Hook. Leg kick and jab. Uppercut. Over and over. Baikal had another weakness, of patterns. The fact he was steady also led him to fall back on a somewhat predictable fighting style when he grew flustered. But his raw physicality wasn’t waning.
The round came to a close with no clear winner. Baikal’s corner-man wiped him down with a brownish rag that had black streaks and stains. It had been white at the start of their fight. Zanma had no corner man, not for lack of offers. He downed half a liter of electrolyte biogel solution and steadied his breathing.
“Remind me again, what was the stipulation for this fight?” he spoke up. He hadn’t forgotten, of course, he just wanted to re-establish it in the minds of the audience.
“No puppets, no weapons, simply put no external equipment,” stated the referee. It was a pleasant surprise that, although he clearly wanted Zanma to lose, the pot-bellied, four-armed, greasy, hairy, balding alcoholic didn’t take any opportunity to make dubious calls.
Despite his mounting fatigue, Baikal had the presence of mind to pick up on the question. The cogs in his head started turning, and halted only at the next ringing of the bell. The same pattern as before played out once more; Baikal’s fists, elbows, knees and shins threatened to smash Zanma like a rusted out fuel canister.
Only, this go around, his swings and kicks came up against resistance that shouldn’t have been there. A right hook twisted just a touch off its path, only to then go wildly off-course. Consumed by the moment, he didn’t falter to question it, decisively pressing on, ignoring the faint glimmers of red that accompanied each interference. These were threads, naturally, maneuvered into place, energized just enough at the right time. Zanma was wasting effort worthy of operating the Wurger on parlor tricks, because that was the point of this, but that didn’t mean it didn’t sting his pride. He couldn’t help but feel a neurotic twinge at every waste of effort, it was a reflexive, unconscious reaction by this point. It was irrational, no doubt; this was a fantastic exercise. Zanma gradually ramped up his degree of interference, subtly contending with Baikal on three, four, occasionally five fronts at a time, all the while also manipulating his own body and delivering woefully weak counter-strikes every once in a while.
By the end of the round, the escalation had long passed the point of blatant visibility. From merely dodging, Zanma had gone to openly catching Baikal’s strikes in a web of seething-red lines, entangling his limbs, pulling on them now and then. The man was a mountain, dense and stiff-legged, so he couldn’t be pulled down, but the shifting tide was clearly unnerving to him. Looking upon the red-haired youth’s face from across the square arena, Baikal’s view of that expressionless visage changed. It wasn’t hollow. There was a sort of detached arrogance behind it. It galled him beyond belief.
He came out of his corner with renewed fury, rivulets of reeking, pitch-black blood trailing down his body as he pushed past his limits. Dust and pebbles jumped up with his footfalls, he dashed along the ground in a low tackle, and the air whistled with his movement. It was faster than anything he had done by an order of magnitude, fast enough to contend with some of the faster beasts of the Zone.
Meanwhile, Zanma remained in place, hair floating and strobing red, but to the eyes of one such as Baikal, he didn’t seem to be doing much of anything. Just before impact, with a gap of not more than two meters, far, far too late, Zanma drew back his arm and twisted his torso as if for a strike.
Then came a flash of red, and thunder struck him upside the head, and Baikal felt himself skidding backward as his consciousness sputtered out like a dying ember.
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Across the ring, Zanma stood, a whip of scarlet-glowing thread in hand, snaking around him like a living thing, weightless and thrumming with psionic force.
“...pulled out his own hair…” came the murmurs. Zanma didn’t correct them, the manner in which he had reached up to form the Distortion Whip had certainly looked like he just pulled it from within his hair. He let the psionic construct fade out. It was too taxing to be pulling it out for any longer than necessary. Walking over towards Baikal, he concealed a sigh of relief as settling his breathing. Had it been any closer, the enormous man would be a headless corpse gushing blood. The whip’s inherent nature was lethal, cutting and piercing; rendering it an instrument of blunt force required a further adjustment, a minute one, but nonetheless an additional step in the heat of battle.
A thin crack spidered down Baikal’s faceplate. Zanma clicked his tongue in dissatisfaction. It had been either that, or serious brain damage.
SIGN OF THE SERPENT-SWORD-SPEAR
RECORDS OF THE RUPTURE KING: CHAPTER OF YAMAXANADU
RECORD #6: DISTORTION WHIP
“Concussed. He’ll live. Let him know that job offer from earlier stands, if he’s willing. I leave in three days,” he said to Baikal’s corner-man. A wrinkled, much older man, weathered yet calm in the distinct manner of an old man in a profession where men die young. He had a speck of reverence in his eyes that had been absent from Baikal. That absence was also the reason Zanma had attempted to hire him on. He couldn’t bet his life on a guide who wouldn’t speak up when he was about to do something stupid. In retrospect, he had been far too forward in his attempt, so it must have come across as him not respecting the veteran zone-explorer.
None dared impede Zanma’s departure, perhaps in part due to the White Serpent looming over his corner, a rectangular pillar the size of a man fixed to its back by clamps like the legs of great insects, protruding from the White Serpent’s tangled musculature. Such clamps were one of many utility attachments. Without any sort of showmanship or gloating, he attached a thread to the puppet’s shoulder and pulled himself up with the illusion of telekinetic flight. As the immense puppet stirred into motion, he couldn’t help but sense a presence, a potent attention directed his way; devoid of malice, but still unsettling. He hadn’t seen any evolvers of the First Phase in the audience. The brief, ever-so-brief, flash of long white hair in motion stuck in his head, but no matter how he looked, he could find not a single head of such hair anywhere, let alone the aura of a First Phase evolver of any kind. By his estimate there were at most three First Phase evolvers in Spillway besides himself, and the nearest, a Becomer chirurgeon, was still exactly where he had been when the fight had started, picking through the peeled-open back of a patient some two hundred meters down the street. Zanma passed by that place on the way to his temporary workshop, out of the way but not hidden, such that random passersby wouldn’t be drawn to it but someone directed there could still find their way.
Zanma reflected briefly on the Distortion Whip on the way back; he hadn’t used it in a real fight until now. Six threads, braided together from the moment of formation, physicalized through Thread Condensation — a method of approaching the raw striking power of a fully developed psionic Vector through the reductionist methods of puppetmasters. It was far more complex than a Vector, but also possessed the superb agility and maneuverability of threads, and the user could directly apply the skills of a puppetmaster to it, rather than needing to develop an entirely new skillset. Naturally, the skill ceiling for controlling the Distortion Whip far eclipsed a raw Vector, making up for its still lackluster striking power with precision and agility. It was still inferior compared to a proper puppet considering the effort for output ratio, but occasionally, such as now, you didn’t have a choice. If a foe managed to close the distance and you couldn’t maneuver a puppet to defend you in time, then techniques such as the Distortion Whip were your lifeline. Moreover, it didn’t just exist in a vacuum — mastering the Distortion Whip was a vital foundation-stone to build up the practitioner’s skills. Seamlessly braiding psionic threads together into composite structure of greater capability than their constituent parts, it was obviously building up to a profound leap in capability later down the line, after the Hyperschizoid Stage gave him the immense thread-count necessary to fully make use of it.
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