The Eternal Assassin

After spending the last few days fighting Moxy in the large, underground arena, Asher had felt as though he'd gotten a fairly solid assessment of the warrior's strengths and weaknesses. She preferred to stay at range, pelting her opponent with lightning fast barrages of air blasts capable of cracking stone. She was certainly able to handle herself in close range combat, but she'd always done her best to keep her distance. Because of that, Asher figured fighting up close and personal in a small hallway would put her at a significant disadvantage.

He was wrong.

Flickering through the astral to dodge a few quick air blasts, Asher closed in on the warrior and stabbed forward, compressing space to ensure his attacks held real threat and put Moxy on the backfoot. Rather than try and dodge however, the warrior let her living pelts handle defense, trusting the strange undead animals to stop his blades with their teeth. The pelts' insane reaction time and speed allowed them to bite down on the flat of his daggers with pinpoint precision, preventing him from cutting them or Moxy to shreds time and time again. Despite all his powerful skills, Asher still only had the strength of a regular person, and not even a particularly muscular one at that. While he struggled to get past her living pelts, she quickly formed a ball of compressed air and hurled it at him.

Having learned his lesson the last time she'd attacked him like that, Asher slipped into the astral and darted into one of the side rooms to avoid the blast, suddenly finding himself in what looked like some sort of storage room filled with crates. Following the wall, he sprinted forward a few feet, phasing back into the hallway and returning to the real world immediately behind his prey, daggers aimed at her neck.

But just as the tips of his blades scratched skin, a literal explosion of wind slammed into his chest as Moxy activated her defensive skill, rocketing him backwards and slamming him into the stone wall at the end of the hall. The explosive force was all the more powerful and focused within the small hallway, and Asher nearly lost consciousness as his head smashed against the hard stone.

Gasping as the wind was knocked out of him, Asher felt at least one of his ribs crack under the impact. He didn't have time to self-assess however, as he was forced to immediately slip into the astral once more to dodge three quick air blasts that tore basketball sized chunks out of the stone wall.

Is it the hallway acting as some sort of wind tunnel, or was Moxy really just holding back this much the past few days? He wondered as he stared wide eyed at the sudden craters. Whatever the case, I take one of those head on and I am done.

Gritting his teeth against the pain in his chest, Asher returned to the real world and decided it was time to take some risks. He'd had plenty of time to think about the best ways to take Moxy down in a real fight, and now was definitely the time to put his ideas to the test.

Activating his Distortion, Asher compressed as much space as he could in a straight line between the two of them before bringing his arm back and hurling one of his steel daggers forward with all his might. Moxy was only standing about thirty feet away, but her eyes widened as his dagger travelled the first twenty feet in an instant. It was the first time he'd ever thrown one of his weapons at her in all their practice bouts, and just as he'd hoped, the move clearly caught her off guard.

The warrior only had time to throw up an arm in front of her head, saving her life but allowing the blade to sink straight through the fur wrapped around her arm and deep into her flesh. Dropping her arm, she started as she finally realized Asher had followed his thrown dagger, sprinting through the compressed space and getting in close to the warrior.

Her experience showed however, as rather than recoil in shock, she merely grinned wider, leaning forward and meeting him head on. Her furs seemed to coil further up her arms, forming something akin to gauntlets with teeth that she used to stop his myriad of slashes.

The two of them danced closely for a few seconds, neither quite able to do significant damage to the other. Asher was able to flicker through the astral to dodge her devastating point-blank air blasts and try to land his own surprise attacks, but Moxy's living pelts had covered her vitals as well as her fists. He was able to draw blood, but none of his attacks hit anything critical, and her superficial wounds rapidly healed up before his very eyes.

Damn her, why can't my healing work that fast? he complained, wincing as his broken rib continued shooting out stabs of pain every time he moved.

The main problem with fighting against Moxy was that the warrior was simply too fast to react. Even with his rapid flickering through the astral, he still had to return to the real world to land an actual hit, and in that split second between his return and his attack landing, the warrior somehow managed to angle her body just so, turning his deadly strikes into little more than annoyances soon to be healed.

How on earth can she react so quickly? Asher wondered, panting as he narrowly dodged yet another uppercut that would have ripped his head clean off, his hair still fluttering from the preceding wind. Her elements are Air, Furs or something similar, and Life. What's the secret?

Trying to work out the warrior's inner workings while dancing on a knife's edge proved to be a poor idea, as Moxy finally managed to land another attack. After twisting out of the way of his first dagger, she allowed his second blade to pierce her in the side in order to give herself an opening. The moment his dagger sunk into her flesh, her own fist clipped Asher's shoulder, and the following explosion of wind snapped something and sent him spinning like a drunk ballerina as he tumbled down the hallway, crashing to the ground.

"And people tell me I'm hard to hit," Moxy chuckled, ripping his dagger free without a sound as she walked over to him, her wound already beginning to heal with a pale violet light. "That vanishing of yours is seriously something else."

"I'd say your healing skills are more unfair," Asher shot back, sitting up and trying to move his left arm before nearly blacking out from the pain. He'd definitely tore something in his shoulder. Probably broke something as well. The good news was he'd be fine in a couple of hours.

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The bad news was he was working with seconds here, not hours.

"I've certainly heard that before," Moxy grinned as the last remnants of her wound vanished, only the open cut in her shirt showing that his attack had even landed. "As much as I'd love to heal you up and keep fighting like we have been the past few days, Loratta says I finally have to put you down for real."

