The First Harem Tournament 2 – vs feline Lightbearer [Scarlett POV]

“Ya wanna do the honour or should I?” Jane asked.

Scarlett inspected the magical wheel that just manifested next to them. A pointer hovered above, waiting to highlight whichever of the manifold biomes the Coliseum could create was chosen. “To the loser goes the right to choose,” the redhead remarked.

“Imma punch your pretty face in.” Jane’s smirk, an artful mixture of love and competitiveness, reflected Scarlett’s own feelings well.

“Try.” The singular word coaxed an annoyed ear flick out of her opponent. ‘Analysis doesn’t suggest she gets any sloppier when she’s angry, so riling her up won’t be of too much benefit.’

Scarlett interfaced with the combat data stored in her ear implants, When it came to the harem, she had a massive amount of it. Spars and shared Instant Dungeon participation had given her more logs than she could store on her mobile devices. The true extent of it lay hidden in a data vault disconnected from any network. She needed the data for equipment development, but it was also too sensitive to leak to the rest of the world.

Jane grabbed the hard-light edge of the wheel and gave it a mighty tug. Gamey sounds echoed across the arena, rapid at first and growing slower as the wheel’s momentum petered out.

The exact biome was unlikely to matter much. Scarlett estimated her victory chances at around 35%. Since the quarter elemental was fused with Copernicus, she outclassed Scarlett in terms of raw Stats. Though Scarlett had more combat data, Jane thrived at making snap decisions. Her empty head let her act with little to no doubt, enabling speed that was more valuable than the perfect calculation.

‘To win this, I have to fight this my way-‘

The wheel came to a stop on an image of a thicket. Suppressing a click of her tongue, the technomancer grabbed the visor under her arm with both hands and placed it on her head. The brass-coloured creation resembled a low-polygon beak. Mechanical latches attached to her ear implants. Unfolding plates moved over the back of her head. Rubber seals latched onto her skin. Runes activated, starting the process of generating and cycling out air. Scarlett closed her eyes, letting the visual feed from the cameras flow directly into her mind.

The world around them changed. Dense, needlely foliage sprung up, interspersed with a few pathways and a manifold of thin, young trees. Jane gave a playful wave before the thicket broke the visual line between them.

The Voidmarrow integrated into Scarlett’s exospine provided a parallel stream to the flow of her own mana, feeding into systems of her mechanical aspects. Voltage surged and decreased. Watts were consumed. Test systems ran diagnostics one final time. Each of her clawed digits rolled with inhuman precision. The talons of her bird-like feet flexed inside their sockets. The circular joints of the robotic doll limbs sent a signal back to the mainframe. Energy flow and flexibility systems all came back positive.

“Three!” the voice of her man echoed in the air. “Two!” She could not lie, the mixture of excitement and worry was quite tantalizing. “One!” She wiped all appreciation for him or the woman across the thicket from her mind. “Fight!”

Scarlett swiped her hand at a nearby outcropping of the thicket. Razor-sharp claws effortlessly carved through the fibres. ‘Confirming that these arenas do not benefit from the Instant Dungeon indestructibility,’ Scarlett noted.

In the same instant she had spent testing this, Jane had charged herself up.

The thicket turned to ash in the path of the superheated lance of solar light. A ten-metre trench was burned into the world, connecting where the two opponents stood. Scarlett swiped the solar lance aside with her alloyed arm and pointed the palm of the other hand across the divide in an instant.

A gorgeously wild smile on her face, the pink-haired cat girl ducked under the electric laser shot straight at her. A second and third beam followed, the last managing to singe a feline ear as the Lightbearer charged across the divide.

Suddenly, she leapt upwards. Her trajectory followed not the smooth, predictable path of an airborne object, but the physics defying will of a martial artist. A mid-air tumble ended with a heel falling with the force of a guillotine.

