Rui adopted a new stance. He brought his arms up, but positioned them lower than before, with their fists directed at Milliana. The physical difference between this stance and his previous one was subtle, but made all the difference in the world. His new stance was geared towards offense, whereas his old stance was partially defensive.
He dashed towards Milliana with Parallel Walk and Balance Direction, crossing the gap between them as quickly as possible.
BOOM
He launched a flying knee kick amped with Vital Pressure straight into her guard, it was an extremely powerful blow that used the momentum generated by the Apprentice-level maneuvering techniques to increase the impact.
Milliana managed to mitigate the damage with a few defensive Apprentice level techniques, but only partially, she had retreated reeling from the blow. In truth she didn't expect Rui to return with such a violently aggressive offensive strategy. She was sure he already realized that he would simply burn his energy with such highly energy-consuming tactics.
Rui launched more and more powerful blows, putting his body weight behind each of them uncaring for his defense. If Milliana was a defensive or evasive specialist, she would have been able to deal with the attacks while maintaining her ground. But she was an all-rounder stamina-specialist. Her focus on defense wasn't as strong as it would have needed to be to not be forced for her to open up distance between them.
She was also very much capable of an offensive approach too however.
She launched several jabs at Rui, but Rui blocked them briefly before continuing his offense unperturbed to her great surprise.
Rui on other hand was inwardly ecstatic.
('Minimalistic energy consumption reduces both your offensive and defensive options, you cannot launch bombastic offensive attacks like Fae because they are quite energy-consumptive.') he figured. ('I doubt you can manage such attacks in the first place.')
He was partially right. The lesser number of offensive options made her attacks easier to predict and thus easier to defend against by timing his defense well, but the process was much more taxing and stressful than he had imagined.
Furthermore, his muscles were starting to sore while Milliana appeared to be pristine condition asides from some bruises that Rui had given her. This was surely the result of stamina-supplementary Apprentice-level techniques.
('She can keep this up for a long time while I can't, I need to win quickly.')
He needed to execute his strategy immediately. He kept blasting her, while she mitigated the damage with minimal motions, however, while doing so she began reaching the edge of the ring.
('Is this his plan? A ring-out?') Milliana pondered, disappointed. ('If so, he underestimated me.') She adopted a tougher and stiffer stance, determined not back down more. She was not new to this strategy; it was one of the many tactics the other Apprentice students had attempted to defeat her.
One foot away from the ring, and Rui changed his stance abruptly, he opened his fists into open palms placing them beside him at chest height while crouching.
('A wrestling stance.') Milliana mused.
His intentions were transparent to her. He intended to shoot; a lunging action in wrestling aimed to performing a takedown, and push her out of the ring.
This was also not a strategy she had not experienced. But a simple strategy such as this had an equally simple counter-strategy.
She would merely need to step forward and shift all her weight to the pivotal front leg, and using the back leg as a force driver was the way to deal with shoots, then she would turn the battle into full-contact ground-grappling by shifting both of them off-balance. This was the least stamina-consumptive way of safely mitigating the risk of a ring out. It was hard to push someone out of boundaries when both of your bodies were on the ground in a taut locked stalemate, it would be possible for a grappling specialist, of course, but she knew Rui was not one. Furthermore, she was certain she had more experience in wrestling than he did.
Wrestling was inherently a battle of perseverance; it was a very stamina-intensive battle, where stamina was just as important as technique.
('Challenging a stamina-oriented specialist in a form of bat where stamina is king, you are more foolish than I expected, Rui Quarrier.') She earnestly evaluated, as Rui dashed at her, executing the shoot just like she had predicted.
p
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