The sound of flesh striking flesh echoed between the buildings as Ana righted herself, eyes cast low, and the Ascender calmly declared, “There will be none—”
Ana’s foot snapped out, low and sharp. It was a kick designed to separate the kneecap from the patellar ligament if done hard enough. She delivered it with the strength of nine men and several Enhancements and Perks behind it, along with all the indignant fury that had suddenly slipped its bonds when her bonuses activated and her Willpower jumped to the high 60’s, letting her shake off whatever the Ascender had been doing to her.
The Ascender was still human. Mostly, at any rate. He still needed to perceive the attack, then have the speed and reflexes to react to it. His reaction to Ana’s lightning quickness was to throw himself backward, instead of deflecting or moving the attacked leg out of the way. Which meant that his feet stayed where they were just long enough for the ball of Ana’s foot to clip his knee with all the delicacy of a sledgehammer.
The Ascender was clearly not used to fighting anyone who could fight back, and he paid for that with a grunt of pain. Not with the snap of a tendon, like Ana had wanted, but pain would do to start. She needed him off balance. She couldn’t give him time to think. The man might not be anywhere near her level when it came to skill, but that slap had been relaxed, a gentle correction, and she was still going to have a wicked bruise tomorrow — if she survived the next minute. If he’d connected before her Vitality bonus kicked in, it might have knocked her out. If he'd struck Messy or Jisha or any of a dozen other people Ana knew like that, their necks would have snapped.
The man wasn't skilled at unarmed fighting, but he was clearly monstrously strong, even by Ana’s standards. But Ana hadn’t been superlative for long, and fighting people bigger and stronger than her was what she’d trained so hard for so long to be able to do. She wouldn’t be able to brute-force this one; if she slipped up, if he tagged her with a real hit, that might be it. That was fine; she just wouldn’t let him. She’d hound him until he fled or broke, or a third mystery option opened up.
The Ascender had a dagger on his belt, but nothing else. The sheath was finely crafted, and the handle was wrapped in thin strips of cream leather, but what really made it special was the large white opal, bigger than Ana’s thumb, set into the pommel. That he’d brought that dagger and only that suggested that either it had some significance, or he knew how to use it, or quite likely both. He drew it smoothly as he fell back, driving it toward her heart as he indignantly exclaimed, “Impertinent—!”
Ana didn’t let him finish.
The correct thing to do when someone came at you with a knife was to run. Ana didn’t have that luxury. Instead she stepped into him, putting his stabbing arm parallel to her chest then grabbing the hand with the dagger with both of hers and twisting at the hip, forcing the arm to bend, the wrist to turn, and the hand to open.
She’d intended to continue the movement to break the wrist and put the Ascender face-first onto the street, but as the dagger fell toward the cobbles the man turned with her, his free hand coming around for a short, sharp punch to her ribs. Ana gasped and staggered back half a step, the shock forcing her to release the Ascender’s hand. Beyond the protective veil of Fight Through she could tell that he’d done some damage. Still, the man was unarmed now, and to her, that meant that she had the advantage. The alternative was to believe that she was outmatched and about to die, and she wasn’t really interested in that line of thinking.
Now she just had to keep him that way.
The Ascender looked perturbed. Not like he was losing his cool, but things clearly weren’t progressing the way they should. He ducked for the dagger, but Ana drove a knee toward his lowered face that forced him to dodge backward, then turned that into a snapping kick that kept him moving.
Ana pursued. He was off balance now, but that wasn’t enough. She needed him where she was at her absolute best, where she had the largest positive skill advantage against someone with over 30 Levels on her. She needed him on the ground. She had one hell of a ground game, and several Perks and Enhancements that just begged her to grapple this guy. She didn’t care how strong he was — though that punch had hurt — or how high his Vitality and Endurance might be; unless he literally didn’t need oxygen, she could choke him out. It wasn’t her only possible victory condition, but it seemed like the most likely one. Not that “most likely” was particularly good in this case, if she were to be honest with herself, but she’d take what she could get.
She launched another series of kicks aimed at his face, throat and knees as she moved, keeping him on the back foot even if he avoided them all. Then, she saw an opening. The Ascender stumbled slightly. His center of gravity fell behind both his feet, and she decided that it was now or never.
Ana drove forward in a powerful leap, aiming for the man’s chest. Rather than allowing herself to collide with him, though, she placed her foot flat on his chest, and with an explosive push of her leg she launched them both back and away from each other.
The Ascender fell backward, almost flipping, his eyes wide as he cried out in surprise and anger. Ana, being at most half his weight, flew. But she was in control, and he, though he was already starting to recover and tuck for a roll, was not.
