CHAPTER 34
Azra'il - POV
The silence before a fight follows its own rules. It isn't the absence of sound, it's that particular instant when the whole world seems to be holding its breath to see whether you're about to do something memorably stupid. I've always liked that instant. It has an honesty the rest of life rarely bothers to offer.
Rudeus lay in the grass a few metres away, with all the dignity of a dropped sack of potatoes. Paul's clean strike had sent him straight off to dreamland, and he seemed rather pleased to be there.
Paul stood on the other side of the yard, wooden sword in hand. And for the first time since I'd been born into this small, irritatingly fragile body, he wasn't looking at me the way a father looks at a child. He was looking at me the way a veteran swordsman looks after realising, too late, that the "afternoon fun" had teeth.
Well. That was rather the point of proposing the duel.
〈Eos, log this as the first real battle of this life cycle.〉
[Logged. Technical note: your heart rate remains impressively steady. An atypical calm, given that you're about to beat your own father in the middle of the yard.]
〈I call that advance planning, Eos. I've waited months for this reckoning. A bit of prior patience is just the price of admission.〉
I activated the mana flow in my eyes.
Paul's energy had changed since the last session with Rudeus, more concentrated, more even, the signature of a man who'd finally understood that holding back against me would be a choice deserving of an epitaph. Good. I hate it when adults insist on treating me like porcelain. Porcelain breaks. I most certainly do not.
I advanced.
His first strike came from an angle that had no business existing, his body shifting with the classic malice of the North Style, weight relocating as though gravity had signed an exclusivity contract with him alone. I'd seen that trick before, in another life, back when I still went by another name and had even less patience than I have today, which is saying something.
I dodged using Flow Breathing, slipping into the exact gap between the feint and the real strike. His wood cut the air a hair's breadth from my shoulder.
Close. Good. Close is the only interesting place to be.
I answered in kind, refusing to fall back, falling back is for those in a hurry to survive, and I was in a hurry for something else entirely. I gripped Rudeus's practice sword, too light by my standards but enough for the purpose, and delivered a horizontal cut against Paul's flank.
He blocked it. The clash of wood rang up my arms like an out-of-tune bell. No hesitation left in that block. No paternal softness had survived it.
The second attack came faster, chained in the classic North rhythm, each strike feeding the next with the efficiency of decades of practice turned pure instinct. Paul was good. Genuinely good. A shame that "good" and "enough" so rarely share the same address.
The third strike landed.
Not the sword, the fist. He risked a quick punch at my right shoulder, taking the one opening my own weight shift had left ajar.
The impact was honest, I'll give him that.
The Golden Muscles absorbed most of it; the Jade Body, incomplete as it still was, dissipated the rest through the skeletal structure with the efficiency of something built to take a beating. It still hurt. A sharp jolt, the kind that would probably have most adults grinding their teeth.
I didn't flinch.
Paul stared at his own hand for half a second, wearing the face of someone who'd expected to knock down a house of cards and found a concrete wall instead.
〈He assumed my seven-year-old body would collapse at the first punch. Truly the frog at the bottom of the well who believed he'd grasped the sky's full depth.〉
[The metaphor is unnecessarily dramatic to describe a simple miscalculation of force.]
〈But it describes the reality with irrefutable precision, Eos.〉
Paul shifted stance, moving into the Water Style, feet anchored, weight static, the doctrine that doesn't attack, only waits and returns. I stopped my steps. We stood still in the middle of the yard, two systems that had mapped each other and concluded, simultaneously, that neither would surrender the first move.
At the edge of the yard, Ghislaine shifted, only slightly, but enough. The bored spectator suddenly had far more interest in this fight than the previous one.
The silence lasted twelve seconds.
Then Paul's patience broke, exactly as I knew it would. He shifted into the Sword God Style in a linear burst of speed, the same strike that subdued Rudeus, that humbled bandits and careless monsters. It came from above, full weight, speed treated as the only defence that mattered.
I activated Storm Breathing.
The world slowed down, or rather, I sped up, and the difference is purely semantic to anyone watching from outside. I slid sideways in the exact millisecond my eyes read the trajectory. Paul's sword sank into the ground where I'd been a second before, kicking up a cloud of offended dust.
I struck back before he could recover his guard.
