AnimeCon Harem 12: Combat Therapy (Patreon)

   Brian gave the haft of the borrowed sword another squeeze as he considered Rebecca’s story. It was at once both unreal and also believable, and something about the forward way she’d laid it all out lent credence to this strange sense of latent ferocity in her that he’d had trouble placing. Knowing so much more about her did make them feel more connected, and Brian definitely felt like he was seeing her in a new light.

   No, it’s more like I’m really looking at her for the first time, Brian admonished himself.

   Some knee-jerk reaction part of himself had at some point in the past decided to quantify Rebecca as a friend of Emily’s, had mentally put her in a box with that label on it. He’d always been polite with her, and treated her in a friendly manner—but, having that specific separation of she’s Emily’s friend in his mind had always prevented him from seeing her as anything more.

   Now her impression on him was that of a sapling that had grown several sizes too large for her planter, with roots breaking free and reaching out for more—to be more than simply classified as this friend that existed on this fringe periphery of their social group. She’d laid herself bare and made this enormous effort to branch across this gulf between them and connect with him. Brian found himself startled at the thought that they were now suddenly more than distant friends; they were now real friends, maybe close friends, a new bond was forming—Rebecca had with her words and actions here become an important part of his life that he would carry with him forever.

   Is it really that easy? Brian twisted and tightened his grip on the sword. To just—I don’t know. We put ourselves in these boxes, we put up these walls, and she just all of the sudden—I can’t really put it into words.

   Rebecca held her sword up again, inviting him to tap back in and continue their fight.

   Taking a deep breath and steadying his resolve, Brian swung his weapon up to meet hers, and their weapons touched. Everything was different. Their fight before—if you could even call it that—was completely without suspense, but this time anticipation tingled along the ends of every nerve in his body. Really committing himself into the match seemed to pull his distracted, discordant tangle of thoughts out and strip everything extraneous away, to hone his frame of mind in on something he could focus his attention on completely.

   Mara seemed to sense that he wasn’t taking this lightly anymore, because she wasn’t just watching him—she was sizing him up as they stalked back towards each other. Her features weren’t classically beautiful, but here where she was completely in her element she was stunning in an entirely different way than Chloe or Kelly. She didn’t possess the dainty loveliness of Stephanie and she didn’t have Emily’s unique quirky cuteness—Mara had something entirely different, something all her own. There was a naked ferocity in her eyes that seemed to see right through him, there was this strange sense that rather than a wildness checked by restraint, this girl had been tempered and driven into a razor’s edge of purpose.

   Before he even realized what he was doing, Brian found his sword sailing through the air to crash down into Mara. For a split-second he began to hesitate— he was putting a lot of power into this swing, and he didn’t want her to get hurt or—before he could even finish his thought Mara’s blade cut through the air, the arc of her sword intercepting his with incredible force and completely terminating his attack before it could land.

   Okay, damn, Brian stepped back, rolling his wrist in appreciation.

   Whatever core made up the inner shaft of his weapon had given out a weird twang of vibration in response to her parry, and his fingers felt lingering aching twinges at having the momentum of his strike so suddenly and completely arrested. It was a little alarming—his attack had already been halfway towards her before Mara began to move, and still her speed was absolutely decisive, her movements minimal and precise.

   “That’s good—keep going,” Mara encouraged in a Rebecca voice.

   It was difficult for a moment for his mind not to linger on the divide between his preconceptions of her as Rebecca and this reality of Mara here in front of him. Rebecca wasn’t an empty affectation or imitation of her grandmother, Mara wasn’t a wolf in sheep’s clothing—she was a wolf pup raised by a stubborn old goat, she was a wolf who had chosen to embrace the kindly nurturing flock values that were important to her without also letting go of her identity as a predator.

   Feeling secure now that he could swing towards her without worrying too much about actually hitting her, Brian lashed out again. The loaner sword hurtled towards her in a blur, but Mara didn’t seem to even be looking at it. She was taking in the shift of his stance as he transferred weight into the power of his slash, her eyes were following his shoulder and arm. Her sword crashed into his again in the deafening clap of cloth-covered weapons impacting and the weapons rebounded back from one another.

