Evangeline stayed there for a few more seconds and corrected the angle of his wrist.
"Don’t strangle your sword with your fingers. Holding it firmly is different from holding it too tightly." Her hand moved over Leonis’s wrist and slightly reduced the pressure of his fingers. "When all your muscles are already tense, the moment you actually need strength, there will be nothing left to release."
He kept his eyes on the blade and tried to apply what she was saying at the same time.
But it was not easy.
The main reason was the warm and soft body of the woman who was still almost pressed against his back, and every time she moved slightly to correct his position, his focus was forced into a completely different kind of battle.
Evangeline’s soft and full breasts pressed against his shoulders from behind, and with every short breath she took, the warmth of her skin passed through her thin training clothes and into his body.
When she leaned slightly forward to correct the angle of his arm more precisely, the soft curve of her butt touched Leonis’s thigh for a moment, and that feeling settled into his mind like a spark.
And no matter how attractive this situation was, passing the exam was not going to happen just because he had a beautiful master.
A few moments later, Evangeline moved away from behind him, and Leonis almost felt like the temperature of the room had dropped by several degrees.
The woman walked toward the center of the field and placed her black sword on her shoulder.
"Now show me something that the Habsburg Family was truly proud of."
He stayed still for a moment, there was no need to ask what she meant, and his eyes slowly lowered to the training sword.
"The Six Crowns?"
"However much of it you truly know." Evangeline tilted her head slightly.
That sentence made Leonis’s hand stop on the handle for a moment.
Knowing was different from being able to do something.
The memories of this body had given him a lot of information; years of training, thousands of repetitions of movements, and the knowledge that a Habsburg heir received from childhood.
But memories could not replace the body.
And they could not allow a Level One to perform a technique created for beings who had reached the highest stages of power, where even normal battlefields were considered too small for them.
The Six Crowns of Habsburg.
They were not the entirety of the Habsburg swordsmanship.
On the contrary, most of Habsburg swordsmanship was made up of basic principles, footwork, Mana circulation, defense, counterattacks, and thousands of other small details that made a real swordsman.
The Six Crowns were what stood at the end of all that training.
Six final moves.
Six answers from the Habsburgs to beings that made humans look small in comparison.
The old philosophy of the family had only one sentence.
If the enemy is bigger, create an attack that makes their size no longer matter.
The power of each Crown was not limited to the current form of the movement, as the user’s Mana, body, Core, control, and understanding became stronger, the scale of the technique itself would grow with them.
In Leonis’s memories, the First Crown had once only split a few meters of ground.
But the same movement in the hands of one of his ancestors, centuries later, had split the fallen body of a giant and had also cut the mountain behind it in half.
And that was still not its limit.
He slowly adjusted his steps, among the Six Crowns, only one of them was currently something more than a memory to him.
The Second Crown, Burial of a Thousand Kings, the Third Crown, Fall of Heaven,
The Fourth Crown, Sword Sovereignty,
The Fifth Crown, Emperor’s Funeral,
And the Sixth Crown... End Of Crown.
Even Leonis’s memories about it were incomplete.
Only one sentence from the father of this body remained in his mind.
"When your sword no longer sees any distance between you and your enemy, you will understand the Sixth Crown."
That was all.
Its secrets had disappeared along with most of the Habsburg Family, but none of that mattered right now.
Leonis could not even begin the Second Crown, he only knew about them, the only thing he had available to him... was the First Crown, and he could only use that one.
He took a few steps away from his master.
Evangeline said nothing and only watched.
He took a deep breath, Mana left his Core, but he did not send it directly into the sword.
The energy first entered his legs, then moved upward through his waist, passed through his shoulder, and flowed along his arm.
His body had to become part of the strike, not something that simply carried the sword.
He took a step, breathed, positioned his waist better, and shifted the pressure onto his back leg.
Mana slowly gathered on the blade, and the air around the sword changed.
The dust near the ground was pulled toward the blade, and a deep sound formed inside the hall.
Leonis slightly pressed his teeth together.
It was a lot of Mana, more than an ordinary skill should consume in a single moment.
But he did not stop, lines appeared across the blade and the pressure of the Mana increased, the stone beneath his right foot made a quiet sound and several thin cracks appeared on it.
Evangeline, who had been standing completely calmly until that moment, made her eyes slightly more serious.
Not because of the amount of power, that amount was nothing to someone at her level, what caught her attention was the way her disciple was using his entire body.
No separate part was attacking, and everything was becoming one single movement.
He raised the sword.
"First Crown..."
Mana compressed along the edge of the blade.
"Falling Star."
The sword came down and the air of the hall was split with a heavy sound, a huge silver crescent separated from the blade and moved across the field like a compressed blade.
The first training dummy did not even have time to shake, the slash passed through the middle of its body.
The second was split into two a moment later, and the third was also cut apart along the direct path of the attack, its two halves falling to the ground in opposite directions.
The slash continued.
Boom!
It struck the protective barrier at the end of the hall.
The transparent surface of the barrier bent inward for a moment, and bright lines moved across it.
The pressure spread through the entire back wall, and then the energy ran out.
The silver light faded, and silence returned to the hall, three training dummies lay on the ground, cut in half.
Leonis lowered his sword, his breathing was heavier than before.
But a single move had been enough to empty all his Mana, his entire Core was empty and nothing remained, this was not an attack he could perform twice in a row.
Evangeline looked at the destruction in front of them.
"Flashy."
"I thought you would at least be impressed." Leonis slowly breathed out.
"I am..."
Evangeline walked past him and stopped beside where he had been standing. As she moved past him, the movement of her well-shaped butt under the tight training clothes was completely clear.
With every step, those two round and full curves moved slightly up and down, and the thin fabric clearly showed their full and firm shape. The light scent of her warm skin remained in the air for a moment and disturbed his focus again.
"Your shoulder rose before the strike."
She touched Leonis’s shoulder with the tip of her scabbard.
"An enemy who really knows how to fight will understand from this movement where your attack is going to come from."
Then the scabbard pointed toward the blade.
"You also put Mana into the sword earlier than you needed to. Almost ten percent of what you gathered was wasted before the release."
Leonis frowned, he had also felt part of that waste himself.
But his master continued.
"Worst of all, after releasing the attack, your body was completely open for almost two seconds. Your balance remained on your front leg, your Core was still releasing pressure, and you could not immediately use Quick Step."
She looked directly into his eyes.
"If this attack doesn’t hit the Fallen, you’re dead."
Leonis said nothing, the woman’s words were harsh, but accurate.
"The Six Crowns were made to kill, your problem is that you still don’t know how to stay alive long enough to get the chance to use them, and unfortunately, your talent isn’t helping you with that."
Leonis placed his sword on his shoulder.
Evangeline took a few steps back and stood in the middle of the hall.
"The Habsburg style is direct. Even when it becomes complicated, the final goal is the same; there is something in front of you, destroy it."
"My style is different." She continued. "I was never looking for power against power from the beginning. If you can control the timing, distance, and flow of the battle, your opponent can be as strong as they want and still never get the chance to use their power properly."
"The name of my skill is Seven Veils of Evernight, and you are going to learn it, little disciple."