Feeling the deep waves of soreness and numbing vibration racing up his forearms, Lucia was thoroughly shaken inside. Possessing the pure bloodline of an Ancient Dragon Sovereign, his biological paraters and raw physical talent should have outclassed Radahn's trics. Reinforced by the structural enhancents of the Dragon King's Body and the premium multiplier of the Golden Vow, he should have been able to decisively flatten the other boy in a contest of un-vouched power.
Yet, the raw kinetic payload contained within Radahn's counter-strike had completely overridden his tactical baseline. It was clear the Carian prince wasn't relying strictly on the contraction of common flesh and bone. His engine had achieved a precise, alchemical fusion between active internal magic power and his muscular-skeletal frawork—unleashing a terrifying, structural force that faintly surpassed Lucia's own mass by half a asure.
Despite witnessing his opponent deploy a force-amplification technique entirely absent from his gaming archives, Lucia registered not a single volt of fear. Radahn possessed an unexpected thod of compressing his internal power, but how could a transmigrator who essentially lived inside the mory Battlefield be restricted to dogmatically repeating the exact historical scripts he had harvested from others?
In the span of a dozen breaths, the two demigods had already traded hundreds of high-velocity blows. Though Radahn held a razor-thin advantage in raw physical mass for the watch, facing Lucia's formidable, scale-reinforced physical defense and an offense that refused to surrender its ferocious montum, the red-haired prince lacked the chanical leverage to break through the line.
Right then, Lucia's blade-work shifted its architecture completely.
The edge of his ancestral Dragon-Scale Blade, which had just perfectly absorbed one of Radahn's heavy cleaver slashes, abruptly snapped back against the steel. His four silver-white wings violently flared, causing his silhouette to flutter backward across the water with weightless velocity.
Seizing the sudden montum advantage, Radahn imdiately brandished his twin greatswords, his boots kicking up massive columns of spray as he charged forward, determined to firmly grasp Lucia's structural opening and liquidate his defense in a single run.
Suddenly, the Carian prince's pupils contracted to pinpricks.
He watched Lucia's leather boot tap the lake surface, instantly freezing his retreat. The dragon youth's torso arched slightly, using the kinetic feedback of his deceleration to complete a perfect, coiled power-gathering motion. His left gauntlet dropped to a reverse grip, locking onto the wire-wrapped hilt of the longsword anchored across his spine—the celadon-hued blade he had not yet cleared from the leather!
The next microsecond, the Godskin Stitcher left its scabbard with a clear, soul-shaking tallic shriek.
The high-frequency vibrating steel slashed diagonally through the mist, manifesting a compressed, razor-sharp vacuum arc that materialized in the empty air like a line of black glass.
Radahn's focus tracked the rapidly sweeping line of the rapier, his processors searching for the optimal microsecond to initiate a parry. However, the exact millisecond the sword's edge reached the terminal point of its trajectory, a blinding, cataclysmic flash of scarlet lightning instantly detonated within his pupils!
The swiftly approaching vacuum arc fused flawlessly with a torrent of terrifying Ancient Dragon Lightning erupting from the celadon steel, roaring across the lake like a mythical lightning drake with its talons and crimson scales unfurled!
Storm Swordsmanship: Dragon Thunder Slash!
On the high granite viewing pavilion, Knight Moongrum abruptly stood up from his bench, his wine chalice rattling against the mahogany as an un-courtly exclamation escaped his teeth. "What manner of sword art is that?"
Commander Ordovis's ancient eyes flared with a sudden, brilliant light. After a long watch, his voice erged in an uncertain, profoundly shaken register. "It appears... the Prince has physically woven the vacuum lines of the Storm Swordsmanship directly into the energetic matrix of the Dragon Lightning Incantations to forge that technique."
The two legendary paladins, anchoring diatrically opposed geopolitical factions, exchanged a silent look, their hearts entirely unable to stabilize the data.
As the apex vanguard commanders of the two greatest empires on the continent, no operator understood better than their offices how difficult it was to engineer a brand-new, independent technique within the three perfected historical sword art lineages—let alone an art potent enough to directly reverse the tide of a battle at the hero class tier!
Even if the execution was still crude in its transitions, even if it carried the un-refined, raw markers of youth and contained a dozen structural flaws that a grandmaster could exploit during a long bout, in the eyes of these two sword masters, this feat was worthy of being recorded in the permanent history of martial developnt across the Lands Between.
