“One thing I always taught all of my students was to never let overconfidence befuddle their thoughts. Down that path only defeat existed.” - Kang Hung-Fei, martial arts tutor from the Al-Shan Empire, circa 681 FP.

“You may have bested Ser Montgover, but you will not find me, Ser Dagobert Eslinn of Kolain, such an easy foe,” said the second knight as he faced off against Erycea in the arena after the corpse of the first knight had been cleaned away. The knight held himself tall and confident even after witnessing the demise of his compatriot. “Have at you!”

Unlike the previous knight, the second one opted for a halberd as his weapon, one just as long as Alycea’s glaive, thus negating her reach advantage. The knight probably thought that he had seen through her “tricks” in the first duel, and with his choice of weapon matching hers in length, would be able to better leverage his superior physical strength.

Too bad the knight had no idea that Alycea sparred against people who were physically stronger than herself the vast majority of the time. The girl was very used to being the physically weaker side in any fight, and had long adapted to that fact of life with various measures to make up for her lack of physical strength.

Unlike her father and elder sister, she had no therian heritage to grant her superior physiques. Unlike her mother, she lacked the sense that allowed her to detect even the most minute of moves from her opponents before it would become visible to the eye, nor did Alycea possess instincts honed by many decades of fighting in situations best described as being on a razor’s edge.

Instead the young girl had to create measures of her own to compensate for her lacking physique. While she was indeed strong and very fit for a juvenile girl her age, enough to put some adults to shame, even against those adults who also trained their body, she was at a clear disadvantage. It was a trouble she had struggled to find a solution with for years.

It was Salicia’s birthday gift of a Willow Heartwood staff years ago that gave her a start to the path she carved with her own hand over the following years.

Most people would have considered the staff unsuitable to be used as a weapon. The wooden staff was arguably too flexible, to the point that merely the act of swinging it would cause it to bend quite a bit. Where regular willow wood was fragile, though, the Heartwood staff had no such demerits, and was indeed extremely durable despite its flexibility and relative softness.

Like all Heartwood types, it also could naturally regenerate damaged parts by absorbing mana from its surroundings, or by an infusion from its user.

Over the past few years, Alycea had painstakingly trained with the staff until she could move it like it was an extension of her body. The softness and flexibility it had formed the core of the fighting style she devised for herself, one that faced the hard with the soft rather than forcefully opposing it with more hardness.

That soon came into play as she clashed weapons with the second knight, who indeed tried to leverage his strength advantage over her, only to be stymied at every turn. Where he forcefully tried to push aside Alycea’s glaive while their weapons were in contact, Alycea simply gave way and instead made her own move to counter his, which more often than not forced him to pull back.

He tried to overpower her with vicious blows, but found to his dismay that the shaft of the weapon in Alycea’s hand would simply bend and dissipate the force of his blows before bouncing back into its original position like nothing happened, while the girl herself barely felt the impact. Even worse, his strikes and chops barely left scratches on the oddly flexible wooden shaft.

Meanwhile, he had difficulties when Alycea struck back. The way her weapon’s shaft bent and wobbled all over the place naturally made her strikes chaotic and unpredictable, which gave the knight fits when he tried to block them. Before a couple minutes had passed, the knight already sported several light cuts and nicks that bled where he failed to defend against Alycea’s strikes properly.

While he sounded all confident early on, he realized all too soon that he had only seen the surface of what Alycea had in store, and was pressed hard into the defensive after the first few exchanges. What confidence he had was long gone as he did his darndest to protect himself from the young girl’s blows, which struck at him erratically and often from difficult angles.

For her own part, Alycea was actually holding back during her fight with the second knight. She had not taken several openings that would have ended the fight, as it would have likely killed the knight. Her father had told her to spare the second one, though injuring him was fine, but the trouble was that it was always easier to kill than to merely injure someone. As such she waited until she could find a good opportunity to disable but not kill her opponent.

That chance finally arrived when her opponent misplaced his hand when he blocked one of her blows. Instead of following through with the strike, Alycea twisted her grip on the weapon, causing the blade to swerve. Instead of landing on the shaft of her opponent’s halberd edge-first, the blade instead landed on its flat, and Alycea dragged it along the shaft towards her opponent’s hand.

With a cry from the knight, both the halberd and seven of the man’s fingers fell to the ground as he fell to his knees and tried to clutch his hands against each other in order to stem the bleeding from his severed fingers. Some of his fingers lost their last joint, while others lost more than that, with the man’s right thumb completely severed.

Alycea just stood triumphantly over her bleeding opponent, proud in the knowledge that she had lived up to her parents’ expectations.