Her jointed leg had been caught on a gauntlet. A hard garri scraped through the air as a thin line of sparks flashed in the dark.
For a heartbeat, their positions were laid bare. That was all either of them needed. Using that fleeting awareness as a guide, they clashed again.
Greaves and gauntlets smashed into jointed limbs. Human flesh and twisted exoskeleton met over and over in the pitch-black, each impact jolting through bone and chitin.
But once their relative positions were clear, there was no logical path to Karatena’s defeat.
She had six jointed limbs plus her own four human limbs. Ten points of attack crashed down on Oakley from every angle, and he was driven entirely onto the defensive.
When a particularly strong clash spat a spray of sparks, Karatena seized her moment.
Now she understood his stance and position completely.
All six of her auxiliary limbs whipped out at once, striking together to finish the fight in a single exchange.
A storm of blows. Oakley met three of the most lethal strikes with his armor, letting his gauntlets and greaves deflect them away.
The remaining three he took with his body. There was no other choice.
Of course, “taking them with his body” didn’t mean he walked away unscathed.
The hooked tips of those limbs tore into his right arm and left thigh, and the last one punched clean through his left shoulder.
“Gah!”
The moment Oakley faltered, Karatena’s long leg snapped like a whip. An axe kick.
Her heel crashed down. Even with both arms raised in a desperate guard, the impact punched straight through, rattling his brain in his skull.
Drool spilled from the corner of his mouth as he staggered backward, feet skidding on the unstable platform.
And still, he didn’t fall.
That blow had the full power of the parasite behind it! Karatena thought. How is he still standing!?
Who was this man? What was he?
No normal human could possibly remain upright after that.
Eyes rolled half-white, Oakley swayed, somehow keeping his posture, dragging himself back into a flimsy imitation of a fighting stance.
After all that damage… and he’s still clinging on!? Karatena thought. What a stubborn man you are.
She didn’t dare rush in carelessly. The safest route was to end this from a distance, with simultaneous long-range strikes from her jointed limbs.
Karatena bent all six auxiliary legs, coiling them tight, then snapped them out to full extension in an instant, sending them lancing forward, aiming to pierce his forehead and end it.
Opposite her, Oakley flung something out in front of him—his own robe, stripped off just a second earlier.
It billowed between them in the air, a makeshift smokescreen in the dark.
Idiot! she thought, a vicious thrill running through her. You really think something like that can blind me!?
Karatena drove her jointed limbs straight through the robe without a flicker of doubt.
Cloth tore with a dry rip, fabric skewered in six places.
Her real body, however, stayed guarded, both arms raised, senses straining against the darkness around her.
An obvious decoy, she thought, lips curling. He thinks he can catch me while I’m distracted by the robe, but I’m not that naive!
In battles like this, survival hinged on one thing: solid, instantaneous judgment.
She’d stayed cool.
She’d seen through the bluff.
With this, she’d forced him to waste one of his precious tricks.
All she had to do now was repeat her long-range volleys, over and over, until the man in front of her was nothing but meat and silence.
In her mind, the path to victory was already set.
But Oakley’s thinking had slipped a step further ahead.
A sudden, heavy weight settled on her jointed limbs, still tangled with that black cloak.
Outstretched in the dark, those limbs had become rails, guides through the air—and Oakley had used them. He’d leapt straight up and landed on one of Karatena’s own auxiliary legs.
An unpleasant sensation jolted up through the exoskeleton.
She had just enough time to begin to think, That’s bad—
And in the next instant, a hideous feeling ripped through her. Every joint in those parasite-born legs was being bent the wrong way and twisted.
Krackle, krack. Ugly little cracks echoed in the dark.
She didn’t even manage to scream before she understood.
Like someone wrenching off a crab’s legs one by one, all six of her remaining limbs were destroyed in a single brutal motion.
“Agh… AAAAAHHH!”
Joint locks.
Leverage applied to a joint, forcing it to bend past its natural limit in the opposite direction.
That was what he’d done to her. She had lost the battle of minds.
Instead of going straight for her main body, he’d gone one step wider, targeting the weapons themselves and ripping her jointed limbs away.
The parasite lurking beneath her skin shrieked in her nerves, its true body howling soundlessly as every one of its legs was snapped.
“D-Damn you!”
She had lost all of her jointed limbs. She couldn’t even safely spawn more brood in this chaos. But she still hadn’t lost.
Karatena lunged into bare-handed combat. On legs that wobbled but did not fail her, she closed on the reeling Oakley and drove a full-force straight right at his jaw.
Opposite her, Oakley, his consciousness flickering at the edges, launched his own right straight to meet her. Two mirrored silhouettes. Two fists.
Their punches landed at exactly the same moment, knuckles crashing into jaws. Both skulls rattled violently.
“Gh—!”
The clean hit snapped both their heads back, and the two of them rocked like toy balance dolls, swaying on their feet.
Their torsos arched back, then snapped forward again. Using that rebound, they sent their fists together a second time.
This time, the exchange favored Karatena.
Oakley’s punch only managed to crack her collarbone. Karatena’s fist, on the other hand, shattered his nose and cheekbone. Two heavy concussions in such a short span scrambled his brain.
Oakley spat out a spray of blood and bile and dropped to one knee.
“Die already,” Karatena snarled, whipping a high kick down toward his skull.
But the moment she moved, the fighting spirit flared back in his eyes.
Oakley twisted away, his body turning with the motion, and answered with a high roundhouse of his own. The air boomed like an explosion when their legs met, sparks skittering in the dark.
The brutal exchange repeated, shin slamming into shin, heels crashing again and again.
“Karatenaaaa!” Oakley roared.
“Oakleeeey!” she screamed back.
In the end, the two of them weren’t so different.
Both had tried to use the people around them, dragging others into their schemes to reach their goals.
They stepped into the line of fire only when they had to. When two such people crossed paths, they couldn’t help but see each other.