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Chapter 1736: Please Explain
Primordial Villain with a Slave Harem

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  1. Offline
    Despawning
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    1745 Lecture
    She crossed the thirty paces in a single stepping burst that cracked the new stone, and the relic came down in an arc that carried enough force to split a shield wall, aimed at the spot where her sister stood.

    Ayame was no longer in it.

    She had read the line of the cut before Kaede's heel finished planting, slid a half step inside its arc, and let the blade fall past her shoulder close enough to part stray hairs, and the floor where she'd stood burst into a crater of stone shards behind her.

    Her counter flicked toward Kaede's wrist, and the relic wrenched itself around to catch it, steel meeting steel with a crack that rolled around the bowl.

    The impact drove Ayame's heels a full pace across the stone.

    The gap was real. Her sister remained a cliff above her even at the exact promised threshold, and every clean meeting of blades said so through her wrists.

    So Ayame stopped meeting the blades cleanly.

    The second exchange, she gave Kaede's monstrous cuts nothing to land on, angling her katana so each strike slid off on a tangent, her deflections measured in degrees rather than force, and Kade's power kept arriving in places her sister had already left.

    The third exchange, she began to steer it.

    A tilt of her blade sent the relie's downstroke screaming past her hip into the floor.

    A quarter turn of her wrists guided the follow-up wide, dragging Kaede's balance with it, and for one full heartbeat the Duchess of Silverwind stood stretched over her own front foot like a student mid-drill.

    "Back foot."

    Ayame said it the way she'd said it a thousand times in a labyrinth to a level 1 nobody with an iron spear, flat and matter-of-fact, and then her katana licked out and opened a thin red line across the back of Kaede's trailing calf, a teacher's cane made of steel.

    The bowl made a sound. Quiet, vast, involuntary, a hundred thousand people inhaling at once.

    "Don't you dare lecture me!" The words left Kaede low and strangled, the effort of keeping them level visible from the stands.

    Ayame reset her stance and said nothing.

    “Sisters, are you watching closely? I'm not quite sure you're fully grasping what you're witnessing, so let me add some context..." Seraphiel's voice rang over the elven sections, the Dawnbringer standing on her seat with her arms spread.

    "That girl is my amazing samurai friend, Ayame Fujimori, and she's barely twenty years old! Us elves can barely function at that age, yet here she is, fighting the leader of a whole Dukedom!"

    The elven ranks lost what remained of their composure, and the gossip current jumped rows like wildfire.

    In the Fujimori prisoner block, nobody spoke at all.

    The lieutenant with the ruined arm leaned forward with her lips parted tracking the angles of the duel with a soldier's eyes, and the angles kept answering questions she had not dared to ask out loud.

    "The root forms are ours," she whispered to the samurai beside her. "Watch her entries. Third Gate, Falling Reed, all of it, that's our school.." Her voice thinned. "And then it becomes... what does it become?"

    No one had an answer.

    What grew out of those root forms had outgrown clan memory, and every veteran in the block knew they were watching their own art carried somewhere their clan had never managed to take it.

    On the floor, Kaede started swinging harder.

    The relic's arcs came faster and heavier, raw statistical violence compressed into cuts that would have ended any duel in the clan's history, and her sister moved through them with an economy so absolute it looked unhurried, giving ground in centimeters and reclaiming it in angles.

    "Shoulders." Ayame slid beneath a horizontal cut that parted the air where her neck had been.
    "They climb when you swing angry. Our tutors drilled that out of me before I turned six, but I see they never managed to do the same to you."

    "Shut your mouth!" Kaede's next three cuts came twice as fast and half as clean, fury bleeding the geometry out of every line the relic tried to draw.

    ‘I am stronger.’ The thought circled Kaedes skull, picking up speed. ‘The numbers are real. I am much stronger! So why?!’

    Inside her grip, the whispers had stopped purring.

    The blade kept reaching for openings that sealed a half-beat before its edge arrived, kept surging toward seams in Ayame's guard that turned out to be doors held open on purpose, and a confusion that did not belong to Kaede buzzed up through the hilt and into her arms.

    "You're telegraphing."

    The correction came mid-exchange this time, conversational, and Ayame stepped through Kaede's hip feint as if it had been announced by herald, rotated past the real cut, and laid her edge against her sister's cheek, gentle as a brushstroke.

