The Battle You Can Never Win

Years ago, aboard a poorly maintained ship, in a dimly lit cargo hold with stained mats haphazardly thrown on the ground, a young girl glared at the old man before her. Her breath came in ragged heaves, her clothes were stained with sweat, and her exposed skin was covered in welts from the older mans bamboo blade. She was on the ground while the man was standing up straight, his breathing only slightly faster than normal but otherwise gave no hint that only moments before he had been swinging his practice sword like a demented blender.

The girl tried to stand but instead fell back down. “Why, the fuck are you making me do all this.” She growled at the man. Earning her a quick smack to the side for her foul mouth and impertinence. “Fuck!” she cursed, earning another strike in the process.

She continued to glare at the old bastard, most people usually flinched under her hateful glare. Especially the weak prey-like Xenos, they always coward at her wrath. But the old bastard didn’t. He just watched her with a calm and patient gaze.

The man was silent for a while before he sighed and looked to the pipes and looses wires along the ceiling. “You ask why I make you train? Why I push you unlike all the others? The better question is why you resist my teaching?” he looked down at her again. “You are taller than most men, you are naturally stronger than a girl has any right to be, and your fire is enough to melt iron. And yet you resist my attempts to polish those advantages. By all rights you should seek every chance to better yourself. And yet you don’t.”

“What’s the fuckin point? Like you said, I’m strong, and being already human makes me faster and tougher than everything out there. So what’s the point in training with stupid swords?”

He frowned, but didn’t strike her again for her foul mouth. “You are stronger than most creatures in this galaxy. But not all. The Kaydic are as strong as a grizzly, and if they get a good charge going they can pass through brick walls like they were wet paper. The Balikstro are faster on four legs than we can ever be on two. Any Uplifted Mammaloid could easily disembowel you with a careless swipe. And that isn’t mentioning the true monsters out there like the Aunviry.”

“Okay, yeah they’re all better. So what’s the point in training if they’re always going to be better than me? I’m only human.” She whined as she felt the growing bruise on her side.

“Because you don’t train for the battle that you can win, but for the battle that you’ll always lose. Because on those days the only thing that will keep you alive is training, good reflexes, and hardened combat experience. They are how you will win the battle you can never win.”

“That doesn’t make sense old man.” The girl snarked.

The air cracked, a brown sword blurred, and the girl let out a yelp as her ass was struck by a Shinai.

The old man who decided to be her mentor continued. “And the only way you get there is by training every day until your hands bleed and your legs give out.”

The girl glared at the old man, but she saw the sense in the words. Even if she hated the old man and his stupid sword. “Fine, but can we call it here. I have a cargo shift tomorrow.”

He looked down at her hands a tilted his head. “Your hands aren’t bleeding yet.” He said blandly as if remarking on the weather.

Daisey groaned, but got up anyways.

The old bastard Mizuno really did make her work until her hands began to bleed before letting her crawl off to her hammock in the sweltering space above the engine bay. She only got a few hours of sleep before the ship docked with the pirate capital and she had to spend the next ten hours moving cargo off the Black Saint.

And after that, when she had finally gotten to sit for a few minutes Mizuno found her and dragged her back to his ‘dojo’ for another round.

She had hated it at the time. Hated him. Hated the shitty rusty ship. Hated almost everyone one onboard. And hated those stupid bamboo swords.

