His hyung is so stupid.

"Do I get to give them a go after you've kicked my ass with them?"

"You know how to dual-wield?"

"Nope!"

"Isn't that just wasting your backlash, then?"

"Some things are worth the backlash, and learning how to use those definitely is."

"...alright."

Tae-gun doesn't expect he's going to kick Si-yeon's ass, though; Si-yeon's got him totally outclassed in melee like this if Tae-gun isn't willing to go lethal. It's just a lot more useful to spar with an intelligent moving target rather than a practice dummy.

Yoo-min and Seungjoo get out of their way and take a seat somewhere they can watch the sparring. Neither Tae-gun nor Si-yeon are likely to fuck up badly enough to actually be dangerous to them but if anything happens Seungjoo is perfectly capable of stopping them.

They start circling each other. Tae-gun has one sword in each hand and thin ice sheets discreetly attached to the bottom of his shoes, and he eyes Si-yeon warily trying to look for an opening.

Si-yeon skips from foot, grinning and doing the same. He's the more impatient of the two, though, of course, so when he gets bored of waiting he leaps, covering the distance between them in an instant.

Tae-gun parries the punch with a swirl of his body and aims one of his swords at Si-yeon's back with the other following closely behind.

He turns midair with his forearms forming an X just in time to block the first sword, allowing it to launch him back and away from the second sword. He lands in a crouch but immediately presses the offense again, aiming for speed and agility to compensate for Tae-gun's weapons and ice-enhanced mobility.

The game is on.

Tae-gun is more mobile—he can fly, if nothing else, and the only upper limit to how fast his ice can go is given by his backlash accumulation rate—and his blades are more dangerous, especially given that he does have prior experience with them. Si-yeon is nimbler, more able to turn on a dime and do acrobatic feats, not to mention that he can easily leap as high as the gym ceiling which mitigates a lot of Tae-gun's advantage through flight. Si-yeon is also reckless, aggressively going after Tae-gun almost heedless of his own safety. Tae-gun, of course, can't let Si-yeon's recklessness prevent him from actually using his blades in ways that would be really dangerous to anyone else as that would be a weakness Si-yeon would absolutely exploit, but Si-yeon can always dodge when he needs to, or straightforwardly tank a hit when that's necessary, though he does that sparingly as it's pretty costly in backlash compared to other things he could do—such as stopping the blades with his bare hands.

It's loads of fun. Fighting monsters is just not the same as fighting another human, and Tae-gun keeps him constantly on his toes. S-rankers are on another level, even if Si-yeon himself is A-rank—although maybe he shouldn't be thinking about "S-rankers" so much as "Lee Tae-gun".

Si-yeon's goal, of course, is to disarm him. In a real fight against monsters there's no such thing, Tae-gun can just conjure weapons at will, but the point of sparring like this is for both of them to practise various individual skills that they can use to build up their arsenals. If both of them were going all-in and trying to kill each other Si-yeon would still be a challenge to Tae-gun but he'd just lose.

But in this constrained situation Si-yeon wins. There are very few espers who can beat him one-on-one in a mostly-physical fight, and it'd have been even more one-sided if Tae-gun hadn't been allowed to use his various mobility aids. In real life he'd have made sure to go ranged and use his conjuration powers a lot more, too.

Not to mention that Tae-gun feels a flash of—something—when Si-yeon disarms him, and he doesn't know exactly what it is, but it's unexpected and it throws him off-balance enough that it takes a lot less time between losing the first sword and the second than it otherwise would. He doesn't immediately give up on being completely disarmed but from there it doesn't take very long for Si-yeon to stop himself from landing what would've been a decisive blow.

Seungjoo claps.

And Yoo-min wolf whistles and says, "That was so hot."

Si-yeon straightens up from where he's crouched on top of Tae-gun and offers him a hand up. "Do I get a prize for winning?"

Tae-gun accepts the hand, dusts himself, and looks at Si-yeon for a second...

...then summons a very thin layer of very cold frost directly over the skin of his face.

"Ack!" He starts rubbing his face to get rid of the frost. "Warn a hyung before you do that!"

He ignores Si-yeon's complaints and goes to pick his swords up. Despite Jaeha's warning that they could handle quite a lot of roughness he still inspects them for damage, and thankfully there isn't any.

"I can give you a prize if you want, Si-yeon."

"Can you, hyung?"

"I mean—"

Si-yeon—looks conflicted for a moment, which is really not a look that fits his face—