Chapter 603 - The Blade That Holds More Blades
After the conversation between Eisen and Kirisho, where they luckily managed to clear a few things up and talk about their thoughts on this whole situation a bit more, the old man stood back up. He was first about to try and work a bit more with Bai, now that it had a slightly different body, but Sigurd swiftly interrupted him before he managed to do so.
The Dungeon Core Guardian stood in front of Eisen with a light smile, "I just wanted to let you know that Brody and Kiron are having a spar right now, and Brody is using the sword with the 'growing blades'. I thought you'd want to see how well it actually works." Sigurd suggested, and Eisen slowly nodded his head with his brows raised. He really was interested in seeing how well that sword-concept would work in an actual fight, "Is it holding up so far?"
"It seems to be doing quite well, at least." Sigurd replied quickly as Eisen stepped through the gate, now standing on the outskirts of the area that Brody and Kiron were using for their spar. Immediately, Eisen had to say that he was more than just impressed with how well Kiron could control his Giant Greatsword. Despite the raw mass and weight, he swung it around like it was a simple stick. And he was actually doing pretty well against Brody on top of that.
Sure, the Demon Orc was most likely trying to make the spar last as long as possible so that they would actually get something out of this, but it was still quite impressive. Either way, the moment that Eisen stepped into the area, he saw one of the blades of the sword he made for Brody shoot right for Kiron.
"Well, that's not a function I added..." The old man muttered. Each blade was supposed to be something like a 'sheath' for the blade underneath that. And since Eisen covered the inside of those 'blade sheaths' in spatial gems that were specially enchanted, they were capable of holding those larger blades than physically possible. It seemed like what Brody was doing was disconnect the outermost of the sheaths before pulling the sword back rapidly while the blade sheath stayed in place, then stopped pressing the button that would make it possible for Brody to put the blade back into the blade-sheath so that the larger and the smaller blade would basically reject each other to make it possible for Brody to accurately shoot the blade toward a target.
Eisen really didn't think of this when he designed this item that way. Since Brody didn't have mana, and as such couldn't use enchantments, he had to place a small soul-generator into the handle together with a few physical buttons to let Brody activate the enchantments in that way.
"He really can use any weapon however he wants, huh?" Eisen sighed, before he continued watching for a while. This wasn't what this specific concept was meant for, but it was quite well-executed anyway, so Eisen figured that it was even better this way. Except that the blades would probably need to be repaired quite soon.
Either way, despite the blade that Brody just shot out flying toward Kiron at an extremely high velocity, he was able to dodge the attack quite easily and soon countered the attack. Or so he tried by swinging his giant blade horizontally toward Brody. He would obviously try to jump, but at least Kiron would be able to predict the possible moves he could go for more easily then.
Although Kiron seemingly didn't expect the follow-up that came instead. Brody pushed his blade into the ground to wedge it in there and then slightly pulled the next one out of it, before he jumped up and balanced his weight on the sword. He stopped pressing the button that fed mana to the spatial-gem and its enchantments, and so, the spatial-gem surface inside of the blade-sheath practically rejected the blade itself again. And in the same way that Brody used this to shoot the blades out like arrows, the Demon-Orc used this mechanic to boost his jump so that he could reach heights even higher than normal, while Kiron's blade hit the blade-sheat that was even more tightly wedged in the ground now.
Ultimately, this made Kiron stop his sword's movements, before he heard a slight whistle as something cut through the air. Kiron shifted his body around and watched as the blade missed his body just so slightly. That would have usually been a quite close call for Eisen, and something to call the fight off because this was far too risky, but it seemed like both Brody and Kiron knew exactly what they were doing, so Eisen figured he should let it happen for a little while longer.
Brody and Kiron continued to fight, and at this point, it seemed like even Kiron was starting to make use of the blades that Brody was shooting out. He pressed his foot onto the blade-sheath and used it to jump up higher, soon reaching Brody as he was trying to adjust himself mid-air somehow so that he could land properly. But instead, he quickly had to pull his blade toward himself to block Kiron's sword-strike.
