“...It appears that the Artat Sect Elder wishes to dispel any possibility of hostility and establish friendly relations,” Ozmir explained, himself still reading the letter. He looked up, seeing Zelsys approaching.
“Far be it for me to pry, Elder, but did you not come to blows and break through their Hundred Hands Sword Union Formation during your visit?”
“So I did.”
“Then it seems that, despite my expectations, the Artat Sect yet holds to the ideals of Lord Branstein in truth, rather than interpreting and disregarding them as it fits petty politics… And that you did not insult them as much as I thought at first.”
“Nobody died, and I gave back swords to replace those I broke,” she laughed. “Of course I didn’t insult them. How do we respond? Not the contents, the method. I somehow doubt they left a convenient aetherwave frequency.”
“These birds can return to sender,” Ozmir said.
And so, later that day, Zelsys penned a letter in response.
Meanwhile, beneath the sect, two young men faced off against one another.
The ring was twenty meters across, elevated from the stone floor, inside a basin filled with a strange kind of dirt that absorbed impacts exceedingly well. Another nearby ring had hard, black sand to accommodate others.
As per their agreement, they both left out their most destructive techniques, leaving them for after the spar, to be demonstrated to one another against dummies, target blocks, and the illusions of the recently-completed Phantasmagoria Ring, the complex array designed to create illusory opponents to train against. It had been completed by a group consisting of people from inside and outside the sect, using various pieces of bleeding-edge essentech and an obscene number of Tablets strung together on a rack to form a Gestalt Logic Automaton. Neither Halxian nor Victor understood the deeper machinations, and neither dared tinker with the machine beyond what was explicitly permitted for its operation. That would be for later, however.
At first, Halxian felt very much like he had the upper hand, and it was true. Victor’s in-close fighting style had gaping holes in it, despite his number of little tricks. Blasts of air, gouts of oily, bloody, sticky mud, horrible bone-thorned flesh-brambles whipping and grasping, walls and great spikes of bone.
They were all just that - tricks. They were applied in accordance with the principles of Sturmblitz Kunst 0, but Halxian had the advantage of a practical martial art developed over the generations specifically for his unique abilities. By comparison to the Estoras family's refined style, Victor was fighting with an impressive, yet nonetheless ramshackle prototype.
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Halxian's spear blazed blue and darted about with the stinger-like deftness emblematic of the Third Calamity Armament Style. Some, his father said, derisively called it an imitation of true flying weapon arts. Some, his father said, had met their ends to this so-called imitation, despite being masters of those flying weapon arts. Halxian’s tattoos blazed alive, burning beneath his skin, pain shooting through him, yet remaining wholly bearable. This was for three reasons; one-third thanks to Makhus’ painkillers, one-third thanks to the snake oil ointment, and one-third due to Halxian’s own rapidly-growing pain tolerance, which he had achieved through establishing partial contact with his Primordial Self. It was a long and difficult process for him, attuning to that animal self and finagling it into doing what he wanted, but slowly, he had managed to widen the hole in the mental wall between his two selves, and convinced the Primordial that the burning, scorching ache was inevitable, and that it would be better for him to be able to ignore it.
Out of all of Victor’s techniques, the rocket-drills gave him the most trouble, and it couldn’t have been more obvious that he was pulling his punches with them. The horrid things screamed at the speed of bullets through the air and tore into Halxian’s skin, leaving splinters on direct hits. On glancing hits they scraped like hell, and even when he blocked or deflected them their spin threw his spear out of alignment or tangled his wrappings. It was a mercy compared to the alternative, he wagered; these little bone rockets’ insides were hollow and mostly empty, they were brittle, and turned into dust and then nothing within seconds of striking.
For a short time, Halxian remained on the offensive. His spear was longer, and lacked the ring that further shortened Victor’s reach, and that was before the Third Calamity Armament Style came into play. It wasn’t just the spearhead or the haft, but his bandages, too, blazed alight with flame, and before long, Victor was covered in first-degree burns, being so minor only because this was a friendly spar. Had it been a real fight, his flesh would still be burning all the way down to bone. It had been a desire to replicate the Calamity Flame that had inspired the invention of CP-T, or so father had said to him. Then again, had it been a real fight, Halxian would by now be riddled with holes as wide as fists.
Moments later, Halxian found himself no better off. As he lashed out with his spear across the whole of the ring, he suddenly found himself beset by fleshy tendrils from below, while Victor sprinted towards him, a great big gauntlet forming around his right arm while flame coalesced in the ring of his staff. Just as he managed to retract his spear and tear himself free, Victor held the staff in front of his face and blew, and a blinding-white blaze erupted from it, washing like a wall of pain over Halxian. Before he could regain his bearings, he felt a battering-ram smash into his stomach from below, throwing him back-first into the ceiling such that he came careening to the ground disoriented and gasping for breath.
Another moment, and the redhead appeared within his vision with a smile on his face and a hand held out in an offer of aid. His bulked-up gauntlet, with firework-like vents still spewing black flame, crumbled away.
“Took me far too long to tune that so it wouldn’t take your skin off,” he gave a wry grin, and as Halxian reached out, thinking nothing of the numb burning sensation all across his hands and face, he felt it. The crackling. As if he had been cast alive in plaster, an eggshell-thin layer of bone crumbled away from his skin, exposing the layer immediately beneath. Blinking twice and shaking off his hand, he took Victor’s offer and let himself be pulled to his feet.