Chapter 126. Soul Is a Luxury for Those Without a Purpose
Catherine’s gaze dropped, the motion sharp and mechanical. Her eyes fixed on the white-hilted sword lying in the dirt at her feet, half buried in the blood-soaked mire.
A strange, preternatural certainty had taken root in her chest: an instinctual whisper that she would need more than one blade to sever the chains of her past. She bent low, retrieving it in one fluid, deliberate motion.
As her fingers closed around the familiar grip, the weight settled into her palm with a satisfying, deadly gravity. Now she stood balanced: Aetherion in her right, the white blade in her left.
She had never fought with two blades. She had never endured the grueling weeks of drills required to master the chaotic, beautiful mathematics of dual wielding.
But as she sank into her stance, something primal awakened beneath her ribs. The explosive, reactive foundation of Wind surged through her legs, and her body began to speak a language her mind hadn’t yet learned.
She wasn’t thinking; she was remembering. She was channeling the weeks of watching William move the way he cycled between Aetherion’s configurations like a dancer translating his fluid lethality into a new, untested rhythm that was entirely her own.
Corwin’s eyes tracked the movement, his composure shifting from cold indifference to something approaching genuine interest.
"Two blades," he observed, his voice carrying a disturbingly clinical curiosity. "Ambitious..."
"Most spend decades trying to master one before they dare touch another."
"I’ve had a better instructor lately," Catherine said. Her voice didn’t waver.
The tremor was gone, replaced by something honed and razor sharp. "Turns out some things you don’t need years to learn..."
"You just need someone who actually believes you’re capable of it."
She exploded forward.
The initial exchange was raw and ugly. The dual blades moved with an awkward, desperate energy that betrayed the unfamiliarity of the technique.
Her blades occasionally collided with each other, sparks flying where steel met steel in a discordant screech. Her footwork was fractionally behind the lightning-fast instincts of her training, her movements jagged as she fought to coordinate two separate limbs.
Corwin met her with terrifying ease, deflecting each strike with the same rigid, formal precision that had made him an unstoppable force for decades. Each time her blades struck his guard, the impact reverberated up her arms like a hammer blow, threatening to numb her fingers.
’Focus,’ she screamed at herself internally. ’Don’t fight the blades...’
’Make them one...’
’Let the wind carry them both.’
The shift happened in a heartbeat. The awkwardness burned away in a flash of white-hot fury.
Wind’s foundation asserted itself, and suddenly, the two blades ceased to be separate weapons. They became two wings of a single predator.
Her movements smoothed into a lethal scissoring motion, a deadly dance of steel that left no openings. She feinted high with Aetherion, drawing his guard up, then snapped the white blade across in a vicious horizontal arc.
Corwin barely managed to twist away, the tip of her blade whistling past his ribs, close enough to slice through his leather armor.
"Better," Corwin said, retreating a half step.
The clinical detachment was cracking; something sharper, something more dangerous, was bleeding into his voice. "You always did learn quickly..."
"That was always the problem with you, Catherine... Too fast... Too eager."
"Chose me for what?" she demanded, her voice a low growl as she pressed the advantage, her blades coming at him in a relentless, overlapping storm of steel.
"For exactly this, eventually," Corwin parried a vicious downward slash, the force of it sending a spray of dirt upward.
His breathing was becoming audible now, the effort of keeping up with her new tempo visible in the set of his shoulders. "Though I confess the timeline stretched considerably longer than I had originally intended."
Catherine lunged again, a series of rapid-fire stabs that forced Corwin into a desperate series of deflections.
Clang. Clang. Clang.
The sound was deafening in the quiet clearing.
"You were never simply some talented child I stumbled across in a quiet village, White Sword," Corwin spat as he shoved her back with a powerful ward.
His eyes burned with a terrifying certainty. "I was sent looking for precisely your kind of potential..."
"A rarity. A weapon. Speed beyond what your bloodline should have produced."
"A capacity for ruthless sacrifice, cultivated carefully over years of patient, deliberate guidance."
The clearing exploded into a chaos of sparks and screaming steel. Catherine didn’t just attack; she unleashed herself.
The dual blades became a whirlwind, a storm of silver that refused to grant Corwin even a moment to breathe. The choreography of their violence was a brutal contrast: Catherine was all fluid motion, chaotic and unpredictable, while Corwin remained a fortress of controlled, economical cruelty.
Clang shriek crash!
