79 - Sector 7 Style Sparring [Cherno]

The next day, they visited one of the smaller Zaveshian temples in the city. Besides the main one, there were five of these smaller, yet still sizable compounds, one for each district, with even smaller shrines to fill in the zone of influence.

“Razem’s seals. Green trousers. Amorphous body armor. That arm…” the receptionist listed off, looking Krahe up and down. He looked at Casus. “I take it this is Krahe? You requested urgent access to one of the training chambers with her as your sparring partner.”

Casus gave a tentative nod. The receptionist handed Casus an ornamental key, and gestured to a door. Down a hallway, to an elevator, and then actually down, into the ground, at least three floors by Krahe’s reckoning.

“Sparring, huh?”

“It was the easiest excuse. I do not wish to actually spar with you.”

“Why not? No armor, no thaumaturgy, both our graft-arms tied behind our backs.”

“Your left arm counts as a graft? How strange. It may not be an unreasonable offer.”

“I’ll be more than happy to show you the martial arts of my world.”

The training area was just one large room with some basic facilities, including a bathroom, barebones sleeping quarters, and even a kitchen and pantry stocked with basic, but nutritious fare. It was so due to the tendency of Zaveshian adherents to go quite far with training.

At the end of the day, Casus’ physical attributes were still an order of magnitude above Krahe’s. Their sparring session thus never heated up to a degree even approaching a real fight - the rules they imposed upon themselves prevented that. Nonetheless, they both came away with some bruises - Krahe significantly more than Casus. In turn, Casus felt aches in his joints that he hadn’t known were even possible. The art which she called Sector 7 Style was a savage one, ruthlessly targeting any weak points the practitioner could find, while also incorporating a heavy dose of strange grappling designed to mitigate any advantage an opponent might gain from superior size and weight. Krahe made it abundantly clear that she wasn’t in the ideal physical state to be doing many of the moves which she demonstrated. After their brief spar, she demonstrated a handful of techniques designed for handheld firearms and even ones that seemed nearly exactly built for the arm-blade which he manifested in his Mamon Knight form. It was… Unsettling, somewhat. Such an arm-blade was a niche weapon, and this woman who had climbed him like he was a tree moments earlier was now giving him great ideas on how to better make the most of his own signature weapon. She didn’t change his understanding of his own blade by any means, but he nonetheless found it astonishing that she had such niche knowledge.

Sector 7 Style was, without a doubt, a savage thing, born from a savage world. An art created by filthy and desperate people to help them win against shiny and put-together foes. It was clearly a style born from a world at constant war with itself, a world where the extremes of grafting had filled an absence of magic.

It was by no means a supreme revelation that would allow anyone to reign undefeated against all the martial arts on the face of Zastreon. Such a thing didn’t exist - an art which would allow one person to reach such heights would not work nearly as well for anyone else… And Krahe herself made that abundantly clear when she spoke of the art. Her descriptions of it lined up with Casus’s own observations.

“It’s a mutant art, ever changing as the environment demands. Bits and pieces taken from all sorts of specialized martial arts to form something that works best for its intended purpose. Pragmatism, I think, is its strongest suite - there are no parts without purpose. I know a handful of forms that look nice, but they’re exclusively for training, nothing to do with actual fighting. I might use some of the motions from one form or another, but only a suicidal moron would go into a fight with the intent to repeat a whole form start to finish. From what I’ve seen, you already have a rock-solid grasp of making the most of your arm.”

Casus thought on his as-of-yet incomplete view of the martial art, and as his gaze wandered over Krahe’s face, he suddenly gained a grasp of what she had shown to him.

“If Sector 7 Style were a person, it would be a child soldier.”

Krahe’s face went hard, and for a moment, she stared off into the middle distance, as if she were looking at someone right behind Casus.

“...Yeah.”

Then, she pulled her gun and her countenance lightened up.

“Now let’s give this baby a test run.”

Casus sat down some distance away from Krahe. She manually opened her pistol’s breech, loaded a bullet, and closed it. Then, grasping the gun in her right hand, she formed one of her strange grenades in her left. He’d seen arcane constructs of similar design, but never from someone of such a low level; there was clearly a deeper understanding of the underlying mechanics at play. It was no wonder. From what she’d told him, Casus had gathered that she must’ve been a weapons expert in her past life. Nonetheless, being able to watch the construct slowly take shape was something else compared to glimpsing it in the middle of combat. The pulsating, furious ember at its heart, the mass of ash and obsidian swirling and compressing around it, the black-green shell formed with the Forming Toroid’s assistance. She rested her right hand atop her left such that the grenade, floating in her left palm, sat just below her gun’s barrel.

A gunshot rang out. The bullet ripped forward a fair bit slower than it normally would, but still at a blistering velocity, dragging the grenade only centimeters behind itself. It struck the middle target out of a cluster of six wooden dummies, and all at once, they were consumed in a swirling inferno, ravenous volcanic glass swirling around them for a few moments. Wooden fragments showered them, and a dummy’s broken-off arm flew just past Krahe’s head. The woman barely seemed to notice.