THIRD ROUND – MATCH #3
Athena Asamiya vs. Aoi Kusanagi


It was a battle between two who could be considered 'heroes' in the midst of the competition. Unfortunately for their end of the divide, only one was going to have to advance – cutting loose one for the good souls in the indirect rivalry against evil.

The forced tension slicing down between Aoi and Athena made the seconds spent idiling against each other seem a tenfold's length longer than reality perceived.

Aoi's stance staggered forward by mere centimeters, trying to get a flinch out of the opponent with an attempt at 'strategy'... "Make your move, Athena... I'm ready when you are..."
She was ready whether she liked it herself, or not.

Athena's palms stood flat with fingers unbent and together, as usual – one by her face with knuckles facing towards her neck, the other outstretched as far as capable, yet a little shakier than normal due to who she was messing with on this round...

There was plenty of time left in the day to take into this fight, as the two slowly closed in the distance while circling around at the length-wise bottom end of the table. The scent of reluctance could be grazed by tongue as Aoi waited on Athena to make an attempt at the first strike, and vice versa for the Psycho Soldier.

The biker's fists clenched while her forearms lingered with slight looseness to the gravity of her stance – she was holding the flames in well despite the struggles she showed in the moments just before the silent ring of the metaphorical bell. As the seconds passed on the clock, Aoi grew to recognize how hard Athena was reading her on the circular footwork alone.

Looking to take a different route, she turned to her left and lifted a leg to quickly climb up the edge of the table – Aoi took a couple well-balanced steps across before flying into the closest of quarters with something akin to her cousin's 'R.E.D. Kick' in mind...

...only to be caught too quick with two feet against the chest from a quickly-spurred Athena dropkick – the forward force of her own body against that of Athena's legs flying into her made for a rough first attack to take for Aoi, and she went back the direction she came from the table, slamming off the rough corner of the wood she walked on before falling.

Aoi managed to not fall flat on her front thanks to the risky placement of her knees towards the floor, but the damage was done regardless and she started off the fight with a bit of wind out of her sails already...

She could see Asamiya shorten the distance again, rather quickly, as she ran with sight to capitalize...

…Aoi would prove not to want any of it already, as she charged forth herself and caught Athena into a clinch to keep her from throwing limbs too widely.

"Unff—!" Athena felt the strike she drove into Aoi's ribs to start, return back to her in a higher quantity as Aoi took little time to rough her up in retaliation, with a few knees to the gut.

Athena slowly tried to catch herself up with little motions and placement that would build up to something more valued in the fight – as she set her foot on top of one of Aoi's and pressed with tangible force.
Aoi quickly pushed away the foot-atop-foot struggle, kicking away Athena's most forward-facing leg with a right-leg kick to the knee, buckling it away and following it up with an elbow across the left side of Athena's face.

The capitalization came immediately after, with a heated though currently flameless fist coming forth upon the Psycho Soldier's jaw; an under-hand uppercut from Aoi caught Athena on her dainty jawline and knocked the idol across the length of a couple of 12-inch rulers. Athena couldn't even perfectly maintain her balance enough to avoid falling on her butt.

The gifted schoolgirl put some of her good seated energy to good use, however, managing to nail Aoi in the ankle to trip her out mid-run; Aoi would promptly fall flat on her stomach just as Athena rolled backwards onto her knees, basically trading positions as the Psycho Soldier started to kneel over the firey biker's body.

Athena knew quickly that Aoi wasn't going to stay down for much longer than a few seconds, and kept her distance before her opponent could circle in too close. However, Aoi was soon back to her feet again and approaching, rather quickly – in fact, she was quicker going forwards than Athena's going backwards.

"Where are you going, popstar?" Aoi said, as she soon caught up to Athena's butt-scooched position and wrapped her arms around the locks of purple hair flowing down the popstar's neck.
"We're just getting started..." If Aoi was gonna fight, she wasn't going to hold back – it was just gonna take some time to get there, as far as Athena's approach was concerned.

"Hup~!" Athena rolled past Aoi's grasp, starting to get sweaty and nervous with her standing as she already found herself on the wrong end of a struggle. She kept herself low as she tried to sweep out the Kusanagi from under her feet.

Aoi lifted her furthest forward foot and the sweep barely grazed her before she stomped the foot back down – but she too missed a strike as Athena rolled a few inches off to the right before crawling up and clinging on for what was an attempt at a single-leg takedown. She held on tight onto the leg of Aoi's leather apparel and tried to let gravity take over as she pushed forward – but Aoi held onto the edge of the table right behind her to keep herself from stumbling... for all but a moment before Athena laid into her body one more time with a double-palm push-strike.

Aoi's body flopped backwards over the right-corner-quadrant of the table, and on that moment started some of the culinary casualties as some of the food, drinks and condiments on the table were either smashed/squished under the pressure of the human body rolling over it, or outright knocked to the floor and left to similar misuse as neither fighter was likely willing to pick up and partake at a time like this.

