Chapter 97 97: Mind’s Eye
The moment the final syllable cleared the old paladin's teeth, the previously chaotic, murmuring ranks of the student column fell into an absolute, dead-still silence.
The absolute majority of the candidates standing across the paving stones comprised native, high-born citizens of Leyndell, direct descendants of aristocratic houses that clutched immense hereditary status across the ministries. Their private archives commanded a clear, highly disciplined database regarding which specific monumental figures within the capital ring were permanently forbidden from being trifled with; consequently, not a solitary scion raised his jaw to mount a public protest against the decree signed by Knight Ordovis—none possessed the stomach to so much as question the arithmetic of the ledger.
Operating as one of the most senior, preternaturally powerful heroes drawing breath across the entire continent, this seventy-winter-old Commander of the Crucible Faction, though un-bendingly anchored to the traditional ministries of the Old Party, was an entity whom even the highest-ranking directors of the New Faction bureaucracy—such as Duke Caven Duolis himself—would mathematically never dare to challenge across an open floor. Under those operational constraints, it was a foregone conclusion that these green, adolescent nobles who lacked a single page of active field experience would fail to provoke his wrath.
What truly bewildered and thoroughly terrified their centers, however, was the raw reality that the Chancellery would choose to broadcast such a ruthless, pitiless output of authority across the absolute initial watch of the Private School's semester—completely disregarding the historic weight of their family crests and ministerial connections. This calculated erasure of political privilege caused the academy's curriculum, which the upper baronies had historically simulated to function as a glamorous, comfortable "gilded" finish for their scions' portfolios, to suddenly manifest as a brutally harsh, high-fatality crucible.
At the absolute vanguard of the column, the countenances of the eighteen expelled nobles suffered a rapid sequence of sharp, flustered color transitions. Yet, trapped within the gaze of the Crucible sentinels, their bodies could only execute a series of deep, profoundly respectful court bows before the old master, before frantically gathering their mantles to evacuate the plaza lines at maximum velocity.
Their processors were conformed to turn over variables vastly more critical than the localized physical punishments or house arrests their fathers would layout across their schedules the moment their carriages returned to the family estates; more crucially, their calculations were forced to evaluate whether their sloppy performance had permanently offended the personal tracking grid of Knight Ordovis, thereby dropping an permanent diplomatic deficit onto the ledger of their respective houses.
Inside the architecture of high aristocratic families where the preservation of systemic self-interest reigned supreme above all blood ties, the exact watch an individual asset was calculated to function as a permanent obstacle blocking the family's long-term institutional development, that individual would be ruthlessly, heartlessly abandoned by the patriarch—transmuted without a single microsecond of remorse into a silent sacrifice to balance a political trade.
"There manifests a high probability that several intelligences among your numbers are currently turning over a specific query: why, after your respective houses expended such a massive volume of political and financial treasure to secure your enrollment certificates, my hand has resolved to treat your presence with such an ice-cold detachment. Now, my tongue will supply the absolute source code behind the math—"
Knight Ordovis's voice boomed across the limestone blocks, his greatsword driving an inch into the paving. "This institution shares zero structural commonalities with any comfortable social environment your muscle memory has tracked across your estates. This coordinate does not comprise a glamorous court ball; it does not represent a low-stakes dueling arena where an operator can forfeit his steel without risking his skin; and it is mathematically distant from a bureaucratic office of fame and fortune saturated with filthy, hidden deals. Whether the ultimate objective driving your application was to transform your mass into a courtly vassal anchoring the retinue of some imperial prince, or to prematurely cultivate a network of relationships with the future ministers and warlords of this dynasty... delete those petty simulations from your memory banks this instant—because my office states with absolute clarity: any candidate who harbors such undisciplined calculations inside his center will undeniably fail to preserve his life-readouts until the closing watches of the semester!"
"Strictly the un-yielding Heroes of the Erdtree, the celebrated field generals of the legion lines, and the master sorcerers and academic scholars who command the capability to physically propel this entire epoch toward a grander zenith will be permitted to preserve their names across these registries. Consequently, archive those unrealistic, small-minded courtly schemes, and focus the entire volume of your concentration on executing every structural task the faculty professors write into your ledgers to a flawless hundred percent efficiency!"
The old master swept his hawk-like eyes across the assembly, the freezing glare cutting through the front rows. "From this watch forward, my tracking networks desist from logging a secondary iteration of this sloppy configuration across my plaza. Do your processors command the layout?"
"Understood, Commander!" the two hundred remaining students roared in a single, synchronized shout that echoed through the columns.
The rigid lines mapping Knight Ordovis's weathered features dropped a fraction of an inch, his posture re-conforming to a resting state as he immediately initiated the formal opening lecture of the semester.
The instructional files defining the initial day's course centered almost exclusively upon the fundamental mechanical principles driving the Leyndell Swordsmanship.
