Gazef Stronoff's POV [level 37]
I had been waiting to ask since Tim and my king shook hands.
Not the politics; the politics were complicated in the way that the court's politics were always complicated. That was the king's work, and Ramposa III was better at it than anyone in that room would acknowledge publicly.
What I had been waiting for was a simpler and more personal request.
I had known Tim for years. Vesuchā had been our teacher after all, and when I met Vesuchā later in my life, he had described Tim with the particular combination of professional respect and personal bafflement that good teachers reserved for students who defied the expected relationship between talent and pure hard work, as Vesuchā had seen all the legends Tim had made for himself.
I had asked respectfully for my king's permission to spar with Tim. The king had agreed with the specific expression of a man who understood my clear determination to test my skills on Tim.
The nobles had immediately turned it into a performance, as they suggested to me to use the kingdom's treasures for this fight, accompanied by the specific energy of people who wanted to watch someone they disliked be corrected and were hoping that the combination of Adamantite armor and legendary weapons would produce that result, as I gave them a respectful bow as I said.
"I will make sure to try my best."
I was not under any illusion that they only wanted to use me for their petty revenge.
But I was the warrior captain of the Re-Estize kingdom. My job was to fight at the highest level available to me, and the kingdom's treasures represented the highest level available. I put them on with the same professional attention I gave to all equipment preparation, checking the fit, confirming the enchantment function, and settling the weight distribution.
Guardian Armor.
Due to it being composed entirely of adamantite, the armor is said to be enchanted with magic that would deflect lethal blows.
Razor Edge.
It is a large glowing magical broadsword with an elaborate hilt similar to my normal weapon. The handle is covered in a gold-like material, and the blade is teal green colored.
Amulet of Immortality.
The Amulet of Immortality provides regeneration and healing to the wearer, but it's very slow at healing.
---
An hour later at the castle's garden.
The garden had been arranged with the efficiency of a court that was accustomed to producing formal spectacles on short notice, tables for the nobles, positions for the observers, enough distance from the centre for safety and enough proximity for clear sightlines. The king sat alone.
His face had a very worried look on it.
I got into battle stance.
Tim stood approximately three meters away and looked mildly bored.
I told him I would not hold back.
He gave me a lazy thumbs up.
I started buffing myself, everything I carried that applied to combat performance, the layers building on each other in the sequence I had developed across years of refining how I prepared for serious engagement. Then I moved.
The charge was full speed, full commitment, the razor edge coming in on the line that opened the engagement with maximum pressure. Against anyone else I had ever faced, this opening produced either a defensive collapse or a defensive response that told me something about how the fight was going to develop.
Tim easily parried it.
Not blocked, but parried, the specific technique that redirected force rather than opposing it, performed with an economy of motion that communicated very clearly that the parry had taken approximately the effort he was currently willing to invest.
I kept attacking.
I am not a person who attacks blindly. I assess and adapt, and the adaptation that this situation called for was increasing pressure to find the level at which Tim's response required more investment. I came at him from different angles, changed the timing, and mixed the Sixfold Slash sequences with conventional attacks in the combinations that had worked against the best opponents I had faced.
He parried everything.
He never attacked back.
The nobles were cheering. I understood that they were interpreting the visible activity, the aggressive engagement, the constant sword contact, and the obvious effort as evidence that I was winning. They were watching someone attack continuously, and the other could only defend, and they read that as the attacker having the advantage.
I was working as hard as I had ever worked in a formal engagement.
My legs told me I was getting tired. They were right.
I stepped back.
Loaded everything I had into the Sixfold Slash of Light, the martial art that Vesuchā had spent years teaching me, the technique that I had mastered before most of my fellow students and that had been the decisive factor in more engagements than I could count. Six slashes, simultaneous, the speed of them collapsing the interval between strikes to something that should not be individually discernible.
The dust rose.
When it cleared, my sword was stuck into the ground.
Cold metal touched my neck from behind.
I turned my head.
Tim was behind me. The sword he was holding against my neck was one of the daggers he carried at his belt, drawn at some point in the sequence that I had not been able to track because he had been moving faster than my perception could follow.
As Tim said, "I guess it's my win."