My sword caught his left forearm hard enough to leave a deep mark, and I noticed, with a satisfaction that probably wasn't entirely healthy, a fine cut opening there, a red line rising to the surface where the compressed mana at the wood's edge did what ordinary oak never could. I could have softened the blow.
I chose not to.
Paul stepped back half a pace, eyes narrowed, staring at his own blood with the expression of a man recalculating every premise of his own life.
"You're faster than I expected," he said, his breathing already less measured.
"And you move slower than my expectations predicted," I replied, keeping my voice flat as a freshly wiped slate.
A tactical bluff, of course. Paul was fast. But I'd learned, across a thousand lives and an embarrassing number of regrets, that combat is also a matter of managing perception, and the perception an opponent has of their own ability decides the size of mistake they're willing to make.
For the next three minutes, we duelled within the limits he'd mastered. North and Sword God interwoven, continuous strikes, the yard being redrawn with every footfall. He caught my shoulder twice more, my ribs once, my forearm again, and each hit left an honest bruise behind, the kind that, without my healing magic, would have gone purple and given me the perfect excuse to complain loudly about life.
My meridians absorbed the pain and redistributed it. The cultivation doing precisely the job it was designed for.
But he still hadn't seen anything.
〈Eos, prepare the flow.〉
[Are you planning to reveal the infusion technique?]
〈I'm planning to let the frog contemplate, however briefly, the true dimension of the sky.〉
[Your satisfaction in others' humiliation remains a statistically reliable constant in my processing.]
〈I'm merely honouring an ancient tradition of demonstrations of strength, Eos. Call it behavioural archaeology.〉
I pushed the mana through my channels, not outward from the body the way conventional magic demanded, and not inward, refining cells. I drove it all into the wood in my hands, applying the compression principles I'd been refining for weeks in the forest, away from watching eyes and complaints.
The training sword forgot it had ever been fragile.
"Celestial Sword Art, Water Dragon."
A liquid, translucent tail wrapped around the oak, spinning as though a river had decided, in a fit of cosmic boredom, to become a sword. I advanced. Paul blocked, perfect, technical, exactly as the manual prescribed.
The manual, unfortunately for him, hadn't accounted for the water simply ignoring his guard the way one ignores a badly written "no entry" sign.
The strike curved around his defence and caught his exposed flank. The hydraulic impact threw Paul several metres back for the first time since the duel began, and this time, he didn't get up dragging his pride along with him. A wide gash opened along his ribs, blood staining the torn fabric of his tunic, running warm against skin that seconds before had still believed this was just heavy sparring.
I could have dispersed the water blade an instant before contact.
I chose not to.
He stayed down, staring at his own blood, at the cut, and then at me, the seven-year-old girl with the wooden sword still dripping the last residue of the vortex.
"What kind of technique was that?" he asked, his voice cracking for the first time.
At the edge of the yard, Ghislaine uncrossed her arms. Her furred ears rose, alert, and the bored spectator's look gave way to something I recognised well: the particular discomfort of a warrior realising, in real time, that the rules of the game had changed without notice.
"Magic without incantation... shaped onto a training sword?" she murmured, more to herself than to anyone present. I knew that tone. It was the tone of someone recalculating thirty years of career in three seconds. "In all my years, I've never seen anything like it."
Zenith, at the side of the yard, had brought both hands to her mouth, eyes wide, fixed on the water still trickling down the oak of my sword. Even she, who'd grown up surrounded by decent mages, didn't seem to have seen anything like it before.
"Celestial Sword Art," I answered, tone unchanged. "One of my variations."
Paul reorganised himself with the speed of a veteran who understood exactly the size of the danger hidden in the phrase "one of my variations." He returned to the fight combining North for chaotic angles, Sword God for speed, Water to try and contain my responses. The most honest and most dangerous version of him.
An impressive technical arrangement. Still not enough.
I'd learned, in ages he wouldn't dream of, that technique without deep understanding is just a gilded cage built from pretty geometric movements. Paul had mastered three styles of this world. I'd lived long enough to know the sky doesn't end where a regional tradition decides to close its borders.
When he came at me from a blind angle using the North, I pushed wind without incantation and shifted my own centre of gravity mid-air, repositioning my body mid-leap with the physics rewritten by someone who treats mana as a vector of movement rather than a polite suggestion.
"Celestial Sword Art, Serpent of the Winds."
