Des watched Milya circle, not just with her eyes but through the Force. She could feel Milya planning, considering. Hesitating. for the moment Des was content with this. She wasn't trying to break the girl's spirit. Far from it, but she could tell Milya wasn't used to a tough nut to crack. Fair. Most Jedi, if things were going right, never saw combat. Never had a reason to ignite their saber. And fewer still faced a worthy opponent. Was that thought arrogance speaking? Des turned it over in her mind for a moment. The Force is a powerful ally, but so is the discipline and training of the Jedi. A skilled, competent Jedi, with thousands of hours of training with saber and/or meditating on the Force and it's deeper mysteries put them head and shoulders above most. No, it wasn't arrogance, just a fact.
By the same token, she realized the intensive hours, days, months... years... of intensive, torturous training, beyond abusive, driven by the whips of shame and guilt, and put her in a different place. Pain was an incredible teacher, not that she'd wish that kind of pain on anyone. There were two kinds of pain: the kind that hurt, and the kind that transformed.
The kind that left gaping holes in her soul.
Even now, she found herself not merely calm but placid, serene, like an undisturbed alpine lake among snow-capped mountains, surface flat and reflective like a mirror. The eye of a storm. A calm had washed over her like the quiet that accompanied a late night snowstorm, when the snow came down in those thick, coin-sized flakes, when all the world was quieted, muted, so that one could hear the flakes landing, piling up, wrapping the world in a blanket of white.
The rock was a bone-breaking deadly missile. But rather than risk slashing it, or trying to stop it, one hand rotated, just a little. A mental trigger, a scooping motion. The rock sailed past her to the front, as she used a touch of the Force to alter it's trajectory into a miss. Of course it was a ruse, but one she had to deal with. Des wondered, then, if that was a trick that was part of her standard package, or if maybe Milya had picked it up from her.
As Milya spun toward her, Des turned on the balls of her feet, squaring up, left saber coming down to guard her leg from the low blade. Bouncing away from the clash, Des whipped her wrist up and around in a fan, bouncing from low to a wall at her left, while she shifted her left back back, retreating, letting Milya's right blade intersect her left.
Again, she had picked up two blows with one technique. Continuing the motion of changing stances, hips rotating, body twisting, she whipped her right saber around in a flat cut at neck level, though she didn't intend to make contact, using it as a ward and warning. The strike carried just past Milya's lovely throat. If she were close enough to strike the tip of Des's saber would have been over MIlya's right shoulder. Instead she was a foot or more out of range.
Raking the tip of her cyan saber back the way it came, Des extended her arm. The blow had no real power. A lightsaber didn't need it to be a threat. It turned into a shallow thrust, but still not quite in range (unless Milya rushed into it). Instead, as it reached the extension of her arm, Des carried it's momentum onward, and around, whipping the weapon in a circle of light, going form a palm-up thrust, out, back and over her head, coming back in with a palm-down backhand toward Milya's right ear in another flat cut.
It wasn't particular to any of the Jedi arts, but something else. Older perhaps. Nuanced, though they shared similar roots. It was a martial art, and a form of self-defense, sometimes taught to law enforcement and highly trained soldiers. People who lived and died on their fighting skills without the Force. Designed to make people into effective fighters quickly with simple methods, but could spend a lifetime mastering all it's nuances. A form that used weapons first, of all kinds, but could translate to empty handed fighting. More than that it easily integrated with other martial arts and fighting forms. Including lightsaber combat.
