"So this was worse than useless."

"Would it make you happier if I did sleep longer?"

"Do whatever you want."

"Well, I suppose I could sleep some more; we'll need to be around at least until the morning to thank our hosts for their hospitality anyway."

"Fine. Good night."

"Good night, Annika."

That smile that she hates again. Fuck this guy. She's out.

Arik is grinning like an idiot.

Oh another smile that she hates. They're multiplying now. "What."

"You're both very cute. Sorry, that house isn't very soundproof."

She is a monk of Odin, she is not cute. "Whatever you say." ...but being resurrected means she's not at all sleepy or tired so she's going to need to find something to do with herself until morning.

"Do you want to spar?"

...that might be a useful way to spend the time, actually. "What conditions?"

"...I should clarify that I have never sparred with anyone other than my deceased foster mother. Who wanted to kill me. Probably you should be the one to propose conditions."

She nods. "To yield, immobilisation, or unconsciousness, then. Property damage or lethality forfeits, indifferent to blood or broken bones, nothing that costs over fifteen percent of your mana at once." That last part completely rules out the attack she did to kill the spirit, which consumes all of it.

"Oh! Those are very sensible rules. I agree."

Arik shifts his stance. His eyes are strangely unfocused. His skin is still bare, but the light glints off something an inch above it. He's holding his sword, which is to say there is the intimation of a sharp edge somewhere in his vicinity. "On three?"

"Yes." She's summoning her spirit spheres already.

"One. Two. Three."

And he lunges.

Annika's fight style is being both an unstoppable force and an immovable object. When she's expecting an attack, even one that is in theory meant to cut, she can often tank it. So she does not move an inch and instead prepares to intercept his blade with her bare hands (not that she's telegraphing it, of course).

She may have trouble with that, actually. See, the thing about blocking something is that it has to be a thing, and generally, it should be a thing that exists. His sword isn't and doesn't. Her hands close on air, and her shoulder gets a fun new piercing, and Arik dances away.

Annika Snaps out of the way once she notices he's actually managed to cut her but otherwise does not flinch at the pain. Flinching at the pain would not lead to victory, and she is the master of her own body.

...what the fuck just happened.

(Arik might observe that she is passively regenerating, slowly, just by standing there.)

She doesn't know how he did that. She vaguely remembers him saying something about his sword not being real? Cutting flesh but not armour? She's not wearing armour, and she relies rather a lot on her own natural resilience. If that's not going to work, she is going to need something else.

She'll change tacks. And for the first move of her new tack, she Snaps right up and close to him with one palm forward pressing directly against his chest with overwhelming force.

He goes flying and lands in a plume of sand and dust!

Wow that's a lot of sand isn't it. Kind of hard to see.

Well, she didn't use her eyes to find that spirit, did she, and she is nothing if not a fast learner. Sounds, smells, the feeling of the movement of air against her skin (she is not any good with that one, but the way you get good is by practising it so she's doing that), and the movements of the spiritual currents around her (also not amazingly good at that, with targets that aren't themselves spirits, but same), those are all available to her as sources of information about her quarry.

And she is fully immersed in her body. She's not moving, she's barely breathing, but she's holding herself lightly, ready to move at the softest touch. Brute resistance won't work, but she can still dodge.

...some of those sensory modalities are being more cooperative than others. Her ears aren't picking up any of the sand-crunching footsteps, and the air is moving exactly as if there were no one else in this sand cloud except her. But there is a spiritual presence. In fact, it's quite bright, if flickery - a spirit overflowing, imperfectly contained by flesh and skin. She can even sense his sword separately from him!

It's coming for the back of her leg.

She can move it in the same direction and at the same speed as it's coming, then, just as it touches her, so that it looks like it's going to connect until the very last moment, and twist her whole body just so, rotating around her other heel as a pivot point to try to land a punch on Arik from above, and four more immediately after if that one connects.