[ND] Chapter 219 - Extra Effort (Patreon)

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Hello everyone, LunaWolve here!

Chapter 214 - Weight has just released on RR with no major changes.

For the Fixers, this chapter has seen no changes.

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Hello everyone, LunaWolve here!

Finally with another chapter, yaaay.

I'm also here to announce that Hell-October is officially coming to a close tomorrow, as the restructuring at my work has, in-fact, finished on-time, believe it or not.

In another twist of strange fate, the restructuring is actually a positive thing for once as well. Starting November, I will likely have a bit less stress from my work responsibilities as a result of all the stress I just tanked this month; so that's great!

Now, to the bad news:

I'll be taking the rest of October off, to fully recover from this ordeal.

Next week was going to be ADMIN WEEK for October either way, but I'm also adding a 2nd week onto the back of that one, as a sort of mini-vacation for myself.

I haven't taken any real days off of writing in a long, long time and the Hell-October absolutely broke my back.

For the longevity of the novels, I need to prioritize myself here this time.

As such, the next chapter will unfortunately only be releasing on November 2nd / November 3rd for ND / TAS respectively.

Thank you for your patience with me this month; it means the world to me! 

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I'm looking forward to hearing your first impressions and opinions on this chapter. \o/

I hope you will enjoy it!

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Here is the link to the chapter:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1CICetF05rfVqKzdg9KGryGoFC_ny6tyEhQ7nfDZ710k/edit?usp=sharing

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Chapter 219 - The one in which the Abuse Tom fucking dies

The opening seconds of a fight pretty much always told you exactly what kind of fight it was going to be. These particular opening seconds told me that Kenzie had a very specific goal in mind, which would likely end up being the lynchpin of the whole thing.

My first move, in direct response, was a textbook counter to her fast-flanking style. 

I slid out half a step ahead of Tom, angling my body to cut the direct line between Kenzie and my teammate, my weight low and centered, arms loose and ready to make her either engage me or lose her momentum swinging wide.

Kenzie looked at my beautifully constructed screen for a single fraction of a second, before giving me the single smuggest look I had ever seen on her face—ears forward, fangs peeking out of a grin that said “Heh”—and… simply dashed straight past me at practically full-speed.

She performed a hard, explosive cut at an angle I wasn't positioned to deny without fully committing to trying to catch her, and her speed carried her around our flank in a wide arc, circling Tom and me like a shark that had taken one look at the diving cage and decided to orbit it to find another entry instead. 

She was clearly intent on picking her target, which was distinctly Tom, leaving the only open question as whether I'd chase to stop her or keep my attention where it was likely more needed—on Jin, who was crossing the mat toward us quickly, ready to bring his Cybernetic arms to bear.

'Now, that's just rude… She's been taking notes from somewhere that is not me—'

Tom stepped up close beside me then, almost back-to-back, his voice low and quicker paced than usual but entirely unhurried underneath, seemingly already having made a tactical decision on how to proceed.

"Preference-wise, I'd rather take Jin and leave Kenzie to you—matchups we've both actually drilled over the past weeks..." His eyes tracked Kenzie's circling arc without his head moving much at all. "But she's clearly not going to allow that. So, adjustment: You take Jin, and you go hard. If you can deal with him before she lands anything meaningful on me—and I am fairly confident I can simply hold her that long without risking much, inexperience with facing her aside—then we collapse on her together, two-on-one, and it's over. Deal?"

I gave him a look. 

It was fully loaded with information I couldn't exactly transmit mid-bout; primarily, that his read on Kenzie was running on badly outdated data. 

He hadn't seen her since before our private sparring sessions at her family's dojo—hours of focused, very specific martial arts work—and he definitely hadn't factored in whatever monstrous volume of Blue Shard immersion she'd apparently been logging after that session and yesterday, if Miss K singling her out for praise earlier was any indication. 

