Chapter 86: The Origin of Swordsmanship
"Does Your Royal Highness possess the tracking data required to identify the exact sword technique my blade just executed?" Knight Moongrum asked, reaching out his silver-plated gauntlet to pull Lucia up from the shifting lake pebbles, a mischievous, knowing smile playing across his lips.
Lucia touched the coordinates of his chest plates where the phantom wound had already cleanly vaporized from his consciousness. He turned the microsecond data over within his thoughts before replying, "The initial opening sequence was undeniably the Storm Swordsmanship, yet my analytical network failed to isolate the specific form. The structural velocity of the swing completely out-registered standard sword drills. The secondary strike deployed to initiate the parry bore a sharp symmetry to the Leyndell Swordsmanship, but tracking the orthodox capital manuals, that move shouldn't exist within a single-blade discipline—the Tree Sentinels and Crucible Knights are conformed to rely strictly on heavy shield bashes to trigger an identical deflection counter-attack, yet your hand closed the loop using nothing but a standard knight's sword."
"As for the terminal execution," he pondered, his silver eyes narrowing, "did your muscle memory fuse the variations of the Carian Blade Arts with some manner of hand-to-hand grappling technique?"
"A close calculation—it comprises a Badlands CQC technique," Moongrum explained calmly, his sword tip resting against the grass. "Your Highness's archives must contain the data entry stating that First King Godfrey functioned as the supreme barbaric chieftain of the Badlands long before his carriage cleared the plateau to become the initial Elden Lord. Many of the raw, brutal combat methodologies deployed by those barbarian clans can be seamlessly woven into advanced swordsmanship. Beyond simple grappling executions, high-impact ground slams, iron punches, and low kicks can be cleverly integrated with the steel to forge extraordinary, hybrid skills that completely transcend the standard definitions of traditional fencing."
Combat methodologies emerging from the Badlands... Lucia pondered, his mind reconstructing Moongrum's rising slash followed by that instantaneous, bone-crushing throat grapple and cardiac thrust. He was internally astounded by the sheer, terrifying breadth of the Carian champion's martial archives.
In the broadest administrative sense of the continent's history, the term Badlands defined the un-mapped, wild territories drifting far beyond the governance of the primary cities, where the nomadic barbarian clans maintained their hearths. These outland warriors didn't belong to non-human classifications like the Mountain Demons or the Misbegotten tribes of the north; they comprised a distinct, primitive branch of the human species that operated completely outside the sovereign administrative apparatus of the Three Great Dynasties.
Their ancestral origins predated the foundational dawn of both the Golden Lineage and the Carian Royal Dynasty, tracing their baseline calendar back to the chaotic infancy of mortal civilization. Long before the Fire Giants and the Ancient Dragons had locked their empires in that mythic struggle for continental dominance, and across the early eras that birthed the ancient Storm Kings and the Uld Dynasties, these nomadic human elements—living and multiplying under the absolute authority of tribal chieftains—had already established their presence as an permanent factor across the Lands Between.
Toward the terminal closing watches of the War of the Gods, the most preternaturally powerful chieftain anchoring the Badlands—universally recorded by the chronicles as the most terrifyingly destructive mortal warrior in the history of the world, Hoarah Loux—was explicitly isolated and selected by the hand of Eternal Queen Marika, who had just systematically broken the power of the Gloam-Eyed Queen of Death. Following their political and divine marriage, he was hand-delivered the noble title of Godfrey, ascending the throne as the First Elden Lord of the Golden Dynasty.
Following that alignment, an immense cohort of primitive barbarian warlords cleared their wild, un-mapped homelands to follow Godfrey's banner into the realm of civilization, forming the original, un-yielding vanguard cores of the Warlord's personal legions alongside the early Misbegotten auxiliaries and the Crucible Knights. Vast expanses of territory that had historically registered as the Badlands were systematically integrated into the official maps of the Golden Dynasty across that expansionist era.
Yet, decades down the timeline, the traditional Badlands boundaries and the pure barbarian bloodlines had become exceptionally rare asset classes across the plateau. The most pristine, orthodox iterations of those primitive combat techniques had gradually dissolved from the active files following the sudden, tragic exile of the First Elden Lord and the subsequent recall of the Eastern Expeditionary Legion. At this watch, perhaps only ancient, immortal heroes like the Crucible Paladins preserved the raw muscle memory of those ferocious combinations born from barbaric slaughters.
The First Carian Knight had not merely mastered these restricted combat files to an exceptional degree; his engine had achieved the fluid harmony required to fuse them flawlessly into the microsecond transitions of his swordsmanship. The sheer qualitative depth of his skill was something that completely defied standard calculation!
Lucia was entirely absorbed in processing the martial logic. Turning his thoughts back to evaluate his own progress, a deep, genuine sigh escaped his teeth. "Compared against the absolute depth of your swordsmanship, the combinations clutched by my gauntlet score like clumsy childhood games. At the absolute best, my style comprises a random, un-optimized collection of basic sword forms, macro combat skills, and independent incantations. They appear sufficiently flashy across everyday drills, but the exact watch my steel encounters a truly world-class opponent, the entire structure will be punctured and broken by a single calculated counter."
"Your Highness's calculation has hit an absolute error."
"Hm?"
"Your Royal Highness is not merely wrong within the boundaries of your vocabulary, prince; your underlying processing logic has suffered a complete structural mis-alignment—" The Moongrum knight smiled nonchalantly, his silver-plated hand gesturing toward the shoreline. "Accompany my boots down the bank."
Lucia tracked his slipstream toward a low-lying, dark pebble shore framing the edge of the lake. The Moongrum knight lightly tapped his boot against the stone, executing a weightless vault to settle his mass atop a colossal granite boulder overlooking the deep water. He bent his spine slightly, his left gauntlet locking around the throat of his scabbard while his right fingers closed into a flawless, absolute ready stance to draw the steel.
