Training Fight (4)
As I entered the black hole, a strange sensation enveloped me.
Everything around me zoomed closer and farther continuously, and a penetrating wave passed by.
Boom!
A great shock surrounded me.
Noticing that the hovering sensation had disappeared, I looked around.
The place where I was standing was an empty space dyed in white.
‘There’s nothing here.’
As I thought of those words, as if a subtle sensation was caressing the back of my head or as if pulling my hair, something got my attention.
‘It’s similar to what happened back then.’
It was the same as when I found and approached the eighth leg of Igras-Sho with the priest that served her. The nerves on my entire body warned me as if it was screaming.
There was something dangerous ahead.
Shhhh!
It happened almost simultaneously. A fissure-like trajectory was drawn in across the place with no particular target, and I defended against it with the Holy Sword.
Clang!
As the space distorted, a man appeared.
Sharp flashes cut through the surrounding. The attack the opponent delivered struck more than ten times, driving me to a corner.
I felt cold sweat trickling down my face while I was blocking all the sword paths.
‘Again!’
In contrast to his lightning-like offensive’s dynamic movement, his face was full of boredom and despair.
The man wielding the weapon blazing with sword energy, storming in without a break, had the same appearance and attire as mine.
‘It’s the doppelgänger again!’
It wasn’t the first time I experienced fighting him.
It was similar to the situation that I had to go through when I took the god of war’s ordeal to upgrade my Unique Skill.
‘At that time, the sacred beast appeared that way.’
Sleeping in the dimension I was in were the pieces lost by the exiled god, fragments of power that they lost after being defeated in the war before the beginning of time.
And the owner of the sealed piece in there was probably Aden.
‘They said that the sword of the god of war was rusty and broken!’
The Holy Sword I was given looked like a weapon that could no longer be used without sword energy since it has been broken into two pieces.
Based on the pattern I had observed until that moment, there had to be elements or shards that would complete the incomplete sword.
Shhhh!
Pa-pa-paht!
The sword energy enveloped the surrounding area like a net, but it couldn’t reach my body. I constantly parried, twisted, flowed, and reflected the barrages.
The attack, which struck the air without cutting me, was mixed with a foreign god’s energy apart from the god of war.
Maybe it was the ‘spirit.’
Cling!
Cling-Clang!
The opponent’s weapon came and went so fast that it became difficult to tell the afterimage from the real thing.
Fighting a being that mimicked my style gave me a bizarre and unpleasant feeling.
Furthermore, the opponent saw through the psychological weaknesses revealed in the previous fight against my doppelgänger.
One would’ve thought that they could attack without mercy due to their disgust for the entity that copied them, but if they faced it upfront, their sword path could continue to be disturbed by his instinctive rejection of making a mess of “their own face and body.”
It was the first time I fought against the sacred beast.
‘But I’ve already traded blows with this kind of punk!’
The vulnerabilities and mistakes that I realized at that time would remain in my head for the rest of my life, allowing me to prevent repeating them twice.
And most of all…
‘It’s weaker than what I fought before! It’s not as difficult to defeat it!’
The Doppelgänger was one inch short of the sacred beast that I encountered during the god of war’s ordeal, making me ashamed that I was firmly determined in advance before coming in.
It wasn’t that they differed a lot. There was just a small dissimilarity.
However, given that I was confronting it after I already built experience, that difference was enough to inflate my advantage as the battle progressed, altering the results entirely.
Shhhh!
Soon enough, my clone was split in half, starting from the top of the head.
Brain water and blood clumps poured down, but I didn’t blink.
The collapsed body soon dissipated with light and disappeared, leaving a minuscule fragment.
‘What’s this?’
It was a fragment smaller than a fingernail.
It looked like glass or even metallic.
The moment I reach out to it…
Shhhh!
I murmured to myself.
“Again?”
The air spat out another doppelganger.
However, at that time, there were two.
Their clothes, face, and facial expressions lingering were the same. They stared at me with a silent gaze.
I gritted my teeth, lifting the Holy Sword wrapped in sword energy.
“Alright, let’s get it over with!”
A fierce attack shot out at the two.
*
Since then, it had become impossible to count how many doppelgängers I had slashed and slain.
I just killed and killed again.
The sacred beast of Aden that I previously experienced and the Doppelgänger that greeted me in the blackhole both used techniques that were frighteningly similar to mine.
Another me fell as his head was blown off, and the one beside him knelt down with a blade stuck to his chest.
Pshk!
Shhhh!
Another one down without a scream.
Every time I took a life, a very small piece, a hardened fragment that shattered sharply remained.
Boo-boo-boom!!
Pa-pak!
A sword energy storm blows and tears away the flesh and bones of the Doppelgänger.
At first, there was at least a bit of repulsion, but as time passed and death piled up, I started feeling apathetic. The process of being surrounded by so many ‘me’ had numbed me down as I slowly erased their traces.
Even though the real me that survived and the fake ones were culled, it had reached a point wherein the boundaries had faded gradually.
Should I have called it an out-of-self experience, self-effacement, or self-surrender?
The traces of the ‘god of the mind’ left in their hearts tried to capture and manipulate my mind throughout the duration of the fight, but it didn’t work on me as it did before.
As time went by, even the sense that I was resisting attempts to dominate me disappeared.
I simply swung my weapon as many times as I had to.
“…!”
In that process, I felt my swordsmanship gradually change.
I found a flaw and broke out of my old habit. The path that I thought to have found maximum efficiency changed to a more direct and simple line.
At first, when my style evolved, the Doppelgängers’ style would evolve as well, but the gap between us began to widen slowly as the boundary between sense and thought collapsed.
