Chapter 370: Millennias Of Experience
Luca looked at Sigrid for a moment. Then he shrugged, as though the question were simpler than breathing.
"I’ve just been analyzing you since the very beginning."
Sigrid blinked. "...Analyzing me?"
"I never tried to overpower you." He lowered his blade from her throat, letting it rest at his side.
"I only looked for the weakest point your body created."
"My...body?"
"You see, Sigrid, your sword doesn’t exist by itself."
He began gesturing as he spoke, tracing invisible lines through the air.
"It moves it’s place because of your feet. It accelerates because of your hips. It changes direction because of your shoulders. It’s stabilized by your elbows."
He paused. "And it is ultimately held together by the tension in your fingers."
His gaze met hers, utterly devoid of arrogance—which somehow made it worse.
"If any one of those links becomes imperfect, your sword becomes imperfect."
A chill crawled down Sigrid’s spine.
"The very first exchange." Luca continued. "You stepped forward with your left foot approximately six centimeters farther than necessary."
"Your hips rotated first. Your shoulders followed a fraction of a second later. You looked toward my right shoulder instead of my center. Your right forearm flexed before your wrist finished aligning."
He raised his blade-arm, demonstrating.
"That tiny sequence shifted your center of force. So instead of meeting your sword directly, I struck here—"
He pointed at a point on his blade
"—roughly eighty percent of the distance from your guard, at approximately thirty-eight degrees."
He traced the angle through the air. "Not enough to stop your momentum. Just enough to redirect it. The farther force is applied from your hands, the greater the leverage acting against your grip."
His expression didn’t change.
"I wasn’t stronger than you. I simply borrowed your own momentum."
Sigrid’s eyes stretched wide.
"...That’s..."
"Impossible?" Luca finished for her. "Hardly."
He continued before she could protest.
"The second exchange. You anticipated I would attack high. So before I even moved, your grip tightened—your little finger and ring finger first."
"That made your wrist rigid. You also raised your elbows slightly to reinforce your guard."
He shook his head. "Most would think that strengthens their defense. It doesn’t. It prevents the wrist from absorbing impact."
He demonstrated the motion again.
"So instead of striking straight down, I rotated my blade fourteen degrees. I contacted your sword near its foitle while using the forte of mine."
"Hence, the impact didn’t travel into the sword—it traveled directly through your locked wrist."
Sigrid’s hand moved unconsciously to her own forearm, as though remembering the sensation.
"You didn’t let go because you lacked determination." Luca said carefully like a mentor.
"You let go because your own muscles amplified the shock. For an instant, your sword felt three times heavier than it actually was. It wasn’t your strength that failed. It was your structure."
She remembered. Gods, she remembered—that strange numbness, that sensation of her fingers simply refusing to obey, as though her hand had become someone else’s.
Luca pressed on, relentless.
"The third exchange. I knew you wouldn’t release your sword again. You had consciously prepared for another disarm. So you compensated—lowered your stance, widened your footing, relaxed your grip, shifted your balance backward."
He nodded, almost approving. "A logical adjustment. But it created another weakness."
He pointed toward the middle of his blade.
"By over-correcting, you created a point of resonance. I didn’t strike to disarm you—I struck at twenty-two degrees, just below your blade’s center of percussion, making the steel vibrate."
"Your wrist froze for three-tenths of a second to dampen the sting. And three-tenths of a second is all I need to put a edge against your throat."
The arena had become a tomb.
Not a single knight dared to breathe.
Sigrid’s mind raced through every exchange, every strike, every desperate correction she had made.
And with dawning horror, she realized the truth: every adjustment, every compensation, every attempt to fix her weakness had merely created another one!
"The sword was never your weakness." He said quietly. "You were."
Sigrid gulped, feeling as if she was being dismantled right now.
"More accurately—the relationship between your body and your sword was. After all..."
He let out a rueful chuckle.
"...there is no perfect point on a blade. There is no universal weak spot. Every stance creates one. Every grip forms one. Every swing gives an opportunity to exploit."
He met her trembling eyes as he concluded,
"My job wasn’t to find a weak point on your sword, Sigrid."
"It was to observe your entire body, calculate where your structure would become weakest and place my blade there before you realized it existed."
He spoke the final words with the same calm, matter-of-fact tone he had used throughout.
"I wasn’t fighting your sword. I was fighting the opening you exposed."
Sigrid stood utterly paralyzed. The foundational confidence of a lifetime shattered like glass.
Every perfect strike she had ever practiced, every victorious duel—now seemed to her to have been riddled with invisible, screaming weaknesses she had been blind to.
The silence broke into a torrent of hushed, awestruck whispers.
"Y-You can actually do that?! Analyze a person’s strike before it happens and perfectly find the weakness!?"
"How is that even possible? Who thinks that fast?"
"Maybe it’s battle instinct."
"Even if it’s battle instinct, that’s going too far! He’s like some kind of golem running calculations at lightning speed. How does that make any sense!?"
They all knew the fundamentals. Observe your opponent. Predict their strike. Counter accordingly.
But Luca had transcended prediction entirely.
In that single heartbeat between Sigrid’s swing and his response, he had analyzed everything—her weight distribution, the blade’s speed and trajectory, the angle of her approach, the direction of her gaze.
And from that flood of information, he had extracted the perfect counter.
The very first exchange had been enough to expose a weakness he could exploit without mercy, leaving her unable to mount any meaningful offense.
