Living Life As A Game: Through And Through 19 Pyrrhic Conclusion

As Elizabeth fought like a mad woman, looking more like a feral beast than a practical martial artist, her enemy could only laugh to herself in silence as she watched Elizabeth's futile attempts to damage her. She was a Peak level Mortal Martial Pract.i.tioner, furthermore, even among the Martial Society, she had an uncommonly rare Lightning-type const.i.tution. All she needed to do now was let Elizabeth effectively tire herself out before continuing to transport her over to the predetermined meeting place, "Nightcrawler."

The woman would have liked to end the fight as soon as possible, but it was actually her rare const.i.tution that limited her strength this time around. Normally, she would be immeasurably proud of her grand and awesome lightning powers, but for this capture and retrieve mission, her lightning's killing power was more than she could control as a mere Mortal Stage Pract.i.tioner. She could only wait for Elizabeth to lose enough Inner Strength to handle her without using Inner Strenght herself, lest she get surprise attacked and her target manages to escape.

Naturally, that initially spelled her having to wait for Elizabeth to use up her Inner Strength, whether through the act of running or bidding her time, the woman didn't really care. However, now that Elizabeth started to actually fight back, the pa.s.sive defensive properties of her lightning-type Inner Strenght actually expedited the tiring process she wished for. Had she chosen to fight Elizabeth back, there was no telling what kind of damage her ravenous lightning energy would do, and if it did more than what the Master deemed acceptable… Even she wouldn't be guaranteed a pardon from punishment.

The woman kept up her guard and blocked kick for kick and punch for punch. Everything Elizabeth threw at her was handled with impeccable ease, yet… as the time pa.s.sed, Elizabeth seemed to be getting stronger instead of weaker. Her speed seemed to be decreasing and her strength waning, but the power behind her punches only increased? How could that be???

The woman's initial smug att.i.tude towards Elizabeth for daring to fight back against someone several phases ahead of her within the Mortal Stage, began to s.h.i.+ft; s.h.i.+ft towards a more serious att.i.tude, and maybe even some respect… She began to hasten the consumption of Inner Strength to tire Elizabeth faster with more paralyzing walls of lightning coating her body. But, the pain of being repeatedly shocked no longer even seemed to exist to the current Elizabeth.

Meanwhile… Elizabeth, off within her little isolated world, didn't even see the woman before as an enemy deserving of defeat. Rather, she had somehow lost herself to fighting back that all she saw was a puppet. In her mind, the dancing puppet of defense only need to be dealt one solid strike and all her problems would fade away.

This "puppet of defense" as Elizabeth dubbed it, was almost a carbon copy of Jane back from when she was training the dojo. Only, now the idea of actually landing an attack seemed feasible. The style of defense was a bit different, but not drastic enough for Elizabeth to have to completely switch up her style of attack.

She could feel with every additional attack the gap in the puppet's defense increase and increase until suddenly, for some unforeseen reason, a total flaw was exposed. The puppet had actually done something as stupid as looking away from her, and now it would pay the consequences.

What Elizabeth didn't know, was that a familiar deathly figure that looked like it had crawled out of the depths of h.e.l.l had appeared to her left side. Sun, her savior, was totally ignore by Elizabeth at the moment, as only the thought of landing a critical hit on the woman before her was on her mind.

In that split second where the woman was distracted by the startling threat of death Sun's appearance brought, Elizabeth made her final move. She went for a merciless elbow strike to the face and landed what Jane and Atid would consider a perfect, textbook, Spinning Elbow. With her body flipping to the right, the back of her right elbow connected right on point with the woman's jaw. Apart from a spritz of blood flying everywhere, the woman also fell a step back.

Dumbstruck, that her attack actually managed to connect, Elizabeth stood gaping like an idiot, instead of moving in literally any direction to follow up on her attack or to prepare against any attack the woman might throw at her. Consequently, her enemy, the woman who had thus far been extremely restrained in not mopping the floor with Elizabeth when she could have countless times by now, momentarily lost her cool.

