Chapter 726: Reversing The Third Style [Bonus - ]

Chapter 726: Reversing The Third Style [Bonus Chapter]

’It’s too fast to slip sideways,’ Silas calculated, watching the green crescent tear toward his face. ’The ring cut his wind-up to nothing... If I step back, the wingtip clips my shoulder.’

As usual, Silas didn’t try to parry it.

The ribbon of water around his sword dissolved and rushed down his legs to pool under his boots.

It packed itself into a dense swirling disc of high-pressure liquid that began to compress under his soles like an iron spring.

WHOOSH!

The disc detonated downward against the floor with the force of a steam piston.

The blast launched Silas straight up with his boots clearing the floor in a clean vertical climb of twelve feet.

FWOOM!

The Severing Gale screamed through the exact spot where his throat had been and passed under his soles, and went on across sixty yards of open floor to slam into the blue barrier.

BOOOOM!

The dome shuddered.

It flashed a violent purple, and the impact rolled through the stands above and sent a shower of harmless cyan sparks sliding down the blast-glass.

Valerius’s golden eyes snapped up toward the ceiling.

’Up there?!’ His mind raced to keep pace. ’He used a water geyser to skip my horizontal line completely?! Who jumps straight up against a wind user?!’

"...That’s cheating!" he shouted.

"Ah? And the one using the equipment for faster casting isn’t cheating?!" Silas shouted back, from the air.

Valerius gritted his teeth and grinned at the same time, which looked painful.

"You can’t dodge in the air, Silas!"

BANG!

He stamped a pocket of wind under his boot and shot up off the floor.

BANG! BANG!

Two more hops.

He took the air like a staircase, each step a crack of compressed gale with his arming sword trailing a streak of green as he ran straight up the sky at Silas.

’Okay,’ Silas thought. ’He’s right... I can’t technically dodge...’

He could use wind magic of course, that wasn’t really an issue so he could however he was trying to avoid that until push came to shove since this was Valerius.

’...Unless the sky has water in it.’

He slapped his free palm sideways.

A hard jet of water burst from it, a thin silver spear of spray, and shoved him two feet off line as the arming sword stabbed through the spot where his ribs had been.

"Oh come ON!" Valerius yelled.

CLANG!

Their blades met in midair and threw sparks the size of coins as the shock spun them apart like dropped tops.

CLANG!

They met again as they came back around with both blades screaming and this time the shockwave kicked them away from each other like two billiard balls.

Valerius bounced off a cushion of his own wind and dropped to the floor in a skid with his boots grinding smoking lines into the tile.

’Fuck...’

Silas on the other hand, turned a slow lazy cartwheel through the spray and came down on the balls of his feet with the tiles cracking in a tidy ring under his boots.

Dark bangs fell over his forehead.

He rolled his shoulders once, and the water crept back up his legs and into the sword as if it had never left.

"My turn," Silas said.

Valerius didn’t wait for the invitation as he dragged his blade across his body in a horizontal sweep.

"Severing Gale—!"

Then he reversed it, dropping the edge in a vertical chop through the same point in the air.

"—CROSS-SEVER!"

SHRRRRRIIIIIK!

The two cuts crossed and met at a point ten feet in front of Silas.

For a heartbeat the air tore in an X as a bright seam of vacuum hung there with its edges screaming, and all the loose wind in the chamber rushed toward it, tugging at Silas’s jacket, snatching his breath, dragging him in by the ribs.

The floor tiles shivered and the suction dragged loose grit across the stone toward the rift.

’What a strong attack... Silas thought. ’If it closes on me, I’m folded in half... This is really the kind of growth I expect from someone like Valerius.’

He dropped his weight and twisted his hips, and he reached for something deeper in his sword-forms.

’First Style.’

The water on his blade stopped flowing and began to spin.

"Severing Horizon!"

He swung the broadsword flat in a full rotation... a single smooth three-hundred-and-sixty-degree sweep with his whole body behind it.

A thin ring of dark blue sea mana flew off the edge of the blade and spread out in a perfect horizontal circle at waist height... it was no thicker than a sheet of glass and darker than the deep ocean.

