Chapter 207: Borrowed Mastery [BONUS]

Power was not enough.

Encrid knew that the moment he became Absolute. He could feel the whole of the world’s energy waiting for him to use it, and he did not know how.

It was like being handed the largest, finest sword ever forged, and not knowing which end to hold.

He was a cultivator for one minute. He had been a swordsman for a year and a half. He had practiced a single form of his family’s swordsmanship twenty thousand times in the dark behind a granary.

One form.

His proficiency was E.

An Absolute Star in the hands of an E-rank swordsman was a flood with no riverbed. It would go everywhere. It would do nothing.

He opened his inventory again.

Fifty-four seconds.

[ Use: Temporary Proficiency Token (Lv: Max)? ]

[ Raises the proficiency of one owned skill to its maximum mastery for one minute. ]

[ Target Skill: Gannon Family Swordsmanship ]

[ Confirm? ]

The system had given him this token on his birthday. His first birthday in this world. A day he had not even known was his birthday until the window appeared.

He had wondered, then, if the system was laughing at him.

He was not wondering now.

"Yes," Encrid said.

? ? ?

[ Token activated. ]

[ Target Skill: Gannon Family Swordsmanship (★★★★★★) ]

[ Proficiency: E (47%) → D ]

It started in his hands.

His grip changed.

He had not moved his hands. They were still hanging at his sides. But he felt the change anyway, in the muscles of his fingers and his palms and his wrists. The way they would close around a hilt. The way they would turn. The small, precise adjustments he had never known how to make.

He knew how now.

It was like remembering something he had forgotten. Something he had once known very well, a long time ago.

[ Proficiency: D → C ]

It moved into his arms.

He felt the Falling Talon. The First Form. The downward strike he had practiced twenty thousand times. He felt it the way he had never felt it before. Not as a movement. As a shape. The way the sword came up and the body rose with it and the weight gathered at the top, and then the fall.

He had been doing it wrong.

For a year and a half, he had been doing it almost right. He had been missing a turn of the hips at the top of the swing. A small thing. Almost nothing.

It changed everything.

[ Proficiency: C → B ]

It went into his legs. His back. His breath.

And then it went into his head.

Memories came.

They were not his memories. He knew that immediately. He had never stood in a snow-covered courtyard with a practice sword in his hands, facing a grey-haired man who looked like the Duke but younger. He had never fought a Gorehorn in a winter forest. He had never stood on a castle wall at night and watched a line of torches coming across a frozen river.

But he remembered them anyway.

A voice in one of the memories said, "Again."

It was an old man’s voice. Patient and hard. It said it over and over, in a cold courtyard, while a boy with Encrid’s hands swung a wooden sword until his palms bled.

Again. Again. Again.

[ Proficiency: B → A ]

The memories came faster.

They came one after another, too fast to hold. Faces he did not know. Places he had never been. Hundreds of hours of training. Thousands of fights. A lifetime of swordsmanship, pouring into him the way the Star’s energy had poured into his channels.

Not one lifetime.

Many.

Nine generations of Gannons had practiced this sword. Nine generations had refined it, fought with it, died with it. And somewhere in the system’s strange, glitchy workings, something of what they had learned had been kept.

Encrid was being given it.

[ Proficiency: A → S ]

The memories stopped being memories.

They became understanding.

He stopped remembering how other men had held the sword. He simply knew. The way he knew how to breathe. The way he knew how to stand. Every form of the Gannon Family Swordsmanship settled into his body at once, not as a list of movements, but as a single thing, whole and complete, the way a song is a single thing and not a list of notes.

And still the window did not stop.

[ Proficiency: S → SS ]

Something opened at the very bottom of him.

It was quiet. Much quieter than the rest. Not a flood this time, but a door, swinging slowly open in a dark room.

And then the windows came.

[ Maximum proficiency reached for the skill. ]

[ Proficiency: SS(Max) ]

[ Duration: 00:50 ]

Encrid read them in a single glance.

SS.

Encrid read them in a single glance.

SS.

He was not surprised.

He had read about these ranks long before he ever saw one in a window.

In The Last Age of Radiance, the people of this world believed A was the summit. A master swordsman with an A-rank art was spoken of the way people spoke of mountains. But the novel had shown more than its characters knew. The signature arts of the Eight Stars of Astralis stood at S, SS and SSS ranks.

The Sword Saint’s Swordsmanship style, at the height of his power in the final volumes, had reached SSS rank.

And once, only once, in a short passage near the end of the twelfth volume, the author had written that there were two more ranks beyond even that.

Ranks no mortal art had ever touched. Ranks reserved for the skills of gods.

That didn’t matter now.

The Gannon family swordsmanship, which was a six-star skill, had now reached SS proficiency.

The SS rank limit was not his body. It was not his Star.

It was the skill itself. A six-star skill could only go so far, no matter who wielded it.

Encrid let the thought go.

He did not need to be a god.

This was enough for now.

? ? ?

Encrid stood very still at the northern end of the Span.

He knew the forms now.

All of them.

Six forms. That was what the book said. That was what every Gannon for the last hundred years had been taught.

For a year and a half, he had been able to perform only the first of them. And not well.

Now he could feel every one of them waiting in his arms. Each with its own weight. Each with its own shape. He did not need to think about them. He did not even need to remember their names. His body knew them the way a river knows which way is downhill.

Encrid flexed his empty hands.

He was not an E-rank swordsman right now.

He was an SS-rank swordsman with an Absolute Star.

Encrid understood, very calmly, what that meant. A six-star skill at SS proficiency, wielded by someone in the Absolute Realm, was not a sword technique anymore. It was the kind of power that ended wars. The kind that broke kingdoms. Given time, it could annihilate empires.

But he did not have time.

He had fifty seconds.

Encrid opened his eyes.

The horde was right in front of him.

? ? ?

Thank you @Calamitous_Fortune, for the Dragon gift~