Getting up quickly with nothing but the crumbs and shrapnel of broken and smushed foods to wipe off her biker bodysuit, Aoi grabbed onto the leg of the table nearest to her and pushed it forward as she got up...
With a slight quake of the objects atop it, the table budged forwards and bumped into Athena's left hip before her senses could somehow see it coming. Aoi charged in afterwards to wrap herself around the Psycho Soldier again in another clinch, with another knee into Athena's gut before spinning and forcing the bottom end of her spine against the hard and tested wood poking in from the end of the table.

However, Athena quickly slipped out from within Aoi's arms and followed up on her with an elbow to the face; rocked from a brain-jogging bunt of an elbow, Aoi couldn't act quickly enough to throw a counter-punch before Athena met up to her with a short-hop...

Another dropkick to the ribs later, and both were sent backwards from each other!
Aoi was left at an all-too-real stumble, her feet skidding back past the left corner of the table beside her, and Athena had dismounted with slight imperfection in her step as she somersaulted back.

The bright purple-pink energy flowed through Athena's hands as she spread her arms to her sides before throwing them forward.
"Psycho Ball~!"
The orb of energy flung out with a hastened pace, providing a faster projectile at risk of possibly low damage – its ending destination pursuing for Aoi's face, it presumed, but it quickly found itself lost to the dust in the wind as Aoi blocked it away at the last second with a swing of her right arm. Still burned somewhat on the red leather wrapped over her forearms, but it was better than getting it straight on the nose – and she would rather not know how much of a bitch it'd hurt from direct contact. Not that she'd want the Psycho Soldier to know it would hurt, either...

Athena threw another Psycho Ball, enforcing her distance even if it didn't do much to budge her Kusanagi opponent. The reluctance to this fight was growingly palpable as Athena's method of offense/defense was revealed further.

On the third 'ball' flung, Aoi swerved sideways past it while clinging past the table and regained close contact with the swing of a heated right hook – the fist clashed with Athena's jaw with none of the momentum pulled away, and continued to rotate through with more strikes on the way.

Two kicks, a left and a right, to juggle Athena up on the pressure against her stomach, and then another elbow that slammed higher up on her chest, just beneath the purple bead central on her sailor-uniform scarf.
From there, Aoi chose to break away from the combo instead of continuing it, seeing as though the wall that Athena was driven into was already starting to crack through – and one would feel both would rather not fall out into the grass and instead keep enjoying the scenery that they were fighting within.

Though it was mostly one kicking another's butt for the most part – Aoi felt the reluctance in the air, around the energy that Athena conserved by being so defensive from the start.

"I guess one of us is okay with not pulling punches on a friend..." said Aoi, looking down on the Psycho Soldier coughing in brief pain before her. The motorbike enthusiast cricked her neck, as she was still feeling out the pressure that was being punched into her in earlier blows of the battle.

"Mmnf... no one's... urgh... no one's ever …really prepared for this..." Athena responded, struggling to bring air properly back into her lungs. "I... I really don't want to hold back – you know I don't – b-but Elisabeth..."

Aoi rolled her eyes. "Yeah, yeah, dignity and what not – whatever she could do couldn't be any worse than what's boiling through me..."

The little flames of fighting spirit in Aoi's hands flowed as she readjusted and cracked her knuckles
"Now get up, and show me what got you here so far..."
She spoke down on Athena as though the idol still had full feeling in her legs.

That wasn't quite the case.
Athena was wobbling lightly under her own weight – the combo that was pounded into her body did a decent number on her condition, which was already on rough ground from what the Psycho Soldier went through earlier in the day with the Blanctorche and the Beart.

Athena charged in with shoulders and head poking furthest ahead, and quickly met resistance from Aoi – as the Kusanagi brought a fist in to press against Athena's stomach, grinding against slowly as both ladies found themselves to a halt, trying to budge past one another's bodies to make way for critical blows.

Aoi hooked her arms around Athena's left arm specifically, and guarded off the kicking strikes reaching for the lower body with a steady right leg and a durable knee – all the while, she again pinned Athena against the table, wood pressing with force against the area above the tailbone's end point as Athena tried to throttle her body towards the right. She had a clutch of Aoi's left leg, hoping to pull her down along the way of a potential cartwheel out of clutch.

Aoi eventually broke away as she drove the steady right knee around the sternum of her opponent, and then followed up seconds later on the keeled-over Athena with an axe kick right down on the back of the neck-and-shoulders area. Even then, the strike wasn't enough to fully bring Athena doing, rendering her down in as much as a half-kneel.

With the spinning momentum of a discus-throw, Aoi prepped to nail down Athena with another big fist to the face to earn herself another takedown upon the fighting idol...
...but it was blocked!

