After keeping a careful eye on her opponent, and keeping herself from being hit, Jinny slowly worked out the method behind the control. It was genuinely impressive. No one else would have been able to make it work. Maybe not even her. She could do the math, sure, but not that fast. Not enough to put it into real play.

There were so many variations to consider to keep up with that constantly changed the equation. Like luck. Idiotic beginner’s luck. Despite her dodging, she was hit. Not once, but twice.

Jinny blinked.

The smack on the ankle was fairly painful, and she’d have a bruise to match. The length of chain yanked her leg the wrong way, and distantly, she knew she’d pulled a muscle in the wrong direction. Those were all part of the battle. 

But that laugh. Something about that irritating laugh, heard for the second time in as many days, burrowed under her skin in a way she didn’t understand. He hadn’t done anything to earn his triumph, and he knew it, and he was still acting like that?

Somewhere in Jinny’s subconscious, a tiny seed of something dark that had been buried for years, chained up by a regiment of training and a man that the child wouldn’t even dare to challenge, rose to the surface just behind her eyes. Her stance shifted. Shoulders square, jaw set, eyes firmly focused on the target. Slade would recognize it immediately.

After all, who wouldn’t know their own form in the mirror?

“Oh. So you [i]are[/i] a fighter. Good.” Jinny smiled. It was not an expression that belonged on the face of a child. “That means I can stop [b]playing[/b].”

She darted into an attack, faster than she had before. Gizmo might have been able to calculate her incoming trajectory. But without the physical strength to overcome Jinny’s speed, no amount of math would make the equation work. 

The first strike was right to Gizmo’s jaw, the pommel of the blade hammering his teeth. That was smoothly followed with the blade itself, slicing his cheek on that side. Tossing the sword from her main right hand to the left, she scooped up the slack of the chain at Gizmo’s feet and tossed it up and over her opponent. It landed behind him.

Without giving him a moment to gather his thoughts, she smacked one of his hands with the pommel, as hard as she could. As he dropped the chain on reflex, she put the sword back in her right hand and did the exact same thing to his other hand.

He was disarmed, and the whole thing had taken about thirty seconds, if that. The fight could be declared here if he decided to give up. But somewhere underneath the haze of anger in her head, she knew that she couldn’t just let Gizmo walk away. She had to make sure he wouldn’t think about stepping to her anytime soon. 

The next swing of the gladius blurred forward, right at his midsection. But instead of using the sharp end of the blade, she used the wider flat end. The raw power behind the blow sent her opponent stumbling back. The chain on the ground was suddenly a tripping hazard. He stumbled and was suddenly flat on his back. Jinny was about 5 seconds behind, with no light in her eyes but the shine from a very sharp blade. One that was in line to go straight for his throat.