Chapter 88: Sword Technique Concept
The morning following the conclusion of the grand imperial state gala, the Moongrum knight cleared his stables to ride alone from the capital gates, setting his horse's head back toward the borders of Liurnia.
In absolute, structural contrast to the suffocating, heavy atmospheric pressure that had swept into the upper wards like a localized storm upon his initial arrival, the Chief of the Carian Knights evacuated the stone parameters of Leyndell without permitting a solitary vanguard guard to escort his saddle. His hand simply directed a personal domestic attendant to convey his formal courtly farewells across the desks of his three foster princes and Lucia's estate, before his silhouette quietly slipped away from the vigilant, highly monitored gazes of the countless Golden Heroes tracking the checkpoints, dissolving smoothly into the vast, fertile limestone plains stretching across the Altus Plateau.
The gates of the Leyndell Royal Private School were officially scheduled by the ministries to click open in three days' watch. Commander Ordovis had been legally designated by the sovereigns to assume the Supreme Chancellorship of the institution, backed by a massive faculty matrix containing nearly a hundred celebrated military heroes and high-court scholars who were conformed to serve as instructional professors. The sheer qualitative depth of this academic lineup completely out-registered the dimensions of the historical class assembled thirty winters past.
What presented a vastly more monumental metric across the court records, however, was the raw composition of the student body registered for the semester. Among the incoming rows, the seven young demigod heirs representing the sovereign interests of the Three Great Dynasties comprised the absolute, undisputed peak of the registry.
In addition to that royal core, following the grueling, non-stop watches of intense bureaucratic competition, cross-factional alignment plays, and quiet aristocratic infighting that had consumed the nobility across the banquet tables last night, the final administrative quota defining the wider student body was securely locked at a ceiling of over two hundred students.
The absolute majority of these allocations had been aggressively harvested by the ancestral, land-grant noble houses anchoring the Old and New Factions of the Golden Dynasty, while the remaining slots were privately allocated via the restricted recommendation letters of highly respected, immortal heroes and patriarchs living within the capital rings. The case of Kristoff, Ancient Dragon Knight—whose name had been jointly submitted to the registrar via the combined signatures of Commander Ordovis and High Priestess Lansseax—comprised the most typical, pristine validation of that specific track.
The academic school operated on a strict three-day rotational system, with the master faculty cycling through four primary core courses: Advanced Combat Methodology, Erdtree Liturgy, Starlight and Glintstone Sorcery, and Imperial Historiography. Naturally, the open blocks of unscheduled watches separating the classroom lectures weren't engineered to allow the adolescent scions to freely roam the palace gardens; those windows were rigidly reserved for the students to independently process, dissect, and research the dense matrices of knowledge harvested during class. Concurrently, the private academy enforced a brutal, three-month assessment mechanism; any operator whose tracking file recorded a failure across two consecutive evaluation cycles would suffer an immediate, absolute executive expulsion—at which juncture of the clock, zero volume of ancestral wealth or high-court connection could save their registry.
Across the three suns preceding the opening orientation ceremonies, Prince Radahn had simulated a script where his massive frame would act as a courtly host, escorting Lucia's vanguard to execute an exhaustive observational tour across the historic landmarks of the capital. However, the Dragon Prince calculated within his own internal matrix that his recent diplomatic travels and non-stop court interventions had already seriously hampered the progression metrics of his nightly drills. He delivered a righteous, un-bending, and completely flat refusal to the prince's invitation.
He went so far as to deploy a highly polished, expertly calculated sequence of sarcastic martial remarks to aggressively provoke the red-haired boy's competitive ego, forcing Radahn's center of gravity to lock into a state of intense defensiveness. Flushing a deep crimson from his collar to his ears, the Carian prince scrambled back to the porches of Triumph Hall to immediately initiate an extra tier of brutal baseline physical drilling.
Monitoring Radahn's rapid, frantic strategic retreat across the avenue, Lucia let out a low, highly amused sneer behind his teeth. Your house is playing games, kid. If your muscle memory fails to expend the hard labor required to match the velocity of my own progression tree, by what manual of arithmetic am I conformed to sharpen the transitions of my newly acquired Eternal Swordsmanship? My ledger hasn't even settled the score regarding your complete failure to contribute a single fraction of an arbitrage credit inside the memory sandbox the other night!
Across those same seventy-two hours of the clock, to guarantee his focus was completely insulated while mining the data of the Eternal Swordsmanship, he executed a brief administrative deployment, dispatching Shirley's white mass down the corridor to nest inside the Haligtree Palace next door, before delivering a advance notice to Princess Ranni to regulate her casual visitation watches. Clearing his deck of all external variables, he plunged his frame directly into the subterranean training vault of Valeria Hall to initiate a state of total, un-interrupted seclusion.
