Defining the Dynamic (4)

Interdimensional data delivery.

The phrase sounded utterly bizarre, an enigma wrapped in technobabble. In plain terms, I couldn't wrap my head around it in the slightest.

Before long, Leon offered a generous explanation via a sprawling private message. Sifting through his rambling, disjointed paragraphs, the core message boiled down to this:

"...Does that make any goddamn sense?"

By any ordinary standard of logic, it sounded absurd. Extracting someone's lived experience and knowledge, shoving it into another person, and having them instantly inherit the mastery? If that were true, Old Man Noah's Ark could mass-produce swordmasters on an assembly line. All you'd have to do was siphon off a master's lifetime of training and clone it into an army.

Yet before my disbelief could fully calcify, Leon's subsequent explanation—paired with Old Man Noah chiming in to clarify—helped me grasp the reality of the situation.

It isn't delivery. It's a transfer.

According to Noah, once experience and knowledge were loaded onto the Ark, they vanished from the original owner entirely. Even if Person A possessed Concept B, the very instant Concept B was extracted and stowed aboard the vessel, Person A lost every single memory of it.

To use an analogy: if someone who understood the concept of a "spoon" converted that knowledge into data and loaded it onto the Ark, they wouldn't just forget what a spoon looked like—they would lose the muscle memory and the entire concept of how to eat with one. There was a strict price to pay, an uncompromising law of equivalent exchange. Under normal circumstances, mass-producing swordmasters by stripping someone's expertise was fundamentally impossible.

Except for one slight detail.

"You arrogant bastard..."

Apparently, mortal limitations didn't apply to Leon. Then again, the man was revered as one of the Three Great Swordmasters in the Demon Lord Gallery; perhaps that caliber of monstrous arrogance was par for the course. Swallowing my grumbling, I continued the conversation with him and Noah.

Listening to their banter, it became clear that Old Man Noah had once operated as the gallery's premier courier service. Rumor had it that back before the moderation team established strict protocols regarding dimensional migration, he had hauled everything across the void—from massive planetary war engines to demon lords looking to launch full-scale dimensional invasions.

With that kind of veteran pedigree and a cheat-grade artifact like the Ark, Leon assumed the package ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠would arrive in the blink of an eye. But there was one critical factor he had overlooked: the sheer, suffocating isolation of my native realm.

From the gallery moderators down to the shadiest anonymous lurkers, everyone had repeated the exact same warning: Tier 100 dimensions and lower are practically isolated dead zones. Seeing even Old Man Noah struggle to force an entry proved they hadn't been exaggerating.

That's a shame.

I had secretly hoped to lay eyes on that impossibly colossal Ark one more time. It wasn't just about catching up with the old man, either; I had nursed a few ambitious experiments in the back of my mind. It would have been the perfect opportunity to test whether the Ark could ferry me across deep space toward the Humanity Coalition and the Mars Republic. But there was no helping it. My home world belonged to Tier 100, and its rigid laws offered no quarter. Being anchored to this desolate coordinate had caused me more grief than I could count.

My disappointment had little time to settle. With that parting warning, Old Man Noah slipped away from the forum. Left alone, I stood in tense anticipation, waiting for the foreign data to strike.

Roughly ten minutes passed before my vision began to waver.

The first sensation was an uncanny prickle of estrangement. Nothing in my immediate surroundings had physically shifted, yet an unshakable certainty bloomed in my chest that the rules of the world had tilted on their axis. It was the skin-crawling instinct of a homeowner realizing an unwanted pest had slipped into their locked, private quarters.

The source of the dissonance became clear a heartbeat later.

Old Man Noah broke through.

There was no cataclysmic rupture in the sky, no titanic vessel cleaving the clouds like before, but I knew with absolute conviction: an intruder had crossed the threshold of my dimension. Whether this heightened awareness was an instinct I had always possessed or a spatial sense gifted by my awakening as a demon lord, its accuracy was undeniable.

Because the instant that perception took hold, a vicious agony tore through my skull.

"Ngh...!"

My eyes snapped shut, a harsh groan ripping from my throat as a blinding headache struck like a freight train. It felt as though a lightning bolt had been hammered straight through my brain matter, piercing and violent. Mercifully, the unknown torment lasted only ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠a fraction of a second, fading as abruptly as it had arrived.