But in time the pain paid off, and those skills that had been beaten into her the hard way saved her life when Greyson’s crazy bitch of a lieutenant tried to kill Daisey in some back alley on Parox. And later those same skills allowed her to best the men she had eventually called Sensei instead of Bastard.

~~~*~~~

It was strange to feel nostalgic for a time where everything sucked, and you hated everyone around you. But fighting Zera again brought back those bittersweet memories. She had hated Mizuno so much back then, but the man who had decided to mentor her eventually became one of the most influential figures in her life. Aster may hate her father and everything about him, but she couldn’t ever hate the heritage he had unwittingly tied her too. Because it was the same culture Mizuno had loved with all his heart. Warts and all.

Zera fought like a deranged beast. Slashing and stabbing with wild abandon. But while she had received some training to polish out her blind aggression, she never took Mizuno’s philosophy to heart. Greyson had ordered Mizuno to share his teaching with Zera just like he did with Daisey. But where Daisey, now Astarte, had accepted his ideas of training for the battle you’ll always lose top heart.

Zera hadn’t.

Zera learned how to cut better and how to save her strength. But once she had learned that she used her strength and youth to overpower Mizuno-sensei in sparring matches. While Daisey had restrained her own strength where she could so as to better learn Mizuno’s skill and techniques.

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Even when after she had fought off Zera and took her spot as Greyson’s right hand she still trained until her hands bled. Even when she left the Terran Pirates and drifted around with her mother she trained. And when she met Karega and got a ship of her own she continued to train for the battle she would never win.

It was that mindset that let her finally surpass her old mentor during their final battle on the central Temple of Temple city. The very same mindset that let her match blows with a vile abomination like Kazlum and his brood. A literal battle she had no right ever winning. And it was the same teachings that she would use to beat this cyborg blast from the past.

Zera’s metal exterior was too tough for Astarte to cut. And it was highly unlikely that Astarte would ever exhaust her. But while she failed to land any actual wounds on her opponent, Zera the Butcher couldn’t land any on Astarte.

Zera aimed her mantis like blades at the kinks in Aster’s armor, but Aster’s reflexes and agility was enough to dodge and deflect Zera’s attacks.

But time was not on her side in this fight. Human endurance was legendary and superior to anything any other biological species could replicate. But no amount of sweat or anaerobic exertion would ever match the ceaseless movements of a machine.

Zera also had plenty of tricks hidden within her robotic limbs. The extra power in her legs had nearly bowled Astarte over when she triggered it as their blades were crossed. A third use had allowed her to dart to Astarte’s and strike at her thigh. Zera had found a kink in her armor, but a single step back had spared Astarte from any real damage.

Her leg felt warm and sticky as blood trailed down. But it was only a flesh wound and nothing that would hinder her mobility.

That attack had finally allowed Astarte to see exactly how Zera kept leaping forward. Somehow she was building up energy in her leg which could be released. A joint opened around where a bulging calf should have been and allowed her to double the length of her leg and gave her explosive forward momentum when used right. In the heat of battle Astarte couldn’t make heads or tails of the mechanism, she saw wires, tubes, and what looked like a hydraulic valve thing. She didn’t need to understand it at the moment though, right now knowing there was a way past the tough metal shell and into some more vulnerable internals was all that mattered.

The assassins’ arms also had a similar ability. But instead of explosively doubling the length of her arm Zera could have curved blade on her forearm launch forward in a powerful stabbing motion. Astarte dodged one of those attacks and saw the blade punch through the concrete of a nearby building. Zera had been stuck in the wall for only a second as she used the leg extension to pull her out and launch her back into melee with Astarte.

Zera also had a wider range of motion than Astarte was used to seeing in a human shoulder joint. When Astarte had rolled under a swing and came up for a slash at her exposed back the other arm was capable of swinging a full 180° backwards and deflecting her blow.

The way the arm had rotated in the joint had unnerved Astarte. She would have shivered in horror if had been given a moment to do so.

Those tricks had surprised Astarte the first time she saw them. And only quick thinking kept her alive. But once she saw them, she was capable of accounting for them and making her plans around them. She had fought enough alien opponents to know how to compensate for strange physiologies. The Aunviry for example had been far stranger to deal with than this borged-out human woman.

Sparks rang from their clashes and Astarte began to look for any more surprises. But as the fight stretched on Astarte began to suspect that Zera had already played her hand. And if she was reserving something then it was probably something she could only do once. With the factors accounted for, Astarte began to plan her actual counterattack, no more probing.

She couldn’t do much about the powerful arm attacks besides dodge, and couldn’t hope her armor could take the hit. The legs presented a weak point, but not one easy to get at. She would have to bait Zera into a launching attack and then sidestep fast enough to stab into her leg. A risky maneuver.

