Chapter 1747: No Spells Cast
Chapter 1747: No Spells Cast
"She’s using water!" A grizzled samurai in the prisoner block shot to his feet, jabbing his finger toward the floor. "That’s not hers! She’s channeling outside power! This duel is supposed to be blade against blade!"
"Oh, sit down." A young samurai three rows back rounded on the veteran with open contempt. "Lady Kaede started slinging spells already like a siege mage, and you didn’t breathe a word about sacred traditions then."
"That’s different! The [Ougon Zan] looks like an honorable samurai technique..."
The lieutenant with the ruined arm vehemently disagreed. "Lady Ayame hasn’t cast a spell. She spoke no incantation nor did she expend mana."
She shook her head while smiling softly, realizing just what an extraordinary sight she had been permitted to witness. "Look at the water on her blade. It follows her line, serves her cuts. That is a warrior’s bond refined into her swordsmanship. Whatever that man gave her simply let her become what she was always going to be. Now look at Lady Kaede and tell me you see the same thing."
Nobody could.
On the floor, the water had done what the borrowed levels couldn’t: it closed the last distance between Ayame’s instinct and her body, the hair-thin gap between seeing the perfect cut and delivering it.
What remained on the other side was the truest version of the samurai she’d been building toward her whole life, angles served the instant they appeared, parries merging into strikes without a seam between defense and attack.
She slipped beneath an arc with a twist of her hips that trailed water behind her blade in a pale blue ribbon, and the ribbon curved with her rotation and caught the overhead sun, painting a luminous crescent across the arena air before dissolving into mist.
In the prisoner block, samurai forgot they were captives.
A young soldier had stopped breathing entirely, her eyes tracking the water ribbons, stunned at what her clan’s swordsmanship had become in this woman’s hands.
It felt like watching a master calligrapher turn violence into brushwork.
Ayame’s feet poured from one step into the next like water finding its way downhill, and the katana followed the same liquid logic, turning Kaede’s arcs back into the stone at angles that bled their force into the floor instead of meeting it.
"What a pitiful, pitiful existence you’ve become, Kaede..." Ayame’s voice carried across the frost, level and unhurried. "I can feel it through every exchange. The blade reaches for the opening, and your body chases it. You’re not wielding a weapon but being steered by one."
Kaede screamed and swung the relic in a diagonal that cracked the air, and the arc that left the steel was no longer gold.
It burned the color of dried blood veined with threads of crimson that pulsed with their own heartbeat.
The golden arcs vanished in a single swing, replaced by a raw demonic wound torn through the air, trailing dark wisps in its wake as if the atmosphere itself were decaying where the arc had passed.
The relic had stopped pretending.
The first demonic arc caught Ayame across the guard and flung her backward three full paces, her heels carving trenches through the ground, and the water on her katana hissed and recoiled from the contact as if it had touched something it refused to mix with.
The second came faster than the golden ones ever had, a crescent of dried-blood light that detonated the floor where she’d been standing a half-breath before, and the shockwave alone sent cracks racing beneath her feet.
These were nothing like the arcs she’d been dismantling.
The golden ones had carried a lot of force, but the demonic ones were just as strong if not more and also carried rot, a wrongness that clung to the air after the light passed and made the water on her blade shudder.
But the relic’s new power came with a price it couldn’t hide.
"Gh!"
Dark veins crawled up Kaede’s sword arm from the wrist, spreading beneath her skin in black threads that pulsed in time with the crimson arcs, and each swing drained the color from her face a shade further.
Her movements changed with the arcs, swings losing whatever form remained as the weapon wrenched her arms toward openings she hadn’t chosen, the blade and its wielder lurching through exchanges like a beast dragging its rider through a field it chose.
The golden arcs had been wild but recognizable as swordsmanship. The demonic ones were artless, aimed by a will that did not care about the body it was burning through.
In the prisoner block, the lieutenant stared at the dark arcs and the black veins threading their chosen’s arm, and the expression that settled on her face was a tired, bone-deep confirmation.
"That is what we served," she said. "Whatever fate has in store for us, we deserve worse."
Around her, a thousand faces found the floor.
For three exchanges, Ayame gave ground.
She deflected where she could and dodged where she couldn’t, and the water on her blade kept flinching from every contact with the demonic arcs, thinning and scattering before crawling back along the steel. For the first time since the water arrived, the older sister looked pressed.
"Hmm..."
Then her eyes shifted and the water stopped flinching.
"Is your master throwing a hissy fit?" Ayame chuckled.
She had already adapted.
"Compared to the real deal..."
Water thickened along the katana’s edge and leaned into the next parry instead of recoiling, meeting the demonic rot and running through it the way a river runs through poison and comes out clean on the other side.
Ayame’s stance loosened as the bond answered what her instinct asked of it.
"This is nothing."
She moved through the demonic arcs the way her water moved through broken ground, filling gaps without forcing them, and the contrast between the sisters had never been more absolute.
Kaede’s body was eating itself to fuel the relic’s tantrum while Ayame flowed through it with a grace that deepened with every exchange, the water and the samurai becoming one fluid thing that turned corruption into mist.
Clean blue ribbons trailed Ayame’s katana as she turned and cut and turned again with a precision so complete that her movements looked unhurried at full speed, every dodge so natural that no amount of stolen power could replicate it.
A thin line opened across Kaede’s cheek, a cut so precise it barely bled.
Then her forearm, then the back of her thigh in a slice that buckled the knee for a full stride before the relic’s brute force hammered the leg straight again.
"Back when your blade created silver streaks, you were so much more threatening. All that grace and control... When I first saw you again after what you did to me, I thought you became a warrior I could never hope to reach."
Ayame grinned, cocky and condescending. "Why don’t you fight like that again?"
Her grin deepened. "Can’t do it? You aren’t permitted to by your master?"
"Argh! Listen to me, damn it!" Kaede finally stopped pretending and began screaming at her own blade with full fury. "I am the master and you’re the tool!"
It did not work.
The blade produced even more violent, darker attacks that, for a woman moving with such fluidity as Ayame, looked less and less threatening by the second.
"Pathetic... So damned pathetic..." Ayame sighed.