[Emergency Treatment Initiated]
Man, my body’s in such bad shape... I only used the Divine Sword Ultimate Technique at a reduced output, and my arm still broke? Seriously? Tch. Guess my skill really has dulled more than I thought.
“Hup!”
After chaining two techniques at the level of a finishing move, I let go of the half-broken sword. Forcing my badly injured arm, which was screaming from the compound fracture, I dragged it back toward my body and thrust out my right hand in the shape of a palm strike.
Half-Finishing Move
Wind Blade Zero Form
Wind Blade Strike
Along with the palm strike, the strange current wrapped around my right hand burst outward. Fwoosh!
“Ghk!”
Man, my hand... As expected, with my physical ability lagging behind, the technique doesn’t have its original power. Tch. Maybe I shouldn’t have thrown it out there. I should’ve linked it into a fist strike instead. Tch. Yeah, my skill really has dropped. I hadn’t seen real combat in nearly thirty years, and I still haven’t adapted to this weakened body... Fighting by calculating every move like Anne does just isn’t my style.
Still, I did land some damage. Not much, just enough to make his left arm bleed a little. No, maybe the [Magic Line] didn’t miss completely—he’s bleeding a bit around the head too?
I pulled my body back. Hm? He’s not following up?
“Cough! Hrk. Truly unbalanced. To possess such extraordinary sword energy, yet have the body unable to endure the strike.”
Well, if you’re bleeding enough to soak your clothes, even if you weren’t hit cleanly... no, not knowing would make you an idiot.
“That’s rich coming from you. You’ve got that level of swordsmanship, and yet you’re the one saying that after never even seeing real combat?”
“Indeed, I suppose so.”
Kojiro gave a faint smile.
“Well then, why not end this with a proper self-execution? By your own words, it seems I’ve taught you a thing or two.”
“If I could do that, I would, but I’m under a restriction.”
Right.
“And even aside from that, to be honest, my heart is racing. It isn’t often one gets the chance to face a strong opponent like this—especially one so strong it’s hard to believe he’s still among the living and has reached this level.”
“Is that so.”
Giving a half-hearted reply, I moved my right hand to the hilt of the second sword at my waist.
“In that sense, and as a sign of respect for my senior, I shall show you one little trick, however clumsy it may be.”
“If you want to show respect for your senior, I’d much prefer you did it by killing yourself instead...!”
Tch. So this isn’t a normal technique after all? For Kojiro, who could swing a sword from any posture, to deliberately set his stance like that before using it...
Is it Tsubame Gaeshi? Hmm. My memories of the original are hazy, but I still remember that much about what the technique is.
“And even if that were not the case, I have also realized what you were aiming for just now.”
“...So you noticed?”
“If you keep striking the same point on a sword, even a blind man would notice.”
“...Normally people wouldn’t catch that, you know?”
Tch. Caught, huh.
“And did you think I would not notice that you were holding back?”
“...I wasn’t exactly looking down on you.”
The Frey style I use is closer to the original than to any modified version. The problem is that, by its very nature, the Frey style is specialized entirely in crushing the enemy with full power. But if I unleash full power with my current physical condition, my body won’t hold and will quite literally shatter. In other words, I have to hold back—but the problem is figuring out just how much to hold back.
To put it another way, it’s like swinging a sledgehammer whose head is barely hanging on by a single frayed string, and trying to crack only the shell of a raw egg.
You have to swing with full force without breaking the hammer—my body. Easy, right? Hell no. It’s insanely hard. The Frey style is, at its core, a style for smashing the enemy by colliding at full power, so if I can’t use full power, how am I supposed to bring out its strength properly?
Normally, you’d never end up in a situation like this. Producing enough force to break your own body isn’t something that happens easily. Once you reach that level, you’ve already gotten used to it along the way. Even if your physical ability is weak, by the time you climb to that level, you’ve usually become accustomed to exerting full power within the limits of what your frail body can endure.
Even if your physical ability has dropped since your prime and you can no longer use full power, it doesn’t usually fall off a cliff. If overexertion wears your body down, the decline happens gradually. If your strength was 50 in your prime, it doesn’t drop from 50 to 5—it goes from 50 to 49, or 48. If it falls step by step like that, you adapt along the way. As long as you’re not thrown into the impossible situation of going from 50 to 5 all at once.
