[ND] Chapter 220 - Acceleration (Patreon)

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Hello everyone, LunaWolve here!

Chapter 215 - Task has just released on RR with no major changes.

For the Fixers, this chapter has seen no changes.

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Oh baby, we are SO back.

Vacation is over, November is a-go!

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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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-------------------- End of Pre-Chapter Author Note (Patreon-only) ------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Here is the link to the chapter:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JAbdh7-F8Lt_7hfVOis9rVNvlRVKptg1tqy9UvV0Gos/edit?usp=sharing

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Chapter 220 - Acceleration

Kenzie clearly did not believe in bout-opening niceties.

Practically the very instant our circling began, she dropped into her typical ready stance and shot off toward me—the entire sequence, from standing upright and watching my slow approach to having her legs fully charged and springing off the mat, taking less than half a second. 

There was no real wind-up to read, no courteous “let’s do this” or anything, just a fox-shaped blur suddenly occupying the space in front of my face, and it was instinct alone that let me sidestep the opening swipe in time… Ever-so-barely. 

Close enough that I felt the air of it move across my cheek regardless.

Then her right leg suddenly came sweeping for my legs, mid-step, as a direct counter to the sidestep.

Which was exactly what we had drilled during our out-of-dojo training session—or she had, at least. I hadn’t taught her this specifically, but she’d come up with this alteration on her own during our time together.

My body was already moving before my brain had even truly finished recognizing the danger—my sidestep flowed into a turn, which transferred my weight slightly, allowing me to raise my leg just in time to catch her leg-sweep on my shin while my upper body bowed far backward out of her follow-up swipe’s reach. 

Her kick crashed into the hastily raised guard with a nasty crack that rang out across the entire dojo, the sheer speed and force of the impact sending both of us staggering apart in opposite directions.

I was the first to recover, if only slightly.

But it allowed me to catch Kenzie coming out of her stagger sucking air through her teeth, and I watched a slim shine of tears forming at the corners of her eyes before she blinked them back—shin-on-shin at that kind of velocity was nobody’s idea of a good time, and she’d gotten the worse end of the exchange by a wide margin.

Given that my Body Attribute of 6 applied across my entire body, rather than simply one area of it—like Kenzie’s legs, for instance—I was practically a wall compared to her in terms of raw mass and density of both bone and muscle.

Which… Made me genuinely feel a bit bad about the whole exchange.

For more than one reason, really. 

It was mostly because I’d already known, instinctively if not entirely consciously, that the counter was coming. 

After all, I had let her develop it—the kick-for-the-legs answer to my sidestep had been her own invention during our private sessions, and I’d nodded along approvingly and never once shown her the response to it. 

Not out of anything malicious, of course. Like I wasn’t purposefully sandbagging her for a future edge—my cracked ribs had simply made enacting the counter to her counter impossible back then: Sidestep, turn, raise the leg, bow the torso backward, all in one continuous full-body motion. 

Me having shown up with scars and cracked ribs had made my body flatly refuse to produce that movement, so the lesson had gone untaught… Until now.

But that, really, meant something far worse, tactically speaking: Kenzie had never even considered what the other person might do in response to her counter, apparently. 

She’d built the move, confirmed it worked on injured-me, and simply assumed the whole sequence was solved. As if learning a counter came with a contractual guarantee that the enemy wasn’t allowed to counter it back or something. That kind of dangerous assumption was exactly the kind of thinking that got people killed outside the Megabuilding.

‘That’s an important conversation for later,’ I noted with a small grimace. ‘Gotta make sure to really impart that lesson, then...’

Much to her credit, though, Kenzie didn’t let the apparent pain stop her for even a second. 

She was already back into her signature high-speed circling, orbiting me in tightening arcs, and only the distinct hitch of a limp in her stride betrayed what the lesson had left her with.