    A hair-thin line of red opened across the Duchess of Silverwind's cheekbone.

    Kaede stumbled back three full steps, and her hand rose to her face on its own, fingertips coming away red, and the duel ground went quiet.

    "She measured that cut to the millimeter," Alexios murmured, leaning forward, the connoisseur in him overruling the king.

    "The girl is fencing a duchess and grading her," Lilith said dryly.

    On the arena floor, Kaede Fujimori looked at the blood on her fingers.

    Her teachers were ice.

    Her clan knelt in the stands.

    Her sister stood across the stone, untouched, unhurried, blue eyes level, waiting for her, patient as the end of every childhood drill, and the relic in Kaede's hands buzzed its alien confusion into her bones while the numbers in her head kept insisting on a victory that refused to arrive.

    Then Ayame lowered her katana a fraction, and for the first time since the duel began, the teacher delivered a full assessment instead of a correction.

    "All that stolen power and technique, but to my eyes, you cut like the sister I remember from my childhood. Always a klutz, tripping over her own feet."

    The last of the duchess's restraint bent past its limit.

    "SHUT UP!" She broke distance with a leap, lungs heaving more from fury than effort, and her voice tore across the bowl raw and cracking. "SHUT YOUR ARROGANT MOUTH!"

    "[Ougon Zan]!"

    Jagged waves of molten gold ripped off her blade and screamed toward Ayame in a fan, and the floor between the sisters detonated.

    High in the prisoner block, the sound landed like a blade between ribs.

    Every Fujimori veteran in those rows knew exactly what they had just heard, and what it meant that they were hearing it minutes into a sacred duel of blades.

    Their chosen had run out of swordsmanship and started slinging spells.

    Somewhere in the rows, an old samurai shed a dejected tear.

    “We chose ‘this’ over that girl?”

    Authors Note: I planned to end the duel today, but ended up having a lot of fun with the setup. Hope it was enjoyable to you as well.
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    1. Offline
      Despawning
      + 0 ⋅ 0 -
      1746 Horrid Realization

      "We chose 'this' over that girl?"

      The golden arcs answered before anyone else could.

      Ayame read the [Ougon Zan]'s spread before the light finished deciding where to land, slipping between the molten teeth on a line that shouldn't have existed, and the detonations chased her across the ground in a chain of craters marking every spot her heels had left a half-beat prior.

      Kaede swung again and again, each arc wider and more ragged than the last, and the gap that Ayame's technique had been nullifying all fight came roaring back through the magic because spells scaled on raw power and raw power was the one cliff her sister still held.

      Ayame could dodge, and she could deflect, cutting the fringe off every golden wave with clean sweeps of her katana, but she could not close, and the gap between them widened step by measured step as the younger sister buried the older in magic.

      In the prisoner block, the lieutenant with the ruined arm watched golden light repaint the faces of the samurai around her, and her brow furrowed.

      Gold.

      Lady Kaede's arcs had been silver for as long as anyone in the clan could remember, a clean moonlit edge that was her signature on every battlefield she'd graced.

      Whatever was tearing across the arena floor right now burned a color that didn't belong to her.

      "This is no longer a duel..." A soldier nearby grumbled.

      "I feel disgusted."

      A Fujimori sacred duel was decided by the blade.

      That was the oldest law of their clan. Steel against steel, the sword speaking where words could not.

      Whatever strength a warrior carried in their own body wasn't forbidden, a warrior fought as the warrior was, but the one who reached for magic first admitted their sword wasn't enough, and in a clan built on the sword, that admission weighed more than a loss.

      Their chosen had made it before the entire continent.

      "Lady Ayame was always the talented one, the lieutenant said to the row beside her. "Does anyone here remember differently?"

      "No one does!" A young samurai shot upright three seats down, straining against the shield at her back. "She was a promising young lady even as a child, I was part of her guard when the elders said she was our bright future!"

      "Lady Kaede couldn't keep up with our common soldiers, let alone the officers sitting in this block before the inheritance!"

      Heads turned through the prisoner block, then more heads, because the thing none of them had dared to say out loud for years was suddenly in the open air and spreading fast.

