ASH SPRANG INTO MOTION as if she were an arrow released from an invisible bowstring. Twice, three times, the Dark Elf beat her back as before, but this time, Allory sensed something new stirring within her friend. Steel. A heart of steel. She had begun to believe! Whirling her blades either side of her body to create a low moaning sound as they whipped through the air, she returned to attack her muscular Elven opponent like a tidal wave unleashed. For the first time, Allory realised that he was being pressed, forced to calculate and recalculate as her assault ramped up, harried to the point of taking a backward step to regain his balance.
Dark eyes flashing with rising fury, as if her earlier efforts had somehow contrived to offend him in comparison to this new Ashueli, he pounded her in return to create space between them. Space to breathe. The Princess pranced backward with an air of regrouping for a fresh assault. She smiled across at him, the smile of a ravening huntress. Their gazes sparred as if eye contact were merely another realm of combat.
Was she testing herself? Building the belief or claiming it?
Revelation!
From the corner of her perception, Allory noticed how the Golden Purrmaine touched his throat. Choked up? In her physical body, she would have felt the same. Squeezy sparkles? Bring it on! Sabline made a low, purring sound deep in her chest, her fires rumbling audibly as realisation stirred in her warrior heart.
Ashueli’s body settled into a stance of martial readiness, a pose evocative of the grace of a reed and the power of the storms that shook Centresky. Fatal beauty. Ashueli had never lacked for character, but never had her mettle been so clear as at this moment. He must sense it too, for the mysterious Dark Elf gripped his blade with renewed determination, standing utterly immobile as he brought his fullest focus to bear upon his opponent. No more games now. No taunts.
Time to do business.
Warrior business.
The Princess sprang forward again, ever so lightly, yet the speed and tenacity of her assault clearly caught her opponent unprepared. Defending himself compactly, the giant Dark Elf had to give ground, step by begrudging step, as the attack persisted. He flashed back and forth, his defence a perfect wall, seamless and technically supreme. The smaller Elf steadily accelerated toward that same level of astonishing quickness that Allory had observed in her several times before, when rational thought no longer interfered and she gave herself fully over to her combat instincts. Spinning abruptly around the man, she launched herself feet-first from a rough tree trunk. Despite that he picked and defended every strike with his blade or armoured forearms, the magnitude of her assault plucked him off his feet and hurled him fifteen feet across the clearing as if she had ejected him from her presence.
Begone, thou pretender!
Giggle.
The Dark Elf rolled lithely into an attentive posture. “Bravo, Princess. Still no touch, how –”
Ash-blur! The Princess crunched against his defences once more, delivering at least a dozen powerful blows in the space of a couple of seconds, a brutal metallic rattling. Huge as he was, the crystal Elf defended but was forced to stumble to one knee.
She smirked, “Don’t you think you ought to save your breath for fighting, my friend?”
Giggle with extra sparkles on top.
He surged upward!
Ashueli yielded like flowing mercury before his ferocious, all-out counterattack. The dark warrior held nothing back, yet his best efforts did not fluster her as before. Supple power blossomed as Ash regained control of the encounter. Now it was her turn to flick his blade left and right with great guile, forcing him to stretch in defence, seeking to draw him off balance.
Allory suspected that this must be an entirely novel experience for the magnificent Dark Elf. Like Ash, he was not one to give up or give in. Ever.
He lunged!
The Princess pirouetted about his lightning-quick thrust with balletic grace, as if playing partner to a planned dance move. Allory yelped inadvertently as she realised that the giant Elf faced the wrong direction!
“Are you giving this your utmost?” she grinned, leaning on her swords behind his back. Ashueli did not touch him, although for a millisecond he must have been completely defenceless, at least to Allory’s inexperienced eye.
The male Elf swung about with a growl of shock. “What?”
“Is this your best, warrior?”
He attacked with a mighty war cry, but the girl surrounded him in a whirlwind of blows. Bamboozling an outstanding warrior. Twice, her sheer speed overwhelmed him and the Elf struck out with sharp cries that betrayed agitation, once with his blade to open a three-inch cut upon her upper right arm, and once with his clenched fist, fetching her a brutal crack across the jaw.
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Green eyes ablaze, she simply shook her head to clear it and came back at him even faster. Faster still. The twin zalish blades moaned hungrily, moving so rapidly they could not be seen except as a blur like a dragonfly’s wings. The Dark Elf had to flash into a humiliating retreat, for even his unearthly swiftness was no match for her insane speed. Retreat turned into rout as he sprang upward into a nearby bough to avoid the remorseless onslaught.
Everyone ran or flew to try to keep sight of the combatants as they thrashed pugnaciously through the trees. Branches and leaves exploded wherever they clashed. Ashueli hammered him about the head whilst dangling upside down by one leg, now defending out of a spray of large triangular leaves, now hounding him from branch to branch, a huntress closing in upon her prey. Every element of the environment was her friend, from the springiness of smaller branches to the solidity of the great tree trunks.
Then, it happened.
