Chapter 1469: The Battle Master

The Red Ring was the Fifth Prince’s private yard in the Throneheart. It sat behind the sixth armory, fenced in by six-inch posts of pressed ironwood that two hundred years of broadsword blades had scarred and notched.

The ground inside was a deep, churned red sand, mixed with crushed salt to keep the river mud from rising through the frost. It smelled of old grease and cold iron, and of the crushed juniper branches the yard-boys used to sweep the blood away between trials.

Prince Regulus was already in the ring.

He wore no velvet mantle and no polished plate, and there was no crimson lion on his collar. He wore a simple leather arming doublet over a grey linen shirt, with the sleeves rolled up to show wrists wrapped in thick strips of unbleached canvas. His snow-white hair was cropped short, and sweat had plastered it flat against his pale scalp.

In the corner of the fence stood Count Pyrrhus, balancing two wooden pails of cold river water.

The Blue Orchid noble’s fine mantle was gone. His blue calfskin boots were streaked with wet red sand, and his jaw was set so tight that the muscle twitched under his ear every time he took a breath.

Regulus did not look at Pyrrhus, and he did not look at the four imperial sentries standing at the ironwood gate either. He was swinging a heavy practice broadsword with one hand, making short, brutal arcs that whistled through the cold morning air like falling hail.

When the sentry opened the gate for Rian, Regulus stopped mid-swing and wiped his forehead with the back of his canvas-wrapped forearm.

"Don’t give me that church posture, sellsword," Regulus bellowed, and his raspy voice echoed off the brick wall of the armory. "I’ve been looking at white silk and gold thread all morning. Show me what broke eleven thousand Hunters."

Rian walked into the ring, his boots crunching softly on the salty red sand.

He kept his hands in his pockets, with his black uniform coat unbuttoned at the collar. His dark eyes took in the fence, the texture of the sand, and the five paces between himself and the Fifth Prince.

’He’s very loud.’

’Very loud for someone who drinks water out of a horse bucket.’

"I’m a Sage, Your Highness," Rian said, stopping three paces away and tipping his chin slightly. "I hit things until they stop moving. There isn’t much to look at."

Regulus let out a roaring laugh that made the sentries at the gate stiffen.

"A Sage! Right! There’s been many talks about you in such few days."

He chuckled but it didn’t quite reach his eyes.

"The Rian threats are as old as the walls. Of course, if we wanted to, we could have extinguished them. But as you know, the Empire has more important matters to deal with. Which makes you a very fascinating person."

Prince Regulus shifted slightly.

"The heralds in the Starward Court say you’re a powerful sellsword with a lucky arm, and the priests say you’re a miracle of El Fach. I say you’re a liar."

He did not wait for a reply.

Regulus kicked a second ironwood broadsword up off the sand with the toe of his boot, and three feet of heavy, lead-weighted timber went spinning through the air toward Rian’s chest.

Rian caught the grip in his right hand without pulling his left hand from his coat pocket.

The weight was terrible. It was fourteen pounds of dense, boiled ironwood with lead shot loaded into the core, a training weapon built specifically to exhaust a Master’s shoulders in three minutes.

"No shields," Regulus said, his crimson eyes bright as he dropped into a low, impossibly wide stance. "No line tactics. Just the wood and the ground. Move!"

Regulus came forward like an avalanche.

He did not use a flashy high-court entry. The prince drove straight down the center line, and his boots threw a wave of red sand out to either side. His heavy ironwood blade whipped into a savage horizontal sweep meant to take Rian’s head off at the chin.

The speed was grotesque for a man wearing no talent aura. It was pure kinetic energy, built on a lifetime of imperial martial discipline.

It was the Vanessa problem in reverse.

When he sparred with Commander Vanessa at the Castle Keep, he had been a Paragon trying to look like a strong Sage, and his minimal output had still flattened the training yard and left her out cold, because he had misjudged how little an imperial officer could take. Here, he had to do the exact opposite.