   When she struck back, he found himself responding without having to think, smashing her blow out of the way and then sweeping back in effort to catch her before she had a chance to recover. For what felt like a long, trance-like moment they engaged each other in a flurry of powerful strikes, the foam-padded weapons cleaving and carving through the air at each other and colliding in the resounding percussion of cracks that drew the attention of everyone in the atrium.

   “Good, good,” Mara grinned.

   This is… strange, Brian thought.

   It was weirdly relaxing to fall into this cinematic back-and-forth of swordplay without either of them whiffing misses or fumbling their blocks or accidentally hitting each other. Brian wasn’t about to delude himself into thinking this situation came about because of him having natural talent or anything like that—Mara was expertly measuring her own pace to his and guiding him along. Her strikes at him looked lightning-fast, but they only came when the angle and position of his own sword was in the right place to block them well. When his own attacks flashed out, it was like she welcomed them deep into the personal space around her and only repelled them at the last moment when they would give those somehow satisfying heavy impacts.

   “You can hit harder, if you want,” Mara said.

   “You’re… way too good at this,” Brian responded, trying to focus himself on hitting harder, on hitting faster—she simply sped up to meet his new tempo.

   “You are… I almost want to say that you feel rusty,” Mara pursed her lips at him in amusement. “Rather than calling you good for a beginner, it’s more like you’re a swordsman a season—err, several seasons out of practice.”

   “Thanks?” Brian quirked his lip. “I think?”

   “Well, all except for your blocking—you’re still punch-blocking,” Mara explained.

   Between calmly fending off the swiftest strikes he could muster, she was able to raise her opposite arm up and tap the hand holding her weapon with her fingers in demonstration.

   “Punch-blocking is—your brain registers something coming at you, and you just punch towards it while holding the sword. On a better-made sword, you’d be catching some of that on a crossguard maybe, but right now a lot of these hits are landing on your fist. That’s still a legal block in Daegonhir—the ‘hand on weapon’ rule, but in SCE with hard weapons or any reenacting with live steel that would be very bad.”

   “Yeah, I imagine,” Brian muttered, glancing at where the skin along the joint of his knuckle was reddening and beginning to tear. “What do I do to avoid that?”

   “You need to really focus on where you receive the strikes at on your sword while you’re blocking,” Mara said, illustrating what she meant with what appeared to be a textbook perfect block as Brian’s attack once again failed to breach through her defense. “Lot of Dageonhir veterans never even learn to, they just start taping their hands or wearing gloves to practice. But! There should be a ‘sweet spot,’ just a few inches above your grip there where the sword balances.”

   “A sweet spot,” Brian repeated.

   “Yeah, a sweet spot,” Mara gave him a serious nod. “You’ll feel it when you find it. Once you’re used to taking advantage of the exact balance of your sword, everything you do requires less leverage—it’ll feel like you’re exerting less but getting more out of each motion.”

   “Makes sense,” Brian grunted. He received her return strike a bit too high up on his blade and felt the weapon nearly tear free of his grasp. “Don’t think I’m quite there just yet.”

   “I wouldn’t worry about it,” Mara said with a disarming smile. “I was just thinking—always good to avoid forming bad habits.”

   “Really doubt I’d ever be any use in some actual competitive match or big battle with a bunch of people or anything,” Brian said. “You’re definitely going easy on me, here.”

   “This isn’t a match,” Mara replied, bypassing his attempted block with ease to swat what felt like a scolding thwap against his shoulder. “We are fighting, but we’re not fighting each other. This is… it’s like a conversation. Our actual words can be whatever, or we can even not talk at all—but we put our feelings into our strikes, and send them back and forth. It can be good for you.”

   “That sounds very… zen,” Brian observed.