Aided by the automated processing loops of his Memory Battlefield, he expended two full days and midnights of non-stop cognitive calculation to roughly sort, index, and compile nearly a thousand independent sword techniques clutched within the Eternal Swordsmanship database—a volume that completely omitted the vast sub-directories of shifting variations that were based on the Carian Blade Arts and explicitly linked to active sorcery conduits.
Due to the temporary, single-digit gridlock restricting his active Intelligence stat, leaving his nervous system entirely non-responsive to mana processing, he resolved to temporarily archive the Carian lines of the swordsmanship, committing the absolute mass of his processing voltage to mastering the remaining physical sword tracks.
Following an exhaustive, structural comparison across the sandboxes, Lucia's tactical engine isolated an permanent anomaly: while the specific sword forms belonging to the Storm lineage woven inside the Eternal Swordsmanship were all exceptionally powerful, they failed to contain the absolute, un-filtered essence of the true Storm Style. The underlying logic was scientifically consistent—the Storm Swordsmanship clutched within his own inventory emerged directly from the pristine Dragon Bloodline Inheritances of the Ancient Dragon Royal Court, commanding an immense directory of restricted draconic sword techniques that even a champion of Knight Moongrum's rank had never mastered across his life path. Naturally, the Carian iteration could never mutate to serve as an absolute, superior replacement for his ancestral style.
The duplicate mathematical rule governed the mechanics of the Leyndell Swordsmanship, the Tibian Mariner Styles, and the rest of the forgotten lineages his blades had not yet encountered across reality. In the final accounting, the Eternal Swordsmanship—which the First Carian Knight had inherited from the subterranean ruins of the ancient Nox civilization and systematically refined through his own lifetime of martial warfare—comprised the single most preternaturally powerful combat system Lucia's visors had logged since his egg cracked, yet it did not represent the ultimate, closed zenith of martial evolution under the stars. His intellect preferred to evaluate the style as a magnificent, fluid base framework—an open operating system enabling his gauntlet to continuously absorb data from other master operators to permanently scale his swordsmanship toward perfection.
If the wheel of time turned to a watch where his muscle memory could simultaneously rival Knight Moongrum across the parameters of the Carian Blade Arts, Chief Knight Ordovis within the heavy templates of the Leyndell Swordsmanship, and the legendary Twin Wings of Ingevyr and Oleg across the wild vacuum tracks of the Storm Style... the ultimate swordsmanship his own hand would forge down the chronology would mathematically out-register the voltage of this current Eternal Swordsmanship by an infinite premium.
On the final sun preceding the start of the academy courses, his cognitive grid recording a localized sensory dizziness and mental exhaustion from the non-stop data mining, Lucia resolved to temporarily put aside his swordsmanship calculations. He elected to execute a handful of low-stakes flashback engagements inside the void to reset his psychological indicators to baseline compliance.
It was an entry-level data point worth noting across his ledger that ever since his spirit had cleared the high-voltage cloud duel inside the Starlight Magic Domain during the state banquet, a massive, brilliant constellation representing the identity of Knight Moongrum had materialized within the upper rafters of the Memory Battlefield's starry sky. However, the node lacked the necessary analytical percentage required to unlock a stable Battle Recollection sandbox.
[Memory Interface: Target Asset Verified]
Target Register: "Chief of Caria" Moongrum
Biological Classification: Human (Master Lineage)
Sovereign Combat Tier (Level): 516
[Active Parameter Distribution]
Vigor: 80 | Mind: 95 | Endurance: 74
Strength: 85 | Dexterity: 90 | Intelligence: 96
Faith: 32 | Arcane: 43
[Logged Methodology Nodes]
- Eternal Swordsmanship (Grandmaster Grade)
- Carian Sorcery (Grandmaster Grade)
[Legendary Attribute Node]
- Magic Domain (Status: Unlocked / Operating under full compliance)
[Analytical Progress Tracking]
Current Parsing Index: 1.8% (Status: Battle Recollections Locked)
Next Sequential Progress Node: 10.0%
Parsing the immense, terrifying data panel formatting Moongrum's registry, every single sword style and physical combat skill clutched within the paladin's lifetime of warfare had been systematically compressed and categorized under the single umbrella of the Eternal Swordsmanship. Lucia's strategic engine anticipated that as his progress markers scaled across the winters, his muscle memory would gradually harvest the capacity to integrate these hyper-complex skills into his own framework, building a completely unique, un-paralleled combat system separate from the dynasties.
