Dogfighting

1.
The first time I bested A – in a real swordfight, I was already a single digit.

Like before, the fight began over some petty concern, and escalated into full-scale disagreement. She shouted at me this time – twice. When her taunts come, her face gives in to distortion; all evidence indicated she was not going to let the misunderstanding settle itself without a swordfight. A –, in her typical authoritarian, brash style, choose not to wait for an official engagement of arms: her sword was already drawn, poised, before I had the opportunity to call terms.

Her strikes came in repetitions, commanding attention from her trademark snarl of determination. Her right arm, twisted many times in battles before to produce that deadliest of weaponry, had threatened to engross itself in its revolution already at the onset. Had she the means and opportunity to do so, needless to say I would not be telling this story. But even the best and brightest make mistakes: gross errors which cannot be forgiven, pardoned or accepted. Not that she did hesitate as you might speculate. No, A – is too professional for that. But when the moment of departure from that professionalism arose, I took it gladly.

The fight took a lot out of both of us. When it was over, I knelt over the deep green grass (even the softest surface hurt, because her final strike had took out my knees). Fascinated by my right arm, refusing to cease shivering after performing the last move, pieces of limbs, flesh, muscle and cartilage lay scattered around me like confetti.

2.
We go back a long time, all the way back to our days in the academy. Then, A – had shorter hair – a crop of sandy curls parted down the middle. Her fringe was unnecessarily messy (and she will always accuse me of copying that style), framing a face with unnaturally sharp ears, a slender slice of nose and drawling eyes. She looked svelte with her arrnour on, but in our sparring sessions, her movements told me a lot of muscles were involved. She uttered a snarl whenever she was frustrated, and her face turned angular, her nose the perfect right angle.

In other words, she was the academy bully, the least liked warrior among the trainees.

Least liked does not entail despised, though. A – might have been the least liked, but the instructors, Rubel, and the other black-dressed men were the most hated. Still, she had accrued a kind of reputation for herself. She was the only warrior in the academy to have developed a technique for herself: a twisted arm move which could drill a fist sized wound in flesh. But mostly her reputation came from an unarmed sparring episode with one of seniors (this lanky warrior named Galatea). She broke her nose; and for the first time I can remember, we the recruits had to intervene to prevent a senior from losing all her teeth.

"Mongrel." That was A – 's favourite cuss word. Unconfirmed sources say she was the eighth daughter of a kennel master. And she said "mongrel" to everyone. Including the senior called Galatea, whom she had beaten into a position which she deemed "worthier of bitch than claymore."

But to me she always added an adjective, and sometimes several verbs. She would find an excuse to have her leg stepped upon by my leg, or have her path intersected by my path, or her favourite tree of all the 50 in our training ground occupied by my simply being present, all just to tell me:

"Scrawny mongrel, you. Really are a dog with your loyalty, you."

Sometimes she would add an epithet:

"And dogs are meant to be kicked."

At our first ever fight, she claimed I had stolen her favourite practice sword. Her face was already beginning to convert into its angular, point-of-no-return quality by the time I had realised what a mess I allowed myself into. Barring the other trainees gathered out of interest into who A – was going to wallop next, she openly challenged me to a duel.

"It's occurred to me I haven't tamed you yet, mongrel," she insisted.

Pleading for out was not an option. Especially not with your fellow peers watching and instructors silently marking what could turn out to be a good show. No one in the academy refused a fight and graduated with a rank (no one except Clare, but she was different). I was not foolish enough to agree, but I lacked the courage to refuse. So I gave in to my fears: I pointed the blade at her in defiance.

She was only too glad to respond. The rumours were that her strikes were dirty and dishonourable; she did not adhere to the rule to keep to the areas easy to heal. To my detriment, she confirmed these doubtful sources: the first swipe could have taken my fingers, the second was clearly aimed at my eyes, and the third – the third – cleaved a nice cut through my thigh.

The whole world seemed to congregate at that malevolent sword. Every move it made seemed to be larger, greater than even the prickling, nagging sense coming from the initial injury. I tried to concentrate, succeeding in throwing some well-aimed and useless strikes at her blade. Straightening the claymore, it moved to my reckless impulses and untrained hand, clumsy and confidently insecure.

Immediately, at one instant moment, her sword seemed to magically evade my focus, and fly to me. In that one short move, she felled my armed hand.

