"I can't see a damned thing in front of ," Chop mumbled to himself as Eik ca through the fracture after him. "And it stinks even worse when it's everywhere."
Yep, this was definitely the sa phenonon as the other three. No, the miasma might have been hanging even thicker this ti around. Not that it made any difference.
Chop didn't miss a beat in deploying his aura to create a barrier between himself and the foul-slling substance. Eik did the sa, the both of them expanding their energies until they had a radius of a good few ters around them that was completely clear of miasma.
"They're skittering around out there like vermin, aren't they?" the old man remarked, his ears wiggling slightly as they picked up even the tiniest noises. "It gives the heebie-jeebies."
"Really?" Eik asked with an eyebrow raised in puzzlent. "Why? You wouldn't even need to flick your finger to wipe them out by the flock."
"You can be creeped out by sothing you can kill. Killing or being killed is not what it's about at all. I've never liked bugs and I still don't."
Eik tilted his head from side to side. "I an, they're not exactly bugs, are they?"
"There isn't much difference if you ask ."
"One of the ones that attacked Gimleh was literally a massive, tusked beast. It's about as far from a bug as anything can be."
"If it creeps out like bugs do, then they're bugs. Bugs can be big."
"All right, you know what? Whatever. They're bugs. How does it feel to have beco the, uuh… What did I turn you into again?"
Chop also had to double-check the ssages on his arm. "Pristine Blade Saint of the Supre Divinity of Toxin. You really like weird nas, don't you, boy?"
"I wasn't the one who made up that one. It was probably Profound Toxin. It always liked weird nas."
"You're one to talk," the geezer muttered.
"What X-rank grade did I see you were? I didn't have ti to read it properly."
Chop frowned. "A bit rude, aren't ya?"
"You're one to talk," Eik shot back with a smirk. "But what do you care?"
"True. Twenty seven."
"Twenty seven?" Eik gasped. "What the fuck! So X-rank is just endless as well?"
"I couldn't tell you, could I?" Chop grumbled. "And enough of that now. There's sothing I want to try." He was nearly shivering with giddiness.
Eik smiled. "Pristine Blade of Toxin?"
All Chop offered in return was a grin. Adopting a ready stance seemingly without even realizing it, Chop's fingers closed around the handle of his tattered, old blade. The wrappings on the handle still hung half bound like old rags, and it appeared to almost be a point of pride for the old X-ranker to neglect the maintenance of his weapon.
Eik had tried to get a straight answer out of the man, but all he would say on the matter was that a true martial artist should strive to embrace the deterioration of his tools as a testant to their tireless dedication to the art. To Eik, that sounded like a ridiculous notion, so surely there must be more to it.
That dedication could just as well be expressed through one's attention to the weapon's condition, or even through the number of weapons the martial artist had gone through in their career, no?
Eyes narrowing, Chop's breath halted. "Sothing's wrong."
"What?"
"My sword. It's not right. It's not the sa."
"You haven't even drawn it yet, dude."
The old fart glared at the young upstart. "A true master can sense the condition of his weapon with a single touch. I'm a true master and I've touched it."
Stolen novel; please report.
"Okay, so what changed?"
Instead of a reply, Chop slowly pulled the weapon free of its sheath. The mont the tal collar that was mounted between the blade and the hand guard ca free, azure light radiated out from within.
In one quick motion, the Pristine Blade Saint released the rest of the sword.
It had been altered completely. To begin with, any damage and erosion had been redied to perfection. But more importantly—and certainly more noticeable—it was not the sa blade at all. The silvery gray had been replaced by glittering blue, and the tal had been transford into solid, impeccably shaped crystal.
Chop had called his sword a masterpiece. Eik had thought it looked more like a piece of iron forgotten in the ground for a few months. Now, however, masterpiece was more than appropriate to describe it.
"My sword!"
"Your sword looks about a thousand tis better than it did before. Not to ntion that it's actually whole now. It was practically falling apart before."
"No, no! This is all wrong! Give back my old one!"
"How?" Eik asked.
Chop threw up his hands in frustration. "You're the one who did this to !"
"I don't know how it functions, dude!" Eik barked back. "I just work here!"
