Chapter 703: Surprise, Surprise, I Mastered That Too [Bonus - ]

Chapter 703: Surprise, Surprise, I Mastered That Too [Bonus Chapter]

"Got you, Captain!" Morwenna roared with her sword descending in an overhead execution chop.

The ironwood came down like a falling mast... yet, mid-air, Silas’s gold-ringed eyes ignited with dazzling golden mana.

He didn’t panic.

He channeled a razor-thin jet of phantom heavy-water pressure beneath his falling shoulder, arresting his momentum in a microsecond and twisting his torso with impossible gymnastic agility, his ironwood blade exploded into a blinding five-strike combination.

CLACK-CLACK-CLACK-CLACK-CLACK!

A flurry of high-speed diagonal slashes hammered against Morwenna’s guard with the concussive fury similar to that of cannons.

Each strike landed with the strange delayed-impact resonance of the Base Flow, sounding like a heavy book slamming onto a wooden desk, followed a beat later by an internal BOOM that rattled her forearm bones.

Ka-BOOM! Ka-BOOM! Ka-BOOM!

Each hit knocked twice, a flat thud first and the thunder right behind it!

Morwenna was forced backward with her boots skidding four paces across the basalt and her breath coming in ragged electrified gasps as she barely brought her crossguard up to deflect the final rising slash.

She slid to a halt with her chest heaving violently as a glorious intoxicating smile split across her flushed face from ear to ear.

’Yes...’ Morwenna thought, her heart practically singing with ferocious pride. ’This is what I like to see! He’s not a fragile person playing with a blade anymore... He’s a monster!’

"Not bad, Captain!" Morwenna barked, her voice thick with adrenaline. "Now let’s see how your edge holds up under real water!"

She lowered her center of gravity, shifting her weight between the heels and the balls of her feet like a ship riding rolling waves.

Her hips turned precisely thirty degrees with her lead shoulder lining up squarely with Silas’s throat.

HUUUUUM!

Ambient moisture from the air began condensing along the dark wood of her blade.

ZZZZZZZZZT!

A terrifying high-frequency scream tore through the arena...

A microscopic film of water, no thicker than a single strand of hair,wrapped around her wooden blade, spinning from the hilt to the tip at a dizzying speed.

The high-frequency water-saw eliminated all surface friction, turning the blunted ironwood into a terrifying instrument capable of severing matter at a molecular level.

It was the Sub-Style!

The scream climbed higher and higher until the torch flames bent away from her blade.

"Come on, man!" Morwenna challenged, her eyes blazing. "Show me your rotation!"

Silas grinned, his blood boiling with pure uninhibited joy.

He widened his stance, matching her wave-riding posture stride for stride.

He released a steady stream of water-mana from his Gold Core, wrapping the blunted blade in a matching film of compressed moisture.

ZZZZZZZZZT!

The identical high-pitched scream detonated from Silas’s weapon...

Two molecularly compressed water-saws screaming at blistering speed within ten feet of each other as the air between them warped and shivered under the friction of the attacks.

FLASH!

They crossed the distance in a fraction of a heartbeat!

SHIIIIIIING!

The sound that followed was the sickening terrifying sound of a hot needle gliding effortlessly through silk...

Silas feinted high, dropping low with a sweeping horizontal cut aimed at her knees, while Morwenna countered with a rising diagonal slash that sheared the pressure in half.

The microscopic water-films clashed, parting the air in a shower of vaporized mist with neither blade giving an inch as they traded six lightning-fast exchanges in the span of two seconds.

Every swing drew a white line in the air, and the lines crossed and recrossed until the ring looked like a spiderweb...

’Her left! No, her right! Damn it, she’s everywhere!’ Silas thought.

She really was on another level but he was managing as well.

"Keep up, Captain!" Morwenna cackled.

"...I’m right here!"

SHING! SHING! SHING! SHING!

Realizing the frontal clash was a stalemate, Silas stepped backward, his rear heel digging into the basalt as he rotated his hips with violent explosive acceleration.

"Tide Blade-Arts, First Form!" Silas roared. "Severing Horizon!"

WHOOOOOOSH!

A thin dark-blue arc of concentrated sea mana exploded from his blade, spreading outward into a perfect 360-degree horizontal ring of razor-sharp water pressure that expanded across the entire width of the arena, threatening to bisect everything in its path...

However he didn’t stop there.

’I finally have the opportunity to leverage the advantages of my high mana against other live opponents... Eh, Monsters don’t count though.’

With another lightning-fast twist of his wrists, Silas layered three successive directional crescents of dark-blue water mana behind the ring, creating a multi-tiered cage of crushing waves designed to box her in from every angle.

’Four waves and one pirate!’ Silas thought. ’Swim out of that!’

