Chapter 45: A Wide Gap
Uthed rolled his shoulder where the pommel had landed and looked at the crowd around the ring, then back at the young man who had just punched him in the face.
The gymnasium had stopped being a gymnasium. Nobody was lifting anything. A barbell sat half loaded on the floor where somebody had set it down without looking at it. A woman near the rack had a towel over her shoulder and had forgotten it was there.
"Mr Theo," Uthed said. "Would you mind if I stopped being a teacher for a few minutes?"
Theo wiped the blood off his chin with the back of his wrist and thought about it seriously, like he was thinking about a question at a job interview.
"Please do..."
Uthed laughed once. Then he sheathed his sword.
To everyone watching it looked like the older man had given up. Theo knew better, because the system knew better.
[Skill Use Detected: Stillness of the Blade]
A small frown tugged at Theo’s brows as he read the system’s warning.
Uthed stood with his hand resting on the wooden sword, holding it like it was in a sheath, and his weight sank low, and everything about him went quiet. And still. The shouting from the racks seemed to travel around the man instead of reaching him.
Theo watched and chuckled silently.
’Ah... is this the part where I get hurt?’
He was correct.
Uthed did not appear to move. The sound came first, a short dry snap, and the air in front of Theo split open. Theo threw his sword up on instinct, on nothing but the ugly animal part of him that wanted to keep his face, and the blade caught the draw at an angle that saved his eyes and cost him his balance.
He slid back four feet on his heels, and the matting squealed the whole way. His arms had gone numb to the shoulder.
[Skill Use Detected: First Draw]
’That was fast. That was insanely fast. Was that even a swing?’
Uthed was already sheathing again. That was the atrocious part. The sword went back into his waiting hand the way a man puts away a tool he has finished with, without hurry and without looking at it, and Theo understood, in a cold little flash, that every second the blade sat in that sheath was a second it was loading.
So he did not let it sit.
Theo came in low and fast, and this time he did not think about swordsmanship at all. He let his body do the arithmetic. He swung, and where Uthed’s guard rose to meet him he was already turning the swing into a shoulder, and where Uthed’s stance shifted he was already at the man’s ribs with the flat of the blade.
Uthed took two of the three. The third one landed and he grunted.
At the same time, Theo felt something in his chest tear a little further, a hot thin line under the breastbone that moved when he breathed, and the system had opinions about it.
[Your body has Adapted to a superior technique]
[You have gained +3 Speed]
[You have gained +4 Battle IQ]
[Warning: Physical strain approaching threshold]
’Threshold. Right. That sounds like a problem for a man who has more time than me.’
Theo ignored it and pressed.
For a moment it was even. That was what the gymnasium saw and that was what the gymnasium screamed about, twenty grown adults hollering like it was a title match while a young man who had held a sword for two days traded strikes with a C-rank hero.
Uthed saw something different. Uthed saw a man who was getting better inside a single exchange, closing a hole in his guard that had been open thirty seconds ago, and he had been alive long enough to know exactly how frightening that was.
So he stopped playing.
[Skill Use Detected: Falling Petals]
The draw came from the low guard and it did not come once. It came in six places, and Theo could not tell which of the six were real until the cuts opened. One across the forearm. One along the ribs. One that took a piece of his shirt and a thin red line off his collarbone even though it was a wooden sword.
Theo staggered back and coughed and kept his feet. The blood ran down to his elbow and dripped from it, and he heard it land on the mat before he felt any of the cuts at all.
’Six cuts. He held back on four. He could have taken my hand.’
He was not wrong about that either.
"You’re still standing." Uthed sounded almost annoyed about it. "Nobody has tasted this skill and still stood. Most would have sat down by now. It would be the correct decision."
"I don’t think I’m allowed to sit down."
"Says who?"
"Says me," Theo said, and grinned cockily, which only seemed to infuriate the old swordsman further.
Uthed’s mouth twitched. Then his hand went back to the sheath.
Theo made the only good decision available to him, which was to attack a man in the middle of drawing a sword.
He went in. He got two steps.
[Ultimate Skill Use Detected: Three-Inch Death]
There was no arc, no wind-up, nothing for the eye to catch. Uthed simply drew and stopped, and the whole of it happened inside the length of a hand.
Theo’s sword left his fingers. He did not feel it leave. He heard it clatter somewhere behind him, over by the racks, and that was how he learned it was gone. He felt the impact in his sternum, and then the floor of the gymnasium came up and hit him in the back with the enthusiasm of an old friend.
The room went silent all at once.
[Critical strain reached]
[Adaptation halted]
[Rest is highly recommended]
’Rest,’ Theo thought, from somewhere very far down. ’What a useful system. Truly.’
Uthed was over him. The glare was gone and so was the fun, and what was on the man’s face now was the flat, tired attention of somebody checking whether he had killed a client.
"Mr Theo. Say something."
Theo said something. It came out as most of a word.
"Again," he said.
"Absolutely not."
"Tomorrow, then."
"Mr Theo, you are bleeding on my shoes."
Theo thought that was fair. He also thought the ceiling of the gymnasium was much higher than he had noticed before, and that somebody should really dust the light fixtures, and that if he was going to be unconscious for a while he ought to get his priorities in order first.
He got them in order.
’Estea is going to be so angry.’
Then the lights went out.
Afterwards, the gymnasium would talk about it for a week. The trainers who had let go of their bars would describe the last exchange to people who had not been there, standing up to show it with their arms hacking at the air, and they would describe it wrong, because none of them had actually seen the draw.
But more than that they would talk about the young man who stood toe to toe with the old man and made the battle so interesting to watch, with his ridiculous twisting body and his impossible movements.
Uthed did not talk about it at all.
Actually, he was very ashamed of himself. Because he had exhausted his entire skill set to draw a line of blood from Theo. Granted, if it had been a normal sword, it would have been more than a line.
But still, it cost him all of his skills and thirty years of mastery over them. Thirty years of standing in the same low guard every morning before the sun came up, spent inside one exchange, on a boy who had picked up a sword the day before yesterday.
With fear beating loudly in his mind, Uthed thought.
’Too wide, the gap between us is already too wide.’