Athena lifted her left arm and caught Aoi by the forearm – with her right arm...
"Psycho Sword!"

While not as sharp as a real, physical sword, the strike still provided as much of a sharp pain flying up on Aoi's upper body, from her navel to her jaw – and almost as high a percent-chance of drawing blood. As she staggered backwards, Aoi's tongue clamped in between the two opposing-and-closing rows of teeth, and she coughed on the metallic taste that spurted to surface.

She was forced to hold that blood-tainted saliva behind closed teeth as she took another pushing kick to the chest from Athena – Aoi's feet slid with the absolute opposite of smoothness, her ankles nearly tripping first before the rest of her body.

Athena halted offense for a few seconds as she regained her posture and fighting stance, breathing in and out to attain that 'magical idol' confidence. She was almost willing to allow Aoi to take her turn, but based on the seconds-too-long spent on Aoi to try and act back, Athena chose to take the next move.

Just as Aoi staggered forth, she was quickly clipped at the left knee with a kick too low to have properly prepared for – and as Aoi half-knelt, Athena swung in on the left of her head with a kick, hooking like the swing of a knife but nowhere near the sharpness to cut into her.

The trifecta of blows sealed off on a front-flip that Athena flung herself into, clipping the heels of her feet against Aoi's forehead as they both hit the floor after the contact – Athena's body landed partially onto Aoi's, but she quickly rolled off and started climbing back to her feet before her opponent could think and figure things out coming out of that...

As Athena's sight fell out of focus on her opponent for just the slightest of moment, Aoi started to roll against the table – until she slowly dragged her legs past the cloth and beneath the furniture. Rather than throwing herself into the action this time, she wanted the Psycho Soldier to follow her down.
Gullible lil' Athena caught the hookline soon after, turning to see the loose cloth hanging down from table push inwards in the underside's gap, and followed the biker girl underneath.

Aoi emerged out from the left side, allowing Athena to follow through – just in time for the Psycho Soldier to receive herself an impending stomachache from the double-stomp Aoi dropped on her as soon as she turned tail and cut her off.

Athena strained her body a little way's forward as she grabbed onto Aoi's shoulders and urged her against the stud in the wall right behind her. Athena's barely-existent abs beneath her uniform were pained by the rough texture of the biker boots as she struggled the leather heels off her body with nothing but torso-based momentum.

Athena acted in response with some boots-to-body of her own, thrusting her legs up against Aoi right beneath where the zipper of her bodysuit was resting. The force tumbled Aoi over into a frontflip that smashed her atop the central delicacies of the table – Elisabeth's food budget was burning in a non-literal sense in this fight, but given that one of the people in action was of the Kusanagi clan, the food was likely to actually burn before the ending ring of the bell.

Aoi rolled back off the table, nearly falling fully onto the carpeting as she struggled with the increasing splatters of various foods tainting her favorite red-and-black attire – not to mention the occasional shards from broken glass threatening to paint further red on it as well.
She nearly fell atop Athena before the magical schoolgirl could get back to her feet – but Athena instinctively caught her.

"Nngh..." Aoi didn't know how to feel from the embrace she was wrapped into... "Wha... what are you doing?"

Athena strained, "Trying not... ngh... to get crushed, of course!"

Very soon after, the detriments of being the lighter-weight of the two competitors – not by an incredible mass, but still enough to make a difference – came back to bite Athena as Aoi pushed her weight up and over the Psycho Soldier, before wrapping her arms around the blessed Asamiya's shoulders and chest...

...and then throwing her over towards the direction of the table, smashing Athena into the already smashed and splattered mess of food, drink and glass that Aoi herself endured not even a minute before.

"I know you're trying to at least fight respectfully," Aoi retorted, "but sometimes, you gotta put your strength somewhere else!"

Aoi climbed over Athena on the table, and threw herself down with an elbow smashing into the pop-idol's ribs, rattling the table further – yet how worth it was it when there was very little space to work with on the table that wasn't sprinkled with glass.

The groundwork brawling turned to Aoi's favor as she wrapped the elbow-dropping arm around Athena's neck and her right arm as it raised above shoulder-level. The headlock viced as the two rolled around on the table, amid a messy battlefield of food wasted to mush and glass left in poking shards on top of the clothed table.

Aoi pushed past the destruction atop the catering with her legs as she tried to find a sweet spot to climb herself back up to her feet. Her left knee jabbed occasionally into the lower-right of Athena's abs, around appendix-level, as she tried to keep the idol weak and on her knees – but what she was also combating was her own footing on the wooden furniture, as her right foot wiggled briefly past the edge...

…and her other leg suddenly buckled a bit too far outwards; her headlock fell to heights too low to hold on properly, a result of gravity taking things to its own terms!

