"Appearances often are deceiving."- Aesop
"Comparison is the thief of joy."- Theodore Roosevelt
At that, Harriet didn't bother reaching for her wand yet, opting for a physical test first. She launched herself at Yuna, still in her bear onesie, at full speed, closing the ten meters between them in under a second. Harriet's body had never really stopped improving since she'd started pushing it, well past anything humanly possible by now, so when she finally arrived and threw her punch with everything she had behind it... she hadn't expected it to simply stop dead against the white mitten of her friend's costume, without so much as a flicker of visible effort on Yuna's part.
That didn't discourage her, though. She pulled out every bit of martial technique she knew, trying to find some way through the defense, driving in strike after strike from every conceivable angle, low sweeping kicks aimed at knocking a leg out from under her, quick jabs testing for an opening at the ribs, a spinning elbow aimed at the temple, even a feint meant to draw a reaction before switching direction entirely. None of it mattered. Every single strike landed against those mittens and simply stopped there, and Yuna didn't shift her weight so much as an inch through any of it. When Harriet finally pulled back to catch her breath and reconsider her approach, Yuna caught her by the wrist and, with a single shoulder throw, sent her flying the full ten meters back to where she'd started. She hit the ground on her back, unable to land it properly on time.
"I'm not entirely sure what to make of getting thrown around by an adorable girl in a bear cosplay." Harriet said, pushing herself back up. That kind of impact clearly hadn't been enough to actually take her out of the fight, probably because Yuna was holding back.
"Part of me is embarrassed about this too, honestly, but the other part's realizing that as long as it's not me who ends up embarrassed, it'll just be everyone else instead." Yuna said, still standing exactly where she'd started.
At that, Harriet registered the full scale of the physical gap between them. She was completely outclassed in both reaction speed and raw strength. She was fairly confident she still had the better technique overall, but the real problem was that Yuna wasn't even using any technique at all, just answering blow for blow on pure instinct, and clearly didn't need to bother with technique in the first place. Against that kind of overwhelming power, technique alone simply wasn't enough.
So she drew her wand, and this time, she didn't hold back the way Yuna had told her not to from the start. She cast a Bombarda at full strength, powerful enough to blow out roughly a tenth of the training room, which measured a good two hundred square meters on its own, and the spell shot straight across the room toward the bear standing in the middle of it.
Harriet had expected her to dodge, or at least throw up some kind of magical shield. Instead, Yuna stayed perfectly still, made no effort to move at all, and let the spell hit her dead on, the entire area around her erupting outward from the blast.
"Yuna!" Harriet shouted, even though she was fairly sure Yuna's confidence hadn't come from nowhere, watching her not even flinch had still been enough to genuinely worry her for a second. The destruction was significant, debris scattered everywhere, though the room's self repairing wards had already started stitching the damage back together, visibly, in real time. After about fifteen seconds, though, a gust of wind cleared away the smoke, and Yuna reappeared, standing in exactly the same spot, having never moved at all, just within a slightly sunken patch of floor, not having bothered to protect the ground beneath her own feet.
"Did I scare you?" She'd let the suspense drag on a little longer than strictly necessary on purpose, teasing Harriet was simply in her nature. She kept going. "Don't worry, I told you that you could go all out. Trust me, this Sacred Gear spoiled me rotten." So yes, her defense was absurdly high too, apparently.
At that, Harriet didn't hold back, turning the whole exercise into target practice against an unmoving target: severing charms, a couple of blasting curses at different angles, a freezing hex meant to lock a limb in place if it ever landed. Nothing made her move, and nothing made her take it seriously either.
"All right, let's actually start then." Harriet hadn't exactly been idle up until now, every spell she'd just thrown had been drilled and sharpened through her grimoire, refined down to something close to precision instruments. And she understood now that if raw force wasn't enough, she needed to find an actual weakness instead.
So she cast a Disillusionment Charm on herself, her own refined version of it, one that also smothered her magical signature along with her visibility, closer to how an assassin might vanish into a crowd than a simple camouflage trick, and began circling slowly around Yuna, who still hadn't moved an inch.
Harriet moved without a sound, keeping to the outer edge of the crater her Bombarda had left behind, boots finding the least disturbed patches of floor by instinct alone. She circled wide, coming up along Yuna's left side, wand already rising for the next spell.
"You know, for someone invisible, you're being remarkably loud about your magic." Yuna said, not even bothering to turn her head, still facing the exact spot where Harriet had vanished a full ten seconds and thirty feet ago.
Harriet froze mid step. "I disillusioned myself. You shouldn't be able to see me at all."
"See you, no. It's an excellent charm, I'll admit, genuinely subtle too. Works on more or less the same principle as the old pink elephant trick, hide something obvious enough in plain sight and people's minds just slide right past it without ever questioning why. But even magic that subtle still leaves a signature behind." Yuna finally turned, and her eyes tracked directly onto Harriet's exact position, close enough that there was no mistaking it for a lucky guess. "Your magic's still sitting right there, glowing about as subtly as a lighthouse, to me anyway. Comes with the perception upgrade, I see mundane and magical signatures both, in as much detail as I want, whenever I want it."
"That's completely unfair." Harriet said, dropping the charm since there was clearly no point maintaining it anymore, the shimmer of displaced air resolving back into her familiar shape.
"Welcome to fighting someone with a bear onesie." Yuna said, entirely too pleased with herself.
Harriet exhaled, rolled her shoulders, and reset. If stealth wasn't going to work, she'd go back to testing the actual limits of whatever Yuna's costume could do. She raised her wand and sent a jet of water hurtling across the room, thick as a fire hose, aimed straight at Yuna's chest.