At some point, their evolution could no longer follow mine. My sword became more precise and heavier. It had also become much faster than the speed of their skill level’s increase, and I was still accelerating.
Near my steps, the small pieces yielded from the collapsed corpses piled up.
Since then, I had measured the time with ‘the number that I swung my sword.’ The time to end an enemy was decreased as the battle was prolonged. If I had to exchange hundreds of swings to cutting a clone’s throat in the beginning, it had turned into dozens, tens, five….
It didn’t take long before I blew a doppelganger’s neck at every stroke of the sword.
Just like that, a little more time passed.
“…”
I was standing on a hill piled up with glittering pieces.
Alone.
‘There aren’t any enemies left, are there?’
I couldn’t even estimate how many I had slain.
My thoughts solidified and flowed heavily.
Even the time around me felt like it had started to slow down.
Paaaht!
The hill I was stepping on became a brilliant aurora and exploded.
Boosh!
Everywhere my gaze reached was burning amid a brilliant mirage.
I was familiar with the scene.
‘It’s over!’
A wave of glory filled the empty space.
The waterfalls of light flowed across the place and began to gather in one place.
The hill of debris piled up under my feet had disappeared by then.
The fragments merged into one, making a whirlwind in front of me and creating a small shape. What’s then left in front of me was a substance that emitted a divine radiance.
It looked like the other missing piece of the half-broken sword.
Shhh!
It wasn’t even clear whether the Holy Sword floated in the air because my body was moving or the sword intended it to be that way.
Not long after, the other piece, the handle that I was holding onto, started to move to its other half as well.
The broken piece then floated in the air, approaching and completing the puzzle. The Holy sword had regained its full form.
Its finalization didn’t drastically change its rugged form. It was still a sword whose brilliance hadn’t become any different and whose function was to swing, cut, and stab.
However, the divine power that began to boil from it was incomparable to before.
‘So this is the sword of the god of war!’
If it had remained in the form of a broken Holy Sword that the incarnates wielded-
It had been returned to the form of the sword of none other than the god of war from then on.
‘!’
I could feel someone in the distance giving off a restless feeling. It was distinctly transmitted through the tension of the seals on the back of my hand.
“Yes, I understand. Sure.”
Mumbling as if to appease it, I gathered strength and conveyed my will like a prayer.
‘Great being, the god of war. I dedicate it to you.’
Paht!
The god’s sword I was holding disappeared.
Simultaneously, the deep feelings of the being in the distance were conveyed to me without filtering. It was the joy emitted, boiling with a keen mind, of the deity sealed in the void.
Unlike Igras-Sho, Aden did not respond to my prayers with a voice in my head. It didn’t even summon me to its mental world.
Instead, it sent me something.
‘?!’
I had a vision.
In the wilderness with countless tombs laid out, a man executed a sword dance. He swung his weapon with an expression that seemed to be drowning in joy, the sword’s trajectory continuing like upwelling waves.
As I bore witness to the scene, I felt the density of the air surrounding me transform.
‘Something feels different!’
The graves in the illusion were proof of countless victories.
The god representing warriors who developed their own martial arts and built up more victories had regained its full strength.
The aftermath was spreading across all dimensions.
Just as the priests and wizards who served Igras-Sho have regained the long-lost light element magic, the priest of Aden and the warriors had begun to handle powerful forces that had never been found before.
As his beautifully dancing phantom faded away, I felt my body get dragged away.
*
Paht!
The landscape instantaneously got reformed once more. I was back at the entrance to the black hole.
“Gasp!”
“You’re here!”
“He’s back! Mr. Seo Jin-Wook is back!”
“How did it go?”
It seemed like nobody emitted any sword energy since I went in there.
I spoke to those that stared at me, unsure of what had happened.
“It was successful.”
Cheers burst forth.
Unlike them, who said that they would only need to destroy the remaining Adgons by then, I was a bit baffled.
‘I mean, it ultimately all worked out well, but…’
I looked at my empty hand.
‘My sword…’
I understood that Aden gave me the incomplete sword of a god, known as the broken Holy Sword, meaning that I could only keep it until I found the other half. I had no choice but to offer it back to its rightful owner when the time came.
But if there’s something was traded away, something had to be gained in return, right?
Since the god had taken my sword, what was left for me to use?
I was unwilling to return to the Imperial Heritage gifted by the Union after being able to experience using that excellent sword.
And the moment I was grumbling inwardly-
Shhhh!
“Huh?”
“Oops!”
– … What’s that now?
Baffled, the Union soldiers and Genograche’s mind wave that murmured all around me.
I didn’t use a skill or divine power.
I just thought, ‘I need a sword.’
Then in my hand…
“A sword appeared?”
Unlike the previous Holy Sword, I had a sword in my hand that had no dents or signs of breaking.
I tried applying sword energy into it.
Whoooong!
“… No way.”
I felt it right away. It was better than any sword I had ever used.
Furthermore…
Shhhh!
Paht!
As soon as I thought about how I would keep it since there was no sheath, it disappeared again as if it melted in the air.
And when I thought that I needed a weapon once more, it reappeared, tightly locked in my hand.
Genograche, watching that, gave shallow sigh-like telepathy.
– Is it a sword that can be summoned and dismissed according to the user’s intention? Well, it’s reasonable, considering that it’s a gift from the god of war.
I was still experimenting as he finished his telepathy.
‘If one is possible, then how about two?’
The answer to the question was immediately made apparent…
– …. What?
… By the two swords held tightly by my hands.
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