Barefooted, weaponless, head bent low and coming in at a full lunge, Arthur exploded out of the door. He watched as the kris swung before his eyes, nearly catching the top of his forehead. But in the sudden darkness, the samseng was blind. His eyes had not adjusted to the tiny amount of illumination offered by the rising moon, not yet.
Ducking under Choi’s swinging arm, Arthur hit the thug with his elbow, driving it into the man’s bladder with Focused Strike empowering his attack. He had missed the hip joint as the man turned, leaving him with a more solid but less crippling attack. It still worked, however, to double his opponent over as the man let out a grunt filled with pain and surprise, and warm liquid exploded from a full bladder.
Rising from his crouch, Arthur wielded the top of his head as a weapon, smashing the crown into a descending jaw. He heard jaws crack together, a tooth crunching even as a shooting pain went down his body and he felt a little faint.
No time for that, for the kris-wielding hand was returning, turning to plunge the blade into him. Both of Arthur’s hands came together into an X-block, leverage applied to his opponent’s hand. He felt the blade press sharply against one side of his forearm, cutting a little, but then he had a firm grip and it had nowhere to go.
Deadly weapon hand controlled, his opponent stunned and injured, Arthur knew he had to keep moving to gain the upper hand. It would only take a little while for his opponent to regain his senses fully, to break out of the constant disorientation that Arthur kept him in.
So.
Twist the arm, leveraging the flat of the blade that was against it as a pivot point. At the same time, release his other arm and slide it down Choi’s attacking hand, grabbing at his elbow to keep it turning and apply pressure to increase the angle. After that, it was but a matter of physics.
The kris popped out of Choi’s fingers, pried apart by the opposing forces as his own elbow was twisted away and the strength from his fingers gave away. The moment the kris dropped to the floor, Arthur took the chance to kick it away, defanging his competition. The blade skittered away into the hallway, clattering and bouncing off a wall.
The time taken to send the weapon far away cost Arthur, though. A hammer blow came down on his lower back, once and then again. It cracked a rib, sent him sprawling to the ground with one hand extended. Long enough for another glancing kick, thrown blind, to hammer into his thigh. Pushed sideways against the wall, Arthur scrambled away, back through the doorway for a moment.
Choi followed, reaching blindly for the doorway, fingers finding the edges of the entrance. He hauled himself in, only to flinch as Arthur threw a haymaker into his approaching face. Unlike Choi, whose sight was beginning to return, he could see all too well.
He felt the punch connect, bouncing off and ringing his opponent’s head. Reeling back, Choi brought his hands up to defend himself, snarling imprecations that Arthur had no time to listen to. Instead, he lashed out with a shin kick at Choi, turning his heel a little just before he connected so that he hit the planted foot with the side of his leg. Scraping his bare foot along his opponent’s pant leg, Arthur hissed in pain as his own foot throbbed.
For a moment, in the middle of the fight, he had forgotten he was no longer wearing his boots. What should have been a heel scrape that crippled his opponent had instead injured himself too, though it sent Choi retreating to the bait room.
Now the man was trying to buy time, fingers blindly questing for the doorjamb to slam it shut. Arthur knew that Choi, with time and sight returned, would likely win the battle. He could not afford to let up, so even on his injured foot, Arthur threw himself forward, shouldering the door to keep Choi from shutting it.
Once more, he went in hunched low. Another Focused Strike, draining his own energy dangerously low, allowed his tackle to hit his opponent with enough force to take him off his feet, allowing Arthur to raise him the much-needed inch before he dropped Choi to the ground.
The thug fell hard, even as he grabbed at Arthur’s head. Choi managed to snake a hand around Arthur’s neck, attempting a full neck crank but having his grip dislodged as he landed on his back . . . on a cluster of sharp-edged beast cores.
The preternatural objects did not break, not under such mundane forces like a slammed body. The energy, however, of his body slam had to go somewhere and it did so by breaking ribs and driving the cores into the body. Screaming in pain, his grip around Arthur’s neck spasmed, allowing Arthur to grasp further up his opponent’s body.
A moment of groping found his opponent’s head, and Arthur yanked the head upwards savagely. He brought it back down, hard, against the unyielding stone floor, hearing the dull thud and crack of skull and stone. His opponent still lashed out, punching him in the guts, the ribs, forcing pained spasms of Arthur’s own fingers on a sweaty skull.
He refused to let go. Instead, he raised the head again and slammed it down, fingers digging into the sides of the face that twisted and attempted to pull away. A blindly flailing hand hit his face and smashed his nose, but another slam of head against stone slowed the questing fingers.
Then another.
And another.
The figure beneath him stopped struggling after the fourth, stopped moving after the sixth. Somewhere along the way, Arthur lost count of the number of times he repeated the brutal motion, the skull in his hands a squishy remnant as he choked under the onslaught of adrenaline and desperate fear.
Leaving him to collapse on the corpse of the man that had harried him since the first day he had arrived in the Tower. Breathing hard and in pain, but victorious.
If you could call this a victory.