      "That's right. She only became powerful after the succession." A grizzled samurai two rows back was on his feet, pointing at the arena floor. "The unnatural strength, the eerie spells, the inexplicable rate of growth and that sword answering to her... None of it existed before the elders crowned her, and now look!"

      His finger stabbed toward Kaede, whose blade was wrenching toward openings her arms couldn't serve fast enough, the weapon and its wielder pulling against each other like two beasts yoked to the same cart, and every veteran in those rows could see it plainly: the woman on that floor was barely controlling her own sword.

      "The elders..." The lieutenant's voice carried a weight that had nothing to do with volume. "We've all had our suspicions for years..."

      Recognition ran through the block, the sound of soldiers hearing someone finally say the thing they'd all been swallowing since the succession.

      "But Lady Ayame's crime..." someone said, and the block went quiet.

      That was the wall.

      The elders could be vultures and the succession could stink of rot, but Lady Ayame had been sentenced to a life of slavery by a decree the King of Vraven himself had signed.

      No samurai had the standing to question a royal judgment, and no amount of suspicion about the elders could outweigh the word of a king.

      The grizzled samurai's voice came back quieter.
      "What was her crime, exactly? Does anyone know?"

      The block went still, and for a moment the only answer was the ring of steel out on the floor.

      Then a voice came from the middle rows, reluctant. "There were whispers, back then, that Lady Ayame had gotten into bed with the Phantom League, and that Lord Raijin's death came far too cleanly for a man in good health, far too conveniently for the daughter already promised his seat, as though she'd grown tired of waiting for what was owed to her."

      "Whispers," the lieutenant said. "Never a charge read aloud, never proof laid before the clan. The elders witnessed the inheritance duel behind closed doors, the King's seal made it law, and the space where a reason should have stood, we filled in ourselves and let it harden."

      Not one soldier in that block had ever been shown a thing beyond the whisper itself.

      The lieutenant lifted her gaze to the lower tiers where Alexios Valorian sat, and sighed.

      "All of this stinks, and has been stinking since the start... But we chose to turn a blind eye and follow orders..."

      On the floor, the golden arcs would not let Ayame breathe.

      Kaede fired [Ougon Zan] in overlapping fans, each swing wilder than the last, and the duel ground shattered in golden lines while Ayame wove between them on footwork alone, landing on strips of stone the light hadn't eaten, strips that shrank with every volley.

      A crescent caught the trailing edge of her sleeve and burned the cloth to ash.

      The next forced her into a backbend so deep her ponytail brushed the floor, the molten light screaming over her chest close enough to press heat through the fabric.

      She rose from the bend and caught the next arc on her blade, deflecting it wide, but the parry cost her a full step backward, and the step after that cost another, and the floor was running out.

      "You're still trying to beat me with just a sword?" Kaede's voice cracked across the gap between ares, breathless and triumphant.

      Ayame deflected another are and let the momentum carry her two steps sideways before she answered.

      "That's the point of this duel, Kaede," Ayame spoke with exasperation. "By our oldest traditions, you just told every samurai watching that your sword wasn't enough."

      Kaede's expression contorted, ready to spit back. But before she could reply, Ayame's eyes went cold.

      "Don't even open your mouth, I'm no longer interested."

      Gone was the reserved samural fighting her treacherous sister, replaced by the Blade of the Primordial Villain fighting an enemy they had to take down to continue their path toward unquestionable might.

      "Nothing I say will get through to you."

      The mark on her stomach pulsed warm beneath her clothes, and Ayame reached for the Reservoir.

      "So I'm done talking."

      Quinlan's water answered through the bond, arriving as a thin film that ran the length of her katana like dew on polished steel, barely visible past the first row.

      Then it thickened into a pressurized current that wrapped the blade in a sheath of translucent blue, catching the winter light and scattering it across the cracked stone in soft pale ribbons.
      Ayame stopped retreating.

      Her weight settled into a stance that flowed instead of braced, and when the next golden crescent screamed toward her, the katana came up in a sweep so smooth it looked contemptuous.

      The water on her blade parted the arc down its center the way a river parts around a stone, both halves detonating harmlessly past her shoulders while she walked through the gap where the spell had been.

      The arena went quiet enough to hear the water dripping from her steel.

      "She's using water!"
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