She thought about the full rotational ability in the arm joint. She didn’t know much about engineering, but she remembered some of Alwen’s lectures on the shoulder joint area after the Battle for the Confederacy. Alwen had to reset several bones in that region and she had taken the time to explain everything instead of just doing it. It was a complicated joint, and already prone to coming out of its socket. Did enhancing that range of motion come with any added structural weakness?

It was an idea.

As the fight drew on Astarte began to feel Zera speed up as her strikes became more and more sure. Astarte realized there was another blatant weakness that Zera had carried with her from the days she was fully human. Her mind.

Zera had a mercurial temper, plenty of triggers, and was highly unstable. And Astarte knew how to use all that to her advantage.

“You wanna know the funny part.” Astarte said in between blows. “Greyson didn’t even care that you were gone.” She taunted in between breaths. There was a reason most real combat didn’t have witty banter or heart felt speeches between foes. Every breath counted and wasting it on speaking was stupid. But she judged it to be worth the effort.

“Didn’t even question me about. Just said ‘Zera’s gone, now you will guard my back’” Astarte teased. “Then not even a week later I was second in command and got to sleep in his comfy bed.” She gave Zera a sloppy self-satisfied grin.

In reality Daisey hadn’t wanted to be Greyson’s guard, nor sleep in the same bed as a forty something man with the reputation for fucking anything with a hole and a heart beat. But she had little choice in the matter if she wanted to stay alive and keep working with the Terran Pirates.

The assassin’s eyes flared “And then you killed him like the deceptive whore you are!” she roared with another predicable jab.

“Of course I did, I refused to be the latest women he ruined and dumped into the gutter.” Astarte countered as she side stepped the blow. She was really glad Mizuno-sensei drilled her foot work so often, it was paying dividends at the moment. “Face it, your days were numbered. If it wasn’t me it would have been him.”

“LIAR!” Zera roared as she overextended again.

It didn’t offer Astarte the opening she looking for, so instead she went for a different sort of weak point. No matter how much her body changed there was one place that had to stay mostly organic.

No one fucked with the brain, not the Toy man, not the Union, and not the people who rebuilt Zera. It was too delicate to touch and far too complex. Just wiring in an advanced cybernetic eyeball to the optic nerve had caused a knock-on effect in Astarte’s head. And that was just a peripheral change.

The hilt of Tenken rammed into Zera’s face, smacking the same place she had dented earlier. There was a thud, like the sound of a dropped metal can, and then the sound of shattering glass. Zera stumbled back and put a hand up to her face where Astarte’s strike had warped the metal enough to loosen up her left eye out of its artificial eye socket. The eye had fallen and shattered at Astarte’s feet, and it now leaked a white fluid.

Zera looked up and Astarte saw the strange deformed metal plate of her face all scrunched up on one side. Half her lip was pulled up in a permanent smile while the more mobile part of her face scowled. She charged right back at Astarte and her right arm splint down the middle, Astarte saw the prongs of a stun weapon race towards her just as the other arm came up for a slash at her face. Astarte stood her ground, took the prongs, and lifted arm to intercept the blade.

The electricity didn’t feel like waves of fire like she had expected, but instead like all her muscles just got pulled at once. She felt her knees go weak as they wanted to buckle. But she gritted her teeth, remained on her feet, and took the pain. This was nothing compared to when she caught in that Egh’ahd sneak attack, nor when she fought Kazlum and had been bitch slapped across a whole room. This was a pain she could handle.

And compared to the electricity coursing through he the Mantis blade in her arm was nothing.

With one arm occupied in tasing her, and the other wedged into the bone of her forearm Astarte knew she wouldn’t get another chance like this. She grabbed the bladed arm with her other hand and with a twist of her hips, threw the Cyborg over her shoulder.

The assassin hit the ground with a thud and Astarte moved foot on her back.

The blade in her arm cut back upwards, got caught in the plates of her arm guard, and snapped off by the hinge. The pain in the arm grew too much to bear so she let that arm fall limp as her other arm held onto the assassin now beneath her feet and pulled. Zera let out a scream that hit the far range of human vocal cords and dipped into a sound only possible in dogs, dolphins, and machines. It even began to stutter like a corrupted audio file.

Even her voice was fake.

Then there was a pop and rip, and the arm came clean off.

Astarte stood there holding the still clothed arm in her hands as white fluids leaked out of the cyborgs open joint. Astarte glanced to the fake arm in her hands then down to the struggling cyborg, and with little hesitation lifted the arm and proceeded to beat the womans head in with her own arm.

Or she would have if a heavily distorted voice hadn’t interrupted her bludgeoning.

“FREEZE!”

Astarte turned to stare at the cloaked black figure of the Arbiter aiming a pulse rifle right at her.

Astarte then raised her hands above her head, still holding the prosthetic arm. “It was self defense” Astarte said to the unwavering gaze of the Arbiter. A flicker of her eye into the Ultraviolet showed the scowling face of a much-recovered Rachel glaring at both of them.