Crossed arms took the blow. Alarm systems flared for a moment as the impact depleted the pre-charged mana barriers. Scarlett immediately rerouted the energy from the laser system to the defensive runes in her forearms.

Scarlett pushed up against the Lightbearer, who turned into a golden streak. The redhead tried to exploit the short moment of vulnerability as flesh transitioned to magic. Her claws moved too slow. ‘Powerful elementalists are such a bother!’ Scarlett complained inwardly, then swivelled sideways.

The unnatural bend of her mechanical knee joint allowed her to narrowly tilt out of the way of the sideways swipe of the re-manifested pinkette. Jane hummed to the tune of whatever overbearing techno music was playing on her headphones at the moment while one attack followed the other.

Scarlett could only dodge, moving with the grace and precision of a mechanical ballerina. Engines and transistors within her robotic limbs whirled. Her exospine grew warmer from the energy flow. All she could do was weave through the persistent storm of attacks, utilizing her multiple cameras to stay clear of a step into the thicket. Flimsy as it was to them, it could still delay an important action for a split second.

‘This is exactly what I don’t want,’ Scarlett thought. For now, she was managing to dodge by calculating the next beat of the song that currently inspired Jane’s movements. There were no openings for counterattacks nor did the redhead like her chances in the long-run. If the song switched at the wrong moment, she was fucked.

She needed distance.

A subtle electric arc jumped from Scarlett’s hand to Jane’s earphones. The compact things were designed for the task of withstanding a fight at their level, they were even designed to resist tampering – but Jane was fighting the designer of that measure. Scarlett broke through her own code, implanting a simple change into the software.

Jane’s movements went from predictable to utterly predictable. Her brow quivered, a part of her noticing the sudden loop introduced into what was an already repetitive song. A brief moment of hesitation, that was all Scarlett needed.

A burst of flame ejected from Scarlett’s bent elbow. Her rocket powered fist slammed into Jane’s stomach. The feline Lightbearer let out a surprised, choked grunt before she was catapulted back. Scarlett leapt the other way, deactivating all but the cooling systems in the taxed arm and then routing energy to all the necessary runes in the other to loosen a barrage of attacks.

The influence of the Voidmarrow tinted the mana unleashed an enigmatic grey. Three dozen arcane seekers curved through the air, scattering from her palm and opened gaps along her left arm. Jane turned into a streak of living light again, a solar streak leaving prismatic shadows. She zapped side to side like a beam reflected on multiple mirrors. Thickets in her path were incinerated.

Scarlett clicked her tongue, continuing to launch projectiles while moving away from her opponent. By her calculations, this state of affairs forced Jane to burn more mana than her. As long as she could prolong it, she would eventually win.

But the gap between them grew smaller and smaller. No matter how much Scarlett tried to outpace the feline Lightbearer, she was the slower of the two. The landscape did her no favours, forcing her to clear the path or be narrowed in by the pre-arranged paths.

The only way to win now was to bet it all on one offensive.

The female form of Jane was faintly visible at the tip of the elemental energy that rushed past Scarlett. Manifesting behind the technomancer, the feline Lightbearer avoided the miniscule window of weakness transition between states brought. Scarlett whirled around, ready to immediately block an attack. She was not ready for having a pair of malfunctioning headphones tossed at her head.

“Ya ruined my groove!” Jane complained.

“Be thankful that my own encryption is so good or I would have uploaded a Black MIDI,” Scarlett threatened.

“Ya monster!”

“I’m from the Big Apple, it’s what we DO!” Scarlett launched herself into the melee, electricity crackling through her system. She was pushing every physical system past its regular limitations, forcing her muscles, physical and mechanical, to ignore what was healthy in favour of what was effective. When her claws swiped through the air, they left trails of plasmatic discharge.