The Kenzie currently orbiting us was decidedly not the Kenzie from his mental files, which meant that his assertion of "I can hold her" was a confidence built on a version of her that no longer existed.

Yet, in the half-second I had to actually weigh the whole situation, I came down on the other side of things anyway.

'...It's probably fine. He's specifically asking for it.' 

Because honestly, there was a better argument buried underneath the tactical, Arkion Dojo one: Letting Kenzie actually show off the fruits of her hard labor—hers and mine both, really—would do infinitely more for her morale than me potentially screening her into irrelevance and shutting her down for the whole round. 

She'd earned a showcase with how much she’d put in, hadn’t she? 

And besides, the anti-Tom portion of our training had been the smallest slice of our efforts by far; we'd spent the bulk of our hours on counters for me and then for Jin, since Tom was never the technically or physically gifted fighter of the group—he was the tactical one, who almost exclusively won with positioning and patience rather than raw technique like Jin or stats like I did. 

Considering that, it was the most “fair” fight Kenzie could actually get here, to see the pure results of what she’d personally trained for—aside from just countering what I’d taught her.

So I quietly assented with a short, terse node and broke.

I accelerated out of our back-to-back formation hard, cutting across the mat toward Jin, who had closed to within a few meters and was clearly timing his approach to link back up with Kenzie's orbit and collapse on us from two angles at once. 

My untimely arrival cut that plan short on the spot. 

He broke his advance mid-stride, hopped back half a step to reset his range relative to mine, and folded into his full combat boxing stance—hands high, elbows tucked, chin buried, those gleaming cybernetic arms forming a wall of guard in front of a center of mass that did not intend to move backward ever again.

Which, for me, meant the same thing it always meant when going up against Jin: Kicks.

His stance was a fortress above the waist and conveniently placed exhaust port, perfectly sized for a single photon-torpedo, below it—the boxing framework gave his arms incredible coverage and his punches genuinely frightening reach, but it paid for all of it with legs that existed mostly to carry the short-range artillery into range. 

[Martial-Arts] and [CQC] had both signed off on the strategy weeks ago, which the free-for-all had validated it in full as well, that as long as I denied him the entry, taxed the legs, and let frustration do the real damage, he’d make a big enough mistake at some point that I could take him out easily.

So I got to work. 

I started patiently circling him—angling the geometry of our dance so his back rotated toward Tom and Kenzie's side of the mat, letting me keep their fight in my peripheral vision while I handled mine. 

Every time Jin tried to cut the angle and close, I met the attempt with a sharp, low kick—snapping into his lead calf, his thigh, the outside of his knee—quick, stinging sounds of meat-on-meat contact designed to make forward movement expensive rather than to end anything outright. 

Kick, pivot, re-angle, kick again, the fluidity drills from barely ten minutes ago still humming in my muscles, each kick flowing into a repositioning step instead of planting me in place like they used to before.

Except something was slightly off.

It took me about three exchanges to realize fully, but there was no mistaking it: Jin was better than I remembered when it came to handling my harassment.

His movements were far more calculated than the free-for-all version of him, yet he'd lost none of the aggression; if anything, he was pushing in even faster than I was anticipating, compressing the gaps between my kicks with footwork that had no business belonging to him. 

Suddenly—just as I was starting to get a grasp on this new side of him—he did something that genuinely did not exist anywhere in my mental file on Jin: He feinted with his legs. 

It was a hard step-in that read exactly like his other bullish entries, fully selling it with the rotation of his shoulders and hips as well—then a sudden sidestep off the line, outside my kick, collapsing the distance diagonally while my weight was still committed to a kick that was now sailing through empty air.

My brain registered the trap snapping shut about one frame before his right hand came shooting out like a piston straight for my face.

‘Fuck—!’

