[Fixer+ | Draft] Chapter 224 - Reach (Patreon)

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Hello everyone, LunaWolve here!

Welcome to the draft release of Chapter 224 - Reach for y'all.

As always, a quick reminder that this chapter is still in the process of being workshopped by me and that this is simply the first-draft.

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What's better in a fight than reach? Range.

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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/1Ilg_Wm2wOyGIl5T2ZxtzWuEKhPRpHfDw2tK6Njkl6LQ/edit?usp=sharing

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Chapter 224 - Reach

When the bout began with Miss K’s characteristically loud clap, Jin didn’t try to close the distance between us immediately.

Which was both somewhat surprising and not, in equal measures.

‘He must’ve taken my [Flow] usage earlier to heart quite a bit…’ I thought as I tracked his movements with my eyes, keeping my body angled towards him. ‘Not anywhere near as aggressive as usual. Smart play, really.’

Instead, he’d started slowly circling me, his eyes flicking between my face, my hands, and the tip of the shinai in a steady rotation.

So, for now, I simply… turned with him.

That was everything that countering his efforts required, laughably enough. I just rotated on the spot, in my neutral stance, the shinai’s tip between us tracking his center of mass like his body was magnetic.

For probably the first time ever, I had also fully immersed myself in my [{Anima Razor}] Skill and simply left it running. Up until now, the longest I’d ever truly relied on its muscle memory and knowledge had been the fight against Valir and her crew—and even that had been a flash in the pan compared to today’s session. A few desperate seconds here, a slightly longer exchange there, but always under copious amounts of “I’m going to fucking die” levels of adrenaline, and always over before I could actually feel the Skill truly finding its footing.

The extended demonstration from earlier, and now this practical example on top, marked the very first time I actually got to inhabit the Skill properly and experience its full breadth and depth for long enough to truly appreciate it for all its worth. 

I had to admit that it felt disturbingly natural—like the shinai had always been a part of my being to begin with and I’d simply forgotten as much. 

The only thing that I was missing now, was [Singing Resonance] to work—but the shinai, as much as Miss K had tried to make us believe for this exercise, was not actually a blade. Or at least the System doesn’t consider it as such. So, unfortunately, there was no [Singing Resonance] to truly crank this whole situation up to 11.

Finally, however, Jin stepped in closer, providing a natural end to my ruminations. 

Although, to be honest, it was clearly not even a real attempt at striking at me—merely a probing half-step to test my reach and reactions, betrayed by his weight still mostly being banked on his back foot for a quick escape—but I still couldn’t let it go unanswered. So I moved forward a half-step as well and gave him a tiny, non-committal swing for his troubles—a lazy flick, really. 

There was no actual power behind it whatsoever, but it was more than enough to have him back off just as quickly as he’d stepped in, and the whole dance immediately reset itself.

But I didn’t have to go hard, thanks to the rules of this bout being beautifully simple: If I hit him at all, he dies. If he hits me at all, I die—or get “disarmed,” to be more specific. 

Which meant that I didn’t need any big, committed strikes here whatsoever—a lazy flick of the shinai carried the exact same threat value as a full-powered swing, at a mere fraction of the stamina cost and recovery time.

‘Ah… I see what you’re doing here,’ I finally realized somewhere around the third-or-so reset of our little dance and my eyes flicked briefly towards Miss K.

She was using me to showcase something that I already instinctively knew—partially from a past life’s worth of video games, sure, but also from [{Anima Razor}]’s inherent knowledge: The reach advantage of a sword, against anyone unarmed, was straight up disgusting.

The shinai was only around 1.2 meters long, if I had to take a rough guess, but that was still more than a full meter of reach that Jin simply had no access to whatsoever—creating an effective two-meter diameter zone of instant death around me.

It was his zone to cross, too, as I had no need to exhaust myself to try and get a hit in—I could always just wait him out and tap him with the sword whenever he ran out of breath.

He tried anyway, of course, as that was his task—and this was Jin we were talking about here, so he tried hard.

He was exceedingly careful about it at first, with probing steps, zone circling and small attempted feints with only half his body that I didn’t even need to respond to, given that his feet never actually came along for the lie—[Deception] practically scoffing at his half-hearted efforts in that regard. 

But as I kept refusing to ever move from my spot—granting him nothing but that same half-step-and-flick combination any time he so much as leaned my way—he started getting bolder… or maybe straight up careless.