‘She can handle pain way better than I feared, at least... Hope I didn’t actually break anything in there, though…’

I kept my eyes pinned on her and settled into my own stance—which remained, to put it charitably, a somewhat hastily slapped-together combination of nonsense. 

I hadn’t finished Section 3 of the shard yet, which was the thing that promised to unify everything I could do into one cohesive whole, so what I fought with in the meantime was an evolving patchwork at the best of times: Part Miss K’s curriculum, part [Martial-Arts] and [CQC] downloads, and another part of scar tissue and real experience from the few real fights I’d already miraculously survived in this world. 

It shifted a little with every shard session, every Skill level, every Attribute upgrade, every real fight and every time I fought anybody—whether for real or more training-wise like in the dojo here. Which meant that, unlike the other three students and their mostly clean, learned styles, my stance had never once had anything stable to it.

‘Probably annoys the hell out of Tom… Heh.’

The thought had barely finished before I made my next combat-based decision, because giving Kenzie this much room to orbit was horrendous strategic malpractice. 

If there was one person in this dojo who used space better than everyone else combined, it was her—every meter I granted was raw material for her speed.

So the plan was to take the space away. 

I dashed straight for her on her next attempted pass, guard high and tight to eat whatever swipes came—and was greeted instead by one of her powerful kicks, launched as a passing attack without so much as a pause in her circling. 

I offered my shin again, same answer as before, and this time around, she’d clearly anticipated exactly that—good work, Kenzie!—because instead of committing into the guard, she rotated around it, corkscrewing her body in almost human-impossible ways past my raised leg. 

The maneuver bled off a solid chunk of her own momentum, but it bought her something even better: She arrived in close, her arm already whipping around in a swipe at my face.

It landed right into my raised guard.

Which I regretted immediately, as I winced, hard, as something sharp ripped through the sleeve of my gi and tore into the flesh beneath, tiny droplets of light-catching blood spraying out across the mat in a fine arc.

‘Fuck! Right—I forgot she’s running with some amount of actual claws today…’ The thought stumbled over its own follow-up almost immediately. ‘Wait. Why is Miss K okay with that?! Shouldn’t the shields we’re wearing be stopping exactly this sort of thing…?’

I did not have the luxury of following that line of thinking, because Kenzie was already in close—and in close was the only range where I could reliably hit her at all. 

Her entire style was built on—and similarly relied on—never being where hands could reach her; a Kenzie inside arm’s length was a limited-time offer akin to a flash sale, and the window for it was already closing.  

My right arm had been knocked off-kilter from catching the swipe, and thus in no position to fire before she could disengage, so I drove my left into her midsection instead—a short, compact jab with as much real mass behind it that I could muster on the quick.

It connected with a solid thud, and I felt the slight giving of something beneath the flesh.

Kenzie, naturally gifted in combat as she was, didn’t fight the impact—instead, she fired her legs in the same direction the punch was pushing her, converting my hit into the first half of her own retreat, bleeding the damage off into distance before I could fully impart all the energy or any potential follow-ups could arrive. 

The gap between us opened back up in under a second. 

I let her go without chasing—not that I could have really done much there, given her speed—primarily because her escape vector had done me a favor as well: She’d backed herself noticeably closer to the mat’s corner, trading immediate safety from my punch and any follow-ups for future positioning. 

She came to a stop there, one hand drifting down to gingerly probe the spot where my fist had landed, her ears flicking with honest surprise at the heft of it.

‘Yeah… I’m not going to hold my punches today as much as usual either, Kenzie,’ I thought, and gave her a slow, vicious smile. ‘You get some of your claws, I get some of my Body. Seems fair to me, no?’

While she visibly recalibrated, I spared a half-second glance at my forearm. 

The cuts weren’t bleeding badly—shallow, clean-edged—but the look of them stopped me cold for a beat, sending a shiver of drear down my spine that I had not wanted to deal with right now. 

Because what they resembled, neatly lined up in parallel like that, was a series of razor cuts—thin and almost surgical in nature. A jolt of deeply unwanted familiarity went through me, icy and bottomless, from somewhere I tried my best to keep it locked away at all times.