I forcibly wrenched my recovering leg down using [Elemental Balance]—painfully tearing at the ligaments and musculature mid-movement to make it work—while jamming my forearms across the incoming line, ever-so-barely managing to deflect the strike with a jarring impact that rattled up through my elbow and shoulder, the sheer mass behind it shoving me a half-step sideways even through the clean anchoring, and leaving my arms screaming.

I instinctively rode the push, used it to exit on an angle to get further away from him again, and reset my range with my heart rate suddenly very interested in the proceedings of this fight.

I was breathing rather heavily, as I took a moment to recover and think about what had just happened.

Jin had almost caught me completely flat-footed, with a feint in his damn legwork—two words that had never once appeared in the same sentence as Jin's name before today.

'Is that even fucking legal...?' I thought, somewhat indignantly, as I re-established my circle at a newly established, respectful distance. 'Can other people just... Do that? Specifically go off and learn counters against me?! I thought that was only legal when I do it… So fucking rude!'

That was unmistakably what this was. 

There was no chance that Jin had simply improved like this across the board, in the few days since I’ve last seen him—he'd improved in the exact area he'd struggled with against me last time. His immobility, his readability and the predictable rhythm of his entries—all the levers I'd specifically pulled to dismantle him in the free-for-all—he’d apparently earmarked, then taken home, and systematically reinforced over the last few days. 

He had eaten his loss, gone away, and done his homework with a damn vengeance—and given the stomach-punched look on his face during Miss K's lecture earlier, I could suddenly picture exactly how many hours of it there'd likely been. 

I immediately adjusted my gameplan accordingly, leaning on [Martial Arts] and [CQC] to come up with a new fighting plan, while cutting the lazy confidence out of my spacing, treating every entry of his as potentially a sold lie, and the fight sharpened into something far more honest between us.

And during the brief recovery windows of it—during the slivers of attention I could spare now that Jin's back was mostly turned toward the other half of the mat—I was getting a live feed of the other fight.

Unsurprisingly to me, it was not going the way Tom had projected.

The glimpses of their fight came in stroboscopic fragments between my own exchanges: 

Kenzie flowing around Tom's guard like water finding cracks, her attacks arriving in rapid, layered sequences—high, low, angle change, strike, kick, back-out—each one chaining into the next with a downright maniacal logic her old wild rushes had never possessed before. 

Tom was heavily on the back foot, sweat and blood already pooling off his forehead and face where Kenzie’s claws had marked him and darkening the collar of his gi, his trademark measured composure visibly fraying at the edges as he frantically backpedaled, blocked and backpedaled again. 

My eyes darted to Miss K briefly, who seemed more than fine with Kenzie’s usage of her claws—which I then also realised wasn’t actually her using her claws, as I caught the tail-end of another swipe. 

They were fully retracted, but tiny parts of it were still peeking through, like razor-sharp fingernails rather than the ten-finger-knives they truly were.

‘She’s landing seriously solid hits on him then, huh? Damn, Kenzie… Making me really want to wrap this up and come play with you…’

Tom’s bionics, meanwhile, were keeping him in it—that infuriating stamina efficiency buying him block after block, retreat after retreat, where everyone else would likely have already folded from exhaustion—but he was merely renting his survival, not buying any amount of control, and much like the housing market of my past life, the rent was only ever going up by the second. 

Just in that moment, a palm strike cracked through his guard and clipped his shoulder, followed immediately by a sweeping low kick that forced a graceless leg-raise, which she was already punishing before his foot landed back on the ground with another swipe at his forehead that he barely managed to evade with a stumbling step, breathing heavily. 

Every exchange ended with him in a slightly worse position than the one before it, bleeding ground—quite literally—and posture in ever-increasing installments.

Even I was thoroughly taken aback by how well Kenzie was doing here, and I'd been her teacher and training partner for a good chunk of this.

'That's definitely a lot of Blue Shard in there...' I noted between kicks, watching Kenzie roll out a feint-to-collapse entry that bore Miss K's fingerprints all over it. 'I've never even seen a good third of those moves before. What the hell?! We sparred like two fucking days ago!'

