final two, he trusted in his armor to defend him. Even with Fuyuko’s strength, her thrown daggers couldn’t overcome his armor and his spiritual power at the same time, but both daggers left small dents in the metal.

Her four remaining daggers instantly returned to her, but Fuyuko did not have the time to throw more. She barely had time to call both of her falcata into her hands in time to engage with the first strike of Amrydor’s war scythe.

The impact of his polearm’s blade against her swords felt strangely soft, and a gash suddenly appeared in her armor, slashing across a collarbone and her sternum. The living leather was resilient enough to not have been cut all the way through, but it was temporarily weakened in that area as it began to repair itself. This had to be related to how he’d cut two of her daggers out of the air without touching them. Somehow, the very edge of his blade wasn’t where the rest of his war scythe was.

Worse, it appeared that the projected edge didn’t have to be aligned with his blade, though the shape and speed of its movement during an attack was identical to the blade’s movement.

The exchange that had taught her this information had also left several more cuts on her body, while she had not been able to land an attack further than his forearms. At least she’d done enough damage to force him to cover his bracers with layers of living crystal, as her blows carried enough force to break through the projected shields of force he defended himself with.

If she broke a bracer, no weapons stored in it would be available to him, so he had to keep them intact if he wanted to retain that option.

Frustrated by this uneven exchange, Fuyuko flipped one of her swords into a reverse grip and stabbed backward into the shadow of her cloak, aiming for the shadow under his foot as he stepped toward her.

Living crystal surged over the bottom of his foot just before his step came down on her upthrusting blade, and his stomp was heavy enough to force her blade away and back through the shadows.

She tried that attack again, hoping to beat his ability to react by aiming for the shadows of his helmet and thrusting toward his eyes. Amrydor twisted his war scythe and Fuyuko felt her falcata’s thrust get caught and deflected by its edge while still inside of the shadow, deflecting it too far to be able to emerge inside of his helmet.

Shit.

He could somehow sense her shadow-based attacks even without her life force giving her away, and he could project the edge of his blade into the shadow realm. Or at least, the portion of the shadow realm overlapped by his own shadows.

Fuyuko growled, then swiped at his war scythe with a sword as her body rippled and grew. In an instant, her reach had changed enough that the swing of her second sword crashed against his helmet with the full weight of her strength and power before he could defend against it in any way. He staggered as his helmet cracked from the impact, and Fuyuko didn’t hesitate to continue her attacks, raining blow after blow while he defended and stepped back to try to recover his focus.

The living crystal of his inner armor flowed over his metal armor to help cushion against her strikes, but even with that assistance, she’d managed to break off several pieces of metal and badly crush his left hand before Amrydor managed to go on the offensive again.

With one hand unusable, Amrydor had dismissed his pole arm, and he thrust forward with his good hand as he summoned a long rapier.

A sense of danger caused Fuyuko to jerk her head back, but the projected tip still pierced her eye, and she felt it pop just before she jumped back to create distance, leaving a gap of over ten feet between them.

Now she knew he could project thrusts or points as well as cuts or edges. Losing an eye hurt and frustrated her, but she’d also tried to do the same thing to him. The only part of it that was truly upsetting was that he’d succeeded when she hadn’t.

Then with a single step, he somehow covered the distance between them with a thrust aimed at her heart. She managed to deflect it enough that the point of his rapier entered her breast instead, with a rib deflecting it enough to keep the tip from piercing her lung. Her counter swing was aimed at his elbow, intending to cut his arm off or at least crush the joint.

However, he’d already abandoned the rapier, leaving it in place as he stepped back out of her reach. Then a physical shield materialized from one of his bracers, strapped in multiple places to his left arm, as that hand was too mangled to hold anything right now, and a short spear appeared in his right hand.

Snarling, Fuyuko pulled his rapier out of her chest and tossed it aside. He’d put all of his weight and momentum into that thrust to ensure he got through her armor, and if she hadn’t deflected it, he might have pierced her heart.

Though with a blade that thin, Fuyuko wasn’t sure it would have been a fatal blow. She couldn’t imagine continuing to fight immediately, but she thought that her ability to quickly heal might have kept her alive and conscious while her heart repaired itself.

If the rapier had been silvered steel instead, that would have been a different matter. Surviving at all without external healing would have been very questionable.

Those thoughts danced through her head as she considered her next assault. Her options were limited, and she decided that brute force with only some trickery was her best option. She reached out through the shadow realm at the same time as her shadow stretched out toward him in this realm, and she pulled hard on his shadow.

It wasn’t enough to move him, but she was just trying to pin him in place and briefly off-balance as she charged him.

Her falcata bashed into his shield with enough power to crack it and make him stagger back a step, though she paid the price when his spear pierced her thigh hard enough to fracture her bone.

Fuyuko pushed forward, dropping her weapons to grapple and claw at him, using his own shield as leverage. It became a dirty fight then, and part of his counter was to use the idea she’d given him of weaponizing the living crystal. She was also quickly reminded that despite his smaller size, he could entirely match the strength of her monster-wolf form.

By the time the fight ended, the area around them was gory.

One of her legs was slashed open to the bone, and she was missing the foot of her other leg, while multiple spikes of crystal were embedded throughout her body, one of which had pierced a lung. She’d also lost her other eye, though luckily not until after her first eye had finished regenerating.

However, her momentum had driven him onto his back, she’d bitten off and swallowed one of his ears, torn off his shield-arm at the elbow, shattered more of his armor, and currently her hand was thrust into his torso with her claws curled up to almost grip his heart.

This was not a victory — Amrydor’s good arm had thrust up under her chin to drive a short spike of crystal slime into the back of her mouth and throat. She could feel the acid of it slowly eating at her as it filled her throat, and Fuyuko knew he could transform that spike into a long, thin version that would pierce her skull just as fast as she could rip out his heart.

Technically, neither of them was fully disabled from fighting, but also, neither of them could progress the fight without escalating to killing the other. Part of her wanted to make the kill anyway, despite the rules and despite the futility — the darker instincts that had fueled her battle fugue state a year ago were loud in her mind once more, fueled by the blood and violence.

But she was so much more than just that set of violent instincts and urges that only showed themselves when she was in a fight.

‘Draw?’ she sent to him, and he agreed the same way. She wasn’t capable of talking at the moment, and she doubted he had the energy to spare if there was an easier way.

Amrydor withdrew the crystal spike and lowered his arm, then Fuyuko carefully withdrew her hand as she shrank down to her normal form. A moment later she collapsed to her knees and didn’t mind at all when he used his good arm to draw her the rest of the way down to snuggle into his side.

Naturally, there was a rush of people around them, but Fuyuko was too tired to pay much attention beyond happily acknowledging her parent’s presence and care as they began healing her and Amry.

Fuyuko felt content and satisfied with the fight. ‘That was fun — I think we need to do this again next year, after we get back from our trip.’

She heard his mental laughter as he replied, ‘Alright, we can do that.’

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Early chapters, some excerpts and short stories, and more art!