Kordri fast

“Yes sir,” I answered, getting into a defensive stance.  Kordri’s figure vanished and reappeared arms length in front of me.

The first time I had come to the soul realm for training, I was killed in the first blow, unable to even react.  Even when I wasn’t killed, I jolted awake at the slightest blow because my soul wasn’t used to taking on injuries.  The second, third, fourth, all the way up to the twenty-eighth time, I had been thrown out of the soul realm in the first hit.  But on the twenty-ninth time, I was able to dodge, just barely… well… enough to persist until the second hit.  Residing and training in the soul realm was difficult, to say the least.  Only after a few weeks of dying in the soul realm was I able to last long enough to actually call it training.

Kordri followed up his left jab to my neck with a right elbow to my sternum.  It was only when we fought that I was reminded of how terrifying Kordri was.  His meek temperament disappeared, replaced by a cold, ruthless warrior capable of killing me over a hundred times in the span of a few seconds.

The asura’s limbs seemingly vanished due to the high speed in which they were moving.  The only reason I was able to dodge was because Kordri’s attack pattern was always the same.  Of course this was done on purpose; the asura had explicitly told me the choreography of his strikes, never once deviating from that since the beginning of our training.  It was pathetic that I was barely able to dodge an attack that I already knew was coming, but that was the difference between us.

Beads  of sweat flew off my face and body as I was scantily able to keep up with Kordri’s onslaught.  Seconds melded together increasingly slower to form minutes as my sense of time dulled.  Desperation was evident as I progressively made more mistakes the longer we fought.  I had yet to land a single blow on him since the beginning of the training.  In the months I spent fighting Kordri, all my strikes had met with thin air.

“Good! you are keeping up longer than usual.  Do not get sloppy, Arthur.  Remain patient and bide for time if you do not see an opening,” the asura shouted as he simultaneously continued striking and easily dodging all of my feeble attempts to land a hit.

I made a blunder at that moment.  Kordri’s sequence of attacks were strategically placed so that if I didn’t dodge it by just a hair’s breadth, I wouldn’t be able to avoid the next attack.

While I did dodge his spinning elbow, my movement had been too large.  I was instantly met with a low sweep that I couldn't avoid due to leaning too far back to dodge his previous blow.

I chose to give up my left foot in response, knowing I wouldn’t be able to completely dodge the sweep.  As expected, the crunching blow shattered my left ankle but I continued dodging.

Even in here, where I knew it wasn’t real, I didn’t want to die.

“Sloppy, but nice follow up. Do not grow desperate and stay levelheaded,” he repeated, executing his next blow.

Even with my broken ankle, I was able to somehow dodge more of Kordri’s restrained attacks until he did something he hadn’t done before.

I was expecting a forward knee to my stomach like he had always done after a right strike, but instead, he shifted his body to perform a roundhouse kick.

I wasn’t able to dodge his left leg but I was able to keep myself from dying instantly.  Instead of his kick snapping my neck, it had connected squarely with my jaw.

The world tumbled around me as I felt myself skipping like a flat rock on a lake’s surface before tumbling to a painful stop on a bed of particularly tall gra.s.s.

I wasn’t able to talk due to the bottom half of my face being completely mutilated and it took most of my mental capacity to suppress the excruciating pain, but that didn’t stop me from good-naturedly extending a middle finger at my mentor.

Responding with a smirk, he helped me up.  “You managed to not get yourself killed,” he said, seemingly impressed.  “Rest until your soul state is healed.”