The training hall fell into absolute silence. Even the distant sounds of the estate—servants moving through corridors, birds singing in the gardens—seemed to fade away, as if the world itself was holding its breath.
Sir Gareth's mouth opened and closed soundlessly as he stared at me. Whatever he'd been about to say about interruptions died in his throat, replaced by something that looked remarkably like recognition. Not of who I was—he knew that already—but of what I was.
The practice sword in my hand felt perfectly balanced, its weight distributed exactly as my muscle memory expected. In my previous life, I'd wielded blades that could cut through alien carapaces and dimensional barriers. This wooden training weapon was crude by comparison, but in the right hands, any sword could become death incarnate.
"Lance?" Celia's voice was small, confused. She stood frozen in her training stance, looking between Gareth and me with growing alarm. "What's wrong?"
I didn't answer immediately. My attention was fixed on the man who had spent weeks systematically destroying my sister's confidence, breaking down her spirit with calculated cruelty. The cold rage that had been building since Maria's revelation crystallized into something sharp and purposeful.
"Sir Gareth," I said quietly, my voice carrying across the hall with unnatural clarity. "I think we need to have a conversation."
"Young Master," Gareth began, his tone attempting to regain its earlier authority, "this is highly irregular. Training sessions are not—"
"The conversation," I continued as if he hadn't spoken, "is about what constitutes appropriate instruction for a student."
I took a step forward, and something in the movement made Gareth instinctively shift into a defensive posture. His hand went to his own practice sword, though he didn't draw it yet.
"I've been observing," I said, taking another measured step. "Listening. Learning about your... methods."
Gareth's eyes darted toward Celia, then back to me. "Young Master, if there have been complaints about my teaching style—"
"Teaching style." I let the words hang in the air like a blade poised to fall. "Is that what we're calling systematic psychological abuse now?"
The accusation struck home. I saw it in the slight widening of his eyes, the way his jaw tightened. Guilt and anger warred across his features before settling into something harder.
"You don't understand the pressures of real combat," he said, his voice taking on a defensive edge. "I'm preparing her for a world that won't coddle noble children. Better she learns harsh truths now than die from softness later."
"Harsh truths," I repeated, moving closer still. "Like telling a six-year-old girl that her mother weeps at night over her existence?"
Celia's sharp intake of breath told me she'd heard those words before. The pain in that small sound did something terrible to my self-control.
"Young Master Lance," Gareth said, straightening to his full height and drawing his practice sword in one smooth motion. "You're clearly upset, but you're also clearly out of your depth. Return to your studies and let me handle your sister's education."
The dismissive tone was a mistake. A serious one.
"Handle her education," I said softly, and drew my own blade with a whisper of wood against leather. "By all means, Sir Gareth. Show me how you handle things."
He blinked, apparently not expecting me to actually draw steel. "Young Master, surely you don't mean to—"
I moved.
Years of combat experience compressed into a single, flowing advance. My practice sword traced a perfect arc through the air, aimed not to kill—this was still just a training blade—but to demonstrate the vast gulf between us.
Gareth barely managed to get his sword up in time. The clash of wood on wood echoed through the hall, but what followed was more telling. The impact drove him back three full steps, his stance broken and his guard scattered.
"Impressive reflexes," I observed clinically, already flowing into my next attack. "But your fundamentals are lacking."
I pressed forward with a series of strikes that would have been impressive for any swordsman. For a six-year-old with an Orange Stage mana core, they should have been impossible. Each cut was placed with surgical precision, forcing Gareth to respond to threats from angles he clearly hadn't anticipated.
His greater size and reach should have given him advantages. His higher mana core should have provided superior physical enhancement. Instead, he found himself constantly on the defensive, forced to retreat step by step as my blade found every gap in his guard.
"Your stance is too wide," I noted conversationally, my sword sliding past his guard to tap his ribs with controlled force. "It leaves you vulnerable to low attacks."
He stumbled backward, breathing hard from exertion that shouldn't have affected an experienced knight so quickly.
