“Oh? That’s a fine suggestion, senpai. I should warn you, though, I’m actually quite strong.”
“Think of it as working off dinner. A simple spar, so I can see the gap between myself and a genius.”
Kaien scratched his head.
“I’m no genius… but I do know a good spot. It’s a bit far. Want to go and have a look?”
“Sure.”
Kaien went back inside and came out with two wooden swords.
“Senpai, shall we warm up with a bit of Shunpo?”
“Works for me.”
Silas nodded.
Their eyes met, and as the last word dropped, both figures vanished from where they stood at once.
The next moment they reappeared almost simultaneously at opposite sides of the flat clearing on the mountain peak.
This time Silas didn’t hold back.
Against an opponent of Kaien’s caliber, there was no need to hide what he could do.
The harder he could push Kaien to go all out, the better the returns on experience fragments would be.
At full effort his Shunpo was far from slow, and it kept him right on Kaien’s heels.
Kaien glanced back.
He was still holding some strength in reserve, and even so he hadn’t expected Silas to keep pace this easily.
Then again, he’s a senior at the Shin’ō Academy.
How could I expect to shake him off that simply?
Kaien’s expression turned serious as he finally began treating this spar as the real thing.
His speed surged all at once, and he left behind a glowing fragment only Silas could see.
Seeing it, Silas calmly adjusted his line.
The instant the afterimage broke apart, his fingers brushed the air almost imperceptibly.
[Obtained Shunpo Insight, Shunpo EXP +25]
Shiba Kaien’s hard-won understanding of Shunpo fused into Silas’s body on the spot.
The two figures chased one another across the peak.
This time Kaien finally gained the upper hand.
Kaien’s brow twitched.
Silas was a little slower, and yet he clung on so tightly that opening any real distance would be no easy task.
Stranger still, he felt a subtle change in the shape of Silas’s Shunpo.
The core of it was still the Shin’ō Academy style he knew well, but certain details in the turns and the accelerations carried the faint shadow of his own training.
Am I imagining it?
After some unmeasured stretch of time, the two of them finally halted, barely ten meters apart.
“Senpai, your Shunpo is very fast.”
“This is Mount Koifushi. There are no houses anywhere near, and it’s where I usually train. It suits a sparring ground well enough.”
Mount Koifushi had a gentle slope and sparse trees.
The summit opened into a wide clearing bathed in moonlight, a genuinely excellent place for a duel.
Kaien took the two wooden swords off his back and tossed one to Silas.
Silas caught it and tested the weight.
Middling.
He settled slowly into a basic chūdan-no-kamae.
Kaien turned serious as well, gripping his sword in both hands in an opening stance, a steady and sharp presence coming off him naturally.
“Watch yourself, senpai.”
Without any signal, both moved at the same instant.
The crisp, loud crack of wooden swords meeting rang far across the silent peak.
The next moment the clatter of wood ran unbroken as their figures shifted and crossed at speed under the moonlight.
The longer Kaien fought, the more startled he became.
Trained by Kinhiko and Ginbiko, his Zanjutsu was enough to overwhelm most of his peers.
Yet however his offense surged, wave after wave, Silas parried it steadily every time and found openings to answer back.
Is Vane-senpai really this strong?
[Obtained Zanjutsu Insight, Zanjutsu EXP +40]
[Obtained Zanjutsu Insight, Zanjutsu EXP +30]
Watching the fragments keep dropping, Silas felt thoroughly satisfied.
Kaien was practically a walking treasure house of experience.
He handled Kaien’s attacks while greedily soaking up those high-quality combat fragments.
Kaien’s Zanjutsu experience was assimilated and absorbed by Silas at speed.
His own strikes began to show subtle changes.
As the exchange deepened, Kaien’s shock grew.
He found that some of his habitual combinations and his ways of delivering power were being copied, whether deliberately or not, and folded into Silas’s defensive counters.
That degree of learning and adaptation was simply inconceivable.
“Good!”
Kaien shouted and stopped holding back.
His Spiritual Pressure erupted, a faint glow rose along the wooden sword, and he brought it down in a heavy diagonal slash.
Silas’s eyes narrowed.
He didn’t take it head-on.
He slid aside with Shunpo, and at the same time his wooden sword scraped up along Kaien’s blade in a reverse cut, straight for the wrist.
Kaien hurriedly changed his move to parry.
With a crisp crack, the two wooden swords, both charged with Spiritual Pressure, couldn’t survive a collision of that force and snapped in the middle together. The source of this chapter is novelping.com.
Amid the flying splinters, both men threw their swords aside at almost the same moment, and fists and palms met.
The fight turned to Hakuda.
Kaien’s Hakuda was every bit as outstanding, fierce and heavy.
Set alongside the technique he had honed over years of training, every punch carried force that couldn’t be ignored.
Silas’s strikes didn’t look as ferocious, but his movements were unpredictable, and he had an answer ready for every attack.
Under the moonlight the two figures traded blows, the sound of muffled impacts running on and on.
Dust rose and formed a hazy halo in the moonbeams.
The longer they fought, the more alarmed Kaien became.
Now he was certain.
Silas was like a sponge, constantly drawing in his combat experience and converting it into his own at an incredible rate.
This ability to learn from an opponent mid-fight and apply it on the spot was something he had never so much as heard of.
Deep in the fighting, in one close exchange, Silas seized on a fleeting gap in the transition between Kaien’s moves.
That came from the mass of predictive data built out of the combat habits carried inside the fragments he had absorbed.
An opening.
Kaien’s battle instinct was exceptionally sharp, and a sense of danger surged in him, but he couldn’t evade in time as Silas’s heavy punch came in.
Thud.
After an impact duller than the ones before it, both men gave ground several steps, their feet carving shallow pits into the earth.
Kaien touched his side.
In the final instant of contact, Silas had pulled the punch.
“Impressive…”
The two of them caught their breath a moment, and when they looked at each other again the fighting spirit in their eyes burned hotter.
It was the feeling of having found a worthy match.
Kaien’s overall strength stood a notch above his, but Silas’s experience was plainly the richer of the two.
A little eclectic, perhaps, and thoroughly practical.
He wondered where Vane-senpai had managed to scrape together this much combat experience over his years at the Shin’ō Academy.
“Again!”
Kaien gave a loud shout, and the two of them clashed once more.
Looking at the fragments filling the air, Silas watched his experience bar climb into the sky.
Until he felt his Spiritual Pressure was nearly spent and his body was heavy with exhaustion.
At that moment, Silas suddenly went still.
Perhaps it was the intense pressure the fight had put on his mind and spirit.
Perhaps something in the process of that fierce exchange had stirred it awake.
Deep inside Silas’s soul, that long-dormant wisp of dark-red Spiritual Pressure, the piece that belonged to a Hollow alone, began to move restlessly.
A cold, violent, alien sensation, thick with the hunger to devour, slid into his heart like a venomous snake.