I narrowly escaped the morning-star mauling with the help of my souped-up reaction time. Using the Storage Cloak to pull out a morning star in one lightning-fast strike is definitely cheating! And terrifying! Frighteningly fast and blindingly brutal!
“We missed? Shoot him—I mean, shoot.”
“What was that?! Did you try to disguise your kill order as a grumble?! Complaining about someone when they’re in earshot is rude—especially if it’s ordering their death!”
Grumbling expresses disapproval and can be considered rude when performed in front of the subject of one’s complaint; it has been known to make people feel a little uncomfortable. That’s why we don’t do that to our friends. But it’s true that in some cultures, good-natured griping is a bonding method, so there’s some regional variation to this rule. So I suppose we just don’t know if being rude to people is considered rude in this world!
“I mean…aw shoot, you’re just too cute.”
“Huh? Now you’re flirting with me? Where did that come from?!”
Y-you know what? I’ll just ignore them. I didn’t want girls flirting with me, even as a joke. Because it was embarrassing, okay?! Hmph.
Anyway, I refocused and began running through slow wuxingquan drills once more. After a couple of sets, I carefully reintroduced my tai chi forms into my repertoire.
Yeah, okay. The footwork’s giving me trouble. Compared to most other arts, tai chi didn’t require a lot of foot movement. Some people even joked that tai chi practitioners were stuck in place like beached boats. But even then, I really struggled to get the footwork down.
Hoplology and Martial Qi Wizardry were the problem. These two Skills encompassed Body Manipulation LvMax, Walking Mastery Lv9, Avoid Lv9, Rapid Movement Lv9, Bend not Break Lv9, Diamond Fist Lv8, and the magic Skills Dash Lv8 and Overclock Lv9. All those movement and martial Skills were, in their evolved form, more difficult to control than ever. And as if that weren’t bad enough, Hoplology applied its own synergistic effect. Each step I took was at a different pace and separate distance from its predecessors. Walking like that hurt.
Gravity magic powered Qing Qigong. Teleport magic powered Hoplology…right? That was the only explanation. My steps were too clunky; the time it took to analyze each one, much too long. But before long, I’d have to bite the bullet and experiment with…it. Ichi no tachi.
“Hwah!”
I slashed in accordance with the lost art of ichi no tachi—the one sword. This mysterious, phantom kata was created by master swordsman Bokuden, from whose sword expertise spilled the kendo art of Shinto-ryu. Ichi no tachi was the grandfather of many a derivative kata, but none of these derivatives bore much resemblance to one another, and thus was the original kata lost in the shadows of history.
“Take the initiative and strike. Sit on the fence and wind up on de-fence.”
This single sword art governed all things offense and defense. A strike that moved so quickly it sliced the enemy’s strike in twain…if you believed the nerds, that was. Which I didn’t.
“Are you kidding me? The nerds never did kendo. Even if they had, how on earth would they know a kata even the experts don’t understand?”
But Wisdom was picking it up. Once again, I feared the nerds were putting bad ideas into Wisdom’s head… First tongbeiquan, then tongbeiquan, and finally—what was it again? Oh yes—tongbeiquan. The tongbeiquan we practiced here was not like any tongbeiquan I’d ever heard of back home!
“Thence offense does commence whence the fencer steps past their opponent’s defense and slashes down with a force intense? Yeah, it’s common sense?”
Ichi no tachi was not so much a move as a philosophy. It was a mentality, a way to remove the opponent’s blade and strike them down in one fluid motion. Hence, though every derivative was different, it was all at heart the same technique.
Meanwhile, as I worked on mastering this esoteric sword art, Dancer Girl taught Sleeping Beauty our stylized version of tongbeiquan. Sleeping Beauty infused her body with magic and qi, let herself relax, then lashed out like a whip, whipping up spirals about the straight axis of her strike’s trajectory. The air trembled, although it most definitely shouldn’t have. Waves shuddered through the air and blasted apart the opposite wall, despite that not being appropriate behavior for walls on the receiving end of tongbeiquan. It was a thick wall! She wasn’t standing anywhere near it! And for crying out loud, tongbeiquan didn’t blast through walls to begin with!