Soon, the two of them fell to the ground together, and due to most of the weight of Kiron's sword being put onto Brody and his sword right now, the Demon Orc was acutally the one that was being pushed back in this moment.
All of a sudden, Brody once more released one of his blades, and it somewhat pulled Kiron's blade with it. Thinking that the Demon Orc was just about to use this chance to swiftly pull his sword away, Kiron slid his own greatsword as close to the handle as soon as he could, soon making contact with the blade there.
But of course, as that blade was bigger than the one before, Kiron had to slightly adjust himself. And in that short moment of raising his blade up, Brody pushed the blade-sheath back onto the current blade and slightly tilted the tip upward so that he could twist the blade to be on top of Kiron's.
Brody pressed his palm onto the flat side of his blade now and pushed Kiron's giant greatsword down into the ground like that. And then, Brody kept pushing it down like that with his foot while he pulled the next-bigger one out of the blade-sheath, using the momentum to swing the blade at Kiron from the side, but Brody apparently wasn't the only one that could make use of his oponent's choices.
The half-dragon made use of the fact that Brody was pushing his blade down onto the ground and just let the tip really drop to the ground. And as the tip was now as deep as it could be, the pressure was put onto the other end, the handle, something that Kiron used to help himself dodge Brody's attack.
At the same time, this unbalanced the blade Brody was using to push down on Kiron's sword so that the half-dragon could swing the blade up, still using the momentum of the handle being pushed down and Kiron dropping to the ground.
If Brody hadn't dodged, this would have most likely just cleaved him right in half immediately. But instead, Brody pushed himself up and back using the same tactic as before, pushing the tip of his blade into the ground and then disconnecting it from the next blade underneath it to give himself a boost.
At this point, Brody's blade was as tall as he was, which wasn't all that much shorter than Kiron's blade anymore. Since the largest size that Eisen made for the blade, so far at least, was a match for Kiron's sword in size, it seemed like it wouldn't take long until he couldn't use these tactics anymore. Although, Eisen didn't actually tell Brody about the limit yet, and he probably didn't check for it, so Eisen was curious about what might happen soon. Now, Kiron and Brody just stood in front of each other again, and Brody held his sword above his head, as if trying to swing it straight down, and at the same time disconnected the outermost blade from the handle in his specific way to make it shoot forward while being swung down. But just before the blade-sheath and the current blade were fully 'disconnected', Brody swung his sword up again so that he could make the blade-sheat twist around and fly toward Kiron in a straight line.
And while Kiron was busy deflecting the flying blade, Kiron pushed his sword forward and disconnected the next one from his sword so that he could push through the stance Kiron took up to defend against the blade flying toward him. However, Kiron managed to, albeit slightly awkwardly, twist his body around, successfully avoiding and deflecting both of these blades at the same time.
But seeing how this fight seemingly had gone on for quite a while already, Brody seemed to want to finish it, and once more pushed himself off the ground trying to go for the same tactic as before so that he could pull off some kind of move mid-air.
However, Brody's current blade was the same size as Kiron's, meaning that it was the last one. So instead of pushing him up even further, Brody had to find out that he was really barely pushed up at all, and instead was now only holding the handle in his hand.
Eisen made it so that potentially more blades could be added over time if Brody wanted it to be that way, so even this last one could be removed and was hollowed-out like the rest.
However, Kiron saw this as a chance and swung his blade against Brody, who really couldn't do much mid-air right now except block the blade, and was then swung around the area.
"Shit, seriously? That's the limit?" Brody groaned loudly, "Yo, give me more next time!" He yelled out toward Eisen, who was just watching with a light smile. But then, Brody seemed to find the base blade right next to him, the smallest of the bunch before getting another idea. It seemed like he just wanted to play around with this a bit more, and so he pushed the handle onto this smallest blade and connected it properly, before he started to run around the area, carefully avoiding Kiron's attacks, always collecting the next-bigger blade. This time, it wasn't a 'reverse matryoshka' concept anymore, but just a regular 'matryoshka' one, where the bigger blades contained smaller ones.
And soon, Brody stood there holding a large sword the same size as Kiron did.