Fae took her classic stance. Her right palm tucked at her waist, upside down. Her left palm faced her opponent, her legs crouched, evenly supporting her weight.
Avi took an open-palmed stance with his fingers facing Fae. It resembled a Wing Chun stance from Earth.
"Begin!" The supervisor commenced the match.
Avi immediately dashed towards Fae, launching a palm jab. Fae simply stepped back, avoiding any contact with his hands.
She avoided a palm jab by sidestepping.
"She's being uncharacteristically passive." Dalen remarked.
"She's cautious of his poison. She doesn't want to make contact with him easily." Rui said.
"She sucks at evading though." Kane noted. "She's just running away and avoiding it by ceding space. Eventually she'll run out of room."
Fae was cognizant of this, and before long, she changed her approach.
She launched a light jab after avoiding a palm jab from Avi. He skidded back, barely putting together a guard.
Fae had purposely made the jab as short and quick as possible. She wanted to minimize the amount of contact she had with Avi's body, even it came at the cost of power.
He simply tried jabbing at her with his palm
She managed slammed him with a palm attack, as he just barely managed to throw together a guard in time.
Fae grew more and more comfortable and smooth as she grew accustomed to this fighting style. She had been apprehensive at first, but the fight was starting to go smoothly.
('Too smoothly.') Rui frowned. Was this man really a rank one Martial Artist? His attacks were simple enough to avoid, and his defense was meagre. He would not be able to withstand Fae's palm attacks.
He didn't understand how Avi managed to not lose a single time in the past nineteen days.
Just as he was wondering what he was missing, he noticed something strange with Fae.
"What's with her arms?" Kane asked aloud, frowning. "They're faltering...?"
Rui's flew wide open as he paid more attention. Fae's expression had morphed into alarm and confusion too, she had to exert serious effort to keep her arms up in her stance.
"Don't tell me..." Rui realized. "It wasn't just his fingertips. His entire arms is covered in poison!"
Fae had consistently struck his guard with each strike, this was on purpose. This explained why he always put up a guard even if there were better options.
Although it looked like Fae was the one attacking him, in reality he was attacking Fae each time he defended himself!
Rui hadn't yet adopted the right mindset when it came to poison due to his inexperience and ignorance in regards to this field of Martial Art and techniques. But he did in fact realize, that this application was quite overpowered.
If his entire arms were covered in poison, that meant he had an incredibly vast attacking area. He only needed to make contact with his opponent in order to poison them.
Furthermore, this poison didn't need to be ingested or be injected into the body, Fae had only made contact with his skin. Yet the poison was starting to affect the entirety of her arm. This meant the poison had high penetration and a short timeframe within which it would start affecting peformance parameters.
"The finger tips drew our attention and subconsciously made us assume that it was the only poisoned area." Kane understood.
"Right." Rui agreed. "It doesn't even matter if his nails are or aren't poisoned or not. Their true purpose is a red herring."
Suddenly their attention was drawn as Fae dashed at Avi.
Kane narrowed his eyes in alarm. "Why the fuck is she blasting him with powerful attacks? Has she not realized what is going on?"
"She surely has." Rui had no doubt about that. Fae was an intelligent fighter. "It's the right move."
"How so? Won't this just accelerate the poisoning?" Kane frowned.
"Yes, but..." Rui continued. "It's her only choice. The poison had just kicked in, meaning it wasn't done yet in all likelihood, as time passes, it will likely have incapacitated her even more. A race agains time is a race she would have lost."
"I see." Kane murmured as he realized. "So she wanted to pummel him as hard as she could to end the fight as fast as she could?"
"Wouldn't it make more sense to attack parts of his body that aren't guarded by his arms?"
"Not really." Rui shook his head. "He's carefully guarding the easiest and closest parts of his body to attack. All other parts of his body would require Fae to launch longer attacks and require her to alter the trajectories of her attack to land clean hits on. The difficulty of it is high given her arms are partial incapacitated, furthermore, greater distance means greater timeframe which allows Avi enough to poison her anyway. Either with his arms or his nails. Furtermore, the rest of his body might be poisoned too. Perhaps if she wasn't poisoned already, this plan might have been more feasible, but in her current state, she needs to end this fight quickly."
Rui could sense her desperation and determination. Seeing how far Avi was able to push someone of her caliber, he no longer had any doubts about his competence, Rui could easily see how he could have beaten small fries with that ridiculous poison.
However, it didn't mean he was having it easy.
Avi gritted his teeth as he guarded for dear life. Although his plan was working, he had underestimated how absurdly powerful Fae's full-powered blows were. Even the light jabs she had struck him with at the beginning were more powerful than anything he had been hit with in the entire contest!
These full-powered blows were devastating.
His arms were already filled with hairline fractures and even some clean cracks. She made a complete mess of his wrist and his entire arms were purple, and it wasn't because of his poison!