Chapter 134: Just Another Day in the Draven Mansion [Part-3]

Chapter 130.

The broad-shouldered knight with the scar across his chin, who had just finished his duel, stepped forward again with a wide grin, wiping the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand and picking up a new wooden sword. He bowed to Neo with great respect, and then he took his stance, holding the sword with both hands.

"Please forgive my rudeness in advance, Young Master. I will try not to hurt you too much."

"Don’t worry about that. Come."

The commander raised his hand and brought it down, and Garen did not waste a second. He stamped his foot against the ground and charged forward, bringing his sword down in a heavy overhead strike that was fast enough to make the air hiss, and the knights around the ring held their breath as they watched the blade cut towards Neo’s shoulder.

Neo didn’t even lift his hands. He tilted his body slightly to the side, and the sword passed by his shoulder close enough to stir the fabric of his jacket, hitting nothing but air. Garen frowned, twisting his wrist to turn the blow into a horizontal sweep, but Neo had already stepped back by half a pace, and the blade passed in front of his chest without touching it.

’It is really different from before. I can feel where the sword is going even before he swings it...’

He remembered the words of his father in the training ground, saying that the mind was slow and instinct was fast, and so he cleared his thoughts and simply let his body move. He spread his mana thin across his skin like a mist, increasing the sense of touch and consciousness and each small stir in the air, each shift in the weight of the man in front of him, reached him a moment before the strike did. Garen attacked again and again, thrusting, slashing, and sweeping the sword in different directions, but every strike ended in the same way, missing him by a hair’s breadth as Neo stepped, tilted, and slid around the blows as if he was dancing in a gentle breeze.

"Hey, he really isn’t hitting back!" someone whispered in the crowd.

"He isn’t even blocking. Look at his feet, he barely moves at all."

Garen’s face slowly turned red, and he began to attack with more force, his swings becoming wider and heavier, and the sweat on his forehead ran down his cheeks in thick streaks. His breathing grew ragged, and the speed of his sword began to drop little by little, until the blade which had once been cutting the air with a sharp sound started to slow, as if the wooden sword had suddenly grown a hundred times heavier in his hands.

After a few more minutes, Neo felt it, the tiny gap between two breaths of the man in front of him, the moment when his arms trembled after a heavy swing and his weight sank into his front foot. Neo’s body moved before he even thought about it.

In a single step, he slid behind Garen’s back, so quickly that the knight did not even have time to turn his head. Neo raised his right hand, and the mana gathering around his fingers condensed into a thin, shining blade of mana, which stopped lightly against the side of Garen’s neck, close enough that the cold of it brushed against his skin.

"That’s enough, isn’t it?"

Garen froze, and the wooden sword slipped from his sweaty fingers and fell to the ground with a dull clatter. He stood there for a few seconds, gasping for air, and then he let out a loud, breathless laugh and raised both of his hands.

"I yield! I yield, Young Master! Hahaha, you didn’t even touch me once, yet I am the one who is out of breath!"

The ring broke out into a loud roar of cheers and applause, and Neo dispersed the blade and stepped back with a smile, patting the man lightly on the shoulder as the knights rushed forward to drag Garen away, teasing him about being defeated by someone less than half his age.

"Next! Who wants to go next?" the commander shouted, his face brightening with excitement.

This time, three knights stepped forward at once, and after arguing for a moment about who should go first, a woman with short brown hair and a spear in her hand won the argument by simply pushing the other two aside. She bowed briefly to Neo, her eyes sparkling with a competitive light, and she took her stance with the tip of her spear pointing at his chest.

"Young Master, I have been waiting for this chance. I will give you my full strength."

"I look forward to it."

The spear moved faster than the sword had. She thrust it forward in a blur, and as Neo slid sideways to avoid it, she twisted the shaft and swept it in a wide arc, then pulled it back and struck again, never allowing him a moment of rest. The spear tip whistled past his waist, grazed his sleeve, and cut through the air above his head, and the knights around the ring clapped and cheered every time she came close.

But Neo’s body kept moving on its own, with no wasted motion, bending and turning and stepping, always staying one breath ahead of the weapon. He did not attack even once, as his only goal was to follow the flow of the strikes and wait for the moment when the person wielding them would run out of strength.

It took longer than the first fight, as the woman was more skilled and her stamina was greater, but in the end, the result was exactly the same. When her thrusts began to slow, and her shoulders heaved with every breath, Neo slipped inside the reach of the spear, appeared behind her, and rested the blade of mana lightly above her neck.

"I yield..." she panted, her spear dropping, a hint of frustration in her smile. "To think that I couldn’t even graze you... Young Master, you are truly terrifying."

"Your thrusts were really fast. I almost got caught on the third one."

The woman blinked, and then she smiled more widely, bowing her head with pride, as if she had received the greatest compliment of her life.