Nick sat cross-legged on the mat with his sword across his knees. His form was silhouetted against the limitless heavens stretching beyond his window. He closed his eyes and turned his focus inward, letting his breath flow slow and deep, waiting patiently for his mind to grow still.
Breath by breath, Nick let everything else go, focusing on the physicality of his body and the weight of his blade. Over time, thoughts rose to the surface of his mind of their own accord. Recollections of desperate battles fought and won. Of triumph, tragedy, and good people lost along the way. Memories of his family, his world, and a life that he would never know again.
He watched as these images floated across the theater of his mind’s eye before sinking below the threshold of awareness once more, waiting until nothing remained but the here and now. Sometime later, Nick opened his eyes, surprised to discover that the sun was hanging high in the sky above. By this point, the blade in his lap almost felt like an extension of his own body. He looked down as he ran his fingertips across the sword’s pitted surfaces. The missing pockets and patches of metal that had been consumed by the magical parasite known as the crimson blight.
He traced the ragged break where the pommel stone had been snapped off completely. What is your story, my mysterious friend? What wonders have you witnessed, and horrors have you endured, far beyond my understanding?
Sensing that the moment was right, Nick took hold of the hilt and rose to his feet. He began his training by examining the properties of his weapon of choice, starting with the grip. Wrapped tight over the sword’s metal core were bands of fibrous tissue, pulled taut to form an intricate swirling pattern.
The wrappings were impervious to damage as far as he could tell, yet soft enough to stop his flesh from being shredded by the power of his strikes. The material was tacky enough to keep his grip from slipping, even when immersed in water or covered in blood.
The hand-and-a-half hilt was long enough to wield the sword in both hands, which was good, since Nick wasn’t nearly strong enough to swing the heavy blade with one arm just yet. Although he could tell that it had been forged with that option in mind. The hilt guard swept down to shield his fingers before bending back up to catch blade or claw.
The sword’s blade was long and gently curved, sharp along one edge to maximize the cutting force as the blade impacted and was drawn across its target. There was an intricate hamon worked into the metal, which reminded him of the markings on a katana. The tip came down to a wickedly sharp point, so fine that he had a hard time focusing on the place where steel ended and air began.
The metalwork was elegant but unadorned, free of engravings or embellishment other than its hamon. The sword needed none. Every inch of the weapon radiated a regal lethality, even in its diminished state. Nick didn’t need experience to know that it was a masterwork, forged by an artisan beneath the light of an alien star. As Trell had implied, there was far more to the sword than its mere physicality.
It had yet to take any damage since he had begun wielding it into battle, let alone being used to carve Trell’s legacy into raw bedrock. If anything, the sword was even sharper than when he had found it, the ragged saw-like edge slowly healing over time. The inexplicable restoration hinted at magic at work, even if the System refused to reveal the blade’s origin or properties.
Now that the sword’s totality was etched into Nick’s consciousness, he raised his gaze and began to move. To begin, he placed all his concentration into how the movement of his shoulders and the twist of his hips changed the angle of the blade. Ready to start incorporating some footwork, he kept his gaze facing straight ahead, resisting the temptation to track the weapon with his eyes. Instead, he tried to sense the length of sharpened steel as if it were an extension of his arms, moving naturally in accordance with his will.
He had only been fighting with the weapon for a few weeks, but in that moment, he arrived at an epiphany. If he truly wanted to master the blade, Nick needed to be able to track its position unerringly in space first. Develop an unconscious awareness of where the sword’s point and edge were at all times in relation to his body.
Beyond that, he needed to sense its balance and momentum. How its trajectory would flow naturally into the next move that he made. Not only so that he could bring his sword to bear upon his foes with a higher degree of precision, but also so he could swing it using every point of his growing attributes without maiming himself in the process.
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Slowly, focusing on mindful control rather than power or speed, Nick raised the sword in front of him and brought the blade down. He began executing a series of glacially slow slashes along each of the eight basic angles that were the foundation of all weapon techniques. He began with a vertical chop along his midline, then worked his way around, practicing each strike in a clockwise rotation until he was back where he began.
The moment that he completed the final slash and his grip was firm, he stepped forward and thrust. A clean transfer of power combining his mass and momentum, bringing the tip sliding home into a point finer than the head of a needle.
