Realizes that Pyrrha's fucking with magnetism

But what she did next surprised me.

As my sword came down, she raised her shield in an instant and caught my strike as I expected her to—but she blocked it with both arms, releasing her sword at her side in doing so. With my Clairvoyance, I saw it all—how she let go of the weapon, how it spun almost idle circles through the air, how her now free hand came up to grasp the inward curving edge of her shield and help force my attack aside, even how my reflection gleamed in the shield over the course of each passing moment. As steel brushed steel and I tried to pull back, I even saw the fingers of her free hand brush the flat of my blade. Light glimmered against steel, shining from a thousand sources throughout the arena yet seeming suspended as I focused.

Then the moment passed and she spun, using her shield to push away from my blade, retrieving her discarded sword before it even touched the ground and striding away.

I didn’t follow. That maneuver had been…beautiful, certainly, and undeniably graceful, but…what surprised me was one simply thing, the moment when she’d let go of her sword to brace her shield with a hand. She’d let it spin through the air for a moment before drawing it back, but…there’d been no true need to let go of it, not really. She could have braced her defense with a sword in hand as easily as without, yet…

It was strange. Something tiny and without any apparent meaning, over in an instant, and yet it seemed so out of place. Pointless, compared to everything else; a needlessly showy addition that stood out starkly compared to the whole. Maybe it was only because I noticed everything in such vibrant detail—

Vibrant detail, I thought, noticing something. In the dozens of lights that glittered on the surface of my weapons, there were four out of place. Off-color, they stayed in the same place no matter how the blade moved, markings on the steel.

Four points of light on the flat of Crocea Mors, where Pyrrha’s fingers had touched them.

“What…?” I whispered, but didn’t have even a second to think about it because Pyrrha was suddenly on the attack. I raised my shield to counter a bash from hers, sliding back a pace as I readied my sword. She came at me shield first again, but I braced myself better this time and though I slide again, I wasn’t pushed away. Shield to shield, we both raised our blades, striking around them even as we pulled back our defenses.

Again, I saw every moment—how she slid her shield across mine to raise a defense, the knuckles of her hand dragging across Crocea Mors’ surface and leaving trails of light in their wake. How rippling patterns of light appeared in the air, spreading from her hands to the small space between us. Dim Aura marks flashed brightly at their touch.

She shouldn’t have been able to bring her shield up quickly enough to block, but my sword seemed to shift ever so slightly as it passed through those waves and she did anyway, stopping the attack even as her own sank into my upper arm. There was a flash of pain before she jerked it back, sword extending into a spear again as she swept my legs out from under me, neither my sword nor shield moving precisely how I wanted them.

I landed flat on my back and I was thinking about it the whole way down. It was subtle—so subtle I couldn’t even feel it—but I’d seen it with my Clairvoyance. Given the possibilities of my different forms of sight and what had been affected…

“Magnetism,” I breathed quietly as she drew a step away, going back to a defensive stance. She stopped at my words, looking at me in surprise. “Right?”