(14)

"Have you heard anything from Hisoka yet?"

Reina turned toward the brunette that had just come into the training room when the question was asked of her. It'd been a week and a half since Kelly met the president's mousy assistant in the hallway, but the latter had inexplicably stopped coming to school several days ago.

The president could only shake her head. "No, nothing. The police even made another circuit through questioning her friends again yesterday."

"So they don't have anything, either," Nariko surmised. "You don't think she's hurt somewhere, or worse?"

But that only earned a slightly more mirthful shake of the raven's head. "No, not for a moment. If Cho had a superpower, it would be unfortunate luck. For all of the trouble she gets into, I've never seen her seriously harmed."

"Well, that's a relief, at least." The brunette lowered her voice and led Tamashini a bit off to the side. "Speaking of superpowers, has yours pinged anything?"

"... Yes," the president confirmed after a moment of hesitation. "It's a large portion of why I'm so certain she's alive. When she does show back up, I am the one she will come to see." Reina cycled through a deep breath. "And then we need to be ready for trouble."

Nariko arched an eyebrow at her. "Are we talking that kind of trouble? If so, maybe you're the one that should be getting an escort, and from the whole team."

"Out of the question. When she comes, it will be because I'm alone. Having the whole team will just cause problems." Her gaze focused more directly on her underclassman. "So I'm going to need you ready when she comes."

"Me? You just said she'll only come when you're alone."

Reina looked back toward the other members of the fencing team, who were going through warm-up exercises while chatting innocently away. "... I must admit to conducting an experiment with you, Kelly. I believe you may be able to be there even if I'm supposed to be alone."

"Why?"

"Because I've already witnessed you meddling with one precognitive event."

Riko spent a moment considering the president's words. "The vase. That's why you were so shaken."

"I don't like to think of it as being shaken," Reina objected, "but it was the first time in all of my life that my foresight had been wrong, and it was solely because you had been there."

She turned back toward the brunette. "You. Specifically. If it had been Nariko Kelly, then she would have been somewhere else. She wouldn't have been in that hallway, she wouldn't have run into Cho, she wouldn't have taken the papers to the office for her."

The girl that was the spitting image of said teammate rubbed her chin in thought. "I was only there because something about being an echo lets me copy spells. You're saying that my existence is disrupting events."

"Possibly," Reina confirmed with a nod. "Or at least, that's what I'm hoping will be the case." Her gaze went distant with concern for Hisoka. "And maybe, with two of us, we can stop her from running away."

"Running away?" Kelly looked to her with confusion. "Why?"

But again, she could only shake her head. "My glimpse didn't go that far. All I know is that if she runs, she won't ever come back. We have to keep her from running."

The brunette went silent as she considered the grim implications, but finally gave a nod of acceptance. "So what do we do in the meantime? Just go on acting like we're not waiting for the other shoe to drop?"

"Exactly," the president replied as she turned back toward the club activities. "What do you think? Have you seen enough matches? Ready to give fencing a go, yourself?"

Nariko considered the question for a moment, then nodded. "I believe I've got a grasp on the basics, sure."

"Excellent," Tamashini nodded back. She waved down the boy that had been doing most of the managing. As the two girls came up to him, she explained, "We'll do a round robin today, ordered by ranking. Put our guest at the bottom."

At that, the boy looked surprised. "Kelly's participating? Miss President, that's not safe. She hasn't gone through a single lesson. She hasn't even picked up a foil."

But Reina's pleased expression remained completely unaltered. "Don't worry, she is a quick study. In fact, I suspect she won't remain in the bottom ranks for long."

He tried to argue more, but Reina's response remained exactly the same, and eventually he surrendered and turned to announce the robin to the rest of the club.

Nariko stepped up next to her, a little hesitantly. "Who are you that you can just tell him what to do like that?"

Reina's pleased expression changed to one of slight embarrassment. "Ah, in addition to my duties as council president, I am also the club's captain. Tora is my vice-captain, but like many, he calls me president out of habit."