Operating as one of the three premier, world-class martial traditions celebrated across the continent, and serving as the absolute bedrock component underpinning the entire Golden System of close-quarters combat methodologies, the classic Leyndell style—which rigidly prioritized the joint execution of heavy shield deflection and straight-sword counters—presented an aesthetic that appeared remarkably simple, unadorned, and devoid of decorative flourishes. Yet, stripped of that superficial simplicity, the architecture of the form enclosed an immense library of deep, highly advanced swordsmanship principles that were seemingly straightforward, yet remarkably ingenious across a melee.
A massive percentage of the candidates emerging from the high ministerial houses, despite having thoroughly drilled the rudiments of this specific sword style under the direction of private house-masters since their childhoods, discovered that the exact watch an absolute grandmaster of Knight Ordovis's tier manually dissected the forms before their visors, their personal understanding of the lineage was revealed to be entirely full of mechanical flaws, structural imbalances, and un-optimized transition delays. They were conformed by the lecture to delete their previous habits, re-aligning their muscles to learn the forms from a absolute zero baseline.
It required zero data entry to state that the handful of candidates tracing their lineages back to impoverished provincial backgrounds cherished this entry window with a fanatical, intense focus, evaluating the Royal Private School as an un-assailable stepping stone engineered to force their names into the upper strata of high society. Their eyes were already thoroughly, un-blinkingly engrossed in processing the lecture notes.
The instructional paths managed by the Crucible Master weren't restricted strictly to dry, abstract theoretical readings over a lectern; his curriculum continuously integrated a massive volume of vivid, high-fidelity physical demonstrations and precise structural analyses drawn directly from the tracking files of his own historical battle campaigns across the Unification Wars. Concurrently, the students were frequently ordered to independently partition their numbers into pairs to drill the newly acquired matrices across the grass.
During these practical training blocks, Lucia and Radahn naturally locked their indicators to form an aggressive sparring pair, their steel continuously executing high-voltage crosses as they verified the data of the Eternal Swordsmanship. Prince Miquella and Princess Ranni had already securely identified their specialized development tracks within the sectors of high liturgy and starlight sorcery; their presence across the combat squares was engineered strictly to broaden the qualitative scope of their general academic knowledge, desisting from launching their physical frames into actual close-quarters attrition. Prince Godrick preserved his default, arrogant detachment toward the peer demigods, dedicating his watches to independently commanding the physical drilling of his younger brother, Godfrey, and Duke Duolis's only scion, Carlyle.
In the final accounting, it was Prince Rykard who—subjected to a dual-tier executive coercion play mounted jointly by his sister's cold gaze and Lucia's mocking smile—was conformed to pair his steel with little Malenia. Carrying a long, thoroughly miserable expression across his features, his gauntlets hoisted an un-sharpened wooden shield and practice sword to cross paths with the little girl's newly unfettered, whirlwind physical combinations.
"Lucia, during that terminal transition loop, did your gauntlet deploy the specific deflection matrix from our teacher's Eternal Swordsmanship? My own analysis suggests the entry angle preserves a clear margin for structural optimization," Radahn spoke, his massive wooden training sword sketching a slow trajectory through the air as he discussed the micro-movements with the Dragon Prince, when a sharp, agonized shriek of pure physical trauma violently cut through the wind from the rear quadrant.
"Agh—!!!!"
Rykard roared through his teeth, his right hand instantly releasing his wooden blade to let the armament clatter against the paving blocks. His left gauntlet clamped a vice-like grip around his right knuckles as his frame executed three chaotic, frantic hops across the grass, his face contorted in a furious glare directed straight at Malenia's red locks. "The third iteration! The absolute third consecutive iteration!"
"Identify the anomaly... what specific metric defines the third iteration?" Radahn asked, his curiosity instantly piqued as his massive chassis strode across the turf, his un-sharpened training sword resting over his shoulder plate.
"That little terror has systematically, deliberately sliced the exact same coordinate mapping my right ring finger three individual times in a row, and every solitary strike has locked its impact onto the identical spot down to the millimeter!" Rykard complained loudly, his left index finger jabbing toward Malenia's face. "If the rules of this academy hadn't legally conformed my system to suppress my active physical statistics down to match her juvenile developmental level, her steel would have liquidated my hand completely!"
Radahn locked his massive fingers around his brother's wrist, hoisting the arm to execute a visual audit over the knuckles. His tracking vision cleanly isolated a distinct, perfectly aligned crimson contusion bruising the skin of the ring finger's primary joint. Armed with his advanced martial eye, he processed the data instantly—this comprised the un-chipped signature of three individual weapon impacts. Yet, what completely shattered his comprehension was the absolute reality that the three separate strikes had achieved a terminal precision error that scored significantly less than the width of a human hair.
"An absolute, world-class miracle of precision!" Radahn exulted, his voice booming with an un-courtly martial admiration. He spun his massive torso to evaluate Malenia, who was currently clutching her wooden training sword against her chest silks, her small mouth pouting as her large blue eyes welled with a nervous, childhood tear line. He asked with immense awe, "By what manual of swordsmanship did your muscle memory lock that trajectory?"