I shook my head sharply, physically clearing it before my mind could be dragged under for memories I did not want to revisit—not here, not ever. 

It was a good thing I did, too—because Kenzie had apparently finished assembling her new gameplan in record time, and in that very moment, I caught her form darting straight back at me again.

Her new gameplan, as it turned out, was rapid-fire adaptation.

The shape of her approach changed on the very first pass: Instead of the usually clean and committed arcs she’d been running, her angles suddenly went jagged, momentum feathering in and out so that the rhythm I’d been timing my counters against simply disappeared. 

I, in response, adjusted as well—trading full counters for more compact, but faster interrupts—which led to her adjusting to my adjustments within three exchanges, suddenly folding fake retreats into her approaches that actually managed to yank my guard toward entirely empty space more than once. 

This was apparently the whole game now: Two people editing their own playbooks again and again, faster and faster in the hopes that you could outpace the other’s speed of studying them. And yet, somewhere in there and despite Kenzie’s very clear leap in capabilities since our last real 1v1 bout, I made the mistake of still quietly holding back more than I should have.

I paid for it very quickly.

Kenzie had either sensed that I wasn’t giving it my all or simply figured I was not strong enough to counter her adequately, so she dove straight for me at the first real opportunity: A double feint off her left, a half-beat of hesitation that my quickly thrown up guard bought completely, and then her claws were suddenly at my face—five razor points filling my entire vision, close enough that my options collapsed into a single desperate backward jerk that saved my left cheek, but ultimately sacrificed every ounce of my balance in the same motion.

[Elemental Balance] kept me on my feet regardless, cheating-level Perk that it was, but not ready to receive anything else… Her follow-up kick arrived a half instant later.

It slammed into my chest dead-center, all of her leg-strength delivered into a target that had nothing to brace with, and abruptly, the mat traded places with the ceiling as I went down hard, the impact force bouncing me into an ugly sideways tumble—with my eyes barely catching Kenzie already pouncing after me, a fox-girl-shaped shadow vaulting into my blurred vision, giving me nowhere near the time a graceful recovery and plan required.

[Acrobatics]’ muscle memory downloads took over at that moment.

The relatively freshly-leveled Skill grabbed my tumble by the throat—shoulder tucking in at an angle I hadn’t consciously chosen, hips rotating over, arms and legs flexing at just the right moments on pure instinct to somehow redirect my momentum from “uncontrolled bouncing” into “kickup”—and spat me back out onto my feet a half-body-length from where Kenzie’s pounce landed, her claws raking mat instead of me for once. 

The recovery was about as clean as it could have been, given everything. 

The lesson that came attached to it, however, was definitely not: My chest throbbed with a deep, pounding ache where her kick had connected, every breath sending a pressure through my chest that was not meant to be there—and with it came some serious, if dull pain.

Standing there, my heart hammering and breathing hard, watching Kenzie flow out of her missed pounce and back into her slightly limping circling without a single flicker of hesitation, I finally realized: If I didn’t start backing up my earlier conviction right now—the whole “I’m not holding my punches either” declaration I’d delivered with such a lovely villainnous smile—Kenzie was absolutely going to lay me out.

‘Alright… Fine. For real this time. No more sandbagging, Sera.’

So I stopped being polite and started being aggressive instead, seemingly from one moment to the next. 

Instead of receiving her passes and trying to counter them as they came in, effectively playing at her speed, I abruptly started intercepting them. 

Instead of simply trying to manage distance between us, I started actively stealing it. 

The plan, in as much as any plan survived contact with Kenzie’s current adaptive style at all, was simple: Out-aggression the aggressor. Her style was built around being the one who dictated the engagement, and every initiative I took instead was initiative subtracted from her.

It was not as simple as just doing all that, however, I learned just as quickly.

It cost me—constantly and consistently.

