Noah dodged.
His steps were light.
With the smallest push from the ball of his foot and a simple turn of the body, Nina’s descending sword passed right beside him.
[Mind’s Eye ★★★]
[Effect: Danger perception based on the sixth sense.
Through cultivation and training, it may develop into extraordinary insight, allowing the Host to calmly assess both self and enemy in combat, avoid danger, and counterattack.]
Activating this talent had caused Noah no shortage of suffering.
Just reading the description told you what the training requirement had been.
He’d needed to get beaten.
A lot.
Still, it was a talent Noah had considered absolutely necessary.
Nothing beat the sense of security it gave him.
Applied to the current fight, the result was simple.
Nina’s first sword missed.
She instantly adjusted and swept sideways.
Noah avoided it by the smallest margin.
She changed direction and pursued.
He dodged again.
Another change.
Another dodge.
To everyone watching, Nina’s attacks came like a violent storm while Noah drifted through them like a tiny boat in raging waves—always appearing one breath from capsizing, yet somehow completely safe.
Nina: attack, attack, attack, attack, attack…
Noah: dodge, dodge, dodge, dodge, dodge…
The crowd stared.
One person did nothing but attack and couldn’t touch the other.
The other did nothing but defend and refused to counter.
Were these two playing around?
Before long, Nina was the first to break off her assault.
She stopped and breathed heavily, having spent far more energy than Noah.
“Can you do anything except run?!”
She shouted at him in frustration and anger.
He was slippery as an eel.
No matter what she did, she couldn’t touch him.
Of course a despicable bastard would fight like a despicable bastard!
Where was a swordsman’s pride?!
Nina was officially overheating.
Noah, meanwhile, had only been evading and had spent far less stamina.
Honestly, it had been easy.
What was footwork?
This was footwork.
The truth, however, was that Noah was still thinking about the system.
It had suddenly produced a new kind of reward earlier.
Was that connected to what he had done?
What exactly triggered the reward?
If he defeated Nina too, would he get another one?
Not that he planned on losing regardless.
But the system had specifically said [The System greatly approves of your performance].
Maybe the key word was performance.
Noah felt it was worth experimenting.
The problem was that the back-to-back duels gave him no opportunity to stop and think.
He’d already committed to the show.
Calling a timeout in front of everyone would only make him look afraid.
Nina rushed at him again like an enraged cat hissing at everything in sight.
Noah used the same old trick.
Dodge.
Watching round two of Attack versus Dodge, the spectators slowly went numb.
That included both Sword Emperors.
Only Gal Farion wore an increasingly shameless grin.
Marcus finally couldn’t take it anymore.
If this continued, the duel was going to become even more ridiculous.
“Noah!
Fight her head-on!”
“Yeah!”
“How can you just keep dodging?!”
“What kind of duel is this?!”
Calls erupted from the surrounding crowd.
“Mm…”
Noah agreed it was probably time to switch things up.
For the first time, sword met sword.
A dry crack rang through the hall.
The two separated after the clash and returned to their respective sides.
Noah had been cautious because he remembered the original story.
If Nina’s wooden sword had been swapped for a weighted training weapon with lead hidden inside, like Eris’s had been, a direct clash would have been embarrassing.
One exchange and his weapon might have snapped.
Thankfully, he’d worried for nothing.
“How about we settle this in one move?” Noah asked after regaining his stance.
Nina didn’t answer.
She focused on recovering her breathing.
Anger still burned in her eyes, but the stance she assumed—the usual starting posture for the Longsword of Silence—was answer enough.
Nina: Rage Gauge 100%.
The spectators finally became interested again and stared without blinking.
Noah smiled faintly and assumed his own preferred starting stance.
It wasn’t anything taught by the dojo instructors.
He reversed both hands, brought the hilt close to his chest, then slowly raised the wooden sword until it rested level with his shoulder, edge facing upward.
At the same time, he lowered his waist slightly and drew his right leg one step back, presenting his body sideways.
The strange posture gradually silenced the surrounding conversations.
Nina saw that Noah finally seemed serious and concentrated even harder.
Her grip tightened around the wooden sword.
He had given up the evasive speed that had been his greatest advantage and chosen to contest swordsmanship directly.