But, of course, Miss Armor Rep and Dancer Girl nodded, like that was exactly what it was supposed to do. With this bad omen, I realized the OP anime version of ichi no tachi was likely to be adopted in this world too. Yikes! What a freaky—and freakishly nerdy—sword discipline.
“Oh, quit being smug! Don’t give me that I taught her everything she knows face.”
Sleeping Beauty had yet to master the art; she’d expended a huge wealth of magic and qi only to leave a crater in the stone wall. (The dungeon emperors high-fived her for it nonetheless.) Maybe the attack would work better at closer range. What if I used it on foes a millimeter away? No, a tenth of a millimeter? Now that’d be an instadeath cheat skill. That was the kind of inhuman feat reserved for dungeon emperors and other higher beings. Speaking of higher beings, while Sleeping Beauty’s high-five was pretty lowbrow, everything else about her was high level. High waist, high hips, high-quality tush…
Maybe the nerd version of ichi no tachi was right. I mean, it was dead wrong, but maybe it was dead wrong in the right way? Like tongbeiquan?
“Hmm…”
To be honest, I did have a way to control my reaction speeds: slow them down with slow-mo. Problem was, if I sped up my thoughts to the point where they matched my reactions, time slowed to an ooze. And if it kept oozing and oozing…then it oozed right into the abyss of Hell, and it only kept sinking from there into the endless abyss, toward the bottom of the bottomless depths. In that stage of stopped time, when all the world was frozen solid around us—was where my eyes met Miss Armor Rep’s. The temporal axis was locked in place, here in the realm of the dungeon emperors—the ultimate in slow motion, the world’s end garden, the quiet whimper of a universe’s extinction—the backdrop upon which we locked eyes.
“I’ll go light, but be careful…of my safety, mostly. Now let’s rumble!”
The air was a blue blur. The world bled streaks of color. We crossed empty space in a span of time too brief to be called an instant. In search of alaya, in search of amala,3 we dissected time into numbers as unfathomably great as the wonders of the Buddha, into upwards of nayuta4 pieces, into a googolplex of miniscule fragments. There, in the trench between existence and nonexistence, where time became but a concept—there, in that nothingness of nirvana, I found the domain of the dungeon emperors.
Miss Armor Rep smiled. The ghost of her smile remained behind her like an afterimage when she moved, like an optical illusion, and she cut through the clastic, almost ceased, flow of time. Like two dancers, like two master fencers, our swords sailed about one another, leaving ghostly afterimages in their wake, dropping down to kiss one another in a clash of steel. As if stirring time into motion once more, our swords traced paths through constrained Kronos, dancing, darting, parrying each other, slicing through space. We described ellipses, drew helices, wheeled and whirled, to meet for a third time. Our swords glanced harmlessly off each other. And then I…I crumpled to the ground. Yeah, because I never stood a chance?
I wheezed, for all the good that did me. “I…can’t…breathe down here. And that third strike broke me… How much…MP…did I use? Huh? All of it? Well, shit.”
Not so much as a tenth of a second had elapsed, and I was already exhausted. Three strokes into the battle, and I was done. But the “fun” was just beginning! See, ’cause these three gorgeous goddesses got gnarly grins, each one as distinctly different and delightful as the girl herself. Tongues skated around the edges of red, red lips.
“Uh…be nice? And stuff?”
Nuh-uh. Nope. No, sireee.
Well, this was bad. The dungeon emperors were very happily shaking their heads no at me. Their faces alone? Fine. Perfectly innocent. The things they were doing with their tongues? Very 18+! Very dangerous!
“You’re all eternally 17! You’re not supposed to be engaging in 18+ activities! That’s a numerical inconsistency! Could you be a little less consistently horny for me?!”
Nuh-uh. Nope. No, sireee.
The dungeon emperors dragged me away. At first, I thought they were taking me to a bedroom, but no. They had reserved the bath for our use, and…added an air mattress?! This was supposed to be a chance to test my equipment! And now all my equipment was being removed! Resistance was futile; I was stuck in place, rendered immobile by my sudden MP loss. Oh, I was defenseless against their ablutionary agonies. With bubbles, and doubles, and toils and troubles, the dungeon emperors descended on me for a bubbly bedroom boogie! Ack!
Sploosh!