[ Ratha Guild – Combat Wing, Gymnasium, Floor 1 ]
The match had been going for six minutes.
Arlen knew because he had been watching for six minutes, which was roughly five minutes and fifty seconds longer than he had intended to stop. He had come down to the gymnasium to run a quick check on the lower-ranking raid members before the meeting with Veda – standard practice, ten minutes on a normal day.
This was not turning out to be a normal day.
Beside him, Rena had gone very still. Not the ordinary stillness of someone standing quietly – the sharp stillness of someone whose full attention had been captured and hadn't been returned yet. Her arms were loosely crossed. Her eyes hadn't moved from the mat below.
Arlen leaned against the observation window and watched.
The guide – small, compact, black hair in two braids that were currently flying in every direction – was dodging Julia Agnato. Julia sparred aggressively with everyone. That wasn't unusual. What was unusual was that the guide was still moving. Six minutes in, Julia going at what Arlen estimated was seventy percent output, and the guide had not taken a single hit.
Not a graze. Not a glancing blow. Nothing.
She moved like someone who had spent a long time being chased by things considerably more dangerous than Julia.
Not just reacting – anticipating, her body adjusting a half-second before Julia committed to each strike. The footwork was wrong for her rank. The weight distribution was wrong. The way she turned into the force rather than absorbing it was wrong.
Everything about her was wrong for what her profile said she was.
"Isn't that interesting," Arlen said, mostly to himself.
"She came in from the most recent hiring cycle," Rena said, without looking at him. "Sera Yun."
"The morale hire?"
"Yes."
"C-rank?"
"Yes."
Arlen watched Sera drop flat as Julia's kick sliced the air above her nose – unhurried, certain, the movement of someone who had already decided where the floor was before the kick arrived.
"That makes no sense," he said.
"No," Rena agreed. "It doesn't."
A brief silence. Julia was grinning now, that gleam in her eyes that meant she had stopped training and started hunting. The feedback loop was running – the more Sera dodged, the less Julia held back, and neither of them seemed to have noticed.
"She's not attacking," Arlen noted.
"She can't," Rena said. "The moment she opens up she takes damage from the gap. She's managing the problem, not solving it."
✦ ♡ ✦
Fwoosh! Sera jerked her head to the right, the wind whistling past her ear as Julia's hand shot past in a vice-like hold. She would have crushed my throat just then. She twisted her body, did a quick somersault, and leapt back to put distance between them.
The match had reached a stalemate.
Julia would keep attacking and Sera would keep dodging. A war of attrition – a test of whose stamina failed first. In natural law, espers outlasted guides. Sera would eventually have to lose.
If she was a real guide.
She'd have to start looking sluggish. Make her movements heavier, take an easy hit, let the ref call it.
Stamina wasn't the issue. As a succubus she had plenty – built to hunt, built to pursue, the kind of endurance that made athletic baselines look quaint. She didn't even need to tap her emergency reserve, the small careful store of converted mana she kept set aside for actual emergencies – a sneaky trick her Instructor had taught her, the kind that didn't appear in any scroll she had read on Ratiora or training manual here on Earth. This was just Julia having too much fun.
Her agility wasn't the issue either. Her Instructor had spent years catching her mid-escape and she had spent those same years learning to make that as difficult as possible for him. With each failed attempt she had sharpened her reflexes, her footwork, her ability to read an opponent a beat before they moved.
After all, he hadn't been able to catch her the last time.
So her problem was simple. Her muscles were warmed up, her stamina was fine, and the only thing left was ending this without anyone asking the wrong questions.
Thwump! Sera dropped flat, Julia's kick slicing through the air just above her nose.
But how am I supposed to take that hit? Julia's actually trying to kill me.
Too much damage meant questions. Too little meant she'd clearly absorbed it somehow, which also meant questions.
Would Causality care if I took a punch a little too easily?
She wasn't sure. She had been carefully avoiding finding out.
If only I could just knock her out–
No. A C-rank guide dropping a B-rank esper with six years of active field work would produce considerably more questions than a strange level of stamina. And her Instructor had never pulled his punches – she had always been expected to respond in kind. Her power was halved right now, but she had no idea what that meant in practice. She hadn't tested it. Too hard and she drew suspicion. Too soft and Julia would exploit the gap and finish it in a way that produced exactly the wrong kind of damage.
There was no good option.
Sera glanced at Julia. The B-rank esper was breathing hard now, an excited gleam in her pink eyes and a slightly crazed smile on her lips. All of Sera's dodging had triggered something instinctual in her – she had stopped noticing that she was steadily ramping up her output, stopped noticing much of anything except the small figure that kept not being where she put her hands.
Julia, Sera thought with genuine alarm. You will kill a guide with that power.
Sera rolled away onto her knees as Julia advanced, thoughts scrambling.
Should I punch her? Should I take the hit? What do I–
Ah. She'd gotten distracted.
Julia's fist was already barreling toward her face.
This is definitely going to look suspicious–
Sera flinched and squeezed her eyes shut.
Thud.
The impact didn't come.
She opened her eyes.
A man's back. Blonde hair. The room had gone cold without announcement – winter arriving all at once in the middle of a spring gymnasium, temperature dropping several degrees in the space of a breath. His hand had caught Julia's wrist and held it, the skin along Julia's forearm pale with frost, thin curls of vapor drifting upward from the point of contact.
"Esper Julia." The voice was pleasant. Unhurried. Lazy, in the way of someone who had interrupted a situation they found mildly beneath their attention and was taking their time about it.
"What are you doing? If you hit someone with that much power, you'll really injure them, you know."