During each attack, he bent his focus toward developing his awareness of the reach of his weapon. The range from where he could initiate an effective strike in a single move. Ideally, he would fight within the reach of his blade whenever possible, remaining beyond his opponent’s to give him more time to dodge and counter. Then Nick raised the sword over his head and started the whole sequence over again.
As he warmed to his practice, he lost track of the passage of time. Sweat dripped down his body to patter against the matting below. Still living within the eternal now, responding to a primal instinct, Nick imagined that a komo was standing before him, one of the aggressive carnivores he had fought back on the Searing Isle.
He focused on that image, shutting out the world around him, until the giant lizard was the only thing that existed except for Nick and his sword. The exercise was an extension of the shadow boxing technique that he had been practicing over the last few weeks.
This time, the image was even sharper than before, due to his recent improvement to his creativity. Watching the vicious reptile circle him, he could make out every fold of skin. Every tooth and claw, in clear, crisp detail. See the beast’s muscles moving beneath its hide as it positioned itself to attack. Follow its feet and its gaze as it committed to an angle of approach and then charged with blinding speed. It’s coming in low. It’s trying to hamstring me!
Without conscious intent, he stepped to one side, bringing the sword around in a tight arc in front of his knees. His blade met his imagined foe square in the neck, cleaving through flesh and bone in turn before shearing its head from its shoulders in a bright spray of blood.
Before he had a chance to lower his guard, a sensation of imminent danger caused Nick to leap to one side, narrowly avoiding the attacks of not one, but two additional komos that had decided to join the battle, sneaking up on him while he was distracted.
The twin beasts came surging for his position, circling to opposite sides to divide his attention and poke a hole in his guard. Knowing that if he made a single mistake, the komos would overwhelm him, Nick began to dance, the lizards hissing as they came at him from two sides at once.
Half forgetting that this was all a projection of his recently upgraded imagination, he began dodging and leaping. Slashing and thrusting. Doing everything that he could to remain unbloodied without losing his awareness of his body and blade. He was slowly developing the sense that a battle wasn’t the mere sum of a hundred disjointed motions, but a single interwoven exhibition of intention and force. As closely connected as the cells of a living organism.
After a while, Nick switched it up, swapping out the carnivorous komos with some of the other beasts he had battled back on the Searing Isle. He began with a group of swordclaw crabs, then moved onto the brutal bonecruncher pack, before taking on one of the ratmen he had fought in the sewers of Kastilla. His concentration finally broke an hour later when he tried to summon the lurk. Not because Nick’s imagination failed him on this occasion, but because it did not.
The multi-ton apex predator was so present, so real within the theater of his mind’s eye, that he knew with utter certainty that nothing he could do would work. The stark truth was that Nick could never hope to overcome an opponent of the lurk’s caliber with his current attributes and abilities. At least not with his sword alone. Even holding it back long enough to beat a hasty retreat felt impossible, let alone the laughable goal of wounding or slaying the majestically lethal beast.
As the image of the lurk wavered out of existence, his body came to a shuddering stop. The hilt of his sword slipped through fatigue-numbed fingers to clatter against the matting below. Coming out of his battle trance, he was shocked to discover that the moon was now high in the silver sky. Day had given way to night without him being remotely aware of time’s passage, so total was his concentration.
He wandered into the kitchen to drink straight from the faucet, moving onto the fridge when he realized that he was starving. While he went to work devouring a bowl of what tasted like spicy lamb curry, Nick walked over to the display and pulled up his profile.
Through use, you have improved the following skills:
Sword has increased from [0] to [2].
Nick was thrilled to discover that he had gained not one, but two skill points during his lengthy training session, likely due to his intense concentration and prior experience in wielding the sword. It was rare to make such rapid gains through training alone, and he knew that he was lucky to have solidified the improvement within the span of a single session.
I wonder if it was because my opponents were so real to me this time. He had been so absorbed by the exercise that he hadn’t even thought to track his progress until his workout was complete.
Although night had fallen, Nick still had plenty of energy. So, after taking a quick shower to rinse off his sweat, he went back to the exercise room to clear the second condition required to perform his experiment, draining his mana pool while testing his new trait and trying out his new spell.