Chapter 223: Training Montage [II/Bonus - ]
The impact was so immense that actual sparks of golden and deep-blue mana friction violently erupted from the point of contact between the two wooden blades.
BOOOOM!
The air pressure between them violently compressed, generating a windstorm that pushed the shattered ice fragments away in a wide circle.
Silas pressed down with all his weight with his muscles bulging as he tried to force her to her knees.
Morwenna held her ground with her boots grinding into the runic stone as she looked up at him across the vibrating wooden crossguards, the wide grin still on her face.
"Brilliant elemental conversion, Captain!" Morwenna commented loudly over the screech of grinding mana armor, genuinely impressed by his battle smarts. "Using ice transformation to kill the momentum of a water spell mid-flight? Your combat IQ is getting scary!"
"I learn from the best..." Silas grunted, his arms trembling as he tried to find a leverage angle.
"You sure do!" Morwenna laughed bared-toothed. "But smarts alone won’t win a blade lock against an oceanic ocean!"
Morwenna’s biceps violently bulged beneath her coat as she didn’t use a spell but instead she simply flexed her overwhelming physical strength to its absolute limit.
With a guttural roar, she violently twisted her wrists, redirecting his downward force, and aggressively shoved upward with a massive burst of raw power.
BAM!
Silas’s guard was completely blown wide open.
The physical torque sent him flying violently in the exact opposite direction across the arena with his boots skidding and bouncing over the stone tiles as he was forcefully ejected from the center of the room.
As Silas was rushing backward, trying to dig his heels into the floor to arrest his momentum, he gritted his teeth, keeping his right hand locked tightly around the leather grip of his practice sword.
’Damn it...’ Silas cursed in his thoughts, his eyes darting across her posture as he finally slid to a halt twenty yards away with his chest heaving. ’I can’t seem to get a clean opening... Every time I try to set my feet for a Tide-Blade sweep, she closes the distance or overpowers my guard with brute force. Her defense is completely airtight.’
It was overwhelmingly clear to Silas that Morwenna wanted to keep this high-speed intense combat exchange going for as long as humanly possible.
He could tell that much from the wild and thoroughly ecstatic grin plastered across her face as she slowly paced in a circle, waiting for him to catch his breath.
Across the arena, as Morwenna watched Silas adjust his grip and lower his stance, her wide grin slightly faltered.
A brief sudden flash of self-consciousness flickered through her feral gray eyes.
’Did Captain realize?’ Morwenna thought, biting her lower lip for a fraction of a second as she gripped her wooden hilt. ’Did he figure out what I’m actually doing?’
Morwenna’s overarching training plan for the afternoon had been quite simple and born out of affectionate greed.
By utilizing the legitimate guise of a rigorous spar, she was intentionally going to hold on and drag the combat out for as long as possible, effectively monopolizing his time and making the entire training session solely about them and their martial bond!
She wanted to push him until his muscles burned and his instincts were razor-sharp.
Her secret lesson plan dictated that once she had completely exhausted his standard offensive options and watched him repeatedly fail to breach her guard, she would formally call for him to stop trying to force an opening through brute strength.
Then, right there in the center of the vault, while he was panting and focused on her, she was going to step close and personally teach him the Second Style of the Tide-Blade Arts... a specialized and fluid technique explicitly designed to help a swordsman find dynamic balance, manipulate an opponent’s center of gravity, and actively break openings into airtight defenses where none previously existed.
It was the next step in his evolution, and she wanted to be the only one to give it to him!
But Silas was not a man who waited around for lessons to be handed to him on a silver platter.
Silas let out a long sigh with his breath clouding slightly in the chilled air of the vault as he looked at her pacing form.
’If I can’t find an opening on the ground where her leverage is absolute,’ Silas thought with his grip tightening until the leather wrap of his hilt groaned, ’then I’ll just have to generate my own opening from an angle where she can’t anchor her weight.’
This was what it meant to be strong... He didn’t want to completely rely on his Heroes, Silas wanted to think for himself too.
’I want to rely on them but at the same time... I want them to be able to rely on me too.’ Silas thought.
Without warning, Silas compressed his leg muscles and exploded straight upward into the air, launching himself twenty feet above the stone floor in a high leaping parabolic arc directly toward her position.
Morwenna looked up, raising her wooden sword to prepare for another aerial clash, assuming he was attempting the same descending strike as before.
She was wrong.
As Silas reached the apex of his leap, his body suspended mid-air, he actively closed his eyes for a fraction of a second.
He engaged the foundational breathing techniques she had drilled into him in the freezing rain a while ago as he drew the abundant chilled atmospheric moisture of the vault directly into his internal circuits, cycling the water mana rapidly through his Gold Core until his veins felt like roaring rivers.
He opened his glowing golden eyes and he angled his Ironwood practice blade exactly fifteen degrees to the right, aligning the blunt wooden edge with the atmospheric pressure of the room.
Even entirely unsupported by gravity in mid-air, Silas flawlessly dropped his internal center of gravity, violently pivoting his hips and twisting his torso with tremendous coiled rotational torque!
He gathered the entirety of his circulating water mana directly into the iron-dense wood of his blade.
He was performing the First Style of the Tide-Blade Arts: Severing Horizon... not from a grounded stance, but completely mid-air!
"TAKE THIS!" Silas roared at the top of his lungs, releasing the coiled rotational torque in a devastating high-speed horizontal slash directly at her airborne silhouette from twenty feet away!
VWOOOOOOOOOSH!
A blinding explosion of pressurized deep-blue phantom heavy-water violently erupted from the blunt edge of his wooden sword!
Because Morwenna had been so deeply lost in her own affectionate, possessive internal thoughts regarding her secret lesson plan and their bond, her defensive instincts were delayed by a single fatal microsecond.
