The prince consort came at me, only this time around it looked like he'd learned his lesson from the first round of fighting.

He walked towards me with his sword held out, but he didn't make a move to attack. No, he just stared at me with a half smile plastered on his face.

"You're going to regret ever doing that, human," he said.

"Regret it?" I said. "That was a good time. I'd like it very much if you could attack me so I could do it again."

I was surprised when my voice boomed out over all the livisk who were gathered around. I looked over to see Arvie hit me with a thumbs up. The sound was blasting from everywhere and nowhere at once. He was using that trick where he turned the literal air into a speaker.

Okay, I guessed I was going to be magnified so everybody could hear us.

I turned back to look at the prince consort, and my eyes went wide as I realized I'd made a mistake. He took my moment of distraction as an opportunity to go from slowly pacing towards me to running at me.

He dropped down and the world seemed to slow down around me again. Only this time around it only slowed down to the point that I could see him drop his shoulder as he slammed into my gut. And now it was my turn to go flying back.

"Okay, this is unpleasant," I said.

"Is there something wrong with your armor?" Arvie asked. "Did you do something to damage it?"

I quickly checked all my readouts. Arvie was able to flash everything at me at a speed far greater than anything I'd been able to comprehend before. I still didn't understand how I had these abilities or what it had to do with being in a livisk battle pair, but I'd take it if it was giving me a combat advantage.

"That's odd," I said. "It doesn't look like he actually managed to break anything on my suit."

"Why would you think he would be able to break something on your suit, William?" Arvie asked.

"I was able to crack his suit when I hit him in the nuts."

"And I'm sure he's still smarting from that wound," Arvie said. "But I'm not sure how you were able to do that."

"Yeah, I'm not sure how I was able to do that either. I'd really like to start getting some answers to what's going on here. Like, did Varis do something to me while I was stuck in a medbay? Was there something about the recovery process? Did I get injected with super soldier serum or something while I was unconscious?"

"I can assure you none of that happened, William," Arvie said.

"Can you?"

"I have access to the records from your convalescence, so yes. Would I lie to you?"

I would've sighed if time was moving at a normal pace. Instead I had to admit he had a point.

"At this point? I don't think so."

"I think it has to do with being part of a battle pair," Arvie said. "That actually developing a human-livisk battle pair is having unintended consequences."

"I bet you wish all the others hadn't fucked off to the distant cosmos in a soft exile so you could actually study this shit before it came to me."

"It does appear that this is one of many blind spots in the Livisk Ascendancy, yes," Arvie said. "But we should probably worry about you surviving for at least the next few minutes so that we can study this further."

"Sounds like a great idea."

The power armor hit the ground and I went rolling, but again it was moving slowly. I was able to pull out some old self-defense moves I might not have been able to do otherwise because I wouldn't have been able to think fast enough. I came back up, sliding one of my hands down and digging into the ground so I could bring myself to a halt.

It probably looked pretty fucking cool. Or maybe I looked like an idiot who managed to get himself tackled and now I was trying to recover.

I came up with my sword at my side, and I immediately swiped up as the prince consort came at me with his own sword raised.

It came down and slammed into mine. At least I didn't have the jarring sensation I would've gotten if I wasn't in power armor. I was thankful for the constant repetition Varis had insisted on with practice swords.

That wasn't something that was covered in martial arts training in either the Terran Navy or the Combined Corporate Fleets. The livisk loved to use swords in their fights, but we were more than happy to pull an Indiana Jones and pick them off from a safe distance with long-range weapons.

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

I'm sure there was probably some propaganda channel somewhere in the Ascendancy that complained about us not having any honor when we fought, but I figured better to be alive and not have any honor than to die an honorable death.

Troops fought all around us. One livisk in our armor ran in our direction. He brought his weapon up like he was about to pull a Dr. Jones of his own.

Which was something I could understand and appreciate. Even if I didn't like the idea that he was about to pull a Dr. Jones on me.

Only the prince consort reached out with his own sword and casually beheaded the dude before he could bring his rifle to attack me. Okay. I didn't want that sword making contact with my power armor. Nice safety tip.

"The human is mine," he shouted, and his voice boomed and carried the same as mine had when Arvie gave me that assist. "Nobody else is allowed to take him. I will bring him back to the empress for my own glory."

More troop ships started to move in around us, followed by more fighters. For a moment I dared to hope that maybe there'd be a rescue coming our way. But all it took was one look at those ships to realize I was well and truly fucked, and not in the fun way I was fucked when I was done sparring with Varis of an evening.

They all bore the imperial seal, and as they landed troops in battle armor started to jump out of the things and started to move in around us.