She couldn’t afford to underestimate him.
Nina watched Noah.
Noah watched Nina.
Their gazes met.
Time seemed to freeze and race forward at once.
Pressure built between them.
Nina lost patience first.
The Sword God Style was the ultimate school of speed, built around striking first and winning first.
Yes, if the initial attack failed, the style could be vulnerable.
But all she needed to do was seize the initiative and defeat the opponent before that mattered.
Too much thought only dulled the sword.
Gather strength.
Strike first.
The realization snapped into place.
Fueled by anger, Nina attacked.
Her heavy step drove force back through the floor and launched her body forward faster than usual.
Her sword pointed toward Noah and raced straight for his neck.
Wrapped in emotion, the strike gave Nina an exhilarating sense of release.
Noah’s Mind’s Eye ran at full capacity.
He saw Nina’s advancing figure.
He saw the point of the sword heading toward him.
If the Sword God Style was built on striking first…
Then he’d simply strike second and arrive first.
Bang!
Noah didn’t dodge.
He moved with the incoming force and used arm strength Nina couldn’t resist to smash her blade downward without mercy.
Crack!
Wood struck flesh.
From an angle Nina had never imagined, Noah’s sword slammed into her arm.
Her eyes widened in disbelief.
She was so shocked that even when she fell, she forgot to cry out in pain.
The Sword God Style’s method of generating force.
The speed theory behind the Longsword of Silence and Longsword of Light.
What he’d heard about the principle of Light Reversal.
Jino’s future variant of the Sword God Style.
And an ultimate technique once wielded by a swordsman from fiction in Noah’s previous life.
He had kneaded all of those ideas together into a hidden card he’d practiced obsessively.
[Longsword of Silence: Tsubame Gaeshi]
If he wasn’t fast enough to perform Light Reversal, then surely he could at least use Tsubame Gaeshi.
Granted, this version was more like a youthful, degraded, broken, bootleg knockoff.
But the three slashes, executed so quickly they appeared nearly simultaneous, combined with [Mind’s Eye ★★★] and [Arm Strength ★★], let Noah exploit his unusual wrist strength to alter force at extreme speed and complete a rapid three-hit sequence.
In practice, he’d stopped after the second strike landed.
Judging by the sound, that one had hurt.
Fortunately, this was only sparring and neither of them had used battle aura.
Otherwise Nina might have needed a long recovery.
Noah thought about that quietly.
As the one-move duel ended, the atmosphere seemed to freeze.
The Sword Saints’ expressions stiffened.
They couldn’t believe what they’d seen either.
That first motion looked vaguely like Light Reversal, something only Timothy, Marcus, and the Sword Kings present should have been capable of using.
But what the hell were the follow-up strikes?!
[Defeated ‘Future Sword Emperor’ Nina Farion with overwhelming superiority and astonished the entire hall through technique.]
[Fate Power Rating +1.]
[Fate Power Rating: 4.]
[The System is greatly delighted by your performance.]
[Acquired: Prototype – Ten Thousand Swings: Tsubame Gaeshi.]
[Note: One thought reaches the divine; sudden enlightenment follows.]
Noah stared at the message.
‘Bro, did we walk onto the wrong set?’
‘System…
are you a Type-Moon fan too?!’
Leaving aside Noah, who had just received another inexplicable reward…
…
‘Totally misjudged him.’
Two techniques were required before a swordsman could reliably reach Sword King: Longsword of Light and Light Reversal.
The relationship between them was ultimately one of speed.
Light Reversal meant moving even faster than a Longsword of Light and interrupting the opponent before their technique fully emerged.
The technique Noah had just used certainly looked similar, but he’d raised the sword so high to shorten the distance his blade needed to travel.
The real focus was the chain of follow-up strikes, which demanded enormous wrist strength and precise technique.
Gal and Timothy reached essentially the same conclusion after watching the duel.
Then both turned toward Marcus at the same time.
Their eyes clearly asked:
‘You taught him this?
You old bastard.
You’ve been playing us.’
Marcus endured the combined stare of his superior and colleague, mouth twitching.
‘I didn’t!
I swear!
I don’t know either!’