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.
Time stretched.
Lay’s next entry, in the slowed frame, became legible - the hip drop visible two miliseconds early in the angle of her trailing shoulder, the weight transfer carrying through her planted foot in a rotation that would deliver the next hit to Kori’s right cheekbone in approximately one and a half seconds. Kori pivoted off the strike line, her left foot turning forty-five degrees out, and the flat of her right forearm caught the heel of Lay’s incoming hand with a shock that travelled up through her forearm into her shoulder.
Lay’s body completed its rotation through the block, the secondary strike already ready in her trailing hand the way Kori had read it would be, and Kori folded low under the second swing the same way Lay had dropped under her earlier slashes, coming up inside Lay’s guard with her right knee driving for her stomach that Lay’s rotation had briefly forgot to defend.
Her knee came upward in a tight vertical arc, aimed for the solar plexus - and Lay caught it. Not blocked. Caught, the fingers closing around Kori’s leg with a grip stronger than Kenzo’s - as far as Kori could remember. She was in a really tight position, and she wasn’t going to let everything end like this. Instead or trying to break Lay’s grip, she used - rotating horizontally, giving Lay two options: Release the grip and get kicked in the face, or keep your grip and get flipped.
But Lay had already predicted this. She had already read Kori’s muscles firing moments before she did something. So she tilted the caught leg just a tiny bit upward - totally ruining Kori’s spin.
Kori was already too commited, so the only thing she could do was extending her hand and pivoting on it, trying to kick Lay upside-down.
But Lay predicted that, too.
She leaned back, Kori’s heel traveling at insane speed centimeters above her face. Her spine bent backward at an angle that had no business being available to a human body, hair brushing the rooftop behind her shoulders, the cloak briefly settling against the ground. And from that bent position, she pivoted on her hands, too - reciprocating Kori’s upside-down kick, but Lay’s both her legs kicked at the same time - not in a swing, but in a scissor motion aimed at Kori’s stomach, the heels passing through the air quickly. Kori threw herself backward into a handspring, the Chasmis holding her oriented through the inversions, and she came down two metres from Lay’s position with both hands up and her stance reset.
She was breathing harder.
The Chasmis was costing her - the few high-output activations earlier in the evening, plus the petal collision, plus the slap, plus the time she was spending in the slowed-down time now to keep up with a body that was somehow even faster than that. Her reserves were dropping fast. But she had contested the last exchange.
Lay rolled back to her feet from the kick and tilted her head, studying Kori with the small, considering attention of someone who had just noticed a thing they hadn’t expected to notice.
"Hmm."
It was the first sound she had made during the fight that wasn’t playful.
"You’re better than you were thirty seconds ago."
"Ha? What’s that supposed to mean?"
"It’s the eye, isn’t it?" The smile widened beneath the mask. "Ice... Speed... You’re famous for that, aren’t you? What was the name again - was it Kori, if I remember correctly? Cute."
Kori’s knuckles whitened from her grip. She wasn’t used to being provoked like this.
Lay came in again, and she was faster this time - as if the dial on her speed had moved up by a measurable increment, the rotational pattern now arriving through Kori’s guard with even higher speed.
That was Lay’s style - attack once, force a block, and from there - endless posibilities: a spin paired with a back hit, an ankle swing, or even a brutal spinning backhand. All of them worked.
The strikes hit harder. The rotations tightened. Her movements couldn’t be predicted that easily anymore, even with the Chasmis slowing down time.
Kori met her head-on anyway. Hand and hand, strike and kick danced together into deflection and parry, each block converting into an unpredictable angle of the next attack, each attack feeding into the next defence in a sequence that nobody could even prepare for anymore. Kori was mostly fighting with, reflex, built from years of drilling these exact transitions on dirty training floors — and for seven, eight, nine exchanges Kori kept up, the Chasmis stretching the moments just enough that her training could catch what her unaided eye could not. Sparks rose off the rooftop where Lay’s heels struck the alloy on her pivots. The frost at the edge of Kori’s stance slowly disintegrated as her boots skidded across the surface. The air between them was filled with the percussive crack of impacts, the dry slap of knuckle meeting palm, the soft scrape of cloth and the harder grind of leather sword harness against Lay’s constantly-rotating back.
Suddenly, Lay’s foot landed on Kori’s hip.
The kick had come from an impossible angle - out of a rotation whose hips were facing away - and Kori went sideways across the alloy, her boots skidding a few metres in a long pair of gouge marks before her balance held at the very edge of the rooftop, the night air rushing past her shoulders, the drop a single misstep away.
She stopped two centimetres from a fall.
Lay studied her from the centre of the rooftop, blades still sheathed at her back, hands still empty.
"You blocked a few of those," Lay said, and her tone had shifted again - the playfulness still there, but underneath it something that hadn’t been in her voice before, a flat acknowledgment that the fight had become interesting. "That was actually pretty impressive."
She let the line sit for a few seconds, then - seeing she got no reaction - Lay added:
"I take back what I said about your name. Maybe I should’ve heard of you."
Kori’s chest rose and fell in rapid successions. Her ribs hurt with every breath. Her left shoulder was numb in three places where the strikes had landed, and her hands were already starting to get wet from the night’s mist and her own sweat. She straightened against the night air, walked up to her Luminite knives resting on the floor. She picked them up, wrapped them around her arm andwalked back into striking range, and as she moved her hand tightened on the chain at her right knife. The luminite core began to glow again - faint at first, then bright, the cold blue light returning to the blade as Kori finally let her Eon flow back into the weapon she had abandoned for the past few minutes.
The frost at her boots returned, and Kori felt her heating body return to its normal temperature, cooled down by the Eon flow.
Lay didn’t move - she watched the glow rise, and the smile beneath her mask widened.
"Oh," she said. "So you’re giving up on close-quarters, huh?"
She tilted her head upwards once, the playfulness fully back in her voice, the brief seriousness of a moment ago folded back beneath whatever mood Lay defaulted to when she wasn’t paying attention to her own affect.
Her hands rose behind her shoulders, found the harnesses, and drew both blades in a single fluid motion that brought the curved Damascus steel free into the cloud-glow, the forward spikes at the tips of each blade angling toward Kori in a low, casual guard.
"...So be it."