When you fight a feral cat—house cats too, remember this—their weapons come built in. Even bare-handed, they leave you in ribbons, claws like hooked knives and teeth like ice picks.

Good thing, in the Silver Era, germs don’t exist. If the other side’s blade isn’t laced with poison, the air stays clean as fresh snow, no infection to fear.

I’m carrying three gouges that nicked stomach, intestine, and liver like cold wind slicing canvas. Seven more tears bite through muscle to bone, making my right hand and my waist refuse power like jammed gears. The scrapes from dodges and clinches? Countless, a storm of paper cuts.

All of these, light and heavy alike, came from Elina’s unassuming little crescents—those short nails that glitter like thin moons.

With my usual polearm or my enchanted legend, the Greatsword Valor, its weight is half for me and twice for my foe. I can keep things at long to mid range like tides held by the moon, and when I decide to strike, the cut and the rush arrive together, an avalanche of steel that seizes the high ground.

In a clean, frontal brawl, I’m confident I won’t lose to any melee class.

But today isn’t clean. Today, straight hits feel like punching fog.

It’s not that my blows can’t hurt Elina. A heavy hook to the head can still dim her lights. But when she pounces now, if I chamber a perfect front kick into her belly, the impact shakes my bones like a bell and cracks me, while she rides the crash like a wave and keeps hounding me, relentless as rain.

Racial stats don’t care about “the dance.” They break the music.

When the damage I deal is less than the backlash I take, it’s time to grit my teeth and trade wound for wound.

Enough chatter. Back to the math.

No matter how high your numbers, if I shut down your attack lines, your strength turns to a caged tiger, all roar, no bite.

Take stock: Elina’s right hand is ruined. Two fingers broken on the left. One eye smudged like fogged glass. Left ankle mangled. What she’s got left for offense is a bad hand and elbow, plus low kicks she isn’t fluent in.

Dodge clinches and smother zero-range. Her pounce no longer has topple-speed; it’s a gust, not a gale. Focus on the real threat—those nails, wide arc, high freedom, like a spray of knives.

Steady. I can win.

As long as I don’t gas out before I drop this cat.

If you pant too long, the lungs scream like torn bellows. It’s the body begging for oxygen, the breathing muscles seizing from overwork. Fighters learn breathwork to feed the fire with air and keep their posture from collapsing like a tent in wind.

Between skilled warriors, damage is one goal, but cutting the other’s breath rhythm is another. Even a basic breakfall needs one held breath; often the one getting hit tires faster because they keep holding air, never resetting the tide.

From what I know, Elina changed class from a standard support Divine Healer to that flail-swinging berserk Divine Healer less than a year ago. She shouldn’t have the craft to tangle breath. Yet every time I try to jab her rhythm, she takes a tiny retreat like a dancer’s half-step, makes me miss, then slams me with a savage string right when my breath turns, like thunder following lightning.

Maybe it’s instinct—the orc’s hunt-sense. Chase the cornered prey. Pay little, kill clean.

Racial stats, again. They weigh the dice.

Tch. Enough.

I raise my knee and bump her closing kick off-line, then stamp her waist down like pinning a writhing rope. Cats are fluid; she backbends with liquid grace, takes the fall with no rigid shock, no crack of bone.

Her hand flashes, a claw for my guts. I know the clinch favors her; I take the win and go, roll out, and slip past those crescent blades before they open my already laid-open abdomen like a book.

She limps. I drag my right leg. We hover outside each other’s range, two wolves circling in frost.

I pull a sealed vial from the shadows, knot a chain to its clasp, and toss it to Elina.

As expected, she stares at the little bottle, puzzled.

“What’s this? If you ask, I’ll be blunt. Your recovery leaves mine in the dust. I didn’t expect a courtship duel to get this wild. To keep us from dying to a mistake, here’s a Type-II HolyWater. Whoever drinks the HolyWater loses. Deal?”

I shake my own identical bottle to show I’m not bluffing.

“Of course, I too prefer fairness with safety,” Elina says. She wears the HolyWater like a necklace. At once her breathing steadies to a quiet tide, the silk over her chest rising less and less—that’s what I feared. In a contest of recovery, I drown.

Good. I snap my fingers. “Then we continue.” I surge in before the thin edge of my advantage evaporates like dew.

Stillness to storm in a few heartbeats.

I drop my center like a falling stone, then charge like a rocket, a streak of fire across the ground.