Morwenna didn’t flinch.

Her lips parted in a wild breathless laugh as her boots exploded off the floor, launching her straight into the heart of the descending wave-cage.

She ran straight up the flat of the first crescent like a staircase.

"Tide Blade Arts, First Style!" Morwenna yelled, her sword spinning in a glorious full-body heel-pivot that mirrored his own with centuries of added depth! "SEVERING HORIZON!"

BOOOOOOOOOOM!

Her dark-blue ring was thicker, denser, carrying the crushing weight of the deep ocean trenches.

Her horizontal ring slammed into Silas’s wave-cage like a battering ram, cleanly shearing through all four of his directional crescents simultaneously.

The severed arcs of water exploded outward into a torrential downpour of heavy rain, drenching the entire arena in a fraction of a second.

Rain battered their skin, plastering their hair to their foreheads, turning the dark basalt ring into a slick glistening mirror and for one heartbeat the whole ring hung inside a curtain of falling silver... every drop caught the lamplight and every drop became a current line waiting to be read.

’Make it more fun...’

In that moment of rain-soaked saturation... Morwenna made her move.

She raised her ironwood blade high over her right shoulder, flaring both of her elbows wide, leaving her ribs, her throat, and her entire muscular midsection completely wide open.

It was the classic bait pose of the Second Style.

HUUUUUUUUUUUM!

A pulse of high-pressure water mana radiated from Morwenna’s frame, synchronizing instantly with the torrential rain coating the arena...

To Morwenna’s senses, time slowed to an agonizing glacial crawl.

This was the Deep-Sea Sink, the blue world only she could see and move through.

In it, every rip-tide in the ocean ran through the air like a road, and she was the fastest thing on all of them.

’This is the full power of the Second Style...’

Her stormy gray eyes ignited into a brilliant luminous shade of sapphire-blue!

The glowing 3D current lines of atmospheric pressure bloomed across the space between them.

Through the falling raindrops, she could clearly see the microscopic drops in pressure where Silas shifted his weight, where his shoulder muscles tensed, and where his mana flow lagged behind his physical movement.

Four distinct vulnerabilities flared along his silhouette... his left ribs, his right clavicle, the hollow of his throat, and his lower abdominal core.

’Found it, Captain!’ Morwenna thought with savage victorious delight.

Her legs coiled, channeling the explosive burst of the Rip-Current Step...

She blurred forward, leaving a watery afterimage standing in the rain behind her with her blade driving straight toward the glowing crimson line at his left ribs.

BWOOOSH!

The afterimage hadn’t even finished falling apart when the real Morwenna was already halfway across the ring yet, the instant her blade closed to within six inches of his flesh...

POP!

The glowing blue current line... vanished and Morwenna’s sapphire-blue eyes widened in disbelief.

’What...?!’

Before she could adjust her strike, Silas’s ironwood blade was already there!

CLACK!

Silas deflected her point with a crisp effortless parry of his crossguard with his body flowing with the momentum rather than fighting it.

And in that surreal slowed-down world of pressure ripples, where the tides traced the flaws of mortal flesh... Morwenna watched in absolute paralyzed horror as one by one, every single glowing current line of Silas’s openings began to flicker, dissolve, and extinguish into thin air.

’No way...’ Morwenna’s mind screamed, her breath stalling in her chest. ’That’s impossible! You can’t erase your own pressure lines unless you’re completely weightless! He hasn’t mastered the deep-sea sink... how is he hiding his flaws?!’

Then, she looked directly into his eyes as Silas wasn’t staring at her blade and he wasn’t staring at the falling rain either.

His eyes were vibrating.

Deep within the pupils of his eyes, the native aqueous humor, the natural fluids within his retinas, was vibrating at the exact microscopic frequency of the Tidal-Blade Arts.

He wasn’t projecting an external moisture field into the air like an amateur mage... he was using the fluid inside his own eyeballs to read the pressure waves of her own technique.

’N-no way...’

He was using a terrifying shortcut to perceive the current lines at an alarming unprecedented pace.

’Amazing...’

Silas could read the currents, but he couldn’t ride them as the Sink wasn’t his to enter so he just had her Perception without her movement.

’He’s using his own eyes...’ Morwenna realized with a tidal wave of awe, shock, and overwhelming adoration detonating in her chest.

’You magnificent terrifying monster... I love yo—’

WHAM!

Before her adoring thought could finish, Silas’s left palm drove forward, delivering a clean textbook diaphragm strike directly into her solar plexus.

Silas had no idea what he’d done a heartbeat earlier.

’Another strange feeling...’

For one moment the floor had simply stopped pulling at him.

He’d felt like a leaf on the surface of a pond, light enough that nothing could take hold of him, and her lines had slid right off his body.

