“I accept your surrender,” Nathan said with immediate magnanimity. “Go on, get outta here.”

To his complete lack of surprise, two out of the three remaining Flatlanders declined to take his advice. While the third stepped back and collapsed into a perfectly regular triangular prism made out of triangular prisms, each of which were in turn made out of more triangular prisms, the other two cast aside their lightning cannon and carbine, respectively. One drew out of a dimensional pocket a swirling chain of interlinked toruses which were studded with hyperbolic spikes of infinite point-sharpness, while the other armed themself with a yellow-dripping chainsword whose jagged sawpoints caught at the air itself.

They charged, naturally, and Nathan’s hand-claw shifted into a very familiar sword.

As a child, and also as a young man, Nathan had needed an outlet for his eager fascination with medievalism and weaponry. His parents, not wanting him to become involved with Renaissance Faires in order to prevent him from becoming a pansexual lothario by the age of seventeen—an irony not lost upon the Nathan of sixteen, who was already aware of his own asexuality—had enrolled him in whatever else they could find.

He had learned a great deal during his time in HEMA, and one of those things was exactly the way in which you were not supposed to hit your sparring partners in the head with a two-handed sword.

He brought his sword up to a high guard pose with his sword near shoulder level and perfectly horizontal to the ground. This looked utterly absurd, but was a completely standard stance with genuine use, as he had learned by having his head pummeled repeatedly by Ox-stanced friends in precisely the manner in which they were not supposed to strike their sparring partners.

He stepped forwards, moving in a way which we might describe as Right Ox To Left Ox and swinging in a controlled manner that involved very little of his total might.

His sword caught an incoming strike from the chainsword, angled to deflect it rather than going into a clinch. His wrists twisted as he followed through and forced the chainsword into the ground, uselessly shouting in triumph and then immediately afterwards in terror as the other Flatlander’s torus-chain lashed out at his face.

“Shiiiiiiii—” he began as he dropped into a squat. “—iiiiiit!” Nathan finished as he awkwardly half-stumbled, half-leapt backwards, parrying the other half of the incoming chain as he brought his sword into Raising The Roof Pose.

The studs bit, impossibly, into the metal of the sword on the parry, and his eyes flashed in fury.

“Alright, fine,” he spat as his HUD informed him that his two foes had begun laughing at him. “Have at you, then.”

What followed was less a display of virtuosic excellence in swordsmanship and more an adequate display of competence and having multiple feet more reach than your opponents. While the chain was long enough to theoretically equalize matters, the relative leverage involved meant that Nathan could reopen combat by sweeping his sword in a parry and binding the chain, fouling its movements as he stepped forwards.

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He brought the hilt of his two-handed sword slamming with all the force he could muster into the midpoint of the hypotenuse on the topmost triangle of the taurus-chain’s wielder, and almost died when the excess force beyond lethal carried him off balance.

He didn’t try to fight it, having learned that lesson painfully and repeatedly over the course of a decade. Instead, he rolled forwards over his shoulder as he overbalanced, bringing his sword around to his front in order to not skewer himself on it.

Rising, his sword met the chainsword of his last opponent in an awkward, edge-on parry. The contact between them screamed as the jagged triangles ground against his blade, but he twisted from his hips and threw the Flatlander, chainsword and all, sideways. This bought him time to recover, and he steadied his stance as he panted, hilt of his sword at his waist and tip leaning against the ground.

The Flatlander didn’t take the bait of Fool’s Stance, no fool it. It bowed floridly instead, raising its own sword to its forehead. Nathan found this perfectly befitting someone—for though this particular Flatlander identified rather as something, he had no way of knowing that fact—about to die, that is, that it was appropriate that the one who was about to die salute, and in order to cover his bases and not be a hypocrite he flipped his sword up into a more standard stance and saluted back.

He kept his sword in guard position as he did so, of course, because he had grown up fighting other teenagers unsupervised after events ended.

His cackling opponent didn’t disappoint him. Pirouetting into action mid-salute, it unfurled itself in an explosive flèche with its sword leading the way to his heart.

His own sword swept fractionally to the side, deflecting the strike, and he chopped down.

And just like that, the duel ended.

Or it would have, if the Flatlanders had only come to the field with four survivors from their mech, instead of twenty eight.

“Heh. Heh, heh…”

Nathan turned to look at the source of the laughter—not the pointed laughter of his enemies, but a pained leonine laugh. A woman knelt on the ground, one arm seeming buried to the wrist in the grass until he saw the hand in question off to the side. Her other hand held a sword whose point was trapped in the internal tesselations of a Flatlander main-polyhedron, and her body was a litany of battle-horrors.

“Heh heh, heh…”

The dead and dying surrounded her. Five of those bodies still moved, black blood flowing as the beat a syncopated rhythm in their deathrattles. The three living survivors of the mech danced to the drumbeats, humming in their eerie and completely incomprehensible language which Nathan’s visorine companion translated only as <> for reasons which escaped his understanding.

“They…” The amazonian warrior coughed blood. With a sudden surge of convulsive motion, she flung the hilt of her sword sideways. She toppled over with the motion, groaning and laughing weakly for a moment until she coughed again and spat out a bubbling green froth. “They solved…”

The rest of her phonemes were inaudible to Nathan, but his visor were able to interpret them regardless.

“They solved the Tiffany problem.”

And then the remaining two enemies swelled up with the power of their kill and, geometrically boosted in power by the support of their dying comrades, charged Nathan in perfect concert.