"Moxy, you have to know Loratta's done for," Asher said, trying desperately to buy time to think. "I spoke with Draken personally, he's got nearly three dozen elites preparing to attack this compound in minutes. You need to run if you want any chance at surviving this. I know we're trying to kill each other and all right now, but I can honestly say I don't want to see you die."

"Don't worry, runt, I know what you mean. We're both battle junkies after all," Moxy laughed, crossing her arms. "Though you shouldn't take Loratta so lightly. It takes more than being hard to kill to become the largest gang leader in Whikoga. Did you ever stop to wonder why Loratta went through all the hassle of constructing such a giant base completely underground?"

Just then, a rumbling shook the hallway they were standing in, and Moxy's grin widened as a small, fresh gust of wind fluttered down the hallway and washed over them, clearly having come from the outside somehow based on the smell of a bustling city.

"Guess that means they've broken in and the real show is starting. No offence, runt, but I need to finish up here. Don't want to miss my chance to fight some fresh elites after all."

Asher was listening, but his mind was focused elsewhere. Something about that light breeze resonated with him, and his mind finally clicked as Moxy returned to her combat stance.

Air! She's detecting movements in the air!

Asher snapped back to reality just in time to dodge a finishing blow, ignoring the burning pain now in both his shoulder and chest as he got to his feet, watching Moxy's bleached form from the astral realm as he took a moment to think.

I never thought about it before, but I must be messing with the air somehow every time I come back from the astral! I don't know if I'm erasing the air that would otherwise be overlapping with my body or just displacing it outward, but one way or another it has to be giving her an early warning signal every time I drop my skill and return to this realm. I doubt it's enough for a regular person to detect, but she must have some sort of skill thanks to her Air element.

But just because I know how she's dodging me, doesn't mean I can do anything about it… Using Astral Dip is the only way I've survived against her for this long. If only I had some way of getting rid of the air itself…

Blinking, Asher suddenly came up with a terrible idea. He had no way of even knowing if this would work, but it was the only thing he could think of.

Whelp, here goes nothing.

Stepping through Moxy even as his muscles burned from holding his skill active for so long, Asher finally let his skill end, appearing directly behind the warrior. Taking a deep breath, he activated a skill he still hadn't practiced with all that much. As the shimmering walls of Spatial Lock popped into existence around them, Asher used his still functioning arm to drive the tip of his dagger toward Moxy's back, bracing himself for what he knew was coming.

Just like every other time he tried attacking her from behind, Asher's dagger was blocked by an explosion of air from Moxy's body, stopping his attack and sending him flying backwards. This time however, when activating Spatial Lock, Asher had done a few things differently than in the past. Not only had he created the prison to be far smaller than normal, barely ten feet wide from wall to wall, he'd also made three crucial changes to what was allowed to enter and leave the space.

First and most painfully, he'd mentally prevented the skill from allowing even himself to leave, meaning Moxy's air blast only knocked him back a few feet before he was slammed directly into the wall of his own skill, causing fresh stabs of pain to lance out from his injuries. Thankfully, the walls of his skill were somewhat softer than solid stone, else he feared he would have either lost consciousness completely, or had the wind knocked out of him again.

Moxy turned and stared at him leaning against his own skill, raising her eyebrow as if asking if trapping the two of them together was really such a bright idea. She opened her mouth, no doubt to make some snarky comment, when she suddenly froze, her eyes widening.

Despite the pain he was in, Asher couldn't help but grin as his mentor finally discovered his true plan. Preventing himself from leaving was only the first of the three changes. His second change made it so that air was allowed to leave the confines of his Spatial Lock.

And his third prevented it from coming back in.

It was a strange combination of rules that would be completely useless in just about every situation he could possibly conceive of.

Unless he had some way of forcing all the air out of the confines of his skill, of course.

Having blasted all their breathable air out of their joint prison with her own defensive skill, Moxy showed just how dangerous an opponent she truly was by reacting almost instantly. Despite being unable to breathe, the warrior reflexively tried throwing an air blast at him, no doubt assuming if she took him down the prison would vanish.

Her jab shot out, but no bullet of air followed in its wake. Realizing her normal attacks wouldn't work, Moxy quickly changed her tune, darting toward him.

Focusing entirely on keeping the deep breath of air he'd taken before trying this reckless plan safely nestled within his lungs, Asher didn't move. Resting against the wall of his skill, he instead used Distortion to expand the short distance between them to nearly twenty feet, wasting as much time as he possibly could.

Moxy still had enough oxygen in her blood to make it through his expanded space, but it still burned a few more seconds off the clock and forced her to exert herself. And just before she could reach him, he gave her a small wave before slipping into the astral, watching the warrior ram into the edge of his skill.

Just as he'd hoped, so long as he stayed within the confines of the prison, his skill held up even while he was in the astral realm. While standing within the bleached, dull realm separate from the real world, he watched Moxy bang fruitlessly on the walls of his prison, her mouth open as the warrior desperately tried to breathe within the vacuum she herself had created.

Just before he was forced to return, the warrior collapsed to the ground, finally losing consciousness. His own lungs had already started to burn from holding his breath for so long, and his entire body shook from the strain of maintaining Astral Dip. Yet Asher fought the pain with everything he had for just a few more seconds, wanting to ensure it wasn't an act. When he was finally sure she was down for real, he let his Spatial Lock collapse as he returned to the real world, greedily gasping in lungfuls of air. For some reason, the area within his Spatial Lock in the astral realm had become a vacuum as well, though he didn't have time to wonder why that was the case.

Hunched over the collapsed form of his old mentor, his chest and shoulder burning in pain, Asher raised a fist in triumph, a shaky grin on his face. It certainly hadn't been easy.

But he'd won.