The wooden shortsword felt incredibly light in my raw palms—almost flimsy compared to the massive, weighted greatswords I had wielded for a decade. I stepped away from the fence, my boots sliding smoothly into the dry dirt of the arena floor as I faced Lysander. He stood three metres away, his chest puffed out with the unearned confidence of an unawakened youth who thought raw strength was all that mattered on a battlefield.
"Don't cry if I clip your shoulder, Astraeus!" Lysander roared with a broad grin.
He didn't wait for a signal. Dropping his centre of gravity, he lunged forward, kicking up a small cloud of red dust behind his boots. He brought his heavy practice blade backward, intending to execute a massive, sweeping horizontal slash aimed straight at my ribs. To an amateur villager, the attack was lightning-fast and terrifyingly powerful.
To my eyes, it was happening in slow motion.
Lysander's attack was filled with fatal, rookie mistakes. The moment he pulled his blade back, he completely exposed his throat and solar plexus. His weight was pitched too far forward on his leading knee, meaning he wouldn't be able to change the trajectory of his swing once he committed to it. I didn't even need to raise my shortsword to parry.
I simply took a single, calculated half-step backward, shifting my left hip out of his line of sight by exactly twenty centimetres.
The tip of Lysander's heavy wooden blade whistled harmlessly through the empty air, missing my canvas tunic by a razor-thin margin. The sheer momentum of his missed swing dragged his upper body forward, forcing his back foot to slide out of position.
"What—?" Lysander grunted, his eyes widening in pure shock as his boots stumbled in the dirt.
Before he could pull his guard back up, I stepped inside his blind spot. Moving with fluid, effortless efficiency, I brought the flat side of my light wooden shortsword upward, executing a crisp, sudden tap directly against his exposed right wrist.
Clack.
The sharp impact vibrated through his arm, forcing his fingers to instinctively loosen. His heavy practice sword slipped from his grip, clattering loudly against the packed earth of the arena. I spun on my heel, bringing the tip of my light wooden blade to a sudden halt exactly two centimetres away from the centre of his throat.
The quiet arena fell completely still. The only sound was the rustle of the surrounding pines and Lysander's ragged, stunned breathing. He stared down at the wooden tip pressing gently against his neck, his jaw completely slack.
"How... how did you do that?" Lysander breathed, a cold sweat breaking out across his forehead. "You didn't even swing. You just... stepped out of the way. I couldn't even see your hand move.
"I slowly lowered the wooden shortsword, letting out a calm, measured breath to mask the dull, burning ache that was already starting to crawl up my unconditioned calf muscles. My adult combat mind had executed the movement perfectly, but my level-one body was already feeling the physical strain of the rapid evasion.
"Your grip is far too tight on the hilt, Lysander," I said smoothly, forcing a light, friendly tone into my voice to hide the cold, analytical edge beneath. "When you throw your entire weight into an opening strike, you leave your balance completely at the mercy of your opponent. If I were a Rift monster, you'd already be dead before your blade hit the dirt."
Lysander blinked, then let out a loud, booming laugh, rubbing his sore wrist as he bent down to retrieve his heavy practice weapon. "Man, you're acting way too serious today! It's like I'm sparring with one of the veteran garrison captains instead of my childhood buddy. Where did you learn to move like that?"
I turned back toward the weapon rack, placing the light wooden shortsword back into its designated slot with a soft click.
"I've just been doing a lot of thinking lately, Lysander," I replied quietly, looking up at the clear, endless blue sky. "Tomorrow, everything changes for us. We can't afford to be careless anymore."
As we walked out of the garrison ring, my right hand instinctively twitched, my fingers lightly curling in the empty air as if still gripping the narrow circumference of that light blade. A cold, analytical calculation began to rapidly turn over inside my brain. For ten whole years, I had forced myself to wield a massive, crushing star-metal greatsword because my system profile read Heavy Blade Resonance. I had spent a decade fighting against my own natural skeletal leverage just to act as a slow vanguard tank.
But just now, my unawakened seventeen-year-old body had rejected the heavy blade entirely. The moment I swapped to the light shortsword, my balance had locked into a state of perfect, terrifying harmony.
It wasn't just my combat memory, I realized, a sudden chill settling deep beneath my ribs as I remembered the massive presence in the dark and the burning heat of the vortex. That surreal dream state... the energy that creature pressed into my forehead... it did something fundamental to my internal channels. I don't know what that Starlight Entity was, but its forest rewired me for a light, blindingly fast blade.