And that microsecond was all that Silas needed...
She was caught entirely off guard by the terrifying density, speed, and rotational of the airborne strike!
The massive crescent-shaped arc of golden-tinted sea mana screamed through the air, expanding to thirty feet wide as it tore across the vault, entirely consuming the space between them.
"What?!" Morwenna gasped, her eyes going wide as she hurriedly brought her Ironwood blade up horizontally, channeling her own oceanic mana to form a hasty defensive guard.
KA-BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!
The phantom heavy-water arc slammed directly into Morwenna’s guard with the force of a breaking tsunami or something similar.
What immediately followed was a massive explosion of pressurized water and spray that completely engulfed the entire right side of the training arena.
Gallons of phantom sea mana detonated outward, washing over the stone floor, shattering the remaining ice boulders into fine mist, and sending a concussive shockwave echoing off the vaulted ceilings.
Silas smoothly completed his aerial rotation, falling through the dispersing mist and landing flawlessly on his heavy combat boots with his Ironwood blade held out to his side as he slid two yards across the wet stone tiles before coming to a complete halt.
When the dense curtain of water mist finally cleared, the destructive power of the strike was revealed.
Morwenna had been violently sent flying backward across the entire length of the arena.
Her boots had skidded over fifty feet across the stone tiles before her body was forcefully slammed directly into the reinforced runic masonry of the far wall!
CRACK!
The physical impact of her body hitting the wall was so intense that it left a massive spider-webbing crack directly in the stone masonry behind her shoulders.
The defensive arrays immediately flashed gold, the stone grinding and hissing as it slowly began to push itself back together to repair the damage left by the Pirate Queen’s impact.
Morwenna stood frozen against the cracking wall.
Her tattered captain’s coat was completely, thoroughly drenched in dripping water.
Her hair was plastered to her face, and water dripped steadily from the tip of her Ironwood practice sword onto the floor.
She blinked her feral gray eyes once.
Twice.
She looked down at her drenched clothes, then looked across the fifty yards of destroyed, water-soaked arena at Silas, who was standing tall and breathing heavily.
The shock on her face vanished, instantly replaced by an expression of absolute, overwhelming, heart-melting Warlord pride.
"Captain..." Morwenna breathed out, her voice trembling slightly with awe. "...you really mastered it. An aerial Severing Horizon with full heavy-water conversion... That was incredible!"
Silas stood his ground, taking a deep, ragged breath to calm his racing Gold Core.
He opened his mouth to reply, wiping a splash of water from his own cheek—
But Morwenna had already moved.
She didn’t run... she simply ignored distance entirely. In a single, blinding flash of gray speed, she closed the fifty-yard gap before Silas could even take his second breath.
Before he could raise his wooden blade or defend himself, Morwenna lunged forward, dropped her wooden sword to the floor with a clatter, and aggressively threw both of her incredibly strong arms completely around his waist.
With zero effort, utilizing her terrifying physical supremacy, she lifted Silas’s massive towering two-hundred-pound frame completely off the ground!
"I am so incredibly proud of you!" Morwenna shouted joyously, spinning him around in a circle in the middle of the wet arena, pressing her face tightly against his bare sweating chest. "That was so clean! The edge alignment was absolute perfection! Now it’s officially time for us to learn the rest of the styles! Before you even know it, you’re going to be a Grandmaster of Swordsmanship just like me! We’re going to conquer every sea in the realm together!"
She was so happy, so wildly intoxicated by his progress and their shared bond, that her affection became suffocating.
"Mmmm~ Captain~ We need to celebrate. Come touch me all you want!"
"Morwenna... you’re crushing my ribs again!" Silas wheezed out, his bare feet dangling six inches off the floor as he patted her wet shoulder. "Thank you! Seriously, thank you, but please let go! I need to breathe!"
Instead of releasing him, Morwenna’s eyes glowed with affection, and she actively squeezed him even harder against her drenched coat, refusing to surrender her prize.
"Never! You’re my apprentice! You stay right here!"
From the perimeter of the arena, where she had been patiently watching the entire destructive martial display unfold, Eluned finally stepped forward.
Her emerald-green eyes narrowed as she looked at the drenched pirate monopolizing her Lord.
"That is quite enough, you insatiable bilge-rat..." Eluned announced.
She raised her pale hands and clapped them together with a sharp smack.
RUMBLE-CRACK-SWISH!
The solid runic stone tiles directly beneath Morwenna’s boots violently buckled and fractured.
From deep within the earth below the Keep, a dozen thick living emerald-green roots aggressively erupted from the stone.
The roots moved like striking serpents, wrapping tightly around Morwenna’s ankles, calves, and waist, forcefully anchoring the Pirate Queen to the floor and gently but firmly prying her crushing embrace off Silas’s body.
Silas dropped back down to the floor, landing safely on his feet and taking a massive gulp of air as he stepped out of the root-encircled drop zone.
"Hey! What is the meaning of this, weed?!" Morwenna snarled, glaring at the nature mage as she was physically restrained by the thick, living timber.
"Your allotted combat time has officially expired, pirate," Eluned declared haughtily, walking gracefully across the wet stone floor toward them with her chin lifted in triumph. "You stated yourself that once he proved his mastery over water, he would be mine and he has clearly exceeded your brutal tests. Well... now it is officially my turn to teach My Love Nature magic."
Morwenna gritted her teeth, her gray eyes flashing dangerously. Her right hand twitched toward her hilt as she could easily summon her abyssal aura and violently slice the thick wooden roots to pieces in a fraction of a second to free herself.
But she didn’t.
Instead, Morwenna let out an annoyed huff and began smoothly wriggling, twisting, and tangling her way out of the root constriction through pure bodily contortion and flexibility, carefully pulling her limbs free one by one without breaking the wood.