I let out a slow breath. The foundation of the story was still holding.
Then, Arga Orlando stepped up.
The protagonist walked straight toward the heavy, unpolished weapons section. But he didn't just pick one. He stopped in front of a massive, steel-forged Guandao polearm. He stared at it, his fingers twitching toward the wooden shaft, before shaking his head and moving on. He stopped again at a pair of serrated trench-knives. Picked one up. Tested the weight. Put it back with a faint, almost imperceptible grimace.
Finally, he stopped directly in front of a massive, chipped broadsword—the exact same class of heavy iron he had used to flatten three Glyphron nobles in the courtyard yesterday. He stared at the rusted hilt for several long seconds. His hand twitched, his fingers curling slightly as they reached toward the steel.
But then, he stopped.
He let out a short, heavy breath, shaking his head as if arguing with a ghost I couldn't see. He bypassed the broadsword entirely and pulled a standard, double-edged longsword from the rack next to it instead. He tested the balance with a single, practiced flick of his wrist.
I watched him from the back of the crowd, processing the data, and nodded slowly.
Ah. Right.
He used a broadsword yesterday because he was fighting three people at once and needed the heavy kinetic sweep for crowd control. Today, it's a 1v1 sparring session, so he's bypassing the halberds and daggers to pick a longsword, maximizing his speed and precision.
In the novel, his defining combat trait is 'Universal Weapon Mastery'. He doesn't stick to one weapon; he constantly switches his loadout based on the scenario to grind different skill-trees. Absolute protagonist privilege. The script is totally safe.
With my anxiety temporarily sedated, I finally uncrossed my arms and stepped forward to select my own weapon.
The racks were mostly empty now. I looked at the remaining heavy battleaxes and warhammers. High damage output, yes, but wielding them required a minimum C-Rank Strength stat just to lift them without tearing a muscle.
If I swing that, the kinetic momentum will surgically dislocate my rotator cuff. Useless.
I walked past the elegant thrusting spears and twin-daggers. Those required complex footwork, pinpoint accuracy, and a high Agility stat. I currently possessed an Agility stat of F+.
I would literally trip over my own boots and impale my kidney. Useless.
I needed something simple. Something with high structural integrity that didn't demand acrobatics. I moved toward the Eastern racks at the far end of the arena.
Someone was already there.
And just like Syevira, she had her own localized isolation radius. The surrounding first-years were giving her a wide, respectful berth, though for a completely different reason. It wasn't the instinctive, biological revulsion of toxic mana. It was pure, unadulterated intimidation.
I stepped into the empty space around her.
The ambient temperature plummeted instantly. A faint, sharp prickle of static electricity bit into the skin of my wrist, making the fine hairs on my arm stand up.
I paused. Shadow? I directed the thought toward my solar plexus, bracing for the phantom frostbite. Are you acting up?
But the space below my sternum was completely still. The Shadow She Left Behind was resting quietly inside Eclipse. This wasn't her. The cold wasn't coming from inside me. It was radiating entirely from the girl standing next to the rack.
She was, objectively speaking, breathtakingly beautiful. Her hair was the color of glacial ice—a striking gradient of snow-white that bled into deep frost-blue at the tips. She possessed an immaculate, razor-sharp posture. When she briefly glanced to the side, I saw her eyes: a piercing, crystalline mixture of white and blue that looked less like human eyes and more like a frozen winter sky.
Above her head, my Native System overlay flickered quietly.
─────────────────────────────────────────────────────
[ ANNOTATION — Tsukuyomi Raiden ]
◈ [GREY] [CROWN]
…
─────────────────────────────────────────────────────
Grey. Dormant. Crown.The undisputed Number Two of our cohort. The Winter Blade of House Symbiode.
Without a single wasted motion, Raiden reached out and pulled a flawless, slightly curved iron Katana from the rack.
She gave it a blindingly fast practice swing.
FWOOSH.
The blade hummed, slicing through the air with terrifying acoustic violence. A pale silver-white trail of Vein-light followed the edge, but I could hear a faint, sharp static crackle buried in the sound, and the ambient moisture around the steel briefly crystallized into floating frost. Three entirely different atmospheric reactions from a single, casual swing.
I watched the blade settle perfectly at her side, my face completely blank.