Every time I actively pressed into claw range meant I was eating swipes—across my forearms, my shoulders, the rare few times her claws snagged just past my guard even across my torso… Each hit ripped audibly through the fabric of my gi, the fabric tearing sound becoming a running percussion line of the fight, sleeves giving way in strips, the left shoulder seam surrendering entirely at some point, until whole sections of the Arkion Dojo’s uniform were hanging in ribbons and I was fighting progressively barer and barer—both arms fully exposed, a shoulder, a widening stretch of midriff—every new line of bleeding and stinging contact mapping itself onto my skin.

The amount of blood seeping into my gi was just as much a sign of how much she was pushing me, as it was a sign of how much I was pushing her.

Kenzie became more and more desperate, as I refused to let up on the aggression despite the wounds I received, which meant her control over her claws became similarly less focused—each swipe I received was deeper than the last.

But every exchange was a true exchange now. 

That had been the entire point.

Whenever I ate a swipe, I punched back—and my punches had some serious Body behind them in a way her swipes fundamentally couldn’t match. 

She paid for my forearm with one of her thighs. She paid for my shoulder with her ribs. She paid for the torso snag that was now painting my abs in glittering red, with a counter that caught her mid-disengage and sent her skipping two full meters off her intended circle-line. 

The arithmetic of attrition ground forward exchange by exchange, and, just as I had expected, it favored me heavily: Her speed advantage bought her ultimately more hits, but my hits were individually ruinous, and her lithe frame simply could not bank the damage my Body of 6 could. 

By the time my gi was running dangerously low on modesty-cloth, Kenzie was noticeably limping on the very leg I’d been taxing since the opening exchange, standing lopsided around whatever my full-power body-shots had done to her midsection, her breathing coming laboured and rattlingly hard through her teeth—and yet still, still, she circled, because surrender did not appear anywhere in that stubborn girl’s documentation, apparently.

‘Fucking hell, Kenzie… What was in that damn shard to make you into such a monster so quickly…?’

We were clearly getting to the point where we were dangerously close to crossing that invisible line between “hard-contact sparring” and “actually dangerous actions”, as Miss K’s attentive eyes had not left us for a single picosecond in the past few exchanges either, I had noticed out of the corner of my eyes.

‘Alright, maximum effort, Sera. You have to end this now or Kenzie might get into trouble with Miss K. She really needs to learn how to control her claws better…’

The next time Kenzie came in, I brought everything I owned to the answer.

The rest of the fight took under three seconds.

[CQC] and [Martial Arts] finally called her feint ahead of time and supplied the counter, [Acrobatics] kept my mass underneath me through the pivot—and [Elemental Balance] glued all of it together, perfect muscle control threading three Skills’ worth of downloaded instinct and muscle memory into one continuous motion with no seams for Kenzie to exploit. 

My counter-punch found her ribs at exactly the right angle coming out of my evasive pivot, during exactly the right moment of her own commitment, and all air went out of her in a single sharp gasp and spit that stopped her entire game engine mid-stride. 

I closed the last bit of distance between us in that instant, wrapped my arms around her, took her to the mat with her own unbalanced—already pre-damaged—stance doing half the work, and pinned both of her clawed hands behind her back before her lungs had fully finished figuring out what my punch had done to them.

A sharp clap rang out.

“That’s the match,” Miss K called. “Winner of the first round: Sera and Tom.”

I knelt there on top of Kenzie for a brief instant longer, chest heaving, surrounded by the splatters and pool of blood, as well as the shredded remains of what had been a gi merely five minutes ago, while Kenzie gasped painfully for air beneath me—then I let her hands go and rolled off, flopping onto my back beside her, both of us simply staring ahead.

Miss K appeared over us with disinfecting towels, dropping one onto each of our faces with zero ceremony.

“Clean up, girls. Ointments are on the bench.” To me specifically, as I peeled the towel off my face and took stock of just how little of my uniform had survived: “There’s a fresh one in your size in my office. Go change in there—keeps the boys from ogling too much.”

