Aighrit matched Rags smile for grin. Her guard hand had indeed been his target, and her having used it to grab for his sword arm showed strategy on her part far beyond what would normally be expected of a beginner. She was learning, and matching him blow for blow, swipe for swipe, counter for counter. His next would show how well she could adjust to one of the fundamental aspects of arena fighting and combat in general, however. In the wild it was usually over once a human got its mitts on something, be it a rat, a snake, or even a large animal without the hands and leverage necessary to overcome the hinderence. Against a human opponent, however, having a hand gripping your opponent’s wrist meant little more than your opponent having a grip on your own wrist. Both resulted in having a point of contact that could be utilized by the other, the only difference being who was in the position to release. As her hand made contact with his left wrist and stopped the downward swing he had been intending on attempting Aighrit stepped forward and to his left, Rag’s right, with her arm either accompanying him or not at her discretion. Either way, her body was now in between her right arm and the blade held in it and his own body.

Had he tried to stand and wrestle for control over his sword hand she would have been in a great position to simply run him through with a thrust from her blade into his abdomen, but those who stand still usually die on the sand. She could either keep her grip and allow Aighrit to move with her arm or release and pivot to try and strike him across her if she still intended on landing the thrust he was expecting to follow her grab. If she had something more exotic in mind then he may well have walked into her trap, but the numbers were on his side so far as he could see it. He hadn’t waited around to see what her other hand would be doing, and had simply accepted that his arm and sword were now in her grasp, and he had accepted this as such because he knew how to take advantage of an opponent who was grasping you. With another step he could be well behind her, but he was also aware that in that time she could simply turn her arm, step into the grab and chicken wing his arm. Likely strategy for a beginner? No, but Aighrit didn’t have time to think that far ahead.

He had stopped considering Rags a beginner when she managed to get to her feet after their short stint at wrestling on the ground, and was for all intents and purposes fighting at his best so far as a practice bout was concerned. Because of the skill of his opponent he would treat her as an equal regardless of her never having taken the sacramenta, a notion important to the thinking time away from the sand and considerably less so in the fighting, doing time upon it. She could have yanked back on his arm while thrusting upwards or slashing high and downwards from her left to her right while turning at the hip and managed to hit him in the back or the back of the head, something he wouldn’t be able to stop her from doing without the second step which would place him in danger of giving her all the leverage over his awkwardly situated sword arm in her hand needed to break it in twain, so he attempted to change the paradigm as would be expected of any competent fighter.

He didn’t consciously think it, but his subconscious mind which the fighter or the hunter reverts to instinctively in the midst of a dangerous meeting with a second predator intent on your own destruction told him that as he was moving to the right and she in the same direction as him if she kept the grip on his arm. This he knew would put her into a position where, unless she released and dramatically changed her course or pulled away would put her into a tailspin should he manage to keep her momentum following his without taking a blade to the gut, and so he attempted the best he could to accomplish the feat despite the silliness of the technique with which he accomplished the task. Shooting his right arm around Rags back while continuing to move to the right while pivoting in the same direction and assuming that Rags wouldn’t release the grip, something he didn’t have time to consider the alternative to before jumping into action and which should she have released and simply slashed might well catch his right arm as he moved it out and into her potential strike range, and attempted to grab at her waist or flank.

He used his right hand mostly because it was available unlike the left, though it would take a quarter second or so longer to get around her than the left and closer arm would have, having to travel across his own body as well as her’s in order to find purchase on her opposite side. Should she slash or throw her body weight into him after he got to her side she would certainly succeed in hitting his right arm or knocking him to the ground conversely, but he didn’t have time to consider these options. He instead attempted to grab, and if successful he would pivot on his right hip once more, stepping outward with his right leg in some macabre version of a waltz. He wasn’t trying to be obnoxious, but that’s the closest to keeping his arm in a relatively unwieldy but safe position and not take a blow or risk her getting leverage on the arm. If she had kept the grab and continued moving to her right, the direction his arm and body were moving, and assuming he had successfully grabbed her he would pull back on her with at least the arm she was grabbing and the potentially successful grab on her left side into himself and, unlike in a sweet ballroom dance, or depending on your partner exactly like in a sweet ballroom dance, aim his forehead downward and forward towards Rag’s own.

A headbutt from an opponent pulling you and potentially your momentum in a centrifugal direction into their strike would almost certainly cause her to lose her grasp on his arm if not be knocked to the ground and, should he send her bouncing off of his head and towards the ground he certainly would not try and stop her from falling, but he had offered her a lot of potential chances at taking advantage of his strange and largely on the spot technique. A better trained fighter might have tried something less silly, but Rags was keeping Aighrit on his toes and at this point it was the best he could come up with on the spot.

Rags kept her grip as her opponent moved, for as long as she held him, they were bound close and neither had offensive use of a hand, and this removed Aighrit's advantages far more than it damaged hers. This was her reasoning. Her foe was slippery and skilled at wrapping her up, but anchored to her, it was his unarmed hand versus her armed. No matter what he did, she would let go only as a last resort. The moment she noticed her sword strike would miss, she pulled it back, and kept it as a guard as she observed his movement, too unsure of what he was doing to risk making a rash move and walking into a trap.

When she noticed that his complex manoeuvre was culminating in a headbutt, she grinned and brought his head to meet his. They both collided in midair, and the double headbutt hurt them both. It hurt Rags more than Aighrit due to the added momentum of her arm being pulled but Rags had a very hard head, covered by rough, sandy skin and rougher, sandier hair. Aighrit did not emerge unscathed. For a moment it looked like Rags, having let go and staggered back, was going to fall, but instead she crouched, lowering her centre of gravity, though she was still looking a little wobbly after that headbutt. She needed time, even a few seconds more, to get her head clear, so she stayed on the defensive and began circling Aighrit with her sword up in a defensive position.