ZZZZZZZZZT!

The ring sped across the floor and met the X.

SHING!

The vacuum rift split cleanly down the middle.

The ring went through the center of the tear as if the rift were a soap bubble, and every crossing line of wind snapped apart.

BOOOOOOOM!

The pull vanished and the shredded air rushed back in with a booming thunderclap that blew Silas’s hair straight up off his forehead.

WHUMP!

Up in the stands Morwenna shot half a step forward and caught herself on the rail.

"He made his hips low..." Morwenna muttered. "He really kept his hips low... to maximize the technique."

All that fucking yesterday taught him a lot of technique from what she could see and Morwenna had the urge to laugh. Could Eluned’s pussy ever teach Silas a new way to utilize his current technique?

’I think not!’

"It is quite beautiful..." said Aeliana, who had not been listening.

"I said he kept his hips low fool!"

"I heard you the first time," said Aeliana, and the cold war quietly reopened its second front.

Down on the field the ring sped on across the floor, clipped the base of the barrier and died in a brief spray of blue sparks.

Valerius stared at the empty air where his best technique had just been dissolved then he threw back his head and laughed out loud.

"HAHAHA! Again! That’s insane! Do that again!"

"...I’d rather you didn’t make me!"

"TOO BAD!"

He came in anyway.

CLANG! CLANG! CLANG!

Three cuts, left to right to left and each one was thrown with the full weight of his hips.

’He seems to be enjoying himself... If he was moving like this in the Tournament Of Succession...’

Silas took them on the flat of his blade and let them roll off.

The first slid along the steel and into the empty air, the second he pulled across his chest and sent sparking down the length of his guard.

As for the third, he tapped it with two fingers’ worth of pressure, and the whole line of Valerius’s attack swung wide like a gate on a hinge.

’He’s learning,’ Silas thought, tilting his head as the green sword whistled past his ear. ’He’s pulling it closer to his body every time.’

"You’re improving!"

"Don’t compliment me while you’re disarming me... Seriously fucker!"

"I’m not disarming you though."

"You’re—" Valerius looked down as his sleeve had a clean slit from the wrist to the elbow. "Quite a monster."

’He would have ranked really high in the tournament, but I wonder why he didn’t fight.’

SHING! ⅇℯ𝚕.

Silas’s edge came back around and stopped one finger’s width from his collar, trembling with held-back water.

Valerius sucked in his breath and for one second the two of them stood a sword’s length apart with the both of them grinning.

"...Right," Valerius said, softly. "One more."

"One more," Silas agreed.

CRACK!

They separated then Valerius fired a Wind Burst from both boots at once and exploded across the arena.

Aero-Displacement stripped the air from the path in front of him, a vacuum corridor that let him rocket forward with almost no drag.

He crossed the distance as if the floor had been greased with his arming sword spinning up into a whirlwind arc that gathered the loose gale around it in a green blur.

"Zephyr Slash!"

WHIIIIIIRRRRR!

’A straight line,’ Silas thought, watching the gale peel back around his friend. ’...Once he commits to that corridor, all he can do is come.’

That meant there was a window... A small one which was maybe the width of a breath.

He planted a boot and let his legs bend.

"Silas!" Valerius screamed, looking wild-eyed and grinning. "Dodge this one properly!"

’He’s going to jump,’ Valerius thought, through the roar of the corridor. ’Again... Fine... The whirlwind goes wherever he goes. There’s no ceiling in this room tall enough to save him!’

’There’s a ceiling,’ Silas thought, a little too cheerfully. ’It’s about sixty feet up, and I’m not going anywhere near it.’

The spring under his boots pulsed once in time with his heart.

Water gathered beneath him again, rising from the tiles in a clear pulsing spring that welled up under his soles and drew itself tight around his knees.

Valerius’s cutting edge came in hot with the whirlwind shrieking like a green wall of cutting edges however Silas leaped.

The spring launched him upward, and the whirlwind swept under his heels and kept going and slammed into the barrier at full speed.

KRAAAAAAAAANG!

The dome rang like a struck bell as cyan light cracked outward in spiderweb lines across the whole wall.

