It was not a very long fight; the timer is still going. The instructor comes over, ostensibly to praise Iomedae and suggest that if she's at class on Thursday they'll be drilling some of the moves for fighting on the ground; if they pick it up quickly, that's his bar for letting them use it during freeform sparring. 

(He does also want to check that Alfirin is okay, but she's back on her feet by the time he makes it over, and he doesn't ask or show any sign that he thinks she might not be. She won't appreciate it. She won't appreciate a suggestion that she could sit out the next round, either. There's really only enough time in class for two more fights, anyway, and he'll pair her with someone that will be a bit more of a fair fight.)

He does suggest they take the remaining minute before the timer goes to get water.

(Marian has been knocked over after her failure to get out of the way - though she did also manage to tangle up her partner's feet enough to drag him down with her - and is RESENTING that her current partner hasn't learned grappling moves and thus the fight is over. If they kept going, she thinks she would have at least a one in three chance of eventually winning via sheer stubbornness.) 

Iomedae's next partner is the tall skinny older woman, who turns out not to be an easy opponent at all; she looks like she should be easy to knock over, Iomedae probably has seventy pounds on her, but she's fast and has absurdly good balance and a much greater reach. She doesn't hit incredibly hard and certainly doesn't fight as aggressively as Marian; if allowed the opportunity, she'll spend more of it hanging back out of Iomedae's range and saving her energy for a good opening before exploding into unexpected lightning-fast motion – and she seems to have an excellent read on Iomedae's body language and anticipate her attacks almost before Iomedae moves. (Iomedae has not exactly been taught how to avoid telegraphing her strikes, especially for kicking.) 

Alfirin is paired with another relative newbie that she hasn't been partnered with yet, a short, mildly overweight, very earnest college-age young man, who is at this point extremely out of breath and dripping sweat, and settles warily into a fighting stance but does not seem incredibly inclined to be the first to attack. 

Marian is paired with Other Tiny Asian Girl, which is always a surprisingly close match given the size difference. Fortunately, for once both of them are experienced enough with grappling to keep fighting even on the ground, and getting her on the ground where she can't kick is probably the only way Marian can win, so she's going to go for that pretty hard. If she can catch her. Her partner is not making that easy and is somehow managing to land a number of kicks and not even give Marian an opening to hit back. 

Iomedae wants to learn how to be lightning fast and anticipate peoples' movements! She's - undecided if she'll be at class on Thursday. This is the best thing that has happened since she became a slave, but she is a slave and her income depends entirely on factors she has barely thought about and will need to consider in more detail when not repeatedly being punched. 

If this guy's not going to be aggressive then she can't really set her goal as being "a moment with her hands free." She'll...feint? That's a thing people do in fights - start moving forward like she's going to attack and then stop right away -

He's been waiting for her to try something (while taking every second he can to try to catch his breath) and will try to step to the side so she misses him and at the same time kick at her while she's presumably-distracted with what her hands are doing. It's clearly a motion he's practiced but he's tired enough to be executing it clumsily, and he's sort of already committed to the kick - and thus off-balance - by the time he realizes it's a feint.

He's still going to land a hit unless Alfirin actually gets out of his way, though. 

She can hop back out of the way of the kick, it's basically the same motion as the feint but a little more. And then forward again a fraction of a moment later because it looks like her feint accomplished something and she should probably do something about that? Her opponent is off-balance physically and mentally and maybe hitting him as hard as she can will do something?

He attempts to block her, but he's in fact off-balance and unprepared for it, and doesn't react quickly enough. She can land a hit! On the torso padding, so it doesn't cause much actual damage - or knock him over, he weighs twice as much as her - but he does not have Iomedae's pain tolerance and it definitely startles him. He stumbles, but manages to hop back with one foot to keep his balance.  

Also she's briefly open for him to hit her back, but she's pretty close - actually too close for him to kick her or get a lot of momentum on a punch. He tries to knee her in the gut instead. 

She sees it coming fast enough to get her arms in the way which - still ow - and then kick at the leg that's got most of his weight.

Yeah he's not looking down and does not see her kick coming, and he's already too off-balance to recover from that. He does manage to try to fling his other foot out and trip her too, but he's not nearly as fast as Iomedae, especially not right at this particular moment. 

She scampers back once he starts to fall, because she's already had one much bigger person fall on her today and she doesn't want to do it again.

...did she just...win?

Technically if she just keeps standing there he could try to get up before she could do anything about it, but, uh. For one thing, ow he just landed hard on his butt and had the breath knocked out of him for like the third time in ten minutes, and two, that was, like, twenty-five seconds of fighting, which means an entire ninety seconds of RESTING before the last bout. 

He flings up both hands. "Fight over?" he gasps. And then, once he's hauled himself into a sitting position, smiles shyly. "...Nice work." If he's embarrassed about losing to a tiny teenage girl on her first class, well, he's sufficiently red in the face already that it's not like anyone could tell if he was blushing.

"Thank you."

...he almost certainly let her win, didn't he.