An audible thud resounded across the courtyard. The viewers either sat in still silence, or produced barely noticeable giggles at the collision, and were they in a better contained area the sound would have echoed from the otherwise fairly silent walls. It didn’t, but it had brought Aighrit back into control over his sword arm. He’d nearly dropped the thing and would have if he hadn’t been the one to initiate the head butt. He’d had the knowledge of what was coming before it happened, and had made a conscious effort to ensure that the blade remained in his hand, but he had been put far more off-kilter than he was expecting he would have been. Her head was much harder than he had thought it would be, and he’d stumbled back several paces after the impact, already dazed and relatively off balance from the earlier blow to his nose. Another few blows like that and he’d be on the ground unconscious. His grasp over technique would be lessened, but it didn’t affect his confidence much. Fights always made their way to this point after a while. The point where neither fighter was at their best, but both were still capable of waving about blades and attempting to position well according to the opponent despite the pain.

It wasn’t so much that the pain turned off or went away, not really. More that it was consciously registered and accepted, relegated to a deeper part of the mind to make room for the thought and consideration which must still occur before one could rest and recover. It was easier to come back from this than from the total oblivion of being beaten half to death on the ground, a matter of days before feeling back to oneself over weeks or months. He was still smiling, but his eyes had lost their luster and descended into a state of dull, wet, glazed apathy, neither seemingly concerned nor particularly happy at the turn in the pair’s fortunes. Perhaps these were the eyes of a fighter resigned to the fact that either way this all went down there would be no easy way out and no happy endings. It was a different thing to know going into a fight that one’s likely outcome was to either beat an opponent senseless or in turn be beaten senseless by the very same person then it was to reach this point of reserved sensory awareness and awakened, lizard brained understanding that once more the being that was he had found itself on the meat trail.

He was a less capable fighter now then he had been at the beginning of the fight, the damage had racked up and taken its inevitable toll upon his mental faculties and his capacity to move and position himself with the precision of a fencer upon the sand. He would rather have danced and positioned and struck in twos and threes with all the softness of a mouse and the deft precision of a pit viper, but that part of the meeting had now passed. This was the second part, the raw, chaotic, demon violence the sand demands of a champion once form and deftness at blade begin to falter in the face of a skilled opponent and prolonged exposure to the pains and hurts of the protracted fight. Aighrit no longer attempted to lock eyes with his opponent, his own gaze trailing just left and down hovering at her right shoulder. Her blade was held in a defensive posture, and it was clear she was intending on using it to keep her distance from him, likely to give her the time to fully recover from the impact. He even thought he might have noticed a misstep, a lone instance of having judged the distance to the ground with a slight inaccuracy on her part.

There would be no form to his movements, no clear pattern or plan except to bring himself closer to Rags, and relatively quickly. He did not move in a straight line, but the jagged, wild stepping pattern of a drunk or one recently awoken from a deep slumber. At two separate times he actually moved backwards a half step during his advance, all the while his left hand holding his blade down and to his side. It was an oddly wild, looping thing to witness, and for all intents and purposes cast him as likely having taken a harder hit than any in attendance would have expected, but save for the occasional backstep he still seemed intent on moving toward Rags. Should she not charge him or move to retreat he would continue to advance in his injured fashion until getting to within a couple paces of her. If he managed to get to this point he would at long last lunge, not to her sword arm but to the outside of it, his own sword arm aiming upwards at his mid torso level and toward her shoulder before quickly, suddenly turning inwards and towards his left side, her right, with his opposite foot and hand hurtling toward her.

Should she have attempted to block the strike conventionally he would attempt to loop around the inside of her elbow with the outside of his own, assuming the blades of their swords would meet after she attempted to block the hit, weaving his wrist and the blade held by it past her right bicep and upwards toward the sky, while stepping forward with his own right foot and simultaneously pull forward on her right arm with his left arm, seeking to pull her forcibly into the punch he was aiming toward her own nose. Assuming she had allowed him to close and attempt to strike at and wrap up her right arm with his left she would still have her opposite hand to guard with, and her legs to attempt a kick as he advanced, but he was confident that if he managed to get her blade arm wrapped up in his own he would be able to meet her face before she could realize and attempt to do much but put her own guard arm into the way of his punch. It was certainly possible that she could kick him in the groin, but her lead foot would have difficulty getting past his own as he had attempted to step to the outside of her body, and it took longer to understand that he had attempted a grab and was moving forward with the opposite foot while punching and to respond to it with a rear leg kick to the groin on her end then it did to simply step forward while punching on his end. This was all assuming she allowed him to close with her, should she have instead charged him or simply evaded him his strategy naturally would have to be altered.

Rags did not know much about deception. Animals did not pretend to be hurt besides playing dead to avoid predators. So, when she say Aighrit was staggering about, Rags did not pay heed to past lessons about her opponent and traps, and went in for the kill. Not even in a frantic rush, but a steady, confident walk towards him. Too late for one trap did he instincts kick in as she brought her sword up to block his strike in the nick of time. She was confused. He had been hurt! Why were his movements so assured now? Unless this was another trap! Remembering traps as her arm was wrapped up and pulled forward, she ignored his sword arm entirely, and focused on his unarmed side. He'd done variations on a theme of this bait and switch several times in the battle so far and this time she was expecting it. As he punched at her face, her own free hand was ready to catch the blow and squeeze his fist as hard as she could. With her strength, it wouldn't take her long to get to the stage where things start making popping noises!