With open palms and her arms tilted either sideways or down, Zel met all three spikes from Rikke’s right arm, using Siphoning Pulse on her hands. Two, she stopped dead. One had been timed weirdly or perhaps had a lower velocity… And went right through her left hand, whizzing past into the ground.

“Overpenetration’s a bitch, isn’t it?!” she cackled as the gaping hole in her left hand pulled itself shut. Even the bones of her ring and middle finger had been unharmed, merely bent a bit before springing back into place.

Rikke charged, launching yet more spines and forcing Zel on the defensive. The silver lining was that although Rikke’s mobility had improved, Zel could still outmaneuver her without issue. She found herself utterly inundated with projectiles, maneuvering about the arena while facing her opponent just to ensure she wouldn’t be hit even once.

“Playing this game with me is a big mistake,” she grinned inwardly, continuing to use her hands to parry the most predictable of Rikke’s spines. Using Siphoning and Graze pulse both, she either stopped them dead or deflected them off to the side, and the more she did it, the easier it became; she could feel them approaching, disturbing her aura. Her defense wasn’t automated by any means, but by the Dead Ones, Zel already knew she was halfway there.

In the audience, Torhild and Merete had taken up spots to either side of Victor, while to Torhild’s right was the Deathwalker called Zefaris. Torhild found her to be cold and impassive every time she had seen the blonde, but there was something different now. Her eyes were wide open, and a faint smile had taken up position on her face, emanating the same excitement as warriors did just before battle. She wondered if it was because her position in battle was usually distanced from the action, thus allowing her to get into it from afar in a way impossible for someone accustomed to melee.

“She’s doing it again,” Zefaris said, an undercurrent of excitement in her voice.

“Doing what?” Torhild asked.

“Innovating. Evolving. Time and again, I have seen this happen. She faces something new in battle and takes it for herself, refracting her own abilities through a new lens and using what she’s already capable of to create something new. If I had to point out a single thing that truly makes her different, this would be it.”

The longer the blonde spoke, the more her analytical speech became tinged by an unabated sense of infatuation. Her face became flushed, breathing heavy, the pupils of her eye dilated to the point the iris was just a thin band of green shaped like a sideways eight. It almost seemed like she was getting off on watching the bronze-skinned monster fight. A near-psychotic grin spread over her face, the pupils of her wide-open eye suddenly narrowing to pinpoints while her left wildly rolled about in its socket tracking every movement of the battle before them. She briefly looked straight at Torhild as she continued talking, and even that brief moment of her stare felt like she was burning a hole into her head.

“Every new foe, every new technique she faces makes her stronger; she’s an ideal warrior, the truest definition of a Tactical Supremacy Asset. The longer they fight, the less effective Rikke’s techniques will be. It won’t be more than a minute before Zelsys can read and counter anything Rikke can do. I’ve had a hell of a time trying to keep up. Time itself bends to my command, yet I can just barely consider myself her equal, even though I would never win in a straight fight. I wouldn’t trade it for anything.”

Eventually, Zel managed to find an opening and used her kinetic charge to ensure a flanking maneuver would succeed, getting around to Rikke’s back, her mouth already full of blood and retributive battery chock-full with charge that would create absolutely a deluge of crimson fireflies. Zelsys was certain; so certain… And her plan came crashing down. She barely glimpsed it. Surrounded by spines, from the back of Rikke’s head, a second pair of eyes stared back at Zelsys. She realized that the mass was covering an entire second face, this one of a weird short-muzzled animal, the same sort of in between as Rikke’s front face, but… Backwards. A humanized… Porcupine of some sort?

Rikke’s cloak of spikes rose up and launched right at Zelsys as the berserker flexed in place. The sheer number of projectiles was such that they came out at a fraction of the others’ launch velocity. Zel used the blood in her mouth as a catalyst, blending as much Pneuma into it as she could muster and spraying it out as a makeshift Rebound Pulse barrier. It bounced two, slowed the rest of them. Zel parried most of the others, but three went right through her hands; one through her right, becoming stuck in its metalized flesh. Acid burst out of its tip; Zel ripped it out with one of her braids. Throughout this protracted struggle, she continuously compressed and refined even more Fulgur in her second stomach, skimming off what she could spare just in case.

Combined with everything else, Zelsys genuinely couldn’t figure out a way by which she could strike down her opponent in melee without getting skewered and melted from the inside-out, and she was certain Rikke would manage to somehow counter a straight head-on Dance of the Fireflies…

A spark in her mind.

The Arcline-Thundergod combo technique she’d been working on. The very technique she had conceived in that bath. She hadn’t even named it yet.

There was just one problem; having removed the blades from her braids, they lacked arc breakout points. The solution was simple and obvious, but the form it naturally took amused and surprised even her; as she funneled Metallum through her braids, she found that it took not the shape of blades, but of gleaming iron skulls appropriate to the beastly forms of her Thundergods.