Disarmed

Fate immediately dove to the side, the sword of the woman in leather appearing where his throat had been a second earlier as he swept his legs under hers.

She jumped over them with a light hop, sending a telekinetic wave out as she did so to prevent him from taking advantage.

At the same time, the woman in metal swung her sword toward Fate's fallen form, the blade extending to over twenty feet long to close the remaining distance and yet not slowing in the slightest.

Fate cursed and entered the ground with Solid Surfing, the dirt above his head shaking from the impact. With a thought, he flew out in front of the metal-armored woman and aimed a punch at her unarmored face.

She released her grip on her extended greatsword and blocked with her unarmored hand, trying to catch the fist. Fate's eyes flashed as he activated the Concept his other self created, Zero Punch.

His fist went through her hand and connected with her nose, her head rocking back. She didn't move back a single step, however, and it felt like punching metal. Fate would've pressed the attack, but he felt his instincts screaming at him.

With a twist, he slapped the blade of the leather-armored woman away with his arm, limb colliding with the flat of the blade and sending it… not as far as he'd hoped.

The sword sheared the air inches from his side, the lightning bubbling off of it jumping into his skin as the weapon passed by.

Immediately, his right leg and arm started twitching, a quick use of his unnamed Concept draining the Divine Energy powering the attack to manageable levels within a second.

Normally it wouldn't have been so fast, but hardly any Divine Energy had entered his body. However, like Fate, these two women were experienced fighters, and didn't pass up the small opening that second created.

The greatsword shrunk to normal size in an instant, the two women slicing at Fate in unison, one swinging upwards and one downwards.

Fate twisted to the side to avoid the Metal woman's blade, using his Divine Reach to slap the Lightning user's sword away once again. The Metal Embodiment missed, but the Lightning woman was too fast.

Moving so fast he could hardly see her, she changed the direction of her sword on a dime and brought her shield around, bashing him in the face and causing him to stumble to the side.

With a grimace, he wiped away the blood gushing out of his nose. Fate had tried to use Reflexive Zero just then, but since the Concept was still new to him, he missed the timing by a hair's breadth. He had also forgotten a key detail, important when fighting Personifications.

While Avatars were the equivalent of peak human fitness, Personifications were a step above that at the minimum. They could always hit harder and endure blows better than an Avatar with a non-offensive Manifest Power like Fate.

They also gained a physical buff to their bodies based on their Manifestation. The Metal woman had steel-like skin, and the Lightning woman was fast even without her Manifest Power active.

And since he had no weapons, he was in an even worse situation.

"We can still talk about this, ladies," Fate suggested after blowing as much blood out of his nose as he could.

The women declined to respond, dashing forward.

More conscious of how royally outclassed he was, he did the only thing he could: find a weapon. He dodged and ducked and rolled and jumped, focusing solely on defense and conserving as much energy as possible.

As he did so, he slowly worked himself back toward the hog, zigzagging around the arena to make it less noticeable. He needed a weapon, or else this fight would be lost. Luckily for him, the ladies were too focused on killing him to notice his plan.

After suffering several stabs and cuts, he rolled away and leaped up. He distanced himself from the women and climbed atop the dead warthog as the Lightning woman bolted after him in a flash.

A flaw in the woman's Manifest Power he had noticed during her earlier jump was that it only worked when her feet were connected to the ground.

Her moving speed was also much faster than her arms could move, so it was safe to assume she couldn't use that speed for climbing. By climbing the hog's corpse, dodging her swinging sword as he did so, he bought himself a few seconds as she clambered up after him.

He used those seconds to wrench a spiky protrusion out of the beast's side, using both his hands and Divine Grasp to do so while simultaneously rebuffing the leather-armored woman's own telekinetic attacks and advance.

He broke it free at last, a soggy, bloody clump of flesh clinging to the base of the curved spike. Unmoored like this, it was as long as his arm, a third of that length previously buried under all the fat and muscle of the Magical Beast.

He held it like a club, hands wrapping around the thinner end as it wasn't slippery from blood. He flicked the flesh off at the woman, who was just now getting to her feet atop the corpse, and it smacked into her face, causing her to stumble back.

He pressed the advantage, stepping to the side to avoid the magically extended sword of the woman in metal and bashing the Lightning woman in the left knee.

She blocked it with her shield, but Fate channeled his Divine Grasp into the strike at the last second, smashing the shield into her leg. She let out a muffled cry as the bone cracked and fell to a knee, wiping the flesh off her face with a glare.

'Even their bones are strengthened?' Fate swore. Usually, such a blow would shatter her kneecap.

It didn't matter. She was still down.

Smacking another distant thrust away with a spin of his improvised weapon, he struck the leather-armored woman's head from below.

She tried to block with her shield, the item sparking with Lightning, but the edge was caught awkwardly under the knee she kneeled on. The time it took her to pull it out slowed her reaction just enough for the hit to connect.

The woman flew off of the warthog's back at the same time the shield finally connected. Unlike the woman, Fate's hand didn't hold it together.