Abruptly, he took two explosive steps straight at me, trying to bait a full commitment out of my swing so he could slip past its recovery. As always, however, I simply gave him a flick of the shinai instead, and he had to practically throw himself backward out of range to escape any potential follow-ups—not that I’d planned on any, seeing him retreat immediately, but the threat was always there, courtesy of the massive reach advantage I held over him.

On the next approach, he tried darting in on a diagonal, switching direction off his outside foot the same way his new footwork had nearly caught me earlier in our hand-to-hand bout. But a full body changing directions was almost always going to be slower than a wrist adjusting four centimeters, so the tip of my “blade” simply kept arriving ahead of him every single time—with barely any effort required on my part, yet again.

Which finally brought him to a whole host of seemingly last-resort-style attempts: Deliberately sloppy retreats, suspiciously predictable rhythms, and almost-but-not-quite overcommitments, all clearly trying to teach me a pattern that he could then break and exploit at the right moment.

And credit where credit was due—it was smart.

Honestly, far smarter than I’d ever expected Jin to approach a fight like this. 

But apparently, when backed into a corner, even he could think properly strategically—which probably shouldn’t have been much of a surprise, given that boxing, at least from the few tidbits [Martial Arts] had provided me with, was as much a mental sport as it was a physical one—if not more so, even.

It was, unfortunately for him, also exactly what I had quietly been waiting for—because one of those fake lazy backsteps actually happened to be genuinely lazy, and my eyes caught it immediately.

I charged.

It was my first real commitment of the entire bout, the shinai and I crossing the three-meter distance between us in a single, rapid motion while his weight was still parked on the wrong foot. And for all his twisting, desperate efforts to evade the incoming strike, the outcome had long been decided before he’d even fully registered the mistake he’d made.

The shinai tapped him very lightly on the shoulder.

“Fuck!” he cursed, though it was almost entirely drowned out by the loud clap that ended the round on the spot.

“Very well done—both of you,” Miss K complimented, striding back onto the mat. “And I do mean both. Jin, you did essentially everything right, which is exactly why this was such a useful thing for everyone else to watch.”

She held up one finger.

“One: Jin had no way into Sera’s range—absolutely none. Not through brute force, not through speed, not through angles, not through baiting… Every path into her range runs through the blade first. That two-meter circle she was standing in? That was her sovereign territory for the entire bout, and it always will be. That’s the kind of advantage a sword brings to a fight, and the reason humanity used them for warfare since time immemorial, right up until the advent of guns.”

A second finger joined the first.

“Two: Take a close look at who spent what. Sera got to stand still and simply rotate on the spot, flick her wrist now and then, but ultimately conserve everything. Jin, meanwhile, had to stay mobile the whole time just to be ready for Sera to potentially charge at him, let alone also having to try to manufacture an opening—burning loads of stamina by the second. Stretch that bout out another two or three minutes and he’s fighting his own damn lungs more than he ever fought Sera holding a sword. It is a deeply, fundamentally lopsided battle, dearest pupils, and I want you to remember how it felt to watch it.” 

She turned toward the two sitting members. “Tom, Kenzie—who wants their turn?”

“I request another attempt, Master,” Jin suddenly interjected, standing there with his pride visibly on fire. “I can do better.”

Miss K considered him for a moment, then waved permission.

As we set up for this second round, she gave me a quick nod—and, for once, I actually understood exactly what she wanted from me: “End it quickly.”

And so I did.

Jin opened the bout with his new idea immediately: A committed, straight-line rush towards me, with no probing at all. It was likely built on the idea of trying to catch me off-guard, to force a bit of an accidentally forceful swing and then use the increased recovery time to slip through the gap. 

And honestly… Against a frozen, purely reactive opponent, it might even have worked out.

But I had also planned to go aggressive on this one—as Miss K had implicitly requested—so I had stepped toward him as well, just as the clap rang out. Which meant his own charge met another, even more prepared charge with extra reach, and the shinai tapped him on the collarbone before his gamble had ever had a chance to reach its potential payoff window. 

Clap. 

Jin stalked back to his starting spot practically fuming, cybernetic hands flexing at his sides, the frustration of complete impotence almost visibly radiating off of him.

“Again—very good,” Miss K said, entirely unbothered by the thundercloud forming over Jin’s head. “I mean it, Jin. That rush was not a bad attempt: Oftentimes, alpha striking your opponent before they’re truly ready can be your one-and-only chance to win a lopsided battle like this. Especially against an amateur wielding their first-ever blade, that approach works criminally often—they freeze, flinch, overcommit or do a myriad of other stupid moves that means you’ve got an opening.” 