   He didn’t even find himself skeptical—his early morning runs had always been his own method for decompressing. It was difficult to draw too many similarities between the activities, however, because running was only active in the sense that it was physical exercise. Sparring like this here put an opponent in front of him, it required him to act and react, fully engage with his partner in a way that demanded the full attention of his faculties.

   “It can be, if you let it,” Mara replied. “Meditation is different for everyone. A wild child like me isn’t suited for stillness! I need motion and movement to really draw out my feelings. Combat.”

   She punctuated her declaration with several consecutive thunderous blows that rained down upon him one after another—Brian had to brace his sword halfway up the blade with his free hand just to ensure his weapon remained steady enough to not be knocked away, because any of these hits would hurt if they landed on his body. When she’d apparently finished, he replied in kind; first attempting a somewhat awkward stabbing thrust—she easily deflected it—and then bringing his arm up around in baseball-swing imbued with every bit of power he could muster.

   Mara seemed to light up with excitement at his daring, and his swing that felt like it could take someone’s head off was instead parried, glancing off her blade and continuing on past her with enough momentum to leave Brian overextended. She darted inside his swing and lightly drew a line up his stomach and chest with the tip of her sword, then turned her wrist and even managed to tap an additional strike on the outside of his thigh before she danced back outside the reach of his returning sword.

   “I think—yeah, you definitely woulda disemboweled me there,” Brian admitted with a grimace.

   “Don’t think, you’re doing good,” Mara spurred him on. “Don’t think too much. This is a good conversation between us with all of this—and I want you to tell me more.”

   He obliged her, stepping in to throw another heavy strike. And another. Another. The situation just seemed so strange to him—on the one hand, it should have felt frustrating that she was so much better than him at this, but instead it just felt... liberating. Like he could really let loose and completely throw himself into this, and with her swordplay she would never be in danger—because she possessed the skill to manage anything and everything he sent her way.

   After all, Brian reminded himself. I’m not even fighting her. I’m fighting to—I don’t know, to draw out some of these feelings that are messing me up. Baggage. Stuff that I’ve needed an outlet for for way too long.

   So, he tried to hack and slash his way back into the zone, back into that sort of reverie from before where his body was moving but the feelings flowed independent of thought or form. As silly as it sounded, there were definitely zen moments here and there, and he could almost allow his mind to wander through all of the things he’d been dealing with in recent memory without trying to understand them. He wanted to find a sweet spot, that point of balance where he’d centered himself so that he was neither struggling to reach nor shying backward from the life that confronted him.

   It was just as easy to be a little mesmerized by the twirl of tunic skirting and the fanciful finesse of Mara’s sword as it turned through the air and rendered each thrust and throw of his thoughtless attacks into nothingness. She was speaking to him through this fight as well, he just hadn’t been able to receive her intentions before. He knew she could have taken simple stable footing and easily refused every advance of his sword, but instead she spoke to him— twisting her body and shifting her footwork through different stances to meet the cadence of his hits.

   Whenever the weapons met it was in the rhythm of her movement, and the force he spent was nullified by the weight of her body pushing from the balls of her feet up through her posture and the slight pivot of her waist and arc of her sword. He instinctively tried to do the same— albeit without her skill and years of practice, he found he was just lunging in and lashing down with surprising power.

   Definitely liberating, though, Brian thought to himself in a daze as the clash of the padded weapons sounded out in shockingly loud smacking sounds.

*     *     *

   Brian stopped outside the door of his own apartment and put his hand against the frame for a moment. He’d had an awful day at work, he was angry and stressed and frustrated, and more than anything he just wanted Chloe to care—to ask what was wrong, maybe listen to him talk about it, to comfort him. The gnawing dread that kept him from opening the door right away and coming home was because he didn’t dare to hold any of those expectations anymore.

   He didn’t want to set himself up for that disappointment right now and feel himself grow more and more bitter.

   It’s just work bullshit! Brian reminded himself. Leave work bullshit at work. Don’t bring those problems home, they’re not for her to deal with. All of that bullshit needs to stay right here outside this door. Somehow.

