Quick analysis . . .
Panel 1 -- Sarine defends and Sara is "scything" across her front from right to left. Appropriate, since this sort of two-handed weapon is descended from a threshing tool. The blade high left wards off a high stroke from the sword.
Panel 2 -- Sarine has to parry low or Sara "harvests" both her legs. Note that Sarine is braced against the blow. Apparently, the dyfus Phlem blades have mass and transmit kinetic energy.
Panel 3 -- The natural back and forth of the two-bladed weapon, a strike high to force Sarine to use up her movement in parry's at various angles. Sara has to keep moving and attacking, or, as another forum-dweller noted, Sarine will take all of her fingers off without getting close enough for a counter-threat. Sarine's hands are behind her weapon, Sara's are not. Again, Sarine extends to brace herself against the blow.
Panel 4 -- Sara sees Sarine's extended leg as an opening. She lets Sarine sweep her left blade back, taking the sword far away from Sarine's extended left leg. Sara then lets go with her left hand and is essentially stabbing and slashing at Sarine's leg with the weapon only held in her right hand. She does this, I assume, because she can strike faster with one hand. If she used two, she would have to twist her body to keep her left arm out of her way.
Panel 5 -- Once the stabbing attack goes in, Sara is pivoting on her left foot as a follow through and is re-establishing her two-handed grip. Sarine's over-extension in panel three may have been a deliberate feint or just confidence. Her blinding speed and unnatural strength would be helping her here. From a full stretch, feet wide apart, body-leaning left, on point rather than flat-footed, she has pulled her left leg back faster than Sara can strike with her weapon, leaned or stepped back to avoid the sweep of the blade, and is coming down and forward with a two-handed stroke. Sara is wide open, in part because she is so much shorter than Sarine, in part because Sarine's sudden shift to Sara's left has left Sara over-extended to her right. Sarine's elbow is probably between the haft of Sara's weapon and where it needs to go to keep Sarine's blade from cutting Sara in half.
Panel 6 -- I think Sara could not slash her left blade forward towards Sarine's gut because Sarine is too close. Instead, Sara tries to duck low to the right, dropping her right hand as a brace, taking a step (her left foot is now ahead of her right.) and disentangling her weapon from Sarine's arms and torso so she can bring the left blade into action. Too late, however, as Sarine appears to have waded into Sara to keep her from getting her balance and, in any event, her sword is swinging so far past Sara's guard she is essentially hitting her from behind.
I think a little compression of action has occurred here. Sara's weapon is shown having already passed Sarine's torso in this panel, but the impact of Sarine's blade must have happened before this movement. If the blade had still been active, Sara might have disemboweled Sarine by accident.
Did Sarine just give Sara a tonsure? Has Poe just made a monkish pun? She does not appear to have taken the top of Sara's skull off, so either she slapped her with the blade and took some hair off by accident, or she may have just scalped her.
Someone with more spending money than me should commission a large size poster of this two-second fight and force Poe to fill in the details I may have gotten wrong.
_________________ "We are not going to die! And do you know why? Because Thomas is too pretty to die. And because I'm too stubborn to die. And most of all because tomorrow is Oktoberfest, Butters, and <i>polka will never die!</i>"
Last edited by Boss Out of Town on Mon Apr 30, 2007 6:33 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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