Detective Abarca and the Destiny Cards - Part 22

The attack had been a full weight power attack from above him. What could that attack do that the current attacks they were doing could not? It was a question that a swordmaster could answer. The first attack would have skewered him, the later attacks would just cut him. Skewered from behind, that made things easy to understand. If she had done that he wouldn’t be able to move freely and he wouldn’t have been able to easily attack her.

Restraining him was a definite possibility, a way to beat him. There might be limits to his regeneration, maybe he couldn’t regrow limbs or maybe there were parts of him that couldn’t regenerate correctly. Being skewered would make it easy to do any of those things without him being able to stop it.

However a good possibility like that wouldn’t present itself again. Since he wasn’t defending himself well they could probably get close enough to do something like it again but only if one of them risked death while the other did it.

It they had an exact plan however she could probably work something up with her spells. So for the moment she concentrated at determining the flaws of his regeneration. She focused attacks towards her face.

That was the first time he actually tried to block the attack. Although block was a strong term for it. His hand intercepted the blade, blocking it from hitting his face be gouging large cuts in his hand.

She knew that there were plenty of reasons to protect your face even if you could regenerate. If she had hurt his eyes then he might not be able to regenerate fast enough for that weakness to not be a hinderance.

Either way that gave her a chance to check something else out. He was willing to defend like that gave her an opportunity.

The next time she made a swing at his face he raised his hand once again to defend but this time she called upon one of her spells. “Activate, Overdrive.”

With that she solidified her footing and brought the sword down with a bone cutting force. He screamed as his hand which was supposed to be for defense was chopped in half. For a moment he was one the defensive pulling back under their assault.

Overdrive however had already ended. It was an extremely short spell. Under Berardo’s advice she had placed some of her spells into pockets that had been sewn inside her shirt. They had discovered that to active the spell close proximity was all that was required, and a bit of distance from other cards so that you could determine which one you were actually using. She had a handful of her spells setup like that.

This one boosted everything for a very short period of time. While other spells had much longer duration this one was very short but during those few moments nothing was stronger than her.

She had previously considered it one of her least useful spells because she had had to pull it out and cast it to get a few moments of boost. Which was alright if she had been casting it on Blade of Unique Sway in a dual but had been practically useless when wielding a sword. That reasoning had been why she had not previously cast any spells. Now with the spell available to her in the middle of combat she was able to use them in the heat of battle.

“Your hand is healing.” Said Diane as the pushed back the man. “However it is not as quick as your other injures. Maybe 10 minutes for everything to recover. In battle that is far too long. You won’t be able to regenerate fast enough. Surrender.”

“Die.” Then he rushed Blade of Unique Sway. This time he used his mauled hand and with his remaining fingers grabbed onto the sword, pulled it close to him, forcing Blade to get closer. Then he slammed his fist into Blade’s chest. There was a crushing sound and blood as he drove blade to the ground. As he pulled away his wounded hand was nothing but a mangled stump. It was still regenerating but it would take even longer now and would be completely unless until then.

However Blade was down. Diane could feel his energy slip away and a moment later he had returned to a card state.

The man grunted, “I had thought your sword would disappear with him. This is better.”

She was still retaining the sword in one of her crystal even though Blade had deactivated. “It was something we practiced. We need to make sure I wouldn’t be defenseless if he fell so I practiced doing a partial awakening and keeping the sword active.”

However the man had already stopped talking. He was guarding himself now with the stump of an arm that he had. Now that all his digits had been removed it was hard to injure the hand more than it had already been injured.

And without Blade to distract him it was hard to get a good opening in his defenses. Without the support of Blade, Diane was pushed further and further back. Her swordsmanship was excellent and had her opponent been capable of taking injuries she would have long since won.

She had something that she could do however. Her armor would protect her more then Blade was protected and she had found weaknesses in his regeneration. She suspected that complicated parts of him were slower to regenerate. His eyes, were something he had to protect. Severe injure was also harder for him to recover from.

There were a couple of other spells that she was capable of using that she planned to use to turn the tide of the battle however it was still not the correct time to use them. She needed to survive and wait a little bit longer before it was time to enact her new plan.

