The seeker's teacher cocks her head up to indicate the obscure star above. “Ever heard of Darkfield Microscopy? Get a succubus in your lap later and see if you can get her to babble about it. Glorious visions, but for now you're stuck here with me!”

An illustrative sweep of her arms to her sides leaves her wide open. The neophyte roars, and lunges with a flickering upward cut. The moment she’s committed her teacher sways back, the afterimage of a blurring dodge and a serpentine sway. Her offhand comes up to brace her downward-pointed blade’s back in a shriek of bright steel–it’s just pure iron? How does she know it’s just pure iron?–and a long lunge carries her forward.

Her sword’s pommel crashes with shockwave force. Leftover-energy blooms in blue lightning carving molten tails from the surround, and cracks the neophyte’s skull open. Tearing agony. Concussive thuds rattling her half-conscious psyche as she bounces, spins, and slams against the carapaced corpse of some butchered monstrosity. She spits up boiling black blood and gets her feet under her.

“I won’t claim that eating shit feels good,” the neophyte laughs, slamming the ground with a fist. “But feeling my fire filling the wounds back in…” she wipes the blood from her mouth. “Oh, I love that part!”

“Doesn’t it?” the black-clad zephyr asks. “Kid, you do an old woman proud. You’re a true demon. I’ve hit you again and again with attacks that would’ve left old hunters catatonic with trauma. You? Claws dig in, fangs grit, and you stand your ground because there’s something past that far horizon, and you're gonna claim it or die.”

She flicks her fingers. A small sprig of a flower with thick, bent white petals and a pale golden bulb. “Edelweiss. A symbol of pride for troops in the alpine divisions.” She twists it back and forth. “I’ve always known it the way an old TV show introduced it to me. Not something for warriors. The mark of the true soldier.”

“What’s the difference?” the neophyte groans, staggering upward. She must be close to passing out–the pain in her skull has almost ended, and there’s a delirious euphoria that feels beyond anything her mistress ever gave her.

“The disgraced warrior falls because her strength lives outside herself, in her ideals and the worth of the masters she serves.” The phase-duelist snaps her hand. The Edelweiss sprig hurtles through the air like a dart. Settles into the neophyte’s fiery scarlet hair. “The soldier fights on because she wants to live, and love herself again.” She smiles. “I see little of myself in the alpine troops. I’m the Edelweiss. I bloom high and clear on the mountains. Others keep trying to wear me for their own glory. But girls like us?” She blurs into reach. Offers her hand. “We end up wearing them instead.”

Her blade’s out of position. She’s wide open. Smiling. Oblivious. The neophyte will never have a better shot than this… yeah, right, a cheap shot now?

She takes the phase-duelist’s hand. “Yeah? Just so long as you don’t wear me.”

“Agreed,” says the woman in black. “The flower’s a symbol. Symbols can be shared.”

“That’s good, because I’m gonna keep my flower,” the neophyte says.

Her teacher smirks. “Thought s–“

The neophyte lunges with a full-out snap of her arms. “Doesn’t mean you can gloat!”

By the time her voice hits the delay between “doesn’t” and “mean”, her opponent’s already picked the thrust off with a neat swat and whipped her own blade to a halt. Its scalding white-metal edge rests on the neophyte’s brow. “Wouldn’t dream of it."

This is futile. This woman is a better fighter than any demon the neophyte’s met before.

So why–

–glimpse of cobalt fire in a wide, joyful eye–

–spark-sprays, razor-light whorls from crosswise clash of blades–

–vibrations rippling down her arms from the impact, heat of blue nova lingering in her flesh–

–how can she feel like she’s winning this fight?

“So, we both know you’ve found your true answer!” her teacher laughs. “Let me hear it anyway–why are you here? Who are you fighting for?”

“MYSELF!” roars the demon reborn. “BECAUSE I JUST FUCKING WANT TO!”

The thundering heart that finally pumps fire and molten stone, the magmatic fury of a demon, it’s all hers. Not a blessing from her teacher. Not the property of her useless manipulative “mistress”, and definitely no gift that pathetic parasite gave her. Hers!

Six flaming wings like razor crescents spread behind her. They’ve been within her all along, just waiting to unfold. Was she really waiting on some exploitative narcissist of a mistress to claim these? Fuck that!  How has she never seen it clearly before, the sword she carries? It’s dark fire, a core of golden iron like a sun blazing in the farthest darkness.

Wailing blood-red runes feed her power through a webwork of lines, from the grip her clawed hands clench to the wave-edged, broad, curving blade. Heat-haze distortions spread, catch a few stray hairs from the phase-duelist’s hair as she dodges the demon's next cleave, and shave them off.