In total, it took a conclusive ten minutes. She defeated all resistance in just her second attack. The sight of blood, and then my wriggling five fingers, blithely relinquishing their lifeless grip on the blade, was an epiphany, a heaven-sent image equivalent to a divine uppercut. It was articulated, verbally, from A – 's mouth later:

"Weak, weak, weak. You're one weak bitch, aren't you Jean?"

Replying the affirmative did not serve any purpose. But then A – had already begun to wind her arm. It would've made a good opening, had not a swift kick to the shin sent me stumbling. And as I listened to the creaking of her spinning arm, my detached hand beckoned like warning to run. Wrestling my way free, I vainly sought to prevent her arm from executing its rotation. As a reward, A –'s elbow came careening into my limited line of sight.

When she released her strung arm the blade came at me so fast there was nothing I could do but throw my arms to protect my face. The blade shred through flesh, then muscle and then – the steel sucked the coldness from my exposed bone at my left arm, paused. A – shrieked with laughter and when I came to she danced towards me and, before I could react, swept her sword up to me, a conscious slap to my face by the hilt of her sword.

"Three revolutions!" she screamed in what looked like maniac joy. "Just three!"

"Weak Jean, you're not even worth five. You're even worth half of my full effort."

Her hand rested on my head as I strained to stand, and my eyes blinked only to see the ground at close-up again. Some of the other trainees were starting to walk away. And A – with them. Her disappearing figure turned hazy with warmth. And a hot, unwanted tear joined the sweat on my face and burned its way to the ground, pooling where my chin rested in its humiliating crater.

3.
So it felt good to lose contact with her when she left the academy as an official monster-killer. Not long after I was deployed too. There were many more fights, with many other girls, before the instructors found it fit to hand me a number. Certainly, I lost some, but some the teammates assigned to me later added that some mad, unnatural obsession with beating away dissent had somehow flourished in me. Not to mention, they noted with a kind of suspicious disdain I was also twisting my arm into a taut tricep-twist. They warned me not to use it as my finishing move, fearing it would spark reprisals from A – , who at my graduation was already drilling, bullying and dogfighting her way to single-digit status.

Screw her, I told them. But, literally speaking, the move was not yet confident enough to show itself completely.

4.
The first time I actually bested A – in a real swordfight, I was already a single-digit.

For some deeply-mistrustful reason, every time this story is told, listeners get the impression of a colossal confrontation at a deserted field between two warriors eager to settle old schoolyard disputes with swords instead of fists.

Not quite. The meeting was not determined by the great hand of coincidence, and neither did we arrange it (though she probably would relish any excuse for confrontation). A message was sent out, ordering us to hunt A – down and exterminate her; in the Organization's style, they believed I – Jean of the twisted arm, whose only obstacle in the academy was a training ground bully – would jump at the opportunity to even the score.

As much as they do not deserve such credit, they were not wholly wrong.

I ambushed her, like a common criminal, outside a town. Behind her, impatient flames were licking the buildings clean.

Her cheeks were flushed with yoki. The Organization had not given the reason for why we needed to dispatch her, but the signs were too evident to be negate. With a thrill, she shouted my name; her voice had lost its husky, teasing melody, degrading into a hoarse, throaty baritone. And her blade was so coated in crimson it appeared to be bleeding.

"Jean, Jean, Jean," she sang. "The dog has returned to its master!"

A single-digit warrior has no excuse to play into the hands of such cheap insults. But once my claymore was drawn, I began circling her, waiting for a chance to end it quickly and cleanly. But A – let loose a burst of yoki, smiling like a grotesque model of Rubel. Blood continued to drain from her blade.

A restless trail harking back to the ruined, flame-tossed township behind.

You're a murderer, I accused. Drop your sword and receive your due penance.

"Dogs don't bite their masters," she said. "Dogs sit!"

Her downward thrust I met with an oblique upward strike. But with each moment, the force of her assault intensified, and not anticipating the explosion of yoki, my knees buckled under me. She forced her into kneeling position.

"That's a good bitch! Sit sit sit!"

Automatically, yoki pumped one extra ounce of brute strength to my arms, and I pushed my way to standing position. A –'s face was livid; her tongue, like a worm, was thrashing in her blood-gargled mouth.

"Sit! Sit! If you don't sit I will be very angry, you crazy dog you!"

