Chapter 72: 70 – Revelry in Combat

A savage exchange of blows followed, each pounding the other in the gut without regard for defense, or so it seemed. Once, twice, thrice Zelsys allowed him to strike her, gauging just how hard his strikes reverberated through her bones and how hard it was to keep down the contents of the stomach in their wake. Yes, this was more than enough to justify using one of her tools. 

“Style: Slayer,” she said in her mind, focusing on invoking the style’s Siphoning Pulse. With it, she could make it look like his strikes didn’t affect her at all, instead of sending shockwaves through her entire body like they did when they landed in earnest, all the while siphoning kinetic charge for her Retributive Battery.

The Fog within her lungs began to rapidly deplete as Zel pulled it into her body, instinctively directing its flow wherever she expected Jorfr’s punches to land.

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Jorfr was a born warrior from far-off lands, rendered an unimpeachable bastion of resilience through the horrific cruelty of his homeland. His skin was tanned leather, his muscles hardened wood, his jaw solid stone, and his punches landed like hammers. 

But this Zelsys, she was a monster. A stranger from a land not ravaged by the war just like Jorfr, an impossible visage of implied physical prowess hardened by… Well, whatever it was that made one take a missing arm lightly.

Again and again he struck her, and again and again she just took it, those silver vein-like lines lighting up just before the strike landed and that silver Fog spraying off her skin on impact. Whether she managed to block a punch with her elbow or whether one landed flat on her stomach didn’t seem to matter at all, a continuous flow of Fog pouring from her nostrils as she continued her defense. It looked… Wrong. The impact wasn’t there. It looked like his punches were just robbed of most their momentum the moment they struck. After three, he could swear there was an ephemeral antler hovering over the woman’s left eye.  

She rather quickly began exploiting Jorfr’s apparent weakness by kicking his legs, obviously unaware that nothing could break that man’s balance, as if he were rooted to the ground itself. Even her blocking changed over just a short few seconds, somehow growing offensive.

No longer was she just reacting to his attacks, but going out of her way to cause such clashes as if him hammering her elbow over and over didn’t hurt at all… Her kicks, too, changed, steadily moving upwards to target his left side where he couldn’t effectively block. Was that an electric arc jumping over her thigh as she raised her leg? 

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It had become obvious to both of them that this wouldn’t turn into a knock-down, drag-out brawl. Jorfr was steadier on his feet than a boulder, and Zelsys wasn’t one to get knocked down or lower herself in some bizarre underdog strategy.

Following their latest collision they had backed away a bit, each catching their breath. Delivery body-strikes to Jorfr felt like a fool’s errand, as if striking frozen wood. It was truly strange just how cold he was on the outside, while his breath was almost scaldingly hot. With breaths as heavy and steaming as a beast of burden he grinned at her, returning to his fighting-stance, and she did the same, filling her lungs to the brim and holding her breath.

Once more they lunged at one another, and once more they collided. Zelsys headbutted his right hook in the same way he had done to her kick, robbing it of its velocity by channeling Siphoning Pulse through her forehead and pushing his fist back a mere few centimeters before the norseman’s ironclad musculature locked his arm in place for a split-second while he decided what to do. The pressure behind her right eye had grown noticeably in that single clash, to where she could faintly see the spectral antler in her peripheral vision. In that moment, in the moment when he chose to open his fist and grab her head, Zelsys delivered a strike of her own to his liver, burning most of her lung capacity to enhance that sole strike, intentionally not drawing on her lightning to surpass her body’s natural self-limiters. He had gotten a grip of her head only milliseconds before her fist met his side.

Jorfr buckled to the side with a grunt of pain under the impact, she felt the shock reverberate through his body and outward, sweeping over the crowd as the norseman’s grip of her head slipped. This, too, she exploited, leaping back a short distance only to charge in again with a messy haymaker strike whose fate was to be blocked.

She pushed and pushed, using the brief downtime to draw in a breath and refill her lungs halfway, immediately burning another quarter of her total lung capacity to deliver a twofold rapid kick to his left side. This time she let slip the lightning, her muscles writhing so unnaturally beneath her skin that it was visible through her trousers.

All this just to buy time, to conceal the fact she needed a moment to switch styles by invoking in her mind: “Style: Beast…” 

The moment she felt that switch in her mind flip, Zel planted her feet and pulled back ever so slightly, just a finger’s width, so she could channel Graze Pulse through her forearm and make her skin slide right over his. There was little force behind her strike, so little that Jorfr didn’t bother do dodge - he just upturned his chin with a look in his eyes that said: “Nice trick.”

His own arm slid past hers in turn, just about the strike into the spot below her armpit like a hammer… Only, the strike never landed. Zelsys discharged her Retributive Battery into her fist moments before impact and struck Yorfr’s chin with a palm-heel strike so forceful it lifted him off the ground and send him flying into the pit’s wooden barriers, exposing that he had orange-glowing glyphs carved into the soles of his feet, one on the heel of one foot and another on the opposite’s front half. Their glow flickered and died as he flew.

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