("How? How did this happen")

Saito was on the ground clutching his split-open arm. He was able to stop the bleeding by converting his arm to metal but this didn't fix the fundamental problem in the slightest.

His arm was now useless and the woman who he thought was cornered couldn't look better. She opened and clenched her hand without a hint of discomfort.

"If only you weren't being such a pain in the ass, I probably wouldn't have had to go this far. You could have just let me wear you down bit by bit with my punches but apparently, that was no good in your mind. Consider this a small price to pay for fracturing my hand."

While she was saying all this Saito had managed to rip a leg of his pants off and had used it to tie together his arm. The sweat was pooling on him and his breath was ragged. He looked at her almost in disbelief.

"What do you mean broken arm? Wasn't that just you pretending?"

She looked surprised by his assessment and quickly felt the need to correct him.

"No. It really is broken although you weren't wrong about me tricking you," she then brought her hand to her face to examine it. "If all it took was this for me to start wincing then I would have chosen a different profession. Even that punch you landed earlier was weak enough for me to have to ham it up for it to seem like it did anything."

Saito rejected this idea in its entirety. She had to be bullshitting him. With a few hits, she'd be down. He believed this with all his might and rushed her.

When he did this the woman looked at him as if was a pile of garbage and with the enthusiasm of a dog owner having to pick up its turd, readied herself.

Unexpectedly (he hoped) He struck first with his damaged hand. She calmly dodged it while also using her sword to cut at the cloth keeping it in one piece.

Also instinctively he drew back his hand when this happened and focused more than he should have on the arm which left him open and allowed Elizabeth to land a punch with her broken hand in the centre of his face.

He used his magic on his face but that sure has hell didn't mean it wasn't painful. He staggered back and noticed blood on his face. It wasn't Elizabeth's, his own nose was bleeding.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

Elizabeth clicked her tongue and remarked.

"Now you've really done it. It's gone totally numb now." She said while looking at her limp hand.

Saito soon had a thought. What if she wasn't punching him with her full strength? What if she was punching him while keeping an emphasis on not breaking her hands? Now that one of her hands was fully broken would she bother holding back anymore?

She soon closed between the space them and continued her onslaught. Her uninjured hand would lightly kiss his skin and the broken one hit him like a sledgehammer.

She then threw a punch with the sledgehammer to his face that he desperately blocked with his only good hand. She then threw another punch with the kinder hand.

Although it slightly stinged it was vastly superior to the hell the other hand would provide.

He didn't know it yet, but allowing this punch to land would prove to be a fatal mistake.

And he found out exactly why a moment later. He felt something pierce his stomach. That's when he realised her fist and his own arm was blocking his vision. He desperately backed away and looked down. Her sword was in his stomach.

"I did find it odd you didn't convert your whole body to steel."

She slowly walked to him and spoke as if she was revealing a secret recipe.

"Then I wondered, maybe it wasn't that you didn't but rather couldn't. You must have amazing reflexes. There wasn't a time I was able to catch you off guard except when I was against the tree. You must have only partially converted your arm as it was only the side the sword struck that had a sheen on it. If you had fully changed it may not have gone all the way through or maybe it would have. Yet one thing was certain, when it went through there was blood on my blade."

Saito pulled the blade out of him and threw it to the ground. Unfortunately for him, it wasn't cheap enough of a blade to break from that.

"So I decided to conduct a little test and the fruits of it were quite bountiful. I simply blocked your vision and would see if you could still block my sword."

She pointed down to his stab wound.

"Thankfully it seems you couldn't."

What she forgot to mention was that she threw the blade into the air and blocked his vision before it fell, while also having the precision to knee the sword into his stomach.

She would only give herself 70 points for this as she was aiming for his chest but at least it proved her hypothesis.

Saito started to slowly back away. He quickly realised the type of monster he had encountered in this uneventful countryside.

("Fuck this, that bastard Daniel didn't say anything about a monster like this having the possibility showing up. It'll take all the powder on me to even return in one piece and who knows if I'll even survive the backlash long enough to reach Akumia.)"

Saito soon realised there was only one option before him. Although he was confident he could bring this woman down in a fight to the death if he was willing to part with his own life. This fight just wasn't worth it. Through no fault of his own, he had to watch out for an idiot that fucked up because he got too greedy. His life wasn't worth throwing away for someone like that.

He then kicked some dirt and tried to make his exit. However, he soon noticed something piercing his neck. He looked to his side and noticed him. It was the fast bastard from before.