Alien Brute's Captive - Aya Morningstar Page 0,50
do die, Thraxa can at least get Catherine to safety. Assuming they don’t walk into a line of booby traps, as well.
I don’t see THESIUS anywhere. He must have slipped out during the toasting ceremony. So he’s actually going to help directly with the heist.
Gethros calls for silence, and he announces the start of the duel with a booming voice.
Mi Treton and I clash our spears together, and just as our spears clash for the third time, the poison hits me.
It must be remotely activated. Maya or Gethros hit it at the last moment. If the poison had hit me immediately, I’d have had too much time to cry foul play, or to at least back out of the duel. If I tried to say something right now, I’d just take a spear to the face before I got any words out. The duel is on, and nothing is going to stop it until one of us is dead.
I move back, but everything feels numb and sluggish. The poison isn’t painful, but it feels like some kind of neuro-inhibitor. My reactions are slow, and it’s like my limbs have all fallen asleep.
Mi Treton thrusts. I meet him in the center, but I can’t feel the pressure right. My hands are so numb, and I have no idea if he’s pressing hard or going soft against my shaft. Without knowing, it’s too dangerous to try to make any move, and I’m forced to back away.
He grins at me.
Even though my nerves are shot, quite literally, my mind isn’t.
He’s a shitty duelist. He’s had some training, but probably just the standard thing aristocrats get growing up. Enough to be “well-rounded,” but he never took it seriously. He never intended to fight a real duel. He’d only fight one like this where he had a huge and unfair edge.
Still, Maya and Gethros don’t know that I’m as good as I am, and even poisoned, I can see that Mi Treton can’t even assess his own strike range properly.
A duel is usually about finding the center. Touching spears together and using muscle memory honed, trained, and practiced for years to make subtle judgments about the opponent’s intentions and movements.
I can’t do any of that now, not with the poison running through my veins. What I can do, though, is exploit Mi Treton’s inability to judge strike range.
I meet him in the center a few more times--mostly to buy time. Each time I disengage, completely noncommittal, just enough to keep him feeling like he’s a real duelist.
Based on how far he’s standing from me, he thinks my maximum strike range is about half a foot short of where it really is. If I wasn’t drugged, I could just wait until he moved toward the middle and then thrust forward at maximum range, right into his face. He’d go down well before he could get his spear within a few feet of me.
As is, I don’t have the reaction time to pull something like that off. My attack would be late, and he’d have time to get his spear up and just impale me in the gut as I went forward with no control of the middle.
Our spears meet in the middle again, and I lose more ground. I’m getting slowly pressed back. I have maybe ten feet behind me before the edge of the ring, and he’s got fifteen feet. Every time I give up ground from clashing with him, I get closer and closer to the edge.
If I step outside the ring, they cut a foot off the back of my shaft, and the duel starts over. No one ever wins with a foot of spear cut away. It’s a death sentence.
Alright then. I can’t exploit his biggest weakness, so I’ll have to do something risky. Something stupid. It wouldn’t be the first time I did that today.
We clash in the middle. Every single time we’ve clashed, I’ve put just a bit of pressure against Mi Treton’s spear, and before he can decide what to make of it, I’ve disengaged and given up ground.
This time is different. I push hard against his spear. I feel him pressing hard back, but I can’t detect any subtlety through the poison. It’s just “hard,” and so I press back even harder.
It’s really dumb. An idiot’s move, but “harder” is the only thing I can sense with my body completely drugged. He’s pressing so hard that I can actually sense it now. We’re both pressing so hard that