Lucy isn't quite sure how she misses - Iomedae doesn't look nimble but apparently she's fast. Lucy's sword goes into exactly the place that elbow was a second ago, and then she feels Iomedae's blade thudding down hard onto her helmet. It's only after she says, "Good!" that she understands that elbow went up to the sky for Iomedae to get over her shield and smack her in the back of the head. 

(Damn, she always forgets tall people can hit scorpion shots. It's not like they'll ever be in her repertoire.)

Lucy doesn't feel the need to verbally ask for another. She'll reset to the starting position a few paces apart and keep restarting fights until someone says they want to quit. 

Sometimes Lucy watches Migliorotto stalk people down on the field. He rarely chases, he's not trying to catch up to anyone who's running away, he's just relentlessly casually walking at people and threatening the whole time. It's something she's struggled to figure out - she's either backing off and looking to block and retreat, or she's rushing in full of aggro - but it's what she was supposed to be working on this practice.

Deep breaths for this; she's trying to mimic the sort of calm focus certain knights have when they're neither panickedly retreating nor angrily advancing but rather just - moving and watching. Her world narrows down to Iomedae's basket hilt, she becomes one with the blade, and she advances with a sweeping offside slash. It's intended to make Iomedae move rather than to kill - it'll be easy to block as she slowly crosses into range - but she's read her Musashi and knows better than to throw an entirely fake attack; the tip of her sword is aimed for the very corner of Iomedae's face. 

Lucy walks directly into Iomedae's thrusting tip.

Okay, I guess you know how to do that now... 

"Good," she says, tiredly, shaking her head to make her chin strap loose again after getting jabbed in the face. And reset. And again. 

Lucy's able to put her shield between her and Iomedae's next several attacks, though her shield arm is getting tired as well. Small, energy-conserving movements - tilting the shield one way so that just the very corner blocks the onside, tilting it the other way so that just the very corner blocks the offside, bending her knees to block the low shot rather than trying to extend her elbow down. And there's the opportunity, with Lucy short enough that she can step around to the side, get under the sword and land a hit on Iomedae's leg while her sword is busy tracing the long graceful arc of the return.

By now she's sort of expecting to hear "light", and when she does she's already doing a high return and prepared to block the crushing overhead from Iomedae. She keeps moving, staying under the sword, trying to push up into Iomedae's space with a high guard - sword nearly parallel above her shield - so that as soon as Iomedae attacks she can punish the sword movement by flicking straight into side of Iomedae's helmet that the sword currently protects.

Come on, take the bait, please? Lucy knows Iomedae can kill her with a wrap to the side of the head, here, but her straightforward flick shot can come in faster than an outside swing can reply. 

In this specific context it might be worth it to have them both get hit because Iomedae hits harder but in nearly all fights that you get into as a brand new paladin and a fifteen year old girl this is not true; you cannot trade; you have to do better than trading. Iomedae does not go for it, 

Eventually Lucy gets impatient with this and tries to feint the flick, pull her sword down in front of her shield, and jam it sideways into Iomedae's armpit. It's the sort of thing that always gets her tangled up, stopped as much by her own cuirass getting in the way of her elbow as by Iomedae's shield edge, and she has to raise her shield against the replying onslaught and back out - no, don't back out, she's the one who likes range - she'll sidestep around to the Iomedae's shield side so she can get a little respite without having to cross that damned donut again.

This is not actually a fight she can win with the virtues she normally beats newbies with - aggression, confidence, poise - nor a fight she is going to win by being stronger or faster, because she's not. Goddamnit she's going to have to actually use that 'technique' stuff that people keep trying to teach her, isn't she. 

Lucia has a pell, at home, with lines marked on it in sharpie and coloured tape - so she can say to herself that she wants to hit A, or B, or green, or pink, and ask her hands to do what her voice called. In a way it feels wrong for it to be hard, because she ought to be in control of herself, but when she swings a sword at full speed at a target two feet away sometimes it wants to hit B and not C. She's still working, slowly, on transferring that pinpoint accuracy to a live opponent; it disappears when she's under stress.

