The master's are continually telling us that often the best defense is a good offense. We're told to obtain the vorschlag, or first strike, and to quickly follow up with the nachschlag, or after strike. The purpose of these hard and fast techniques is to overwhelm the opponent. Ringeck advises that if you are able to strike repeatedly, then the opponent will not be able to come to blows. This tactic makes perfect sense and is wrapped up in the idea that you are often safest if you have the initiative in the fight.
Initiative is a function of timing, and the Liechtenauer tradition recognizes three major moments of timing during a fight: vor, nach, and indes. You have either seized the initiative and are fighting in the vor by constantly threatening your opponent, or you are looking to weaken your opponent by taking away their options, often by striking their sword and so fight in the nach, or hope to regain the initiative once the opponent has already taken it and so threaten the opponent while simultaneously protecting yourself from their technique by striking indes.
Given the three timings, it would seem then that a large portion of the Art of fencing deals with fencing not from the vor, where you can try to overwhelm your opponent, but rather from the nach or indes, where you work to stymie your opponent's techniques and threaten them with your own. It is a fight, after all, and not many opponents are going to allow themselves to be overwhelmed. A fight is not often so one-sided. The treatises on historical fencing would be short indeed if the entirety of the Art lay in the vor.
It's important to understand that the admonishment to constantly be on the attack is an ideal. If your opponent has a modicum of skill, they will work in earnest to prevent your ability to overwhelm them thus forcing you to parry and ward off their techniques.
This is where the entirety of the rest of the Art of fencing comes into play. The Liechtenauer tradition speaks of four displacements, the vier versetzen, which can be used to counter techniques from the guards ochs, alber, vom tag, and pflug. The underlying principle behind the vier versetzen is that your opponent has assumed one of the above guards and has initiated a technique from that guard. We're told by the masters that guards are nothing more than waypoints along the path of a technique, and so the four displacements are strong counters to the techniques that begin at the four guards.
What's important to note is that the four displacements take into account the two timings I spoke of earlier, nach and indes. Since your opponent has seized the initiative--the vor--your counters are thus relegated to those remaining two timings. Much of the fencing treatises deal with what you can do with these two timings. In order to highlight this fact, I'll use the vier versetzen as an example. The four displacements take advantage of both nach and indes.
The first displacement, the krumphau against a thrust from ochs, can utilize both the nach and indes timings depending on the target. If your krumphau strikes the opponent's sword, your technique was in the nach as you didn't threaten your opponent directly. After striking the opponent's sword, the opponent has a moment to act while you also move to attack them.Conversely, if you target the opponent's hands or arms with the krumphau then you have attacked indes, having immediately regained the initiative while protecting yourself.
The second displacement, the zwerchau against a cut from vom tag, is an indes action. You deflect while simultaneously striking the opponent in the head.
The third displacement, the schielhau against a thrust from pflug, is again an indes action by simultaneously deflecting and targeting your opponent's head or body.
The fourth displacement, the scheitelhau against a rising cut from alber, is most often committed in the nach being that you strike down at the opponent's sword, thus stifling their technique.
Interestingly, Joachim Meyer writes in his treatise of 1570 that there are essentially two types of parries. The first parry is the parry done out of fear. This is the straight parry, where you are most concerned with defending yourself without giving much thought to threatening your opponent. The second parry is the parry that is executed with a strike. Of the parries that are executed with a strike, Meyer notes two types: "The first is when you first put off your opponent's stroke or send it away with a cut, and then rush at his body with a cut, having taken his defense. The second way to parry is when you parry your opponent and hit him at the same time with a single stroke, which the combat masters of old especially praise as suitable." The first parry here is fighting in the nach, as you are targeting the opponent's sword by putting "off the stroke" and then finally targeting the opponent's body. The second parry is fighting indes, as you protect yourself and strike your opponent at the same time.
Furthermore, the strikes that are included in the vier versetzen are the strikes named the meisterhau, or master cuts. These cuts are named the master cuts because they take advantage of the defense timings, nach, and indes. The five master cuts deal with the intelligent, self-defense portion of a fight, and are to be learned so that your fight doesn't look like a "mindless peasant's brawl," as Joachim Meyer discouraged it from being.
Much of the entirety of the fencing treatises should be looked at from the perspective of a fighter who has not seized the vor, and is fighting in either the nach or indes. Techniques such as wrestling at the sword, following after, changing through, doubling, mutating, pommeling, etc. are responses to regaining the initiative. In other words, those techniques teach you how to defend yourself when you're attacked.
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