-"Use Youw Stwengths"-
How long had it been, now?
Pivot, pivot, pivot. Never stop moving- you cannot afford to cease moving, his senses screamed.
Minutes? Maybe hours? His sense of time had drawn into nothing but how many beads of sweat had hit the moss-ridden stones beneath his feet. How many sparks of plasma had left flecks of their remnant existence on his grey robes, cloth fluttering wildly with each elegant motion.
Deflect, parry, push. The blade is no more than extension of your arm. Your will. It is control.
Time had ceased to be in this dance. It held no great value, for what would time care should he need to perform this dance for hours? When his life depended on it? When the lives of others depended on it? It was precision. It was elegance. It was sheer discipline and calculating measurement given expression.
Weave your feet. You do not have the strength to block, so glide…
This was a reprieve. No dramatics. No need to reflect on irritations. No need to address problems. There was nothing but the weight that sat in his palm, the aching of his right arm and his legs.
Force an opening. Patience is your virtue, but opportunity is your sin. Do not wait, but remain waiting. Bring it to yourself, but do not move until the time is right.
The trick was letting his left hand control the momentum of his body. To use two hands while maneuvering his foil would be a disgrace to the elegance of Form II. It would undermine the precision, the grace and mindset one needed to wield when executing it. He’d seen how the dance looked, in a flurry of masterful orange and swirls of black that turned those who stood against him practically null. It was a (frankly) terrifying expression of arrogance and superiority- but that superiority wasn’t unfounded. The flash of that blade as it arced and jabbed across it’s targets was no false feat of skill- no pseudo-mastery achieved via approximation. No, that had been real.
But Thelion could not move as that Hero had. No, he was far different. Nearly seven inches shorter and probably close to a hundred pounds lighter, Thelion did not have the power to match that tyrannical strength in a copy. He had to make this style his own in a way best suited to his form. Best suited to his frame and mindset. What he lacked in the raw power to execute his moves he made up for in his lower center of gravity, his natural flexibility, and his raw talent in exerting the Force on himself to pace his movements.
His eyelids shut, but he still saw. Saw better than when his eyes were open, and the world was clouded and foggy. Ever since that day, he refused to put on glasses or contacts. Out of hesitation. Out of fear that it’d happen again. Instead, he chose to rely on the Force to guide his vision and his ears, to place faith in the way the world around him moved to his supernatural senses.
"Beginning Training Session 43: Form II; Difficulty Seven; One Attacker."
The droid moved first, training foils moving in Jar’kai to press him into an immediate dual ‘Sai Cha’. His own blade swiftly moved to the left, catching one blade as his feet began the dance. Shifting with his back he let himself fall backwards with his knees buckling forward. Accelerating one foil into the other, a flick of his free hand used the Force to shift his feet impossibly into the pirouette around the training droid. His arm, contorted into the shape of an obtuse and upside v , swiftly corrected itself as he pulled backwards to unleash a flurry of ‘Shiim’ to it’s outer limbs. The gyrating noise of hydraulics and mechanisms filled the room as the two foils snapped backwards, the arms doing a full 180 degree rotation to face Thelion once more. His neat stabs earned him a few nicks, but the majority fell in the hail of deflections executed by the daunting metallic figure.
His right hand retreated towards his stomach, blade poised into a defensive matter with a half-forward lean as he analyzed the probing movements of the droid. The way it held both foils in a downward angle reminiscent of the upward slashes of Shii-Cho. The way it’s footing reminded him of the Ataru of Viscara’s Sith, aggressive and offensive- broad strokes full of power without compromising precision, in exchange for defensive capabilities. He could see how he was being analyzed as well, his pattern memorized and exploited against him, forcing him to perfect each and every shift of his foot and placement of his wrist.
Then the droid moved, and he moved with it.
‘Cho Mok’ towards his left arm, ‘Cho Sun’ towards his right, the indigo light of the training implements moving in synchronous as the ‘Cho Mok’ swung upwards at him, while the ‘Cho Sun’ swung upwards. The first came at a diagonal while the second came at a perfect vertical. He could work with that. His saber flickered outwards to collide with the Cho Mok as his feet once again danced along the ground, sweeping and stepping with elegance to sidestep the Cho Sun. “Not as sloppy this time,” was all he could afford to think to himself as his wrist rotated to keep that diagonal blow blocked before guiding it away, into a wide opening. Without hesitation he drew his saber backwards and thrust it forwards into the side of the droid- and all of it’s motion stopped.
"Lethal blow struck; Shiak; perforated horizontally through torso."
He collected his breathing before his datapad went off. A glance aside as his sweat went cold.
It was time to put that practice to work.
