Even after Blue called for the start of the fight, Hera and Grilat just stared at each other. Hera was moving a bit but not in an aggressive way, just to get used to this new body. It was odd to think that she was here and somewhere else at the same time. Her mind was perfectly attuned to her current body. Even the amount of strength she had to put in her legs was still the same. Of course, this might be because she got a debuff that reduced everything equally, but still, it was impressive.
"She already said go. Are you done?" Grilat asked.
Hera rotated her wrist holding Claw, then gently tossed Fang in the air, making it spin around twice before catching it again. During that time, she flicked her wrist as a flourish and got into her fighting stance, "I am."
"See, that's a problem. In a real fight, flourishes don't matter." Grilat pulled his heavy two-handed sword from the side and stepped forward. Just as he started his second step, the man dashed forward at high speed. Or at least what seemed like a high speed for him and Hera. Everyone else watching the fight saw every move they were making with perfect clarity. They were all used to fighting creatures of the same level they were now, but they were watching two people who could barely be called level one.
Despite her reaction time, Hera noticed that dash coming from a mile away. As someone was about to do something like that, their bodies would move with intention, and she could see those shifts before he even started the second step. Dodging to the right, she let her shoes glide over the ground and spun around, hitting the man's left leg with her daggers. That move wasn't entirely unexpected, and Grilat managed to move enough, so the cuts were only grazing him and not dealing some actual damage.
Hera moved back, her feet still moving over the sand, almost dancing in front of this beastman warrior. Grilat didn't expect to be hit at all when fighting against her. He was going to use this to show how she was too dependent on her legacy, but now, he was the first one to be injured, even if it didn't hurt. Seeing the expression on the man's face, the Empress smirked, "My turn?"
She dashed forward, going for a frontal assault that was really obvious. Still, Grilat had to defend. He put his sword on a diagonal to still be able to move it in any direction if the daggers were coming from a different angle. What he didn't expect was that the Empress changed his destination halfway through the attack. By using the glide effect of her shoes, she went to the left to go around him. Grilat shifted to block an attack on his back, but Hera didn't stop there. She did a complete lap around the man arriving at the same point she seemed to be aiming at from the get-go, but now, instead of facing the warrior face to face, she had a clear shot to his back. Using both daggers, she stabbed Grilat and pulled Fang up and Claw down, opening large gashes on his moss body.
"Shit!" Grilat groaned and tried to hit Hera with his elbow, but the Empress was expecting something and was already backing out, "You are better than I thought," Grilat smirked.
"You're not," Hera replied.
Grilat snarled, and the hairs on his body changed to green. Hera wasn't sure if that was a skill or something about the moss, but she got ready for anything. The warrior with a wooden mask changed how he was holding his sword. Instead of using both hands, he used only one and charged at the Empress. He was faster now and started to attack with a flurry of slashes that was impressively quick for the size of his weapon. Hera blocked and dodged as many as she could, but she got hit a few times when he started adding some punches. None of the attacks was enough to deal significant damage, but it was enough to push her back. She tried to spin around him again, moving back and forth using her glide boots, but now Grilat was able to follow her. The hair on his body kept following her as if they were magnetized.
"STOP!" Grilat shouted, and Hera felt her body tensing up as the yell was part of a spell made to do just that. Stun someone momentarily. Seeing an opening, Grilat kicked Hera in her stomach, which sent her tumbling back. He stepped forward with a smirk that no one could see because of his mask, "You are good. But you can't take your opponents at face value. Just because I'm a fighter doesn't mean I don't use spells."
Hera chuckled as the man prepared an attack, "I know. And that is exactly why you lost," she clenched her fist, and the poison that was inside Grilat's pushed all the liquid inside the moss forming his body out. The man instantly fell to the ground, looking like a bunch of dried plants, and his original body got up.
"What the? What the fuck was that?" Grilat yelled as he got up. However, because of the violent effect of the poison, he was still a bit dizzy. Feeling all the water inside one's body be pushed out all at once was very disorienting.
"The 'rain' you complained about. Aside from my legacy, I use poison. These moss bodies are not very sensitive, and when I did a flourish with my daggers, I flung a poison needle at you. Since we can still use our own mana pool when inside this body, I made that needle supercharged and controlled the poison to first spread and then latch on to all the water inside the moss, then all I had to do was tell it to get out of the body. That rain was a rain of that poison, each with a unique effect, and they could overlap and stack. Didn't you notice how some of the monsters just fell dead to the ground before even doing anything? That is all because of my 'useless rain,'" Hera explained.