"Big brother... does your processing engine permanently focus its resources on the absolute wrong sector of the dataset? Even if your mouth lacks the courtly etiquette to comfort my physical trauma, shouldn't your initial response be to issue a sharp reprimand targeting her undisciplined violence?"
"Seal your jaw for a watch."
"Oh."
Verifying that Malenia's internal stress levels were scaling, rendering her entirely unable to formulate a coherent response across the open floor, Lucia walked through their circle to drop his knees onto the grass beside her boots. His massive hand reached out to gently, soothingly smooth the copper silk of her long hair, his tone dropping into a soft, relaxed baritone. "Your brother Radahn isn't mounting an offensive, little one; his voice is presenting a premier piece of praise targeting the precision of your blades. Disclose the calculation across our ears—what specific variable allows your eyes to permanently track and strike the identical coordinate across his guard?"
"Because," the little girl whispered softly, her fingers tightening around the wooden hilt as her mind carefully assembled the structural data files of the melee, "because Brother Rykard's right ring finger functions as the absolute, weakest bottleneck anchoring his entire defensive loop! The point comprises an permanent flaw!"
"A flaw?"
Lucia's spatial processors experienced a briefwatch of structural stillness, his silver eyes shifting to trade a rapid, highly analytical look with Miquella, who was currently deploying a low-frequency cooling miracle to damp the bruising across Rykard's hand.
Relying on his deep library of future meta-knowledge behind the screen, his memory tracks had long ago logged the existence of Malenia's legendary, preternatural perceptual talent—an innate, law-overriding sensory archetype historically cataloged as the Mind's Eye. Yet, tracking the active dataset of the present pre-Shattering chronology, her young consciousness had already independently mastered the capacity to compile and deploy that terrifying calculation to map weaknesses inside a live, full-voltage combat engagement.
"An permanent flaw across my guard? My own engine states that your blades simply harvested a sequence of random, lucky dice rolls!" Rykard barked, his hand shaking out the residual chill of Miquella's miracle as his face flushed with a thorough, aristocratic dissatisfaction. "My system executed the exact defensive counter-stance Knight Ordovis demonstrated across the floorboard to absolute perfection!"
"The metric contains a structural deficit—Brother Rykard, although your muscle memory replicated the raw physical forms articulated by the Chancellor with an exceptional fidelity, the absolute fluid smoothness regulating your transition from a heavy left-hand shield bash into a right-hand straight-sword counter-attack suffered a microscopic, recurring stagnation loop every solitary time your center shifted... and the tendons mapping your right ring finger happened to function as the final, absolute terminal coordinate where your system exerted its physical tension," Malenia explained crisply, her small voice delivering the complex mechanical breakdown with a terrifying, un-blinking clarity. "Consequently... my blade simply exploited that specific operational window to intercept your transit, which comprises the absolute structural reason why my wood intersected the duplicate spot."
Finishing her tactical thesis, her head dropped back into a shy, childlike angle, her tongue sticking out slightly behind her fingers as a bashful murmur cleared her lips. "My house offers an absolute courtly apology, big brother... my hand will preserve a stricter caution to scale down the kinetic velocity of my slashes across our next run."
Radahn's dark eyes flared with an immense, blinding fire the exact millisecond her explanation finalized its compliance. His massive palm lunged through the air, delivering a thunderous, friendly slap directly against the base of Rykard's bronze skull. "Do your processors finally parse the math, you lazy thing? My own mouth has stated across a hundred watches that your baseline swordsmanship tracks score as an absolute, un-optimized catastrophe! Rectify the structural deficit immediately!"
Rykard's features wove into an expression of profound, un-fused grievance. Within the private basements of his memory, his mind replayed how his red-haired elder brother used to systematically beat his mass into the dirt the exact watch he attempted to teach him a basic Carian sword form, before simply barking that his chassis lacked a sufficient volume of drilling hours and conformed his muscles to execute another hundred reps. How on earth was his intellect supposed to decode what specific microscopic tendon was failing its metrics deep inside his hand?
Furthermore, turning over the data of the sparring match, he was forced to confront an incredibly bitter alchemical reality: he had indeed logged a distinct, heavy drag across his nervous system precisely when switching his momentum from total defense to total offense. But by what system of cosmic privilege was this little, fragile girl—an entity who had been completely confined to an iron wheelchair for over six winters, and had unlocked the biological capability to stand straight upon her own feet for less than a single moon—capable of systematically reading and punishing his elite forms while their active attributes were scaled to a dead even baseline?
And to compound his aristocratic humiliation... her small mouth had just turned across the grass to ask his shield permission to scale down her kinetic velocity? To use less force so his bones wouldn't break?
The timeline is entirely bankrupted, Rykard calculated in an absolute, dark despair. My princely dignity can legally no longer survive across this capital.
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