‘Finally,’ Rave thought as the biome roulette came to a standstill. Depicted were three identical pictures of an island in the middle of a sea. The arena started transforming, giving the funky Lightbearer some time to look at Nariko. The two of them looked alike, even though the influx of European heritage made Rave different enough that they weren’t carbon copies with an age difference. They were, however, clearly mother and daughter.
Nariko’s dark blue hair was just as dishevelled as Rave’s, but the abyssal auctioneer tried to tame that by keeping it in a ponytail, with moderate success. She looked awfully good in her suit as well.
It was a jet-black thing, sleek to the point of making pure-breed horses look pixelated next to it, from vest to pants. The bright pink socks and yellow bindings on her otherwise fitting shoes stuck out like a coconut in an apple cart.
The transformation of the island advanced rapidly. Sand rose, then the majority of the area was flooded with water that seemingly appeared from everywhere. All the while, the viewing areas moved further and further away.
At the end, they stood alone on an island, a sandy hill in the middle of the ocean. Only the stereotypical palm tree and the announcers’ desk hovering far above shared this endless ocean with them. Tropical as it may have looked, it was not particularly hot. On the contrary, Rave found it rather cold.
‘This is basically a glorified boxing ring…’ Rave twirled one of the longer strands of her hair around her finger as she lazily inspected at the whole set-up. It was just a sandy island, not a whole lot of room to dodge anywhere. ‘…Great!’ she smiled to herself and locked her eyes back on her target. She was all fine in making this up-close and personal. “I am going to punch you in the face, mother!”
In response, all Nariko did was close her eyes and sigh. A sting of annoyance and something else went through Rave. The annoyance was easily explained: the fact her mother didn’t even give her a word of response was highly infuriating. That something else though, what was that?
Rave quickly identified it as that heart-sinking feeling of parental disapproval. Only another reason to kick her in the schnoz. “When are we starting?” she shouted up to the announcers’ desk, where Dra was mentioning some trivia about the contestants again. Some political yadda-yadda, Jeff was hyping up the family drama, all in all she did not care.
When she was ignored for several moments, she pointed upwards and shot a harmless beam of light. “It seems contestant Rave wants to be in the spotlight,” Dra drily stated. He was damn right. She knew that her dashing good looks and overly forward personality often made her the centre of the room, and she loved it.
Being flashy was about half of what she did, the other half was kicking ass. “Well, let’s not keep her waiting any longer then, folks!” Jeff shouted into his microphone, and the countdown began. Rave dug her heels into the dirt and finally activated what she had been hiding from everyone else in her group.
Living material spread from her feet, a layer of pink, polyester-like material that completely covered her from the neckline to the tip of her fingers in a matter of seconds. “So you did prepare after all,” Nariko said. Was there a bit of approval in her voice? Rave was sure she had to imagine that, all her mother ever did was get on her nerves. “I hope you haggled properly.”
The bodysuit was light and clung to Rave like a second skin. It wasn’t just some mono-coloured thing; instead it showed a linear texture of vertical strings tightly knit together. At the shoulder and hips, there were deeper lines that separated the suit into segments.
The clothing was eaten away by the living material, leaving her stark naked underneath. While that had the benefit of her clothes not annoyingly rubbing against her, that meant that she best remembered not taking it off after the fight was over. The eating process included the Miales gloves.
‘Ah dangit, those were a present from John,’ she thought as the plates reinforced the back of her hands regardless, now being part of the suit. The dual cores, heart of this item, in her soles were of the same kind of crystals that served to create Aclysia, although with different attributes. It wasn’t sentient or anything, it was just made with the best materials Rave could get her hands on.
This suit was an investment for her life, being upgradable with whatever weird material her boyfriend managed to get. No wonder that it had cost all of her savings in one go. For now, however, it would need no upgrades. ‘I refuse to be just left in the dust,’ Rave thought, getting into an aggressive stance.
She wasn’t weak, she was just surrounded by people even stronger than her. Rave’s pride, however, refused to let her take it so easy on herself to be the weakest among them. She tapped her foot to the last two numbers of the countdown. “BEGIN!” Jeff shouted, and Rave sprinted forwards.
‘Can I get the blessing please?’ Rave asked her familiar.
‘Suuuuure…’ the male voice of Copernicus rang in her head with what Rave realized to be a yawn, and two orbs lighted up below her calves. The light that indicated that the suncat’s blessing was with her only increased Rave’s vigour. The team was on a winning streak, only one more for a perfect set.
Her aura flared up in blue once, the typical colour of a martial artist, then it exploded in a flash of light. The sound of the waves around them intensified, the smell of sand and salt was strong in her nose, everything she saw became sharper, more defined. All of her senses kicked into overdrive as cat ears sprouted from her head, woven together from her hair.
The explosion was a reinforced natural phenomenon of the transformation. It normally wasn’t even close to that bright, but Rave wanted to blind her mother. A strategy that utterly failed. Nariko was a light-magic user herself. There was no way she would get blinded this easily; as a matter of fact, it was unlikely any light magic could blind her.
‘So, I might as well go for damage!’ Rave thought and whirled around in a kick to the stomach. From John’s stat projections, she knew that she had more than double her mother’s Agility right now. He had warned her that these numbers were not necessarily accurate, but Rave decided to just go ahead and test the waters by going all in.
Jumping into shark-infested waters was a completely viable strategy if one felt they could beat up all the sharks. Her foot connected with her mother’s side as the Japanese woman went-wide eyed. The attack, combined with the shockwave of light that followed, threw her to the side, and Rave went right after her.