Her head tilted towards me. “But against any halfway prepared swordsman—let alone someone with actual training, like our very own Sera here—”

I gave her a flat side-eye, which she did not acknowledge in the slightest.

“—it simply doesn’t work. The sword-wielder is never obligated to just stand still and receive your cleverness. They can go on the offensive too and when two offensives meet, the only thing that truly decides who wins is whoever has the better reach.”

Her eyes then went to the two people still sitting on the floor.

“Jin, sit down. Tom—you’re up,” Miss K called, and Tom rose from his spot on the mat with a look in his eyes that told me he’d been taking extremely detailed mental notes during the last two fights.

We took our positions and the clap rang out.

True to form and expectation, Tom did not do anything even remotely resembling what Jin had attempted. Instead, he immediately started managing the space between us actively.

He wasn’t directly circling me—not like Jin had, at least.

Instead, he was taking lateral steps to the left and right on his side of the mat, always hovering just outside my two-meter zone of instant death, while his eyes did that methodical scanning thing of his that they always did during our spars.

It only took a few exchanges between us—which mostly amounted to me taking a probing step in his direction and him immediately backing off a generous distance towards the open side of the mat—for me to figure out what he was likely going for.

‘He’s not looking for an opening… He’s just building a model for now, huh?’ I thought, my eyes narrowing slightly at Tom. ‘You’re trying to see how fast I can rotate, how I move my feet, how I flick the sword, and whether there’s any bias hiding in any of it. Aren’t you, Tom?’

He’d deliberately positioned himself so his back was always angled towards the open mat, while he simultaneously tried to bait out my flicks at maximum range—clearly trying to pin down the precise distance where my threat zone ended, so he could then camp exactly one half-step outside of it and try to force me into overextending on a real attack. 

Which he could then, in turn, exploit with one of his counters for the winning touch.

‘Or simpler said: If he can’t cross the zone to get to me, he’s going to try and force me to momentarily leave the zone behind instead.’

There was just one small, yet fundamental problem with that entire plan of his: The zone wasn’t some fixed area on the mat—it moved with me, for as long as I held the shinai and didn’t overextend myself.

So… I simply started walking at him with calm, steady steps—blade always held between us—my sovereign two meters of death trailing along with me like an invisible, oversized sombrero.

And Tom, for all his careful thinking and modelling, suddenly found himself on the receiving end of a very simple truth he’d already met oh-so-many times before: The best-laid plans do not matter when the opponent across from you simply doesn’t care for them.

He tried to break the walk-down with angle changes, which I shut down by cutting the corner each and every time, [{Anima Razor}] adjusting my movement angles to the shinai’s maximum reach before his direction switches had even fully finished.

He then tried a desperate stop-and-counter maneuver, planting himself and inviting me in, hoping to finally force out that big, committed strike his entire gameplan had been waiting on this whole time… Which I graciously declined to cooperate with, giving him—much like Jin before him—a series of lazy flicks instead.

And when his heels finally touched the boundary of the mat, his remaining options collapsed to zero. He threw himself into one last-ditch, full-out attack regardless—and I tapped him gently on the sternum with the shinai not even a blink after he’d started it, given that he’d launched the whole thing from a position that was already practically inside my reach.

Clap.

“Dead,” Miss K announced cheerfully. “Kenzie—your turn.”

Tom returned to his seat on the ground next to Jin with his usual, highly analytical look on his face—likely rerunning the entirety of the bout to figure out what he could have done differently.

‘Genuinely hope you find something… I could probably use the knowledge, too. As much as I don’t want to face anyone with a weapon while unarmed, I doubt I’ll get lucky enough and never have to deal with it.’

The bout with Kenzie, meanwhile, was… different.

Different, because Kenzie apparently did not believe in zones as a fundamental concept. 

The clap had barely finished echoing before she was already moving—darting sideways, switching directions several times within a single breath, her whole approach built on flooding me with more things to react to than I could handle. 

Based on the even-more-erratic movement than usual, I figured that she was trying to scramble the easy rotation-tracking that had shut Jin and Tom down, so she could slip into range to land a hit through the resulting confusion.

And, to be entirely fair here, it was very fast and downright confusing, trying to follow her movements—as it always was, facing Kenzie. 

Even while running lopsided and clearly still struggling… The limp from our earlier bout was still unmistakably there, buried underneath all that explosive movement but visible in every single push off her right side—and she was trying this hard anyway. Which made me feel a sharp stab of guilt and genuine worry in equal measure, even in the middle of the bout.

