[@Liliya]

[i]During the few seconds before that critical moment, Zande continued doing something to his mouth and belt. Loading his blowpipe maybe? Well, wouldn't ya know it. It was as if Abby had seen the future. 
Zande turned around counter-clockwise as she gained on him, right axe brought aloft in anticipation for a swing, blowpipe in hand, and as expected fired a dart at her face which simply plinked off her halberd blade. His wild eyes were wide, he gasped in a startled breath. Right as she swung her halberd at his face with her momentum though, the train flew off the rails. 
How could she have expected the secondary, close-range projectile from the blowpipe immediately following the initial shot? Zande hadn't just loaded his blowpipe, he'd also have tucked a small leather pouch of spitting cobra venom into his mouth and bitten into it, in case she was able to handle the dart (not that he'd expected it to work on someone so well protected). Perhaps then she'd be, in that brief moment, no longer taking the blowpipe into consideration as a deadly weapon. One shot, that was how they worked. You couldn't hold a second dart in your mouth, it defied common sense to do so. 

That monstrous axe was the threat, that vicious edged hunk of metal that could cleave a goat nearly in two. Now that he'd lost the element of surprise, so evident in his eyes, she just had to make sure he didn't outright smack her axe from her hands or ignore defense and try to smash her fingers out of desperation. He was a physical terror, but it seemed the mental faculties were indeed lacking. The huge axe swayed, beginning its flight...

And she'd be less than four feet away when without warning, the presumably empty and useless blowpipe would gout a misty spray of genuinely blinding venom at her eyes. Zande's axes were intimidating precisely for this reason. To shift the victim's attention away from the real threat. Zande knew better than to risk trading blows with his heavy weapons in a tight spot, at least until he'd tilted the odds in his favor. She'd need a Spidey-sense to predict this one. Even if she squeezed her eyes shut, the venom would glaze her face and seep in to slowly kill her eyesight, assuming she lived longer than two seconds after closing her eyes in front of the headhunter. Trying to rub it away would only work it in further. Her hands were nowhere near her face, and though the possibility of her looking away in time existed, she'd be very hard pressed to do so with no warning and scarcely a fraction of a second to register the sudden shift in the danger spectrum from looming sparth axe to empty blow gun suddenly blowing its viscous load right at her face.

Were things to carry on like that and she still swung for his head, he'd bring his axe crashing down right to left with a shrill, maniacal scream, aiming to whack the head of her polearm away with jarring gusto, hard enough that it'd be tough to pull it back for a quick recovery, particularly not in the close quarters she was soon to enter into.

She could rely on her blind momentum to try and impact Zande's body, rely on feel and instinct to try and stick him, but he had armor too, wasn't bound by the linear force of momentum, had maintained solid footing, and had probably noticed that she hiding one of her arms. This killer had been pulling dirty tricks for a long time, and he was savvy to the lethality of hands unseen. It was true that he wasn't bred a gladiator or war dog. He was a predator by nature, from the untamed wilds where the chain of command could change with as little difficulty as a knife sliding smoothly between unsuspecting ribs, where enemy and prey were one and the same, and you didn't bury your kills, you ate them.[/i]