After that things really heated up, and we traded dirty tricks for a while. Her neurostims could make my muscles lock up if her hands got within a few cems of me, or else tickle me mercilessly. I could coat my skin in a film of frictionless superfluid oil, and still make any part of it cling to anything I wanted with a nearly unbreakable grip. We could both use our fields in concert with our muscles, or as a shield against each other’s blows.
Finally we broke apart, breathing heavily, and I realized we had an audience. Most of the older men had stopped their training to watch us, along with one new arrival.
“Very impressive, Miss Long,” Akio said. “Although your choice of training attire is a bit unconventional.”
Suddenly I was very glad that my dress was expensive smart matter, and not some cheap fiber blend like the shifts I’d worn at the orphanage. By this point a shift would have been soaked through with sweat, clinging to me and probably half transparent. But my dress was as clean and dry as if it had just come out of the fabber. With its active cooling feature running full blast I wasn’t sweating much either, and somehow it even kept me from getting all smelly.
“Practice as you mean to fight,” I said simply. “An enemy isn’t going to wait for me to change into a gi before they attack me.”
“Well said,” he replied, although I noticed that he was wearing a traditional gi just like everyone else. “Your retainer’s mastery of the Furious Angel techniques is impressive, but your own style is more difficult to place.”
“You’re guess is as good as mine, my lord,” I admitted. “It’s innate, and so far no one has been able to figure out where I came from.”
“Please, call me Akio. Will you indulge my curiosity with a match?”
He held a pair of sheathed swords in one hand. Long blades that the datanet identified as a modern variation on the ancient katana style, although these didn’t have real edges. Practice weapons, then. But a more serious sort that the wooden things I’d seen the other men playing with before.
“I’d be happy to, Akio. And please, call me Alice. But I have to admit, I’ve never even held a sword before.”
“Then this will be a learning experience for us both.”
He tossed me one sheathed weapon. Emla stepped back, giving us room, and I hefted it thoughtfully. Feeling out how it would move. What the weight would to do my balance. How to strike, and defend. Billions of possibilities flashed through my mind’s eye, most of them discarded as soon as they appeared. But others coalesced into chains of movement. Clusters of probability that were worth my full attention, and vast regions that weren’t. I could do this.
“Blades only?” I asked, stepping back and copying the pose he’d assumed. Wait, no, he was taller than me, and a lot heavier with all those muscles and internal armor layers. I adjusted my feet slightly, and flexed my knees a little more. Perfect.
“Unarmed strikes and grapples are allowed, but no hidden weapons or other tricks,” he amended. “Any blow that would disable an unenhanced human counts for a point. An advantage of three points decides a match. Those are the standard Masu-kai dueling rules.”
I nodded, noting the way he’d adjusted his own stance slightly. I realized he’d been ready to take it easy on me before, but after seeing me read his stance he’d decided to take me seriously instead.
Why did that feel so good? Was I that worried about what some lowlife crime boss thought of me? Well, he was a pretty yummy crime boss. But this would be a terrible time to get distracted, so I told myself to pay no attention to the way his muscles flexed when he moved.
Okay, maybe a little attention. One thread. Two, tops. I was good at multitasking.
“Ready? Begin!”
I exploded into movement, crossing the distance between us in a single leap. My blade flashed out in a clean arc that combined the draw with a disemboweling blow, but he must have been expecting something like that. He smoothly slid left out of my blade’s arc the instant my feet left the floor, and tried to take my head off while I couldn’t dodge. I parried with the scabbard, a neat trick I almost hadn’t thought of, and the impact sending me flying halfway across the mat.
Good thing, because I needed the extra milliseconds that gave me to prepare for his next attack.
He was good. Really, really good. Even faster than Emla, and at least twice as strong. I couldn’t block or parry in the normal sense at all. It was all dodging, or else putting my sword where the impact of his next blow would help move me where I wanted to be. But what really made this hard was the incredible skill he displayed.
I could see every possible way either of us could move at any given moment, and pick an effective counter to anything he did. But trying to look three or four steps ahead to outsmart him didn’t work. The sheer number of options we both had made it impossible to check every possible way an exchange could play out, and he didn’t just blindly pick the ‘optimum’ move like a bot would.
Instead he did complicated feints and misdirections, trying to lure me out of position for a surprise attack. He threw in intentionally pointless flourishes to distract me, only sometimes they had a hidden purpose that I barely caught in time. He’d spent huge amounts of time and computing power exploring the space of possible fights that we were dancing through, and he took every opportunity to lure me into regions of the possibility space that put me at a disadvantage.
It still took nearly two minutes before he managed to slide his blade around mine at just the right angle to send it flying from my hand. The follow-up punch would have crushed my throat if he hadn’t pulled it at the last second.
I twirled around the blow, brushing past him within easy grappling distance so I could reach out and snag the spinning shape of my sword with my manipulator field. He reversed his sword and tried to stab me in the back, but my smaller size made me nimble enough to evade the attack. I got behind him, sword in hand, and then we were both hurriedly spinning and backpedaling.
He glanced at the sword. “How did you do that?”
“Manipulator field,” I grinned. “That’s allowed as long as I’m not boosting myself or hitting you with it, right?”
“I see you’ve been reading our dueling rules. But fine manipulation at three and a half meters, with an emitter that can’t be more than six cems across? There are no enhancement projects in the Kerak Sector capable of matching that.”
We circled each other slowly, feeling for an opening.
“Yeah, I’m pretty awesome,” I admitted. “It’s actually a full-body emitter network, though. I can stop small arms fire for a few seconds, before my power cell runs dry.”
“Do you need to stop and recharge?”
I blinked, and barely had time to realize he was teasing me before I had to frantically evade another attack.
I was learning, though. His second touch took three minutes, and then I managed to hit him back. We broke apart again, and I realized I was panting. I was pushing myself to the limit, and it felt amazing.
“You aren’t simply copying my style,” Akio observed.
“Of course not. That would be stupid. You obviously know it better than anyone, so you’d just use it to beat me. Besides, I’m not strong enough to fight the way you do. I have to do more of a float and sting approach.”