It was very clear by now that Tom wasn’t going to last.

It wasn’t even a question of if anymore, just when—and even that when was merely measured in individual exchanges, not minutes like I’d hoped. 

His guard was degrading in real time, his retreating angles getting shallower as Kenzie herded him toward the mat’s boundary. 

“I can hold her that long” had been a perfectly reasonable projection built on hopelessly stale data, but even I hadn’t expected things to get out of control this fast. If our plan was going to work out here, the “dispatch Jin quickly” half of it needed to stop fucking around and get to it.

‘Fine, then... Change of pace. Sorry, Jin—no more messing around.’

I reached inward, zeroed in on that strange lever inside me, and pulled.

‘[Flow]’

The world around me slowed down hard, the entire universe contracting down to a single subject: Jin. 

His boxing stance stretched out in front of me into something inherently readable, every muscle twitch, every weight shift and guard adjustment suddenly legible as clearly as print, the minute tells of his new footwork—the toe-load before a sidestep, the fractional hip cock that preceded his feints—laid bare like annotated diagrams. 

Everything else at the edges of my perception went soft and infinitely distant, the Ability’s tunnel-vision active in full, but that was fine. 

For the next handful of moments, there was nothing else I needed to see, after all.

I switched from defense to full offense inside a single heartbeat.

The transition caught him completely off-guard. 

One moment I was the circling, leg-kicking menace he’d spent several days specifically learning to counter and the entire bout adapting to—the next I was somehow already inside his range, having slipped past his jab through a window his own feint-step had opened, a window I could now clearly see forming before he’d even really finished committing to it in the first place. 

My first strike cracked into his lead, misplaced thigh with every bit of Body behind it, deadening the leg mid-movement. 

The second—a palm, going straight up—slammed through the abruptly opened gap between his high guard and his suddenly compromised base, snapping his chin up. 

He reacted fast, credit where it was due, cybernetic arms collapsing inward to try and shield, then counter the way years of drilling had likely taught him, but [Flow] let me read the counter as it was being assembled, so I was already gone from where it landed, pivoting around his outside shoulder, fluidity training from earlier singing through every transition—each attack banking its momentum sideways into the next position instead of spending it all forward, exactly the way the ghost in the shard had been preaching at me all session and [Martial Arts] had greedily slurped up.

A hooking kick quickly took his deadened leg out from under him at the same moment my forearm pressure redirected his stumbling mass diagonally, and physics handled the rest from there. 

Jin hit the mat flat on his back, hard enough to drive the air out of him in one loud, involuntary burst, and the follow-up strike I pulled to a stop a hand’s width above his sternum made the ending official. 

His arms dropped on the ground with a loud, frustrated clang. 

He was out for the count—by the rules of the bout if not by consciousness.

[Flow] ran out right then, the world’s edges rushing back in—

—just as I turned, already dashing toward the other fight, toward my teammate.

But I was too far away.

I understood that with horrible clarity the instant my perception widened enough to take the scene in, because Kenzie had chosen this exact moment to stop hunting and start finishing. 

Her combination attack unfolded with a speed and precision that would have been unrecognizable literally just a week ago: A blurring low feint that dragged Tom’s guard down a precious few centimeters, fingernail-claws flashing in a controlled rake through his gi and across his forearm that made him visibly flinch—then her whole body corkscrewing around his flank with that absurd feline flexibility, spine bending through an angle that human anatomy would have simply capitulated at, a palm strike hammering his floating ribs from a direction he had no possible answer prepared for. 

Tom stumbled forward, while immediately trying to reset, but she simply didn’t allow it—another strike, another angle, her momentum perpetually increasing—somehow—until a final cracking blow across his jaw sent him reeling backwards and leaving him briefly, visibly stunned, his eyes losing focus for the half-second that decided everything.

