Every student on the training ground had stopped thinking about anything else.
But the question occupying their minds wasn’t the one that might have been expected. They weren’t wondering how Necrotize was keeping pace with Ronald.
They were wondering how Ronald was keeping pace with Necrotize.
Elizabeth wasn’t thinking about either of those things.
What held her attention, completely, to the exclusion of everything else, was sothing quieter and more fundantal than the spectacle of power on display. Neither of them was drawing on anything external. No aura, no enhancent, no magic woven into the strikes. What she was watching was pure technique. Two people operating at the outermost edge of what the human body, guided by genuine mastery, could actually do.
She had never seen anything like it in person.
That. That was what she wanted. Not the power. The skill. The kind that lived in the hands and the feet and the split-second decisions that happened below the level of conscious thought. The kind that took a lifeti to build and couldn’t be borrowed or inherited.
She watched with her full self, committing every exchange to mory.
***
Ronald’s gaze had narrowed to a single point of focus, Necrotize, and only Necrotize. His hand had shifted to the very end of his hilt, lengthening his reach by a fraction.
Then he vanished.
Not slowly. Not with warning. One mont he was standing in front of Necrotize, and the next he simply wasn’t there, reappearing in the space behind him, blade already in motion, the strike angling in from behind with the full weight of his montum behind it.
Necrotize didn’t turn his head. Didn’t shift his feet. Didn’t rotate his shoulders or adjust his stance by so much as a degree. His sword arm simply moved, reaching back at an angle that shouldn’t have been readable, shouldn’t have been reachable, and the parry landed clean, deflecting Ronald’s blade before it could find its mark.
The sound of the impact rang out across the silent training ground.
***
Ronald used the brief contact to shove Necrotize back, creating space.
Necrotize vanished.
He reappeared directly above Ronald and brought his sword down in a clean vertical slash, no angle, no curve, straight down with the full arc of his reach behind it.
Ronald caught it on the flat of his blade, both arms absorbing the impact from above. The block held.
Necrotize landed and imdiately stepped back, putting distance between them.
Ronald’s arms were nearly gone.
The feeling had started leaving his hands soti in the last exchange, that deep, bone-level numbness that ca from absorbing too many hard impacts in too short a span of ti. His grip on the hilt was more habit than strength at this point, his fingers holding on through sheer refusal rather than any remaining capacity.
He didn’t lower the sword.
He wanted to see the end of this. Whatever form that took.
Across from him, Necrotize was enjoying himself enormously.
There was sothing irreplaceable about this, the specific pleasure of a sword in hand, weight and reach and the small calculations of distance and timing. He wasn’t using his full technique. He wasn’t using anything close to his actual strength. In absolute terms, this exchange was barely a whisper of what he was capable of.
And yet.
This is exactly what I’ve been missing.
The problem with existing at the level he did was that almost nothing could et him where he was. There was no one to spar with. No one to push back. Power without an equal to press against it had no texture, no feedback. It was simply force moving through empty space.
But this, even this small and careful version of it, had friction. It had another person on the other end, reading him, responding, refusing to simply collapse.
He turned the wooden sword over once in his hand, feeling the grain of it.
Ten million years.
That was how long it had been since he had last fought with a sword. Not estimated, not approximate. He knew the number precisely, the way he knew most things. Ten million years since he had last stood across from soone with a blade in his hand and felt the clean, honest language of steel, or in this case, wood, speaking back and forth between two people who were, for this one suspended mont, simply fighters.
He found he was smiling without having decided to.
***
"My lord," Ronald said, his voice steady despite the state of his arms. "Shall we end the session with one final exchange?"
"Agreed."
Ronald settled into his stance, feet shoulder-width apart, sword held in both hands, weight distributed with the precision of soone for whom this particular position had beco as natural as breathing. Every line of his body spoke of a man committing completely to one last mont.
Necrotize stood across from him with his sword held loosely in one hand, posture easy, expression calm. He looked, to any outside observer, like soone waiting for a train.
Ronald exhaled slowly.
Then he moved.
Everything he had left went into that sprint, every reserve, every remaining fragnt of strength his arms could still produce. The technique that shaped itself around the montum was one he had not used lightly in years.
Imperial Style, Third Form. Mountain-Severing Divine Slash.
Necrotize broke into a short run of his own, his own strike already forming.
They crossed.
One passed through the space the other had just occupied, and for a single suspended instant they stood back to back, the training ground completely silent around them.
Then a sword hit the ground.
The sharp crack of wood splitting reached the students a half-second after the mont itself. They stared at the broken pieces, then at the two figures standing apart from each other, trying to process what they were seeing.
Because the broken sword belonged to soone none of them would ever have predicted.
Necrotize looked down at the splintered hilt in his hand.
A smile crossed his face, quiet, unhurried, and entirely genuine.
I lost. But... that was deeply satisfying.
Several tres away, Ronald had gone to one knee.
His lungs were working hard. His arms had nothing left in them. He stared at the ground beneath him while the reality of what had just happened assembled itself in his mind, piece by piece, until it ford sothing he could actually hold.
"I won." The words ca out barely above a breath. Then, louder, as though he needed to hear them again to believe them: "I won. Against the God of Destruction. I won."
Necrotize turned to look at him.
Ronald looked up.
For a mont neither of them said anything.
Then Necrotize inclined his head, a small, unhurried gesture that carried more genuine respect than most formal ceremonies managed.
"Thank you for the instruction, Professor." A pause. "And for the match. It was a genuine pleasure."
He turned and walked back to his place in the line.
***
Every student watched him go.
Even Elizabeth.
She had spent the better part of the morning looking at Necrotize the way people look at sothing that stands between them and where they want to be. But the expression on her face now wasn’t that. It had shifted into sothing she hadn’t quite intended to feel, sothing that had arrived without her permission while she was busy watching two people fight with nothing but skill between them.
It wasn’t admiration, exactly. Or perhaps it was, and she simply wasn’t ready to call it that yet.
The Combat Departnt’s second class ca to an end.
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