   The job attracted a lot of the same kind of guy—late teens or early twenties, already a young parent with baby momma drama, either struggling with an arrest record or already exhibiting the signs of drug abuse. They played pranks on each other and fooled around, they built forts out of the shipping boxes product came in before they had to get flattened for the compactor, and it was rare that any of them lasted on long enough to get hired on with the company from the temp agency. Brian never really minded them messing around, since it rarely affected him.

   One of the newest batch of workers who SHOULD have been loading pallets, packing boxes, or guiding boxes through the case sealer and getting them labeled had instead been dicking around throwing a dirty tennis ball back and forth across the work area.

   Today, however, a gangly teen had scrambled in front of Brian’s moving forklift in an attempt to grab that dirty tennis ball before it got run over. The lift had been moving at speed—the dumb fucking kid had almost gotten himself killed. The pathway his lift took was marked on the floor with tape, there were signs, his forklift had both a warning light and an in-motion alarm, Brian himself managed to spot the kid and stop the lift without losing his load, but STILL.

   The worker was screamed at by the floor boss and fired that same day, but even though Brian had performed admirably, he STILL got called in to the foreman’s office and lectured about safety. The crew of temp workers running the packing line were all sullen and cagey and gave everyone glares, and Brian? Brian was PISSED.

   The tension from realizing he’d almost crushed a worker to death never had time to bleed back out of him, the setback on orders meant he didn’t have the luxury of taking things slow for the rest of the day, and being dressed down by his boss for doing absolutely nothing wrong just rankled. They’d made Brian fill out an incident report that was going to be on his record with the company. He was getting mad all over again just thinking about it.

   But that’s all work bullshit, and now I’m off the clock, Brian told himself again. He blew out a long breath, unlocked his apartment door and stepped inside.

   Chloe was waiting for him on the couch, with her arms crossed in front of her and a dour expression on her face. She looked upset, and he wearily ran through a mental checklist of things he might have done wrong before leaving for work before coming up dry. He FELT dry, dry, empty and hollow. Closing the door behind him, Brian didn’t trust himself to greet her or ask how she was. Some part of him hoped that she would pick up on him being more quiet than usual, that she might sense something was wrong.

   “You could’ve brought home something to eat,” Chloe regarded him with a bitter expression for a moment before shaking her head in disappointment and turning away. “We basically don’t have anything here. So—what do you expect us to do for dinner?”

   He paused with a frown, wondering why that hadn’t registered on his mental checklist for a moment before realizing why.

   “Stroganoff?” Brian suggested as he bent down just inside the door to start taking off his work shoes. His feet were killing him, and he was a lot more exhausted from today than he’d thought. “Think we still have some left from last ni—”

   “We had that last night,” Chloe reminded him. “We’re not eating the same thing every single day, Brian.”

   “Okay,” Brian said, too tired to fight her.

   “Okay?” Chloe’s irritation was rising.

   Okay—because I cooked yesterday, Brian thought to himself. Even though I worked, even though I work long shifts every day and you’re here doing… whatever it is you fill your time with all day. We agreed back then to switch off cooking every other night, because THAT was equality. Apparently. But—how long has it been since YOU made dinner?

   He didn’t bring that up, though. In fact, he was sure she was baiting him with that right now, probably because she was eager to renegotiate their earlier understanding in the new context of some micro-aggression or perceived injustice or maybe even just some feminist article she’d read today that had rubbed her the wrong way. She seemed full of piss and vinegar from something, worked up into a spite and prepared to trap him up in some line of clever arguments she’d been preparing here all day. So, Brian planned to do what he’d always been doing lately—keep himself from being lured into that.

   “We can—I don’t know,” Brian finally wrestled his work boot off. “Order a pizza or something. I—”

   “Ordering garbage?” Chloe said, in that all-too-familiar tone of hers that suggested he’d just given her the wrong answer. “Garbage. We’re not eating garbage every night, Brian.”

   “Okay,” Brian said, staring with a blank expression as he took off his other boot.

