Luvi was back in a fighting ring. She was up against a visiting opponent who was pretty adamant about not letting Luvi use magic, which was probably more than fair. All he wanted was a straight up fair fight which was something Luvi was beginning to miss. Nowadays her focus had drifted away from traditional fighting and on to how she could fight using her runes. It was nice to go back to the good old days, or so she thought. This guy was really doing a number on her from the get go.
He wasn’t a very big guy but he did have a presence in the ring. He was quick, maybe the fastest Luvi had ever fought. He could get punches in that Luvi would have never thought were possible had he not proven it before her very eyes. It was odd because Luvi was usually the faster fighter so she didn’t have much experience dealing with someone this far out of her league. It also helped that she didn’t know hardly anything about unarmed combat. She could have ended him with a blade in about two seconds but being forced to use her fists was challenging.
Luvi’s least favorite of her opponent’s moves was how good he was at the flicker jab. It was a series of fast jabs that had a certain snapping feeling to them. They had a whipping motion that didn’t follow the conventional punch motion. They were thrown just below Luvi’s eye level so she couldn’t always see them coming. It was an incredibly good strategy because her gloves were usually blocking that part of her vision so they often came as an unwelcome surprise.
Understandably, her opponent was sacrificing all his defense to gain this speed advantage but that didn’t seem to matter much when he could just step away every time it looked like Luvi was going to attack. She was no master at deception and for the most part her attacks were straight forward. She could throw feints but against a trained eye it was difficult to fool. It was especially frustrating because the jabs kept alternating at an unpredictable pattern between her head and body causing Luvi much grief.
To counteract the barrage of punches, Luvi dropped into an even wider stance than usual. She wasn’t going to get knocked down, but now it was harder for her to move around. At the end of the first couple rounds someone on the sidelines told her to get her head back on straight. “it’s okay to walk and dodge, Luvi,” the man had lectured, “if you need to move a lot to dodge just use your hands as a counter balance.”
Luvi didn’t have much time to react before getting pushed back into the ring. These minute long breaks were not nearly enough for her to get better at boxing this opponent. Still, she fixed her form and stopped being so tense. She let her body loosen up and started dodging a couple of the punches but it was clear who the victor was going to be. Luvi had to throw in the white towel and call it quits.
There was no way she could keep up with someone like that. He wasn’t even all that impressive of a boxer, but against someone untrained… he was quite impressive. Still, it hadn’t been a total waste of time. As Luvi replayed the fight in her head, she picked up on things her opponent did and kept them in mind – she intended to make good use of those tactics and moves in the future. After the fight, one of the more seasoned fighters kept on lecturing her about how she should have handled the fight better which was both helpful but also annoying.
Luvi gave the man as menacing a glance as she could muster then walked to a punching bag and started hitting it lightly. She didn’t want to create more sound than necessary. She confirmed that her arms were, in fact, very tired. It would seem that her natural resistance ability through hone didn’t mean anything if she wasn’t using a rune. She humored the thought and put a strength rune on one arm and punched a punching bag with each fist. Sure enough, her arm with the strength rune was a lot sturdier and more received a little less pain from the impact.
Luvi walked over to the side of the room and grabbed some cleaning supplies and used the last bit of her already active endurance rune to wipe some equipment down. She knew just want to do to make her fellow gym goers happy and she would gladly do her part. If nobody cleaned up then this place would quickly turn into a pigsty.
Eventually tired of physical activity altogether, Luvi then went home as she had training of a different sort slated for the afternoon. Luvi wanted to establish a routine of studying. This had the potential to help her out in the long run. Luvi yawned, already getting tired just from thinking of how much studying was going to take.
Once she was settled, she started going over what she knew about the endurance rune. Since Luvi had foregone using magic for the past couple days and she was excited to be using her ether again. The rune was simple in concept. It was something that could give her hours upon hours of extra work. However trying to amplify that relief or give it to others was difficult to grasp. It was like focusing too much on something she had muscle memory of and finding out just how hard it was to alter.
As she studied, her mind started to wander. She shuddered, wondering what it would be like to go up against another hone mage. She imagined taking a punch from someone who had been granted over seven times his natural strength. Any normal person would end up shattering his entire arm with that strength but the resistance granted by a hone mage allowed them to do such things without harming themselves.
Luvi looked away from her notes for a moment. “That stunt I pulled at the fight today was reckless,” she said to herself. “Had I taken a bad hit I could have gotten my nose broken.”
She didn’t want to accept that she had come close to injury but it was what it was. Was training in hand to hand worth the risk of injury? She wasn’t sure what the right answer was. All she knew was that she would have very much liked to have given her opponent a debilitating rune and claim an easy victory.
Suddenly a wave of motivation came over Luvi. She felt her spark gain a burst of inspiration and flipped onto some Umbral runes. The thought of having caused people harm was enough for the spark to kick into overdrive and really get a grasp on this difficult rune. Aggression and negative thoughts were good motivators for Umbral rune study, it would seem. It wasn’t long before sleep begged to take her but she used the rune of endurance to keep herself going. There was work to do, she could sleep later.
Several hours worth of practicing her runes later and Luvi had an epiphany of sorts. She had drawn the rune of weakness onto her table and while she already knew that this didn’t really do anything… she started thinking about the possibility of leaving the rune there and possibly making a trap of sorts. She’d nobody to teach her the simple concept of runic traps so it’d taken her many seasons to come to the realization on her own.
She worked off of this hypothesis of hers, slowly experimenting with ways to draw the rune and lace the surface of her table with ether so that she could make the rune do what she wanted. Then, on one unassuming attempt, it worked. She simply touched the rune with a finger and her whole arm started to feel weak.
“This is… incredible,” she said with short, rapid breaths. Sleep was long overdue at this point but she was so focused that it was hard to stop.
A major cause of her frustration, as she soon discovered, was that the runes that she tied up in a trap did not perform as strongly as she expected. She did not know whether she was simply not making the traps right, or if the weakness was simply an unavoidable side effect of being associated with a trap.
No matter how she modified the trap or tried different ideas well into the night, she made little progress in increasing the efficiency of these ‘traps.’ The good news was that she grasped the concept well enough to place them with confidence.
“There’s so much more I want to test,” she said, failing to stifle a yawn. “But it must wait until tomorrow. I’m so…” She couldn’t even finish her sentence. Her face fell onto her arms that were folded on her table and she slept.
