“I need coffee.” I shambled through the sitting room and into the kitchen.
The advancement had filled me with jinsei, amplified my senses, and left me suddenly wiped out. It wasn’t yet nine in the morning, and already I needed a nap. That wouldn’t do. There were so many new things about my core I wanted to explore. Its capacity to store jinsei. The effect it had on my techniques. What it had done to my body.
I was pulling the coffee supplies out of a cupboard when a floorboard behind me creaked a warning.
A rough hand slammed my face into the cupboard. The coffee set fell from my suddenly nerveless fingers and shattered on the floor. A burst of stars exploded across my vision, and a terrifying weakness spread down my spine.
Fingers closed in my hair and drew my head back, then slammed my skull into the granite counter. With a snarl, my unknown attacker hurled me across the kitchen and into the side of the stainless steel refrigerator.
A few days ago, even an hour ago, that series of attacks would have killed me. With my new core, though, my body was more resilient and able to withstand the damage. The attack hurt, but my skull was intact, and my nose wasn’t even broken. My rattled senses snapped back into focus, and I pushed jinsei out of my core and into my body’s channels. If the intruder wanted a fight, he was going to get one.
I bounced away from the refrigerator on the balls of my feet just in time to avoid a brutal punch that smashed a dent into the side of the appliance. I almost hadn’t seen the attack at all, because my foe was wrapped head to toe in a strange field of jinsei that obscured every detail of their form. The humanoid swirl of power jumped away after their missed attack and threw their arms up to defend themselves.
“Who are you?” I demanded, settling into a ready stance. It was hard to concentrate on the figure in front of me, as if the jinsei surrounding them didn’t want me to see them at all. If I’d still been an initiate, the field might have made them completely invisible.
My advancement had just saved my life.
The assailants didn’t waste any words. They lunged forward, throwing punches and kicks in a blistering flurry of raw aggression. Unfortunately for them, the kitchen was cramped, and that limited their range of attacks to easily blocked straight-line strikes.
I defended myself and cycled my breathing to bring my body, core, and aura into alignment. My opponent had pulled back to evaluate me more closely, and I wondered if he was surprised at the strength of his target. I found myself excited by the fight, ready to test my abilities against a serious opponent. There’d be no pulling punches in this sparring match.
My attacker switched tactics and summoned a fusion blade in the blink of an eye. It was a strange, spear-like weapon, and the attacker threw a blistering series of thrusts toward me. The jinsei-fueled attacks came fast and furious, forcing me into a defensive stance.
I kept the fusion blade’s business end from punching holes in my chest and gut with counterstrikes and parries, though my defense cost me numerous cuts across my forearms and the backs of my hands. My Thief’s Shield wasn’t enough to save me here. Even if I stripped the aspects and jinsei out of my opponent, the speed and savagery of his spear thrusts would leave me full of holes.
Summoning my own fusion blade wouldn’t do me any good in the cramped quarters, either. The long hilt and blade would be useless for defense or offense, just as they had been in Albert’s dinky apartment. Meanwhile, my opponent’s short stabbing weapon was the perfect tool for poking a bunch of holes in an opponent at very short range, very quickly.
As if he’d read my mind, my blurry attacker executed a series of short, sharp thrusts that backed me against the kitchen wall. With nowhere to go, I slapped the first few attacks aside, took a cut across my forearm, and narrowly avoided losing an eye by jerking my head to the side at the last minute.
Through it all, I cycled my breathing, drawing in beast aspects from the catfish that swam in the lake around the cottage, the birds that nested in the building’s eaves, and, yes, the rats that cavorted in the fields that surrounded the lake. While my opponent had focused on murdering me, I’d been preparing a riposte.
In the instant he extended himself to drive his spear’s point through my face, I formed serpents from the beast aspects and struck.
Each of the glowing tendrils was as thick as my wrist and narrowed to a sharp tip. My first serpent looped around my foe’s fusion blade and spiraled down his arm to stab his bicep. In the same moment, the other serpent speared into his core.
Or, they would have.
The jinsei that surrounded my assassin wasn’t just camouflage, it was also powerful defensive armor. My serpents bounced off it with a pair of loud cracks and recoiled as the sacred energy they’d struck lashed out at them with jolts of lightning-aspected jinsei.
The unexpected retaliation drew a grunt from me, and if I’d been any weaker, it would’ve stunned me into immobility.
Instead it just made me mad.
My opponent tried to free his weapon from my serpent, with no luck. Rather than continue the fruitless struggle, he let the blade dissipate and came at me again with his hands and feet. This time, the golden energy around him shifted to red and black, powerful destructive aspects from his aura flooding into the sacred power.
A counterpunch from my left hand drove
