The very next moment, the Butcher’s beak-like point slipped in under the Matriarch’s left arm, the dull-red glow of its edge soon overtaken by the red of spilling blood as it sunk a good few centimeters into a gap between ribs before her flesh was hardened beyond its ability to cut. After the right came the left, Zel’s arm snapping from a bent to a perfectly straight position with a flash of white and a nearly one-hundred and eighty degree turn of her fist. It felt like punching a vat of water and cornstarch, soft flesh giving way before it suddenly grew hard and unyielding, and despite this arcane protection, the raw force of the strike sent Arnys skidding backwards a short distance.

At least a third of the seal under her collarbone vanished. The oval’s domed barrier swirled with strange colours, sparks and a small spray of liquid shot out from one of the machines on Arnys’s side of the arena, and a strange rumbling could be heard from the armoured vehicle outside the courtyard.

Cough-laughing in pain, Arnys got her bearings and disappeared across the oval, dismissively gesturing with her left hand towards one of the concerned-looking arcanists outside, barking at him: “Keep an eye on it and I won’t need help! Give it a chicken or something!”

Zel could feel her second stomach was full. Now she had to mould its contents so that they would go where they needed to when they were needed and do what was required of them… And in that time, she could make full use of her lungs’ output.

Shifting her feet, Arnys raised her blade above her head and took on an exaggerated stance. Playing along, Zel did much the same, raising the Butcher onto her shoulders and gripping the gaunt-cannon’s trigger lever. If it truly fired lightning, then with her understanding of the Matriarch’s lightning-walking patterns, she could hit her.

Click. Click. A momentary wait, a lungful’s Fulgur poured into the sleeve. When they finally both charged, Zelsys used every brief stop between bursts of movement to fire a low-powered Thundercannon after Arnys.

Clang.

Clang.

Clang.

Clang.

Again and again, the lightning reached out.

The fifth time it hit, and the sixth, and the seventh, but Arnys was unharmed. Blindingly-bright sprays of white and yellow erupted from each impact, Zel’s always-visible lightning clashing with the barely-visible Fulguric force that apparently enveloped her opponent whenever she moved in that strange way.

In response the Matriarch went on the offensive, closing in around Zelsys and delivering tiny, irritating cuts when by rights she could’ve inflicted full draw cuts.

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

Graze Pulse couldn’t have been more perfect for this.

Ten slashes.

Fifteen.

Twenty.

Fifty.

A hundred.

And barely a dozen cuts upon her skin, and still about half her stamp left.

By the time Arnys realized that her attacks weren’t quite landing and stopped, Zel had stockpiled a fully-formed antler’s worth of Fulgur. Rather, it wasn’t the lack of damage that made the Matriarch stop, and certainly not the lack of an audience response, perhaps because it only lasted some three-quarters of a minute.

It was the fact that she got struck by a random discharge from the immense aura of lightning that had built up around Zelsys.

Still, she was utterly covered in shallow cuts from her torso, her exposed arm, even her face and a few on her legs, thoroughly concealed by the already-regenerated leather of her trousers. With a smile on her face, she burned lungful after lungful and forced her injuries shut, rendering them down to thin red lines. By the power of Kabral’s curious brew, the cuts could already be seen healing as her body readily spent the tremendous surplus of Vitae.

At its core, this was still an exhibition match.

Pure, technical contests of skill weren’t its main point. They occurred in the gaps between spectacular clashes filled with impractical movements and half-aimed potshots, solely for the enjoyment of the participants and those few who could comprehend the combination of mind games and spacing management at play.

Three lungfuls burnt for Fulgur, a truly serpent-like arc from the tip of Zel’s tongue tracing the Butcher’s saw side before she set loose the Flying Thundersaw, for she wished to save the contents of her Retributive Battery. It flew well overhead, screaming through the air just above as she sprinted headlong towards Arnys, dropping into a slide at the last moment and guiding the Thundersaw towards the Matriarch from behind.

A wide slash from the right for an extra layer of distraction was sufficient to get a full-powered punch in, but she chose instead to will her left hand’s armor into claws and swiped after the bare skin in the thigh window of Arnys’s ridiculous pants.

Before she could even properly get back up, Arnys had already redirected the errant hunk of screeching cold-iron into the ground - where it would soon run out of energy and turn to dust - before she swept Zel’s foot, putting her back down. In turn, Zel burned a lungful’s Fulgur to forcefully handspring up and catch her opponent with a rising headscissor, spinning around on her surprisingly stable figure before tossing her forward with a forward flip. The entire time, Zel’s unstable aura lashed about and ripped gashes in the ground, its seething white tendrils repelled by brief, blindingly-bright sparks of yellow whenever one came close to striking Arnys.

Amidst the raucous noise of the crowd and music, she heard someone scream: “YEAH! URAGÁNRANA!”

In the vicious exchange that followed, neither came away unscathed. Despite her own lackluster speed Zelsys pushed the attack, modifying her own combat style to accommodate the nature of the fight and her opponent both. Short, efficient movements, sacrificing power generation for reactivity and speed, to the point of gripping the Butcher by its guard and willing its sawteeth to simply recede altogether that she might use it as a bladed tonfa.

Zel faked muscle twitches and body language, she spat miniature lightning-sphere to intentionally trigger the blinding flashes of Arnys’s aura, and in the brief moments of blindness attempted to exploit her own superior body awareness to make up for Arnys’s unimpeachable raw speed and skill.