---Master---

---???????’s perspective---

“Is this a joke?!” I say as the short, Asian man with dark hair and a dark beard walks toward me “Or are you that delusional, little man?!”

I gesture with a clawed hand to the blonde, struggling to free herself from under a quarter ton of unconscious, knuckledragging savage and metal armor and the herculean redhead hanging limply from my other hand, his, previously pretty, face mashed to a bloody, toothless pulp!

He has no way of knowing about the blue skinned subHuman who ran away after getting its arm broken but its absence also speaks to how utterly outclassed he is.

“There is no delusion here…” declares the short man “…I see what you have done to my students and I intend to stop you before you can do any more.”

“These are your students, are they?” I ask, my interest piqued “You’re some kind of fighter?”

His left eyebrow twitches upward and he answers “Some kind, yes.”

“Seems to me like you didn’t bring a weapon…”

“I brought no weapon, bar those of my own body.” he confirms.

“Sooo… you wouldn’t be able to do much about it if I were to just, I don’t know, kill this guy right now!?” I say, leveling four straight, clawed fingers towards the big guy’s throat.

“I wouldn’t, correct. You could do that… if you so doubted your ability to best a ‘little’ 117 year old man in combat that you feel it necessary to tie up loose ends first, that is…” he answers, nonchalant.

This fucking guy!

His clearly trying to goad me… and it’s working!

I release the tension I was using to suspend the big guy off the ground with and he falls to the floor like a sack of potatoes.

“Alright, you little fucker! You wanna die so bad, I’ll oblige you!” I say, turning, bodily, to walk towards the infuriatingly calm man.

He takes one of his hands from behind his back and raises a finger.

“Would you allow me a few moments to remove my vambraces?” he asks, like this is a friendly sparring match!

“You don’t wanna keep those on, old timer?… You might get scratched otherwise(!)” I say, flexing my durasteel claws to demonstrate.

“I should like to remove them if you’ll permit it…”

“Fine… take them off if you think it’ll help you(!)” I answer, layering my voice with enough scorn to make very clear what I think having the vambraces either on or off does for his chances.

He gives a dignified nod and says “You, like myself, seem to be a man who takes combat very seriously… I trust you wouldn’t do anything so devious as attack me while I’m distracted and my guard is down?”

I bring a claw to my chestplate and make an X “Cross my heart, old man(!)”

He gives another statesmanlike nod and brings his left hand to the fastenings on his right wrist.

When they’re loose enough, he wraps his hand around the metal and pulls it off, leaving his arm bare.

Still holding his right vambrace in his left hand, he begins unfastening the other one before pulling that off with his right.

It seems like he’s taken his attention entirely off of me.

I think about attacking him but decide against it, not because I promised not to, but because I don’t want or need to rely on underhanded tactics…

Killing him while he takes his armor off would imply I was afraid to fight him for real… I don’t like that!

Extending his arms at shoulder level, he locks eyes with me and drops them to the pavement.

They don’t bounce or roll, they just hit the ground with a metallic *thud* that suggests they were pretty damn heavy!

“You ready?” I sneer at the man standing 14 inches shorter than me.

“Almost…” he says, pressing his right knuckles into the flat of his left palm and bowing to me “…now I’m ready.”

It’s almost sweet!

The old coot thinks this is a dojo match!

Almost makes me want to take it easy on him… Almost!

“Begin!” he announces immediately followed by me aiming a clawed strike, powerful enough to rip through sheetmetal, at his face.

--- Shí Dǎo Yuán’s perspective---

As the lethal blow streaks toward me, my leg shoots forward, both dipping my head 1.5cm below the path of this skeletal cyborg’s attack and allowing me to hook the back of his right ankle with my foot.

I yank it out from under him and there is an instant’s surprise visible in his body language… Then, before gravity has time to assert itself, his torso curls rearward with unnerving speed and flexibility to allow him to plant both of his palms on the ground and launch a narrowly dodged kick with his left leg, as he performs a backward handstand flip and lands on his feet.

He shortens his limbs to make himself more stable and compact.