The air around me compressed, tinged green, and my trajectory curved mid-jump, wrong, impossible, delightful. His sword cut through the emptiness where I'd been an instant before.
He stared at nothing with the face of someone watching his own physical certainty collapse like a house of cards on a windy day.
"You used wind magic to alter your dodge trajectory in mid-air?" he asked, brow furrowed.
"Yes."
"While keeping the sword's flow active?!"
"Yes."
"That shouldn't be possible!"
"The heavens haven't sent me any written complaints yet," I replied.
He glanced briefly upward, as though genuinely assessing whether some divine intervention might arrive against my audacity. No celestial objection came to his aid. What a disappointment for him, I imagine.
Outside the fight, Ghislaine took a step forward without quite realising she'd taken it, as though her body had decided, on its own, that the distance of a spectator no longer sufficed.
"Nobody changes direction mid-air like that," she said, voice low, almost disbelieving. "Not even the best swordsmen I've seen. It's like the wind decided to fight on your side."
A brief silence. Then he advanced again, with a different posture, having abandoned any attempt to categorise my techniques. He'd accepted that conventional rules had collectively resigned in that yard.
Now his only objective was to win.
I respected the resolve.
The ground between us already told the story of the fight: patches of churned earth, heel-marks, a section of low wall destroyed by a charge that had come too close. Paul's forearm was bruised and bleeding, his flank cut, ribs throbbing beneath his torn tunic. I felt the accumulated weight of three hits to my shoulder, which the Golden Muscles had already begun charging back to me in the form of fatigue.
We were two combatants at the edge of a duel, where all that's left is whatever each of us has that's most real in the soul.
And I wasn't there to beat Paul. I was there so he'd feel, in his own flesh, an equivalent fraction of what Zenith had felt that winter, because flesh, unlike the heart, at least has the decency to heal.
It was in that moment I spoke the first truth. I hadn't planned the timing; it arrived with the naturalness of water finding the right crack in the rock.
"The respect I felt for you as your daughter died that winter, Paul," I said, blocking a linear thrust and countering in the same breath. "I don't feel hatred. I don't feel anger." Another strike, which he dodged with visible difficulty. "I only feel absence. And absence is a far harder void to treat than fury; anger, at least, confirms the target still holds some relevance in the life of the one feeling it."
Paul blocked with the Water Style, redirecting the force of my strike with the fluidity of decades of practice. He said nothing. But his shoulders faltered for a second, and I saw it.
"You must have noticed I still answer when you call me," I continued, the cadence of my words syncing with the clash of wood. "Still train when you order it. Still share a roof with the civility that living together demands." I leapt back, dodging a lateral strike. "But you stopped being my father the night you betrayed Zenith. You became just the man who shares the house with my mother and my siblings. The difference is profound, Paul. Not subtle."
At the edge of the yard, I heard a muffled sound. I didn't break focus; I knew it was Zenith, hands over her lips.
Paul attacked with a new intensity. It wasn't fury, it was the response of a man wounded in the soul using the only vocabulary he possessed: swordsmanship. The Sword God Style came with all the force and speed his adult body could offer.
I activated my newly created elemental variation.
〈Eos, release the electrical flow.〉
[Flow activated. Monitoring channel temperature to prevent overload.]
"Celestial Sword Art, Thunder Dragon of the Nine Heavens."
Electricity ran up my arms in a static shiver, my white hair rising as though it had opinions of its own about the situation. Blue sparks crackled along the oak, and the mana density was such that the outline of a lightning dragon drew itself, sharp, in the air behind me.
CRACK.
I vanished from one angle.
CRACK.
I reappeared from another.
Paul swung at a target that had already stopped being there two cracks ago. His wood cut through empty dust. Mine found his torso with the full weight of hardened oak, the kinetic force amplified by the discharge and the momentum of months of waiting.
I didn't deliver the strike at the minimum intensity needed to bring him down. I delivered it at the maximum my control allowed without breaking bone, a deliberate calculation, the exact line between punishment and mutilation.
Paul was thrown hard against the earth.
He fell onto his back, the sword slipping from his fingers, a deep cut opening at his left shoulder where the compressed wooden blade tore through cloth and skin with the same ease as well-forged steel. Blood began soaking the torn sleeve of his tunic.
He wouldn't be getting up from that easily.
That was the intention.
