AnimeCon Harem Bonus: Mara, the Nightmare (Patreon)

In the remaining ring on the far side of the central stage from them, Sulric and Mara needed even less time to get prepare. She simply passed her round shield and axe into a pair of waiting hands— it didn’t seem to matter whose, and stepped to one side of the ring.

She’s not even gonna use her shield? What, am I supposed to go easy on her?

“Tap swords,” the herald who would be acting as referee instructed, gesturing to both of them. The two fighters advanced a pace, tapped their swords against one another in respect, and then stepped back again.

“Three… two… one… lay on!” The ring’s herald cried out, initiating their fight.

Sulric loosened his shoulders and raised his shield to a ready position, ready to slowly stalk forward while sizing them his opponent, as he’d done countless hundreds of time in the past. But, he never got the chance.

Are you kidding me? The rather plain-looking young lady in the linen tunic was already hurtling towards him in an enormous leaping bound. The very instant the herald had cried out lay on, Mara was extending herself into a lunging, one-handed thrust.

Leaning reflexively into a forward stance, and bracing his round shield against his shoulder for the imminent impact, Sulric raised his sword in preparation to cut down the instant she was in range. In his split-second evaluation, while she was fully invested in a foolish, charging stab, she’d be completely unable to block; this was going to be an incredibly quick match.

The timing of his counterattack was perfect—but she was just too fast. The tip of her padded sword decisively caught the bottom edge of his shield, then she controlled the recoil from that jab bouncing back by rolling her wrist, spinning the sword up with unbelievable speed to neatly intercept his own sword strike, cleanly parrying it away.

Their entire first exchange lasted only a split second, but Sulric stumbled back, narrowly avoiding a deft riposte that followed the insane parry she’d performed. He felt a cold sweat begin to creep up his back, and he righted his shield back into place. Fuck, she’s good. Better than Idren, maybe.

When her first thrust had caught the bottom of his shield, he’d felt the entire viking shield pivoting down away from his shoulder, with his punch-style grip at the center becoming a fulcrum that would open him up to her follow-up. In fact, in that bare instant following her first stab, his upper arm, shoulder, and neck had all been completely exposed. If he hadn’t already been proactively striking out and necessitated her parry, the match might’ve already been decided by her.

Cursing himself for not having constructed his foam-padded plywood shield another six inches larger, Sulric dropped into a lower, slightly uncomfortable stance so that he could stabilize his shield from the top with his shoulder, down to his knee bracing the bottom. It wasn’t going to wobble on him now, but before he could formulate any further plan of attack, she was upon him in a dizzying flurry of blows. Fast left, sweeping right, twisting her sword around for an unexpected stab coming from above, a sweeping slash from below that immediately followed—he didn’t even know how, and it was all he could with both his shield and sword to batter and bash the incoming barrage away from reaching him.

Something was going terribly wrong here. His own padded sword was a few inches longer than hers, and it should have been heavier, too—yet in each actual exchange where he crossed swords with her, his was consistently being knocked askew, while hers barely seemed to budge. His shield, shuddering beneath the torrent of impacts, felt like it was bruising his shoulder, and he’d already been forced to break his forward stance by pulling back his leading foot, or she’d have already scored points on it.

Shit—and I can’t read her, at all, Sulric realized as he watched her sword flash and snap into him from every angle. The standard strike positions he was accustomed to—up, down, left, right, the diagonals, and thrusting stabs—simply weren’t coming anymore.

Mara would begin a strike to his side that, with an elegant twist of her wrist, came instead from above or below, her sword sweeping first in crescents and arcs, then increasingly complex parabolas that became impossible for him to predict. He was certain there was a flow to it all, some sort of pattern, but with her incredible speed, it felt like he was opposing several enemies at once. Each of her strikes followed the next in a fast and fluid flow that turned into an unstoppable chain of hits before he even realized he was backpedalling desperately.

It’s like I’m chicken-scratching out in manuscript, and she’s drawing cursive into me like some kinda goddamned calligraphist.