His guard and posture inform me that he’s taking me a lot more seriously than he was a moment ago.

I cannot afford to underestimate him, either.

Undeniably, the impenetrability of this man’s armoured body, the power being provided by his actuators, the weaponry in the form of his clawed digits and the acuity of his artificial senses make this one of the most threatening opponents I’ve ever faced in all my hundred and seventeen years.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

Perhaps the most threatening, if only for the evident ruthlessness of his killing intent.

The first time I fought Shí Wèi Qi (the woman who would become my Shīfu) the gap between our respective skills was much wider but, when she laid me on my back, letting me taste defeat for the first time in my young life, she, obviously, did not strike the final blow.

I can’t expect any such magnanimity from this man.

The monstrous man who is, to me, what an average Human is to a gardenworlder, swings a bonesplintering kick at my midsection. The light gravity allows me to jump clear of it and launch myself backward with a kick to his rock solid chest.

The kick has little effect on him, not that I expected it would.

There is much of this man’s story that I can read in his stance, in his strikes and in his mechanical body.

I assess him to be in his sixties… he engaged in sport shooting and hunting in his youth and young adulthood, he’s a veteran of the War… Marine branch and, if I’m not mistaken, one of the Special Brigades… one of the more ethically dubious ones I would wager.

There’s one more thing…

“I see you have lost someone.” I state, calmly.

His whole stance shifts as he hisses “What did you say?!”

“Multiple someone’s, actually… A family?”

“You…!” he tries to interrupt but I keep speaking.

“A family was ripped away from you unjustly and, ever since, you’ve sought to make yourself invulnerable so as never to feel that way again. You learned to fight, you replaced your flesh and bone with metal and actuators, you eschewed all loving company so that you could shield yourself from evermore feeling the sting of grief… Am I right?”

His body straightens up and I imagine that, if there were still flesh on his face, he would be scowling as he says “You don’t think it’s a bit of a cheap play, resorting to psychological warfare, old timer?”

I shrug “You have a skull for a head… I don’t know what that is if not psychological warfare(!)”

“Fair, fair. But… your little mindgames won’t work on me!” he declares, defiantly.

“No… I’m quite sure you believe yourself to be as fortified emotionally as you are physically…” I mock.

He affects a laugh before asking “Is your plan to bore me to death, old man(?!)… ’Cuz it’s working!”

“My apologies, let us get back to trying to kill eachother like civilised people(!)” I smirk.

“You don’t need to tell me twice!” he answers, menace in his voice, before lunging forward to aim six more swipes at me.

Five of them I evade. One catches my cheek.

We fly apart and I bring my hand to my face. It comes away slick and red.

This is the first time I’ve seen my own blood in nearly a century!

The man brings his jet black, metallic claw, dripping with my blood and marbled with an intricate pattern like that of wood grain, to his face.

He parts his organic teeth to reveal a second row of sharp, triangular, durasteel teeth behind them.

In his mouth is a disconcertingly biological looking, grey, synthetic tongue.

He runs his left index claw over the artificial gustaoceptor, streaking it with my blood.

“Hmmmmm… AB+, no recent admixture from any primitive cousin species, good general health, no cancers and… Ah! There they are!… Highly elevated levels of cortisol, catecholamine, vasopressin and epinephrine… also called adrenaline… You’re not as calm as you pretend, are you old man!?” he says with malicious glee.

I cock an eyebrow and answer “And you managed to keep a straight face when you reproached me for my mind games(!)”

He gestures to the fleshless frontage of his skull and says “Works wonders for my poker game… not having facial muscles anymore(!)” before shifting his clawed feet from plantigrady to digitigrady, opening his arms, his palms facing forward and his claws curled, bending his body into a predatory crouch and saying “Time to finish this!” and exploding forward.

He was not wrong when he said I wasn’t anywhere near as calm as I appear.

This man is much stronger than Túdì Fāng, unconscious in her armour, and certainly Túdì Míng, semiconscious with his face pulped.

He’s faster than Túdì Tuun and more versatile than Túdì Brunhilda.