   He didn’t have anymore more to say— he walked past her and over into the bathroom so that he could shower. The bad gut feeling that he’d just made the problem worse and that she was going to get more and more upset now did weigh on him, but it wasn’t something he was up for dealing with right now. He didn’t have the strength left today to bicker with her. So, Brian spaced out, secluded himself in the bathroom and undressed with weary motions.

   Doing his absolute best to shove everything he was feeling deep, deep down inside of himself.

*     *     *

   Brian… okay, you just turned scary all of the sudden, Mara decided, trying and failing to swallow down all of her glee. It was difficult to keep herself from tackling him to the ground. It’s like he went off somewhere away into his own head for a bit, and what he brought back with him—was this.

   The transformation in his mentality was somewhat gradual, but within a span of minutes everything shifted. The dreamscape was in an entirely new kind of upheaval—everything still smoldered with pink heat, but stone and earth alike were overturning in a quake of violence. Mara didn’t have the presence of mind to search everyone else out while she was in the midst of combat, but she knew entire forested swathes of brown timber were being crushed beneath a rolling avalanche of rock.

   What that metaphor meant, exactly, she wasn’t sure. Her power or connection to the dreamscape didn’t seem to wane as the land churned and crumbled, but she absolutely felt as if Brian was some suppressive gravity field across them all that was in some state of total flux. Where he was stamping down his emotions it fell like a hammer to flatten every surface into stillness, and where trauma couldn’t be contained the ground rose up in hills of disruption as if blasted outwards with explosive munitions.

   This is—this is BETTER, right? Mara wondered. Part of healing? Maybe? I hope?

   The most drastic change here and now in the real world was that Brian stopped even attempting to defend himself, and simply let her every attack land. As a fighter, this was something Mara was infamous for not allowing, because when opponents brushed off her hits she just started hitting harder as an ungentle reminder. But, Brian soldiered on apparently unfazed, ignoring blows that made the SCE battlegaming veterans watching their match from across the room wince in sympathy. Brian didn’t even seem to register them as they hammered into his body, and strikes that were absolutely guaranteed to bruise and take the wind out of the sails of most any other fighter she sparred with just seemed to flow off of him like water.

   The Brian from before had fought to her expectation—he’d been fighting himself more than he’d been fighting her. There was too much caution, too much deliberation into where he was putting his sword, and he wasn’t able to pursue advantages that were necessary in a sparring match. He’d swing his sword in her direction but not at her, he’d take specific care to ensure strikes wouldn’t ever actually hit her body should she fail to block them—which for Mara was of course frustrating and slightly insulting, even if she recognized it was just some subconscious hangup Brian had.

   Once the layers of self-repression that had been actively holding Brian back began to fall away, however—Mara found herself in a very different fight than before.

   Holy hecks, Brian, Rebecca wet her lips. Deep down, you’re actually kind of scary. I’ve finally got you venting things all out, now… but I don’t know how much longer I can keep this match going without one of us getting hurt.

   His strikes became more and more difficult to contend with as he exerted more and more violence into each sweep of his blade. Rather than the cautious, playful taps from before these were methodical, brutalistic, the obstinate heavy chop of someone taking a hatchet to a tree trunk. Though he was broadcasting his strikes with a full wind-up, there was little Mara could do to exploit the openings if hits weren’t bothering him, and continuing to parry them without putting undue stress on her own wrists and forearms became difficult.

   Mara retreated first one step, and then grudgingly gave another, and he advanced. She struck crushing blows across his arms and shoulders, blows hard enough to stagger him and some actually physically knocked his larger body backwards... but he just regained the ground and didn’t otherwise even seem to notice. When Brian stopped thinking about how he was fighting, when he appeared to stop registering pain, the match turned into him continuously bearing down on her like an unstoppable juggernaut— and it was turning her on like crazy.

   Brian reared his sword up in the air for a furious downward strike, and Mara couldn’t help but blanch. He was leaving himself wide open for a stab to the gut, but when she leapt in and impaled him with a particularly vicious thrust to the stomach—had they been using anything other than safety-foam weapons Brian would have been completely gored—he just tanked the hit, refusing to even double over. Brian’s blade dropped down from above before she could maneuver back out of range, and so she braced a hand against her own weapon in a halfsword technique, attempting to angle this dangerous guillotine drop of his off to one side.