She was surprised she felt a slight twinge of disappointment when she saw that only made the brunette blink. Had she really been looking forward to the girl being impressed by something like that?

"Still, one would think there would be rules against putting me in without any experience."

"Not really. After all, we can only say that you have no activity recorded in the club. We can't speak to any experience you may have outside of school. Of course, Tora knows that's not the case, not in fencing, anyway, but he would need a vote of the club to overrule me."

"And they'd vote against him?"

Reina nodded without hesitation. "I'm not proud of them for it, Kelly, but I fear I'm throwing you a bit into the lion's den. A round robin is an opportunity to move up in the club rankings, and even someone at the bottom must believe they could beat someone with no experience at all."

"One spot above the bottom is at least no longer the bottom."

"Precisely."

Nariko frowned, but Reina was pleased to see she wasn't intimidated. "I have to admit, when you asked me if I wanted to give it a go, I didn't expect you intended to throw me right into a tournament."

"Of course not. You would have reconsidered your answer, and you would have chosen incorrectly."

"You seem like you're putting a lot of faith in Analysis when we're still not even sure I have it."

But Reina chuckled at that. "Not at all. I'm putting faith in a swordswoman that can fight demons without a transformation. For you, the drawn out steps of training and testing would be a waste of time."

The brunette's eyebrow raised in suspicion. "You wanted me handicapped."

"I want them to have half a chance." She tucked a lock of raven hair behind her ear. "They've been getting lazy lately, settling into their ways. If you can make it over halfway through, I can use that to light a fire under them."

Tamashini sighed as she considered the alternative. "But if we taught you how to fence first, not only would you just roll over them, but they would already know you have a natural talent for combat and would use that to excuse their losses."

"I see."

"Then let us get you suited up."

* * *

The brunette stood across from a boy a year ahead of her, though she only knew that because she had seen him before they each got into the fencing gear.

The cotton and mesh did a brilliant job of obscuring nearly all features of the duelists, and she couldn't help but think that, injuries go hang, she'd rather be without the stuffy protection. Everyone wore the gambeson-like doublet and pants, but only the current competitors wore the wire-like helmet, padded gloves and sensor-loaded vest.

The foils, themselves, were powered by rechargeable battery packs that plugged in underneath the guard. When they connected with the vest, the sensors would detect the minute electrical discharge and alert the judge by engaging the corresponding light on a portable box with a loud buzz.

The teacher that oversaw the class was the judge, and the brunette found she was a little surprised that it wasn't Sarasa. Miss Sada was so omnipresent in the girls' school lives that one could almost be fooled into thinking any other teachers were background characters, rather than anyone that actually did anything.

But no, he was apparently a literature teacher and a collegiate competitor in fencing, and had been delighted to share his passion for the sport with his students. He had a bit of a pretty-boy face she personally would have called French, but she didn't actually know his nationality.

Tamashini was sitting off to the side apart from the other club members surrounding the dueling area to watch, accompanied only by Tora who stood at her side like her personal knight. Yeah, she wasn't doing much to dissuade the royalty everyone treated her with.

She wondered if Reina even realized the impression she was giving; the raven-haired girl had always seemed embarrassed when her reputation was brought up and acted as if the deference was forced upon her.

She turned her attention back to her opponent, the worst fencer in the club.

No, she immediately scolded herself for jumping to that assumption. She only knew he was the lowest-ranked member, and certainly he had a firm grip on his foil, though if she had to nitpick, his stance was a little too wide and there was a bit too much wobble in how he held his blade.

She quickly double checked her own stance and grip to make sure she wasn't making a hypocrite of herself, even if only in her own head.

The teacher made the call to get ready, then, with a dramatic downward sweep of his arms, shouted for the contestants to begin.

... but his voice's echo had hardly faded from the gymnasium before mass mutterings filled the onlookers in the wake of an electronic buzz of an alarm.

