Free Web NovelChapter 14: Chapter 14. God Vs Mortal
Necrotize walked out to face Ronald at an unhurried pace, wooden sword held loosely in one hand. He came to a stop and looked at the professor with a calm, open expression.
Ronald’s discomfort was entirely understandable. Necrotize didn’t hold it against him.
What he did appreciate was that Ronald hadn’t let it show in any way that mattered. The nervousness was there, readable if you knew what to look for, but it hadn’t scattered his focus. The man was still present. Still a professional. ƒгeeweɓn૦vel.com
"Professor," Necrotize said, keeping his voice easy. "You don’t need to worry about what happened before. That won’t be repeating itself." He paused briefly. "I’ve spent some time learning to manage what I carry. It wasn’t a straightforward process, but my power is within my control now. You can breathe a little easier."
Ronald heard the words.
His nervousness did not particularly decrease.
The problem, he reflected, was that he had no framework for understanding what controlled meant when applied to a god. If Necrotize’s idea of restrained power was still an order of magnitude beyond what Ronald could survive, then the reassurance, however genuine, didn’t actually change his situation in any meaningful way.
Still. He set his feet, raised his sword in both hands, and made himself ready.
***
Necrotize began to advance.
No formal stance. No telegraphed shift in posture. He walked toward Ronald the way someone might walk toward a conversation, one hand holding the sword, his whole bearing unremarkable. Ronald tracked every step, his grip tightening by degrees.
Then the walk became a sprint.
Necrotize closed the distance in a single fluid surge and swung, one-handed, horizontal, a clean sweeping cut aimed at Ronald’s midsection.
Ronald brought his blade up and blocked it.
He held.
His body did not come apart. His feet stayed on the ground. He absorbed the impact and remained standing, and the relief that moved through him in that moment was almost embarrassing in its intensity.
Necrotize felt his own quiet satisfaction at the same time, not at Ronald’s relief, but at his own. There it is. I can do this without breaking everything around me.
Ronald used the contact to push back, leveraging his sword to drive Necrotize a step away.
They separated. Then they began to circle, each keeping his eyes on the other, reading the space between them with the careful attention of two people who were, in their very different ways, taking this seriously.
Then they came together again.
The exchange was sharp, swords pressing against each other, each pushing for angle and leverage. At the moment of maximum contact, Necrotize made a subtle adjustment, a small redirecting cut that fractionally disrupted the line of force.
Ronald’s balance shifted. Just slightly. Just enough.
In the same instant, Necrotize drove a fist toward his abdomen.
Ronald had felt it coming, not through any magical sense, but through the accumulated instinct of a man who had spent decades reading the small signals that preceded attacks. In the fraction of a second available to him, he rotated his sword and brought the flat of the blade across to intercept the punch.
The impact landed against the wood instead of his body. The force still shunted him back a step.
But he’d blocked it.
Around the training ground, no one was breathing.
***
Both of them were smiling.
Ronald, because he had just blocked an attack from a god and was still standing upright to think about it. Necrotize, because he could feel his control sharpening with each exchange, the feedback of a skill being relearned, settling back into grooves that had grown dusty with disuse.
Necrotize rolled his shoulder, working out a faint stiffness.
"It’s been a considerable number of years since I last held a sword," he said, almost conversationally. "My technique has degraded considerably from what it once was." He glanced at Ronald with something that might have been an invitation. "Would you be willing to go another round, Professor?"
Ronald shifted his grip from two hands to one.
An offensive stance. He was done defending.
"If it pleases you."
***
They moved at the same moment.
The impact of the two wooden blades rang across the training ground. Within seconds they had traded a rapid sequence of strikes and counters, the rhythm between them finding its own pace, quick, sharp, neither giving ground without immediately reclaiming it.
Ronald committed to a horizontal slash, driving the blade at throat level.
Necrotize tilted his head back just enough to let it pass, simultaneously pivoting his weight onto his rear foot and launching a hard thrust toward Ronald’s left side. freewёbnoνel.com
Ronald read the direction before it arrived. He pulled his leg clear and let his body rotate through the motion, turning the momentum into a vertical slash angled down toward Necrotize’s sword arm.
Necrotize caught it coming and parried, blade to blade, deflecting cleanly.
The exchange continued.
Strike. Counter. Redirect. Answer. Each attack met, each response generating the next question. The two of them moved through it with the focus of people who had, without quite deciding to, stopped performing for an audience and started simply *fighting*.
Somewhere in the middle of it, Ronald noticed something had changed in his own face.
He was smiling, not the professional acknowledgment he’d offered Dominic, not the proud instructor’s nod he’d given Elizabeth. Something older than that. Something that hadn’t surfaced in years.
This. Pure swordsmanship. No aura, no magic, no overwhelming force. Just technique meeting technique, one person’s skill pressing against another’s, neither side certain of the outcome.
He knew, on some rational level, that Necrotize was holding back, that what he was engaging with was a fraction of what the being in front of him actually carried. But that knowledge, strangely, didn’t diminish anything. If anything, it sharpened the pleasure of it. He was being met where he was. He was being given a real fight.
Ronald found he wanted to see where this ended.
He pressed forward.
