Chapter 76: VS Sword Emperor [NARRATOR POV]
Three days after the inauguration, Eugene Bluewolf made good on his request.
The Royal Knights' training courtyard had been cleared and secured, the stones swept bare under a grey afternoon sky. A mixed audience filled the gallery above—Royal Knights on one side, Arbalest personnel on the other—each group watching the opposite with the careful attention of people trying to assess something they hadn't seen before.
A battle between emperors commands respect wherever witnessed.
The very announcement of such a confrontation draws crowds, including commoners who hunger for a glimpse of power they'll never possess, nobles seeking to gauge the kingdom's shifting balance, and warriors hoping to glean insights from masters of their craft.
In the Asura Kingdom, Saint-ranked experts could be counted on two hands. Emperor-ranked? A single hand sufficed.
The rarity of witnessing such prowess made Eugene's challenge extraordinary, a spectacle that would echo through taverns and training grounds for months to come.
The gathered audience held its collective breath as Claude stepped forward, his movements fluid despite the weight of expectation.
The soft whisper of steel against leather filled the courtyard as he unsheathed his practice blade, the mundane weapon somehow seeming more dangerous in his grip.
"Get ready, Master Eugene," Claude's voice carried across the stone courtyard, calm as still water before a storm.
Eugene shifted into his stance, the great sword familiar as an extension of his own body after decades of mastery. "Come whenev..."
The world lurched.
Without waiting for courtesy or ceremony, Claude activated Time Square chantlessly. The familiar sensation moved through him—not true time manipulation, he'd realized, but advanced body enhancement that made his form surge with speed while the world seemed to crawl.
His enhanced perception swept across Eugene's form, searching for the opening that would end this quickly.
What he found instead made his blood run cold. Every apparent weakness was a trap, every seeming vulnerability a carefully laid snare.
Eugene's stance appeared casual to untrained eyes, but Claude could see the coiled potential in every muscle, the calculated positioning that would turn any aggressive approach into his own destruction.
He'd already adapted to the speed enhancement. Claude could see it in the way the Sword Emperor's weight had shifted—not surprise but anticipation.
The spell dissolved as Claude released his hold on it, returning the world to its normal pace. He approached Eugene slowly now, studying the Sword Emperor with new respect.
"What? So you won't use that body enhancement magic?" Eugene's weathered face creased with interest, his grip tightening on the great sword's hilt.
The words landed differently than the question implied. To someone of Eugene's caliber, Time Square didn't look like time manipulation at all—just enhanced speed, enhanced reflexes. He saw it for what it functionally was: advanced body enhancement magic.
The revelation would have to wait. Eugene exploded into motion.
The Sword Emperor's attack came without fanfare, a simple, devastating slash that carried the weight of decades behind it. No flourishes, no wasted movement. Just pure, concentrated lethality that made the air itself seem to part in respect.
Claude twisted aside, feeling the practice blade's passage ruffle his hair.
Before he could fully process the dodge, Eugene was already moving again, his great sword carving a path toward Claude's back with impossible speed.
Teleportation? No, Claude's enhanced perception caught the movement. Pure technique.
Eugene had used the momentum of his first strike to pivot, redirecting his entire body's force into a follow-up that would have skewered a lesser warrior.
CLANG
The block sent shockwaves up Claude's arms. Even through the practice sword, Eugene's strength was monstrous. Claude let the recoil carry him backward, creating distance while his numbed hand struggled to maintain its grip.
He flicked his wrist, sending a sharp arc through the air to restore feeling to his tingling fingers. The brief moment of weakness hadn't gone unnoticed—Eugene's experienced eyes tracked every micro-expression, every tell that might reveal an opening.
"As expected from the Sword Emperor Eugene," Claude said, circling slowly. "It's my first time facing a Sword Emperor. Though I have a Spear Emperor acquaintance, the way you move is completely different."
The words weren't idle chatter. Claude studied Eugene's footwork, the subtle shifts in weight distribution, the way the great sword moved like it weighed nothing in those scarred hands.
Every detail mattered against an opponent of this caliber.
Eugene's eyes never left Claude's form, tracking movement and mana flow with equal intensity. He couldn't afford distraction—not against someone who could cast chantlessly, who could enhance his speed without warning.
One moment of inattention would...
The thought itself proved prophetic.
For just an instant, Eugene's mind wandered to the implications of this battle. A fifteen-year-old matching him blow for blow. The political ramifications. The questions this would raise about Arbalest's true strength.
That instant was eternity to someone like Claude.
Mana surged without incantation, without gesture. One moment Claude stood five paces away, and the next, he simply wasn't there.
"Where did he go!" Eugene's voice cracked with the first hint of genuine alarm.
Instinct saved him. Pure warrior's intuition screaming danger made Eugene throw himself aside just as an earth spear erupted from the ground where he'd stood.