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"I see…" Grilat started walking around while looking at the ground.
"Apparently, you don't. If you had seen it, you wouldn't have underestimated me, and maybe you would have put up a better fight," Hera scoffed. She was still very upset about being called useless.
"You only hit me with the poison because you cheated. You attacked me before the fight started," Grilat squinted at her.
"I did that after Blue said for us to start. It's not my fault you waited while I pretended to get comfortable in this body."
"So that's how you fight? You lie and cheat your way to victory?"
Hera chuckled, "I don't go around fighting people. If I'm fighting something, it's a monster trying to kill me. There's no lying in cheating when you're fighting with your life on the line. You walk away after you are done, or you die."
"I guess you do have a point," Grilat nodded.
"I know, and I don't need you to tell me that. Next time, ask about what we can do before challenging someone to a fight. You might learn some things," Hera got up and started going towards her body, "Kadhan, how do I get out of this?"
Grilat grabbed a spear from the training weapon's rack and tossed it aimed at Hera's head.
'Empress!' Nimbus and Lurize yelled, but they couldn't move since she ordered them not to interfere.
"Watch out!" Adriel and Blue yelled.
Hera only had time to turn around and see the wooden spear rushing towards her face before she felt it piercing her moss skull. A moment later, she was back in her real body, gasping as if she had just woken up from a nightmare. She coughed for a few moments, touching her face repeatedly to make sure there wasn't a hole or something embedded into her skull. When she calmed down, she glared at Grilat.
"What the hell was that?!"
"You wanted to go back to your body. I just helped," the man replied.
"You were just being a sore loser," Hera huffed.
"And you were a crappy winner. We are even. And I apologize for underestimating you. It might surprise you, but no one in the village is very proficient in poisons. We've tried that before, and it never seemed worth it. It took too long for the poisons to affect our targets, and trying to Poison something only to kill it later hardly ever worked. Most times, it will either result in nothing happening or the creature going through some sort of mutation that would allow it to use poison against us. But like I said, this is only because we never specialize in it. If you can do something like that quickly, we might change a few of our ideas about hunting the Night River," Grilat nodded.
Hera sighed and tried to remember their goal here. She was still very angry, but it wasn't like she could do anything about it, "I'm happy to help if I can, but I don't know how my poison would affect something made out of water."
"That's fine. It's at least another thing to consider. The whole idea of using the Boulder to pull it out of the ground is already a stretch by itself," Grilat said, "Now, let's continue to the rest of the lesson."
Grilat Spent the next 2 hours explaining the room to her and her party. The jungle was split into different biomes, and a different type of creature controlled each of them. The thick jungle was the land of bugs and plants. Various quadrupeds ruled the more open forests or plains. From wolves and tigers to gazelles, from bison to foxes, and a particularly large species of sloth that seemed to lord over all other creatures. Luckily, they were herbivores, which could explain why the plains would change from time to time. As those massive beings devoured the trees, the jungle would grow smaller, only to regain its missing land as the sloths went into hibernation during the winter. There were also a couple of plateaus covering a very wide area on two corners of the room. Each of these mountains had different animals living on top of it or on the massive walls that were about 500 meters tall. Surrounding the plateau was a network of caves where bats, vultures, and other large birds would create their nests. Since it was a place generally safe from predators, the flying creatures would form small colonies and avoid attacking each other. On top of the eastern mountain, they could find some species of monkeys and more plant monsters, but those were more tree-like instead of the flower and vine species that were found around the village. Lastly, there were only two types of creatures on the western mountain: bears and drakes. Those were locked in an eternal struggle since they were each other's only source of meat. Oddly enough, the western mountain didn't have any flying creatures living around the walls for some unknown reason.
He continued explaining more about the place, the forest, and the types of natural dangers they could find aside from monsters. Unfortunately, most of the information went over everybody's heads. Not because they couldn't understand it but because they were all tired and without tablets to write everything down, it was very hard to retain that knowledge. When Grilat realized that his effort was useless, he told them all to head back to their house. He would explain things again the next day and try to see if there was another way to make them remember what he was talking about.
Hera's group went back to their home, and once more, the Empress created a soundproof barrier around the house so they could talk about the curse. This was going to be their routine for a while, and it was better to get used to it.