(Attendance… plz…)
….
Heroic Aura.
King Gazel's Hero's Aura was one of his high level Extra skills.
It was the kind of passive ability that came with his title, an authority radiating outward from his presence that pinned anyone weaker than him to the ground and made movement itself feel like wading through deep water.
Knights twice his weight had buckled at the knees just from standing too close to him in moments like this.
His own Pegasus Knights, hardened veterans every one of them, were currently bracing themselves quietly because the air around their king had become heavy in a way they recognized but had not expected to feel here, today, against a young red-haired adventurer.
Reinhard wasn't affected by it.
Not in the slightest, not by even a flicker. He stood the way he had been standing the entire conversation, weight even, hands relaxed, his red hair stirring from it.
But nothing else.
Gazel saw that, and he understood something with the clarity that someone with experience could understand.
The young man in front of him was not just talking tough or wearing a confident face. He had the skill and the strength to back every word he had said or just have proven himself worthy.
It was Gazel's way of doing things, did he even need to get serious or fight at all?
It still wounded the Dwarven King's pride, though. As both a king and a former hero. To be told he was unworthy of his opponent's main weapon, and to know the opponent meant it the way a man might tell another man that the sky was blue.
Treyni, having made certain that everyone was clear of the dueling space and that both combatants were ready, raised her voice across the area.
"Begin."
Gazel rolled his shoulders once. "Just so you know, even though this is a duel, I won't be holding back."
Reinhard finally drew the sword Benimaru had given him from its plain sheath, lifted it, and angled the tip toward the Dwarven King.
"I would hope you don't," he said quietly. "I'll do what I can to meet your expectations."
The phrasing was different. He hadn't said I won't be holding back either. He'd said he would meet what was being brought against him. And the difference, small as it was, did not escape Gazel.
The Dwarven King smiled faintly as he raised his blade. How arrogant. He thought, and then he was gone.
The watchers along the edges of the area, even the experienced fighters among them, even the Pegasus Knights who had spent years training under this same king, lost track of him in the same instant. There was the king on one side of the open ground, and then there wasn't.
Clang.
The sound of steel on steel rang across the area as Gazel arrived, the full speed of a hero-king behind a downward cutting strike, his blade meeting Reinhard's blade in a clean impact that sent a shockwave of displaced air rolling outward in every direction.
Reinhard had simply blocked it.
That was all. He hadn't stepped back or slid the blow off to the side or absorbed the impact through any clever angle. He had simply blocked it, and the strength Gazel had put behind the cut, the entire weight of a hero's full-speed downward swing, had simply been stopped by Reinhard's raised blade as if it were nothing remarkable.
The echo of the collision crossed the entire open field. The Pegasus Knights drew breath as one. Gazel was going at it with everything he had. Even from this distance, anyone who knew the king's combat could feel that.
Gazel disappeared again, and reappeared, and again, the ringing of his blade carving paths through the air in arcs that traced themselves across the dueling ground.
The Dwarven King wasn't holding back at all anymore. If anything, in the first few exchanges, he had been. But once Reinhard had deflected and locked his strikes those first few times, Gazel had understood something he didn't need many more reminders of, and now he was going at full power.
For a while, Gazel had been attacking from the front. Direct lines, head-on strikes, the kind of opening pressure a hero used to break a lesser opponent's rhythm.
Now he was changing tactics.
A duel was not supposed to be just frontal pressure. When the opponent had the advantage, you came at them from every direction at once, hitting wherever you could see an opening, refusing to let them settle into one stance.
So the attacks shifted. They came from the sides, from behind, from above, from low angles he could only have reached by half-vanishing and reappearing from a new vector.
Anyone watching this fight from the outside would have assumed the man on the receiving end of all of this was outmatched, completely unable to even attempt a counter, barely able to deflect and block in time.
Clang. Clang. Clang.
The same could not, however, be said about the attacker.
Reinhard moved back and forth as he intercepted strikes. In the middle of all of it, Gazel could not find a way around him.
The king tried from every angle he could conceive, putting as much force into each blow as his body could produce.
He even tried to break the weapon Reinhard was holding, applying force behind his blade with the exact technique that should have shattered an inferior weapon and even the one Reinhard was holding, but the weapon held because Reinhard's grip held.
Gazel attacked from one side, then vanished, then reappeared from the other. The vast majority of onlookers, with the possible exception of the Dryads, could not follow the king's movements at all. But Reinhard intercepted every one of them as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
Through every single exchange, every single combo, Reinhard did nothing but block the incoming strikes and shrug them aside without effort.
It had been less than twenty seconds since the duel began.
Gazel was, by any honest measure, shocked. He just didn't show it.
A swordsman could tell, when crossing blades with another swordsman, whether the person on the other side of the steel was going at full strength.
The body told the truth in ways the face could not hide. For warriors and swordsmen and anyone who lived by the blade, fighting was a kind of language.
