Despite his absolute lack when it came to physical capability there was one thing that Gizmo did have in his favor, his awareness in a fight was razor sharp. Not that it helped all that much, seeing Jinny move too close in did nothing to help stop her as his body just wasn’t capable of keeping up with her, much less the speed of his thoughts.


Still it did allow him a partial victory when he was able to block the first strike, not that it was more than him getting a small length of chain between him and the gladius. He couldn’t do anything about the follow up strike however, and just grit his teeth at the painful smack.


His pain fed into his anger, which Gizmo had long ago learned how to use as fuel for his spite. Not directed at Jinny in particular, even if she was his current target. It sharpened his focus, and Jinny could almost see the gears in his head churning as Gizmo’s gaze flickered around for a moment not abandoning her, but calculating everything around her.


His attempt at retaliation was quick, impressively so considering his poor physical condition, a smooth pull and twist and Gizmo once again had the chain fully extended out and swinging down on Jinny from above.


But now that she was looking for it Jinny caught sight of the basis of Gizmo’s manipulations. There was about six inches of chain slack that Gizmo kept on hand and he was using that slack as a fulcrum to redirect the chain. Had he been in better shape it would have been easy to assign it as long hours of practice, the lack of that meant he had to be running the math in real time. He was simply too accurate for it to be anything else.

Still his overall attacks were simply too straight forward or too slow to be of much real danger to Jinny, Gizmo might have been skilled, but he wasn’t that skilled. Soo his attacks remained easy to dodge.

There is however always one thing that can bridge a skill gap. Sheer dumb luck.

With one of his strikes he miscalculated, put too much force into it, it went wider then he meant for it too causing the chain to run into the ground. Something that he had been trying to avoid as that normally would have killed any momentum the chain had.

It didn’t this time though, it wasn’t something Gizmo was expecting, so he wasn’t entirely sure what caused it, but instead of simply striking the ground the handle skipped off it. Reacting nearly blindly Gizmo was able to pull off one more redirection of his weapon. Whipping the length of the chain into Jinny’s ankles, which hurt, and pulling once the chain wrapped around her leg causing her to stumble at least.

Gizmo was quick to let out a triumphant “Ha!” at his first successful hit. Unknowing that he drew Slades attention back to the fight, and him in particular because of it.