Chapter 2472: Rivers

Cassarae’s next strike tore across the plains with enough force to open a trench several kilometers long, but Tomoe slipped past the edge before the earth finished collapsing into it.

Without a sword in her hand, the sword maniac moved differently than before, her attacks compressed into smaller motions as every finger became an edge, every turn of her palm redirected the Sword Will already filling the air, and her hair occupied whatever space her hands could not.

It was all so natural and fluid, so beautiful and almost structured in an odd way, especially considering how chaotic and jumbled it might all seem from an outside observer.

Tomoe stepped inside the next slash and brushed two fingers against the flat of Cassarae’s rusted blade instead of meeting its weight directly. Sword Will entered from the side and altered the weapon’s path by only a few degrees, enough to let the edge pass Tomoe’s shoulder before her opposite hand rose and opened three narrow cuts across the Guardian Angel Set.

Cassarae twisted with the impact instead of fighting it, using the turn to pull her sword around her body and bring it down again from above. That was the first thing she had begun taking from Tomoe.

The woman almost never allowed an action to end where it began; a dodge became a better angle, a block changed her footing, and even being launched backward merely gave her more room to prepare whatever came next.

Cassarae had always thought in cleaner divisions. Attack, recover, attack again, but the rhythm felt wrong now that she could hear her sword properly, so when her horizontal slash missed Tomoe she stopped pulling against the momentum and simply stepped through it, allowing the rotation of her shoulders to become the beginning of the next strike.

The formation surrounding Earth reacted with her.

Water high above the atmosphere shifted as buried Runes beneath the plains aligned along the path of Cassarae’s sword, then an enormous pressure fell with the descending blade.

Tomoe crossed both forearms and gathered Sword Will between them, but the impact still drove her through the ground hard enough for the stone below to collapse in layers and form a crater across the plain.

Cassarae didn’t wait to see whether the attack had worked. Tomoe had already taught her how stupid that was. She turned the end of the swing into a thrust, and the point of her rusted blade had barely angled toward the crater when a narrow stream of white-blue Sword Will erupted from below and chased Tomoe through the broken earth.

Tomoe twisted aside and let the attack tear across her ribs rather than through her chest, then stabbed sharpened strands of hair into the crater wall and used them to pull herself free.

She landed several hundred meters away with blood pouring down her side in a volume that should have left anyone else staggering, yet all she did was press a palm against the wound and let grey-black Sword Will condense beneath her skin.

Fresh blood pushed out almost immediately.

Cassarae stared for half a second before understanding what she was seeing, and the realization irritated her enough that her nose wrinkled. "You’ve got to be fucking kidding me."

Tomoe laughed as Sword Will continued turning into blood inside her body, replacing what she had already lost while the pressure around her dipped by only the smallest amount.

She wasn’t healing the blood vessels first and waiting for her body to catch up. She was simply making more blood because her Sword Will allowed her to erase the distinction between what her Will was and what she needed it to become.

Cassarae rushed her again before Tomoe finished smiling.

The next exchange carried them farther across the plains, Tomoe slipping beneath the first slash and carving five lines toward Cassarae’s stomach with one hand while strands of hair attacked from behind.

Cassarae turned just enough for the Guardian Angel Set to take the worst of it, then brought her sword upward through Tomoe’s thigh and tore away a strip of flesh large enough for blood to spray across the ground.

Tomoe used it before the droplets landed.

The blood sharpened into hundreds of crimson needles and reversed direction in the air, forcing Cassarae to sweep her sword across her body while dragging the surrounding formation into the motion.

Wind, Aether, and the pressure of Earth’s distant waters rolled together and crushed the returning attack, but Cassarae barely noticed the destruction.

Something about Tomoe’s control had clicked for her. She wasn’t consciously guiding every droplet, it was like she had just given them a law to abide by, a truth to follow, one condensed into a single word... Sword.

Maybe if Sylas had been there he would have seen it for what it truly was.

Will Priming.