Yuna didn't dodge. But this time she raised one white mitten almost lazily, and the water froze the instant it touched the air around her palm, arriving as solid ice rather than liquid, a spear of it hanging inches from her face. She flicked her wrist, and the ice shattered into a hundred harmless pieces that clattered against the floor.
"Water's a bad choice against me, by the way." Yuna said, almost apologetically. "But then a lot of elements are a bad choice against me. From what I've been able to test so far, the costume's built in functions let me manipulate the elements. Oh, and I've also got Dimensional Storage and Extrasensory Perception, like you already saw. I can heal too, and I'm resistant to a lot of magic on top of all that."
"That's obscene!" Harriet tried again anyway, this time layering the water spell with a compression charm behind it, forcing the jet into a narrower, faster stream, hoping speed alone might get through before Yuna could react. It didn't. The water still froze mid flight, an inch further from Yuna's skin than the last one, and shattered the same way. She tried a third variation, splitting the stream into a dozen smaller needles instead of one solid jet, hoping to overwhelm whatever process Yuna was using to freeze it. All twelve froze in the exact same instant, then dropped to the floor as ice shards, without Yuna so much as narrowing her eyes.
"You're thinking too hard about the water part." Yuna said, tilting her head slightly, the little round ears on her hood tilting with it in a way that would have been adorable if the rest of the situation weren't so thoroughly humiliating. "The problem was never the shape. It was the element, like I told you."
It's like attacking an invincible element in a video game, Harriet thought, but she didn't give up, and set her actual plan into motion. Still moving, she used a wide sweep of stinging hexes instead, dozens of small, fast projectiles meant to test reflexes rather than raw power, less about doing damage and more about seeing if Yuna's stillness was a genuine confidence or simply a lack of urgency. The hexes arrived in a spray, and Yuna moved for the first time in the entire fight, not to block, but almost playfully, stepping sideways in one smooth motion that put her exactly one meter to the left of where she'd been a heartbeat earlier. Every single hex sailed past her, missing by inches, close enough that Harriet was fairly sure it had been calculated down to the centimeter rather than actual dodging.
At that, Harriet levitated every last piece of debris scattered across the room and sent them all flying at Yuna at once, who responded by shattering each one by hand, one after another, her reactions fast enough to make it look almost lazy, if nothing else, just an excuse to actually move her body a little.
"Cute." Yuna said. "You're getting faster with the follow ups too. That's good. Keep going."
It was, Harriet realized with a slowly rising kind of dread, less a fight and more an evaluation. She was being tested, not fought, and Yuna hadn't so much as raised her own hand to attack once, content to let her flail against a wall that simply refused to move unless it wanted to.
She understood well enough that Yuna was letting her see the actual gap between them, showing her exactly what baseline she still needed to reach, but that didn't mean she was ready to just roll over and accept it either. Sure, she could keep standing in the crater her own explosion had left behind, but that didn't mean she should. Harriet had finally reached the spot she'd actually been aiming for this whole time, the section of the wall where the room's repair runework sat exposed, and she poured her mana directly into it.
The effect was immediate, the repair rune accelerating dramatically, the section of floor and wall around Yuna's feet knitting itself back together at several times its normal speed. If Yuna didn't move now, she'd end up fused into the floor itself, not exactly dangerous, but enough of an inconvenience that even she would probably rather avoid it. And, exactly as expected, Yuna moved.
One second she was standing across the room, mittens loose at her sides, and the next she was directly in front of Harriet, close enough that Harriet could see her own startled reflection in her eyes. A paw closed gently, almost tenderly, around Harriet's stomach. But Harriet had already had just enough time to aim her wand exactly where she knew Yuna would end up, after all, however strong Yuna might be, she wasn't actually experienced in real combat.
"Kuma Punch." Yuna said cheerfully, and tapped Harriet once, lightly, in the center of her stomach with her mitten. But Harriet had also used that same window to finish charging her own spell, a pressure shot, air compressed down as tightly as she could manage, and she fired it off at point blank range.
She released it in a single, sharp motion.
For her part, the hit landed like being run over by a train, she stayed conscious, Yuna had clearly held back, but her own spell had landed too, not enough to actually hurt, just a shallow cut opening along Yuna's cheek, barely more than a scratch, welling up with a single bright bead of blood before it even had the chance to properly sting.
"Well, that was interesting." Yuna said, wiping at her cheek. "If I can pull that off, plenty of others can too, so... are you sure about all this, Harriet? Want to keep going? Or should we just go hide out in Hawaii instead and hope the world doesn't explode without us."
"How considerate." Harriet muttered, rubbing her sternum. "Though honestly, like you, I'd rather go to Hawaii but with a clear conscience than to hide from anything."
Yuna touched two fingers to the cut, almost thoughtfully, then looked at the faint red smear on her white mitten with something that wasn't quite surprise and wasn't quite pride either, somewhere comfortably in between the two.
"Now that," she said, "is exactly what I think too, can't be safe anywhere with people at my level after all."
"Anyway," Harriet said, still on the ground, a wry smile on her face.
"Anyway?" Yuna asked, tilting her head.
"You and your ridiculous costume just proved something to me." Harriet said.
"What?" Yuna asked.
Comparing the two is pointless. Granted, mine clearly holds extraordinary potential too, and I haven't even come close to uncovering everything it's capable of yet, though the same is probably true for hers as well. But still... Harriet thought.
"God's a troll for even thinking up a Sacred Gear like yours." Harriet said, sounding, for the first time in a while, genuinely defeated.
A/N: If you want 5 more chapters, check the synopsis for more info.