I wake up almost immediately, but I am not me. Or, I should say I am not in my own body. I don’t even seem to really have a body. I am watching a boy train with a sword on a practice dummy. He is slowly practicing his strokes one after the next, for hours. I watch as he lines up the perfect stroke, and moves with grace determination, and violence. His blade doesn’t even touch the dummy, but the strike cuts it cleanly in half.

The vision twists again it is the same boy, he is now a teen. He is standing in a forest similar to the one I am in. He is fighting beast after beast. His movements are precise, he wastes no effort. Wherever he swings his blade an enemy falls cut. Until a massive beast strolls out of the forest. I see some fear and apprehension on his face for a short second before he steels his resolve. The others with him have run from the massive beast leaving him standing alone in the field to face it. I watch as he is overcome with a calm, unlike anything I have ever felt. He stands tall and sheaths his blade. He then takes the stance he practiced for hours on end as a youth. His blade is an extension of himself, part of his soul. The beast roars trying to shake him before it charges. The beast gets to within a handful of steps when he strikes. Two halves of the beast sail to either side of him, covering him in blood and gore.

I shift again this time the teen is a man. He is on a battlefield fighting insectoid creatures. He is wearing armor and is carrying a spear. He is in a line of troops on a massive field. It is clear from my point of view that the humans are largely outnumbered as the insectoid's army is truly massive. The vision shifts the man is in a pitched battle the humans are guarding a large city and there is a desperation to them. It is clear the humans are going to lose and the city is going to be sacked. The man crests a hill as the human fighters start to try to drop back being harried by the insectoid invaders. The man drops his spear and loses his helmet. Others try to convince him to retreat but he only nods his head, as they pass him. Once it is only him and the invaders. A massive pressure descends on the insectoids. This gives them pause, as the only point the pressure could be coming from is the lone human on the hill. The insectoid invaders begin to surge forward. He sets his feet in the familiar stance and strikes out three times. The first strike cuts down the first two rows of invaders. The second strike cuts down the next five rows. The third strike cuts down ten rows of invaders. This continues until there are less than a fourth of the invaders remaining. This invigorates the remaining human fighters who sweep out and destroy the remaining insectoids. The man is lifted as a hero by the human victors.

Next, I am warped to the front of a massive army. The man is slightly older now he shows some graying hair his face is marked by scars and age. He is wearing expensive armor and riding a regal horse. I can tell the army is his, as riders come to him get orders and leave. He is riding through a valley in a mountain range. In front of him, his army has stopped. The valley is a dead end! The mountains to either side are tall, imposing, and seemingly impenetrable. After a few minutes, he arrives at the front of his army. In front of him is a solid sheer rock wall. To either side of the wall are steep peaks. He dismounts his horse with the ease of a veteran rider and hands the reigns to his subordinate. He walks over to the wall and touches it with his hand before leaning over and pressing the side of his face to the stone. When he is done, he takes one hundred steps. He again assumes the stance his whole army can feel the pressure he is exerting. The stone around him begins to rumble and crack. Until he strikes! This time all who are there witness as a massive blade of energy leaves him and cuts into the rock. He strikes two more times and two more visible blades leave him. When the dust clears the rock wall is no more and there is now a way through. His troops move to immediately clear the rubble, as he sits and waits.

My view shifts again and it is obvious that this is the last time. The man is now old his hair is white. He is walking with a cane his limbs lack all of his former power. He is wearing plain grey clothes he lacks his fancy armor. He is not even carrying his customary blade. HE is walking through a forest with a multitude of beasts. Every so often a beast will attack him only to be cut in half with merely a nod from the old man. The old man keeps walking forward at a steady pace until he hits a wide ravine over a fast-flowing river. He stops for a few minutes as the pressure builds this time the pressure is unbearable for a brief moment as the old man waves his hand and a cut appears in the air. He steps through and is on the other side of the ravine. He continues at his steady pace never faltering.

I understand immediately what the vision was trying to show me was a concept. I replayed each section over and over in my head. My intelligence was such that the vision was now burned into my memory. The man was not a mage he never felt like he was ever using magic or mana. The whole thing felt like the evolution of a skill. In fact, he had several skills that seemed to be on the same path. The world the vision came from seemed to be different for this one as the warriors in the battles were using steel. This vision was meant to convey many things to the viewer. His mind was working a mile a minute to understand everything he had witnessed.

When I broke it down there were a few things that I could glean off the top of the vision. The first was the energy he was using was not mana or magic. It was a form of resonance from the blade itself. I remembered some text from the definition of the Death Blade. This class grants an understanding of both blade energy, and death energy. Your grasp of these energies is only limited by your INT, and WIS. This vision must have been the way it granted access to this information. Once I had this, what was being done fell into place. The energy was separate from MP or SP. This energy was created by the weapon initially. Once you hit a certain point with it though you could use the energy without a weapon.

Once I had that breakthrough Insight kicked in and I had another. The use of this and other energies was based on three things. The vision had clearly shown the man’s progression. His first breakthrough had been through eagerness and determination. The next two had been through desperation, and the last two had been through conviction. Mastering the energies required several things the chief among them were focus, conviction, and resolve.

I meditated for some time on this. Watching the scenes over and over in my head. I know whatever had devised this system had never meant for this to work like that. But my insane mental stats let me remember the vision like I had recorded it in my mind. I knew somehow the vision was supposed to be fleeting to give me a feeling as to what I needed. My mind though had become my own personal DVR. I could play the memory back over and over. It included feeling the intense pressure, seeing the attacks being formed the feeling in the air around him at the point the attack was released. Moreover, I have an advanced understanding of the science of cutting. The application of pressure over a small area, shearing, and the tensile strength of objects. I know of microns, nanometers, molecules, and atoms. I know that cutting things causes heat as cast-off energy. That in this case that heat can be used as a weapon on its own. I feel it lock into place like it has clamped onto my soul. Which is actually very close to what happened.

