It wasn’t every day Braze got to watch arrogance and stupidity conspire so beautifully in a single, humiliating package. Perhaps this was some remedial apprentice, too dull for his master to suffer in close quarters, and thus sent out into the world to spare them the sweet release of his grating presence.
Few things amused Braze more than those rare moments when he came across a Sith whose pride and foolishness collided into such a spectacularly dim-witted display of idiocy. His tongue was sharp enough to cut, but there was little sport in trading barbs with a creature too witless to appreciate them, so he left the matter there, knowing full well the futility of pressing it further. Any verbal sparring would soar clean over his head. This creature was simply too uninspired to appreciate the finer points of the exchange.
Braze would have even bet that subtle Force work, mind tricks, influence, all of it, was far beyond the creature’s talents. He seemed far better suited to bluster than to anything requiring subtlety or control in the Force.
As the young prodigy Braze had become, he had trained to obsessive degrees where lesser men could not endure. The null-field might have stripped away the Force, but it had not stripped him of instinct, nor of the hard-earned adaptability that had kept him alive in far worse circumstances than this. He had been shaped in high-pressure chaos, where bodies lied less than words and timing mattered more than bravado. The Force was not the source of his survival, merely just one more weapon in a far larger arsenal. Mikhail could keep his posturing; the very fact that he had chosen to heave debris through crowded streets and narrow alleys only proved how ill-suited he was to true combat tactics.
Braze was not in the mood to play the impressed apprentice, or fulfill the role of some absentee parent either. If the fool wanted to mistake the absence of the Force for weakness, then Braze would be more than happy to school him in the old-fashioned way, one humiliating lesson at a time. Let the brainless dolt throw his tantrum; Braze was quite content to teach him, patiently and thoroughly, that arrogance was a poor substitute for skill. He could turn that overconfidence into a liability with ease.
Braze was, in many ways, the sort of man people would mock if they did not understand what made him dangerous. A well-rounded combat pragmatist, he had devoured lessons with a voracious hunger that never quite faded, training constantly until mastery was not a goal, but a habit. Some might have called it obsession. Whilst others, with less sense, might have called it a fantasy. The truth was it was but preparation. He was the sort of man novices would sneer at if they mistook discipline for affectation, the inevitable 'I have studied the blade' type, though with far too much actual experience for the joke to truly stick. Where lesser fools performed dedication, Braze lived it, honing himself to an absurd degree until even leisure became little more than a disguised training exercise. Braze had long since crossed from mere interest into something far more severe.
This was no adolescent devotion to the romance of combat, but a ruthless, hungry pursuit of competence in every form it took. He absorbed lessons, refined instincts, and trained with such relentless consistency that social convention tended to lose its grip on anyone who devoted that much of themselves to the blade. Braze was no exception and his social life did suffer for it, but it was all worth it knowing he could protect his friends.
Braze had spent the last four years obsessively honing himself until the
Trial of Skill would be little more than child's play. He had pushed blindfolded practice,
Faalo's Cadence, sensory deprivation, and Force deprivation alike well past the limits of reason, training both with and without the Force until instinct, timing, and motion had become second nature.
Where others relied on conditions, Braze learned to transcend them; where lesser men broke under deprivation, he had made it a proving ground. If the Trial of Skill was meant to test whether a Jedi could endure, adapt, and prevail under physical, mental, and combat pressure, then Braze had already been living that answer through the armour of hard-earned experience. He understood that no one rose to the height of their own vanity; they fell only to the level of their training.
Braze would suffer no fools, least of all one who mistook volume, arrogance, and parlor tricks for true mastery; and this one had already exhausted what little patience he might have been granted.
Braze read the motion of his opponent’s body line with languid ease, and the half-Echani simply turned sideways with a partial diagonal step, letting the debris fly past him in a rush of displaced wind as he closed the space between them with concerning speed.
Braze seemed to pass through the debris by instinct rather than effort, each fragment missing him by bare centimeters, yet he advanced with unwavering confidence, devoid of any trace of fear.
A tilt of the shoulder, a minute shift of the hip, the soft drag of one foot across broken stone; tiny corrections answered threats before thought could name them. It was motion refined down to its smallest possible language, an ideomotor grace born from relentless training, where the body moved before the mind had to ask.
The white haired prodigy closed the distance too fast for the movement to feel theatrical. There was no sweeping flourishes, nor any reckless lunges for Mikhail to catch and turn against him. He cut in on the diagonal, slipping just outside the Sith’s centerline as the debris screamed past, and entered close enough that any broad counter would need room it no longer had.
Far be it from Braze to stop the Sith from adding destruction to a city of their own with wanton, poorly planned attacks based on half-baked ideas. But if Mikhail wanted to throw power around like a child overturning furniture, Braze was perfectly willing to step inside the mess and make that power a burden.
His first contact was all pressure and precision: saber tucked close, shoulder angled in, every inch of space between them made suddenly dangerous, turning the space Mikhail needed into a narrow, glowing threat.
If Mikhail wanted victory, he would have to offer more than spectacle and noise. Braze could forgive wayward sith arrogance, on occasion; what he could not forgive was making a fight boring.
“So what’s your name; Glup Shitto? I’ll need something worth engraving on your gravestone, other than ‘failed Sith apprentice.’” 
Matthew of Valendale
