Lay took a step back.
Her balance wobbled. Just slightly. Her head tilted upward, her chin rising, her hand coming up toward her throat. The vacuum technique was not having the effect Kori had intended - but it was having some effect, the body’s atmospheric system registering the pressure differential even through whatever defences Lay had against it.
Her fingers reached her mask.
She pulled it off...
... And sneezed.
From somewhere below her diaphragm and deep into the lungs, the sneeze exited her body with full output, the force of it shaking Lay’s entire body, whipping the cloak around her shoulders and sending the remaining microscopic ice particles in a violent radial burst outward from her face. The frost that had settled on the rooftop around her - the crystals Kori’s technique had condensed onto every surface in the implosion zone - was blown loose by the air displacement and scattered across the alloy in a brief, glittering wave. The pale blue dust caught Kori’s knives’s white-blue glow and fell to the surface in slow, beautiful spirals.
She wiped her nose with the back of her hand.
"Whoops. Sorry about that."
She scratched her nose once, sniffed, then refitted the mask across her face with a small adjustment.
"Cold air does it to me every time."
Kori stood in her stance. She had not even flinched through the sneeze. Her knives were still in reverse grips, her boots were still planted in their frost ring, and her Chasmis was still open at low output, scanning Lay’s body for the Eon signature it had not yet found.
Lay glanced down at her wrist.
She was wearing a watch.
Kori had not noticed it before. It was an old piece - brass case, brown leather strap, the kind of mechanical timekeeping device that had been replaced by electrical displays years ago and now survived only as an affectation among collectors and old soldiers. The watch was simple, primitive, almost charming in its anachronism. Lay studied it for a moment, the corner of her mouth pulling upward beneath the mask.
"Oh, my bad," she said. "I got carried away with the chit-chat."
She dropped.
The motion was not a stance change in any conventional sense. Her knees bent. Her hips dropped. Her centre of gravity descended in a single, fluid sink that put her shoulders at the height of Kori’s waist. Both hands came back behind her - open, palms angled outward, fingers held straight in the rigid blade-shape of a hand prepared to strike with its edge rather than its knuckles. The cloak settled around her low posture.
It was not a fighting stance Kori recognised. It wasn’t even a style she had seen before.
"Let’s finish this cute little meeting."
Lay stepped forward.
Two steps. Casual. The first step put her at half the distance. The second step - accelerating, the rotation of her hips beginning before her foot landed - put her inside Kori’s guard.
Kori made a decision in the half-second before contact.
The Phalanx had a saying - discipline outlasts the eye. It meant that even when sight was taken from a fighter, even when whatever enemy you’re facing moves faster than you can see it, the training remained, the technique remained, the instinct and years of work remained. Kori had built her body on this principle. She was the strongest Phalanx alive. Her name was a fact of the city. The thing in front of her was a swordsman from the Underworks who had reduced her great ice to "pretty tricks", and Kori was going to settle this matter the way it deserved to be settled - fairly.
She would not use Eon.
She pulled the amplification back to the bare minimum required for combat metabolism – then she gave up on that, too. The frost ring at her feet dimmed, the pale blue glow at the cores of her knives fading slowly. She would fight Lay with body alone, the way Lay was fighting her. Her ego said this was the only honest test.
At the last possible second, Kori leaned back, barely dodging Lay’s swing aimed for the neck. Kori answered with a fast diagonal - left arm coming up across her body, the point angled past Lay’s incoming guard, a hit that should have landed somewhere along Lay’s left shoulder and forced her to retreat into a defensive posture.
Lay was not there - her body had moved during Kori’s strike - not faster than Kori, but earlier, the rotation of her hips having committed to a path before Kori’s hand had reached the space Lay had been standing in. She came around Kori’s left side in a tight, low circle, her shoulder dropping under the path of Kori’s guard, her own right hand sweeping upward in a fluid arc that ended at Kori’s exposed ribs.
The strike landed. But it wasn’t like Kori had expected it - it was not a punch. The hand was held flat, the rigid blade-edge of the palm catching Kori at the lowest floating rib on her right side. The impact was at least as strong as a hammer strike, yet it came from a short swing.
Kori flew to the side, her feet leaving the frost ring for the first time since the fight had started. She crossed two metres of rooftop in less than a second. But she corrected mid-air and rolled to a safe stop, then she swiftly got back up, her boots planted again.
The rib was not broken. Of course, for a normal human it would have been broken, and maybe if Kori used reinforcement or Eon technicuqes, it wouldn’t hurt so bad. But The pain slowly retreated to a sharp, hot line across her side.
In front of her, Lay was already preparing for the next attack. She came in low again - the same rotational entry, the same hip-drop, the same drift around Kori’s flank. Kori met her this time. The right knife came around in a tight horizontal slash, the blade aimed at the line of Lay’s collarbone, and Kori followed the slash with her left knife in a rising counter that would have caught Lay if she had moved laterally to evade.
Lay didn’t move laterally. She dropped beneath both blades instead, her knees folding in a controlled collapse that took her body below the level of Kori’s strikes, and from the bottom of that fall her legs extended in a spinning sweep that forced Kori to jump clear as the kick whistled across the rooftop a centimeter from her ankles. By the time Kori’s boots landed again, Lay was already rising out of the sweep, the rotation carrying upward through her hips and into a chambered right hand, the swing arriving at Kori’s neck before Kori’s stance had finished resetting. Kori’s left forearm came up to catch the wrist mid-strike, bone against bone in a thunderous crack, her other hand already turning inward to drive her knuckle toward Lay’s exposed ribs.
Lay twisted around the caught wrist before Kori’s counter could land. Her body rotated through the contact point in a single fluid motion that carried her around Kori’s blocking arm, her free hand coming down across Kori’s shoulder in a descending chop. Kori’s defence was a milisecond too slow. The next hit came across Kori’s back in a diagonal sweep that caught the meat above her scapula and sent her stumbling forward three steps, completely ruining her balance. The rooftop felt unsteady beneath Kori’s boots, her body fighting to recover its centre of gravity.
Kori’s pulse was rising. Her breathing was a fraction harder than it should have been. The hits were bruising in a deep, hot line above her shoulder blade, the rib was hot down her right side, and she had not landed a single strike - had not even forced Lay to defend. She completely relaxed, shaking her arms, and beneath the curtain of her hair the Chasmis opened once again.