The poor boy across from her had taken a heartbeat and a half to realize he'd already been struck by a lightning quick lunge to his heart.

Tamashini was apparently the only one in the club not to respond in shock. Even her little knight's jaw had fallen slack.

The students didn't have the many hours it would take for every match to take as long as a full official match, so they used a best of three rule for their club's round robins instead of first to fifteen.

Ironically, this made it much more like a traditional kendo match, but she doubted that was an intentional similarity. She even got a lecture on etiquette the club expected she'd received from Tamashini that had definitely been more from kendo than European fencing, but this was likely more to train good sportsmanship into the students than to push the sport in an Eastern direction.

Still, despite having seen it once already, it did the boy no good. The judge congratulated her, had them square off again and started the next round. The boy had clearly intended to duck down and to his right in anticipation of her lunge, but she had already tagged him in the same spot before his body began the motion.

The boy ripped his helmet off and threw it to the ground, storming off before the teacher could even finish making it official.

She quickly came to understand Tamashini's complaint about them being lazy as she made her way through half the club in similarly short order. Oh, sure, occasionally one would parry or duck and last another second or two, but none ever tagged her back.

The biggest problem seemed to be that none of them took it seriously. It was just a game to them. Of course, she had to remind herself that it was, in fact, a game. None of them were fighting for their lives, none of them were looking to become the next Zorro, heck, none of them were even expecting to take this skillset to a college degree.

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She was against a bunch of hobbyists and nothing more.

That gradually started to change as she moved into the second half of the robin's roster and encountered a steadily growing resistance. Tamashini's choice of language about how far she expected her to get had clearly been deliberate.

Still, with great effort and honed reactions, she still made it all the way to Tora without receiving a single tag.

The boy left Tamashini's side to speak with her while the match before theirs took place. "Kelly," he opened to get her attention as he approached, mesh helmet already under one arm. "Before I start, I figured I owed you an apology."

The brunette turned to meet him when her name was called, but her eyebrow went up at his words. "For what?"

"Honestly, I didn't think you had any business on the piste," he confessed. "The president said you hadn't ever done fencing before. I've never known her to lie, but ... perhaps she's been misinformed?"

Ah, that's what this was. The suggestive way he asked the question was a natural, You can tell me the truth, sort of tone. He didn't dare question his queen, so he was questioning the visiting jester.

"It's true," she said instead. "I've never done fencing in my life." After a moment's hesitation, she offered, "Some kendo, but not fencing."

That was a complete lie, of course. Nariko Kelly had never done kendo, either, but she was certain that she, herself, had studied it a great deal. Some, as a consequence, was true for neither of them. As an average between the two of them, however, she figured she could excuse it to soothe the vice-captain's ego.

It seemed to work. "Ah," he replied, as if that were some illuminating secret. "But then, why are you here instead of in the kendo club?"

"Trying something new." Back to honesty. A convincing alibi always rested on mixing the two in a way that the truth was the scaffolding to support the falsehoods. "It was Tamashini's idea, and I've never actually done kendo ... publicly." Another truth and a half-truth. She'd have to be careful of anything she hung on that second part.

"I understand," he nodded sympathetically. "A lot of people can get ... weird about assuming why you might take up a particular pastime."

She scoffed. "You don't need to mince words with me, Tora. You mean they might think I'm a nerd."

That got a laugh from him in return, if a short one. "Forgive me, I've been told I'm too soft-spoken."

"Eh, don't worry, a candy-coated tongue is a great asset for a knight."

"A knight, Kelly?"

She shrugged it off, though. "Don't worry about it, just the impression you give. Especially the way you stand next to Tamashini."

The boy blushed crimson instantly. "It's just station! I'm the vice-captain, I'm supposed to be standing with the captain!"

"Says the knight with a crush on the princess," she teased, but slipped her helmet on as the match before them wrapped up. Once it was secured, she slapped him on the shoulder. "Come on, we're up."

