"Sounds hot."

Sendhei snorts but nods. "Maybe. I don't think I've ever seen it but the basic ideas should still work..."

"My fighting style is half dancing already. - would you like to see me spar with Taharqi?"

He has no ulterior motive in this. None whatsoever.

"Yes."

"Let me show everyone around here first and then we can go."

"How are you even up for that," wonders Raziya. "I'm exhausted."

"Maybe I don't mind losing," he shrugs, winking at Tintin.

"I have only-barely-not-superhuman endurance! Especially for walking - humans are meant to walk, it's how we hunted back before anyone had figured out weapons, we would just walk after our prey until they collapsed dead from exhaustion."

"I still did that a lot, back before I lived somewhere where the prey actually fights back."

"I love this planet. My bizarre paleoanthropological facts are current events."

Taharqi laughs but motions for everyone to follow him.

Tintin is happy to follow!

This house is definitely not meant to hold this many people, but it'll do in a pinch; it has enough open space.

The ground floor is pretty much only that one room, plus a fenced and roofed area outside in the back where Taharqi keeps a few workbenches. He also shows them his forge on the other side of the fence and the compost heap they have farther away, far enough for the smell to not get to them. "Mostly for alchemical compounds and fertiliser," he explains.

Up one flight of stairs there's a door that leads to a balcony they could see from the outside. There is a large isolated fire with some pots and pans, and in the corner there is a drying rack with strips of meat. Back inside and up another flight of stairs is Taharqi's bedroom, torch-lit and fairly cosy, with a weapons rack on display, and through another door is a back room with an alchemist's bench and a tall shelf with scrolls and even a couple of bound books.

"You know alchemy?" wonders Horan.

"I dabble. Not very much. But it's good to have a few potions and poisons for arrows and such."

"Alchemy! It's possible I can help with that. Unless it's, you know, mostly magic, rather than being mostly chemistry. Hmm."

"It's at least some magic," shrugs Taharqi. "Or so I think.

"Anywho, this now concludes the tour." He bows to his audience, and Sendhei rolls his eyes fondly.

Tintin applauds.

"Now, then. Shall we fight?"

"Yes. Outside?"

"Naturally." He leads the way, again, and Sendhei follows excitedly. Horan does, too, and Raziya doesn't want to be left alone inside the house so she GUESSES she can go.

And, when they're outside and they've established the ground rules (no weapons, no sorcery or tech, no groin shots) -

Tintin spars in the asari style. Elanorela is a martial art that has been honed over thousands of years. Evasion is a dance, but strikes are efficient and viper-quick. He's never not in motion. Really this style is supposed to be augmented with biotics and a sword, but there are provisions and affordances for any circumstance, such as "your amp has burned out" or, in the asari case, "you risk a massive brain hemorrhage if you use your biotics again before seeing a doctor". Under any circumstance, a practitioner of Elanorela must be a deadly weapon. Tintin has taken this lesson to heart.

Taharqi has never seen anything like that in his life. It's beautiful, and yes he does see what Tintin means when he says it's like a dance.

His own fighting style is not too dissimilar, in the sense that he also favours quickness and agility. His people are not used to fighting wearing much armour, and so the way to survive an attack is to not be hit by it. He specialises in dodge rolls and feints, and there is something to be said for the fact that he is used to being agile while carrying heavy weapons made of metal; he can go faster than most people, and the focus on subduing his opponent rather than killing him makes him try to go for an attrition strategy of sorts, trying to dodge and simultaneously land the occasional hit to wear his opponent out.

It's not really enough. Tintin has both a genetically enhanced metabolism (over Taharqi's tiredness after the journey) and, as has been explained, a fighting style that has seen thousands of years of improvement. He feels like if he managed to get Tintin in a full grapple that might do it, but what he gets instead is very thoroughly defeated.

Tintin ends up kneeling on Taharqi's chest with his hands demonstratively encircling Taharqi's throat.

"Yield?" he asks quietly.

"I do," he says, grinning, and his audience starts clapping.