She had just been struck and her mission could officially be considered a failure as Sun had arrived. Since the mission was through with anyway, she resigned herself to that spark of hatred bred from Elizabeth managing to hold her back for long enough to let Sun find them, and she moved to ruin Elizabeth, by maiming her.

The previous aura of purple energy Elizabeth called "chaotic," became even more dangerous as the woman's intentions to move on the offensive began to take form. And by the time a deadly kick to her head was visible, Elizabeth could do nothing but watch in horror, as her enemy's foot approached her face. Moments like these felt like hours as it mirrored what one would experience right before dying, but there was nothing Elizabeth could do against her apparent encounter with death.

Only… a real apparition of Death managed to block what looked to be a life ending blow, as Sun had in some way or another managed to put himself between Elizabeth and the other woman, before the lightning-spewing kick managed to connect. Sun managed to intercept the blow, but due to his lack of preparation and time, he didn't correctly block or catch the woman's leg. Rather, his exposed upper torso took the kick without a bit of additional support.

This was just the kick of a Level 5 Peak Mortal, which was a full Stage below what Sun considered a match. Yet, this full powered kick of someone a whole stage below him, adding on the fact that Sun didn't possess Inner Strength or Qi of his own… The consequences of taking this blow were disastrous to say the least.

After the brunt force of the kick already shook and displaced some of his internal organs, the additional destructive powers of lightning only made the situation all the worse as several internal organs were punctured if not directly crushed to pulp. Fortunately, Sun was not one to instantly give out to pain, and he managed to land an equally destructive blow of raw strength with an uppercut to the face before he collapsed to the ground.

As the dust settle from this infinitely scary first encounter with other martial artists, Elizabeth need a couple moment to recoup herself. She was scared beyond a reasonable doubt as that last kick sought to literally kill her, but after a couple seconds of accepting that she was still alive and kicking, a new priority took precedent over the status of her life right now.

Sun was probably in between life and death at the moment, and while initially Elizabeth didn't initially value her relations.h.i.+p with him all that much, right now she felt like she owed him for saving her not once, but twice. She propped Sun up and gave him a piggyback ride to her home, only instead of it being the usual sun-and-rainbows atmosphere one attributed to the act, Sun was not only looking like a corpse, but it was nighttime and it was raining…

Coincidentally, her group of kidnappers actually chose to move in a direction close to her home, so after using her phone to reorient herself, Elizabeth managed to return to her house in less than five minutes. She laid Sun down on her living room floor and cleared away all the furniture around him. Against common sense, instead of calling the police or even an ambulance, Elizabeth took it upon herself to restore Sun back to a stable condition.

The two of them had just involved themselves in some sort of gang-like warfare between Martial pract.i.tioners, so asking for normal people's help would just be shooting herself in the foot. Furthermore, there probably wouldn't be a guarantee that Sun could be healed by normal means considering the nature of the attacks he had sustained. Elizabeth also didn't call Jane or Atid, as the only number she had was the dojo's business number and not their personal cell numbers. It wouldn't be worth it in her opinion to waste even a sliver of a moment gambling to see whether or not either of them would pick up the phone when the Dojo was closed.

After running to her room and withdrawing her set of Acupoint Needles, she made a mad dash to the kitchen and brought a whole roll of paper towels to keep the blood leaking from Sun's body in check. Against all her desires to get straight into healing Sun, Elizabeth knew for a fact that her current supply of Inner Strength would barely be enough to fix all the surface level wounds he sustained.

She had run a diagnostic check across Sun's body and was horrified by the damage she found. Just on his torso she found two bullet wounds, seven broken ribs, a broken collar bone, a couple spinal pins were completely shattered, and just about all his internal organs were AT LEAST mildly damaged; the worst being his left lung which had dozens of wholes present all over. Thus, the most logical choice for her was to quickly meditate before anything else.