For a brief moment, she was faster than Jane. It allowed her to leave a singular claw mark on the other woman’s cheek. Immediately, Jane Unleashed. Pink hair turned golden, glowing like a piece of the daystar itself. It was radiant, beautiful and it forced Scarlett to overclock her core systems further. Cooling runes all over her body began to steam, working as hard as they could so the heat wouldn’t deform the instrumental lines carved into the layered metal.

Even this much only brought Scarlett to temporary parity with Jane’s elevated state. The two rapidly exchanged blows. Attack, riposte, counter-riposte, dodge, swipe, kick, step back and re-engagement, all of it in the span of a few seconds. The overbearing might of their movements scattered the ashes of the bushes burned by their excess energies. Lightning arced into the ground, setting fire to anything it touched. Radiance spread, drying out the world with gold.

Jane’s left arm snapped forwards just as Scarlett’s did. Hard-light and metal claws met. There was a brief flash of competing mana, then the sharp surfaces slipped past each other. In an instinct that didn’t quite belong on the battlefield, the two women interlocked their fingers.

Neither let that become a bashful incident. Both tried to use it to their advantage. The surface of Jane’s bodysuit insulated her from the heat. The doll-joints made the martial art Jane tried to employ useless. They danced around their bond for a bit, trying to push and pull the other into a better position by it.

Jane succeeded first.

Scarlett thought she let herself be pulled close to slam her knee into Jane’s stomach. The intention was there, but it was too slow to compete with the sudden, savage headbutt the combat savant executed. Who would have expected anyone to headbutt a pointy metal visor?

The impact dented the metal, shattering electronics within, and sending shockwaves through the computing methods Scarlett used. It was a state that could very well be likened to being dazed, except Scarlett had three more data centres to continue operating while one of her externalized minds was reeling.

For as much as she still knew what was happening, she was all the same powerless to stop it.

Continuing to press, Jane managed to topple Scarlett over. Her talons lost grip on the ashen ground. She fell over, landing on her back. Her mechanical tail, wrapped around Jane’s midriff, yanking her back before she could straddle the redhead beneath her.

The Aura of the woman flared, giving greater power to the punch that crashed into the tail and snapped it into two pieces. Not bothering with unwrapping the part left around her, Jane leapt back forwards.

There was nothing dignified about the rolling and scratching that followed. Scarlett could not formulate a proper plan, make no real use of her extra range of motion, and in the end her overcharged systems could not withstand the tax anymore. Just as a stray punch by Jane broke the visor, the critical weapon’s system shut down from overheating.

“I give up,” Scarlett spoke the three inevitable words.

Jane immediately stopped. Her panting breaths turned to laughter as her Aura and Unleash both deactivated. The flame-like cloak of golden mana and bright colouring of her hair were both drained in a second. “Does anyone ever tell ya that you’re scary?”

“Look who’s talking,” Scarlett groaned. Her mind was already spawning schematics of what to improve. ‘Objectively speaking, I pushed her quite far,’ the redhead told herself, as she watched Jane jump to her feet and wave at the cheering crowd. That sort of work was best left for extroverts like her.

The fight had left one of her ears singed, a claw mark on her cheek and Scarlett had landed that one solid punch earlier on. With better terrain, she could have played the range advantage for longer. With better limbs, she could have stayed in an elevated state for a prolonged period as well. Though, on the flipside, Jane hadn’t used her Babel Phrase as well.

‘Emotionally, it pisses me off that I didn’t pilot this better,’ Scarlett admitted to herself and looked at the back of her right arm. She wasn’t just a fighter, she was the operating product of the crafting crew’s combined genius. Losing felt like disappointing all of them as well as herself. ‘This would sting a lot more if it wasn’t her.’

The cat-eared battle-maniac struck a few more cute poses for the cameras, then turned back to Scarlett. A lewd grin spread on her face. “Ya get yourself in order, Scarlett,” she purred. “I’ll take my prize in a bit.”

‘Losing definitely isn’t that bad when it’s her,’ Scarlett thought.

Outwardly, she harumphed.