* * *

She wished she could say she'd teased the vice captain as a clever ruse to get him frustrated and prone to making a mistake, but even if that had been her attention, it very much failed. The boy was ten times the fencer of the member a rank below him, a dark-skinned girl with dreadlocks who had nearly driven her from the strip, and Tora came at her like he had something to prove.

But then, with Tamashini right there watching him fight the stranger that had beaten her way through the entire club roster, maybe he did.

Even though she lunged first, he brute forced his way through, shoving her foil away as he pushed in toward her. She had to break back to keep from being bowled over, and he pushed the opening that gave him with utmost aggression. He fought so differently from any other member of the club she'd faced so far that she kept misinterpreting where he was going to go.

She began to lose her footing, her upper body going back faster than her legs. She saw an opening. She thrust even as she tried to stop her fall.

The buzzer sounded, but she could feel his foil against her chest. They looked over, and both lights were on. Virtually simultaneous strikes.

"Point, Tora!" the teacher declared. "Right of way!"

Obviously. Right of way determined who could score by who was the aggressor, and that certainly hadn't been her.

The club members broke out in cheers at the smell of first blood, but the vice captain motioned with his hand for them to settle down as the two of them returned to their starting positions, but it was the teacher who raised his voice to be heard above them.

"Don't get so excited. It's still best of three."

Tora had a way of flicking his foil so that it whipped with more force than he was putting in. Learning from that display, the brunette pushed to exploit it for her own use the instant the next round started. Her first few blows were rough, but their foils were soon slapping against each other as the two fencers stood their ground, looking for an opening in the other's defense as they exchanged attack and defense.

She saw hers first. He took a hair too long to swing as he shifted his weight to his front leg. She knew before he truly started the motion he was going to pull back and lunge. The path of the foil nearly plotted itself to her very eyes, and she stepped to his inside as he committed to it. His foil lunged past her, while hers cleanly slapped against his side.

Mutterings returned to the audience of club members to replace their initial jubilation, but Tora returned to his starting position without comment. He didn't need to say anything. The determined rigidity of his posture spoke volumes.

The third time, he came at her completely differently, attempting to control her position with thrusts, while every time she attacked, he spun his foil around hers, forcing her to retreat to avoid entrapment. He was back in control of the match and he knew it.

She parried, countered, dodged, made him work for it as much as she possibly could. But she knew she was wearing him down. She could see him getting frustrated, hasty. If she could only endure ...

It was all a lie. The last time she ducked under and to the side of his thrust, he used the whip that he had previously only used for defense to slap his tip over her shoulder, behind her back and against her shoulder blade.

As the buzzer sounded, Tora turned away as he pumped his arm into the air, giving a cry of victory.

"No point!" the teacher declared. "Etiquette! Tora!"

... In his enthusiasm, he'd fallen prey to the club's more unique competitive rules that had more in common with kendo. The vice-captain barely suppressed his groan of frustration as he reluctantly returned to his starting point.

Unfortunately for him, his new tactics didn't avail him for a second time, now that she knew the end objective. Their exchanges were fast, but every time he went to try to open another shot, she moved in a way that denied him and forced him to retract quickly to defend against her counterattack. It wasn't long before she was wearing him down again, forcing him to exhaust his energy in attacks that never landed.

In a moment of clarity, she recalled Flare Witch's fight against Dakunaito that first night, the way he defended, not because he had to, but because she made it the easiest path to take. She was pretty sure bashing his face with her pommel was an illegal move, sadly, but she remembered to slip attacks in all the same.

They were little attacks at first, harmless little jabs that would have never closed but served to remind him that he couldn't only focus on attacking. The more he tired himself with his relentless assault, the bigger her attacks became.

The moment finally arrived where they were trading attacks equally, and she could see in his eyes through the mesh of the helmet that he understood what was happening.

And then the scales tipped. He began defending more as his assault flagged and hers gained momentum. It became a torrent of blows as a veritable foil storm pushed him back, past the middle, past his starting point, into the danger zone as retreating became the only way he could keep defending against her onslaught.

