BANG!
"Missed me."
BANG!
"Missed me again."
BANGBANGBANGBANGBANGBANG!
Motohama and Matsuda could only watch in shock as Issei casually stepped out of the way of multiple spheres of crackling purple light, a smug smirk on his face as he did so.
Standing on the opposite side of the field was a grimacing, sweat-covered Aika, hefting a steaming, fuck-off sized hand cannon whose mere visage was enough to make the two break out in cold sweat.
Taking a deep breath, the girl stilled her hands, which had been trembling as a consequence of both the recoil and the energy drain of consecutive firing, before gritting her teeth as she shifted the barrel towards Issei and opened fire once more.
BANGBANGBANGBANGBANGBANGBANGBANGBANGBANG-
"Look at what we have here."
The two teens froze in shock which quickly turned into horror at those words. Their necks turned towards the owner of the voice with a speed that could be called glacial at best, cold sweat mixing with the already plentiful amounts of perspiration that already stained the entirety of their bodies as the form of Xinthia loomed over them, something that could only by the most charitable metrics be called a smile splitting her face.
"While everybody else is sweating their proverbial balls off, what do I find? Why, I find a pair of slack-jawed slackers, sitting on their asses and watching somebody else's training instead of getting back to their own! Well guess what, slackers one and two, your laziness has just earned you a sparring session with me!"
A chill went down both their spines at those words.
The two of them had had the opportunity to witness what Issei and Xinthia called 'light sparring', and it was more than enough to raise the hair on the back of their heads.
Well, maybe not Matsuda's, but that's beside the point.
That 'light spar' was enough to make them throw away any notion of growing strength and power that they'd felt their daily training had been bringing them, as well as any pride they felt from the way they dealt with their first experience with what they now knew to be a Stray Devil.
Seeing the flashes of light, listening to the rapport of, and feeling the shockwaves resulting from the clashes between their best friend and their trainer was a sobering reminder of the fact that they were at the bottom of the totem pole as far as the supernatural world was concerned, and it had lit up a massive fire under their asses that pushed them to try their best to catch up.
It was that same fire that made it so that rather than complain or try to delay their oncoming pain, the two teens instead met each other's gaze, a nod and twitch conveying a silent message, before, with gritted teeth, they acted.
A fistful of snow was thrown at Xinthia's eyes, courtesy of Motohama, while Matsuda drew in as much Tantric Energy as he could into his body for a single full-power strike in the form of a kick aimed at the succubus' throat.
Their coordinated attack was easily thwarted by Xinthia, who swatted the dirt away from her eyes almost as if she had already been expecting it, swayed back just far enough to avoid Matsuda's foot, before grabbing his ankle and, after a short spin, threw the baldie against his glasses-wearing friend, sending the two into a tumbling roll.
Groaning, the two teens pushed themselves back up to their feet and turned wary gazes toward the succubus, who responded with a brutal smirk. A small puff of snow flew across the space between them before Xinthia tore off towards the two teens, who responded to the best of their capabilities.
Matsuda, being tougher and better at reinforcement than Motohama, blurred from the glasses wearer's peripheral sight and appeared in front of him, arms covered in glowing purple lines crossed in front of his chest.
BAM!
Matsuda's guard was barely capable of slowing down Xinthia, the combination of the snow and the harsh impact causing his feet to slip out from under him, yet that one moment of delay was enough for Motohama to jump over him, a small magical circle with a magical yellow glow on the palm of his outstretched hand.
"HAH!"
A blinding flash of light filled the training field for an instant, during which time Motohama lunged at Xinthia with a stone in hand, poised to smack her over the head with it.
SMACK!
The flare of light dissipated only to reveal the sight of a grimacing Motohama, whose swollen hand held Xinthia's fist and the powdered remnants of the stone he had swung. The succubus raised her other hand right in time to stop another kick from Matsuda, this one aimed right at the back of her head.
Opening her fist so that her fingers interlaced with Motohama to keep him from escaping and holding Matsuda aloft by the ankle with her other hand, Xinthia spoke up.
"A ruthless baldy going purely for kill strikes and a despicable little bugger using whatever cheap tricks he has in his sleeves…" Her face split into a smirk, "Good. In battle, every strategy is a valid strategy. No trick is too dirty, and no tactic is too despicable. Mercy is a privilege that the weak cannot afford to offer their enemies, for they have no assurance as to their ability to survive them in further conflict, much less defeat them.
"Live long enough and there'll possibly be a point when you can offer your enemies mercy, for your power will be enough incentive for them to not cross you out of fear of you going nuclear, but until then, you bite, you scratch, you crawl through mud and shit, and you do any and every despicable thing you can think of to survive."
She followed that speech up by smacking the two solemn teens against each other before once more tossing them away.
The two rolled back to their feet once more, though with a noticeably increased level of difficulty, before meeting each other's gaze once more and nodding, before tearing off at a run in opposite directions.
