Hard Carried by My Sword

Chapter 263

Through the thick fog of the Nether Valley, a creature that had forgotten the boundary between life and death charged straight for Leon. The eerie creature came at him on its four legs.

Even from the blurred silhouette behind the mist, it was obvious this thing was nothing like a human. Watching its movements through Sight, Leon immediately understood what felt off. There was no presence.

It was not “weak,” nor “muted”. There was just nothing. Even beings without life had traces of energy, but this thing had none. Only the cold blue glow of its eyes revealed its path.

So my senses really don’t work here.

An Aura Master’s perception could map an area of several meters around them and detect everything as if it were in the palm of their hands. But in the Nether Valley, that ability fell apart. Everything here, dead or alive, moved by the power of the fog saturating the air.

Beneath the melting flesh of the creature, its cervical bones twitched. The hellhound ripped through the mist, baring teeth coated in thick, tar-black slime.

It reminded him of the corpse-flowers he’d seen before entering the valley.

In terms of its threat as a monster, I’d say it’s around a B+-rank.

Leon watched its movement to the very end. The moment its paw snagged on a stone, causing it to lag for less than a tenth of a second of hesitation, he struck.

One clean cut split the hellhound in half. The corpse twitched once like a broken puppet and melted away, vanishing like ice held before a furnace due to the effect of the Holy Sword.

“How did that thing even move?” Leon murmured as he instinctively glanced at its insides.

The hellhound’s organs were rotten beyond recognition, muscles liquefied, and even its bones had dissolved to the marrow. It should have been incapable of any movement, yet it had charged without faltering.

Catching the distraction, El-Cid said, —Focus. Understanding the valley can come later. Worry about yourself first.

Got it, Leon replied inwardly.

Clearing his mind, he then glared into the depths of the mist. The hellhound had only been the opening wave. The valley responded to intruders who rejected its mist by sending its creatures forth, exactly as William had warned. Those who died without rest surged toward Leon like a tide.

An ogre!

One surged ahead, trampling other monsters aside. Blue eyes, characteristic of the undead, burned as it raised a club.

Leon stepped in without hesitation despite not having the Sun Sword, Grand Chariot, Aura Blade, or Aura Weapon. This much wasn’t enough to make him retreat.

He deflected the club by a precise five-centimeter margin, stepped into its chest, and leaped, his sword carving upward. From gut to heart to throat, all the way to the crown, the ogre’s upper body split apart and collapsed like a marionette with severed strings. Ignoring the melting gore behind him, Leon advanced another step.

Dozens of blue-lit eyes surrounded him, a ring of undead bodies ready to crush him with sheer numbers. Normally, he would have swept them aside with Sun Sword, but that wasn’t an option right now.

I have to cut through them with swordsmanship alone.

To follow El-Cid’s lesson, Leon pulled back the Aura instinctively gathering around his blade. Both eyes moved rapidly, tracking enemies.

Orc ahead. Troll on the left. Gnoll on the right. A wyvern and several harpies diving from above. Even with perfect angles, one stroke couldn’t pierce them all.

Then, his next course of action was simple. Aura coursed through his veins, accelerating.

If once wasn’t enough, he would strike twice. If twice wasn’t enough, he would strike three times.

He plotted each trajectory ahead of their encroaching movements, pushing forward faster than they could close in. With a flash, the orc split diagonally. Riding the momentum of his swing, he crushed the troll’s skull. Before its body dissolved, Leon kicked off it and bisected the gnoll attacking from behind, its halberd and all. All of that only took an eighth of a second.

No sooner had he felled three than a wyvern’s talons plunged toward him. Its undead frame was lighter, but the momentum it had gained from the lack of fear of death made it even fiercer. Halving it head-on would still bind his movement for a brief moment.

Can’t meet it straight on.

Leon stopped his reflexive counter, slid half a step aside, and angled his blade upward. Descending from above, the wyvern had superior positioning and leverage, and Leon knew that meeting an enemy who had the superior ground with force would be foolish. Efficiency, adaptation, breaking disadvantage through technique—that was true martial skill.

Using Sun Sword to erase everything in front of him would’ve been manipulating Aura, not swordsmanship. For some reason, Leon could now understand what El-Cid meant.

The wyvern’s neck was carved halfway through. It crashed into the ground, shattering like brittle glass as its wings snapped. The moment the Holy Sword cut it, its regenerative property vanished, and its body simply fell apart.

With that, Leon earned himself a single moment to breathe and regather. He used the opening to reorient himself and pierced the fog again with the Stigma of the Observer.

“There’s a disgusting amount of them. I’ll hit a thousand in no time at this rate,” he muttered.

—It’s not about the number.

El-Cid said, —Forget about killing a thousand. Instead, focus on correcting the distortions in your technique, just like you did earlier. Review each movement carefully and straighten your discipline with the blade.

“So relying too much on Sun Sword is what made my form sloppy?”