I blinked against the residual sting, breathing heavily as I regained my bearings.

"...What was that?"

I slowly opened my eyes, scanning the ruined landscape before turning my attention inward to inspect my own flesh. Confusion instantly took root. Nothing had changed. Had that brief jolt truly been the package delivery?

Something had definitely engraved itself into the recesses of my mind. Even the simple, thoughtless act of opening and clenching my fist felt subtly, unnervingly different. What baffled me was how thoroughly anticlimactic the whole ordeal had been. I had braced myself for an agonizing cognitive overload, assuming I would spend hours wrestling with a flood of alien techniques before painstakingly cataloging my newfound strength. Instead, all I had received was a one-second migraine and an awkward twitch in my joints.

Did the delivery fail midway?

Doubt crept in. Given the brutal resistance of a Tier 100 dimension, it seemed entirely plausible that half the data had been corrupted or shredded during transit. I pacing back and forth, flexing every muscle and testing my balance in a desperate bid to locate any tangible change, but nothing revealed itself beyond that faint, lingering awkwardness.

"...Something's definitely wrong."

Unable to stomach the uncertainty, I pulled open the Demon Lord Gallery interface and fired off an urgent inquiry to both Leon and Noah.

Less than five seconds passed before the terminal pinged.

They must have been hovering over their screens waiting for my report, given how lightning-fast the replies landed.

Staring at the rapid cascade of text, my skepticism only deepened. Still, I turned away from the screen and reached for an old piece of gear resting nearby.

"It's been a long time since I held this."

My fingers closed around a solid metal rod, roughly one meter in length. Part steel pipe, part oversized riot baton, this peculiar implement had once been one of my signature personal weapons—forged during the golden era when I conquered Gates as a celebrated hero. In recent years, relying on the effortless convenience of my transcendent abilities had left it gathering dust, making the grip feel somewhat foreign in my palm. But that hardly mattered. Leon had staked his reputation on the claim that any rod-like object would suffice.

Just swing it, he said.

Savoring ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠the cold, heavy weight of the steel, I slowly leveled the rod. Directly ahead stood a dilapidated, multi-story apartment complex—a hollowed-out concrete husk left rotting after the world war, an eyesore slated for demolition that I was supposed to clear away anyway. In short, it was an isolated ruin where collateral damage didn't matter in the least, the perfect testing ground to unleash whatever was dormant inside me.

"Hoo..."

Drawing in a sharp, clipped breath, I channeled strength into my shoulder and arm. The metal rod arced upward toward the overcast heavens until it formed a clean, unbroken vertical line with my spine. Arm and weapon pointed dead toward the sky, locked in flawless perpendicular symmetry with the cracked earth below.

In that suspended instant, an overwhelming wave of familiarity crashed through my consciousness.

This is the stance. From here, this is how the blade must fall.

It was a posture I had never once adopted in my life. I had never swung a blunt metal rod like a honed broadsword. Yet my sinews and nerves adjusted with terrifying fluidity, moving as though I had executed this exact strike millions, tens of millions of times before. My body, operating on instincts that felt entirely alienated from my conscious ego, flowed seamlessly into the execution.

I let the rod fall, bringing my arm down in a smooth, effortless descent.

The moment the tip swept from the sky toward the earth—

CRACK—!

The towering, multi-story concrete complex sheared cleanly down the center, splitting entirely in two.

"...What?"

The destruction didn't end there.

I hadn't channeled a speck of supernatural energy into the strike. It had been pure, unadorned physical motion, an ordinary metal pipe tracing an ordinary downward arc. Yet the consequence carved into reality far outstripped the simple bifurcation of a building.

Through the yawning chasm of the divided apartment, my gaze drifted upward, and my breath caught at the impossible spectacle hanging overhead.

The eternal, suffocating blanket of gray ash—the impenetrable bank of war-torn smog that had choked this world's atmosphere for decades—had been severed. A razor-thin, unbroken incision parted the clouds from horizon to horizon, revealing a breathtaking streak of pure, brilliant azure.

The sky itself had been split wide open.