Ana didn’t know what tricks he might have, but she had wings. She manifested them mid-air, reversing her momentum with one powerful beat and shooting forward as the Ascender hit the ground. But he wasn’t without training or reflexes of his own. He rolled over his shoulder, putting his feet underneath him, and as he rose he was already striking. The punch was timed well, taking Ana’s speed into consideration, and despite the man’s sloppy technique and poor grounding Ana could see the force behind it. It was aimed to break her face, skull, or neck, and it might've if Ana were anyone else; someone who hadn’t made martial arts a central part of her life, and who couldn’t block, deflect, or dodge almost any common attack by reflex.
In this case, with Ana airborne and heading straight for the man, dodging was out of the question — she would have to block. The Ascender had thrown something of a haymaker; Ana’s block was as much a hammerblow to his bicep as it was an interception, and she hit him before he hit her. Even then, the punch was heavy enough to drive through her block and clipped her shoulder hard enough to send her tumbling, pain shooting up her arm and neck. But she’d been ready for it, and Combat Acrobatics let her use the momentum.
The hand of Ana’s blocking arm snaked under and around the Ascender's to the front of his chest, her elbow locking above his and her hand grabbing a fistful of his leather coat. Her other arm went around his back, her shoulder in his armpit. Then she tucked and twisted. Her feet hit the street as she made a half turn, her body contouring to his, and with a pop of her hip and a sweep of his legs she flipped him hard on his back, smashing a shocked wheeze out of him as he hit the cobbles like a bag of cement falling from a high-rise.
Her plan to flip him onto his stomach was instantly shredded as the man’s hand bunched in her tunic and yanked down, his strength winning out against her balance. Cloth tore but not enough to free her, and she fell forward and off her feet as his free hand came up to deal such a blow to her side, in the same damn place on as before, that Ana saw black and heard her ribs snap. The blow finished what the yank had started, leaving her tunic in the Ascender’s grip as she was sent up and to the side from the force.
Her tunic tore, but her grip on the Ascender's coat held, and his leather proved tougher than her linen, keeping her from flying away to farther than arm’s length before she got herself under control. Ignoring the pain and her badly injured ribs, Ana used her wings to twist in the air and kicked out at the man’s head. He was quick enough to raise his neck to avoid the kick, but he didn't have the grappling experience to know not to let your opponent get her knee behind your neck.
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The Ascender didn't understand what was happening until it was too late. Using her grip on the man’s leather coat, Ana pulled the two of them together until she was practically sitting on his left shoulder, her right leg behind his neck and her left knee folded across his throat. He slapped at her, then gripped her trousers, and when he only managed to tear the thin fabric he reached up with his right arm, grabbing for her face.
“Big mistake, asshole,” Ana gasped out, spitting blood as she grabbed his arm and pulled, arching her back to extend it and shimmying so she could get her right leg under his armpit. Twist And Lock made it easy.
Ana didn't know if the Ascender had ever heard of a rear triangle choke, but he definitely understood that something bad was happening as Ana locked her left ankle under her right knee and squeezed with everything she had.
The Ascender choked audibly. He threw some short, awkward punches at her side, but despite each hit aggravating what must have been several broken ribs, Ana didn’t so much as flinch. Then he changed tactics and hammered at her shin with his free left hand, hard enough for Ana to notice it despite Fight Through. Then he did it again, and again, and again.
On the fourth hit, Ana felt something break, and she grit her teeth, maintaining the choke. On the sixth, her whole lower leg bent at the middle. The shinbone had already shattered under the Ascender's repeated blows, and the tibia just couldn't handle the strain on its own anymore.
Ana saw white, but the pain couldn’t touch her. Not really. And her muscles might as well have been woven of steel cable; her leg bent, but it didn’t fold. When she said, “Just give in, you bastard!” it was a series of choked sobs, but it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter that a crowd had slowly formed around them, silently watching. It didn’t matter when the Ascender’s weakening blows drove her broken bone through the skin, and it didn’t matter if she was doing permanent damage to her leg. Nor did it matter that the punch to her chest had definitely broken her ribs, and that it was getting increasingly hard to breathe. Touanne could fix her, or she couldn’t. Ana needed to have a future for that to matter.
The oppressive weight of the man’s aura, telling her that this was wrong, that she could not win, that a mere mortal should not dare stand against an Ascender, didn’t matter. Ana was committed. She had to win here, or she would die. She was sure of it.