Athena looped out of the headlock right as the opportunity was most prominent for escape, with a flipover, followed by a swinging kick that had the potential effect of making Aoi's bottom lip stab itself on her teeth.

Aoi immediately whipped back with a sweeping roundhouse, scorching the tablecloth slightly with the flames spurting behind her ankles – but Athena jumped, stomping past the remnants of glass as she walked closer to the other end of the table, out of Aoi's reach. Even then, there wasn't too much more distance to make without having to get off the table, and she nearly stumbled off herself.

Athena's momentum to motion shifted so far forward that she proceeded to throw herself off the table – and nearly skull-first against the opposing wall as she landed into Aoi's arms mainly by her lower body, and then was dropped back against the left-end of the table with a spine-rattler of a slam!

Aoi didn't even allow the Psycho Soldier a second of reprieve as the Kusanagi ran against, and a couple steps up the wall she faced in front of, and charged in with a firey fist diving down...!

...that was caught right into two hands glowing purple – as Athena felt Aoi's body fall nearly entirely onto her own, and the heat of the orange flame threatening to darken the shade of purple flowing through the idol's locks. Athena's legs quaked as they wrapped around Aoi's waist, as they slowly intertwined over each other's body in another deadlocked struggle on the table.

Two bodies rolled over each other, continuing to deal with the mess left on the table, until both Aoi and Athena were able to climb up to kneeling positions – by this point, the little pinches and pokes into the skin of their legs was the least of the combatants' worries, as the purple magic and orange fire slowly canceled out against each other, and what the clash devolved into was a trading of punches. Raw reality was thrown from one end to the other, and vice versa, as the brunette and the violette battered lumps out of each other for as long as their stamina held for the moment. They were both the hero of their own story, and considerably one to others as well, but it was this hero's motivation that made them go at 100% with whatever energy they could use within their fists.

More than ten seconds' worth of punches unpulled, with unconscious intention to loosen teeth and knock spouts of red blood out of each other, entitled the fight between the two respectful young ladies as something that proved neither were wanting to hold back given the future beholding them.

"Aurgh...!" Aoi's throat cleared out a grunt of pain and frustration just as her thrown blows were slowly staring to dwindle down. However, by this point, she had one last quintet of knuckles in the chamber before needing to 'reload'.

"Oohf—!" Athena felt the last of the brick-like slams across her jaw reverb the most out of the plentiful set. She almost couldn't talk with the soreness under her teeth and tongue...
"You weren't kidding... I'd much rather take the 'punishment' again... but I can't right now...!"
She pulled Aoi in by her right shoulder and slammed another palm in center, right above the nose.

Aoi's body creaked back even further, nearly tumbling off the table again... "Don't say that... you know you want to push through this..." This time, she threw an elbow that laid low and dangerously close to Athena's throat.

"K'oough~!" Athena let a pained cough escape...
"Though I wanna ask... is this too fast for you, or not enough?"

Aoi let another flat palm of the magical prospect smash against her nose, and her upper body wiggled with slight limpness.
"Now that you mention it," she panted. "...I'm down to take this down a peg... but you probably won't like how."

Aoi's left arm reeled slowly in preparation – a spark of orange re-emerged around the nonflammable leather on her gloves.

Though Athena would agree on putting things to an end soon, she would rather not let it be on Aoi's behalf. A hoarse gasp came out of her as she threw both of her arms back, letting an emergency supply of Psycho Power flow into a protective aura.

As Athena's arms flung forward, so did Aoi's burning fist – and the colors of clashing magic hit with the force of two cars on opposite ends of a highway.

Not the best option. For both of them.

The tablecloth was the first of things to come apart from the shockwave that ensued – the pressure was enough to split the white cloth in half from the centerpoint, and the wind in the sudden sharp pressure-shift allowed the halved clothsheet to take plenty of the already-demolished feast along with it from the wood to the carpeting.

As for the fighters, on the other hand...
…they both went flying in different directions, sparks of purple and orange blasting from where they previously knelt, like Independence Day fireworks, and the walls on the opposite ends dented in from Kusanagi and Asamiya's bodies smashing into them.

Thankfully, the architecture of the room wasn't damaged enough to render things into an avalanche like one of the bouts in the previous round.
Not so much with the bodies taken along for the ride, as they both were left banged up from the collusion; Aoi and Athena were in desperate need of air in their lungs, and they both couldn't get up for the moment.
Not necessarily taken out of commission to mean a double knockout – which had happened before, and one would imagine Elisabeth and Chizuru didn't want to scramble to salvage things again (and as a result of that, there was now a new danger in Shiki involved in the fray) – but there was definitely a need for a breather.

For both of them.
For the women in charge.
And for those who were watching within the private confines.


Next Chapter: This match may need a moment to calm down, but it doesn't mean the ladies won't go harder once they get back into the thick of things...! Which of the motivated heroines will win? Find out in the next chapter!