Chương 63: The Duel (2)
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Null Magic has its limitations and its advantages. While the benefits of practically infinite mana pool were great, [Stack] was ridiculously abusable since it created an exponential increase for anything no matter how small to start with, while pumping power into a spell could only give a linear proportional increase.
I pointed the tip of my sword-spear at the ground and opened my left hand palm-up at around chest level. "Come forth, Wind. All-encompassing presence, [Air Sense]. Fog of battle, [Charged Mist]. Quicken the spark of life, [Nerve Impulse]." A gust of wind centered around me spilled out, blowing away dust and loose pebbles from the middle of the clearing.
"Come forth, Earth, strength of ages, [Jurassic Bone]. Sinews of time, [Tyrano Legacy]." To reinforce my bones and muscles. "Come forth, Light, cloak of healing, [Mendicant Aura]." To repair the damage as I push my body beyond its limits. Visualization was the key.
"Ready?" Elze asked.
Yae and I nodded.
"Begin!" she brought her hand down as the referee and faded back into a corner of the clearing.
Our swords clashed. And now Yae found that her usual method of batting aside the spear pole to slash down at my exposed neck no longer worked. The sword-spear had a flatter body that could deflect that and slide past her own guard to cut at the inside of her own arms.
We probed each other's reach for a while. For the moment it was like katana vs long sword.
It took all of these buffs just to match Yae in physical ability. Everyone in this world had magic – even if that magic was called chi or ki or generic fighting spirit – an internal source of energy that allowed for feats that were mildly superhuman.
Clang. Clang.
Inferior to [Boost] and [Stacked Amplify], which could meaningfully multiply physical capabilities to superhuman levels. This would just bring me to peak human and slightly beyond.
"This… is better," Yae noted. "This feels more natural with you, Playa-dono. You respect the killing edge of a blade. A weapon that could be used as sword or a spear, it suits a style that seeks to be unpredictable, that is so!"
"You don't think that means it can only be mediocre?"
"Your sword…." Yae shook her head. "When it hits…"
She surged forward and slashed to my left, but it was just a feint with her feet seeking to kick at the inside of my knee, with her sword to follow through as I lost my balance. But I raised my own feet and met her kick, toe to toe. We both recoiled away from each other.
I pushed at the ring pommel of my Zanzibar, abruptly extending its length though my right-handed grip. Yae parried it in a gentle circle.
But before she could strike back at me, it was as if she pushed away my whole body with that soft parry. I was quickly out of range and she had to pull back because I could still extend the stab to her now-exposed torso.
"Your sword… every strike is full of Joy. I do not understand…" she whispered. "It is not a sword with darkness to it. How can this be?"
"… Yae, I really don't understand this whole 'conversing with one's swords' thing. I'm still mostly a novice at this. You'll have to use /actual words/ to make me understand."
We clashed for a few more strikes, neither of us landing a hit.
Yae pulled away again and exhaled. "Your defense is tighter, more refined. I approve, Playa-dono, it is good! But your offense… you rely more on speed and switching between several strike points to find a way to overwhelm or slide past the opponent's defense?"
She shook her head sadly. "There is no real… strategy… to it. I could almost call it a mechanical way of fighting… were it not for how your sword is so quick and feels so weightless. In that way it is at least very like the point of a spear and one must beware how quickly it can shift between slash and thrust, that it is."
Her gaze sharpened into a glare. "There is still something you are holding back. How can there be darkness in such a bright sword? It is the brightest lights that cast the darkest shadows! Show me your seriousness, Playa-dono! I can feel your hesitation still. There is yet more that could you be doing about this!"
"Ahahaha… I really don't think there's any of that mystical sword philosophy in what I'm doing…"
Monika 'stood up' from the log and her voice resounded through the clearing. "Behind the man known as Zah Player von Chara is a Deep and Dark History. There is power there. But also a deep abiding shame. Player… I give permission. Unseal your Dark History!"
What, seriously? I turned towards Monika with my head at an odd angle again to emphasize how I was quirking my eyebrows behind my masked eyes. "Monika… that is the opposite of taking this seriously."
/"Just do it, Player. You decided this long ago."/ She paused. /"Well, a month ago. The only way you can survive this is to bear the shadow of his soul. Go all in or go home, and we can't go home anymore."/
I sighed. And I closed my eyes. And I remembered.