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

I open my eyes and see my friend there waiting. I can tell he wanted to approach me but everything within my immediate area is currently cut. I am surrounded by cut things, stones, branches, and even the dirt underneath me are showing signs of being cut. I am surrounded by a current of air that is cutting anything falling into it. I can tell it has been at least another few days, as I stand. I walk from the clearing to the gigantic lake.

When I get to the shore of the lake, I can feel a malevolent presence under the water lurking. I can tell the avatar is trying to tell me not to get too close to the lake. I see a ripple in the water as I get closer. There is a surge in the water heading right towards me. I draw sky cutter in the direction of the surge and watch a massive blade of energy rip out across the lake. The blade has to be twenty feet tall and razor-thin, the blade itself is the width of a human hair. It cuts into the water ten feet deep, turning the water into superheated steam as it passes. I hear a shriek as a rumble passes through the water. The surge is no longer heading in my direction as I feel a small surge of XP. I see a few large fish and what looks like a tentacle float to the top of the water before they are devoured in a feeding frenzy by other fish. The blade continues to streak across the lake hitting a small island in the middle before disappearing once it is out of my visual range. The attack requires me to concentrate on it for it to keep its form.

That test being successful I need to do something about myself. My enlightenment is causing the wind around me to turn into micro blades. When I look down at the shoreline of the lake where I am standing, I see the stones near me being turned into sand. That sand is being turned into glass by the residual heat being generated by the micron-width blades cutting everything around me. I sit ignoring the heat and focusing on the field. The vision did not show anything like this because even when the old man had advanced mastery. He lacked the scientific knowledge that I possessed. While his world had advanced to the point of being able to make steel. They had none of the advanced knowledge I possessed. They had no way of measuring microbes or even the thickness of a hair. These were all things available on earth, and while I had no specific expertise with these things. I did possess enough knowledge to make me dangerous. I knew that the thickness of a human hair was in the twenty to forty microns. And that a filament from a spider’s web was two to three microns. I also knew because of recent events that a virus could be anywhere from thirty to fifty nanometers. That was part of the problem. My enlightenment had caused this field to spring into place. And now it had its own level of inertia.

I sat down where I was not feeling the need to cause any more damage. I need to concentrate on this field to get control of it. I didn’t feel any presence other than the avatar around me. Not that it would have mattered it might have helped weaken the field if there would have been something for it to attack. Once I was set, I began concentrating on the field. There was no inherent knowledge of this from my memory, and it did not seem like I was going to get a second. I could feel that whatever managed these things might have realized just how much I gained from what should have been just a glimpse and a jump start and did not want to give me anymore. Once I had a feel for the field, I reached out with the same three elements required to create it in the first place. It took even more focus and conviction to compress the field into myself. Once that was done, I had to figure out what to do with it. That turned out to be the easiest part! I had two empty slots left for auras I would compress it even further and push the field into an aura slot. At first, it was easy to compress the field, but I ran into issues the closer I got to getting it to what I needed. As the field got smaller so did the blades it contained. The smaller the blade got the smaller things they were able to cut. This included themselves, and even some air and mana particles. This in turn generated a huge amount of heat and electricity that had to be dealt with. Fortunately for me, I had a huge body of water next to me to direct the heat and electricity into. I felt the lighting and heat jumping off me into the water. The whole area was covered in steam and there was a static electric pulse zipping through the air. The ball I had created of the field kept wanting to slip through my fingers and release itself. I knew that would be catastrophic as at that point, not even I would be immune to it like I had been before. To seat this into the aura slot took even more focus, conviction, resolve, and a massive amount of concentration as I had to place it in the slot. I also had to keep directing the massive amounts of energy it was creating.

I lost track of time while this was happening as I knew that I had to do this now. Failure was not an option as it meant death. It felt like I was there for years when it finally snapped into place. I felt a thud and then my hair began to stand on end. My whole body became electric, I felt like I had an electrical plug stuck into my back. When I opened my eyes, I was able to take in the scene of destruction around me.

When I sat down, I had been on the shore of the lake on the semi-even ground. When I opened my eyes, I was in a crater that was at least twelve feet deep. The crater was at least seventy feet in length as well. On the far end in what had been part of the lake was a glowing heated wall of rock. This section of the lake must have had a high density of iron, as the stone was still intact and radiating heat. The whole area is covered by a dense cloud of steam. The heat would be stifling if it bothered me. My stats were so high that I barely even felt it. I summoned my bladed wings and jumped. It was easy for me to clear the side of the crater. I wanted to see just how much damage I had done. Floating from a height of a hundred feet I could see the desolation I have caused. Overall while the damage is extensive, it mostly is on the lake shore and into the lake. The forest is relatively untouched it looks as if there were a few sparks that were heading towards the forest but the avatar handled those. The shore for the most part is not that bad either, except for the section where I was sitting. The crater is an oblong shape that is mostly out into the water. The area around it seems to be boiling and steaming. From my position, I can also see something glinting in the cut out on the island. I power glide out to the island to see what it is. When I get out to the island, I see a few different things. Where the cut impacted the rock, most of the rock has turned to dust. Except for a few separate stones that were black and shiny. I collected all of the black stones, as well as some crystals that were on the island. I jumped and power glided back to the shore of the lake and walked up to the avatar.

I get to him and say “sorry about that.” Before I pass out!