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.
"Wait!"
Kori’s voice came out rougher than she had intended.
The figure stopped - her back still turned. Her cloak settled around her in the cold air.
"Just for a moment," Kori said. Her voice was steadier this time. "Who... Are you?"
A pause.
The figure turned her head. Not fully. Just enough that Kori could see the line of her cheek beneath the hood, and the dark hair at the edge of her temple, and the suggestion of a faint, friendly smile that didn’t quite show.
When she spoke, her voice was deep and even. Warm in a way Kori had not expected. The voice of a person who could have talked someone out of a fight, in a different situation, with the right amount of time.
"Terribly sorry," she said. "I’d love to play with you more... But I’ll have to take my leave now."
She walked the last three steps to the ledge. Without slowing. Without hesitating. Her right hand was already twitching toward the harness holding the blades at her back, the fingers loosening, the index just clearing the leather of the sheath as her boots reached the edge of the roof.
She stepped off.
The motion was so casual that Kori almost did not register the action. The woman simply continued her walking pace past the lip of the rooftop and let gravity take her, her body falling out of Kori’s sight, her cloak rising briefly behind her as the air caught it. Gone in less than a second.
But Kori wasn’t about to let her.
The Chasmis activated. Time slowed, stretched into its perceptual elongation. Kori’s body broke from its stunned posture into a single forward dash that crossed the rooftop in three steps - three steps that, in the slowed frame, took only as long as Kori needed them to take. Her right knife came up, left arm extended for balance. The momentum of her run carried her toward the ledge at her highest available velocity.
She reached the lip, stopping right in time so the speed wouldn’t throw her off completely.
Her right knife was attached to the chain - A thin, dense, woven silvery line that ran from the knife’s handle straight to Kori’s hand.
In her whole experience as a Phalanx, Kori had only used this technique four times...
And only one was successful.
Her right arm came around in a wide horizontal circle, the knife at the end of the chain catching the air, building rotational speed faster than she could have built it through any other technique. The chain extended outward as the rotation increased - a meter, two meters, three. The knife became a blur at the far end, a glowing weight orbiting Kori’s body in a tight, accelerating loop.
The Chasmis held the world at its slowed pace, and inside that pace, Kori had every second she needed.
She thought about Osamu’s launch. About the trajectory she would need to send a knife on, weighted with a chain, to wrap around a body falling away from her at crazy speeds. About the angles a chain would take after it caught - how it would tighten, how it would settle, how much of the figure’s body it would loop around before the weapon ran out of chain. About the figure’s known reflexes, her demonstrated ability to read incoming attacks, and the very real possibility that she would catch the knife in midair and turn it against the woman who had thrown it.
The figure was still falling, still in her descent posture. Still less than a half-second past the ledge in real time. Kori was not going to get another one tonight.
The chained launched off the ledge in the direction the figure had fallen. The knife flew at the end of the chain - the chain in Kori’s both hands unspooling at the same rate she had given the throw, meters of steel line peeling out behind the blade as it descended through the slowed air. The motion was beautiful, in the way that all well-executed Phalanx techniques were beautiful: the throw, the trail, the line in the air.
She watched it go.
The Chasmis tracked the figure. She had been falling for what felt like a long time in the slowed frame and was, in actual time, less than half a second past the ledge. Her body was still in the descent posture - not yet drawing her blades, not yet finding a wall to hook with the spike, just falling.
The chain reached her.
The knife passed her body on the left side. The chain, trailing behind, kept moving - wrapped once around her torso, caught against the resistance of her own falling weight, then wrapped a second time as Kori’s hands kept feeding line. Two loops, then the knife swung around the line, locking it tight.
The figure’s fall stopped completely, her body jerking against the line. The chain held. The chain was now taut between Kori’s hands and the woman dangling below the ledge, the chain coiled twice around her body.
Kori released the Chasmis. Time snapped back. Her vision swam briefly - three activations in the space of a few minutes, plus the backhand, plus the slide. She did not have many more in her reserve tonight.
The figure hung at the end of it, suspended in air below the ledge, her cloak still settling around her body from the abrupt stop, as if even the cloak was confused about what had just happened.
Kori prepared to heave.