Kenzie leapt.

Her powerful legs practically fired her off the mat into a rising somersault I knew all too well—because I’d been on the receiving end of some of its earlier drafts, knew the trajectory and the timing and precisely what would follow—and my eyes went wide as the world dropped into  slow-motion once again, this time adrenaline-fueled. 

Her rotation carried her up and over, body tucking, and then her leg came scything out of the spin into a falling hammerblow aimed directly at the crown of Tom’s stunned, undefended head, her heel riding the full converted momentum of the jump.

‘Kenzie, no—! Fuck!’

I immediately recognized the danger: This wasn’t spar-force. 

This was serious, hospital-if-not-morgue-grade power and aim in that attack—and genuine fear spiked through me, as my brain frantically audited every option for getting there faster and returned nothing in time—

SLAP.

The sound of meat striking meat cracked through the dojo, and everyone stopped dead.

Kenzie hung suspended in mid-air.

Miss K suddenly stood beside Tom—having crossed however many meters of mat in however small a fraction of a second to have made it in time to catch Kenzie’s attack—holding the fox-girl aloft, one-armed, by the leg. 

The heel of the caught kick hovered mere centimeters above the top of Tom’s head. 

Miss K wasn’t even braced. 

She stood there, completely casual-like, with the posture of somebody holding a grocery bag—and not a particularly heavy one—while an entire airborne fox-girl’s worth of momentum had apparently simply… vanished.

The half-mad gleam of battle-glee in Kenzie’s eyes sobered in the span of a single blink, replaced by pure, cascading panic as the full picture of what had almost happened caught up with her.

“I—oh no. Oh no, I’m so sorry! I didn’t—Ma’am, I wasn’t thinking! I just—”

“Tom.” Miss K’s voice cut straight through the stammering. “You’re dead. Go lie down.”

Tom—still swaying faintly and eyes slightly unfocused—looked up at the heel parked a hand-span from his skull, processed his own mortality for a moment, and did as commanded, simply dropping heavily to the mat’s floor without a word of protest.

Only then did Miss K rotate her attention up to the girl still dangling from her grip, her golden eyes holding exactly none of the reprimand Kenzie was clearly bracing for—and I had almost expected to come as well.

“Now that,” she said, “was a phenomenal showing, Miss Molida. Easily your best work since you walked into my dojo. Keep that up.” She let Kenzie down onto the mat with effortless control, steadying her by the shoulder until her feet remembered their job. “And wipe that panicked look off your face—I’m not going to scold you for this. You’re not here to fight at half-speed; the potential danger part of this arrangement is exactly why I’m on this mat with you. You commit, I catch if necessary. That is the entire reason I’m here.” 

Her tone flattened into something matter-of-fact and final afterwards. “You weren’t trying to kill him. You were simply trying to win. There’s no problem to apologize for, Miss Molida.”

Her eyes found mine over Kenzie’s shoulder at that exact moment, held them for one brief instance, and I felt the internal cringe land square in my chest at the underhanded rebuke tucked inside all that reassurance—because I was the one student in this room whose actions had failed that exact differentiation before. 

“Now then—I believe we still have a finale to observe,” Miss K offered with a perfectly congenial smile, as if she hadn’t just delivered a kill-shot out of nowhere, “so don’t let me distract you two.”

With that, she simply strolled off the mat, unhurried, leaving the two of us standing in the sudden quiet.

Kenzie’s eyes met mine.

The last traces of her panic drained away as the situation settled over her—Jin down, Tom dead, nobody left on the mat but the two of us—and what replaced it was a slow-blooming, sharp-toothed hunger that I recognized instantly. 

Mostly because I could feel my own expression morphing into the exact same thing, one muscle at a time, entirely without my say-so.

‘Good shit, Kenzie,’ I thought, rolling my shoulders loose as I closed some of the distance left between us. ‘This might end up being a whole lot more difficult than I thought…’

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