The buzzer sounded as her final blow lanced into his chest and finally drove him over the boundary as he landed with an anticlimactic thump onto his butt.

"Match point!" the teacher declared. "Kelly!"

The brunette took a moment to catch her breath before lowering her stance and pointing her foil down and to the right. She reached down to help the vice captain back to his feet, then stepped back from him again to hold her blade straight up before her as she bowed her head. "Thank you for the match."

Tora chuckled and pulled the helmet off, his matted hair showing how much the match had driven him to sweat. It was a bit of a sour chuckle, though, and he shook his head. "Damn, the speed you learn at is terrifying."

But then he turned back toward Reina and bowed his head. "I'm sorry, Miss President. I lost from my own hubris."

The raven-haired young woman seemed expressionless at first, but when the teacher began announcing the next match-up, she interrupted him.

"The next match is--"

"I will be fighting next," she declared, and despite the difference in volume next to the teacher's bellows, he went silent.

The brunette looked over at him, but it seemed like while he was trying to insist that the order had already been determined and had to be respected, he had trouble raising an argument against her.

Meanwhile, Reina stood and made her way over to the piste, her footsteps the only sound in the suddenly silent gymnasium. Only when she came to the opposing starting point did she speak again, her tone neutral and detached. "I didn't think you could make it past Tora."

"I nearly didn't," the brunette confessed.

"And it was his own fault," Tamashini agreed. "Yet I doubt he could beat you again."

She didn't answer that claim. How could she? Admitting that she could see through him now would only be seen as arrogant, but he would have to improve faster than her to overtake her again. As he was now, no, she was fairly certain he'd missed his chance.

Fortunately, Reina seemed to realize the impossibility of a civil answer and didn't wait for one. Though she'd carried her helmet up with her under her off arm, she tossed it to the side without preamble, letting it bounce and roll across the floor away from her. She pointed to the brunette's with her foil. "Take it off. The vest and gloves, too."

The brunette hesitated in confusion at the order, but then peeled her own helmet off and tossed it aside following the raven's example, then did the same with the gloves. The vest went last, though with more care to avoid damaging the internals. This left her, like Reina, in only the cloth doublet and pants.

Only when she finished complying did the club's captain continue. "I propose our match be determined thus: No helmets, no target zones, no boundaries. We fight until one can no longer fight or surrenders, and the one who loses concedes the formal match."

The mutterings from around the gymnasium returned once more. Even those who were getting their own matches delayed seemed to have forgotten the slight at the new development. Certainly, no one was going out of their way to dissuade it, not even the teacher.

Slowly, the brunette nodded. "Agreed." Whether she wanted it or not, it seemed like the only path she would be allowed to go. At the very least, it meant some of the chains would be released from her.

Reina raised her weapon toward her. "Then, Kelly, one last time ... En garde!"

There was no pronouncement to start. Reina waited only long enough for the brunette to ready herself before she attacked. The way she moved was similar to Tora, and it was obvious who he had sought to emulate, but that was the only similarity between them. If Tora had been a knight, then Reina had suddenly become a monster.

The brunette had faced this level of power only once before, when she sparred with Natsumi. Like the redhead, Reina didn't use weapons in her alter ego of Sacred Witch, and like Flame Witch before her, more was the pity.

Unlike Natsumi's direct and heavy style of individual blows, however, Reina sought an overwhelming ferocity of attacks to penetrate as deeply into her opponent as her piercing black eyes. Even as her arm fired again and again like an overdriven piston, her dispassionate gaze never wavered from the brunette's face.

She couldn't allow herself to get overwhelmed by the sheer volume of attacks. She thought if she could at least pull away, she could avoid them as a general area, but they moved with her. It seemed impossible, but every blow Reina launched was not just a blitz, but individually targeted.

She would parry, strike back, try to ply openings, but like Natsumi, the black-haired upperclassman was quick to deflect. Even with her eyes locked onto the brunette, she never seemed to overlook the slightest movement from her.