If she asks her arm for a strike, her arm will do the same slightly diagonal motion which Iomedae has been reliably catching on her shield. She has to go through the whole list of things that she noticed made it easier, the last time she was on the pell; letting her hand turn over earlier than she intuitively feels like it needs to, glancing past Iomedae's shoulder so her head will help her body rotate enough, getting the sword horizontal before she pushes off with her toes to pump it to the correct height, leaving her grip loose and relaxed until suddenly she tightens her fingers to give the blade a crack as it sails horizontally over the enemy shield at just the perfect angle to get past it, and her wrist keeps rotating to - 

"Good," her mouth says again, because Iomedae has hit her in the chest while she was busy doing all that thinking.

Lucy sucks in air greedily once her ribs unfreeze. Damn, that girl hits like she's trying to do a murder! 

Yes, that is the objective of swordfighting. You should try not to resort to it but when you do resort to it it is because you are sure that the other person needs to be dead or at least incapacitated. Practicing not killing people would be practicing entirely the wrong skill.

Technique was the right idea, though. If she's fast and accurate enough she can put her sword into those gaps in Iomedae's guard, which are there, Lucia sees them... they just get covered so quickly because she's fast - and are dangerous to go for, because she's got reach and she dishes out bruises. Lucia isn't going to outdo her on aggression. It has to be all precision. 

Reset. Again. 

They both want to hit each other. Their swords clatter as each attack blocks the other, both looking for the same line and finding only a sharp shock to the sword wrist. Now they're toe-to-toe and it gets messy and frantic. Lucia bounces her sword off Iomedae's shield and Iomedae batters Lucia's shield and their swords collide again and then again, both trying to be faster than the other. If she could hit Iomedae in the brief moment between Iomedae's attack and her recovery - but she can't, she can't be twice as fast as her.

She can be slower though! On her next shot she breaks the pattern - attacks, and instead of attacking again she waits just a second for Iomedae's block to move while Iomedae looks for her own attack, and now she can get through the guard with a lazy-looking slow shot that she tries to make snappy with a sudden twist of her shoulders and last-second clamp of her fingers on the handle. 

This works to get through the guard! Lucy isn't even bothered by hearing light again, because she did the thing she practised doing and it actually worked because practice works!

She can bounce the sword off Iomedae's helmet and turn her wrist over to crack her helmet again from the other angle (light again) before she has to focus on blocking, backing out, surviving.

Now Lucy's feeling enthusiastic about this. She dives in again, ducking her head into her shield to avoid Iomedae's welcome-into-my-reach hospitality, and goes for a wrap to the back of the head that is blocked by Iomedae shrugging her shield back over her shoulder. 

Lucy blocks and attacks and blocks and attacks and - they are back to the messy speed contest and she doubts the same trick will work twice in a row, but if she gets her guard set up a little differently she can block and punch Iomedae's sword down into her own shield, and that gives her a fraction of a moment of window to smack Iomedae in the shoulder.

"- hold-" Iomedae pauses to consider. She does not think any of those blows were individually incapacitating but she...thinks she would be down by now, from blood loss if nothing else. 

"Good!"

Lucy stopped the second a hold was called, and stepped back and let her sword tip fall to her shoe (not on the ground - she's been yelled at about getting dirt in people's visors - always balanced on her own toes). 

That was good? But it wasn't any harder than anything else she hit, and it was probably gentler than several of her previous attacks - she was really cheating for speed a little bit - 

"I heard a hold called?"

Gabriel is fairly immediately hovering anxiously next to Lucy and Iomedae. 

"What's wrong, Iomedae? - it's awesome that you called hold, anyone is allowed to do that any time they are concerned about safety, no matter how new you are. I just have to check so I know whether we can lay on again." 

"Sorry just needed think to know if that hit kill me. But it did, and I sayed so! Lucy won!"

This seems like an excellent opportunity to address calibration.