The stone spike gleamed wetly in the afternoon sun, sharp enough to pierce Emperor-grade Touki.
But Claude hadn't relied on the spell alone.
SHINK
Steel bit deep into Eugene's back as the Sword Emperor landed awkwardly from his dodge. Claude's practice blade, invested with enough mana reinforcement to pierce even Eugene's enhanced defenses, slid between ribs with surgical precision.
"Wha..." Eugene's breath came in a sharp hiss as pain bloomed through his torso.
"I did mention having a Spear Emperor acquaintance," Claude said softly, withdrawing his blade with clinical efficiency.
He stepped back, cleaning the steel with a practiced motion that spoke of experience with real blood.
"Sadly, you're weaker than him."
The insult landed harder than the wound. Eugene felt his Emperor-grade Touki—a defense that should have turned practice blades like paper—had been pierced as if it were silk.
The sword was the same training weapon they'd started with, blunted, mundane steel.
How had Claude made it cut through defenses that could turn aside enchanted weapons?
Mana reinforcement. He'd pushed mana through the blade itself—through the haze of pain the logic assembled—giving it an edge sharp enough to cut through anything.
But the control required...
Claude offered no explanations, only a knowing smile that spoke of secrets Eugene couldn't begin to fathom.
The Sword Emperor's laughter came bitter and defeated as he raised his hand in surrender. The gathered crowd erupted in gasps and whispers—a fifteen-year-old had just defeated one of the kingdom's finest warriors without breaking a sweat.
Claude's demeanor shifted instantly from cold efficiency to warm concern. He approached Eugene with healing magic already gathering in his palms, offering assistance with the same courtesy he'd shown before their battle.
"There's no problem!" Eugene's voice boomed with genuine mirth as Claude's healing closed the wound. "It's a wonderful thing for Asura to have such a young dual-class expert! A Saint-ranked mage and King-ranked warrior at fifteen, who would believe it?"
The political implications weren't lost on Eugene as he left the platform. A new power had emerged in Asura, one that could shift the delicate balance between noble factions.
"A new force to consider," Eugene murmured as he departed. "What an interesting development in the race for succession..."
With Eugene's defeat, no other challenger dared step forward. Claude's demonstration had achieved its purpose, establishing beyond doubt the military might backing Mike's newly granted authority.
"Thankfully there's a ban on territorial expansion," Sauros joked, slapping Mike's shoulder, "or you might be conquering half the kingdom by next month!"
Mike's nervous laughter joined the surrounding nobles' uneasy chuckles. The jest carried uncomfortable truth—with Claude as their enforcer, Arbalest's potential for growth was genuinely terrifying.
The territory Claude received from Sauros had lost its regent in the Metastasis Event, one of countless tragedies from that catastrophic night.
The disaster had claimed over thirty thousand confirmed dead, with twenty thousand still missing, including Zenith, Rudeus's mother.
Based on intelligence from Roxy, Rudeus's former teacher, Zenith might have been transported to the Begaritt Continent. Search teams were already mobilizing, though the journey would take months, and the continent itself was a maze of deadly labyrinths.
Paul had wanted to lead the search himself, but Claude and the others had convinced him to remain in Millis. His work coordinating refugee efforts was too crucial, and Begaritt was no place for desperate, emotional decisions.
The match ended and the crowd noise swelled, but Reida had stopped hearing it several exchanges ago.
She stood at the gallery railing, hands folded behind her back, watching Claude exchange a few courteous words with Eugene while healing magic closed the wound in the man's side. Eugene was laughing—genuinely, bitterly, the laughter of someone who'd just discovered the ceiling was lower than they'd thought.
Reida understood that feeling precisely.
She had sent a technique refined across six decades of practice directly at the Dragon God's shoulder. The execution had been perfect. The mana had simply stopped being connected to its intent six inches from the target, as if the water itself had reconsidered.
That was Orsted.
What she'd just watched was Claude—fifteen years old, holding a practice blade—dismantle a Sword Emperor who had been doing this before Claude was born.
The two experiences did not belong in the same category. Orsted's power had operated outside any framework she possessed for measuring it. Claude's was different, recognizable, traceable, built from principles she could follow even when she couldn't match the execution. He was fast in ways that had a logic to them. He read his opponent at a level that spoke of genuine depth, not just talent. He had invented a mana technique mid-fight that she had needed three exchanges to even identify, let alone name.
That was not a child with gifts.
That was someone who had already been somewhere she had not.
She thought about Isolte, who had been training with him these past months and would carry those lessons forward to the Holy Land of Swords.
And she thought about the Water God succession—a weight she carried that she hadn't yet resolved.
There was work still to do. She had known it before today.
Today only sharpened the knowing.
Isolte had spent the last three months watching Claude train.