Even with breaks and tears, there’s a way to fight injured. In Bronze it’s fine; in the Black Iron Era, stances prized rooted legs and piling weight, a way to keep from hurting yourself before you even swing. You relied on sharp edges and long reach to do the work.

But in the Silver Era—no, for any true fighter—stability is for defense only.

Veterans know: armor won’t save you; only movement slips a spined siege-beetle’s battering charge. Steel shields fail; only a dodge avoids the blade-storm of a mantis with eight scythe-arms spinning like a turbine.

Stini, a master of the body, doesn’t even chase balance. Her motion is water and wind; from any posture, she can lunge and still pull her center back as she darts with spear-and-sword.

And I—Andor Mephy, a man of the Greatsword—I never stand still. My body and the great blade’s tip are the poles of a gyroscope. Motion births the cut; the cut carries me through motion.

Most fighters, while circling, borrow the rush for a heavy strike, then slip away. Until the last bell, the feet don’t stop, a dance of steps in dust.

Even with fractures, people grit through it—retreat, or fight to the last spark.

Elina hurtles at me like a fired shell. Her broken left ankle can’t plant; she chooses a knee strike, aimed dead center at my chest. Take that on the nose, and ribs will snap and spear the organs—blood like a burst wineskin. So I slip in and shoulder-check into her arms. High risk; narrow bridge.

It doesn’t land like I dreamed. First, her body outclasses mine by miles. Second, her chest—let’s call it a shock-absorber—soaks impact like layered silk.

I’d hoped to crack a few ribs and chain a combo…

Combat equation: wrong. Calculation failed.

I’m about to die.

It’s normal. I’m no Laplace’s demon. Predictions fail. Reality laughs.

My upper back, naked to her claws like a target board.

She has a clean shot to scoop my heart out. I believe her grip could do it.

But this is a courtship duel. You don’t propose by killing. Besides, Elina serves a Divine Being. She knows Greater Healing Divine Art and the Soul Return Prayer like a surgeon knows his scalpel.

Hmm…

I gamble. She won’t go for a kill out of the gate.

Even with a license to walk the edge, humans fear the long sleep. Their own death. Others’ death. It lives in the marrow.

I ignore the scream of my fractured right leg. I stamp and torque again.

Right hand sweeps up from below. Her C‑cup chest fooled my angle earlier; now it’s my lifeline. It blocks her sightline as her claw reaches for my right shoulder to crush the scapula. My hand skims between her peaks in a blur, then shoots up from under and clamps her wrist.

Got you.

Thank you for your mercy, Miss Elina.

I knew you wouldn’t kill me.

I force my ruined right leg to fire again, a bow at breaking point. I arch and twist her left arm, then hip-throw in reverse and whip her away like flinging a chain.

I don’t let go. My fingers bite her wrist like iron.

Her weight lifts off my shoulder at once. She answers with a coil and a spring. In a blink she’s airborne, body twisting, long leg raised to the moon, then scything down.

My right leg is done. Two bursts and it’s a dead branch. Elina can rebuild. I can’t. After that blown exchange, my fuel is ash.

What’s left? Only grit and stubborn bone.

I shove one last twist out of the right leg, turn half a circle. Something gives with a clean snap. The shin goes numb before the pain, a hollow where feeling used to be.

At the same time, Elina’s right arm, twisted to its limit, starts crackling like breaking ice.

Cat, I’ll be faster. I’ll be meaner.

I wrench her last good arm and snap it—at the exact moment my back takes a hammer from the sky. The impact is a god’s thunderbolt. Air and blood blast out of me in one rush. Darkness drops like a curtain.

An hour? Two minutes? Only the hum of blood in my ears. Consciousness claws its way back into this wrecked body like a swimmer to shore.

If I can still move, I move. I plant my knees like tent pegs. Sight is a fog. I crawl toward where I remember Elina falling, dragging myself like a snake through reeds.

I grab her thrashing legs. Clarity hits like cold water. I roll aside on instinct. A kick hisses past my ear, a whoosh like a diving hawk.

I pivot and crawl again, guess by feel, then dive across her hips. I straddle the cat whose hands can’t move, coil around her legs like a constrictor, and pin them. My one good hand presses her full chest to block a sudden headbutt while my fingers fish for the HolyWater I gave her.

I stoop, bite the cap, and fill my mouth with the HolyWater.

I clamp her throat, force her jaw open as she bares teeth at me, feral and blazing.

I kiss her through the struggle, not gentle at all, and ram the HolyWater across.

The dance is over.