I stood in the garden in the kingdom's treasures with my sword stuck in the ground and thought about what had just happened. I had not hit him once. I had attacked continuously for the duration of an hour; that had taken everything I had, and I had not touched him.
The nobles were silent.
The king's face had moved from worry to the expression of pure shock.
---
Tim's POV
I gave Gazef's back a playful slap with the specific solidity of a man in Adamantite armor who was currently dealing with the recalibration that follows a comprehensive sparring loss.
"Don't worry, Gazef; if you train some more, you will one day beat me."
I was laughing while I said it, which was genuine; the absurdity of the statement delivered to the most skilled warrior in the kingdom was something I found rather cruelly funny. Gazef received my laughter, and his downcast frown settled a little further down.
The boy appeared from the observer area while I was still talking to Gazef.
Eleven years old. The bearing of someone who had been doing serious physical training for his years, not the casual fitness of a well-fed noble child but the specific development of someone who had been working at something with real commitment. He bowed with the careful precision of someone who had practised the gesture because it mattered to him to do it correctly.
He said his name was Climb. Said he was a fan of mine, and asked me, how I had gotten so good at swordsmanship.
I looked at him, the determined face, the real respect in the eyes, the way he was standing that communicated that he was here because he genuinely wanted to learn something and not because someone had told him to be here.
I told him the truth; it's pure hard work. Not talent; I had the worst swordsmanship talent of anyone at Vesuchā's dojo, and Gazef confirmed this.
Gazef told Climb, that Climb was more talented at the sword than I had been.
I watched the stars appear in Climb's eyes. The specific expression of a young person who has been told that the gap between where they are and where they want to be is bridgeable by pure hard work.
He picked up his practice sword and started swinging, with a cheerful smile on his face.
Then bloodlust hit my awareness like a splash of cold water.
I turned my head as fast as I could.
Princess Renner was behind us, a few meters back, at a table with her attendants. For a fraction of a second, the fraction of a second that my reflexes operated in, the interval between one assessment and the next that normal human perception moved too slowly to register, her face was pure hatred and rage at me.
Then it was back to her normal face. Like the smile was always there. The pleasant expression that the court saw and the people around her took at face value was a mask.
I knew the lore. I knew what Renner was. I knew what she felt about Climb and what she felt about anyone who redirected Climb's attention from her and what that feeling meant for the person who redirected it.
I gave her a friendly wave.
She returned a friendly wave.
I told Climb I was leaving as I jumped.
The shockwave from a hero-rank jump was not nothing. The tables went over. The nobles among them received the specific indignity of afternoon tea becoming involuntary, and I was already in the air before the first cup hit the ground.
---
E-Rantel appeared after a day of travel at a comfortable running speed, the city recognizable from a distance.
My tier ten angels were gone.
I had known they were going to despawn; the summoning duration for the Seraph Empyreans had a limit, and the limit had passed during the days I spent in the capital. The tier two angels that had been distributed through the city were also mostly gone, the same duration limit having expired. The city's medical infrastructure was back to what it had been before the transformations, which was considerably better than what it had been before I returned from the Dragon Kingdom but was not the comprehensive coverage that the angel presence had provided.
I noted this as a problem to address with the next daily transformation and continued home.
My office had the specific condition of a space that had been occupied by a shadow clone for several days: neat, functional, and with the paperwork in the state it would be in if I had managed it myself, which was because shadow clones were me.
The clone looked at me when I entered.
"Hey dude, I found something cool. Wanna see?"
"Don't call me DUDE, just call me Tim, like a normal person."
This was not typical clone behavior. Shadow clones operated on the parameters I set when I created them; they maintained the assigned tasks, they responded to situations within those tasks' scope, and they did not typically develop independent initiatives beyond the assignment.
I waited.
The clone picked up the life god idol, the carved pale stone figure of Alah Alaf that I had been keeping on the desk as the primary daily-use item since returning from the Dragon Kingdom.
It glowed.
The white light that I associated entirely and completely with my own experience of the divine transformation, the internal illumination, and the specific quality of holy magic operating at a tier I had no word for except divine, came from the clone.
The clone transformed.
Into the form of Alah Alaf.
I stood in my office and looked at my clone standing in my office wearing the form of the life god.
My jaw hit the floor.
---
Tim [level 97]