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 and a heavy swing were all that mattered on a battlefield. The morning sun was climbing higher over the pines, casting long, sharp shadows across the packed earth of the ring.
"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. The sheer force of his movement whistled through the quiet clearing, a heavy, predictable trajectory designed to crush anything in its path.
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 to gather momentum, he completely exposed his throat and solar plexus. His weight was pitched far too forward on his leading knee, meaning he wouldn't be able to change the trajectory of his swing or pull back his guard once he fully committed to it. In my past life, I would have matched that brute force with a heavy parry of my greatsword, absorbing the jarring impact through my shoulders. But now, with my upper body completely locked in a knot of burning soreness from two hours of gruelling drills, I didn't even need to raise my shortsword to deflect it.
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 raw momentum of his missed swing dragged his upper body forward, forcing his back foot to slide completely out of position as his balance fractured against the empty vacuum.
"What—?" Lysander grunted, his eyes widening in pure shock as his boots stumbled clumsily in the loose dirt.
Before he could even begin to pull his guard back up, I stepped inside his blind spot. Moving with fluid, effortless efficiency that bypassed my physical fatigue entirely, 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 under the sudden shock of the micro-angle strike. His heavy practice sword slipped from his grip, clattering loudly against the packed earth of the arena floor. I spun cleanly on my heel, bringing the tip of my light wooden blade to a sudden, absolute 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 stood frozen in place, staring down at the wooden tip pressing gently against his neck, his jaw completely slack as the morning light caught his wide eyes.
"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 unawakened body was already feeling the heavy physical strain of the rapid evasion. Without a stabilized mana core to constantly flush out lactic acid, even a single master-tier step required a conscious physical tax from my unconditioned muscles.
"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 from the soil. "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. Once we stand before that Altar, the global system unseals our pathways. We can't afford to be careless anymore."
Lysander wiped the dust from his trousers, his boisterous smile returning as he balanced his heavy blade over his shoulder. "You're right about that. Tomorrow morning, everything resets. But seriously, Astraeus, that movement was insane. If you can slide around like smoke tomorrow, the academy scouts are going to lose their minds."
As we walked out of the garrison ring, leaving the empty training clearing behind us, my right hand instinctively twitched. My fingers lightly curled in the empty air, as if still gripping the narrow circumference of that light, single-handed blade. A cold, analytical calculation began to rapidly turn over inside my brain, dismantling everything I thought I knew about my own physical capabilities.
For ten whole years, I had forced myself to wield a massive, crushing star-metal greatsword because my past-life registration profile read Heavy Blade Resonance. I had spent a decade fighting against my own natural skeletal leverage, enduring agonizing joint stress just to act as a slow vanguard line-breaker for the noble houses. I had simply assumed that my body was meant to endure that blunt, crushing torque. But just now, my unawakened body had completely rejected that heavy logic. The moment I swapped to the light shortsword out of sheer muscular soreness, my physical balance had locked into a state of perfect harmony. The footwork felt entirely weightless, and the speed of the strike required barely a fraction of the physical force I usually exerted. In this life, I wasn't going to be a brainwashed tool for the noble houses. Tomorrow, when the Altar unsealed my pathways and handed me my old heavy blade talent, I would ignore their tactical training mandates, drop the greatsword permanently, and build my future entirely around a single, lightning-fast shortsword style.