Speak for yourself.

"What? What?"

Sweat from the enormous effort of defence was soiling my fringe, leaking in to mix with my speech-laden saliva.

"Disobedient dogs deserve to be cast into the fire!"

Her face had now turned itself inside out. There was no longer the prominent nose, razor-thin features so distinctively A –. Instead, the yoki ran amok her human shell, the mere capsule where the monster within her took its placid form. The nails at her fingertips had begun to narrow, then sharpen; her eyes, once malicious as a summer sunlight, were glowing like hot coals; her biceps bubbled by the minute. And by the time I pushed her bulky frame away, her face had become feral: shining teeth perched atop a snout, rabid, carnal.

Her voice was different. She spoke with her throat, an unfriendly growl: "Only dogs like you mimic their masters' moves."

The critical recognition of her counter-accusation came with a strike targeted for my forehead. The blow swerved across my blade so fast and so quick it blinded, and the next image I registered was a curtain of blood veiling my eyes. In between those big obstructing streams of blood – came the perilous sound and sight of her turning her right arm in continuous revolutions –

Panic drove my arm into its preparatory twisting: 1, 2, 3 –

"No more chances, you! Fifteen revolutions will finish you, dog!"

Not yet. And betraying the sight of what must have looked to be a deep stripe on my forehead, I began to force the process – 6, 7, 8 – hoping against hope my answer would have the advantage of spontaneity and power over hers. In those crucial seconds, muscle began to blend into muscle, bone flexed into bone; the crunch of already damaged cartilage and joints, as they kneaded themselves into a singular funnel of elastic muscular power – under the influence of blood-drenched yoki the pain fuelled a persistent turn, turn, turning of this weapon . 13, 14, 15 –

At 15, she came at me.

"Copycat you!"

The tornado of her arm was aimed at my face. With my other hand holding my twisted arm in place, deflecting the attack did not appear possible. So I resorted to something Clare would surely disapprove of: I pouched at A – with what would probably have appeared to be a lame attempt to allow my knee to take all the damage.

And it worked. A –'s drilling, spinning sword took out a chunk of knee, bone and tendon before I crashed into her – 19, 20, 21 – She reeked of yoki at close-range, and her loosely swirling arm spun away into empty air.

"You – you – you!"

– 23.

It's already been emphasized earlier that even the best are prone to mistakes. And in this do-or-die fight, the error had, for the first time, shifted to A –'s record: she had come at me with 15 revolutions of her favourite move. Whether she could have done more is now mere speculation, but considering her superiority and creativity in inventing the technique – which turned me, unofficially, into a thief – there was not any doubt she could have outstripped even 23 painful, demanding turns. Why she stuck to 15 is a question reserved for earnest prayer and soul-searching, like a deadly secret to be revealed only on my deathbed, when I'm hopefully succumbing to a rightful, mortal wound through my torso.

And not from disgraceful split kneecaps during this fight.

What remained to be done was simple. A – snarled; I pulled every last drop of control over my yoki into my taut, sword-holding arm. I plunged it right into her chest, and then said for the first time (of what would be many more): maximum number of revolutions reached. Then I let go.

She reminded me of those ridiculous toys we used to play in our far, innocent childhood: a spinning top. With my arm as pivot, I watched A –'s entire body unravel into streams of beautiful ribbons, as if I was opening a present, her parting gift to me (a finally triumphant swordfight), only to find that the end of the unwrapping left a resonant, placid silence so pleasing to embrace.

My knees hurt; a timely shower of offal and fleshy clumps drizzled my head; my sword-arm fell crumpled. I thought it would take a month for my legs and knees to heal. Crawling and not willing to let myself turn lethargic from pain, I pawed over to A –'s claymore. Winner takes all, I remember thinking. And in the savage beastliness of the moment, I flung the sword across the battleground till it rested beneath a blood-splattered tree.

5.
Most warriors, especially Clare, believe in this pagan veneration of fellow warriors' graves, marked by their lofty swords. Well, whenever I pass by that sword (and Clare would be mortified), I make sure I present a wreath of my most generous spittle.

Edited: 10.10.08.

Originally written for Mikke, who inspired me with his Jean story. I was experimenting with short introductions & conclusions for my Short Story writing class as well. Comments & criticism is always welcome :) Thanks.