—No. Your Aura Blade is well-made, and there were plenty of times you had no choice but to use it.

El-Cid steadied his impatience. —In the end, martial arts is ceaseless refinement, something you polish and scrape until it reaches perfection. No one starts from perfection; you have to stumble and err along the way.

His advice barely ended before the monsters surged again. The earlier few had only been an appetizer. Now, hundreds of undead charged with burning blue eyes.

They felt no pain or fear. Their hearts were cold, their brains rotted, and the very concept of “retreat” no longer existed in those hollow skulls.

Their formation was a mess. Those tripping on loose stones were trampled underfoot and crushed into pulp, yet still wriggled as their half-liquefied flesh tried to move without dying. In other words, it was an utterly repulsive sight to see.

A creature reached Leon first—a dryad overgrown with corpse-flowers shrieked like a banshee. A split second later, thick venomous spikes erupted from its entire body.

Even one hit would let that curse-like poison seep into his veins. With Sun Sword, he could have incinerated the entire barrage in one sweep, but he was forbidden from using it now. So, Leon quickly chose the next best option.

He swung with the flat of his blade, knocking every spike away like swatting aside a hail of arrows. A few grazed his armor, but the drake-scale plate forged by Titan smiths did not yield.

The spikes bounced off with pitiful pops. Leon immediately shifted into offense and severed the dryad’s head while it was exposed.

“Wha?!”

Then, a hand shot from the soil and grabbed his ankle, followed by corpses surging in from every direction. He smashed the hand with a stomp and freed himself, but even less than a second of delay was fatal. An orc’s glaive sliced several hairs off his forehead, and a direwolf lunged right behind it.

The thing that held me down was... a rat-man? They’re already hard to sense, but now, without life-signs, it slipped past my perception and got through!

It was proof of his swordsmanship’s shortcomings. Even without Sun Sword, an Aura Master should grasp everything within the blade’s reach as if seeing it with his palm. Leon had grown too accustomed to fighting with Aura Blade and had neglected the fundamentals of domain control.

But he didn’t shrink back. He just had to be faster, sharper, and more precise. As long as he outdid himself from a second ago, that was enough.

Short, concise, but never rigid, Leon told himself as he trimmed unnecessary motion.

Where he would dodge by two centimeters, he now slipped by one, and countered in the remaining one, thinning the numbers of the barrage. His sword knocked away the glaive, crushed the orc’s skull, and he followed by kicking the direwolf’s jaw as it dove for his legs. He did not obsess over one strike, one kill.

In martial arts, reading ahead was everything. Seeing ten moves ahead versus a hundred produced an entirely different depth. Leon’s concentration sharpened until his instincts brushed a realm he had never touched.

“Here.”

Without even looking, he stomped down hard. The rotten earth cracked open, making a sound that shouldn’t be coming from mere dirt. Sure enough, the rat-man that had grabbed him earlier lay there with its skull caved in, grey matter leaking out.

This was Leon’s domain. Even without emitting Aura, a Master’s “circle” became their territory, detectable through subconscious exertion of will.

—Aura or no aura, it doesn’t matter.

As if talking to himself, El-Cid murmured, —If your will is firm enough to draw the boundary, you can perceive everything inside that boundary even with all five senses sealed.

When Psychokinetic will reached its peak, one isolated their domain as their own world, bending space-time and causality itself. Those who reached that level was called transcendents, or Grandmasters.

Such beings had once slain dragons and even gods in ancient eras. In the past, there were dozens of them, but now, only Kasim remained. The rest had disappeared after writing their own legends.

—I’m not telling you to fly before you learn to run. First, learn to draw the boundary. A mage distinguishes inside and outside with a magic circle, but for a martial artist, things are simpler.

At some point, Leon had entered a trance. He carved through monsters coming from every direction, letting El-Cid’s voice sink deep into his consciousness.

It was truly strange—he was moving faster and more violently than before, yet it felt as though his body were perfectly still. His vertical slash bisected a kobold, and with a rising diagonal swing, he severed the forelegs of a Giant Mantis ambushing from the side.

“Haaah...” freёwebnovel.com

One breath reclaimed his domain, and he lowered his sword. His sequence of movements had flowed like water. The saying went, “Motion within stillness, stillness within motion.” Knowing when to move and when to stop—those who shattered that boundary achieved true swiftness.

“I think I’m finally starting to understand...” Leon murmured as he left the trance.

The weight of the sword in his hand felt unusually heavy. The lines he carved with this blade were the borders dividing him from the world. He thought of ancient martial scholars who once studied swordsmanship with brushes instead of blades. It finally made sense. freēwēbnovel.com

What he was truly wielding wasn’t metal. It was his will, shaped like a sword.

And when that will became solid enough to cut the world, martial artists revered it by one name. El-Cid spoke.

—Welcome to the path of the Mind-Blade.