Ordinarily, going up against a girl of such slight stature, slinging such lightning-quick strikes at him, his first instinct would’ve been to shield-rush her. A solid body check to either slam into her or shrug her aside. Knock her off of her feet, or at the very least back her off; break her momentum and give him a chance to counter, some breathing room. However, the thought of shield-rushing this girl never occurred to Sulric—because while her blitzing arcs of fanciful swordplay looked light as a feather, they were hitting way too goddamned heavily.

The smack of cloth-covered foam hitting foam resounded out impossibly loud throughout this entire side of the convention hall, with the sort of volume Sulric didn’t hear often on any of his normal battlegrounds. Each strike was a thunderous crack slapping down that made him flinch. The unbridled, bone-rattling force behind each blow made it feel like he was squaring up against a much larger opponent—one wielding a slablike two-handed greatsword, not this girl who was casually flicking a short-sword into him from every conceivable direction with practiced ease.

After what felt like another eternity being battered beneath the unstoppable onslaught of this girl’s attacks—the entire fight thus far in fact lasted about nineteen seconds—Mara ended it. Sulric’s shield was hammered out and away from protecting his body, and she struck—his left leg, his right arm, and a strike to the chest. All light taps, contrasted sharply to the downright murderous hits he’d endured up until that moment. He couldn’t even tell which of those hits landed on him first.

“Good match,” Mara said politely, nodding towards him.

Sulric exhaled slowly, feeling his shoulders sag down and struggling not to collapse to the carpeted floor. In twenty seconds, he was completely exhausted. In fact, it felt like he’d fallen from the top an impossibly tall tree, attempting to block and parry every branch on the way down. Did that... just happen?

“Match in favor of Mara, the Nightmare, realm Marshal of the Arken territories!” the nearby herald proclaimed in a loud voice. A hearty roar of screams and cheers followed, rising up from more people than he’d have imagined would be watching a small one-on-one match like this.

Wait, Realm Marshal? I fought the ARKEN REALM MARSHAL?! Doesn’t that Arken area cover, like, three different states?!! Sulric bowed low, the look of humiliation on his face quickly turning to one of horror, and he shot a searching glance over for his friend Idren. Damn. Idiot still hasn’t finished his match.

“Thank you,” Sulric finally said in a humble voice, letting out a self-mocking chuckle. “Can’t really agree it was a good match, though. Felt like trying to fight a Tazmanian devil, a—a tornado, or something. Wasn’t no fight at all.”

“Thank you! Here, give ‘er a try,” Mara offered with a clear, bright laugh, spinning her short-sword handily to present it hilt-first to Sulric. “You’ll see why.”

It was a beautifully crafted, if somewhat wide-looking sword, constructed along careful lines to give the illusion of tapering to a point. In the instant he reached out his hand to grasp her sword, he became aware that everyone nearby was watching him, some discreetly, others rather blatantly, halting mid-conversation to turn and watch.

He grasped the hilt, Mara let go of the blade… and Sulric stared, dumbfounded, as the sword dipped down sharply to point towards the ground.

Fuck me. The foam sword was heavy, feeling in fact far heavier than any padded weapon—of any length—that he’d ever held. This is as heavy as a real goddamn sword. How the hell did she safely weight this?

“Over twenty-nine ounces,” the girl announced proudly. “Exceeds our minimum weight for glaives and polearms, but at less than a third of their typical length. Balanced nicely, too, no?”

Sulric grimaced, hefting the sword up and giving it a slow, impossibly awkward swing through the air. It sluggishly swayed back and forth, looking nothing like he was trying to execute a proper sword strike. Embarrassed, he let her sword drop back down. Jesus. JESUS. She was swishing this thing at me like it was a goddamn fairy wand.

“Unfortunately, I have to reblade the whole thing just about every other practice, because the foam compresses into these awful dead spots so fast with that weight—but it packs a real punch, doesn’t it?” Her eyes were eager and enthusiastic, and he cursed inwardly again at realizing just how young she actually was.