With the miniature fusion core that he presumably has powering his body, my bones would be dust long before he fatigues.

He doesn’t have the grace or elegance in his Art that any of them do and his defence is fairly nonexistent but one doesn’t particularly need to defend when one’s entire body is built out of the most durable material known to science.

All in all, I have never feared for my life as much as I do in this moment.

Buddha preserve me.

I have to pray my strategy works.

I have to rely on having antagonised him enough that he won’t want to kill me instantly but, instead, will want to cause me suffering before he ends my life.

His limbs howl through the air as I avoid and evade them by millimetres each time.

Actually, I don’t avoid all of them…

I’m nicked several more times by those razor claws.

Exsanguination puts a much tighter time limit on this fight than I would have from just my stamina.

I give myself minutes before I no longer have the strength to carry out my risky gamble.

It has to be now!

I leave him an opening, naturally enough that he could believe it was an accident.

His right hand shoots out to grasp my neck.

As I hoped, he doesn’t instantly claw out my windpipe, instead clamping down, digging in his claws only hard enough to draw beads of blood and lifting my feet from the ground.

I play at helplessness… I don’t have to do too much acting.

“I’ll give you credit, old timer… you gave me a good fight!… Shame you couldn’t have lasted a little longer!” he says, opening his mechanical mouth to show me the metal teeth behind his enamel ones.

I’m waiting for one last act of arrogance before I make my move.

He obliges me, extending all four of his limbs which he has had at full retraction the entire battle.

Now standing more than 2.3m tall and holding me off the ground at arm’s length, he is utterly vulnerable to the move I’ve been planning since I walked into this fight.

I swing my body around his arm, freeing my neck (as well as cutting it up quite extensively).

The power with which I throw myself toward him pulls him forward in the same axis and opposite direction.

If his limbs were still retracted, his centre of mass would have been lower to the ground and he likely would have been able to stay standing.

With extended limbs, though, I am able to pull his point of balance out of his base of support and he topples forward.

I land atop his back, locking the joints of his right arm, and quickly throw my left hand to his left elbow, keeping that arm pressed into the ground.

He swivels his head 180° to look up at me and screams, furiously gnashing his mechanical jaws.

I know I have seconds at most before he frees himself and so I act fast!

I throw all my weight, all my strength, all my being into pulling his locked right arm across his back in a motion it is not designed to perform.

The individual pieces of armour might be impregnable… but the joints… the joints are always a weakspot!

The actuators groan and squeal as they are leveraged with more force than could ever be produced without a nearly metre long lever arm.

They finally reach their breaking point and his whole right arm ruptures from his body.

The release of the opposing tension causes me to roll over his left side and into a fighting stance, freeing him to stand back up.

The (now) three limbed man launches himself to his feet and wheels on me.

I cast the disarticulated arm behind me, well out of reach of either of us, and raise my right hand toward him, my palm facing down.

Even dismembered, this man is still a serious threat!

I cock an eyebrow, affecting a smug expression, and flick the fingers of my right hand toward myself in an overhand beckon.

The bluff I’m making is one that, if he sees through, I will die…

He must believe that I could genuinely do this all day.

The monstrous man looks behind me to where his arm lies on the ground, looks to his empty arm socket and then looks to me, assessing.

Then, without a word, he spins on his heels and beats a retreat, seeming to have evaluated the changed odds unfavourably.

Even if I weren’t moments from collapsing, I would have no chance of catching him when he’s running at that speed.

He’s long gone when my equilibrioception informs me that I’ve lost my feet a moment before I feel my body impact the ground.

I roll over to see the other members of Elysium I was in the company of, when we came upon this scene, running to me from where I told them to stay hidden.

The disembodied arm is thrashing about on the ground where I threw it.

Mr Kelly confidently bends down and snatches it by the back of the wrist, quickly taking the shoulder joint in hand as well.

“Are you alright, Master Yuán?!” asks Ms Stone, her voice strangely distant… like I’m hearing it underwater.

“I believe, child… that I would benefit from some medical attention.” I say in answer.