Lay stepped out of the dust.
Both hands behind her back. Her posture loose, casual, the cloak settling around her with every slow movement in the cold air. The lazy half-smile was still there. She walked the last meter toward Kori with the easy pace of a woman approaching a stranger at a party - no threat in her body, no tension in her shoulders, no acknowledgment whatsoever of the fact that she had been slammed into a rooftop thirty seconds ago.
"Hmmm," Lay said. She tilted her head. "You kinda look familiar..."
Kori held her stance.
The frost at her boots was still spreading. Both knives still in reverse grips. Her body was still locked into combat geometry. But the woman in front of her – the one she was chasing - was now a meter away with no weapons in her hands and no aggression in her posture, and Kori - slowly, against the better instincts of her training - let her stance soften by a fraction. The blades stayed up. The knees stayed bent. But the readiness dropped a notch, because Lay had not given her anything to respond to.
"Who are you?" Kori asked.
"I told you. I’m Lay."
"That’s not what I’m asking."
"Of course," the woman named Lay shrugged. "But that’s everything you need to know, seeing you’ve never heard of me"
"Where are you from?"
"Around here, I’d say." Lay’s smile widened slightly.
"Neoshima?"
"Maybe."
"Do you know what the Phalanx are?"
"Mm." Lay tilted her head the other way. "Big strong people? Eon? Fancy techniques? The city loves them, I guess."
"Do you know who I am?"
Lay studied her face for a moment. The hood shaded most of her own, but Kori could see her eyes - dark, amused, scanning Kori’s features with the lazy attention of someone trying to remember a name they didn’t give a dying fish about.
"Oh, so you must be one of them," Lay snapped her fingers. "And seeing these knives, and... the ice thing," She gestured vaguely at the frost spreading around Kori’s boots. "It’s pretty."
"You don’t know my name."
"Should I?"
"I’m -"
Kori stopped herself before the words came out. The introduction had been queued - strongest Phalanx alive, the title she had carried for the better part of a decade, the recognition every person in Neoshima of any social class or political affiliation gave her by reflex when she walked into a room. The mere fact that she was about to introduce herself was something her body had not done in years. People knew her. People always knew her. The introduction was for new acquaintances, and Kori did not have new acquaintances anymore, because the city had no people left in it who did not already know exactly who she was.
Lay tilted her head. Waiting.
"Forget it."
"So you forgot your name, mm-hmm." Lay’s smile remained.
"Don’t take it personally," she then continued. The voice was warm again, almost kind. "I just don’t really keep up with that kind of thing. The famous people, the titles, the rankings. It’s all very impressive, and I’m sure your name means a lot to high-up idiots."
"Mm."
"It’s just that the lower-down idiots I’m near?" Lay shrugged again, casual, dismissive. "The Eon does all the talking up here. It’s nice and all: the lights, the techniques, the wave forms. Pretty stuff, yeah. But down from where I come from, we get by on hands. The Phalanx names don’t really make it past the upper districts’s floors."
Kori’s expression did not change.
She was not, externally, doing anything. Her face held its standard set. Her stance held its standard form. The frost at her boots held its standard pattern.
But internally, something was beginning to register pressure.
She did not feel anger the way other people felt it. The Chasmis had taken the heat of the emotion, replaced it with the cool, methodical recognition that an emotion was occurring. But the recognition was here. The emotion was occurring. Her body knew. The ice at her boots knew - it had thickened by another centimetre while Lay was talking, the frost patterns getting denser, the structural lattice deepening into the alloy roof.
Flashes of memory pushed at the edge of her thinking.
Swimming through icy ocean water at age fourteen. Her instructor had timed her with a stopwatch and refused to let her stop until she had done six full laps of the inlet. The cold had been so total that her teeth had completely stopped chattering somewhere around the third lap.
Pushing through a thorn-wall in the second year of training. Plant Girlie had grown it specifically for the exercise. The thorns had been long enough to puncture flesh and short enough that they couldn’t be avoided by any angle of approach. Kori had come out of the wall with her arms looking like she had been mauled, and the next day she had been told to do it again, faster.
Eighteen-hour Eon-channelling drills. Sleep deprivation runs. The years and years and years of repetitions that had made her what she was, that had carved her body and her mind into the most efficient combat instrument, worthy of the title "Strongest Phalanx Alive", the title that had cost her things she had not understood she was paying until the Chasmis arrived and took the rest.
And this woman.
This woman, in her werid, cheap cloak, with her smile, was telling Kori that none of it counted because "down there" didn’t keep up with rankings.
Kori stomped.
The sole of her boot struck the rooftop with the full weight of her amplified Eon channelled through the contact point. Ice exploded outward from where her foot had landed - a fast, dense, propagating sheet of pale blue crystal that spread across the alloy roof in a perfect radial expansion. The frost reached Lay’s boots in less than a second. It climbed up her ankles. It locked around her calves. The ice continued forming, layering itself into a thickness that would have stopped a high-velocity gun round, the surface hardening into something that, by every metric Kori had ever measured against her own techniques, should have been impossible to break without an absurdly strong strike.
Lay looked down at her legs, tilting her head.
She tested the ice with a small flex of her ankle.
The ice shattered.
Not with effort or struggle. Not with the strain of a body breaking free of a restraint. With a single, dismissive motion - Lay’s calves twitched once, and the bulletproof-grade crystal around her ankles fragmented into pale shards that fell to the rooftop with an ear-scratcing sound.
"Nice tricks," Lay mumbled. She brushed a small shard of ice from her shin with two fingers. "Pretty, but not really useful, you know..."