The Rapier Is Orthodox Martial Arts
The Swordsmanship Expert.
She loved the sword. Its keen edge. The exquisite marriage of straight lines and curves.
Her body, however, refused to follow. She was less than mediocre—someone who had never even stepped into the Profound Realm.
Even so, she could not cast aside her idolatry of the blade. Day after day she lived as a scholar, pouring herself into the theoretical study of swordsmanship.
Someday I will become a true swordsman. My theories grow richer by the hour. If I stack enough time and effort, one day I will break through the wall of realm. So she believed.
Then, one morning, the mirror showed her the wrinkles on her face.
She had grown old.
Back pain followed. Arthritis. Her teeth loosened. Memories slipped like sand through her fingers.
Age eroded her flesh beyond the blessings of martial arts. The day of her death drew near.
Her realm… remained Harmony Realm.
Ascending to the Profound Realm would have lengthened her life, yet that wall stood impossibly high before her.
The Swordsmanship Expert finally understood how little time she had left.
She despaired—not from the terror of dying, but from the knowledge that she would die having achieved nothing at all.
It was around then that she first heard the rumors of the cult.
—KRAAANG!!!!!!
The clash of steel rang out.
The Swordsmanship Expert’s vicious blade slammed into her opponent’s rapier.
Her entire right arm was a mass of purple tentacles. She stretched them long, then coiled and layered them until they formed a blade—her sword. A living bio-weapon.
She could pour internal energy into it exactly as one would a mechanical prosthetic. No—in some ways it was superior. It felt as vivid and responsive as true living flesh.
“What a monstrous form! How ghastly! How could you do such a thing to your own body!”
Carina Rothschild, blades locked, twisted her face in open disgust.
Even the Unorthodox practice of replacing perfectly good limbs with mechanical arms had always been beyond Carina’s comprehension. A tentacle arm was simply unspeakable.
The Swordsmanship Expert’s reply was iron.
“I have no need of it. That wretched, clumsy arm that would not even obey my will.”
Yes. When she severed her original arm she had felt not the slightest regret.
No matter how much sword theory filled her skull, a body that could not realize even a fraction of it—she could cut that body away a hundred times over.
She attached the new arm. She underwent surgery upon her dantian.
Now she had crossed the wall. The swordsmanship she had only ever swung in imagination, she now swung with her own hand.
If she could simply keep living like this, she would do anything.
She had achieved her dream. Every single day she felt the pure sensation of being alive.
It was not a proper rise in skill through orthodox methods, and the return-to-youth technique remained incomplete; her body was still that of an old woman. She herself could not say when her lifespan might suddenly gutter out.
“I fear nothing. I will die swinging my sword.”
To die doing exactly what she desired—that was her dream.
The Swordsmanship Expert reset her stance.
Continuous Strike Form.
Carina raised her rapier, ready to defend.
In the span of a few heartbeats a flurry of exchanges erupted.
—Clang!!!
—KRAANG!!!
—Whoosh!!
—BOOM!!!!
—Sssshrieeeek!!!!!
—Clang!!!
—Shunk!!!
—KRAAANG!!!!!!!
—Crack!!!!!!
After the final blow both combatants sprang backward at the same instant.
This had been only a probe—each measuring the other’s measure.
Carina held the clear advantage.
She stood unharmed; not so much as a hair had been touched.
The Swordsmanship Expert, by contrast, had taken a heavy impact to her left shoulder. The weapon was unmistakably a rapier, yet the force felt as though she had been hammered by a war-mallet.
The Swordsmanship Expert was astonished.
Transcendent talent. The effort that supported it. And the limitless resources of a superior household.
In those brief exchanges every one of those things had been laid bare.
This was the Orthodox Path.
This was an elite.
Yet she had no intention of losing. She still held a trump card of her own.
The moment that light opening clash ended, the others charged their respective opponents.
The match-ups were roughly as follows:
The Swordsmanship Expert and the Fervent Martial Atheist versus Carina Rothschild.
The Conch Administrator and the Publicity Ambassador versus Dang Bernouilli.
The Leader versus Hyukryeon Wiseol.
It was something of a gang-up, but this was a mud-pit brawl to begin with.
And ganging up on someone stronger than yourself had always been an accepted tactic. Orthodox elites were simply that powerful.
The only reason the Leader and Hyukryeon Wiseol fought one-on-one was that both were strategists rather than pure combatants.
Schemers tend to be ruthlessly self-aware; rather than fumbling an attempt to kill an opponent with inferior skill, they prefer a defensive posture that lets them gather information.
Thus their duel kept the tongue busier than the blade.
—Clang!!!
The Leader’s sword met Hyukryeon Wiseol’s.
Crossed in an X, the Leader spoke first.
