The Blade Finds Its Mark

Everything narrows to a single point. The opening is there for less than a breath — a shoulder dropped a fraction too far, a guard swung a hand's width too wide — and you are already moving into it, committed, before the thought has even finished forming in your mind. Time seems to thicken around you. You feel the strike land all the way up your arm, solid and certain and final, the particular deep jolt of a blow that has found something vital rather than merely bone or armour.

Your foe's momentum simply dies mid-motion, all that gathered violence draining out at once. The snarl on that face slackens first into plain, almost childlike surprise, and then into nothing at all — no anger, no fear, just an emptying — and the weight that was bearing down on you a single heartbeat ago becomes only weight, dead and heavy, folding away from you toward the ground. Then sound rushes back in all at once: the clash and shout of the fight around you, the rasp of your own breathing, and your pulse suddenly loud and fast in your ears, reminding you that you are still, against everything, alive.