"Your grip is inconsistent," I continued, flowing seamlessly from a thrust into a horizontal cut that forced him to frantically parry. "Sometimes too tight, sometimes too loose. It telegraphs your intentions."
Another series of attacks, each one finding its mark despite his increasingly desperate defenses. I was teaching him a lesson in the same way he'd been "teaching" Celia—by systematically demonstrating every flaw and inadequacy.
"Most critically," I said, my blade dancing around his guard to tap him lightly on the shoulder, "you mistake brutality for strength."
Gareth's face was flushed now, sweat beading on his forehead as he struggled to keep up with attacks that seemed to come from impossible angles. The careful superiority he'd maintained over a defenseless child was nowhere to be found when facing someone who actually knew how to hold a sword.
"This is impossible," he gasped between parries. "You're just a child!"
"Yes," I agreed, pressing my advantage with a combination that drove him nearly to his knees. "I am. Which makes your inability to land even a single blow rather telling, doesn't it?"
The psychological warfare was deliberate and precise. Every comment designed to mirror the systematic humiliation he'd inflicted on Celia, but with one crucial difference—my observations were accurate.
"Perhaps," I suggested as my blade traced a complex pattern that left three separate scoring marks on his tunic, "you should consider whether you're truly qualified to instruct anyone."
That was when something in Gareth finally snapped.
"Enough!" he roared, his mana core flaring with sudden intensity. Blue Stage mana flooded through his body, enhancing his speed and strength to levels that should have been overwhelming for someone of my apparent capabilities.
But more than that, something else began to manifest around his practice sword. A subtle shimmer at first, then growing more pronounced—a coating of pure, concentrated aura that transformed the wooden blade into something far more dangerous.
Sword Intent. The hallmark of a knight who had reached the first level of mastery of the sword.
"You want a real lesson, boy?" Gareth snarled, his enhanced speed carrying him forward in a blur of motion. "Let me teach you about the difference between talent and power!"
His Sword Aura swept toward me in a strike that held decades of training and the full force of his Blue Stage enhancement. It was a blow designed not just to defeat, but to dominate—to prove beyond question who held superiority in this exchange.
My wooden sword rose to meet it, and for a single, crystalline moment, time seemed suspended.
Then the blades met with a crack like thunder.
My practice sword exploded into splinters, the wooden fragments scattering across the training hall floor. The force of Gareth's enhanced strike had shattered it as easily as breaking kindling.
I stood perfectly still, looking down at the broken hilt in my hand with complete calm. Around me, wooden fragments settled to the floor with soft clicking sounds.
"There," Gareth panted, his aura still crackling around his intact blade. "Now you understand the difference between us. Talent means nothing without the power to back it up. You may be gifted, young Master, but you are not my match."
He straightened, confidence returning now that he'd reasserted what he saw as the natural order. "Perhaps now you'll show proper respect for your betters and leave your sister's training to those qualified to handle it."
I raised my head slowly, my crimson eyes meeting his with an expression that made him take an involuntary step backward.
"Sir Gareth," I said quietly, my voice carrying a note that seemed to resonate in the very air around us. "Do you think I can't kill you with this?"
I held up the broken sword hilt, its splintered end still sharp where the blade had snapped away. The question wasn't asked with anger or frustration, but with genuine, almost clinical curiosity—the tone one might use to ask about the weather or the time of day.
I tilted my head slightly, studying him with the same detached interest a scholar might show when examining a particularly unremarkable insect. My crimson eyes moved across his face with methodical precision, cataloging every feature as if trying to understand how something so insignificant had managed to draw my attention.
The silence stretched between us, heavy and oppressive. Somewhere behind me, I heard Celia's sharp intake of breath, but even that seemed muted, as if the very air had thickened around us.
Gareth's confident smirk began to falter under that gaze. His sword hand trembled almost imperceptibly—not from fear, not yet, but from some primal instinct that recognized it was in the presence of an apex predator. The kind of recognition that made prey animals freeze in open fields, knowing that movement would only hasten their doom.
"Young Master," he began, his voice notably less steady than before, "you can't possibly—"
I blinked slowly, the way a cat might when deciding whether something was worth the effort of killing. The simple gesture somehow conveyed volumes about how utterly beneath consideration he was. His words died in his throat as the temperature in the room seemed to drop several degrees.