An exquisite display of martial art.And completely useless for my build.
If I try to swing a finesse-based curved blade like that at a Mid-Tier monster with a crystallized hide, the edge will bounce, the recoil will shatter my wrists, and I will be digested.I do not need elegance. I need an industrial crowbar with a handle.
I need to select a weapon and leave this section of the rack immediately and under no circumstances make eye contact or say anything that could be interpreted as a challenge or a greeting or any form of social interaction—
My eyes landed on it before I could redirect them.
The Tang Heng Dao.
Straight spine. Single edge. The grip was wrapped in something that had been leather once and was now mostly optimism. The iron was pitted, dark with age, and whoever had last used it had not bothered to clean it properly. It was, by every cosmetic metric, the least impressive weapon on the rack.
I reached out and pulled it free.
The cold bit into my palm immediately. Heavy, uncooperative, no balance whatsoever. In the game, the Tang Heng Dao had a hidden exploit — thrusted at an exact ninety-degree angle on the precise counter-frame of an enemy's attack animation, the physics engine ignored one hundred percent of the target's Barrier Shield value. It was a documented glitch. I had used it approximately three hundred times.
Perfect. This is my weapon. I am going to take this weapon and walk in the opposite direction and—
"A straight blade."
The voice came from directly beside me.
I did not startle. I did not make a sound. What I did was experience a brief, violent internal event that I was choosing to classify as a recalibration of my threat assessment parameters.
Tsukuyomi Raiden was standing exactly one arm's length to my left.
She had not been there four seconds ago. She was there now. Her piercing winter-sky eyes were locked onto the heavy iron in my hand with the specific, dense focus of someone reading a language they find genuinely interesting.
When did you get here? How did you get here? You were two meters away and I didn't hear a single footstep. What are you?
My face remained a completely vacant canvas. Internally, every single one of my remaining calories was being directed toward not taking a step backward.
"It has no curve to absorb or redirect kinetic impact," Raiden continued, her voice smooth and crisp, like the air before snowfall. She wasn't looking at me. She was looking at the blade. "It demands absolute skeletal alignment to wield. One incorrect angle upon impact and the recoil shatters the wrist." A pause. "You intend to pierce armor. Not cut flesh."
I intend to survive a single sparring rotation and then lie down somewhere horizontal until the world stops being so aggressively eventful.
"You've been studying my grip for twelve seconds," I said. My voice came out flat. "From two meters away. Before you moved."
Raiden's eyes shifted to my face. Something in them recalibrated slightly. "Your selection was notable."
"It was the only thing left on the rack that wouldn't dislocate my shoulder."
"That is not why you chose it."
It is absolutely why I chose it. It is the only reason I chose it. I also chose it because it has a documented physics exploit that—
"A curved blade forgives hesitation," I said, because she was still looking at me and some part of my brain had decided that filling the silence was safer than letting her keep analyzing. "This one doesn't. But if you find the exact moment where the opponent's momentum peaks and forces a perfect ninety-degree angle—" I looked down at the blade, then back at her. "Armor becomes irrelevant. The structure simply breaks."
Raiden was quiet for a moment.
Why did I say that. That was the frame-data explanation for a physics glitch. I just explained a game engine exploit to the Winter Blade of House Symbiode and framed it as martial philosophy.
"You are describing a counter-thrust technique that has not appeared in the standard curriculum," Raiden said. Her voice had gone somewhere very careful. "The angle requires reading your opponent's weight shift before the strike commits. Most practitioners spend a decade learning to see the window." She paused. "You spoke of it as though it were obvious."
"It is obvious," I said. "Once you've seen it enough times."
In approximately three hundred hours of documented gameplay footage, yes.
The biting, aristocratic chill in her winter-sky eyes dissolved.
What replaced it was significantly worse.
It was the specific, dense, entirely focused look of someone who has just found something they intend to understand completely. Not admiration. Not warmth. Something more serious than either. The look of a person who has decided, quietly and without asking permission, that you are now a subject of genuine study.
Please stop looking at me like that.
I am an E-Rank insomniac running on borrowed calories and I just accidentally described a video game exploit as ancient sword philosophy to the second-ranked student in the entire cohort who is now examining me like I'm an undiscovered technique written in a dead language.
I would like to go stand somewhere else.