“Now we’re talking! Now you’re fighting with your whole soul!” her opponent calls. A rippling, a fullness… satisfaction? Her teacher's opened her aura, letting emotions flow.

“You better hope you can take it,” she growls, and kicks off to a wrathful, rhythmic assault of heaving full-body cuts. The phase-duelist again wields the powers she showed at the start. She warps and blurs with spatial distortions that pull the follow-on fires of her student’s strokes into madhouse twists, she evades with blue-ripple pulses of kinesis.

Then her afterimage technique returns–with the sudden twist that she hardens into the last upward slice. Her body’s lines blur, multiply, face-clones and duplicate limbs unfolding from each other while her sword of umbral nova teleports out of each ended stroke to meet her kaleidoscopic hands at the start of the next.

Needless to say, the new demon eats every single hit. She has a lot to learn before she'll know how to counter something like that. Yet rather than humiliation she feels awe, pride, a furious form of ecstasy.

“That’s so cool!” she laughs, tumbling away covered in burning-edge gashes that pour black blood for just a few seconds before they seal. “That’s one of the most bullshit attacks I’ve ever seen! I love it so much!”

Her teacher joins her. “You think that’s good, huh? Wait for the phase-lashing!”

By any technical standard, the younger demon's losing. Any of the people she looked up to before meeting her former mistress would probably call this pathetic, and she just can’t give those wheedling voices any more weight. She made this sword and this rebel spirit for herself, stole her own fire, and handed it all to a whimpering withered thing that only wanted her for a tool.

“Never again,” she growls. “I’ll never let anyone take me away from myself again.”

“Dear, vicious kindred,” the Lady whispers, smiling bright. “I’m so proud of you.”

“Don’t get cocky, you old hag,” the darkfire duelist answers. Oh, this grin! The sweet tension of scorching-hot otherworld muscle along her jaws! “I’m thankful for the push and all, but don’t think I’ll get all sentimental on you and stop trying to cut you in half.”

“I’d be livid if you tried to take me any other way,” the Lady yells back.

“So,” the onslaught demon breathes, “it is possible for both people to win a duel.”

“Glad we agree,” the Lady says. “This is my most favorite kind of fight. I’m so glad to share it with you.”

“Just don’t lose on the technical side,” the fledgling says.

Every stroke and cacophonous collision brings a new-ignited delight, two blinding stars of power zigzagging past each other in scything passes by the sword. No matter how many times she’s knocked down, how many times her sword goes spinning away when the Lady cleaves her hands off or she has to regrow a horn broken in a bind, grapple, and throw to the ground, the younger demon's on her feet and heading back to the fray in a blink.

“I know what I am now, you smug bitch!” she laughs. “Onslaught demon! That’s one of yours, right? Feels like it! Well, if it works, I’m happy enough to take something you made and use it for my own!” She’s so full of the searing joy! “Hey, what’s this one? This feeling?”

“Oh, that?” the Lady chuckles. “That’s the same kind of fighting spirit I feel. But I’m pretty sure you knew that already.” A single steely fang sneaks into her grin. “I call it Zeal.”

“Yeah?” her student tastes the word on her molten-metal fork of a tongue. “Zeal… yeah. I like that. I’m going to call it that too.”

And the Lady draws to a halt. One last time, she clasps her silver amulet.

“This,” she murmurs. “This will be the shining moment.”

Her form condenses, a vortex of blackest umbra and searing cobalt plasma that bleeds off into gouging lightning-bolts. Her singularity becomes a rebound blast-wave, scorching bubbling slag from Saingediir’s walls. She rises from her core's roiling nova-night–the ten-horned demon, skin an infinity of interlocking symbols in snow-white metal, undertones of blue-tinted microbes and streaming nanite swarms.

Digitigrade legs ending in armored feet with a raptor's sickle toe-talons shining in silver. Black hair full of star fields. Now the heart-shaped face sports a cloven chin marked by two extra blue eyes astride the cleft. The divide runs up her palette into her nose: a slit-crevice of a vertical mouth intersecting the horizontal one inherited from humans. Many slits on each side of her neck flex with every breath, pouring superheated gas.

"Hey, those seams in your face," the younger demon asks. "Can you--"

The Lady obliges with a loud, fleshy crack and many liquid squelches as everything below her eyes explodes outward, folding back to reveal flailing dark-slime pseudopods full of glitters like black opals. Behind them, the many jaws and their irirescent fangs make circles of scything that descend back into her throat where the blue maelstrom of her hunger beckons, spinning spirals of assimilation.

Her brows lift as though to say 'ahhh.' Of course the only sound she actually emits is a distorted, liquid, many-voiced whorish moan.

The seeker rolls her eyes. "Right, guess I walked into that one."