"The wall cracked!" Solenne shrieked from the stands. "My Lord, the wall cracked! That’s a high tier barrier... I read the specs on the way down!"

"It’ll hold," Mia said, chewing a honey-nut she’d smuggled from the tavern. "Probably."

"Probably?!"

"Look at their faces... They’re not done."

Valerius’s eyes went wide.

"He did it again—!"

Above him Silas hung at the top of his arc, rising for one long breath with the cold air whipping his black jacket.

Beneath his boots the gathered water churned.

It rushed up around his descending frame and wound around the blade in a thick violent spiral, spinning with terrifying torque.

’Morwenna already gave me a way to attack the side and a way to break up...’

His eyes flashed a brilliant blinding gold.

’Like the way the Third Style works,’ He realized. ’Don’t let the water spread into an open wave and don’t waste the mass either... Condense the entire column into the point of the blade, and drive the weight of the sea straight down the line!’

He channeled the pressurized water downward along the length of the sword.

The liquid packed tighter and tighter as it darkened to a deep churning navy so dense it seemed to swallow the glare of the floodlights, and the air around it began to hum.

FWOOOOOOSH!

The water screamed along the blade and the light dimmed around him as if the whole sea had been pulled into one point.

Silas tipped over at the top of his arc and fell, and for one long second the only sound in the chamber was the rushing of the air.

WHOOSH!

He plummeted like an iron anchor thrown from the clouds, falling through the air with the crushing weight of a tidal column driving behind his edge.

Down on the tiles, Valerius gritted his teeth as his golden eyes filled with a blue deluge hurtling toward his skull.

’He’s coming down like a falling mountain!’ His instincts screamed that any sidestep would leave him in the splash radius. ’No room to dodge! I have to meet it and break it!’

"Bring it down, Silas!" he bellowed, pouring every drop of his Purple Core’s wind mana into his arms.

He planted both boots in the gray tiles, bent his knees and threw his arming sword up in a two-handed reinforced parry, with emerald wind shrieking around the steel to meet the falling ocean.

CRACK!

The broadsword crashed down onto the arming sword dead in the center of the chamber and the impact was absolute.

KRAAAAAAAAAAK!

The tiles under Valerius’s boots split in a spider of cracks, and the pillar of water stopped for one trembling heartbeat, held between wind and sea... then the pressure found a way out.

A wall of churning water burst out from the point of collision in a blinding torrent of white foam and high-pressure mist... The tiles bucked, and a hurricane of spray and steam rolled across the whole field.

BANG!

A second concussive shockwave ripped through the floor an instant later and blew the mist outward in a thirty-foot halo of howling air, shaking the bedrock itself.

Up in the stands, Solenne screamed and dove behind Rika’s skirt... Mia whooped and punched the air.

"THAT’S MY STUDENT! Did you see the elbow?!"

’Aren’t you supposed to be cheering for your own Lord...?’

Rika blinked at the spray rolling toward the glass.

"Well... this battle sure is interesting." She said and the phoenix peeked out and sneezed a tiny puff of smoke.

Truly, battles with weaker beings were a bit interesting... Not that her master was weak but that was what they were to divine beings, battles truly stopped becoming interesting when one became a deity and divinity came into the mix.

Rika trembled a bit.

’Any random deity could come out of nowhere and one-shot you and they don’t want to enjoy a battle at all...’

Thor was one of the few that wanted to but she was so strong that you just had to reconsider your choices for that one, because you would regret it.

Morwenna gripped the rail so hard that the iron creaked, and her jaw hung open a quarter inch.

’He reversed the Third Style... Heh...’

Silas landed lightly on the balls of his feet, in a crouch that cracked the tile in a new ring with his black jacket snapping in the backdraft of wind and spray.

Water ran off his chin and dripped from the tip of his sword.

His heart hammered with something very close to joy as his dark hair blew wildly across his brow.

"Okay..."

He kept the broadsword loose in his right hand with his senses already coiled for the next rotation of his sword-form, and eased his guard down an inch to see through the thinning sheets of falling water.

Then, through the mist, something made him stop.

’Huh...?’