The fight was over in a single exchange.

Nathan, sheepishly, felt as though he should have predicted that. Tanya’s batting him and Honeydew about hadn’t been on the basis of supernatural speed or strength alone—she’d simply been so much better than them that the two may as well have been doing theatrical fight choreography. It was training—not for the swordswoman, but for the two junior partners.

So when Tanya stood before a swordsman and sorcerer who perfectly mirrored herself and Honeydew in manner and equipment, it shouldn’t have been very much of a surprise that the fight didn’t last very long.

The outcome was surprising even on that expectations scale.

The sorcerer, armed with a wand in each hand and wearing a diadem on his brow, was slender, resplendent in a purple ermine-trimmed leather diagonal tunic which ran from his left shoulder to his right knee, fully baring his left leg and leaving most of his chest bare. The swordsman, by contrast, was in plain plate that left no skin exposed, weathered steel with smoothly articulated joints and a narrow grille overtop the visor which gave him sight. He held his two-handed sword just above the level of his shoulders, parallel to the ground with hands spread on the hilt, body side-on to his opponent as his chest rose and fell in slow, steady breaths.

Tanya was, for once, expressionlessly serious. Body three-quarters refused to the foe, her rear hand gripped her sword just under the crossguard while her forward arm bent ninety degrees at the elbow to hold the hilt just above the pommel. The sword rose forty-five degrees in the air to form a smooth, motionless line rising from her forehead, and an unnatural stillness came over her.

Even the crunch of popcorn failed to draw any notice or mar the solemn intensity of the scene.

There was a sense of beginning, a start to the fight which took no verbal form. It was a shift in the fabric of the world itself, local though it might have been; a development of intent that, were the containment of same not so impeccable, would have rent reality asunder no less assuredly than if Honeydew had let loose the crackling power which had begun to surround her.

The swordsman shifted his weight minutely, muscles tensing as though he were prepared to attack—and then shifted back, as though he had never committed, as though he were now attacking in another direction. The sorcerer’s aura flickered with elemental energies in non-colors visible to perceptions Nathan was being granted only by courtesy. Body language and cues shifted fluidly in fleeting motions planned and abandoned faster and more smoothly than Nathan could possibly track, as did mana and essence and runic patterns, though Bo’s hissed intake of breath let him know that of the two of them, one was perfectly capable of not just observing but understanding the mastery at work.

Through it all, Tanya was perfectly still in her stance, sword rising at its motionless forty-five degrees as though from statue arms. Her lethal Intent coiled around her, latent and waiting, and no action or reaction betrayed any move she intended to take.

If you encounter this tale on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

And then everyone moved, seemingly in unison.

What transpired was far too brief an exchange for Nathan to have any chance of perceiving, a burst of movement beyond the speed at which his senses could operate. He could not see the way that the swordsman’s strike came in with sublime grace and no warning discernible even to a master, nor the way that the razor-discs of ice appeared in the millimeters which Tanya would have to navigate in order to parry or evade it. The razor-sharp spike of firmamentum, an obsidian beyond the mundane, was too rapid in its conjuration and flight to make any impression in his vision; and the way it combined lethal power and precise accuracy in order to deny her any remaining options for victory was something he could have appreciated in theory but never recognized in practice.

If it had been slower, if he could have watched the strike coming in, he would have recognized an absolute degree of mastery in the way the swordsman stepped in and struck with the most minimal of motions, his sword’s front edge reaching only as far as it must. It was as though the sword were not only a sword, but a spear as well; and yet it was unlike that entirely. But he would never have understood it.

Reader: you must therefore appreciate these things in his stead, and also the resolution of the fight.

No reaction from Tanya could ever have been fast enough or perfect enough to survive the onslaught. Any motion she might have made would have brought her into the shredders the sorcerer had conjured, and while they were not a lethal threat they still represented a crippling injury in any line of evasion which avoided the killing blows aimed at her.

She was no faster than her opponents, no better equipped. There were no cheats, no overpowered contingencies—there was only the two-on-one.

There was only skill.

In the moments between when her opponents committed to their attacks and when they acted, Tanya was already moving. She was no faster than they, and no better equipped; but she had acted first, had taken that small shuffling step and gentle motion of the wrists and arms which had been their utter undoing.

With his target no longer standing where his spells relied on her being, two of the sorcerer’s razor-discs of conjured ice attempted to manifest inside of Tanya’s body. Attempting to breach that inviolable domain, for hers truly was such, killed him as surely as the obliteration of his brain would have—and with what passed for his soul obliterated, with him no longer alive in any sense of the word to maintain it, the firmamentum spike’s connection with reality frayed before it reached her. Each molecule of it decohered simultaneously, leaving only a momentary bow wave’s turbulence to fail to reach her.

With her single step, her wrists uncrossed as her shoulders rotated, sword coming around in an elegant cut. The swordsman’s blade was nudged upwards and to the side by her strike, flat redirecting edge in a gliding kiss, moving it just enough to drift gently past her as her own sword’s edge made its own graceful introduction.

She was no less still afterwards, no less a person frozen in time’s non-passage. And indeed, to Nathan, watching, she had seemed to teleport: one moment a statue standing with her sword raised before her as she faced down two near-peers at once, the next still a statue but now two feet away with her sword a bare inch in a man’s skull as both of those opponents collapsed in death.

Silence pooled for long seconds as Nathan gawped, understanding only that he did not understand.

“Whoa,” Bo said in a tone of pure, wholesome awe, and the moment was broken.