Having just witnessed the Golden Vow, they could only attribute this secondary revolution to Lucia's preternatural, terrifying genetic genius. What their databases lacked was the simple ledger entry stating that less than ten suns had passed since Lucia had first scratched the design of this technique into the dirt of his training void.
Previously, while evaluating the combat files of the Ancient Dragon Knights, Lucia had noted a recurring pattern: the human vanguards frequently layered Dragon Lightning across their standard Leyndell sword forms.
Unlike true dragons like Lansseax, whose internal divine treasuries were nearly infinite, those human knights fell far short of a true drake in total Faith trics, purity of source, and master-level control over the lightning elent. Consequently, their fused thodology was an efficiency compromise—it multiplied the raw destructive output of their mundane steel while drastically enhancing the practical combat value of their limited incantation slots.
Lucia's system operated on a completely separate tier. Although his body was still within its green, juvenile developnt cycle, his demigod status provided an internal divine power volu that completely eclipsed an ordinary knight. Concurrently, because his Dragon Lightning erged directly from the bloodline inheritance left by the ancient Dragon Lords, and because he possessed the non-stop, practical training loops hand-delivered by his nightly simulation battles, the raw voltage of his lightning far outclassed the miracles mastered by the capital guard.
The true operational deficit separating his current form from a top-tier ancient powerhouse like Lansseax lay strictly in his degree of mastery over the lightning elent itself.
Among the five pri elents governing the material cosmos—earth, water, wind, fire, and lightning—the lightning force was universally notorious for its absolute dominance, volatile nature, and terrifying resistance to cognitive control. Whether it was Lansseax's shifting Lightning Blades or Fortissax's twin Lightning Spears, those high-tier manifestations were the result of an operator wielding the elent with absolute, effortless sovereignty after centuries of non-stop refinent.
For Lucia, since his Dragon Lightning had cleared the interdiate milestone, conjuring a standard Lightning Spear took no more effort than breathing. But to fully extract the maximum percentage of his divine power—to wield thunderous, hyper-velocity attacks as naturally and easily as shifting his own arm—was an architecture far beyond his current mastery.
Locked in that structural bottleneck, his obsession with maximizing his single-target offensive output triggered a flash of inspiration. He resolved to reference the Ancient Dragon Knights' integration thodology, systematically rging the offensive vacuum tracks of his Storm Swordsmanship with the raw, volatile power of the Red Lightning.
He spent dozens of watches testing the equations inside the gray quiet of the mory void. After logging dozens of catastrophic failures where the lightning simply shattered his sword vectors, his engine finally locked the variables—fusing the elental energy perfectly into a singular Vacuum Slash.
Back on the Rodel Basin, the vacuum blade wreathed in roaring crimson lightning pierced cleanly through a sequence of three magical sword beams unleashed by Radahn's cleavers. The terrifying kinetic impact blasted the red-haired prince across the surface of the lake, the residual shockwaves of the storm wind blade physically cleaving the water's surface, stirring up towering, mountain-like walls of white spray on either side of their track!
Countless fine threads of red electricity exploded across the flat of the blades Radahn had crossed to shield his head. Even his incomparably robust, massive torso was temporarily locked in a state of absolute neuromuscular paralysis.
Lucia stamped his foot down against the water, the liquid beneath his boot instantly pressurizing and shattering outward like a massive spiderweb. His silhouette transford into a white streak of hyper-velocity light as he shot across the lake. The Celadon rapier and the dragon-scale blade silently parted the rising mist of the basin, their tips aid directly at Radahn's exposed chest plates!
Seeing the elegant, celadon point of the Godskin Stitcher approaching his sternum with absolute velocity, Radahn's internal magic power detonated through his veins. In the absolute nick of ti, his nervous system broke the paralysis grid, allowing him to barely intercept the razor-sharp thrust using the heavy flat of his right greatsword!
Each relying on the imnse volu of their respective divine power and internal magic to stand firmly upon the liquid surface, one operator advanced with relentless, non-stop offensive pressure, while the other retreated to catch his breath and stabilize his center of gravity. Amidst the continuous, thunderous clangor of clashing steel, the duelists swept like a storm toward the deep heart of the lake.
Radahn's muscle-magic force amplification remained active, but tracking the arithtic of high-level combat: once an operator falls behind by a single move, their system falls behind step by step. Facing Lucia's ferocious Storm Swordsmanship and the sudden bursts of Dragon Lightning he occasionally unleashed with a flick of his gauntlet, Radahn could only maintain his line while executing a calculated retreat. Though his footwork hadn't descended into total disarray, the heavy swings of his twin cleavers were beginning to show the clear signatures of an operator who was hard-pressed and structurally struggling.