There were days when I felt like I had no reason to get up in the morning, there were times I felt I couldn't even be bothered to finish eating. There were days when procrastination would eat up irreplaceable hours of my life as I could only lie down there with no motivation to move. Darker days, wracked with guilt and desolation, feeling that I could only ever struggle only to fall back down. When I couldn't even be bothered to distract myself with the entertainments that could usually make me forget about everything. No other worlds could tempt me anymore. The promise of wealth meant nothing when nothing I could buy would bring me anything but momentary joy.
And being with other people… hurts.
I didn't have a reason to move, but I knew that if I simply stopped moving I might end up never moving again forever.
I took a deep breath and held it. Subtly my shoulders began to bob up and down. I began to put all my weight onto the tips of my toes.
Slowly I breathed out, "Mmm... Hm. Hm…"
And Monika said /"Kononoe Yae. Attack him with the intent to kill. Where he has gone, he will not need eyes. He will be worthy. Or he will DIE."/
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Yae attacked me with the fullest intention to do her best to chop my head off with a blunt blade because why not. She had the fullest confidence that I would be skilled enough to deal with that. Dang it, Monika!
But there was no more room in my brain for panic.
[Air Sense] allowed me to use prioperception as a substitute for eyesight. A [Charged Mist] was charged with static buildup, partly to help Monika's projections but in combination with [Nerve Impulse] that accelerated my reaction time…!
I felt the air parting before a sword blade. I tasted steel and the shape of her arm. Yae had a perfected high speed body, muscles firing in the perfect balance between force and reflex action. She moved through the air not with the ramming unsubtlety of a rocket but like a single sakura petal in the wind.
Our swords didn't clash. Her blade slid softly off mine and down with the blade pointed the wrong way from my armpit, while the point of my own sword raised up slightly just asking for her to ram her face into it.
Yae merely had to flick her foot and slid back with a single step. Footwork was the key to swordfights, only amateurs concentrated so much on what the arms were doing. Most of the time, the killing blow comes from losing control over the range of your enemy's strike zone.
Her eyes were wide with surprise, but lips quirked up into a satisfied grin. "Yes. This is much better. Your defense… while it was good before, I can feel a difference now. That stance, you are keeping yourself in tension. It is a good stance. But it spends energy even when not moving. Is this wise?"
There was no longer any room in my brain to feel proud about any of that.
She struck out again, first from the front, then to the side, and in each instance I didn't even bother to block, merely angled my body to the side. But every thrust can be turned into a slash in an instant!
Her blade rasped against the very tip of my own sword-spear, nonchalantly flicked up for a block that had very little power behind it but enough to deflect the whole swing safely downwards. Once again Yae disengaged before I could take one step into her guard and then stab the point of my sword towards her now unprotected throat.
"Kuh. What is this pressure?" she hissed. "Before, your sword was as joyful as the sun. Now… it is a cold, dark sword. Before, there was the feeling of power that could always still be forced through. Now… there is nothing but precision?" She shivered. "It is almost freezing… a sword without any human warmth, it is."
Yae had her own sword-intent or ki sense that accomplished much the same thing. Or it could be a lifetime of battle-honed senses, sight, sound, feeling, muscle memory, all combining into one instinct that was so refined it could almost read the future. She later described the feeling like entering a freezing black hole in the world, where every movement eventually gathered towards a single point.
/"I know what you're thinking. What sort of sword style is he using? And I could say a variety of old sayings like 'the one who seeks to hold a sword must first slay himself' or 'in battle only those who seek to die will survive', something like that."/
Yae nodded. That sounded perfectly legit.
/"To put it another way, the first thing a swordsman must have is Clarity. You can't allow emotions to cloud your judgement, or you will die. You can't allow judgment to override your instincts, or you will die. And you can't allow instincts to betray your ideals, or you will die long before any of your goals are fulfilled.
/"Pain and hate can devour people from the inside, and fear weakens even the strongest blade. Player might not like to think about all these sword philosophies, but I am the woman who has the Art of War always at her fingertips."/
The day would come when Monika would regret making the simple facts of our existence sound much grander than it was. But for the moment, it was like stars were born inside Yae's eyes. "Please tell me more, Monika-sama!"
/"And there are more ways of achieving Clarity than just meditation or numbing one's mind through grueling practice and desensitization. All beings who live can open the [Third Eye], this is something I know that Player does not know. In the end, though we are bound together, we started from different places. He will never know more than just vaguest whispers of [LIBITINA]. And for this, I am very very thankful.