Arvie fired off a few charged plasma blasts at the troop transports with his wrist blaster. One of them went up in a spectacular explosion that took a bunch of troops before they had a chance to get out and cause some trouble.

"You know, you could just leave me the fuck alone," I said, bringing my sword around at the prince consort. He brought his own down, and it clanged against my sword, the metal pressing against the plasma and refusing to break down the middle like it should.

I took the opportunity to punch him with my free hand. His eyes went wide for a moment, and then blood streamed down his nose again as he stumbled back a few steps. Then he was coming at me again, screaming in an obvious rage with his sword up.

"Do we really have to keep doing this?" I shouted as I brought my sword up to block his attack.

And then I went on the offensive.

A lot of people have the wrong idea about what a sword fight looks like based on watching too many movies. The kind of stuff that got popularized back in the early days of cinema on Earth was created precisely because it looked impressive up on the big screen. But Flynning, that was the actual word for the practice, wasn't exactly the most practical thing in actual combat.

You didn't want to hit your opponent's sword if you could avoid it. You wanted to hit your opponent. Sometimes that meant hitting their sword if that kept their sword from hitting you, but the whole thing was far more direct and ugly than pretty movie sword fights.

This definitely wasn't a fight between the Man in Black and Inigo Montoya. It wasn't even a fight between the Six-Fingered Man and Inigo Montoya.

No, I just bashed at the guy over and over with my sword, using every tip and trick I'd learned from fighting Varis. It wasn't even the niceties of fencing back on Earth. Even that didn't quite hold a candle to the offensive shit you actually did with a sword. Which amounted to trying to bash the other guy to the point you could stab them in their vital organs and hopefully have them bleed out before they had a chance to do the same damn thing to you.

And so I hit him as hard as I could. Again and again. I screamed and ignored the battle raging all around me. I ignored the troop transports all around me. I ignored everything but the livisk right in front of me and the warning systems that would tell me if there was some asshole trying to attack me from the side.

One of the benefits of having a Combat Intelligence who had my back was I could rely on him to do that kind of stuff. That, and the prince consort seemed to have sent the appropriate message to all the assholes with that beheading. None of these other assholes seemed eager to attack me after that.

Which was just fine with me. If he wanted to do this on hard mode for him and easy mode for me then that was just peachy keen with me.

More troop ships were coming in with every passing moment. I figured it was only a matter of time before we were completely overwhelmed. I wondered if it was really worth it, doing all of this to try and save one little girl.

I told myself that it was, even as the more rational part of my brain screamed at me that it was the stupidest fucking thing I'd ever done.

People could go on about being honorable and doing the right thing all they wanted, but at the end of the day there was still a not-inconsequential part of me that couldn't believe it was finally going to be lights out. That I was going to get captured by this bitch of an empress because I decided to do a swan dive to save a livisk.

And all that frustration, all that irritation, all that anger at the empress spending so much time trying to kill me, all my anger at the Combined Corporate Fleets and the Terran Navy for trying to drum me out and giving me shit assignments, all of it poured out of me.

It also seemed to echo back and forth with anger that flowed through the link. I wondered if Varis was angry at me because I was about to die and somehow she could sense that, or if she was angry that she couldn't get in here to mount a rescue mission because of the interference the empress was running.

Whatever it was, that anger bounced back and forth and intensified, and so I threw myself at the prince consort one final time. I rained blow after blow down on him.

His armor cracked, and he started doing defensive moves only. He held his sword up, and it started to finally get little chinks in it. A spider web ran down his chest plate as I landed another blow. I didn't know where this strength was coming from. It sure as shit wasn't coming from the power armor alone, though I knew that was giving me an assist.

And then, finally, I landed a blow on his shoulder that had his armor cracking and blowing open. His shielding mechanism stopped working with a flicker as the purple haze around his head disappeared. His head was exposed to the superheated inferno all around us, and as he tried to take in a breath of that superheated air, he suddenly looked and sounded like a gutted fish.

Okay, he didn't sound like a gutted fish. They had no lungs to pull superheated oxygen into, but he sounded like what I imagined a gutted fish would sound like if they could breathe in heavily irradiated superheated air.

He fell to his knees under the blow, and he looked up at me.

"What in the name of the empress are you?" he croaked with his last breath.

I looked down at him. I grabbed him by his mane of hair and pulled his head back.

"I'm the human who's going to kill you."

And I brought Harath's sword to his neck and chopped his head off, holding it up and letting out a primal roar that allowed all of that anger that had been coursing through me to pour out through my body in one supreme moment of pure rage.

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