(He doesn't think so! He thinks he could probably beat her if they were both rested instead of both exhausted, the advantage of being small is that being exhausted doesn't slow her down as much, but - well, half the reason they do sparring at the end of an intense class, and in back-to-back sessions like this, is because fighting while exhausted is when it most counts. He's not going to tell her that she won fairly, though, he's embarrassed enough already. He drags himself to his feet and looks sheepish and goes to get water.) 

Alfirin can have an entire ninety seconds to rest before the final sparring match of the class! 

Marian is having to do a lot of chasing her partner in order to get close enough to attempt to get them both on the ground. She's pretty sure that either they'll both still be on their feet after two minutes, or they'll be wrestling on the ground for most of whatever time is left, because her partner is also competitive. 

If she were a completely different person, it would perhaps occur to her that losing a fight in less than two minutes is also a way to get literally any rest. This has not even slightly occurred to her. Why would you do that. 

...She manages to corner her partner a minute and ten seconds in, and isn't actually fast enough to grab her leg and flip her while herself staying on her feet, but can strategically lunge at the right moment for them to both lose their balance and end up on the floor. Marian is not actually starting out on top, which isn't ideal, but all she has to do is manage not to get both arms pinned at the same time - and her legs are free for kneeing - 

Fortunately enough of the other fights are over that she doesn't need to be incredibly cautious of who's near her and too distracted to get out of the way, as they both roll around on the floor in a tangle of limbs.

Ow. Okay wow that genuinely hurt, her partner managed to get her in the exact same spot Iomedae did earlier. That's okay, Marian does not technically need to breathe very much if it's only another thirty seconds. 

She eventually manages to pin both of her partners's arms and extract a "fight over!" with, like, ten seconds left on the timer. They both flop on the mat, grinning at each other. 

Iomedae's partner is getting bolder and trying harder to trip her, though still trying pretty hard not to get close enough to give Iomedae any real openings. She hasn't landed a huge number of hits - and the ones she did weren't even hard enough to hurt - but Iomedae has mostly not been able to touch her at all. She doesn't look especially tired or out of breath, either. 

Iomedae's not tired but if she needs improved technique to hit the woman then the same thing, done repeatedly, isn't going to help. If this were a real emergency she would smite the woman but that is of course wildly inappropriate conduct during sparring (even though it would only work if the woman is Evil, you can't use more-than-approved force on people in a sparring match just because they're Evil) If this were a real emergency and she was out of smites she'd - probably retreat, honestly, the appropriate thing to do when you're unarmed and your unarmed attacking isn't working is to come back with a weapon. 

Instead she'll just try to rush the woman and drag them both to the mat; they're not allowed to keep fighting there but Iomedae's bigger and she thinks it'd be more of an advantage on the ground.

Iomedae continues to super telegraph all of her movements and her partner is faster, and mindful of being cornered. 

...That being said, there is totally an obstacle that isn't usually there down one of the paths she could dodge away if Iomedae kept rushing at her, in the form of Marian and her partner - who are apparently allowed to keep fighting on the ground - rolling around each trying to get enough leverage to pin down the other. Iomedae has a better line of sight to that side of the room from her current angle and it's not obvious her partner has seen it yet; fifteen seconds ago they were still far enough from the wall that she could have run around. 

Iomedae's situational awareness is notably better than her punching but instead of leveraging this to her advantage she will go in the other direction so they don't trip over other people, she's not sure if that's allowed.

In that case she's not going to be able to get close enough to knock her partner over in the remaining thirty seconds on the timer, though she can manage to almost-corner her enough to at least get a kick in that lands solidly - not enough to be incapacitating given the padding, but it might well have caused enough injury to end the fight if they weren't all bundled up in torso protectors, and definitely earns her a grunt of pain. 

The timer goes. Her partner looks exhilarated.  

That was not long enough for Marian to catch her breath, especially not given that her diaphragm is still not in perfectly working order and also she and Aisha were kind of just lying on the floor giggling. (Grappling is really fun and also somehow manages to be even more exhausting than running around dodging and kicking.) 

She hauls herself to her feet. 

Iomedae mostly isn't analyzing what she learned. She finds that if she does too much of that her brain just gets in the way of her body actually learning. She grins and swivels around to see if there's anyone else to fight.

Final round! Pretty much everyone except the tall older lady - who the instructor partners with Alfirin for the final round - is looking out of breath and worse for wear at this point. Marian is paired with the overweight young guy who recently lost to Alfirin but has, relatedly, had nearly an entire two minutes of rest by the time they're lined up again. Iomedae can fight Aisha, and have mildly better odds because, despite being in very good shape, after nearly a minute of fighting on the ground Aisha is more out of breath than she is. 

Tall older lady will dodge in and out and kick Alfirin from well outside the range at which Alfirin can do anything back, though the one upside is that her strikes don't actually hurt very much. 

Aisha...is going to wait and see what Iomedae does first, actually, how about that. She's so out of breath and going abruptly from horizontal to vertical has left her a bit lightheaded. 

Alfirin can block some kicks and take some kicks and... not actually successfully do much else in this fight. She can try (and fail) to hit or catch the kicking leg, she can try (and fail) to get in close enough to land a hit, she can try (and fail) to stay out of reach. At least it doesn't hurt much.