Carian Sheathing Form: Clear Mirror
He closed his blue eyes, his respirations slowing into an incredibly deep, rhythmic cadence as the cool night wind swept across his visor. Inside Lucia's refined spiritual tracking network, the internal magic power saturating the knight's chassis desisted from accelerating its circulation velocity; instead, the mana descended into a state of absolute, petrified tranquility—exactly like the still, undisturbed surface of a deep mountain lake before the dawn.
Roughly ten breaths bled off the clock before the sharp, ringing shriek of a masterwork longsword clearing its scabbard violently shattered the silver quiet of the moonlit night.
The Moongrum knight's eyes snapped open, a brilliant, blinding starlight flaring from the depth of his pupils, looking exactly like twin Full Moons rising from the basements of his soul!
The sword was cleared, unsheathed, and swung through a single, cataclysmic fluid motion!
The silver tip of his blade appeared to transmute into a scholar's ink brush, utilizing the celestial dome as its parchment to paint a solidified, tangible arc of compressed vacuum wind across the air. Yet, the exact millisecond the sword tip reached the terminal boundary of the slash, a solitary point of intense azure light—like a hidden star suddenly detonating within the void—blazed across the lakeside. An incomparably massive volume of internal magic power, mimicking flowing celestial ink, instantaneously saturated the vacuum line with the un-fused luster of a radiant starlight blade, transmuting the attack into a colossal, sweeping crescent of pure starlight that roared across the basin!
The next microsecond, the entire boundless lake was cleanly cleaved in two—
A gargantuan, terrifying abyss that reached down to the absolute mud of the lake bedrock materialized directly across their field of vision. The surging walls of water displaced on either flank stood like sheer, vertical cliffs thousands of feet high. The kinetic aftershocks of the strike rippled across every coordinate of the domain, the volatile, displaced mana triggering a non-stop cascade of flickering blue lightning arcs across the spray!
Lucia stared completely blankly at the apocalyptic canyon torn through the water. His meta-knowledge replayed the burning magical scars left across the terrain after Adula and Smarag—the twin glintstone dragons from his past life—had expelled their tracking breath attacks. But compared against the display anchoring his visor at this watch, the structural voltage contained within this single sword swing out-registered those drakes by more than a hundredfold.
"Your Highness should preserve an intimate familiarity regarding the structural layout of this specific sword technique," the Moongrum knight chuckled softly, executing a fluid movement to guide his blade back into the leather housing amidst the deafening, thunderous roar of the divided lake walls collapsing back to reclaim the basin. "The watch Your Royal Highness initial deployed this exact combination to repel Prince Radahn's vanguard across the capital basin... Commander Ordovis and my own office were both profoundly amazed by the math."
"My... system?" Lucia looked entirely bewildered for a handful of seconds, before his modern memory channels violently mapped the transition, his entire facial symmetry twitching with an involuntary shock. "Your vocabulary implies... this specific execution comprises... the Dragon Thunder Slash?"
Lucia felt his cognitive engine hit a total stasis lock for a full five seconds. Although his physical eyes delivered the explicit readout stating that this starlight canyon belonged to a completely separate dimension of power far above his own Dragon Thunder Slash, his memory meticulously cross-referenced the precise physical details of the Moongrum knight's execution.
The combo had initial opened with the exact Vacuum Slash track from the Storm Style, before systematically fusing an alternate elemental energy into the line the exact microsecond before the steel reached its terminal release point.
The arithmetic was identical. Beyond the simple variable of substituting his crimson Ancient Dragon Lightning with high-density Starlight Sorcery... there existed zero mechanical divergence between their styles.
The layout was a perfect mirror.
"My office states that Your Highness's logic has suffered an error because the act of systematically combining your swordsmanship with separate physical combat skills and high-Faith incantations does not comprise some cheap, opportunistic shortcut—let alone the childish play your vocabulary just cited," the Moongrum knight said, his voice dropping into a deep, calm, and intensely serious register. "Across the calculations checked by my own intellect and the mind of Chief Knight Ordovis... the exact watch Your Royal Highness expended several moons of your childhood to independently forge the architecture of this Dragon Thunder Slash, your ultimate trajectory across the history of swordsmanship was mathematically destined to surpass our own zenith."
"Your Highness's archives likely lack the data logs stating that the absolute sword masters who walked this continent a thousand winters past conducted their initial research along an identical coordinate. They bankrupted their collective wisdom to systematically merge the mechanical tracks of the Storm Swordsmanship, the ancient Uld Dynasty Blade Forms, the Tibian Mariner Styles, and even the alien combat files harvested from the Onyx Lords, the Alabaster Lords, and the First Generation Albinaurics—desperately hoping to compile a brand-new, unified sword lineage that could seamlessly synthesize the structural assets of every historical school under the sky."
"My lips have merely unfolded the historical lineage governing the third sword technique. At this watch, my office can legally disclose to your ears the true source code behind the initial two sword forms—those advanced combinations that mimic the Storm and Leyndell lineages, yet operate on parameters entirely un-aligned with their modern execution."
The First Carian Knight slowly exhaled a long breath of mist. He lifted his silver visor, his eyes tracking the constellations and the pale Full Moon hanging across the sky with an almost pious, reverent focus, his voice dropping into a soft, awe-inspiring whisper.
"That specific methodology comprises the absolute terminal end of all swordsmanship traditions logged across the ancient eras... and concurrently functions as the absolute, pristine origin code behind every single martial lineage engineered after the conclusion of the Forbidden War."
"As the direct biological descendants of that fallen, star-worshipping civilization... we people of Caria call that forgotten archetype—"
"The Eternal Swordsmanship."
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