One of his punches managed to slip through her guard. She had thought she had been perfect as defending but at the last moment slipped on a small blood pool. Her armor protected her from the majority of the blow however she could feel the pain in her chest and suspected that one or more of her ribs had broken.

Then she realized what he was doing. He wasn’t just mindlessly fighting her but he was also a clever opponent. He had forced her to fight him in a circle. All the while she had been spilling his blood. By now the floor was slick with it and it was beginning to get hard to keep her footing.

It was her shoes. They were just normal shoes however normal shoes were not designed to do sword fighting on a blood slick floor.

She felt that she was unprepared for this kind of fight. She had sword training from Blade of Unique Sway and Dreamer training after doing some Destiny Burst and training from Berardo. However under all of that was still a soft and weak girl.

The trance of the combat made her remember when she had first gotten Destiny Burst. It had been the card club. The school was a well ranked one so her father had made sure she had gotten into it. It had basically been an accident. Her father had been home that month and she hadn’t really wanted to deal with him. However the only way she was able to stay at school would have been to join a club, to have a pretend obligation.

So she joined the card club. It didn’t have many members, they appreciated her since she was able to use her families wealth to make the club better. She had been able to convince her father that it was a trial, an attempt at controlling people. Much to her dismay and her father’s excitement it worked.

Then it changed, her entire world flipped upside down. The mysterious box with the cell phones inside it and the cards. She later learned that the Makers occasionally distributed those boxes to bring in new players to Destiny Burst and her club was just lucky in getting one.

It had changed all four of them. They all got into the game, played it with each other and other all that they could. But the strangest thing happened, she was no longer special. All of them had been special so the fact that she was from a rich family suddenly mattered less and less.

The strangest thing in the world to her. The sudden meaninglessness of the wealth. She had been brought up to think that was everything that mattered, that she needed to exceed her father and become even greater. Many times she had struggled with it, wondering if that was true but her father had shown her every time that wealth meant everything.

Maybe she had waited for this very moment, to be shown that there was something more, something else, something beyond her father. Initially it had just been Destiny Burst but then it was also her friends, real friends, people that stuck with her not because she was rich but because they shared something. That was Destiny Burst.

The second revelation happened when Cockatrice attacked the school. Previously she had been in a magical world. A place beyond her father that she loved and enjoyed. But that was something else. Something beyond even that.

It was that moment when she reached a place that she thought that her father would never be able to reach. A battle for life and death with magical powers among others like her. How would he act and react to being like this, would he do the same even if he had cards. She thought that he would have lost and died. That she had done something that he could not.

That desire drove her to continue, to become something beyond her father. To go to greater and greater heights that he would never have been able to achieve.

Now she just needed to make another step. She needed to beat another opponent. A regenerating enemy who had already beaten her greatest ally. During the clash of her sword against his arm she quickly recalled those thoughts about her past.

Now things were ready for her to make her final move. All the crystals that had been keeping Blade of Unique Sway active were available to her again. She still couldn’t resummon him until his injuries had been fully recovered which usually took a hero several days.

She did however have a few extra spells sewed into the fabric of her shirt. They were some of the extra spells she had gotten when learning Destiny Burst. She had never really mastered using them on Blade of Unique Sway. But they were something that seemed like something that she could use on herself.

“Activate, Lightness of Breath. Activate, Heaviness of Form.” Called out Diane as she activated both of the spells together. A pair of spells that had been bundled together, obviously deliberately by the Makers. Together they controlled the weight of a person allowing them both ease of movement when needed but also strength and power.

The problems with them were two fold. They were continuous spells, ones that could be kept up as long as the Dreamer wished but as a cost each of them took two crystals. This prevented her from using both of them along with Blade and her armor.

The second problem is that they required constant monitoring of their effect, theoretically she would have been able to do it on Blade but practice as she could she had never been able to use them to their utmost potential. At least until she started to use them on herself. Feeling her own body and the effect of the two spells she was able to balance them perfectly.

Now that let her flow, move like water, around her opponent.