Log Horizon - Volume 9 - Chapter 5.4

4 
Meanwhile, about a hundred meters from Elias and Kanami’s fight, Leonardo and the blond girl, Rasfia, were confronting each other. 
The forest, which had looked like a green ribbon from up in the sky, seemed to have sought out the water of the mountain stream and grown thickly. In the desolate wasteland of Aorsoi, it was likely that only the moist soil of the river basins could maintain stands of trees large enough to call forests. 
The two who had been facing off in the branches of the woods were now racing through the trees, launching attack after attack at each other. 
Leonardo was an Assassin. 
Assassin, Swashbuckler, and Bard were known as Weapon Attack classes, and they were specially designed to inflict physical damage. They tended to fight in the vanguard, and not only did they have the physical strength necessary to deal massive damage, they acquired high-level agility in order to evade enemy attacks and claim locations that would give their attacks an advantage. 
On top of that, Leonardo was a level-90 Adventurer. His physical performance was high, and he’d never let a Normal monster defeat him. This was true even if the opponent was level 89, very nearly his equal. 
However, Leonardo hadn’t managed to land a solid blow. 
He was having this much trouble, even though he should have been the faster of the two, because of Rasfia’s bizarre martial arts. 
The girl’s movements weren’t human. 
She’d stick an overarm stroke straight into a tree trunk or hang upside down, using freakish actions to toy with Leonardo. 
They might not have been martial arts. 
Her approach to movement paid no attention to the principle of getting around on two legs. Her abrupt, creepy motions were just like those of some sort of insect. Using her sharp nails and toes, Rasfia scuttled up tree trunks, facing backward. 
“What pleasure. What joy.” She laughed with a bell-like voice. 
As she bent her joints in impossible directions and moved like an insect, the fact that she was a lovely girl with a doll-like beauty made her seem like something out of a nightmare to Leonardo. 
There was one other thing that cemented that grotesque impression for him. 
“Shut up!!” 
“Gee-hee!” 
Leonardo’s slash had severed Rasfia’s arm. 
“Aah! The steel. It bites me, it rends me. So this is pain, or perhaps an ache. More vermilion than sunset, redder than the equinox flower, more scarlet than the false strawberry—aah, aah!!” 
Immediately after that coquettish, singsong cry, Rasfia’s severed arm struck back at Leonardo. Its fingernails grew like steel daggers, and cloaked in cold air, they slashed through his leather armor. 
Tch!! Again? 
Twisting to avoid the subsequent serial attack, Leonardo put some distance between them. 
This happened again and again, and it was making Rasfia seem even more horrible. 
That severed arm… When he looked, it had reattached. 
The same was true for her legs and torso. The girl seemed to have a freakish sort of immortality. Possibly because she knew this, Rasfia brandished her four chilly, cloaked limbs, laughing elegantly as she did so. 
Normal-rank monsters were defined as monsters with combat abilities that made them appropriate one-on-one opponents for an Adventurer at their level. However, in adjusting that balance, Adventurer indicated somebody who was at that level, who was equipped with store-bought weapons and equipment appropriate to their level, and who had not yet reinforced their special skills with mastery points. 
Put that way, it meant “an Adventurer with minimum skills for their level.” 
Leonardo wasn’t a top-level ranker-class Adventurer, but he’d still racked up more than enough experience to count as a veteran. The bulk of his equipment had come from raids, and at the very least, he had production-class items that filled in any gaps. His special skills had been reinforced to their maximums with mastery points. 
The idea of Leonardo having trouble with a mere Normal-rank monster was ludicrous. Of course, he hadn’t expected to settle things instantly, but the fight really shouldn’t have dragged on for more than a few minutes. 
Leonardo’s and Rasfia’s levels were roughly equal. In addition, Rasfia’s rank was Normal. However, for that very reason, Leonardo—who was an Adventurer with a full set of equipment—should have slightly but decisively surpassed her in combat strength. 
Is that the trick—? 
That blinking, flickering status display. The name RASFIA was alternating with GNOLL. The blinking was irregular, and there was a mesmerizing rhythm to it. 
He didn’t know how it worked, but this Rasfia NPC seemed to be controlling that blinking at will. 
Leonardo had picked up on something through their repeated clashes: 
This woman was choosing which name took damage. 
Would those be “souls,” to borrow Coppélia’s word? Coppélia had called the phenomenon “Parallel One,” but from Rasfia’s behavior, it was clear that “one” was a gross understatement. Leonardo’s instincts told him that this woman had several dozen “souls,” at the very least. 
Rasfia was switching her “name” right before Leonardo’s katana hit her, letting a disposable name take the damage for her, then discarding it. 
…This is seriously not normal! 
Twice, three times. 
Rasfia thrust out her delicate hand with the sharpness of a raptor. True, there was something astonishing about that speed, and the execution was clean. However, her physical body was no different from that of a girl in her early teens. Leonardo evaded, using the difference in reach to his advantage. 

A split opened up in his cheek. 
Rasfia smiled, tilting her pretty face. 
The tips of her outstretched fingertips had blurred like an illusion, morphing into a hairy hand. That hand held a roughly made scimitar. 
The gnoll hand and the weapon it held flickered, just as they had when they appeared, then abruptly vanished. 
Taking advantage of Leonardo’s astonishment, Rasfia closed in. 
Her gothic dress flared like a rose blooming in empty space. A lace petticoat peeked out from the generously full skirt. From within it, a pair of jackal’s hind legs, spotted with gray, stretched out toward Leonardo. 
If Leonardo hadn’t avoided them at the last second, those toes would have gouged out his eyes. As he watched, they morphed into small pumps decorated with silk ribbons. 