...He’d moved on instinct, and it had worked.

’Like Soul magic... I need to grasp that feeling.’

For some reason, he felt like he was reaching another bottleneck for water magic... Wasn’t this level of growth a bit too unreasonable, no?

"Oof!"

The phantom heavy-water shockwave exploded outward, sending Morwenna skidding backward across the wet basalt with her boots carving two deep wakes through the pooled rainwater before she slapped her blade down to arrest her slide.

The slowed-down world of blue ripples shattered and dissolved.

Morwenna crouched on the wet floor with one hand clutching her stomach and her dark hair plastered to her neck, gasping for breath as water dripped from the tip of her nose.

Then, she looked up.

A slow and utterly smitten smile broke across her face.

"You bastard," Morwenna chuckled softly, her voice overflowing with boundless warmth and admiration. "You really are something else, Captain... A complete and utter freak of nature..."

She wasn’t angry in the slightest.

Anyone else who found a cheap shortcut to bypass decades of her grueling blood-soaked training would have earned a blade through the throat for insulting the martial arts.

But for the man she loved? For the Captain who held her soul in the palm of his hand?

Morwenna made a huge unconditional exception.

Her heart began thumping with violent erratic beats against her ribs with her chest heaving as she slowly rose to her feet, rolling her shoulders.

"Alright, Captain," Morwenna purred, her eyes shining with renewed fierce excitement. "Let’s see if your eyes can keep up when the tide truly starts to pull!"

BOOM!

They clashed again and the sparring match ascended to a new breathtaking peak.

Morwenna moved like an oceanic gale with her Rip-Current Steps leaving water afterimages flickering across the arena floor and her strikes coming from angles that defied mortal anatomy.

...But Silas was intercepting them!

His eyes tracked the pressure drops before her muscles completed their contraction as his blunted blade met hers with razor-sharp precision.

Left! Behind! Above!

There were three Rip-Current Steps, three afterimages however the real Morwenna was never in the first one.

’Left ribs!’

CLANG!

’Behind, my knee!’

CLANG!

’Above?! Oh, come on!’

CLANG!

"Not fair!" Silas yelled.

"Pirates don’t play fair, Captain!"

Some of her blows broke through, a stinging crack to his shoulder, a grazing slash across his thigh that left his muscles bruised and burning, but Silas returned every single hit with interest.

He broke past her high guard, driving a rising counter-slash across her ribs, feinting low before landing a crisp heavy pommel-strike against her armored wrist that nearly disarmed her.

CLAAAAANG!

One final thunderous clash of ironwood blades met in the center of the ring, detonating the pooled rainwater into a massive thirty-foot mist-curtain.

The concussive shockwave blew both combatants backward, skidding ten paces apart across the basalt floor.

"Argh!"

Silas immediately dropped into a low aggressive forward stance, his gold-ringed eyes ablaze, preparing to launch into another high-speed attack...

CLAP! CLAP! CLAP!

A crisp clapping echoed through the steamy mist as Silas blinked, lowering his wooden blade.

Morwenna stood across the ring with her ironwood blade resting loosely against her shoulder.

She was grinning from ear to ear, wiping the sweat and rain from her face with her forearm and her eyes practically overflowing with warm proud affection.

"Stand down, Captain," Morwenna laughed, her chest heaving. "That’s enough blood for one evening... You’ve earned your keep."

She walked forward, her boots sloshing through the wet tiles, her posture relaxed.

"I’ll admit it... you’ve mastered the First Style, the Sub-Style, and the Second Style. Sure, you’ve still got rough edges on your Rip-Current Perception. You’re relying too much on your ocular trick, which means a smart opponent will blind you with a burst of sand or heat before you read the current. And you only went weightless once, by accident, for a heartbeat... You need to find that again, and on purpose but for a landlubber who learned the basics a while ago... You’re a goddamn terror."

Silas let out a long ragged breath, straightening his spine and wiping his wet bangs from his forehead with a proud grin matching hers.

"I learned from the best," Silas smiled.

"Damn right you did," Morwenna smirked, propping her hands on her hips, her heavy chest pushing proudly against the wet sharkskin. "And as promised... I’m going to teach you the Third Style of my Tidal-Blade Arts right now and like I thought before I started teaching you... this one is easy."

Silas arched an eyebrow, his interest instantly piqued.

"Easy? Coming from you, ’easy’ usually means I only break three ribs instead of five."

"Don’t be a baby," Morwenna chuckled. "Get into a high defensive guard... Two-handed grip with your blade angled forty-five degrees to catch a heavy blow and firm up your stance."

Silas nodded, adjusting his footing on the slick basalt, raising the ironwood blade with both hands and locking his core into solid bedrock.

Morwenna stepped back two paces.