Kairliina seals her face, pressing fingers to her full lips with a girlish titter. "I'm refining the layers of my form that eschew the humanoid form entirely, but I want more time to explore, refine, and enjoy those for myself before I share them with others."

"That's fine," the darkfire duelist nods rapidly. "This is plenty to take in for now."

A single great golden eye at the center of her forehead, and four wings–the upper pair are larger–like blue-black cutaways in creation. Faint snowblind impressions coil and sharpen within their shade-space. Hints of unspeakable horrors. A slit-hemmed, ankle-length gown of cobalt skin swirled with circuitry, with veins that pulse bioluminescence, fastened with a blue-and-silver sash over gothic-style silver plate held together by a second skin of circuitboard runes and black biomechanical sinews, finishes out her form.

“Alright,” the darkfire duelist acknowledges. “Now I feel like I’m fighting an outer succubus.”

“You realize I’m still an outer succubus when I appear human, yes?” the Lady asks.

“I… uh…” she considers playing for time. No. Be straight with it. “Yeah, sorry. I'm just... it's easy to get hung up the aesthetics, you know?" A sheepish grin. "I guess, with succubi being arch-shapeshifters, any shapes you wear become demonic. Seems I still need to work on that, on the whole sense of feeling that a demon is a demon because she just is.”

The Lady’s lips quirk. “That speaks wisdom, kindred.”

The Lady’s true form is astonishingly short–probably under five feet. Why? The darkfire duelist puts it together fast–same power, smaller form, greater speed.

“Hey, I get that condensing the same power into a smaller form means you’ll move faster and hit harder inch for inch,” she asks. “But if you’re doing that, why not just make yourself so tiny I can’t even see you?”

"In most cases?" the Lady shrugs. "I'd just feel too silly to invest myself in the fight."

The darkfire duelist shakes her head. “Makes sense. I'd find it hard to put up a good figh if I felt humiliated by facing something the size of a flea. But I can definitely enjoy getting mauled by an intimidating, gorgeous elite duelist–“

“Intimidating? Gorgeous?” the Lady peeps.

The onslaught demon chuckles. “I knew it. I knew as soon as you told me how much we’ve got in common that you’d be incredibly weak to unexpected compliments.”

The Lady clears her throat. “Yes, well… some weaknesses are worth hanging on to.” She continues, “Anyway, I like this height. I’m four foot eleven because it feels like a good height for a diminutive sex gremlin with horrifying levels of power.”

Her eyes twinkle. “Past this, you could just match me by shrinking yourself. Any demon can grow or shrink in size with just a little practice. Where does that end once we start it–the miniaturization arms race?” She taps her lips. “Although… a duel at microbial or even subatomic scales does hold savor. Just think how gargantuan our attacks could get, relative to the size of our bodies–“

“So,” the darkfire duelist interrupts, “you had personal reasons for wanting to get my spirits up.”

“Of course,” the Lady agrees. “Crushing the weak means a race to become the biggest loser. True strength tests itself against true strength, and I wish to become peerless.” A beat. "Alright, that's a pretty sentiment, but the truth is that after coming up with that line I just had to say it. I just like fighting someone else who likes fighting. I just enjoy it more. Whether I'm actually the strongest... who cares? It's about the joy of it all."

The darkfire duelist grins. “Thanks for this, oldtimer. I’ll owe you one. Hey, question–what if you had to fight an unbelievably powerful pixie?”

The Lady grins back. “Then I’d want to be half an inch tall, so I’d become half an inch tall. Matching my opponent’s size, at least roughly, creates a more visually appealing battle. Maybe I’d be a little taller so as not to lose the thematic size difference–say, about fifteen to twenty percent taller." Her tail frisks. "A Saelvur maiden seeks to become artful in all things, yes? It's all about the flair. But enough. I’d rather focus on one dance partner at a time.” She inclines her head. “Ready for one last pass?”

“Come on, geezer,” the darkfire duelist snarls. “My ex-mistress wanted me to wait for her to name me. Fuck that. Now’s my hour to reclaim my it: My name’s Vmot Tangediur.”

The Lady’s own grin spreads wider. Her chin splits enough to reveal slivers of the glistening black pseudopods within, and irradiance gleams in the metalloid fangs behind her black lips. “My name is Kairliina Saelvur Urwollust,” she answers. “Let’s raise hell.”

Kairliina’s sword surges to its full size. Triangular spikes, alternating blue and pink diamonds, expand from the eight points of the guard. The edges trail wakes of eaten reality, the blade's flawless geometry leaving recursive afterimages the only mark on new void.

“How do you stop that guard from stabbing you in the hand?” Vmot asks.