Cassarae’s gaze sharpened, and when she attacked again she stopped dragging as much raw force behind the strike. Instead, she reached into the answer Earth was already giving her and imposed the same direction on a smaller portion of it, causing a ridge several kilometers away to split at the exact angle of her swing.

Tomoe’s grin widened at once. "Yes."

"Don’t fucking encourage me."

Cassarae shifted her wrist and cut again, but this time the blade itself barely mattered. Three separate wounds appeared around Tomoe from three different directions.

Different parts of the planet had answered the same command, and while Tomoe slipped between two, the third opened her forearm before she could disperse it.

Blood ran freely again, joining what had already begun gathering through the trenches carved across the battlefield. Tomoe kept replacing what she lost by catalyzing Sword Will into fresh blood.

Kilometer after kilometer of broken earth slowly filled with thin crimson streams.

Some of that blood returned to Tomoe as weapons, while some evaporated back into Sword Will, but enough remained that rivers started forming below them.

Cassarae began learning from those too.

Tomoe raised two fingers and one of the blood-filled trenches answered, a crimson ribbon snapping upward behind Cassarae before flattening into an enormous blade. Cassarae didn’t turn to block it, instead shifting the angle of her sword by less than an inch and letting the world respond on her behalf as a ridge of stone rose behind her and intercepted the attack.

The ridge exploded, but even that destruction gave Cassarae something else to work with. She flicked the rusted sword and wrapped the fragments in Sword Will, sending hundreds of crude projectiles back toward Tomoe with none of her opponent’s finesse and far more force than they had any right to carry.

Tomoe cut most of them apart with her hair, but one still punched through her shoulder, another tore across her cheek, and a third opened her abdomen deeply enough that blood poured down both legs before more grey-black Will transformed to replace it.

Cassarae watched the process while continuing forward, and for the first time she began to understand why Sylas enjoyed fights like this so much. But more importantly, she also remembered how much she had once loved them too before her sword path had become so muted and restricted.

Cassarae couldn’t do what Tomoe did, nor did she need to.

Tomoe’s control had been refined to an absurd level, allowing her to invade the smallest gaps in Aether and turn almost anything around her into an extension of her sword, while Cassarae’s own control remained too rough and jagged around the edge. She still wasted too much power, still lacked a delicate sort of touch, and still couldn’t see as many steps ahead as Tomoe could.

But she was still having fun. And...

Earth made up the difference.

The planet already knew how to move, and Cassarae only needed to make her intent clear enough for that movement to follow. As her sword became simpler, the response became cleaner, and less thought followed her every strike.

Cassarae slashed low, forcing Tomoe into the air, then changed the angle of her wrist before the sword maniac could reposition.

The water formation above Earth shifted in response.

Pressure crashed downward at the same moment Cassarae’s sword rose from below, trapping Tomoe between two directions of the same attack. She threw both palms outward and spread every strand of her hair into intersecting edges, but the defense broke beneath the amount of power answering Cassarae’s command and sent Tomoe tearing across the plains.

She struck the ground hard enough to open another trench beside the rivers of blood already winding through the battlefield, then rolled back to her feet with half her torso painted red. One arm hung lower than the other and several cuts had stopped closing completely, but the excitement in her eyes had only deepened.

Cassarae advanced again, and for several exchanges Tomoe’s hands and hair became little more than moving lines of failed precision against the weight of an entire world. She redirected what she could, slipped around what she couldn’t, and kept converting Sword Will into blood whenever another wound opened, until the rivers beneath them had grown broad enough to reflect the sky.

Then Tomoe raised one hand.

Cassarae slowed as every drop of blood around them moved at once.

Crimson streams lifted from trenches stretching across kilometers, peeling upward in long ribbons while the blood still running from Tomoe’s body joined them. The rivers twisted around her and compressed, Sword Will flooding through the gathered mass as the enormous volume shrank again and again until all of it condensed into a single glowing ruby blade in Tomoe’s hand.

She looked down at the weapon for a moment, then raised her eyes toward Cassarae as a wild grin spread across her face.

"Now the battle can really start."

Tomoe stepped forward, and the world trembled.