His proud Sword Aura—moments before a symbol of hard-won mastery—began to flicker like a candle in the wind. Not from any attack I'd made, but simply from proximity to something so fundamentally superior that his technique couldn't maintain its integrity.
"Young Master," he began uncertainly, something in my demeanor raising alarms that his battle-tested instincts couldn't ignore.
But I was no longer listening to him. My mind had turned inward, to truths forged in battles against impossible odds.
This was the essence of Sword Unity—the fourth and ultimate level of sword mastery, far beyond the mere Intent that Gareth had achieved. At this level, the distinction between weapon and wielder ceased to exist. The sword was not a tool held in my hands, but an extension of my very soul.
'Every single thing,' I thought with absolute certainty, 'as long as it is wielded by me, is a sword.'
This wasn't philosophy or metaphor—it was the literal truth of Sword Unity. A broken stick, a dull knife, a piece of shattered glass, even my bare hands if necessary. All became instruments of perfect lethality when shaped by a will that had transcended the boundaries between self and blade.
My Orange mana core began to thrum with sudden intensity, but the power flowing through it was unlike anything this world typically witnessed. This was technique so refined it bordered on the supernatural, mastery so complete it could manifest impossible effects through inferior channels.
In my mind, words began to flow—not spoken aloud, but resonating through my consciousness with the weight of lived experience. Each verse carried not just memory, but the essential truth that had forged my path to Unity.
When worlds crumble in claws of the void,
Hope's corpse feeds the blade's hungry birth—
I rise as severance's final verse,
Wrought from slaughter's unyielding hearth.
The broken hilt in my hand began to transform, not physically, but in its essential nature. My will, shaped by Unity, imposed new reality upon the crude matter. What had been a destroyed training weapon became something far more fundamental—the perfect expression of cutting intent.
In halls where horrors scrape eternity's bone, I
reaped their chitin hymns with sweeping grace—
The crescent that harvests midnight's throne,
Turning desperate arcs to death's embrace.
Power flowed from memory into motion, from verse into technique. The first form of Final Dawn Severance began to manifest around the broken sword, not as mere aura but as crystallized understanding of what it meant to cut.
Gareth's crude Sword Intent—impressive for someone at the first level of mastery—suddenly appeared laughably inadequate. He had barely grasped what it meant for weapon and will to touch hands. I had achieved complete fusion, becoming something that existed beyond the petty limitations of physical form.
The air around me began to shimmer as my sword verse pressed against the boundaries of what an Orange Stage core should theoretically be able to channel. But mastery of this level didn't bow to such limitations—it transcended them, carved new possibilities from the fabric of impossibility itself.
When shells mocked mortality's fragile thread,
I became the star that threads through fate—
One point devouring realms of the dead,
Harvesting their cores in cosmic hate.
"Young Master," Gareth whispered, backing away despite himself as the broken weapon in my hands began to sing with harmonies that defied comprehension. "What are you doing?"
But I was beyond answering now, lost in the internal recitation that was reshaping reality around me. Each remembered verse wasn't just poetry—it was technical instruction, philosophical truth, and murder incarnate all compressed into perfect understanding.
The power building around me transcended simple aura manipulation. This was what happened when someone who had touched the peaks of sword mastery imposed their will upon the world through technique so refined it became indistinguishable from magic.
And in that moment, as my broken sword ceased to be wood and splinters and became pure cutting intent made manifest, something impossible happened to Gareth's carefully maintained Sword Aura.
The blue nimbus around his blade—his proud achievement, the mark of Intent—began to crack and split apart.
Not from direct attack, but from simple proximity to something so far beyond its level that its very existence was challenged. Like ice meeting flame, like shadow meeting dawn.
The blue nimbus around his blade flickered, wavered, and began to split apart at the edges.
Gareth stared in horror as decades of training and achievement started to unravel before the weight of true mastery.
"What..." he breathed, his voice barely audible over the rising resonance of power filling the training hall, "what are you?"