He had to suppress his Paragon reflexes. He had to hold back the layers of Shingan screaming inside his skull, and force his eyes to track the prince’s blur of grey linen at a normal, painfully inadequate human speed.

He left Eclipse Step alone, and Umbral Severance with it. He did not even use Full Impact to turn the prince’s momentum back into his throat.

Rian simply raised the heavy ironwood blade and caught Regulus’s strike on the slant.

CRACK.

The impact echoed across the courtyard like a tree trunk snapping. Rian let the force of the blow drive him backward, and his boots dug two deep, tearing ruts into the sand as he slid back three paces, throwing up a fan of red salt.

Regulus did not stop.

The prince stepped inside the recoil without a hitch in his balance. He spun the massive wooden blade over his shoulder and dropped into a sweeping low strike that blurred through the dust, aiming to shatter Rian’s knees.

Rian hopped back, feigning a clumsy, desperate retreat.

Regulus rode the momentum of the miss, using the heavy swing to pull his body into a complete rotation. The ironwood whipped back around in a rising diagonal thrust, aimed squarely at Rian’s exposed left ribs.

Rian saw the line two full seconds before the wood arrived.

Even heavily suppressed, Flow Perception mapped the angle, the exact weight of the lead core, and three different ways to break Regulus’s elbow with a simple pommel strike.

He took none of them.

Instead, Rian twisted his torso half an inch too late, and he let the heavy ironwood tip slam into the side of his chest.

A sharp crack snapped beneath his uniform coat as his seventh rib gave way.

The pain burst across his side like liquid fire and drove the breath straight out of his lungs. He let the force sweep him off his feet. Rian tumbled through the air and rolled across the red sand before coming up on one knee five yards away, with his black uniform coated in crimson dust.

In the corner, Pyrrhus let out a small gasp, and his hands tightened around the handles of the wooden water pails.

Rian stayed on one knee for a heartbeat and coughed once. A thin drop of dark blood trickled from the corner of his mouth, staining his chin.

’A cracked rib.’

His mind tracked the break with mechanical precision, while his mouth tasted heavily of copper.

’Brilliant. Baletta is going to make me drink salted mutton broth for three days.’

"Get up!" Regulus roared.

The prince stepped forward with his sword raised high above his shoulder, and his crimson eyes stayed fixed on Rian without blinking.

As the Battle Master closed the distance, Rian felt a freezing pull across his skin. It was a thin thread of essence, and it was trying to latch onto his posture, his muscle balance, and the exact rhythm of his ragged breathing.

Regulus’s talent was active. The prince was trying to read his underlying martial structure, to copy and dissect the core of his movement.

It was a talent worth having, and a clone could not copy talents.

’Pity. I’d have liked that one.’

So Rian memorized the feel of the thread instead, for the body in Ryugan that could.

Rian raised his dark eyes. He kept his Shingan locked down tight behind three massive gates of compressed soul-force.

He channeled his single public talent. Lightning Rod.

The air in the Red Ring snapped. A jagged streak of blue voltage sparked out of Rian’s palm and coiled around the heavy lead core of his ironwood sword. The smell of burnt ozone and evaporated frost overpowered the scent of the juniper branches.

Electricity hissed and spat from the wood, arcing into the red sand and turning the salt into tiny, exploding glass beads.

Rian drove forward off his back foot.

He used no stance and no fluid martial art. He delivered a crude, explosive, two-handed thrust, pure One Strike output wrapped in a border sellsword’s heavy, unpolished footing.

Regulus’s brows shot up.

The prince shifted his blade to parry, fully expecting his talent to catch a complex martial sequence he could mirror at once. But Rian’s attack was entirely empty of technique. It was just a heavy stick with a devastating amount of raw lightning strapped to the end.

The prince’s copying talent slipped off Rian’s stance like water off greased iron. There was no deep martial heritage to mirror, and there was no hidden technique to steal.

There was only raw, ugly, crackling force.

BOOM.