When they tried to imagine doing the same, they hit a wall of impossibility.
Even if their minds could somehow process information that quickly, their bodies would never be able to adjust the angle or modify the force of a strike mid-swing the way Luca had.
They simply lacked the control. The training. The sheer inhuman precision.
In that moment, the way they viewed Luca transformed entirely.
Before, they had assumed that stripped of his overwhelming strength, he would be helpless.
A God reduced to prey.
Now they understood he had been using Sigrid’s own power and form against her, dismantling her technique again and again through nothing but analysis.
They finally grasped why he had claimed to fear nothing even in mortal form.
With this level of mastery, he could find their weaknesses and turn them into weapons every single time.
Shivers rippled through the crowd.
Poppy, who hadn’t fully absorbed the technical details, tugged at Thea’s sleeve.
"Thea. Is what he just said...impressive?"
Thea didn’t look away from her sword. Her voice came out distant, almost dazed.
"Yes, my lady. It’s so impressive that I find myself needing to reconsider everything I’ve spent my life learning."
She finally raised her eyes to meet Poppy’s.
"My family’s swordsmanship is renowned across the highlands. Exceptionally strong. But I’ve just realized..."
"...it would be completely useless against him."
Around them, the whispers continued, but the tone had changed. No longer shock. No longer anger.
Something closer to awe. And fear.
Because they understood now: it wasn’t that Sigrid was too incompetent to fight him.
It was that Luca was so impossibly competent that he could find her weaknesses every single time and exploit them without the slightest effort.
They looked at him as though he were some kind of monster wearing human skin.
And finally, Sigrid found her voice again. It was steadier now—curiosity tempering her shame.
"How?" She asked. "No—I understand how you did it. You explained that clearly enough. What I want to know..."
She paused, searching for the right words.
"How did you learn to think like that? If I pushed my blade too high, you knew exactly where to strike. If I changed the angle of my attack, you adjusted your response in perfect synchronization."
"Where did you learn all of this?"
The question hung in the air, and every centaur present leaned forward with undisguised hunger.
Even those who had spent decades mastering their craft wanted to know.
"Did you learn it from a Master?" Someone called out. "Some legendary swordsman from your world?"
"Was it a secret scripture? A forbidden technique? Come on, Hero—tell us!"
They had been given the answer to a mathematical problem.
But the formulas behind it, the methodology, the path that led to such impossible mastery—that remained a complete mystery.
If there was some hidden teaching, some scroll of supreme swordsmanship, they desperately wanted to know of it.
Even Poppy, who had never cared for swordplay in her life, was watching Luca with undisguised fascination.
But Luca simply offered a quiet, almost shy smile
"It’s nothing as complex as that. Truly." He shook his head. "What it all comes down to...is experience."
The crowd stirred, confused. Experience? That was it? That was the great secret?!
"You see." Luca continued, a thoughtful expression settling over his features.
"In my world, over the past couple of centuries, new weapons have emerged. Modern weapons. Far more destructive than swords. But for the vast, vast majority of human history..."
He spread his hands.
"For thousands upon thousands of years, the sword was the most used weapon in existence."
A strange, almost melancholy smile crossed his face.
"Because of that, for most of my life, the weapon I used most was also the sword. And when you live as long as I have lived, and wield the sword for all of those years..."
He met Sigrid’s eyes. "You accumulate enough experience that a single glance is all it takes to see where your opponent’s weakness lies."
He shrugged.
"That’s all there is to it."
Silence. Then—confusion rippling through the crowd.
"What is he talking about? Why is he suddenly discussing the history of his world?"
"It doesn’t even make sense! If his world has moved on to modern weapons, wouldn’t he be more familiar with those? Why does he speak as though he’s been using a sword his entire life?"
"Look at him. He barely appears twenty years old. How much experience could he possibly have?!"
They couldn’t make sense of his words. Even Sigrid and Thea exchanged glances, trying to figure his meaning, and found themselves equally lost.
The reason was simple: they believed Luca was young.
Only Luca knew the truth.
Only he knew that he had wielded a sword for thousands upon thousands of years.
Though he generally preferred to fight with no weapons at all, there were times when he changed his approach and took up the blade instead.
And when you held a sword for that long and practice with it across millennias, you didn’t simply learn techniques.
You became one with it.
All that experience. Every battle, every duel, every enemy who had ever crossed blades with him compressed itself into a single moment of perfect clarity.
One glance was enough. One heartbeat was enough.
He could see every flaw, every vulnerability, every microscopic weakness in stance and grip and angle, because he had seen them all a million times before.
That kind of knowledge couldn’t be taught. It couldn’t be written down in any scripture or passed on through any technique.
It came from millenniums of experience crystallized into a single movement.
But the centaurs, lacking this context, simply assumed he possessed some supreme secret sword art that he was unwilling to share. It was the most reasonable explanation available to them.
And no one felt anger at the perceived secrecy.
Of course there were open sword techniques practiced by everyone.
But they also knew that certain knights, certain noble families, guarded their own scrolls and scriptures—passed down through generations—containing swordsmanship that could never be revealed to outsiders.
It was simply the way of the world.
So they held their questions and kept their silence.
But still, they marveled.
Before, if Sigrid had lost, they would have attributed it to Luca’s raw, overwhelming power.
But now they understood the truth. Luca was a swordsman through and through.
He was so utterly devoted to the blade that he had become one with it and could exploit every weakness that existed.
And that, perhaps, was more terrifying than any amount of strength.