/"He only sees what allow him to see.
/"Let his Third Eye open. Let his true self be free."/
There was no room in my brain for plans, tactics, strategy. The time felt right, and so I moved.
I let out a breath and hummed again "Hmm, Huh-hmm!"
The ground shattered beneath my feet as I moved.
Our swords no longer clashed as much as they simply banged together. Yae grit her teeth and tightened her grip, for it seemed like I wanted to just smash her sword right out of her hand. But putting too much strength into a blow was usually a mistake. But she couldn't capitalize on that because the next blow pulled back only slightly to hit again with greater amount of force.
Once. Twice. Three times. My blade smashed into hers with edge-ruining violence.
And then she chuffed in pain as a boot drove into her stomach and all breath from her. She staggered back and only barely managed to keep from falling on her but. She kept her sword out as if a fearful novice all over again.
She blinked, confused and angry. That… that should not have caught her by surprise.
Looking back, she could tell how it could have distracted her. All that smashing at her sword was to focus her attention, making her look for the moment to deflect and counter-attack. But that was just technique, she should have always been prepared for that. Real samurai, just like real knights, didn't just bash each other's swords Errol Flynn-ing all over the place. Grappling was always a pivotal part of single combat.
But at no point did she feel any fear or that she was getting out of her depth. In battle, her trained instincts allowed her to read the flow of combat and even to perceive incoming motion simply through air pressure, without the use of a spell as I was doing.
She got back up to her feet, and centered herself. And once more I was standing still, with the tip of my blade slightly pointed down towards her knees. My shoulders moved subtly up and down, as if I was buoyant on air.
Was it really just as simple as creating a vacuum around the blade? Yae's battle-honed senses remembered what felt wrong. No… in the end, her other instincts regarding positioning and leverage should have alerted her.
"This… this is too different!" Yae whispered. But her smile was turning somewhat feral. "What sort of sword is this?!"
/"This is the sword he would have if he didn't have me. Pain comes before strength. Would he be stronger if he had to fight everything and everyone? Maybe. But I'm glad that it turned out this way, even if we're weaker together than alone. If you're alone against the world, strength itself has a way of devouring ideals. There is also clarity when you shed Blood for the Blood God and offer Skulls to the Skull Throne."/
Yae flinched at that. For some reason the air grew colder and more forbidding.
/"He has achieved Clarity. He will keep on moving even when standing still, because this is his ideal. There must always be something productive being accomplished, even in his rest his mind cannot be allow to lie fallow.
/"But you might think less of him for the simple way he primes the engine of his soul."/
Yae looked up sharply. Though Monika's projected form sat beside Linze, her voice was coming from all over. It was just as valid to look up at the sky rather than look at me when talking to Monika. Maybe better, since the latter would provoke confusion. "Monika-sama, I beg your pardon, but why would I? The novice searches for special skills, but for the master the most basic of movements is greater than the school's hidden techniques, it is true."
Linze placed her face on her palms, and it was unclear if she was sobbing or trying to hide embarrassed laughter.
/"Mmm. All right then. Player? Hello? Wake up, love."/
And then a strange pounding music filled the clearing. (1)
/"Music is one of the earliest brainhacks that humans have ever discovered. It is something that resonates at the deepest parts of our bodies – literally so, for it change your hearbeat – and our psyches, and our souls. It provokes emotion, it gives energy, it incites thought and action. It can make yesterday as clear as today, making pain you once felt as real as the day you first experienced it – or remove the pain of today in the promise of pain shared or a tomorrow where pain no longer abides.
/"While music might be considered a frivolous exercise by some, and individual tastes will always differ, its greatest power is not how it can create legions of fans or give wealth to its stars… but in those single moments when some words, a song, a tune, without the knowledge of its creators, can change the course of a person's life.
/"Music creates our reality. It was my song that in the end crossed the line and allowed Player to accept me into his heart, and because of that I became real. In the times before when he could have died, he became a wayward son, who would always remember. He would equal this madness. He cast himself into the winds of fortune, and that is why the heavens wait for him."/
Everyone else looked puzzled. The music they were hearing seemed to have a different meaning.
/"And the name of this tune is [Char the Great.]"/
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AN:
(1) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SotzrBEYz04
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