The two ironwood blades collided in mid-air with the force of a siege ram hitting a gate.

The lead core inside Regulus’s sword shattered under the massive electrical discharge, blowing the dense wood into a hundred smoking, blackened splinters. A shockwave of blue static rippled outward and threw a ring of red sand high into the air.

Regulus stumbled back two heavy steps.

His right sleeve was scorched black from the wrist to the elbow. For a moment, he only stared down at the ruined, smoking hilt in his hand.

Silence fell over the Red Ring.

The static charge slowly faded from the air, leaving only the sound of the freezing river wind. Regulus raised his head and looked across the churned sand at Rian.

Rian stood five paces away, holding his cracked rib with one hand while his unbroken, faintly smoking ironwood blade rested casually against his shoulder.

"Pity," Regulus muttered, opening his fingers and letting the useless, burnt hilt drop into the sand.

The prince shook his stinging hand, and a dry, crooked grin spread across his pale face. "I’d have liked that one."

"Take Ysolde’s berth, sellsword," he said. "I’ll see you command it."

He turned toward the gate, stepping over the scorched wood without a second glance.

"The Eleventh Squad is assigned to the Sixth Legion vanguard," Regulus called out over his shoulder, and his loud voice carried easily to the sentries at the gate. "Forty silver a month. Rian commands his own unit under Captain Vaertia. Enter it as a draw on the ledger."

Rian lowered his sword and wiped the blood from his chin with the back of his frayed sleeve.

"Thank you, Your Highness."

In the corner, Pyrrhus hurried after the prince with his pails, slopping river water over the sand.

***

Regulus stopped at the gate. He picked a wet cloth out of one of Pyrrhus’s water pails and scrubbed the sweat and soot from his neck, and then he rubbed the wrist under his scorched sleeve. It was still in one piece. The sellsword had seen to that.

He did not look back at Rian, but his voice dropped low, meant only for the count standing beside him.

"He was holding back, Pyrrhus."

His red eyes stayed fixed on the distant white tip of the Luminance Spire.

Pyrrhus went rigid, and the water pails shook in his grip. "Your Highness?"

"The boy took that rib on purpose," Regulus said softly, wringing the cloth out between his fists. "He gave me a cracked bone to buy his squad a berth on the flagship, and he didn’t give my talent a single thread to catch."

He threw the wet cloth into the pail, splashing freezing water over Pyrrhus’s boots.

That morning at breakfast, his father had sat with the Keep’s reports stacked beside his plate and read every page. The Emperor had never done that for a border garrison, not once in Regulus’s lifetime.

"Father read the Keep’s papers himself," Regulus added lightly, leaning in close to Pyrrhus’s ear as though it were a joke. "All of them. Twice."

Pyrrhus’s breath caught in his throat. The pails stopped shaking, and his face turned the color of wet chalk.

"Come along, Count," Regulus laughed, slapping Pyrrhus hard on the shoulder as he walked out of the ring. "We have an expedition to fit out."

***

Rian stood alone in the center of the Red Ring, listening to the prince’s heavy boots fade down the stone corridor. He slid his ironwood sword point-first into the sand, pressed his hand firmly against his throbbing rib, and let out a long, quiet breath.

’He read the papers.’

Rian looked up toward the high walls of the inner keep.

’Well. At least I know he’s a good reader.’

***

[A/N]

This is regarding the inconsistent updates. After a long break, I had finally decided to be back, I had put all in place. And then on 1st of October, 2027, 6:55 AM. I lost my mother. I had lost my father fourteen years ago, but this struck like nothing else in my life. It hurts to a degree I can’t find enough words for. And I don’t even know if I’ll ever be able to heal from such hurt.

I literally have no one to look out for me anymore, because I’m her first child. I have no one to call when I’m sick, I’ve got nothing, I’m an orphan. Please take my sincerest apologies. I will try my best to consistently update. Both for your sakes and for mine. Thank you, and I shall not turn down any sort of support towards me in such moment of hardship.

Thank you.