The two of them started circling Xinthia at full sprint, one clockwise and the other one counter-clockwise, eliciting an intrigued raise of the eyebrow from the woman. Matsuda was the first to break from this run, thick Tantric Energy building up within his legs in jagged lines of purple light before he once again moved at a speed that would've been little more than a blur to the average eye, reappearing in front of Xinthia with his leg already in motion towards her liver.
The succubus slapped the limb away, once again unbalancing Matsuda. Unlike the previous time though, the baldy moved with the blow, allowing the momentum of the slap to carry him into a tight spin that was fast enough to fling the snow around his support foot away at speed, before all of that built up momentum was converted into a spinning heel kick aimed right at Xinthia's chin.
Xinthia raised both of her hands, one of them ready to block the kick and the other one to retaliate, only for the snow under her feet to shift, causing her center of gravity to change right as Matsuda's foot made contact with her hand.
SWOOOOOSH!
She slid back a dozen feet as a consequence of her unsteady footing, carving a pair of throughs through snow and dirt alike, only for Matsuda to reappear right above her just as she stopped, his body spinning at high speed in what looked like the physics-defying, cinematic version of a somersault, before his body unfolded, every single drop of Tantric Energy in his body directed towards his outstretched right leg, causing the muscles in the limb to seemingly inflate to twice their usual size, his vascular veins visibly intercrossing with the thick, jagged purple veins of energy running along the surface of his skin.
"HAAAAAAAP!"
Xinthia once again felt the snow shift underneath her, this time in the form of a thin cloud of the powdered water climbing all the way up to her shins before small streams of electricity started running through it at a seemingly unceasing rate.
BOOM!
Issei turned his gaze towards the loud noise, curiously peering into the thin cloud of snow that had risen up where sounds of battle had been coming from.
BANG!
He absentmindedly tilted his torso out of the way of another one of Aika's shots, to the girl's audible frustration in the form of disgruntled grumbling, which then turned into a shriek of surprise as she just barely ducked under a speeding snowball that would've likely given her a good shiner had it hit, yet only grazed a few strands of hair as a consequence of her experience-borne dodge.
Half a dozen more snowballs flying at her at that same speed forced her to turn her efforts from blasting her boyfriend away to destroying the projectiles. She cursed inwardly at a mistake she committed by shooting down one of the snowballs far too close to herself, with the resulting snow curtain obscuring her sight.
Her legs tensed up while thoughts of repositioning moved through her mind at lightning speeds, only for her mind to go blank when Issei suddenly broke through the snow and filled her field of view.
Instinct superseded thought at that moment as Aika's wrists subconsciously shifted positions before she fired a blast of energy right towards Issei's face.
'I got hi-!'
Her victorious thoughts were dashed when the brunet's head tilted out of the way of the fist-sized ball of energy with nary a strand of hair lost, before his fingers, outstretched in the form of a gun, were placed on the girl's forehead.
"Bang."
Aika's eyes crossed for a moment as she stared at the fingers on her forehead before she exhaled, the tension of their training session leaving her body completely, and causing her to flop bonelessly on the snow, her chest heaving as she greedily gulped in air while the snow underneath her rapidly melted as a consequence of her much warmer than usual body.
"You… Cheater…" Aika spoke in-between gasps, "Low… Class…. Can't…Dodge… Range…"
Issei crouched down in front of Aika, an amused tilt to his lips as he spoke.
"With the way you're leaking power, any competent low class with even the barest understanding of your abilities would be able to feel the buildup of energy before each shot, as well as mentally track the shot itself. You're doing the ranged equivalent of telegraphing a punch."
"How… Should I… Change…"
"Better control. Compress the power you're packing within your shots so that there's less leakage, making it much harder to anticipate them, with a bonus of increasing their destructive power in exchange for a higher accuracy requirement.
"Defensively, you already started well with trying to anticipate the opponent's movements, which is a basic part of the sniper skillset you're cultivating, the importance of which you likely know of much better than I do. Other than improving at that, you need to learn how to minimize wasted motion.
"That last dodge of mine, it seemed really fast, right?"
The girl didn't waste any breath speaking, choosing instead to nod silently.
"Actually, it wasn't a particularly fast movement in the sense that I demanded more power from my muscles. Instead, I just eliminated any useless motion from that dodge.
"Think of it like this. In professional baseball, the low-end speed of a fastball tends to be at around eighty-something miles per hour, or around a hundred and thirty-something kilometers per hour, with the fastest pitches going up to the mid-to-high nineties, very close to 100 miles per hour, or around the high one hundred and fifties in kilometers per hour. Batters are capable of keeping up with these pitches. Does this mean that batters are capable of moving at 80-something to 100 mph? No. Then, how do they do it?
"They do it the same way pitchers achieve these speeds in the first place, which is efficient movement. Both sides of the equation spend years honing their respective skills, learning how to best pitch and bat in a way that eliminates wasted motion, and thus wasted energy, and allows them to put all of their bodies' power into the pitch or swing.
"The pitcher's side of the equation is convenient insofar as your shooting is concerned, but it's the batter you want to focus on when dodging. There is a basic requirement for reflexes, tracking abilities, and predictive capabilities for them to figure out the path the ball is going to follow and where to hit, but the mechanics of the swing are nothing more than tightening the range of motions as much as possible, and distributing the power through their body as necessary, meaning the legs, shoulders, arms, forearms, wrists, back, lats, each and every one of them only gets as much power as they need, and performs as small a range of motion as possible for the desired swing.