Realm Marshal, at that age. Fuck me. She really IS a Realm Marshal. Sulric remembered being overawed by Marshall Wolfe’s skill back in his home territory of Belltania... but he couldn’t even begin to imagine Wolfe triumphing over this girl. Girl? This terrible force of nature.

“Er… yeah,” He admitted with a nervous laugh, passing the sword back to her with reverence. “But, uh, how do you actually manage to swing that thing around?”

“Same as with anything else; practice,” Mara replied, lazily swishing the short-sword to draw a pair of figure-eights in the air at incredible speed. “Lots of practice.” The glimpse of her arm he caught within her sleeve wasn’t gigantic, or masculine or anything, but it was definitely well-defined. As she swung and twisted her wrist through different forms, muscle corded like steel flexed briefly into view like sketched lines of strength upon her lovely forearm.

“Christ, are you ladies gonna stand around flirting all fuckin’ day, or are you ever gonna fight?” Idren complained, finally shouldering his way with his tower shield through the enormous audience that’d gathered. His deeply-set eyes flashed, bewildered by the calm scene he was taking in over here.

“We—uh, our fight’s over already,” Sulric admitted, sheepishly glancing towards Mara. She said nothing, instead cooly appraising Idren.

“You lost?” Idren seemed to realize, furious disbelief hardening the lines of his face. “Sulric—are you fuckin’ serious?”

“It looks like it’s you and me, then,” Mara observed, taking several slow, measured steps back to her side of the ring. The chattered discussion filling their side of the enormous Atrium seemed to fall to a hush.

“Yer goddamn right, it is,” Idren growled, pushing towards the ring with a snarl. “Outta my way.”

“Mara!” Brick-cloud called out over the crowd, the huge man once again wearing his horned helm. “You want your shield?”

The auburn-haired girl narrowed her eyes at his concern, realizing after a moment that her big friend had actually lost. She turned her full attention to size up her new opponent as he entered the ring. Idren was a full foot taller than her, and had the craggy face, angry scowl and shaved head one might expect on a prison convict. Beyond that, she saw nothing more than his tower shield, a five-foot tall rectangular slab of plywood and foam, bound with an unadorned off-white, somewhat battered-looking cloth cover.

“...No need,” she decided, forgoing use of her shield once again as a handicap. He was, after all, already approaching her shield-first, not even willing to tap swords with her for a show of respect. Mara rolled her shoulders, set her feet, and then nodded towards the Stormheart acting as this ring’s herald.

“Alright, three! Two!” The eager Stormheart shouted, “One! Lay on!”

Idren took the initiative with a charge, immediately pushing forward with his shield up like a rushing wall. As it reached her, there was a tremendous thundering crack, and the shield inexplicably bucked backwards. Sulric could see that Mara was now in a forward stance all of the sudden... and her padded blade only became visible to him as a blur after it began to slow down following her strike.

...Holy hells.

Pushing forward again, Idren was in return stopped dead once more by the force of Mara’s blows, the large tower shield shuddering and quaking in a way Sulric had never seen the thing do before. Mara’s sword arm seemed to vanish with each of her swings, her sword transforming into an obscure gray shape of repulsive force that denied her opponent every inch forward he tried to gain. Each of his attempts were met with instant and unrelenting punishment, her crushing blows correcting the tower shield’s position back to the far edge of her sword’s range.

“Light!” Idren called, bracing the tower shield forward. “Light, light!”

“This isn’t classed as a polearm,” Mara waggled her sword for him, amused. “You don’t have to call ‘light.’”

In Daegonhir, weapons of a certain length and weight were decided to ‘disable’ shields after two consecutive heavy hits, putting the shield out of play. Calling ‘light’ was part of their honor system, where the defender had the right to insist the attacker’s blow wasn’t sufficient enough to count for a shield breaking hit. A handful of the Stormheart fighters scattered around the periphery of the small stage began to laugh, but Sulric grimaced.

