The figure’s blades were already up. Her angles were already set. Whatever Kori landed into now would be a controlled exchange with a swordsman who had read the entire descent and built her defence around it. The capture plan was dead. The new plan, made in roughly half a second of available thought, was survive the next contact.
But the way the figure’s blades were angled and pointed, and with the speed Kori was heading towards them – she’d just get sliced up into four. At the last possible second, Kori twisted: Mid-spin, mid-descent, her body pivoted on its long axis, her shoulder coming around to take the impact she had originally meant for her hands and knives.
The angle change cost her the elegance of her landing, but elegance was no longer the variable that mattered. She hit the rooftop two metres to the right of where her plan had wanted her, striking the surface shoulder-first, the impact carrying her forward in a long, scraping slide that took her ten metres across the alloy roof before finally bringing herself to a stop.
The impact was so strong, that a thin line of blood silently slid down from one of her nostrils. She did not feel it yet - the pain was queued somewhere behind the adrenaline. Her body was already working on the more important problem - getting up. She rolled to her knees, then to her feet, both knives still in her hands, her stance settling into the low guard she had drilled for fifteen years.
She looked across the roof. It was wide - maybe twenty-five metres across, the upper surface of a building that sat above the industrial district. The electrical plant below filled the air with a soft residue, like the air after Raizen used to dash for a few times, thrusting himself into a wall or two. Pipes ran along the building’s edges in thick unparallel lines. A few cooling towers extended into the sky a hundred metres away. The whole district was a network of intersecting metal, all of it lit from below by the warm orange of working machinery.
Kori took a breath, and wiped her nose with the back of her wrist, only now noticing the crimson line that almost reached the edge of her mouth. She had a few seconds, she told herself, to look at her opponent properly. To analyse. To gather the information she would need to win.
With a quick exhale, she raised her head, activating the Chasmis once again, scanning the rooftop.
The figure was not there.
She blinked. Looked again- but the roof was completely empty, the ledges were empty as well. The space where the figure had been standing - the small radial crack in the alloy where her impossible stop had left its mark - held no body.
Kori sighed in disappointment. Maybe the woman had retreated, maybe she had taken the contact as an invitation to disappear into the industrial maze below.
Suddenly, something hit her leg.
A foot caught her left calf from behind, sweeping across her stance with the precision of a clean martial strike. Her knee bent without her even realizing. Kori dropped, with no control, into a kneeling position. She had no time to recover before the next hit arrived.
The figure was already in front of her.
She had crossed the roof in the time Kori had spent scanning it. Crossed without sound, without visible motion. The Chasmis afterimage Kori could still partly retrieve from her own memory had registered nothing - no thermal disturbance, no displaced air, no signature of any kind. The figure was simply there, where she had not been an instant ago, standing close enough to Kori that the curved blades on her back caught the light of Kori’s knives, still flaring with pale blue light.
But both blades stayed sheathed. She did not draw them.
Instead, her right hand came around in a wide, casual arc. Open palm. Backhand.
The slap landed across Kori’s face.
It was the loudest sound Kori had heard in a long time. The impact travelled through her jaw and into her skull, and her vision flashed white. The technique behind the hit - the angle, the timing, the rotation of the woman’s hips into the strike - was so refined that Kori’s own combat instincts didn’t register the strike until after it had already happened. Her body went sideways. The concrete of the rooftop accepted her landing with a crack that burst outward from her shoulder, the alloy fracturing under the force.
Her vision came back in pieces. White, then grey, then the rooftop at an angle she had not chosen.
She lay there. Stunned. Not unconscious - Kori’s Phalanx-grade nervous system did not surrender to concussions the way ordinary nervous systems did - but for several seconds, her body’s coordination layer simply refused to respond.
She processed the hit while she lay there.
The woman had not drawn her blades. She had not used Eon. She had used a single backhand from her empty hand, the backhand had carried enough force to crack reinforced rooftop alloy, and the technique behind it had been so clean that Kori - who had trained against the Phalanx’s best - had not been able to predict.
This was not a body Kori could simply outclass.
She also realised, as her vision cleared, that the woman had not been trying to kill her. The backhand had been calibrated to immobilise - to stun, to drop, to buy the figure the seconds she needed to disengage. If the strike had been intended to kill, it would have been a closed fist, or the edge of the hand, or simply one of the blades. The choice of an open-palm backhand was the choice of a fighter who had decided the opponent in front of her did not need to die today.
Kori slid backward. She pushed herself up onto one elbow, then onto her hands, then onto her feet. Her face throbbed. She raised one hand and brushed the cheek where the strike had landed.
She looked at the woman, but she had already turned away.
...walking slowly straight toward the ledge.