She lunged with a vicious thrust of Aetherion, but as Corwin raised his blade to catch it, she twisted her wrist mid swing, sending the white blade spinning in a horizontal arc meant to bisect his throat.
Corwin’s reaction was inhumanly fast. He ducked, the wind of her blade ruffling his hair, and immediately drove his pommel into her sternum.
Thump.
The air left Catherine’s lungs in a strangled wheeze, but she didn’t retreat. Instead, she used the momentum of the impact to spin backward, her boots kicking up blood-soaked earth as she regained her balance.
"Look at you," Corwin taunted, stepping forward with the measured gait of a man walking through a garden. "The fury suits you..."
"That righteous indignation—that’s exactly what I needed to see." Corwin laughed. "Anger makes you faster and anger makes you forget to hesitate."
"Shut up!" Catherine roared. "You’re trying to trick me...! You never said any good thing about anger!!!"
She threw herself at him again.
This time, she coordinated the blades with terrifying precision. Aetherion came down in a crushing overhead strike, CRACK,CRACK meeting his blade with enough force to send vibrations through both their bones.
Before he could push back, the white blade darted in like a viper, aiming for the gap between his pauldron and gorget. Corwin twisted his torso sideways, the steel screeching against his armor as it found no purchase, but the effort forced him to stumble.
Catherine didn’t give him the chance to recover. She drove her shoulder into his chest, a desperate, bone-jarring collision that sent them both staggering.
"Do you remember the winter training?" Corwin asked, his voice eerily calm despite the blood trickling from a fresh cut on his cheek.
He parried a desperate slash that would have taken his ear off. "When I left you in the snow for six hours without food?"
"You cried, yes. But when you finally stood up, your movements were sharper."
"Your focus was absolute... I wasn’t being cruel, Catherine!"
"I was removing the weakness of comfort."
Clash! Clang! Sssssss!
The blades locked at the hilts, their faces inches apart. Catherine could smell the copper of his blood and the stale scent of old leather.
Her teeth were bared in a snarl, her muscles screaming as she fought to maintain the bind.
"You weren’t teaching me to fight," she spat, her breath hot against his face. "You were breaking me down to rebuild me as something... soulless."
"Soul is a luxury for those who don’t have a purpose," Corwin countered.
With a sudden, violent twist of his hips, he leveraged his superior strength, throwing her off balance.
Catherine stumbled, her boots skidding through the gore, but she rolled sideways just as Corwin’s blade whistled through the space where her head had been.
She came up in a crouch, blood dripping from her chin onto her collar. Her lungs burned like she was inhaling molten lead, and her forearms felt like they were being split open by the constant impact of steel.
Stab, parry, slash, and thrust.
The fight became a blur of high-stakes geometry. Catherine attempted a complex feint: she dropped low, sweeping the white blade across his ankles to force a jump, then immediately launched Aetherion upward in a vicious uppercut aimed at his chin.
Corwin anticipated it. He leapt, but not away; he leapt into her space, his blade descending in a murderous overhead chop.
CLANG.
She raised both blades in a cross guard to catch the blow. The impact was seismic.
The force drove her to one knee, the sound of her kneecap grinding against the hard, frozen earth echoing in her ears. Her arms shook violently under the weight of his relentless assault.
"Every scar you bear, every sleepless night where you wonder if you’re good enough..."
"Every moment of doubt you’ve ever felt was my handiwork," Corwin said, pressing down harder, his face contorting into something almost proud. "I didn’t just train a soldier."
"I forged a masterpiece of trauma and technique."
Catherine’s vision blurred with sweat and rage.
’I am not your masterpiece,’ she screamed internally. ’I am the weapon that kills you.’
Pushing upward with every ounce of strength left in her quads, she exploded from the defensive posture. She abandoned all pretense of formal technique, turning the fight into something primal and ugly.
She swung the white blade in a wild, slashing motion that forced Corwin to retreat, then immediately followed with a brutal, close-quarters strike where she used the pommel of Aetherion to smash against his ribs.
Crunch.
The sound of cartilage snapping was sickeningly clear. Corwin grunted, a genuine sound of pain breaking through his composure.
For a split second, the predator wavered.
"There it is," Corwin hissed through gritted teeth, blood spattering from his lips as he recovered. "That’s the animal I wanted..."
"Now, show me if the animal can actually finish the hunt."
The two warriors charged again, their blades meeting in a shower of sparks that illuminated the carnage of the battlefield like dying stars. The dance of death continued, relentless and unforgiving, neither one willing to yield an inch of ground.