‘Kenzie, your leg and ribs… You’re going to make it all worse, you complete fucking idiot...’

My flicker of worry, however, changed absolutely nothing about the reality of her situation.

Because despite all her speed, attempts at misdirection and the manufactured chaos, she still had to solve the exact same unsolvable problem the two boys had faced before her: Every single route into touching range ran through the blade first. And unlike while facing her in hand-to-hand combat, I didn’t have to track every single part of her body for once, always having to try and predict which part of it would be slung my way first. 

Instead, [{Anima Razor}] just kept the tip glued to her center of mass—the one part of her that all the rapid movements in the world could never actually fake the position of—and I patiently waited for her to commit to anything real.

Which was why, when Kenzie finally did commit, exploding out of a feint-heavy weave into a full-speed dash straight at my chest, she ran directly into the one thing that had been pointed at her the entire time: The tip of my “blade.”

And it very nearly went really, really badly, because her commitment was, as always, total and complete. Couple that with her speed still being absurd despite her injuries, and in the last fraction of a second I had to actively flick the tip aside to keep her from accidentally impaling herself on it—as much as one could impale oneself on the blunted, cushioned tip of several bamboo slats bound together, that was… But with that much momentum behind her, I hadn’t exactly been keen on running that particular experiment live.

But it was still enough for the shinai’s shaft to catch her across the shoulder instead as she blew past me and tapped my shoulder a half-instant later.

Miss K’s clap sealed the result.

“Also dead,” Miss K commented, striding back out onto the mat while Kenzie wobbled to a halt, panting hard and looking rather torn between frustration and hypoxia. “Quick breakdown while everyone catches their breath, my lovelies.”

She gestured at Tom first.

“Tom’s approach was the most intelligent one on paper: Map the threat range, then fight at its exact edge to try and bait an overextension. Against a sword-wielder who is rooted in place—a guard holding a doorway, for example—that is legitimately a good strategy. The problem, as you all witnessed, is that a sword-wielder with functioning legs simply brings their range along with them. That kind of space management only works for as long as you have any actual space left to manage. The moment Sera stopped simply standing around and instead forced Tom into a corner, he had already lost—technically even before then, when she saw through what he was trying to do and simply refused to play his game.”

Then she pointed at Kenzie.

“Kenzie’s approach, on the other hand, was the most dangerous one—for both parties, really. Overloading someone’s perception with speed and misdirection is a real, legitimate tactic, and against a mediocre swordsman it absolutely can work: They panic-swing at shadows or potentially lag behind your movements, and you simply slip in right there. Somebody with any kind of experience or composure, however, will just track your center of mass, like Sera just did, and point the sword at you. Which means any attempts to dash into range will just get you impaled.” 

Her eyes flicked over to Kenzie for a moment, a serious expression on her face. “And just for the record: Sera literally saved your life right there at the end, in case you didn’t catch it. The tip of her blade was still squarely pointed at your throat and even with it being cushioned, it would have done some serious damage considering your speed and mass going into that attempt. I almost stepped in, if I hadn’t seen Sera flick the tip away in time. Mind you, for the second time today, Miss Molida. Let there not be a third time.”

Kenzie’s ears wilted all the way down at that, “Yes, Ma’am… I’m sorry, Ma’am…”

“Which brings us,” Miss K continued, clapping her hands together with entirely too much relish for my liking, “to the final exercise of the day. All three of you—up. You’re fighting her together now.”

My stomach dropped into my knees as three heads turned towards me in eerie synchronization… Nobody had mentioned a group round before.

And yet the three of them were already peeling themselves off the floor and spreading out across the mat, taking up positions around me that read suspiciously like the exact spacing we used for our usual end-of-session “try to tag the Grandmaster” game—Jin squaring up directly ahead of me, Tom drifting off to my left flank, and Kenzie limping her way around to somewhere behind my right shoulder, exactly where I couldn’t keep all three of them in view at the same time.

I somewhat nervously readjusted my grip on the shinai while running some very quick calculations on sightlines, my rotation speeds, and the exact number of directions a single sword could possibly point at any given time.

‘…So this is how Miss K feels every single session, huh?’ I couldn’t help but think. ‘Feels pretty unfair to put a non-Grandmaster into this position… But, actually… This is exactly what it would be like to fight a group of halfway coordinated Scavs, is it not?’

Reframing the situation like that helped quite a bit, surprisingly.

‘I guess let’s see what I can actually do here, then…’

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