Although Nazuna was displaying the kind of cocksure attitude that could only usually be seen in someone who was proud of knowing how to count to ten, these words had come straight from the heart without the merest hint of condescension. For the first time in a long while, a dark haze clouded Goh’s emotions. To ward off his misgivings, he unleashed his next attack, but quick as a whip, Nazuna grabbed Goh’s fist mid-swing and caused him to overbalance and fall to one knee.
“Y-You upset my center of gravity?!” Goh whined as he struggled vainly to get to his feet. A martial arts expert could throw an opponent off-balance and keep them kneeling on the ground just by grabbing one of their fingers. Goh had performed this technique on Mera’s spawn by grabbing one of its claws, though this time, he was being treated to the flip side of that situation, with Nazuna grabbing his entire fist. As a maven, Goh should have known how to counter the hold, but his entirely untrained opponent wasn’t letting him budge.
Dammit. How’s this even possible?! Goh screeched in his head. It’d be one thing if she had her sword out, but how’s this dumb chick one step ahead of me in bare-knuckle brawling?! He considered himself a better unarmed, hand-to-hand fighter than any of the Masters in both cliques, but here he was being manhandled by Nazuna, who was a total novice in his particular brand of martial arts until a few minutes ago. For someone as prideful as Goh, this level of embarrassment was painful in itself.
Nazuna hummed with skeptical indifference. “I guess this move is kinda handy for stopping someone from moving, but it’s just too boring for me. Ah! Maybe it’d be neater if I did this! And this!”
“What the—?!” Before Goh knew it, Nazuna was applying pressure to his fist to twist his arm in an attempt to snap his joints like a twig. In a paroxysm of instinctive self-preservation, Goh spun his whole body around in time to save his arm, but this caused him to effectively judo-flip himself hard into the ground. Nazuna gasped in amazement, like a toddler experimenting with a new toy.
“Wow! I didn’t even try twistin’ that hard! I can’t believe the amount of force that slam had just now!” she cooed. “I think I used your own motion against ya! This is super-duper cool!”
Goh coughed up a storm after being thrown into the dirt. This lousy brat! First, she copies my kuzushi, and now she’s pulling off aikido moves?! I can’t call her a natural, because this goes way beyond natural!
He’d believed he was the top martial artist in this whole world, a prodigy able to replicate moves after only seeing them once. But not only was Nazuna able to copy Goh’s kuzushi, she had also discovered a way to turn it into an entirely new move, which happened to be the sort of combo that would normally take more than a decade to master, and that many hopefuls would find impossible to pull off for as long as they lived. Yet she had nailed the individual techniques within minutes.
Nazuna was the kind of rambunctious, childlike character who was so easy to please, it only took Yume calling her “ma’am” the first time they met for her to be on cloud nine. But when it came to fighting, she was the most gifted champion in the Abyss, even surpassing Light in terms of combat skills. This was because Nazuna had an uncanny ability of understanding a move after seeing just a tiny fraction of it. Or rather, she would gain encyclopedic muscle memory of a new technique and its derivatives within a second of it being performed on her.
After getting his breathing back under control, Goh scrambled to his knees. Still doubled over, he leered up at Nazuna. Shit! he cursed inwardly. With my power level and skills, I can’t beat her! He finally accepted there was a good chance he would be defeated here, but even so, he was too prideful to retreat. Goh mustered up the strength to get himself back upright, then unleashed a flurry of karate moves on Nazuna.
“Get lost, you little shit!” Goh bawled. “Kiss my ass and burn in hell!”
“I thought I toldja I’m not a ‘shit.’ I’m Nazuna!” the Vampire Knight said while dodging the Master’s latest barrage of attacks. “Wait, I did tell ya my name, right? Didn’t I?”
Goh launched a desperate mix of sharp jabs, high kicks, and liver-destroying crescent kicks, but all missed the mark due to Nazuna effortlessly evading each one. I know she’s never seen these moves before, so how’s she dodging ’em?! Goh howled in his head. Has she got my breathin’ down too?
Figuring out an opponent’s “breathing” was synonymous with becoming able to instinctively predict moves that would otherwise be completely unanticipated. In other words, Nazuna had started to acclimatize herself to the rhythm of Goh’s style of combat and had basically decoded how to duck, parry, or counter whatever he threw at her. The Master had used this exact same natural ability that he too possessed to prevail over the untold number of people that he’d fought, but on this occasion, he found himself being completely outread by Nazuna. Goh sucked his teeth in frustration, but he could see the situation wasn’t going to get any better, so he decided to draw on the one final trick he had up his sleeve.
“I’m s’posed to be the fightin’ genius! Me!” he yelled. “I’m not losin’ to a dumb kid like you!”
Goh followed this declaration up with a powerful left-footed high kick that would have decapitated any normal opponent before they’d even realized what had happened. But Nazuna simply moved her head sideways like a child playing dodgeball.
“Genius, ya say?” she opined innocently. “I think this is pretty average.”
But Goh wasn’t finished yet. Using the same foot that was already in midair, he executed an ankle drop with as much speed as the high kick, the change of trajectory so smooth and controlled, his leg seemed to move like it was a living creature.