Some humans fight with blades, those who live on worlds that allow it, use firearms. Or for those aboard stations and ships, crossbows. Me? I refuse to use any of that. My body is my weapon. Sure I carry a utility knife, don't most of us? But it's never been used to draw blood. With a single blow I can knock a man down, with a well-placed kick I can knock over a being the size of a tree. My hand, small as it is, can strike a seemingly random spot, and in moments my enemy seizes up and then dies.
My body is my weapon, trained by an art that was many centuries old. It was taught for defense, it was taught for meditation, it was taught, to all things, peaceful monks in temples. Martial arts, kung-fu, tae-kwon-do, judo, tai-chi, ninjitsu, jujitsu, hapkido, aikido, capoeira, sambo, dim mak, kendo, and so many others. I've learned them all.
My body, a deadly weapon of war, meant to protect the peaceful. None shall harm those under my care. I won't let you die, not on my watch. -- Anon Guest
Deathworlders come up with so many methods of offensive defence. Their weapons are many and varied, but the most interesting things happen when various administrative forces attempt to ban a rebellion-minded proletariat from rebalancing the scales of justice. Banning weapons never really works. Banning certain types of weapons just leads to the peasantry inventing new kinds of weapons out of ordinary household objects.
When fighting with any kind of weapon is banned, the Deathworlders simply invent methods of incapacitating others bare-handed, bare-footed, and sometimes naked. Many an army has faced a throng of Humans wearing only paint and a grimace[1], and that alone has caused them to turn around and think about their life choices.
Then there's martial arts. Training mind and body to be beyond normal Deathworlder limitations and exceed what should be possible with a Deathworlder body. This sort of thing generally takes years and one Human trained in one discipline is a being to be feared. The limit used to be one Human lifetime, but Humans have a way of cheating.
The B'Nari invented functional immortality. Scanning bodies at their prime and after intense training, then printing a new one for the mind-pattern to inhabit, _restored to a youth, but still bearing the re-enforcement produced by said training.
It's entirely possible for a Human to train in all possible martial arts and still look like a being in their prime.
Human Twii had been around and around again. Ze had started with Tai Kwon Do, and a lucrative job as an Edge Guardian. That is, someone who guards frailer cogniscents in their journeys through or beyond the Edge Territories. Thus, when the B'Nari let it be known that immortality was affordable, ze leaped at the chance.
Returned to a fresh teenaged body, still bearing the physical changes wrought by their starter discipline, Twii moved on to learning others. Lifetime by lifetime, they learned every martial discipline there was, and may have invented a few more.
Their kata is long and intense, but the work is still lucrative, and hir reputation is widespread.
Some call hir The Immortal Twii while others whisper about The Reincarnated. Ze has spent time as any gender, and one lifetime without a gender at all, just to see if hormones played any part in their physical prowess.
The results, at least to Twii, were clear. Proper training trumps gender every single time. Ze prefers a lower centre of gravity, and skill always outweighs muscle. That, in combination with a frighteningly intense understanding of cogniscent anatomy, means that Human Twii has not needed a weapon in three hundred Standard Years.
Nobody has been able to land a blow on hir for most of those.
Therefore, when Human Twii tells a cogniscent, "You will not come to harm," that means that only the truly unpredictable happenstance could possibly get past hir.
It's also a really bad idea to try and pick a fight with hir too.
[1] See reference files: Celts, Berserker, Thymwa, and Vellis.
[Image (c) Can Stock Photo / luceluceluce]
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