“We were not ogling!” Tom protested immediately from the bench, sounding almost insulted.

“I was merely assessing her considerable injuries,” Jin stated flatly, while looking demonstrably towards the ceiling. 

Not that there had been all that much to see, frankly, between the remaining parts of the gi and all the blood that was covering my skin in the places that were visible—but I was deeply thankful to not have to be standing around half-dressed in front of the crew for the rest of the session regardless, so I quickly shuffled into Miss K’s office. 

I made sure to quickly rub all the blood off me and apply some of the hemostatic ointment in between clenched teeth—the razor sharp cuts sending sharp pains through my body at every touch—before putting on the gi.

Getting into it felt like being issued a new body.

When I stepped back out shortly after, Tom and Jin had relocated to flank Kenzie on the bench, the two of them helping her work ointment into the collection of bruises blooming along her leg and side—Jin slathering it on with the surprising precision of a field medic, while Tom narrated which spot he was working on like some sort of project manager. 

Kenzie endured it with her ears at half-mast, wincing on schedule, her breathing still coming out in heavy, rattling pulls between clenched teeth. 

I’d barely sat down and started applying additional ointments on my own arms when Miss K planted herself in front of the bench, arms crossed, and opened with the exact question I’d been carrying since the first tear in my sleeve mid-bout.

“Now then… I’m quite certain Tom here isn’t the only one here who’s been wondering why I didn’t step in when Kenzie decided to show a bit of bite today,” she said, golden eyes sweeping across the four of us. “Or, more to the point—why your shields suddenly weren’t catching that kind of damage anymore.”

We all nodded in complete unison, as it happened.

Her smile turned downright predatory.

“Because this was always the plan, dearest pupils! Get you used to combat slowly, then ramp the realism up, bit by bit, until the training actually resembles the thing it’s training you for.” 

She started a slow pace along the bench line. “You can’t seriously expect to spend your lives fighting unarmed Scavs and polite, empty-handed Gangers. That’s not how any of it works out there. Practically everyone who will ever want you harmed is going to be holding a weapon of some description. A pipe. A sword. Or—” she gestured lazily at Kenzie’s hands, “—about five really, really sharp knives arrayed in a single hand. That last loadout, admittedly, is a bit less common than the others. But a single knife? Two? That’s not anywhere near a rarity out there, kids.”

She stopped pacing.

“Since our dear Miss Molida already went and accidentally revealed that I’d lowered the shields’ threshold for what counts as excessive force—” Kenzie’s ears flattened all the way down as every head turned toward her, “—I’m simply accelerating the timeline a little starting today. Which… Honestly, is all for the better. The sooner you get used to live edges being brandished at you, the fewer bad habits you’ll build as a result of the soft training conditions you’ve had so far. Plus: Untraining bad habits is tedious work—for me. So... I guess I owe you a thank you, Miss Molida.”

Kenzie looked thoroughly embarrassed to be singled out for the first few seconds of that—shoulders up around her ears, tail wrapped tight against her leg—but towards the end she’d straightened back up with a cautiously pleased expression.

The boys were nodding along with appropriately serious faces.

Me, though? My brain had locked onto exactly one clause of that entire speech and was now turning it over with single-minded, borderline fanatical interest.

‘Weapons training… Which means, sooner or later, actual weapons in our hands too, right? Has to be, unless Miss K is going to attack us with weapons and ask us to defend ourselves—which even just thinking about that sounds like fucking nightmare fuel…’

The only question that actually mattered to me as a result was simple: Would I get a knife-analogue to train with?

Because if Miss K was about to add sanctioned blade-work to my weekly dojo sessions and [Martial Arts] portfolio—professionally supervised, Grandmaster-corrected knife-work-cum-martial-arts—then today’s shredded gi and two dozen bleeding cuts were about to become, retroactively, one of the best trades I’d ever made…

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