She vanished from one place and reappeared right behind him. What? One second, she faced the giant Elf; the next, she stood at his back, a touch of ghostly smoke appearing to drift off her body. Ashueli blew on his nape. “Boo.”
Roaring a curse in his Dark Elf tongue, the warrior sprang thirty feet into the next tree!
Ash stalked him with a thunderous expression creasing her striking dark brow. That level of concentration, the focus of her willpower, was not just impressive, it was terrifying. And exhilarating! Allory felt as if Middlesun itself had just taken a breath and settled in to watch the impossible come to fruition. She wished she could gasp or pant, so intense was the confrontation.
The Dark Elf struck upward with his blade, only to find his opponent sitting between his legs, swords at rest. The onyx blade hurtled downward but she was no longer there – oh, Ash was making faces at him from a different branch! Suggids!
Sabline snickered as if this were a great humiliation for the Dark Elf. Three of his fellows nocked arrows to their bows, but the man roared furiously at them to desist. Ashueli paused her attack with faultless decorum, perhaps obeying an Elven warrior code, as he resolved the distraction. Then, his black blade whistled through a complex attack pattern, sparks spraying a dozen feet from every contact, but her defence remained rock-solid.
He lashed out furiously in a monstrous spinning blow. Ash’s body disappeared and reappeared in the same place, again exuding that hint of dark smoke. There was no contact despite that his sword apparently passed through her torso – or where it had been, just a fraction of a second before.
The man spun in a full circle, frustration and wonder both evident in his voice as he gasped, “Princess?”
“Didn’t even know I could do that,” she murmured.
Her opponent recovered with aplomb, but even to Allory it was clear that the female warrior had not taken advantage of a crucial instant’s imbalance.
As he rallied again, her point was proven. The great Elven warrior could not land a single strike. Ten blows faster than any arboreal cobra had ever imagined striking its prey, and he flailed only at leaves.
Her twin zalish swords dropped from her hands. In the blink of an eye, Ashueli swarmed all over the Dark Elf, making him look as if he were fighting a puff of dusky smoke. From behind, her legs clamped in a V about his midsection, trapping both of his muscular arms at his sides as if she had turned into an improbably gorgeous boa constrictor. Her arms wound about his neck, but desisted from applying a full-blown stranglehold. Despite his huge strength, he could not budge her hold.
He roared in defeat!
“Don’t suppose I’d mind taking that purposeful touch right around now,” Ashueli murmured, raising her fingers to the chin strap of his helm.
Well, the was touching him with most of her body, but Allory supposed a promise was a promise, especially in this peculiar Elven honour-culture. The threat must be carried out to its exact specification or it would not count.
As she worked at the buckle, the man bellowed and bucked violently, almost throwing them out of the tree, but he appeared as helpless as a kitten in her sinewy grip. His troops just stood and gaped at the pair as if a Raptor had snuck up and paralysed them without being noticed.
Slipping the armoured cheek plate upward, Ashueli leaned in to kiss the precise spot she had intimated before, only to gasp and fall off the giant Elf in a flustered rush.
“Sali’karm Jhoranyal! Ul-tiram noi sharri-no!”
His helm clanged lightly upon the turf. The man thus revealed was every inch as rugged as Ashueli had once suggested, Allory realised at once. That was plenty of Elf and he was more than easy on the eyes. Ahem. Being a different species and all that. Still, if the Dark Elves had warrior gods, then amongst them was where this giant belonged. His hair was the same colour as his eyes, a shock of azure against his magnificent dark skin.
“I am Ula-Sali’karm Jhoranyal of the Ahlumviar,” he announced gravely.
Having expected the sight of him to put the tingle into Ashueli’s sparkle, shocked shook Allory’s new form as she saw her friend wilt instead.
Ash cried, “I crossed blades with the Ula-Sali’karm? I am dishonoured. I beg your forgiveness, my Lord.”
“I initiated this bout.”
He gazed down upon her bent head as she prostrated herself before his feet. Nonplussed? Thwarted? Enthralled? Humiliated? Heaving a sigh, he touched the point of his onyx blade to the side of her neck, delivering the barest scratch imaginable. “The culpability is mine. I declare that the blood demanded has been repaid in full. Be free of all remorse.”
Rising in a flash, she gazed unflinching at him. “Am I?”
Delivered between clenched teeth, the grating reply came, “Of this bout you are without a doubt the victor, Princess Ashueli, but there is another matter between us that I must broach.”
“Another?”
A croak of outrage.
“Regrettably.” Bowing as rigidly as the crystal of his core nature, he turned to the Dark Elf nearest him. “Given your heated words earlier, I am constrained to return this to you and to demand immediate redress as a matter of honour.”
The man handed an ornate, richly bound scroll to the Dark Elf leader.
Ashueli stared at it as if she had just been offered a jungle viper – a very, very venomous and irritable viper.
“Your hand?” As she thrust her left hand out belatedly, Jhoranyal smacked the scroll into her palm. In low-voiced fury, he snarled, “I do believe that this is your contract, o Princess. I await your reply.”