He’d been on the receiving end of those hits of hers just a few minutes earlier, and he didn’t think subconsciously mistaking her strikes for polearm smashes was far-fetched at all. They hurt, down to his very bones, regardless of whether or not they were blocked. I’ve let glaives that didn’t hit anywhere NEAR that hard break MY shield in field battles.

“Light!” Idren either hadn’t heard her, didn’t care, or—more likely, was taunting her as he continued to edge forward, tower shield holding rigid beneath several more of her calamitous hits.

Mara hopped back, eliciting several gasps from her captive audience, and then sprung forward, putting what Sulric was sure must have been her entire body weight into a flashing strike that buckled the tower shield, bending and then folding the thing in half.

She broke his shield, Sulric openly gawked as his friend swore and tried to pull his arm free from the straps of his sagging shield. As he tried to hurl it aside, everyone could see that the plywood had split in a jagged line right where his arm had been buckled in. She broke it. Just like that. She couldn’t ‘break it,’ so she just BROKE IT. Holy fuck! Is that even legal?!

No one seemed inclined to stop her. She stood waiting patiently while Idren struggled out of his shield, standing with the indomitable confidence of a goddess of the battlefield. Shields and weapons did often break or become unusable throughout the course of a Daegonhir skirmish, it happened. But, he’d never seen it happen in such a... purposeful way.

Despite turtling behind his giant shield against a smaller, and shield-less opponent, not only did Idren fail to gain any ground—his endeavor was shut down the moment she seemed bored with it. Realm Marshall of the Arken territories. Maybe even IDREN can’t beat her.

“Pah,” Idren spat loudly. “Yeah, alright. Come on, then!” He pounced forward, and his mace flew into Mara so fast that it seemed to flicker. Unlike their real-world mace counterparts, heavy, bashing things too slow to measure up against a proper sword, in Daegonhir they were often known as speed bats.

The simplest possible thing to wield; padding on a stick. Rather than being balanced or shaped into a blade, which would have an ‘edge’ and a ‘flat,’ the entire head of the mace was considered legal striking surface. It could be carelessly swung in every direction without form, without worrying about how or where they were hitting.

And Idren was hitting, striking out as fast and furious as he could lash out, his mace cleaving through the contested space between them in an unrestrained all-out offense. His weapon had become a difficult-to-catch blur of speed matched only by Mara’s own sword, which twisted and turned through the air to meet it with cracking clashes that sounded too loud to possibly come from padded weapons.

“C’mon, then,” Idren roared. “That all you’ve got?!”

The copper-haired young woman shifted from foot to foot with elegant grace for each deft block and twirling parry, finally seeming pressured. Idren loomed over her, making up for his mace’s stubby length with the reach of his much longer arms. But, at the same time, even Idren’s practiced speed and simple strikes were still being turned away, each hit flicked aside with Mara’s startling finesse.

Afraid to blink for fear of missing a sudden conclusion, Sulric held his breath as the competing fighters hacked and slashed at each other, almost too fast to follow—Idren’s larger frame lunging in with his mace, Mara stepping and countering everything he could throw at her in a whirl of her blue-and-green tunic.

“Is that it, little girl?” Idren spat, his bald head beginning to bead with perspiration as he forcefully cut and stabbed. “Got anything to show but runnin’ and dodgin’?!”

“Of course.”

Mara calmly reached out with her free hand, plucked the mace from Idren’s grasp, and tossed it over her shoulder.

It hit the floor and tumbled to a stop at the edge of the ring amid shocked silence.

Gaping in stunned astonishment at his now empty hand, Idren froze as the onlookers surrounding their ring exploded into a roar of surprised screams and cheers.

Sulric felt his mouth falling open, and watched in startled stupefaction as his fellow Belltanian edged nervously back from the unexpected turn of events, looking at Mara as if she’d suddenly sprouted hydra heads. Then, Idren fled the ring, turning and forcing his way through the people pressed in behind him with a pushing shove. The broken shield and stubby mace remained, laying discarded on the floor around Mara, the only proof that another fighter had ever been there.