Up on the banquet platform, Rykard's features were a mask of pure anxiety. Monitoring his brother's increasing danger, he couldn't restrain his voice. "If the Prince maintains this velocity... our brother's line is going to break!"
"Banish the impatience," Ranni murmured, her posture completely calm as her deep blue pupils tracked the two teoric figures locked in the center of the spray. "Our brother is rely waiting for the alignnt of the stars."
As an operator who was currently locked in a high-voltage exchange against Radahn, Lucia was fully conscious of the fact that the red-haired prince was maintaining a massive percentage of his assets in reserve, having only succumbed to this temporary deficit due to running head-on into an unseen sword form.
Both demigods still clutched un-revealed cards within their ledgers; they were far from the absolute limits of their stats. Naturally, Lucia wasn't naive enough to calculate that a single Dragon Thunder Slash would close the book.
His current directive was clear: capitalize on this structural montum. On one flank, he had to systematically suppress Radahn's internal rhythm, ensuring his own blade retained the absolute initiative in the upcoming cycles; on the other, he had to apply the maximum humanly possible psychological and physical pressure, forcing Radahn to deploy his ultimate trump card at an un-optimized, premature juncture, thereby securing the final tactical arbitrage play.
The Godskin Stitcher clutched in his left hand thrust out a howling Storm Blade arc, while the Dragon-Scale Blade in his right hand turned into a blazing torch of red electricity. Simultaneously, he forcefully pushed off the water, his entire torso twisting into a violent spiral as he unleashed a secondary Dragon Thunder Slash!
A pale blue magical sheen flashed across Radahn's cleavers. Ard with that enchantnt, his blades cleaved through the oncoming wind arc, but the velocity left him completely bankrupt of ti to parry the secondary lightning slash trailing behind the breeze.
Seeing that crimson, crackling arc approaching his throat, the red-haired prince executed a bizarre, logic-breaking counter-move. He violently slamd the cleaver clutch within his left gauntlet back into the leather scabbard at his waist, his hand dropping to the hilt in a reverse grip to strike an unmistakable, ancestral stance for a Battoujutsu—a lightning-fast sword-drawing technique!
Lucia's pupils dilated, his internal alarm grid detonating. He imdiately froze his prepared follow-up combinations, using his silver wings to forcefully halt his montum, hurling his fra backward into a rapid retreat.
At that precise microsecond, Radahn's fingers tightened against the iron hilt. The instant the steel cleared the lip of the leather, the internal magic power saturating his massive fra exploded with terrifying velocity!
The first inch of the blade revealed to the autumn air flashed with a hazy, pale blue cosmic radiance. A faint, indistinct spherical boundary domain unfolded concurrently with the steel, crashing head-on into the oncoming Dragon Thunder Slash!
The next microsecond, that seemingly fragile, hazy blue domain swallowed the imnse montum of the Dragon Lightning exactly like a silent, starving cosmic black hole. The pale blue sphere then blossod with a dazzling, blinding brilliance, its energy instantly transmuting into six floating Glintstone Phantoms! The exact millisecond Radahn's cleaver was fully cleared from the wood, the starlight blades shot across the water with unparalleled velocity, targeting Lucia's vitals!
Lucia frantically swung his steel, throwing out a dense barrage of vacuum wind blades to create a defensive net. But the glintstone projectiles were simply too fast for his current Dexterity trics. Even pushing his physical reactions to their absolute limit, his steel managed to deflect only four of the phantoms. The remaining two pierced cleanly through his defenses, digging into his left shoulder and right thigh, sending two bright splashes of demigod blood flying across the basin.
Radahn surged forward a single, massive step, closing the distance before the water could resettle. A heavy, cataclysmic cross-slash from his twin cleavers detonated a shockwave that violently erupted into a fifty-foot wave across the lake surface. Weaponless in his transition and weakened by the sudden piercing trauma, Lucia's fra was cleanly cleaved away by the blast, sent flying across the sky!
He crashed heavily into the churning water a hundred paces away, his armor sending up a massive cascade of white foam.
Floating within the cold lake, his mind frantically replayed the architecture of Radahn's sword-drawing strike from a mont ago, his modern consciousness utterly unable to restrain an internal, raging curse:
The god-cursed Carian Retaliation skill... you can actually integrate it into a sword-drawing matrix like that???
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