“Didn’t expect your own daughter to be this fast, huh?” she mocked as Nariko barely landed on her feet, skipping several more steps backwards in a desperate attempt to get away from her assailant. Rave let a shower of small punches rain down on her mother, each reinforced with the colourful flashes of mana filled light.
Pure energy, heat and blunt strength forced Nariko to give more and more ground until the abyssal auctioneer had one foot in the water. It was a grinding process, taking several minutes of continuous assault, but Rave’s aggressive strategy seemingly paid off. A false punch that quickly turned into a high kick sent Nariko flying even deeper into the shallow water near the island.
For a moment she was submerged underneath the waves. Rave, standing on the beach, took a couple of heavy breaths. Being in cat form was great, as it allowed her to regenerate mana slowly by being exposed to sunlight. Still, she was feeling a bit strained from the continuous battering she had given her mother.
Nariko rose from the water with slightly sluggish movements; the assault couldn’t have left her undamaged. “Had enough yet?” Rave asked, still breathing to restore her stamina; “Ya could always… ya know, give up, and then we can go back to not talking to each other.”
The blue eyes of her mother looked at her with the same disappointment that Rave had known from her all her life, staying silent. The only thing Nariko did was fix her ponytail. After the earlier acknowledgement, however small it had been, this gesture of ignorance only hurt that bit more.
Years of anger welled up again, and Rave shouted from the top of her lungs, “SAY SOMETHING!” A giant leap carried her all the way to where her mother was standing, submerged up to the hips. A double explosion of heated light from the funky Lightbearer’s hands turned the water into steam where her mother stood.
Had stood.
She had dodged the attack in a flash of golden arcs of power, similar in appearance to the electric discharge of lightning but so different from it in all but two aspects. It was fast and it was pure energy.
Rave didn’t have the opportunity to see anything else as she was quickly enveloped by the warm mist she had brought forth herself. The water slowed her down, and a bolt of crackling light hit her in the shoulder.
‘You are incredibly impatient,’ Copernicus sighed watching over this whole thing from his position on top of the palm tree. Rave was left no room to answer; instead, she had to quickly jump out of the steam and see that she got into a more advantageous position to continue her attack from.
Her mother was a way stronger mage than she was, fighting on distance would only disadvantage her.
Once outside the cloud, a second bolt of golden lightning coming from the island made Nariko’s position clear. How she had made it back to the beach in what couldn’t have been more than 3 seconds, Rave wasn’t entirely clear on, but she would need to set after her.
Under the suppressive fire of arcs of pure energy raining down on her, Rave made a zigzag course for the beach. She hated the cold water, it tested her already strained endurance further, and the wetness of her outer layer interfered with her mana regeneration. The suit let through the precious sunlight she needed, but it was now getting soaked, and that meant that her mana regeneration was getting blocked for most of her body.
‘Maybe I should have upgraded it against a situation like this after all,’ Rave realized. In her defence, she hadn’t expected to fight her arena duel in the water, but the fact of the matter remained.
Nevertheless, she managed to get away from the assault surprisingly unscathed. The worst hit she sustained had been the one on her right shoulder, which was numbed but did not terribly hurt. Everything else were just minor hits.
Finally, she was close enough to the island, so she was only ankle deep in the crystal clear water. She pounced the rest of the way. Her mother, spying an easy hit, pointed at her. If the massive number of hours spent fighting Nathalia and Thana had taught Rave one thing, then it was how to dodge in a situation where you had no business being able to do that.
Rave twisted her upper body mid-flight, and the bolt aiming for her left shoulder missed. Having correctly guessed that Nariko wanted to numb both of her shoulders to limit her attack potential, Rave smirked. She turned the twist already in motion into a spinning kick and missed graciously.
It had been off from the start, her burning muscles refusing to accurately follow what Rave wanted to do, but it should have connected. However, just before her leg could crash into Nariko’s neck, which was the next best thing to punching her in the face, the abyssal auctioneer disappeared.
In her place, Rave saw a bundle of the radiant lightning that she had seen earlier when Nariko dodged. It hadn’t been a side-effect of whatever she was doing, it had been the effect itself. Now a mass of pure energy, Nariko relocated within a split second, answering how she had stormed back to the beach as Rave threatened to make a pretty bad landing.
However, not all was lost yet. Sure, her stamina was bad, but she was just sluggish, not dead-exhausted. She could continue to fight, and right now, she had the tool to make the next hit the last one. The kick that now had missed still had all of the energy that came from Copernicus’ enchantment until it connected with something.
Landing on one leg surely looked goofy, but it was the only way to keep that energy. She turned towards her mother just in time to see both of her hands sparking with incredible amounts of power.
The roar of released energy flew by Rave’s ear with unrelenting volume and might. A sound so eardrum shattering that Rave thought she was standing right next to a thundercloud. The shockwave caused her to topple over, the foot carefully kept in the air connecting with the ground and creating a mighty ripple of light on the floor that was just a useless blow by the time it reached Nariko’s legs.
Rave looked at the glassed scar the attack had burnt across the beach. She herself had not felt the slightest bit of heat, a completely contained and concentrated energy attack. One of only two, Rave realized, as Nariko lowered her now empty left hand, her right one still crackling with undiluted, shining lightning.
Her mother hadn’t missed, she hadn’t aimed for her in the first place. She had been holding back this entire time. “Give up, I don’t want to hurt you,” Nariko demanded and clenched her fist. A flick of her wrist would send the second attack flying. She wouldn’t miss again.
If there was any love in those cool eyes, it did not rise to the surface.