The sword spoke in itself when clanking against each other. It exposed not just what the opponent was thinking but how the opponent was thinking, the entire shape of their mind and intent compressed into the motion of an edge through air.
To read another fighter through their blade was a state most warriors had to train years to even begin reaching.
Gazel had been at that level for decades.
And he could not read Reinhard at all.
Clang. Clang. Clang.
The Dwarven King didn't stop attacking. He didn't slow or pace himself or try anything clever to recover his rhythm. He just kept coming in, again and again, from every angle he could find.
From every side he tried, Reinhard either blocked his strike instantly or deflected it with the smallest possible motion of his own blade.
And in all of it, from the start of the duel until now, Reinhard had not made a single attack of his own.
Past the thirty seconds mark, Gazel reappeared in front of Reinhard once more. Not to attack this time. He simply stood there, his blade lowered, his breathing harder than it had been thirty seconds ago.
"You do realize," Gazel said, and there was an edge in his voice that hadn't been there before, "that in a duel, both parties are supposed to fight. Not one party attacking and the other party only defending."
Gazel was, to put it mildly, angry. Not angry at Reinhard exactly. Angry at the situation. Angry that this young man was matching every attack, enduring his Heroic Aura, and keeping pace with his speed all at once, and doing it without the slightest sign of strain on his face.
There was no tension on his face or in his shoulders, no quickening in his breathing even by a little that he wouldn't have missed.
Reinhard looked exactly the way he had at the start of the duel.
Reinhard nodded. "I know. I just wanted to see how strong you were."
Then he seemed to realize how that had landed, because his expression softened slightly and he added, with a small apologetic look in his eyes, "I didn't mean any offense. I was just curious. That's all. The way you can think so quickly in the middle of a strike to change your attack pattern, then choose another angle, then adapt to a new style mid-combat while still looking calm doing it. It really is impressive. It reminds me of someone. Someone even faster than me."
Gazel went still. Because what Reinhard had just casually described was Gazel attacking him at full power, with absolutely everything he had. And while Gazel was using every ounce of his strength and experience to apply pressure, Reinhard had been quietly analyzing him.
In Gazel's mind, the situation rearranged itself into something cold and clean.
He had thought, for the first few exchanges, that he was the one measuring him, that his pressure was the test. At least in the beginning.
Gazel looked at Reinhard for a long moment, and the answer to who would win this duel had already arrived in his head, even though the duel was technically still ongoing. He could see it. He hadn't seen anything in Reinhard. Not at the beginning. Not now. So he decided to say something.
"You..." he began.
"I'll start now myself. Take it."
Reinhard's voice came in over Gazel's, polite but firm, before the king could finish his sentence. Gazel heard it and registered it and braced.
Reinhard adjusted his grip on the dueling blade. He moved.
He was in front of Gazel one instant.
Gazel did not have time to react to most of it. When Reinhard's outline finally stabilized in his vision, his instincts and decades of experience kicked in at once forcing his body to move subconsciously.
His body read where the cut was going to come from, and he raised his blade to block it head-on.
There was just enough information in the shape of Reinhard's stance for an experienced hero to predict the angle, and Gazel predicted it correctly.
Reinhard struck him from the front.
The blade came down on the angle Gazel had read, and Gazel's own sword met it solidly in a clean parry.
For an instance, Gazel thought he had managed to hold his position. The grip was firm and the angle was correct, the steel right where it needed to be.
Then the force behind the blade arrived.
It was not the kind of force a Dwarven King could account for.
There's a phrase that warriors use, sometimes, when they speak of facing an opponent who is overwhelmingly beyond them.
They say the smaller fighter sees a shadow. Not the opponent themselves, but a vast dark shape behind the opponent, looming so large that the actual person becomes a small figure standing in front of something the eye cannot fully take in.
Gazel had heard the phrase used by old veterans before. He had never experienced it himself. He experienced it now. Standing there in the parry with the boy in front of him, what he saw was not Reinhard.
He saw a shadow, hundreds of thousands of times larger, looming over him the way a mountain looms over a man standing in a puddle at its base.
Clang.
King Gazel had lost. In an instant.
He hadn't been able to strike… hold or been able to get out of the way of the strike that came for him. He had tried to absorb the impact with his blade, and his grip held, his sword still in his hand at the moment of contact.
But the force behind the cut was so far past anything he could process that, in the same instant, his sword was knocked clean down out of his grip, and Gazel himself was no longer standing.
He was on the ground, as he fell on his butt, the dueling blade resting somewhere in the dirt beside him.
He had but lost in a single motion… a single strike.
Treyni's voice rose immediately across the area, somewhat happy and proud.
"The winner is Reinhard."
….
A/N: Dont worry, will be taking the story pace faster. His time for leaving the forest has come.
Next destinatio:
Journey to the dungeon? Holy kingdom? Or to meet shizue dying student?
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