She had sparred with him, been corrected by him on footwork principles she'd thought were beyond reproach, and watched him absorb instruction from Reida and then apply it in ways that went sideways in directions neither teacher had anticipated. Training with Claude was frequently humbling and occasionally alarming and never what she'd expected going in.
She thought she'd understood the scope of what she was looking at.
The match with Eugene corrected that impression thoroughly.
The crowd around her was still processing shock. An Emperor had conceded. A fifteen-year-old had won a bout that most people in this kingdom would have bet their houses couldn't happen. She heard the whispers—dual-class expert, Metastasis survivor, prodigy, impossible—and understood them as the sound people made when they didn't have better words.
What she had seen was simpler and more significant than any of those words.
Claude had taken everything Reida had taught him and everything he'd built himself and everything that fight required, and he had combined them in real time without visible seams. That was not what prodigies did. Prodigies executed at a high level. What Claude had done looked like integration—like all of it was already one thing that he was merely expressing.
She would be training with Eris at the Holy Land of Swords.
Eris, who had been next to Claude through two years of the Demon Continent.
Isolte looked forward to understanding what had rubbed off.
[RUDEUS POV]
We were almost there when everything that had happened finally caught up with me.
Not at once. Grief and shock and relief don't wait politely in line—they come sideways, in the smell of Eris's hair or the sound of the wheels on a dirt road or nothing particular at all. One moment I was watching the countryside roll past the carriage window, and the next I was remembering Orsted's sword moving faster than I could process, and the ground coming up, and the specific quality of realizing you are dead before the realization finishes forming.
I had been revived. The potion Claude pressed to my lips had brought me back. I knew this. I had been alive for weeks since it happened.
Knowing a thing and being done with it are different problems.
Eris sat pressed against my side, closer than she would have been before. She'd barely left my arm's reach since that afternoon. I wasn't sure she knew she was doing it. The carriage swayed and she shifted with it, her shoulder solid against mine, and I didn't move away either.
"Rudeus was about to die," she said without preamble, staring at some middle distance that wasn't quite the window and wasn't quite me. "How can you talk about it so simply?"
Because I cannot talk about it at all, I thought. Because saying the real thing out loud—that I had been afraid in a way that hadn't finished yet, that the thought of Orsted turned my hands cold, that I would genuinely beg rather than risk her seeing me die again—saying any of that would mean the fear was still in charge. And I had decided, on the road after waking up with a repaired lung and a bruised everything, that I was not going to let it be in charge.
"I don't want to die next time," I said instead.
She turned to look at me properly, and whatever she saw in my face made her stop arguing and lean into my shoulder more firmly.
"If Eris gets into danger," I added, quieter. "I'll make sure we can at least escape together."
She didn't answer. But she didn't move away.
I spent the rest of that afternoon practicing. Malformed stone fragments accumulated on the carriage floor around me—failed attempts at the disruption technique Orsted had used, the one that had swallowed my spells without even the dignity of deflecting them. Disturb Magic. I had watched it happen to me, which meant I had some sense of the principle, which meant it was at least theoretically learnable.
I had no idea if I could actually learn it. But I needed something to do with my hands, and it was better than thinking.
Eris watched me fail repeatedly with the specific expression she reserved for activities she found puzzling but was willing to tolerate.
"Is it working?" she asked, after the seventh failed fragment.
"Not yet."
"Oh." She nodded as if this were a satisfactory answer, and went back to staring out the window.
I tried again.
That night, Eris fell asleep within the hour—she always had—and I sat across from Ruijerd at the fire and finally said the thing I'd been carrying since before the Demon Continent.
I told him about the Human God.
All of it. The dreams that had started when I was five. The voice that had never identified itself but had always known more than it should. The way it had pointed me toward Ruijerd specifically, in a world that feared Superd so completely that the pointing felt generous. The connection to Orsted, who killed people who had been touched by the Human God's advice—and the fact that he had not killed me.
Ruijerd listened the way he listened to everything completely still, without interrupting, with the patience of someone who had stopped being surprised by the world a long time ago and had simply learned to wait for things to finish revealing themselves.
"Human God and Dragon God," he said, when I'd run out of words. "The seven gods of antiquity. This has become quite the tale."
I kept going. The curse on the Superd race, I said—it wasn't natural. It was placed. Something I'd read, something I half-remembered and half-suspected. And the evidence we had from Orsted suggested it was beginning to fade. Not gone. Not fixed. But no longer the same absolute wall it had been.
Ruijerd was quiet for a long time after that.
Long enough that I started to worry I'd said too much or said it wrong, that I'd broken something I didn't have the skill to repair.
Then I saw the corners of his eyes.
I looked at the fire instead. Found something interesting in the embers. The fire was genuinely very interesting and I studied it with complete attention until I heard Ruijerd's breathing even out.
"Then it's time for me to sleep," he said finally.
"Right," I said. "Good night."
Some dignities deserved protection, even from friends.
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