"That's great! You don't need to call a hold for that - you can always change your mind, too, if you need to, and say a hit was actually good even if you initially said light. Or make the call after a disengage, and that's fine too."

Gabriel read once, in a book of advice for marshals, that the polite way to point out bad calibration is often to ask a question - rather than saying 'you just called light to a hit that left a visible dent in your helm' one can always ask 'was that lovely dent in your helm there before?' 

"Do you want some help figuring out what should count as good? You know best as the person being hit, but from a spectator point of view the first two attacks looked better. I can understand it's very tricky because you have a good helmet on your head, and nothing on your shoulder!" 

"The first two was better. But if Lucy swording steel, not kill me, I think, not - not only that. But all three, I think that kill me if Lucy swording steel. ...I stab Martin five times. When a real fight, takes a lot."

Robert is so so glad that he already explained the situation there to Barry.

Maybe Iomedae should have an outlet for her aggressive impulses that involves less, uh, thinking about death. Like.....rock climbing?

"Sorry, you stabbed a guy five times?" 

This is not alarming because Gabriel is not reacting like it is terribly alarming but - no actually she's still kind of alarmed. Sometimes people terribly underestimate how bad things are, like when the boys in her high school were flicking bogeys into girls' hair and the teachers didn't act like this was at all something that proved civilization had fundamentally failed to create situations in which people did better things than torment each other because they found it funny, and in fact after the fifth time they acted like it was a minor inconvenience that they were tired of hearing about, and Lucy had maybe slightly had to punch one of those guys in the parking lot after school. Maybe Gabriel thinks that it's fine for minors to stab people so long as they say sorry afterwards, or that it's okay to stab a guy with a small knife so long as he was being really obnoxious - she feels like she heard worse moral takes than that in high school politics class.

She is not supposed to ever be quiet about what she believes is right. That's one of the rules of magic she's committed to. Lucy isn't sure how to do that in this situation so she goes with the first thing to come into her head. 

"I - it's very morally wrong to stab people in a real fight!" 

Iomedae looks deeply puzzled at her. "I don't know - morally. It ...better to stop him some other way, if you have one, because no priests. But better to stop him than not, even if you kill him."

Gabriel would absolutely not violate kids' privacy if he could help it but Iomedae just brought that up on her own and this situation is going to go south very very fast if he doesn't say anything.

"Luce, it was self defence. Let's not quiz her about a possibly traumatic experience, okay?" 

"Self defence five times?" - Sir Gabriel is giving her a look that means she can ask about this LATER. "Okay yes sorry."

Lucy kind of feels like stabbing somebody once can be self-defence but doing it five times is definitely murder! But she also feels like she is imminently about to be murdered by someone she does actually respect deeply if she doesn't shut her mouth, and she has said the minimum thing that her magic needed her to say, she has avoided being complicit in pretending that stabbing people five times is a NORMAL THING that you can just bring up in conversation and not expect people to CHECK - 

“That is what I saying, that in a real fight many people still able fight after hit. …I no mind Lucy asking. If a holy warrior should do some thing different I need to know that.”

...she can't help it, she really likes Iomedae. Lucy often has moral objections to things that other people thought were fine or excusable, and usually when she brings them up, those other people do mind - and mind quite a lot.

She had not been aware it was self defence, when Iomedae first mentioned it, and she supposes she really doesn't know the circumstances or the situation. But the pressure to object right now feels so much less urgent with a strong signal that Iomedae is the kind of person who might even theoretically be open to ever discussing it again.... which they will probably need to happen because Lucy isn't certain she can be friends with someone who killed someone unless it was for a really good reason, but she does want to be friends with Iomedae.

"Better to stop an attacker than not," she agrees quietly. This is a truth she can say without getting into the calibration questions. 

"So, yes, sometimes people can still fight after they've taken a lethal hit, but - they'd still be dying eventually, right? And for the purpose of tournaments, once you take a hit that is good, you lose immediately. We want to train to not be dead at all - it might be easiest if someone just hits you with a good and a light so you can see what the line is."