But right now, I’m in exactly that impossible situation. And not even from 50 to 5—more like from 50 to 0.1. Before, I could wrap myself in a bit of wave energy, put some force into a single slash, and literally split a mountain. Now, to produce that level of power, I’d have to go all out, pile on every trick I know, and even then I’d have to damage my body just to get close—and I still wouldn’t reach that level. Before, I could wrap myself in a decent buff and get that kind of output with a normal attack. Now, even if I stack every buff I have and wreck my body while doing it, I still can’t reach it. In my head, I’ve already taken Kojiro’s head several times over, but my body can’t keep up with the motion.
In short, it’s hell. I haven’t been hit once in this fight, and yet my own techniques are making my body bleed. What a ridiculous sight. Tch. When I fought Lancelot, I’d been summoned by Command Spell and started by unleashing a Spiral right off the bat. When I fought Saber, her sword path was linear, so I could read it and somehow redirect the force. But Kojiro’s swordsmanship is technical and refined, which makes redirecting it difficult. No, if I deliberately try to redirect it, I can do it—but if I try to do it properly, my body can’t endure the motion of the redirection.
In other words, Saber’s sword strike might have a power of 1000, and I can redirect 999.9 of it without much damage. But Kojiro’s strike has a power of 100, and the most I can redirect without damage is 99. Either way, I’m still redirecting most of it, but the damage to my body is much greater when I’m dealing with Kojiro. If I remember right, this guy’s strength was C, but in practice it feels like the damage I take blocking him is even worse than when I was blocking Saber’s sword.
Ugh. This is brutal.
“I shall make this one strike the turning point of our duel.”
“...Fine.”
Haa. Hmm... the rough answer is... blocking it with the coat is impossible. Maybe once, but not all three. In that case...
“Here I come! Secret Sword, [Tsubame Gaeshi]!”
It’s coming. The long katana sweeps in horizontally.
At first glance, it doesn’t look all that different from an ordinary slash, but then the second and third “parallel-dimensional Kojiro” appear and each unleash their own strike.
A simultaneous triple slash. Retreating is impossible. Blocking is impossible. Then...
I set my stance. Taking a light breath, I focus on the sword in my right hand.
++++
“It was an honor to cross blades with someone as strong as you, even if only for a moment.”
Sasaki Kojiro, or rather the man who bore that name as his true name, thought that as he looked at the young man before him. The opponent’s swordsmanship was certainly impressive. To be honest, when he had drawn a giant slash after seeming to trace a taiji pattern with a single sword just moments ago, Kojiro had truly been startled.
Narayatagon. It means a lazy donkey rolling on the ground. As a swordsman, dodging in such a way is a great disgrace. And yet, that technique was so absurd that he had no choice but to evade it that way.
What kind of harmony could possibly allow such an impossible miracle to be performed with a single sword? What kind of enlightenment would make that possible? He truly wanted to know. Enough that when using Tsubame Gaeshi, he briefly found himself thinking it might be better to hold back a little and avoid killing him.
But doing so would itself be rude to the man before him. He would show his respect by cutting with all his strength.
The man before him thrusts the sword in his hand forward. Clang! With the sound of metal, for some strange reason, the sword of “another self” is flung back before it even properly collides with his own, stopping about an inch away. But even so, there are still two more strikes left.
Clang!
“Ghk!”
What?! Just a moment ago, his sword should have knocked back the other self’s blade, but in an instant Kojiro felt a recoil in his hand, and before he knew it, a burning sensation spread through his chest as the sword had already driven into it.
“Cough! Hah, hahahaha...”
Had he been too arrogant? Ah. So this is what it means to be a frog in a well.
++++
Through extreme concentration, I step into the “realm.” The black space. By stepping into the realm of [Li], I force an impossible phenomenon into the realm of possibility through overwhelming technique and impose it upon reality.
Honestly. In the past, I could enter this realm just by focusing during battle. My skill really has declined.
The first thrust used within the realm of [Li]. With a metallic ring, the slash is repelled by the thrust. At the same time, it causes a distortion in space.
Frey style Secret Technique
Three Slaughters Thrust - Sword Style Variant
Fwoosh!
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