“I just turn intangible where it touches,” Kairliina answers. “If I need to keep my form too stable for that, I use spatial distortion. And if I end up stabbed anyway, well,” she flashes her fangs, “I’m a total painslut.”

Vmot has to take a moment, blink, and consider. “That’s a hell of a combat advantage.”

“Only in moderation,” Kairliina giggles. “But then, I can keep my footing while I cum, so…” Her silhouette multiplies, splits, warps: here a high guard, there an uppercut in the making, elsewhere a presented point for a thrust on the high-line. Impressions of her split maw, her burning lustful, eyes. Pulsing in and fading away to the rhythm of her steps.

Hundreds of possible moves unfolding from every breath she takes.

“Now you’re phase-lashing,” Vmot says, staring in amazement. “And you can… just manifest into any of those possibilities, right? That’s how it works?”

“That’s how it works,” Kairliina agrees, singsong. “A quantum dance, the continuum of an ever-inverting and deadly dream.”

“I have no idea how to do that,” Vmot confesses. “I don’t even know where I’d start.”

“That’s okay!” Kairliina chirps, bright and maidenly as only a practicing slut can be. “When I first invented the concept, I barely understood it myself. It took me a long time after I died out of Earth and first manifested my powers learn. I needed even longer after that to become skilled enough to win a lethal fight against another practitioner.”

“Yeah?” Vmot calls out. “Then my journey to match you starts right here! Come on, Kairliina! Hit me with everything you’ve go–“

One fractured glimpse of the Carag maiden glowing brighter than hypernova. Blurred sensations of blows that fill Vmot from toes to horn-tips with unraveling ecstasy. Jumbling, roiling, floating and crashing and floating again. She spins into a column and crashes to a halt, nearly split in half in seven places. Every gash pours too much pleasure to comprehend. It pours with her lifeblood, pours into her clothes between her legs.

Her fingers slacken on her sword. Still, she retains enough thought to pull it closer.

“You… you really woke your whole self up again?” Vmot asks. “Just to fight me?”

“Uh…” Kairliina grins sheepishly. Her arm blurs, sending her great blade home to its scabbard with a one-two slip as she flashes to Vmot’s side and kneels down. Azure comfort pours from her hands. Wounds seal. “No. I haven’t even tapped this fork's power maximum, though you did get me close.” She finishes her healing and sits back. “Sorry.”

“Sorry?” Vmot asks. Tears spill. “No, you… I mean… a demon can be this strong?” her voice cracks. “You’re not half-human?”

“Nope,” Kairliina says. “I've been a demon from day one. Everything I've achieved, I've achieved by embracing my demonhood.” She thumps her cuirass, making metal sing. “From here to the Void, I'm a full-souled outer succubus. Carag, and proud of it.”

“I never thought…” Vmot struggles to form words. She feels too full for words. “In every story, demons are thieves. Leeching from gods, leeching from humans, leeching from each other. Always looking for someone else’s soul, someone else’s spell, someone else’s sword… you’re not a goddess?”

“Uh-uh." The maiden of the Carag shakes her head. "I’ve got a Phase for pretending to be a goddess, that's the closest I'll ever get.” She clasps Vmot’s shoulder. “Everyone gets the joy of being strongest when they're true to themselves. Demons too.” An offered hand in its silver gauntlet. “If you’re heartened by that, there’s one thing I think I might be ready to try for the first time. I’d like to show you. It’ll be our little secret, at least for now.”

“A secret technique?” Vmot asks, taking the offered hand. “Yeah, I… I’d be honored. Uh… whoa–” she puts her hands out for balance, and in so doing, clashes her burning runic sword against Kairliina–whose cuirass sends the cut glancing away without harm.

“My armor actually deflects attacks,” Kairliina laughs. “Crazy, right. Still lots of ways for a skilled phase-duelist to distort a full-size cut through the seams. But an edge is an edge.”

“You really do seize every advantage, don’t you?” Vmot grimaces. “Still, sorry.”

“No worries,” Kairliina says. “You’re woozy from the clobbering I gave you, I was focused on the joy of chattering…” she shrugs. “Sometimes it's better to let our guard down, and get a little embarrassed, if that's what it takes to chase joy.” More frisks of her tail. “That’s also why I can take thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of hits and still regenerate.” She shakes her head. “Enough. You’ve listened to more than enough of my preening today. There’s one part of you I think I can still cut, if you want.”

“My past?” Vmot asks. “Can you do that?”

“I’m an adept of the deep power,” Kairliina says, deadly serious. “I can do anything I'm willing to grow into.”

“Fitting,” Vmot says. A steadying breath. “Alright. You have my oath of secrecy, Inheritrix.” She spreads her arms. “Fuck me up, outer mommy.”