“Some people seem to actually enjoy going into battle and risking their lives.

I’m not talking about people who were so jacked up they could barely think about anything but to fight and kill. That’s just getting caught up in the heat of the moment, and that happened to everyone. I’m talking about the actual sick perverts who went into battle to relish the feeling of toeing the line between life and death on their own choice.

Those bastards either die quickly, or they get to become some of the better known names amongst us mercs.” - Eugen Ross, retired mercenary.

Was it exhilaration? Thrill? That feeling of being truly alive whilst in the midst of a dance between life and death itself?

Elfriede was uncertain what to call the joy she experienced and reveled in while in the middle of a fight. It was something she had felt since long ago, perhaps part of the reason she was so accepting of her grandmother’s training and the subsequent assassin work that followed. Why would she say no when she enjoyed the work?

The opponent before her was one that she had not faced for a good while, one who was skilled and desired to take her life, with no holding back. It had always been her favorite to fight those types, where the difference between life and death rested on the edge of a blade, but there were few such opponents in the past years.

A couple of the blademasters from that one place in Posuin had been the last ones that gave her any challenge, and afterwards, it was pretty much either easy opponents or just sparring. Sparring wasn’t the same, as there was no intent to kill involved, and besides, she mostly sparred with the very few people she cared about anyway.

As such, she knew to cherish this sort of opponent after a long while and not to take them out too quickly.

Her opponent was clearly skilled with the longsword he wielded, and he knew to make use of his range advantage, as his weapon was longer than her pair. Even so, Elfriede was used to that sort of situation, and knew exactly what to do. She lightly danced on the ball of her feet for a while, casually avoiding her opponent’s strokes by a narrow margin.

She did it partly to incense her opponent and goad him into making more aggressive maneuvers, and partly to observe his fighting style.

After a few strokes Elfriede was reasonably certain that her foe fought using the fighting style that could be considered the orthodox one in the former Clangeddin Empire. It was a style better suited to unarmored, one on one duels rather than the battlefield, and she was somewhat familiar with it. She was also familiar with how to kill its practitioners.

One major advantage her wind-based sphere of perception had over sight was that she could anticipate her opponent’s movements far better, as she would have sensed them beginning the movement before it would have been noticeable visually. It was how she managed to avoid her opponent’s blows with such ease, as she had known where they would be headed towards the moment her opponent started to move.

In a similar way, it also made it far easier for her to pull off otherwise risky blocks and parries compared to others.

When another slash came diagonally towards her side, Elfriede did not dodge the blow, but instead raised the blade in her left hand. She did not attempt to block the strike with the blade – that would just be folly, as the force of a two-handed blow would just blow through such a block with ease – but instead used the crescent blade on the handguard to “catch” her opponent’s blade.

At the same time, she twisted her body sideways and reached out with her right arm, her blade lashing out towards her opponent’s hands as his body was outside her reach. To his credit, her opponent saw the strike coming and managed to get his hands out of the way, though not without taking a wound. The tip of Elfriede’s blade sliced right through the man’s leather glove and cut the back of his hand, leaving a bleeding, if light injury.

That successfully incensed the man, who looked at his injured hand for a moment before his features turned into an angry scowl. He renewed his offensive towards Elfriede, his longsword deftly flicking from one attack to another, each carefully linked to prevent her from slipping into her own range while also threatening to carve her into pieces.

For her part Elfriede allowed the corners of her lips to rise slightly as she joined the man in a dance of blood and steel. For the most part she avoided his strikes, those that were too difficult to fully avoid, she deflected or blocked using her own blades. The odd design of the blades came into use as she heavily made use of the crescent-bladed handguard or the dagger on the pommel to do so.

If her opponent saw her smile, it clearly only further aggravated the man, as he put more force into his swings in an attempt to overpower her or blow through her defenses. His aggression only gave Elfriede more openings to utilize however, as she weaved her way around his strikes, waiting for a particularly good one to exploit.

That moment came when a powerful thrust was aimed at her right shoulder. Elfriede calmly caught the side of the man’s blade with the joint where the two tips of her own blade met and pushed it away from her while she tilted her body to the left and returned the favor with a thrust of her own using her left-hand blade. Her opponent tried to step back and avoid it, but Elfriede still sliced his cheek open with the tip of her blade.

As an added insult to the injury, the second tip of her blade which was set perpendicularly to the first also sliced through a good chunk of the man’s hanging beard.

“Is that all you got?” asked Elfriede mockingly at her opponent even as she licked the blood that stained the tip of her blade.