"What are you doing, Kelly?"

The council president asked the question without even breaking stride in her assault, as easily as if they were still sitting at her desk.

"I told you, no target zones, no boundaries. Give me your all."

The brunette grimaced at that. Tamashini was right, she was trying too hard to keep thinking of it like a fencing match. Alright, then, time to play a little dirty.

She let the captain drive her back toward the stands as the club members seated there nearly fled from them. Better to take the high ground and force Reina to pursue her uphill. Better to make the advantage of leverage and reach hers, at least for a short while.

Once she was halfway up the bleachers, she reached under the guard of her foil and ripped out the battery pack, then promptly chucked it in Reina's face. The raven-haired leader raised her arm over her face in reflex as the brunette used the expanded space to better grip her weapon in two hands and brought it down on Tamashini's gloveless wrist.

The captain gave a yelp of pain and jumped back, but kept her grip on her weapon, her gaze more wary at the underhandedness she had requested, but the shorter fighter wasn't done yet.

The brunette pursued her opponent by leaping from the stairs down at her with an overhand blow, but Reina slid to her right rather than stay in place. That was fine, expected, even. Weapon of choice or no, the foil in Reina's hand was still only a fencing foil, and the worst she could have done by taking the opening was thrust it at the brunette's chest, protected as it was by gambeson.

Since the condition was to get the opponent to surrender or render them unable to continue fighting, the blow would have been pointless, and she would have taken a blow to the head or gone toppling to the floor with the brunette's mass atop her in exchange.

The moment the brunette landed on all fours at the base of the stands, she spun and sent her leg out in a sweep to catch the raven's feet and yank them out from under her.

One aspect of Reina's that was not like Homura was that she was clearly inexperienced in unarmed combat, and the look of surprise on her face as she started going backwards was delightful to see.

But then she bent back with it and got one hand under her. The brunette thought she caught ever the slightest flash from under that hand just before Reina launched herself off of the impromptu handspring and back to her feet a dozen arm spans away from her opponent.

It was the freshman's turn to look surprised. Did that cheater really just use magic to recover?! True, she was told that witches couldn't use much without transforming, but Reina was the oldest and most experienced of them. It seemed that came with a few tricks up her sleeve, so long as she could pull them off subtly enough not to draw attention to it.

The one trick the brunette knew was way too flashy to get away with.

With nothing to do but push, the freshman threw herself back into the fray, leveraging her two-handed grip to brute force through Reina's blitzes. Unfortunately, the light weight of the fencing foil meant it didn't really translate two hands into extra force efficiently, making the trade off of lowered reach much less appealing.

Like Tora before her, she knew what was happening long before it was clear to the onlookers, even as they chased each other back and forth across the breadth of the gymnasium and across every remotely traversable surface it contained.

By the time it ended, Reina had backed her into a physical cinder block corner. With one final swipe, she hooked her foil under the brunette's guard and slapped the weapon away from her, and then the point of her foil was at the underclassman's throat.

"I understand better now the issue in your initial sparring with Homura," Tamashini told her, the taller girl's eyes still that piercing, unflinching black. "Nariko's body is fit, but it is not trained for close combat."

The student president narrowed her gaze as she punctuated her conclusion. "These are your limits with such a body. Until you improve it, you can go no further."

The brunette set her jaw at that, struggling not to take offense, but any protests she might have raised were interrupted by enthusiastic laughter that had disturbed even the other members from celebrating their captain's victory.

A small-framed girl with glasses that took up most of her face was standing there near the door to the gymnasium, though she had surely not come through it.

"Amazing, Prez!" she praised as she clapped for her hero. "I always knew you were strong, but it's so wonderful to see you put that bully in her place like that!"

Both girls turned toward this new arrival, who shadows seemed to cling to despite the overhead lights, with shock and surprise, though only Reina found her words.

"Hisoka?!"