Novel Full 324 Blades are a man's fantasy
The shadowy realm collapsed around Mathew, letting him back into the reality he considered his own.
“Did you get them?” Nadia asked with her eyes sparking with excitement.
“Get what?” Mathew asked, genuinely confused by both her question and her enthusiasm.
And then, he scoured his mind in the search of what the girl could mean.
‘Oh shit,’ Mathew cursed in his thoughts when the realization dawned upon him. And before the girl could even answer his own question, Mathew lowered his head.
“I’m sorry, so much changed at the merchant that I forgot about your request,” he apologized.
“Huh?” Nadia pulled her eyebrows together. “It wasn’t super important so you don’t need to feel guilty,” she raised her hands and waved them in front of her chest. “And seeing the look on your face, I can tell that something big happened inside,” she then added, clearly trying to change the topic away from the one that made Mathew uncomfortable.
“Happened?” Mathew repeated Nadia’s words in a questioning tone. “Nothing happened. But what I can buy at the merchant…” the young man hesitated.
He had no qualms about explaining the situation. He didn’t want to hold the information back.
He simply lacked the correct words to express the magnitude, the scale of the change.
“It’s like… a thousand times more options now?” Mathew attempted to put his experience into words. “Ten thousand more options?” he attempted to guess.
Yet, the more he thought about what he saw in the merchant’s subspace, the more his face froze.
‘I didn’t realize it back there because I quickly got used to it but…’
“Now that I think about it, it feels more like a hundred thousand or maybe even a million times change,” he said with a sigh.
“Are you for real?” Nadia asked with her eyes wide open.
Even though she could enter the merchant just like any other system holder or system beneficiary, she opted to leave this task for Mathew.
“It’s like going from a roadside stall to a massive shopping mall,” Mathew admitted, finding a better way to describe the change. “And not the small joke of a mall that we were in earlier today,” he added, shaking his head. “I mean those really big ones.”
“That’s…” Nadia hesitated, struggling to digest the news. Her face remained in a state of complete focus with her eyebrows pulled together and her eyes cast down.
Then, she shook her head and raised her eyes back on Mathew’s face, clearly dumping this topic to the back of her head.
“Either way, no matter how many more options we have right now, we are still limited by our funds,” Nadia said with a cheeky smile. She then raised up on her feet, standing on the tips of her toes as she looked over Mathew’s shoulder in search of what he brought from the merchant’s space with him.
“There are five swords, two spells, and…” Mathew listed everything that he bought before suddenly putting his mouth to a stall. His body pushed forth and he leaned over the girl’s shoulder, bringing his lips closer to her ear.
“And I bought a system’s seed,” Mathew revealed in a soft whisper.
The young man pulled away before reaching out for the storage window floating slightly above and to the side of the merchant’s hood before bringing out all the items that he bought in their physical form, save for the system’s seed.
“Here are the weapons,” he said, laying down the sabers on the ground. “And here are the spells,” he added as he placed two scrolls beside the swords.
“Those sabers look pretty ordinary,” Nadia muttered as she squatted down and took a closer look at the blades.
“And that’s because you don’t know the military history of our nation,” Mathew replied in a slightly amused voice.
For a geek like him, the weapons on the floor were the pinnacle of cold weapons. A weapon that, although mostly in the ceremonial way, remained a piece of military equipment from its conception all the way to the modern times preceding the apocalypse.
“Do you mean it’s that legendary…” Nadia hesitated as she squinted her eyes and scoured her mind in the search of some remote memory, “Sigmundian?” she guessed while raising her head and looking up at Mathew’s face.
“That’s what I thought when I first saw it,” Mathew revealed with a small smile. “But I realized my mistake before actually buying it,” he then added, leaning down and grabbing one of the sabers.
Contrary to the ordinary sabers his group was using before, this model was relatively straight. Half of its blade was as straight as it could be, with only the latter half slightly angling away from the side of its cutting edge.
“Sigmundian’s saber wasn’t a type of weapon,” Mathew pointed out, flaunting his historical knowledge, “but a name for a specific example used by the king. In fact, Sigmundian Saber was actually of Batoryean type. Or to be even more specific,” Mathew grinned, “A Polish saber of Hungarian type. It was named after Stephan Batory because it was during his reign it ended up popularized.”
“Potato, potato,” Nadia replied before showing her tongue with an amused expression. She then picked one of the sabers herself and stood up in a straight-up fencing position.
“Rather than its history, I’m more interested in how effective it is,” she said, bringing the weapon’s tip up before raising her weapon-holding hand up to her chest.
Nadia pushed her hand on an arch, stretching it as far as she could in front of her while turning her angle to lower the tip of her blade as far as she could.
With just a single flick of her wrist, she painted a small circle with the weapon’s tip. She raised her elbow and then bent her arm. Then, she executed a lightning-fast downward cut.
A horizontal slash. X-type cut from overhead. Upper slash coupled with a backstep. Parry during a small jump.
The girl went from one form to another, quickly getting herself accustomed to the weight, length, and handling of her new weapon.
“I think I can see why it ended up so popular,” she then muttered as her hand returned to the default position above her chest.
This time, however, as she stared at the blade right before her eyes, there was a look of reverence flashing in her pupils.
“And they say blades are a man’s fantasy,” Mathew joked a little before shaking his head. Then, his expression soured a little. “Thinking about this, it’s quite a pity that rather than using blades,” he muttered, turning his eyes towards the two scrolls on the ground, “I will try to focus more on using spells.”