When the Ascender gave up on hammering her leg and instead used the slickness of her blood to force his fingers under her leg to try and push it off him, it didn’t matter how strong he was. When the Ascender bucked and thrashed, trying to use every muscle in his body to throw her off, it didn’t matter how strong he was. Ana’s Effective Strength when fighting was 93. The Ascender was monstrously strong, but so was she. And that was before Unbreakable Grip and Close Quarters, which both increased that Strength significantly. He might still be stronger than her; he was an Ascender. He’d passed the Level cap, and likely had some powerful Class of his own. It didn’t matter. His leverage was terrible, and Ana had trained for her entire adult life to give herself a fighting chance against people bigger and stronger than her, and she’d learned well.
Ana was strong. Ana was tough. Ana was skilled. And Ana knew that she couldn’t give in, not if she wanted to live. Not if she wanted her friends to live. Her choke was holding, and the Ascender’s struggles got weaker.
The Ascender’s struggles got weaker, and the crowd began to rouse. Confused murmurs and horrified gasps and whispers to the effect of “An Ascender! What’s an Ascender doing here? What’s happening?” reached her ears, but she barely heard them. Her focus was on the sounds of the man’s labored breathing and the panicked rhythm of his heart, and the taste of blood in her mouth that got worse with every breath she took as she forced her own broken ribs into her lung. The black was starting to creep in at the edges of her vision as she used far more oxygen than she could pull in. The question was which of them would last longer.
With her leg not as strong as it should be, the Ascender’s struggles weren’t weakening as fast as she’d hoped, even after he stopped thrashing. It had taken fifteen seconds or so to choke out Waller; Ana wasn’t sure how long they’d been on the ground in this position now, but it must be over a minute. Ana was getting lightheaded, and the black was creeping faster than she was comfortable with. Fight Through could only do so much, evidently. And Level 18 was still only Level 18, no matter how powerful her Class.
She could feel the lactic acid building up. The strength was slowly leaving her. She was pulling back so hard that she was horizontal with the ground, and her vision had narrowed to a small patch of dark sky where the brighter stars were beginning to show. Soon even that would be gone, and if the Ascender was still awake by then, that would be it. He’d cough, and sputter, and then he’d stomp her head into the cobbles.
Ana couldn’t hear his breathing or his heartbeat anymore. All she could hear was the awful bubbling sound every time she drew a painful breath, and the rapid hammering of her own heart in her ears as that little patch of sky slowly shrank to nothing.
Sorry, she told the goddess in her mind. Putting a coherent thought together was hard, but it felt important, even if she felt ridiculous for apologizing to the one whose fault all this was. I guess I found my limit. Look after Messy. Somehow. Look after her.
When the reply came, it was so nonchalant and hard to understand that Ana didn’t even get offended. I would, the goddess said, but…
The Ascender in her grip shuddered violently for a brief moment, and went limp. It took some time before Ana realized that she had a notification — a new notification. She was done.
She relaxed, using the last of her strength to try to fall on her good side as the darkness took her.
* * *
Ana came to with the sense that she hadn’t been out long.
Her eyes fluttered open a sliver. The black only barely receded, but she slowly became aware of a few things in the world outside of herself. First, that all that blood she’d coughed up wasn’t on the stone cobbles of the street — it was soaking into an embroidered green skirt, turning the fabric almost black. The Ascender lay on the cobbles in front of her, a hilt topped by a white opal protruding from his chest. And while there seemed to be a lot of shouting going on, there was only one particular voice she could listen to. A beautiful, soothing voice, singing in a language Ana only knew a few words of.
Ana wanted to roll on her back and look up, but she was pretty sure that might let blood drain into her good lung. That, and she was so tired, and only barely hanging on. The pain was so bad, and she couldn’t say if her broken leg or her shattered ribs were worse. She’d have killed for some shock to take the edge off. As her mind cleared just a little, she managed the wherewithal to curse all her System features for letting her survive and hurt herself to the point that she could feel this much pain when it was all over.
While she waited for something to happen — because she wasn’t going to be doing anything anytime soon — she looked at those notifications.
Despite it all, the pain and the near-delirium, Ana wanted to laugh. Or maybe cry. She was alive. The Ascender was dead. And Messy had accepted. And, goddess, when she tried, Ana could feel her right there behind her, whole and healthy. That made the whole evening worth it, near-death experience and all.
Feeling oddly at peace, Ana let herself succumb to the pain, faintness, and exhaustion. Though, she did have one thought that niggled at her as she slipped into the dark she’d been fighting so hard a few moments ago.
What the hell was an Ascension Point?
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