"This is not oka—" Out of the miasma ca a spawn of the Lord of the Moon. Appearing suddenly, it charged out of the darkness like a specter, leading with a gnashing maw. With what appeared to be three, stubby limbs to support it, the thing was essentially all head and mouth.
Just like all of its brethren that had attempted to take their lives before it, it was ugly as all hell.
Pale as a bleached sheet, the corners of a wicked grin were visible despite the pie hole opened wide.
Seemingly on pure reflex, Chop's new blade whipped out and back to its starting position with such blinding speed that even Eik's eyes could barely register what happened. X-rank grade twenty seven, all right. Fuckin' hell.
In the sa mont that the razor-sharp shock wave blew away the miasma in a vast cone in front of Chop and revealed thousands of spawn lying in wait, the struck monster was bisected at an atomic level.
Sohow, the cut must have been impossibly fine and perfect, because when the two severed halves of the spawn tumbled to the ground, it didn't shed a single drop of blood. A glimpse of the wound showed a wound so clean that it looked like a clean, bloodless drawing of the cross section of a torso in a dical student's textbook.
The conical area of land cleared by Chop's sweep was partially covered in dense forest of the sa ashy and fragile vegetation as on the other infested worlds, but the Pristine Blade Saint of the Supre Divinity of Toxin didn't even deign to watch as the wild energies of his attack felled them all.
His focus had been claid in its entirety by the new blade in his hand. The still-tattered bindings of the handle swayed slightly as they fell between his trembling fingers. His mouth bobbed open and closed repeatedly as he seed to be searching for words.
"What?" Eik asked as he swept his arm across the horizon in a wide arch and delivered a tidal wave of rapid, liquid toxin which overwheld and extinguished everything within a kiloter in that particular direction.
"That was… incredibly easy to execute. Much easier than it normally would be."
"Really? So the new sword is better?"
Chop mulled it over for a second before answering. "I an, it was effortless before, but I just more or less did it by accident just now. That never happens."
"So, what, you've lost so of your control, or what?"
Chop lay his head to the side, held it there for a mont, and then shifted to the other side. "I suppose that's one way to put it. This weapon is more potent than my own. I will admit that I had begun to believe that what I had before was the limit of what a sword could be. Sharpness, smoothness, balance. I thought that my unity with the blade had brought it to the epito in all aspects," the old man said, gazing down at the blue edge again, once more seeming to forget that he was in the middle of speaking.
"And?" Eik pushed.
"Right!" Chop breathed as his head snapped back up. "This… Whatever this is that you have created, has certainly beco proof that I was mistaken. It's going to take so practice to get used to this."
"Ah, sorry, I guess…"
"Sorry?" Chop exclaid incredulously. "This is perhaps the single best thing to happen to in two hundred years! Do you know how long I've been stuck? Do you know how long it's been since I last had sothing I felt I could improve upon? I could not be happier."
Without waiting for a reply from Eik, he leaped into the air, the blue glow of the blade lighting his path through the miasma. Monts after he disappeared into the opaque field, it was all swept away as if by the force of a gale force hurricane.
Countless crescents of blue energy slashed flawlessly and easily through anything in its path. Mountains were cut in twain, the rest of the forest that had been revealed by his earlier strike was annihilated to completion, and deep, seemingly bottomless fissures were opened in the earth.
Eik could only gape as he watched. The unfathomable precision with which the Pristine Blade Saint targeted individual spawn was stunning.
A combination of stabs and slashes, the continuous barrage of ultra quick attacks put any other weapon user Eik had ever seen to complete sha—and that included himself. He counted more than a hundred of these frighteningly destructive moves every second.
Like a furious god of war, Chop unleashed devastation that was incomparable to anything he had displayed at the demonstrated he had given an S-ranked Eik just a little while ago. The speed at which he swung the Pristine Blade of Toxin made it look more like a rapidly spinning sphere surrounding him rather than the after images of a sword.
And most unsettling of all was the sight of the geezer cackling like a madman all the while. It wasn't quite as funny when it was soone else getting the battle frenzy giggles.
The old X-ranker wasn't going to kill him in this sparring match… right?
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