The moment that the fight ended, both Reya and Leo let their weapons clatter to the floor and roughly sat down. Rests were allowed between fights, but they couldn’t last long.
Neither spoke, too focused on recovery. Deep, heavy breathing was the only sound either made, at least for a while.
“Good fight.” Reya eventually said, standing up. Leo could tell that she was still exhausted, and he felt a bit bad that she’d likely lose most of her following matches because of how long this one had lasted.
“Yeah. I really liked how you fought,” Leo offered, and she nodded.
“If it was good, shouldn’t you have hated it?” Reya asked, despite having nodded, and Leo giggled. It had been a while since he had, and Leo’s amusement turned into silent introspection.
He missed his family, as well as his friends. He’d laughed and smiled so much more when they had been around.
Leo shook his head and stood up, silently parting ways with Reya and returning to his square. A minute later, Leo was tossed into his fourth match.
***
Leon Horner: 2 wins, 2 losses.
Tilly Wisher: 11 wins, 10 losses.
He’d finally escaped the ‘Set for punishment.’ line, but it only took a single loss for him to fall back into it.
Leo tiredly returned to his square, and while waiting for his fifth fight, thought of how he’d lamented that the melee combat lessons would only last an hour. It hadn’t seemed like enough, but he had also anticipated breaks. Instead, it was an hour of nothing but constant fighting. ‘So far, what, like… ten minutes have passed- at most?’
Forty five more minutes of this seemed grueling. He really regretted having dragged out his fight with Reya for so long.
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Leon Horner: 3 wins, 2 losses.
Owen Lobber: 9 wins, 10 losses.
Leo’s most recent fight had been closer than the last one, despite Owen having been a bit worse than Tilly. Leo had done what he’d done with Reya again, and gone easy on him until he’d managed to shatter one of his arms with his mace.
After that, Leo had taken no chances and gone all-out to win, but that he’d lost his arm- for the third time today- meant that Owen had technically done better than Tilly.
‘Third time today…’ Leo suddenly thought. The suits transferred the pain of the wounds he’d been dealt for a few seconds, but obviously didn’t allow him to actually lose or shatter limbs. That wasn’t the important bit; it was that Leo hadn’t shown much of a reaction to it the second and third time.
Was it because of the vision of Siguror? After all, in the vision, Siguror’s body had been torn to shreds a dozen times by the group of knights, and he’d felt all of that pain himself. However, he’d also had Siguror’s mind to endure it with.
Leo had suspected that Verin’s visions were the cause of the changes to his mind, but this was practically confirmation. Unfortunately, it also was confirmation that Leo’s decision to avoid Verin’s visions didn’t matter, and that scared him a bit more than it probably should have.
Leo’s area was finally expanded to another red square, signaling that his fifth fight was about to begin. Leo focused in on them, and grinned when he saw that it was the same girl he’d fought the first time; Trisha, if he recalled correctly.
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‘This is the perfect opportunity to see if I’m actually improving.’ Leo thought. She still wielded an axe and shield, and didn’t seem very tired. Leo wasn’t sure about his own state in that respect.
Right now, Leo felt okay. His body wasn’t aching very much, although that would certainly change later, and he didn’t feel tired, but the feeling of tiredness had returned after only a minute of fighting with Owen. He supposed it wasn’t tiredness, and more like… fatigue? He wasn’t even sure if there was a difference, but decided to roll with it.
‘Go!’ flashed across the floor as all four walls turned green, and Leo lunged forward at the same time as Trisha. They met in the middle in only a moment, and he found it significantly easier than before to parry the heavy overhead swing of her axe.
Leo had spent a good amount of time thinking about what to do when he encountered a shield, and had come up with very little. Lots of the kids in the coliseum used them, though, and so he had watched how others dealt with them.
What he’d learned was that shields weren’t some sort of magical defense. The first step was just to attack quickly and unpredictably. If that failed, there were alternative, albeit dangerous, alternatives.
And so, that’s what he did. Leo fell into the comfortable, basic rhythm of attacks that Erich had taught him, only stopping to avoid dying to her axe. He performed the wechselhaw, which skimmed across the surface of her wooden round-shield, and brought it right back down with the oberhaw. She managed to just barely block it with the rim of her shield, but it obscured her vision; thus, when she lashed out with her axe from behind it, it was very easy to dodge.
A flurry of blows were exchanged, and Leo felt like he was in charge so far, but he was working far harder to keep up the pace than she was. Her movements consisted of mostly moving her shield up and down, right and left, and occasionally swinging her axe in order to keep him from taking advantage of the occasional hole in her defense.
Leo couldn’t let the battle continue like this, and so he switched to the more desperate maneuvers that he’d seen others use to get around their opponents shield.
He suddenly got really close, making it so that she couldn’t very easily strike at him with her axe, due to her own shield being in the way. This wasn’t good for him, either, because his weapon was a bit too long, but that was fine because Leo’s intention wasn’t to attack her from here.
Instead, Leo grabbed the rim of the shield and tore it to the side, leaving her torso wide open. Leo’s prepared blade shot forward in a stab, which was rare for him, and it went right through her gut.
At the same time, her axe bit into the area right between his shoulder and neck. Both blows should’ve been fatal, and the two whirled around to see the results.
Leon Horner: 4 wins, 2 losses.
Trisha Heider: 13 wins, 6 losses.
Leo grinned madly seeing the results. He’d won. He could feel his soul in the spirit realm even now, and he was shocked at how quickly it was absorbing everything into itself. It hadn’t been going so fast earlier, and Leo supposed that it was a mixture of his soul having gradually become stronger since he’d awakened, and the pressure forcing him to improve faster.
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Leon Horner: 6 wins, 2 losses.
Jill Brown: 5 wins, 16 losses. Set for punishment.
Leo was bone tired. There couldn’t be many more fights… surely, this had been the last one.
But it wasn’t. Leo’s square was boxed in with another, turning the walls of his area into a rectangle. Leo focused in on his opponent, and frowned when he saw who it was.
Reya Villhager looked like she was on the verge of death. Her style of fighting had to be incredibly exhausting, and Leo’s six or seven minute long fight had likely made today’s class beyond grueling. He felt bad, and wasn’t sure if the mad grin on her face was because she wanted revenge or if it was because she, like him, had gained much from their last fight.
‘Go!’ flashed across the ground, and the fight started. Leo didn’t move very much, but Reya crossed the distance and, using her momentum and leveraging her entire body weight, swung her zweihander in an enormous arc. Leo didn’t have much choice but to leap backwards, avoiding her blow but putting himself at a severe disadvantage for the rest of the fight.
Her weapon was longer than his, and by a large amount- which meant that Leo needed to be close, not far. He’d avoided any damage by leaping backwards the first time, as it had been effectively his only choice, but the follow-up attack was too fast for Leo to close in again and attack.
Leo definitely wouldn’t be dragging out the fight any longer than it needed to be this time. He let her keep him at a distance for a while, as Leo dodged and leapt away every time. He was well aware that Reya was cornering him, but there wasn’t much he could do about it until she made a mistake.
With how exhausted they both were, that mistake wasn’t long in the coming. The slightest moment of sloppiness was enough for Leo to end the fight in a single strike.
It was a full minute into the fight, and there wasn’t even a single major issue with her strike; it was the compounding effect of a dozen different, extremely minor, mistakes that caused her to swing slowly, but not weakly, a bit earlier than she should have. Leo parried the heavy weapon and lunged forward, and his sword slammed against the suit guarding her neck. The fight was over instantly.