“How did—how the… what did you just do?!” Sulric demanded. He didn’t even recall rushing forward towards Mara as the ringside devolved into chaos.

“I disarmed him,” Mara blinked at him, a beautiful smile appearing across the young woman’s features. Nothing about her seemed in any way plain to him, anymore.

“Disarmed him?! You—”

“I’m sure you think your friend is a great,” Mara cut him off with a shake of her auburn curls, “but, he’s not a sword-fighter. He might be good at playing to win, and he might be considered competitive in Daegonhir—but he’s not a swordsman.”

Rendered speechless by her response, Sulric couldn’t muster any argument. To him, Idren had always been a brilliant fighter. An impassable wall of an opponent he just couldn’t beat.

“Oh, don’t give me that look,” Mara rolled her eyes. “He was a reflex fighter. He wasn’t paying attention to my footwork, and he wasn’t reading my stances. All he was doing, was focusing everything on swatting everything out of the way as fast as he could, and then trying to hit my shoulders at every other possible opportunity. That’s not proper melee-combat—that’s high speed whack-a-mole, while wearing garb. He trained himself to hit at a reflex. So, when you slowly raise your hand up…”

With a slow, unhurried motion she brought her hand up and patted Sulric’s head.

“...it doesn’t register at all. Because he’s not thinking, he’s just straining his eyes to catch the fastest strikes. Completely focused, but only on pushing his reflexes to their limit. He wasn’t sword-fighting.” This girl was clearly several years younger than him, but it didn’t feel that way at all, and Sulric was still paralyzed with shock when she shook her head and strode away into the jubilant crowd.

“Well, looked like magic to me,” Sulric muttered to himself in a daze as he watched the girl climb back up onto Brick-cloud’s shoulders. Somewhere amid the shouting someone had begun to chant Nightmare, Nightmare, Nightmare!

After stooping down to retrieve Idren’s forgotten mace from the floor, Sulric joined in the rallying cheer as well.

* * *

Foxy had just been leading Mary down from the upper level veranda when Idren barrelled out of the Atrium, knocking over a young woman in a hoodie and bashing the Folken Tail cosplayer beside her down into a stumbling spin.

“Hey—!”

“What the hell, dude?!”

“Watch it!”

Red-faced and utterly livid with fury, Idren stamped on. He had no apologies for any poor souls who got in his way, he was on a rampage across the upper level, either chasing after someone Foxy didn’t see, or more likely, running from something he couldn’t contend with. So, Foxy did what came naturally to him; he caught the eye of the tall, tabard-wearing guy with the angry scowl and smirked at him.

That got Idren’s attention, and it wasn’t much of a course change for the enraged Daegonhir fighter to step in Foxy’s direction, thrusting a one-armed shove intended to knock the smaller man down. Unfortunately for him, Foxy actually stepped in to the shove, slamming his back into Idren with a twist of his upper body and gripping that extended arm with both hands. With a forceful yank and a whirl of trenchcoat tail, Foxy threw the fighter over his shoulder, sending the bald man crashing forcefully into the ground with a thundering boom.

“Oh my—oh my God,” Mary breathed in shock, both hands clutching her face. “Is he—”

“Yeah, the guy from earlier,” Foxy said, deftly pinning his knee against Idren’s back and pressing him into the floor.

Although everything had happened fast, Foxy was embarrassed to admit his throw had been pretty sloppy. It had worked, certainly—but he hadn’t kept proper balance while he was pivoting, and was in no way certain Idren would come through that abrupt collision with the floor as unharmed as he’d intended. He’s not moving, at least. Should I check for a fuckin’ pulse?

“Ah, well,” Foxy composed a nonchalant sigh, willing his heartbeat to return back to normal. “Thought he might’ve been a good challenge… but from the looks of it, he was just another sore loser all along.”

“Are you okay?” Mary asked, bewildered.

“Yeah, why wouldn’t I be?” Foxy replied, giving her a cocky smile. “Wasn’t my fault, this time. Is that security I see, running this way?”

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