Following a brief microsecond of internal hesitation, his mind bypassed the higher-tier nodes to lock its selection squarely back onto Godskin Apostle Samuel—his absolute initial sparring partner inside the sandbox. His predatory intent had firmly resolved to shatter the fifty percent analysis wall across this watch, regardless of the physical toll, refusing to allow this black-flame executioner to choke his advancement parameters a single watch longer.
"Initiate transit into the Battle of Recollection."
The exact microsecond the syllables cleared his thoughts, the massive constellation representing Samuel's historical file and the floating starlight text vanished from the void. The dark, ancient Black Flame Emblem—an iconic sigil that had grown entirely too familiar to Lucia's tracking network across months of nightly massacres—ignited its pale fire in the grey air exactly forty paces from his boots. Samuel's translucent, white-robed silhouette stepped out from the basements of the black flame, his flesh rapidly solidifying into full physical density!
However, before the Apostle's nervous system could complete its baseline alignment to launch an offensive, Lucia's right boot violently stomped against the gray sand, his entire physical mass launching forward through the space like a sudden, apocalyptic storm gale!
BOOM—!
Across the trajectory of the sprint, his somatic cells completed their Semi-Dragonization morphology in the span of a single heartbeat. Two massive, frost-bright dragon-scale blades Assembled entirely from his raw spiritual energy manifested across his left and right waist harnesses.
Verifying that the operational distance separating their visors had been reduced by more than half, Lucia's engine triggered a secondary, explosive output of speed. Amidst the deafening howl of the displaced air currents, his twin blades cleared their leather like two silver dragons violently leaping out from the floor of a subterranean abyss, instantaneously painting two shimmering vacuum arcs that stretched more than ten paces across the sand!
CRACK—!
Samuel's greatsword swung through a desperate parry to intercept the descending slash, a low, muffled groan escaping his teeth as the kinetic payload slammed into his wrists. But his defense had failed to account for the secondary line—the alternate dragon-scale blade wove through his flank with fluid, terrifying velocity, the razor-sharp edge systematically slicing through his white silks to lay bare the stark white of his ribs in a deep, bone-revealing laceration!
Monitoring the blood spray, Lucia's features remained entirely devoid of adolescent vanity. His jaw locked, his teeth grinding together as he forced his internal muscles to project their maximum possible output, unleashing a continuous, blinding torrent of silver sword light as his forearms swung through a frantic, high-frequency melee combination.
Yet, after sustaining that initial, catastrophic setback from the un-predicted opening blitz, Samuel's combat engine rapidly adjusted its filters, handling Lucia's escalating offensive with an eerie, master-level compliance. His robed arms appeared to stretch, lengthen, and contract like high-density vulcanized rubber across the sand. The needle-point of his Godskin Stitcher moved with the effortless agility of an aquatic predator swimming through a current, systematically darting through the gaps of Lucia's slashes to precisely strike the absolute weakest point of kinetic density anchoring each swing. He did not merely break through the dragon youth's offensive combinations with absolute mechanical ease; his steel managed to carve more than a dozen deep and shallow puncture wounds across Lucia's scale plating.
As the engagement bled into its fifth minute of non-stop violence, the absolute disparity separating their respective recovery parameters re-wrote the baseline rules of the match.
Although both combatants possessed the permanent, law-overriding properties of the Cradle Blessing, Samuel's gaping rib laceration had already systematically re-knitted its tissues with the effortless velocity of an engineered zipper sealing a canvas jacket. Lucia's deep puncture wounds, conversely, were merely initiating their initial alchemical mending cycles. In the final accounting, the Apostle comprised a top-tier, world-class hero of the old era; his active stats still maintained a massive, crushing margin of superiority over Lucia—a demigod youth who had only recently crossed the threshold of the hero tier.
Beneath the macabre, terrifying face tattoos coiling across his leather hood, Samuel's dead eyes gleamed with a smug, predatory satisfaction. Relying on his hyper-acute combat senses, his processors logged the data indicating that the kinetic power output animating Lucia's muscles was entering its gradual decay cycle. The exact watch this frantic, all-out offensive ceased its momentum, the absolute difference in their raw physical statistics would be completely exposed across the sandbox—and the Godskin Stitcher would easily pierce the heart plates of this young Ancient Dragon to close the file.
Just as the Apostle calculated that the victory slot had been securely locked into his ledger, a strange, high-frequency neurological tingling sensation suddenly erupted across his sword-wielding arm.
The next microsecond, a blinding, cataclysmic wall of dark red lightning violently detonated across the flats of Lucia's twin blades, and two massive, rolling Vacuum Slashes saturated with the un-fused fury of the Ancient Dragon Lightning roared straight through his guard!
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