“To have uncovered the secret of this Moralaren… You must have seen that person’s research notes after all.”
Hyukryeon Wiseol answered evenly.
“If you mean the one who uses paper slips and writes papers on paper—yes. So that person passed information to the Demonic Cult as well.”
—Clang!
Blades struck again.
“Rumor has it a young master of the Namgung Clan has come to this planet. He must be traveling with your party, no?”
“No point in denying it. Yes.”
“Then why is he not here?”
“You don’t use an ox-cleaver to butcher a chicken.”
“Which is to say, this place only rates a chicken-knife. A small mercy, then.”
“You talk well enough.”
The brief exchange ended; the Leader’s blade flashed toward Hyukryeon Wiseol’s shoulder.
—Ching!!!
The parry came easily.
Seizing the momentary disruption of the Leader’s posture, Hyukryeon Wiseol thrust for the flank.
—Clang!!!
The disruption had been a feint; the thrust was lightly turned aside.
Now it was Hyukryeon Wiseol’s momentum that seemed broken.
Without hesitation the Leader released the sword with his left hand and shot out a joint-lock.
—Thud!!!
But the broken momentum had been Hyukryeon Wiseol’s feint as well. He reversed the joint-lock, clamping hand to hand, intending to use the grip for a throw.
I expected that.
The Leader had anticipated it. Allowing himself to be pulled, he drove the sword in his right hand toward Hyukryeon Wiseol’s abdomen.
Hyukryeon Wiseol had anticipated that as well. The back of his free hand knocked the blade aside.
But the Leader had anticipated that his opponent would anticipate. With both of Hyukryeon Wiseol’s hands occupied, he launched a leg technique.
Yet Hyukryeon Wiseol had anticipated that his opponent would anticipate the anticipation; he slipped the kick and prepared an internal-energy contest through the locked palms…
But the Leader, having expected exactly that, aborted the kick and tried to cut off the energy clash with a palm strike…
But Hyukryeon, who had expected the expectation of the expectation, abandoned the energy contest and resumed the throw…
But…
But…
In the midst of this utterly unproductive exchange, Hyukryeon Wiseol quickly noticed something wrong.
His internal energy was steadily draining away.
He found the answer at once.
“Energy absorption.”
“Correct.”
“You kept forcing contact.”
The Leader lifted his hand. Internal energy siphoned from Hyukryeon Wiseol shimmered along his palm and forearm—stolen in tiny sips every time their blades or bodies had touched during the probing standoff.
“Orthodox internal energy is truly refreshing. An entirely different class from the dregs of Unorthodox rabble. Like health food.”
“Amusing joke. Let’s see how well you put it to use.”
Hyukryeon Wiseol settled into a sword form and charged.
…
Meanwhile, on Carina’s side of the field.
—Ssshk.
Carina raised her rapier.
In accordance with her house’s tradition, she announced her own name.
The declaration finished, she launched the form at once.
This time it was a great technique. The rapier vibrated under the force of her internal energy. A terrifying volume of power boiled within the steel.
—Drrrrrrrrrrrr.
A sound like a tank charging across bare earth. Golden aura bloomed from the blade and spread outward.
Then Carina took a single step.
One step.
It was far too vast to be called a mere footfall.
The mechanism resembled the charge of light-foot techniques, yet the mass behind it was incomparably heavier.
It called to mind the charge of heavy cavalry—warhorses clad head to hoof in iron, crushing every obstacle in their path.
This was one of the signature martial arts of the Western World.
In ages past, Eastern martial arts had struck the West like a thunderbolt.
A swung sword outmatched gunpowder. Bullets failed to kill.
The very firearms that had ended the age of knights were, paradoxically, trampled beneath Eastern cold steel.
And so the West researched martial arts with desperate hunger—arts of their own that could stand against the East.
In that process they resurrected, reassembled, and reinterpreted the techniques of the knights they themselves had once destroyed.
Fencing, which distilled the principle of the fastest thrust.
Into that principle they mixed the principle of Weight.
Weight.
The heaviest single blow.
The fastest and heaviest charge.
The lance charge of knights.
A martial art that fused the swordsmanship of infantry with the charge of heavy cavalry.
A thrusting sword art that produced the power of a warhorse without any horse at all.
In the tongue of the East: Heavy Cavalry Mounted Sword Art
…Of course, with the passage of ages the technique had evolved until it generated far greater force than any mere horse could ever have produced.
Carina took that single step and charged.
—KUUAAAAAAAAAAANG!!!!!!!
Like a delayed sonic boom, the sound tore through the air in every direction.
Behind her, along the straight line she had traveled, everything lay annihilated. The ground was gouged deep. A mad gale howled through the wake. She was summoning a small natural disaster inside the canyon.
And ahead of her, at the tip of the rapier…