"Basically, figure out where the blow is coming from, figure out the least effort-intensive way to get out of the way of the blow, and follow through with it. Figure that out, and you'll be pulling off these sorts of dodges with ease."
The girl nodded at that, showing that she had been following along Issei's words, only for a twitch of her gun-bearing hand to result in a snowball hitting her face, this one at a regular, non-threatening speed.
Standing up to his full height and stretching, Issei turned his focus towards the other side of the field, where Motohama and Matsuda stood across from Xinthia, a small crater on the ground splitting the space between them.
Matsuda was gritting his teeth in pain while trying his best to keep most of his weight off of his right leg, which was spasming very visibly and showed multiple patches of reddened skin, while Motohama stared at Xinthia with utterly bloodshot eyes, his fingertips split to the point that a thin stream of blood painted the snow underneath him, while both of his arms twitched under sporadic flashes of electricity.
Xinthia, seemingly feeling Issei's gaze on her, turned towards the brunet, whose single raised brow conveyed a full question, prompting her to answer.
"They tried to set me up. The bald one put his all into a single ax kick as his finishing move, and the glasses-wearing one mixed a snow spell with a veritable flood of weak electricity spells to keep me from getting out of the way, or even blocking effectively.
"It ultimately resulted in what you see, since the bald one's body isn't sturdy enough to just shrug off that type of pressure, and the glasses one isn't proficient enough with the spells he was casting to point the harmful bits completely my way.
"All in all, any low-classer worth their salt would beat each of their asses, or even both at once. The fact that the bald one's leg doesn't look like a sausage casing and that the glasses one didn't blow himself up or suffer an aneurysm after performing the necessary calculations to multicast and spam spells he hasn't mastered yet is a testament to their potential to not suck if I bat them around enough."
Issei blinked in surprise at Xinthia's assessment, before turning towards his best friends and flashing the two of them a thumbs up.
"That's high praise coming from this madwoman. I'm proud of you guys."
BANG!
A tilt of his head resulted in a tree a fair distance away getting a hole punched through it before he crouched and his wrist blurred as he picked up a handful of snow, crunching it into a snowball with a single squeeze of his hand before lazily lobbing it over his shoulder, drawing a pained yelp from Aika.
Seeing that the training session was finished, Motohama slid Matsuda's arm over his shoulder to help him keep his weight fully off his pained leg before his eyes narrowed as he spoke.
"Hey, how come Lilith doesn't have to get tortu- I mean, train with us?"
"Lilith isn't just skipping training to sit on her butt, so no need to feel indignation or envy," Issei spoke in an amused tone, "She's currently training with her mom."
"Indeed." Xinthia said in a surprisingly solemn tone, "Lady Laveria's standards are extremely high. It is likely that Lilith is undergoing much stricter training than all of you."
In a secret room of Saint Leona's, a large magical circle slowly spread through the ground, each and every one of its lines glowing with a bright purple light, before a ripple caused it to vanish altogether.
"Your hold over your energy isn't good enough! Try Again!"
Lilith no longer jumped in shock at her mother's harshly-toned orders, licking her lips before focusing on her energy once more. Trying to simultaneously sink her consciousness into her energy and keep it in the room around her, Lilith pushed her Tantric Energy out from under her feet, causing a magical circle to slowly come into existence underneath her.
'Steady…'
Sweat rolled down Lilith's face, matted her hair to her scalp and neck, and caused her clothes to stick to her skin, yet all of these irritating sensations were forgotten in favor of the feeling of the thrumming, pulsing energy coursing through her veins.
The circle underneath Lilith gained some visible details in the form of gradually forming geometric patterns of various different types, before another pulse ran through all of the room's surfaces, upsetting the control Lilith possessed over the burgeoning magical circle, causing it to fade away once more, and bringing the succubus to her knees.
"Is that it?" Laveria spoke in her most imperious voice, as if talking down to the lowliest of simpletons. "Are you done? Is that all you are capable of before giving up?"
Lilith's desire to speak up was impeded by her urgent need to fill her lungs, allowing Laveria to keep speaking unimpeded.
"It seems this is your limit. Well, it's not as if you even need to be any stronger than this. You can just sit in place twiddling your thumbs while waiting for Issei to save you again the next time someone attacks you and you fail to defend yourself. Doesn't that sound like a comfortable, laid-back existence?"
Lilith's eyes all but spat fire at those words. Her fists clenched so tightly that her nails pierced through her palms, resulting in blood flowing down her wrists, which was matched by the blood running down her chin due to how hard she had bitten her lip.
Putting both hands under her, Lilith forced herself up onto staggering legs, before taking a deep breath and holding out her hands.
The fire in her eyes was only matched by the cold, sharp focus that fell on her mind as she once more took her power under control, causing a bright circle of pinkish-purple light to slowly unfold underneath her…
-CHAPTER END-