[Hayame’s hooves lash out, wild and strong, with enough strength to cave in a skill or split it open onto the streets below… if they collided with more than air. But her opponent is inhumanly quick, and even though she had known it, seen it happen… a part of her mind still doesn’t want to believe it, even in this impossible world of impossible sights. That a man who looks like a human can move like a demon from a story, faster than even a field jinba who has trained to be a warrior from the moment she was big enough to wrap her hand around a bow could follow.
He is a flash of darkness at her side as she starts to come down from her defensive rear, for a moment she expects a blow and is glad she had bothered with armor, but then his weight lands heavy on her withers, right where a rider would sit, and Hayame-
Something goes wrong. She hasn’t been forced to bear a human’s weight but one time, the annual occasion in which all yearlings in the stable turning fifteen would be saddled and ridden by the grooms that had hand-reared them in place of their Armless mothers. The lesson was clear. If they were good horses, that would be the only time they were straddled like beasts. If they were not… they soon enough would find their arms replaced and the smooth edge where they’d once began harnessed with leather tack and metal rings to attach reins, and they would become accustomed to the bit and the saddle.
A sick surge of nausea overtakes her, but she can’t act on it, not now.
Desperately, she twists on the way back down to all four legs, struggling to reach behind her with her right arm to grab and rip him from her back, but then his arm locks around her shoulder from behind and arrests the movements, so instead—-]
1/2
He is a flash of darkness at her side as she starts to come down from her defensive rear, for a moment she expects a blow and is glad she had bothered with armor, but then his weight lands heavy on her withers, right where a rider would sit, and Hayame-
Something goes wrong. She hasn’t been forced to bear a human’s weight but one time, the annual occasion in which all yearlings in the stable turning fifteen would be saddled and ridden by the grooms that had hand-reared them in place of their Armless mothers. The lesson was clear. If they were good horses, that would be the only time they were straddled like beasts. If they were not… they soon enough would find their arms replaced and the smooth edge where they’d once began harnessed with leather tack and metal rings to attach reins, and they would become accustomed to the bit and the saddle.
A sick surge of nausea overtakes her, but she can’t act on it, not now.
Desperately, she twists on the way back down to all four legs, struggling to reach behind her with her right arm to grab and rip him from her back, but then his arm locks around her shoulder from behind and arrests the movements, so instead—-]