   Instead, both swords broke.

   His boffer bent and folded in the crash of force, and she could feel the foam degloving from the core of her own weapon and beginning to twist off. She shrugged both falling weapons off her one shoulder before Brian could slam into her, and on reflex grabbed for the spare she usually kept on her belt—but the axe that should have been dangling from her belt frog was absent, she hadn’t worn it to this fight. It was over.

   “Good fight,” Mara breathed, slapping a hand across the breadth of Brian’s chest to make sure she had his attention. “Good fight, good fight.”

   “Jesus—bro, are you okay?” A bystander called over to Brian. “She was wailin’ on you there and you just kept marchin’ in.”

   “Guy’s a fuckin’ machine!”

   “No way,” a tunic-clad LARPer disagreed. “He lost forever ago—he was already dead like, a billion times over.”

   “Give ‘im a tower shield, he’ll bulldoze in field battles,” One of the onlookers wearing chainmail proclaimed. “Physique like his, fighting like that? He can just roll back the melee press, push a big gap in the lines.”

   It was insanely difficult for Mara to ignore the burnished slivers of sexual excitement thrumming up and down her body. The warmth of Brian’s skin beneath the cloth, the heartbeat she could feel before retracting her hand. Brian’s refusal to yield an inch even after being horribly battered by an onslaught of attacks was a little bit irresistible, and she felt the sudden urge to tell him to take off his shirt so that she could check for bruising. So that she could carefully, thoroughly check for bruising with her lips and mouth and tongue and maybe—

   Goodness Gyratos! Rebecca struggled to reel all the Mara that she’d let out to play back in. No no no, bad! BAD! Bad horny brains!

   For his part, Brian blinked in surprise at the now comically bent sword in his hand. The big batch of loaner swords ultra-lights made for the event were built upon golf club shafts they’d collected from thrift stores over the past year, and Rebecca felt pleased to see that they’d been constructed with care. Though the graphite rod inside Brian’s foam blade had snapped, the tightly wound wrapping of cloth tape around the core had prevented the broken shaft from protruding through the padding and posing any actual threat of harm.

   We were… um, really going at it! Rebecca thought, shifting from one foot to the other and increasingly mindful of how wet she’d become.

   Fingertips probing gingerly along the length of her own weapon made her blush—beneath the cloth covering, the foam of this one was practically mangled. Her core was half-inch fiberglass and would flex rather than break, but the once-neat lines of shaped foam were now very distorted. The softer stabbing tip foam of the weapon had unseated, many spots of padding along the length were compressed into dead spots with the excessive force they’d wielded against one another, and there were several obvious rips inside where foam layers had separated—this sword would need rebladed before it saw any more combat.

   “How do you feel?” Rebecca asked, looking from the ruined sword in her hand back up to Brian. “I was... gettin’ in quite a few licks there, towards the end.”

   “I… uh, yeah, I just kinda let go, stopped even trying to block,” Brian brushed off his shoulder and then ran a hand down his arm in surprise. “Seems like you got me pretty good.”

   “That’s…” Rebecca struggled to find tactful words as she let her gaze wander over his musculature. “Not a strategy many can bear. I hit pretty hard—are you alright?”

   “Nothing to lose sleep over,” Brian shrugged off her concerns. “Just like old times, really.”

   Crapsticks. CRAPSTICKS, Rebecca couldn’t help but swear to herself. I was only considering the Chloe drama—how could I forget? Emily DID mention way back before that he had abusive parents. Pushing him to vent this way might have been the LEAST delicate way of getting him to open up and blow off steam. Great, Rebecca. GREAT.

   “Okay… that’s, I’m sorry, that did get a little out of hand,” Rebecca gave him a sheepish look. “I’m sorry for that. But, also like—how do you feel?”

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