The yard fell into absolute silence. Rudeus remained unconscious a few metres away, entirely unaware of the afternoon's family drama, snoring with the dedication of someone who'd dived headfirst into oblivion.
I approached Paul, stopping a pace away, and pointed the tip of my training sword at his sternum, with the precision of someone closing out a reckoning.
"The debt of honour is partially settled for this afternoon, Paul," I said, keeping my voice perfectly cold. "Every bone aching in your body right now is an exact fraction of the pain Zenith carried in silence. Don't ask me for a discount." I paused, just long enough for the next sentence to carry the weight it needed to. "The remainder of the balance isn't collectible by blade or by any display of strength in this yard. That part is entirely yours to settle."
Paul looked up at me from the ground, eyes wet with a mixture of physical pain and moral exhaustion. There was no humiliation in having been defeated, only the sober sadness of a man receiving a punishment he knew he deserved, and discovering the punishment didn't make the internal burden any lighter.
He looked away, searching for Zenith at the edge of the yard.
I walked to my birth mother, who was crouched, trembling slightly, hands still covering her lips as the tears kept falling without stopping. Without any words of comfort, I've always found speeches of affection practically useless in a situation like that, I extended my left hand and wiped the trail of tears from her warm skin with my thumb.
It was a silent gesture, without drama, but carrying all the protection my soul, across more than a thousand lives, could offer the woman who'd carried me in her own womb. Zenith held my hand firmly against her face, gripping hard, letting out a shaky sigh that seemed to release a knot that had been lodged in her throat since the winter of the scandal.
Lilia stayed beside her, eyes closed, head slightly bowed, accepting her own share of weight in that domestic truth without any defensive justification.
After Zenith let go of my hand, I went to put the sword away in a corner and turned to retrieve the teacup left on the low wall earlier that afternoon.
"Azra'il."
The steady voice was Ghislaine's.
I stopped walking, turning slightly. She remained exactly where she'd always stood, but the quality of her posture had changed drastically. The warrior's attention had turned into an analytical, almost reverent focus I hadn't yet registered in any swordsman in this plane of existence.
"What's the official name of the combat style you just demonstrated?" she asked, ears angled forward in a sign of total military focus.
It wasn't the question of a spectator impressed by fireworks. It was the query of a master who'd devoted her life to classical Asuran swordsmanship and had just run headfirst into a system entirely beyond her own theoretical limits.
"Celestial Sword Art," I answered, calm.
"Where did you learn it?"
"I developed the applications myself, watching the flow of the waterfall and the wildlife in the deep forest," I replied, keeping my expression unmoved. "I had plenty of free time."
Ghislaine kept looking at me with the expression of someone processing an answer that was technically coherent and, at the same time, completely insufficient to explain what she'd just witnessed.
"What you just did isn't confined to conventional magic," she observed, slowly.
"It isn't."
"It doesn't follow the rules of classical swordsmanship either."
"Indeed, it doesn't."
"They're both forces operating in the same flow of movement, simultaneously."
"It's the only logical conclusion when one analyses the mechanics of combat soberly, Ghislaine," I explained, picking up my porcelain cup. "Separating mana manipulation from physical swordsmanship is as inefficient as choosing to fight using only your right arm while immobilising your left. A technically viable choice for academic instruction manuals, but of total practical inconvenience against a real opponent."
The furred-eared woman fell into absolute silence, absorbing the concept with the solemnity of someone who'd just discovered a new frontier for her own art.
"Developed all of that alone, in the forest..." she repeated, more to herself, trying to accustom herself to the physical impossibility of that sentence coming from the mouth of a seven-year-old girl.
"Trees and rocks don't tend to raise etiquette complaints or theoretical objections when you miscalculate during training," I remarked, casual.
Paul, still lying on the beaten earth, wounded, bleeding, made a low sound that didn't quite become a word, but communicated perfectly that he'd heard the remark and was processing it with whatever dignity he still had left, which, given the circumstances, wasn't much.
Rudeus remained oblivious to all of it, in his professional repose on the damp grass.
I raised the cup to my lips and took a sip.
The tea had gone completely cold.
I drank it anyway. Cold tea has the honest flavour of something that started out hot and waited the necessary time to become something else. Not necessarily worse, just different from what it was at the start.
It was, by every practical measure of that afternoon in Vila Buena, a perfectly fitting close to our duel.