The first contact rang across the rooftop like a struck bell.
Damascus steel had its own voice. Kori had never crossed steel with that particular alloy, but she recognized the tone the moment Lay’s curved sword met her reinforced knife - a deep, layered harmonic that travelled through both blades, into both arms, and along the bones of her shoulders before either of them had committed to the next motion. The note hung in the air for half a second. Then Lay turned, and the bell-sound dissolved into the long, rising shriek of edge sliding along edge as Lay’s blade dragged across the parry, the forward spike at its tip carving a slow diagonal toward Kori’s chest without quite committing fully to the strike.
It was a question, not a full attack: Lay was asking what Kori would do.
Kori brought her other knife up from beneath, swinging it from the chain. The blade aimed for the soft underside of Lay’s wrist, a cut that would have ended the exchange if it landed - but Lay was no longer where her wrist had been: The rotation that had pulled her sword along the parry had also pulled her body off Kori’s flanking line, the cloak settling against her shoulders as she came around Kori’s right side with her second blade already rising into a downward strike at the base of the neck.
Kori had a fraction of a second, and she used it fully. Her knife twisted unnaturally in the air, coming up to meet the descending sword. The angle was adjusted by Eon in the moment before contact, and the second clash rang out across the rooftop in the same deep, harmonic note as the first, but this time the impact carried weight.
Ice exploded from beneath Kori’s boots in a violent explosion, pale blue crystal racing outward across the alloy in patterns dense enough to coat the rooftop in a thin glaze. The luminite cores in her knives bloomed, the soft glow of the earlier exchanges becoming brilliant now, blue light reflecting on both steel and ice. She had given up on pride. She wanted to win.
Lay noticed. Her free hand pulled the second sword into a backhand stance, and her body settled into a deeper guard, replacing the laziness of the first exchanges with something... A bit more serious. Whatever she had been holding back through the hand-to-hand portion, she was no longer holding it back with the weapons.
The next clash came in split frames for Kori, that’s just how fast Lay was moving.
Lay’s right blade swept upward in a horizontal cut at Kori’s shoulder; Kori turned the strike, guiding it off with her own knife and slipped her elbow inside Lay’s guard, looking for the throat. Lay’s left blade was already there - the spike rising from below to catch Kori’s incoming arm, forcing her to abort the elbow strike and pivot away. The pivot brought her boots through the frost ring she had been growing subconsciously, and the ice tracked with her, every step she took thickening the glaze beneath her, the rooftop becoming her own terrain by degrees.
Lay caught the change after the second pivot. Her boots, which had been finding traction on dry alloy a moment before, were now landing on a surface as slick as a polished countertop. Most fighters would have slipped. Lay simply shortened her steps, her centre of gravity dropping a few centimetres lower, her footwork adjusting to the friction coefficient without breaking rhythm. The blades kept coming.
She came in fast. Her right sword feinted high, the left swept low, and the high blade reversed in the middle of its arc and dropped into a chopping strike at Kori’s collarbone - a sequence that Kori had read with the Chasmis, but reading and intercepting were not the same thing. She managed to block the third blade contact, but the impact landed on her right shoulder with enough force to drive her boots six meters backward across the ice.
Although the strike was fully blocked, Lay still managed to nick the skin with the spike’s tip. Kori’s right shoulder dropped a centimeter as a thin red line appeared along the muscle, the sharp steel shallowly cutting through the skin and almost reaching the muscles. Kori felt the cold air enter the cut and sucked a breath through her teeth.
Her Chasmis stretched the next second. Lay was already coming around for the follow-up, her body in the middle of the next rotation, both blades ready for the next attack. Kori let cold gather in her left palm, and at the last possible moment, She opened her hand. A burst of frost exploded outward across Lay’s incoming path, a wave of crystallized air thick enough to obscure vision and reduce reaction speed in anything that breathed.
Lay walked through it.
She barely slowed down, the frozen current blowing her off the ground for a second. She swiftly raised an arm to clear her eyes, but it didn’t even hinder her attack. The frost wave broke against her body and dispersed around her with the indifference of mere bad weather, and the next two strikes arrived on schedule - one at Kori’s hip, one at her shin - both forcing Kori back another step across her own ice. The cuts were shallow. Lay was not aiming for kills. She was scoring her, almost the way an instructor scored a student.
Kori’s anger registered as data. Except that this emotionless data was enough data to make Alteea gasp, if put on a computer. Kori’s Chasmis kept her face unbothered, kept her breathing steady, kept her stance from collapsing into the rage that the rest of her body was trying to express. But the air around her got noticeably more cold, and the frost beneath her boots grew teeth, ice spikes rising along the edges of the rooftop in small jagged ridges, the temperature dropping fast enough that the air itself was beginning to condense. Her left knife glowed brighter. The right blade in her grip was icy to the touch with its own channelled light.
The next time Lay rotated, Kori rotated with her - matching the spin, abandoning her stance entirely, letting her body move with Lay’s rather than against it. The two of them came around at the same speed for a half-beat, the rooftop turning beneath them, and in the moment when Lay’s left blade was furthest from its guard position Kori brought her right knife across in a horizontal cut aimed at the gap between Lay’s ribs and her hip.
The blade hit Lay’s skin. It was not a deep cut - Lay had begun adjusting her body the instant Kori had committed to the spin, the cloak shifting forward, her ribs angling away - but Kori’s knife caught the side of Lay’s torso along a four-inch line, and beneath the cloak, opened where the luminite-charged steel passed through them... Bandages. Lay wasn’t wearing armor, or even normal combat clothes. The only thing she was wearing were bandages. Reasonably thick, pulled tight against her strong abdomen. Kori wasn’t able to see higher than that, but the fact that someone like Lay, someone that was on par with her, someone that had jumped over so many buildings and had such speed, was insane enough for her.
A thin red line appeared on Lay’s side. The first blood Kori had drawn from her tonight.
Lay’s rotation completed clumsily. She came out of it three metres from Kori, both blades still in her hands, the cloak falling back into place over the wound.
She looked down at her side, then back at Kori.
The only reaction Kori managed to get from her was more of a single exhale, surprised and entirely genuine. The amused half-smile that had been her default expression all night was suddenly a real smile, the kind that pulled the corners of her eyes upward, and for the first time since the rooftop had begun, Kori saw Lay’s whole face brighten with an expression that actually meant something.
"Ohhh," Lay said.
She glanced down at the red line on her side, at the few lines of bandage that were starting to unravel, then up at Kori, then back down at her own blood. The laugh resolved into a low, delighted hum.
"Now we’re getting somewhere."
She rolled her shoulders. The blades came up into a new guard – somehow even lower than before, the curved edges angled outward, the forward spikes now pointing at Kori’s eyes. The casual posture of the opening exchanges was gone.
Kori adjusted her grip, too. She couldn’t use fancy Eon techniques to defeat her. She couldn’t uses her own predictable techniques to defeat her.
This was just a battle of pure strength and speed.
She had drawn blood. Her Chasmis was fraying at the edges of every activation, and her right shoulder was slowly bleeding into her sleeve. None of it mattered yet. She was contesting. The fight had become a real fight - and whoever this woman was, whatever the Underworks had produced to walk through her ice like weather, Kori was going to find the thing that broke her.
Across the frost, Lay frowned and for some reason relaxed her entire stance.
"Hey" she said. "Since you got all this ice and stuff..."
She scratched her head with the tip of her own sword, the one that didn’t have Kori’s blood on the spike.
"...Could you pleaaase make me a slushie?"