“Whatever’s the matter? Have you given up? Have you shriveled up? Like a flower that never sees the sun, like a migrating bird that’s lost its home?” 
Rasfia’s mocking smile settled Leonardo’s resolve. 
He still didn’t completely understand, but he decided that this was no time to hesitate. 
If I stay on the defensive, things are just gonna keep getting worse. 
Close the distance. They were already so close that if either leaned in, they’d be able to touch the other. As if abhorring that distance, Leonardo thrust out his left hand. He wasn’t attacking. It was an activation trigger. 
With a flash, he unleashed Deadly Dance from that stance. It was a special Assassin attack skill. As a technique, it was a bit different: When used back-to-back, its power gradually rose, but if you messed up in the middle, its attack power would fall. 
Leonardo had activated it not from the technique’s icon in his mind but through gesture input. 
In the world as it currently was, there were two ways to activate combat skills during battle. As in the days of Elder Tales, you could activate skills by selecting an icon. The other method was voluntary activation, in which you mimicked a motion to activate it, using your own body as an input device. 
In an overwhelming majority of cases, icon activation was used. 
“Fight” and “attack successfully” were easy to say, but there was a huge variety in both monster builds and battlefield terrain. The Adventurers were ordinary earthlings with no martial arts or combat experience, and no matter how much stronger their physical abilities were, their skills were limited. 
As long as they selected an icon, their special attack skills would track the enemy they were facing and make their attack hit home using the most appropriate action. For the classes that fought in close combat, this was a core attack method. 
However, instead of doing this, he’d activated the skill voluntarily, using his own body. 
This was the secret of Kanami’s “strength,” which he’d noticed that day. 
Monks were called “the combo class,” and they had an incredible number of special skills that used one technique to execute multiple attacks. 
Aerial Rave was one of the showiest serial special attack skills Monks had. It was a five-stage technique: In addition to using back-to-back left and right punches to knock the enemy into the air, you used a knee kick to toss the airborne enemy higher, then performed a heel drop, segueing into a rear spin kick in one flowing motion. The damage from each individual attack was slightly lower than it would be ordinarily, but when you totaled it up, the five-attack combo inflicted massive damage on monsters. 
Then you had Triple Blow, which was a technique that unleashed three powerful punches—a right punch, a left straight, and a right hook—in a row. 
Since Leonardo wasn’t a Monk, it had taken him time to fully understand it, but those two special techniques had triggered his line of thinking. 
In short, Kanami had used the two final attacks in Triple Blow as the first two punches in Aerial Rave, fulfilling its activation conditions. 
While a special skill was activated, Adventurers couldn’t activate another one. In Elder Tales, that had been common sense. As a matter of fact, even now, the mental icon went dark while a special skill was activated, and you weren’t allowed to input anything. 
However, when activating a special skill with a physical body, there was no time when input was invalid. Even if it did exist, a person could perform back-to-back input using something that resembled wait-listing. 
Aerial Rave was a powerful combo attack, but its damage relied on the kicks in its latter half, the heel drop and the rear spin kick. The earlier punches were there just to get the enemy into the air, and as far as damage was concerned, they were practically nothing. However, when using icon input activation, the sequence flow was set, so starting or stopping it in the middle was impossible. 
Even if an attack was unnecessary, it couldn’t be left out. 
Kanami had destroyed this common sense. By substituting the powerful Triple Blow for the early, low-damage attacks meant to break down the enemy’s stance, she’d drastically increased the total performance of both special techniques. 
Of course, this was easier to say than to do. 
Special skills that were activated from the visible icon assisted the Adventurer’s actions by instantly sizing up their own stance and the terrain, the enemy’s body build, and the distance between them. 
Voluntarily activated special skills didn’t have that sort of assist function. To begin with, there was a considerable range of voluntary activations. For example, for a basic Deadly Dance, the Adventurer thrust their left hand out, charged up, then executed a rapid strike with the blade in their right hand. That was all there was to the technique, but there were seven different motions that could be used to activate it, and those were only the ones Leonardo had confirmed for himself. There were all sorts of angles and timings at which one could thrust out their left hand, as well as permissible charge time ranges. 
Unless Leonardo himself selected one of these diverse variations to match the conditions in front of him, the attack probably wouldn’t be effective in actual combat. Voluntarily activated attacks didn’t have auto-tracking, so without a lot of training, their hit rate was lower than icon-activated attacks. The difficulty was too high, and the system was so complex that nobody felt like practicing them if there was no advantage in doing so. 
However, there was an advantage. 
Leonardo swung the blade in his right hand. The slash became a drawn line that was absorbed into Rasfia. The icon in his mind went dark and began slowly recovering, like an hourglass. It took one second. If he used Deadly Dance again one second later, the power behind that second attack would increase by 7 percent. 
However, Leonardo didn’t waste that second. 
He added another attack, scooping upward with his left hand. The special skill was Quick Assault. Then, immediately after, Deadly Dance. Then Stealth Blade, leading into another Deadly Dance. Turning the simple pose of thrusting out his left hand into a method of attacking with the Ninja Twin Flames he held in both hands, Leonardo became a storm of blades. 
Assassins didn’t have the variety of combo attacks that Monks had. As a result, Leonardo couldn’t copy Kanami’s fighting style exactly. 
Realizing this, he’d racked his brains and put together this fighting method, Parallel Plot. It used “charge” and the gaps between motions to turn a series of special skills that would normally only be processed in sequence into a double-layered attack method. 
At this point, he could only use a combination built around Deadly Dance, but all of Leonardo’s nearly thirty skills had to have the flexibility of voluntary activation. By combining them or honing them to perfection, Leonardo would probably be able to deal damage that surpassed the Assassin maximum. 
Leonardo confronted his opponent with a fighting style that, while still far from perfect, was all his.