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🕑 Added 2025-08-28 14:00:07 +0000 UTCThe wall broke down. The doors flew open. Rhys stumbled again, almost falling, and would’ve fallen if Laurent wasn’t there to hold him up. Mirai tumbled over the floor, but Grave chased after her and caught her with ease. Out of the dust and the rubble, a gold sword glowed. A figure stepped forward, white robes flowing around his legs, eyes fierce, face impassive. The Sword Saint.
Rhys laughed, half-coughing. “It’s over. It’s too late. The deed has already been done. There’s nothing you can do anymore—”
The Sword Saint stepped aside, his face still blank. A shorter man in ornate purple robes pushed past him, waving his hand in front of his face and coughing. He looked around, then frowned. “What is this? Where are the cores?”
“Gone,” Rhys said, and then a thought occurred to him: had the politician known for sure that there were still cores in the vault before he’d come here? It was still possible to bluff his way out of this.
Not forever. Once they left this… there were too many people he’d reached out to, in his core swapping. Some of them were even mad at him, for having stolen away their ill-gotten gains. The story would get out, and the man would know it was his fault. But for getting out of this situation, for surviving the immediate future, he could still—
“We put them somewhere you’ll never find them!” Laurent snarled, full of righteous fury.
Rhys looked at Laurent. He stared at him for a long moment, then sighed. There goes that plan.
“What have you done?” the man asked, gaping at them. “The Empress’s core vault… if it’s not handled correctly, in the right hands, it has the potential to be a massive weapon, or a terrible plague upon the world!”
Yeah, that’s why I wanted to keep it out of yours, Rhys thought. He glanced at the Sword Saint from the corner of his eyes. The man stood completely still where he’d stepped when he’d entered the room. He hadn’t reacted to a single thing that had happened this whole time; his eyes stared unblinkingly ahead.
There’s something wrong with him. He glanced at the man in purple robes. Had he done something? Or was it just that the Sword Saint had met with a terrible fate, and this man was capitalizing on it?
He thought back to the tournament, when he’d seen the Sword Saint challenge the Empress. The man had seemed normal enough then… but it wasn’t like he’d gotten up close and personal with him. I should ask Bast.
Speaking of, where was Bast? He looked around subtly, but found nothing.
The man narrowed his eyes. He jabbed his finger at the four of them. “Luc! take them in.”
Laurent stepped forward, pushing Rhys behind him. After the core swap, he’d ended up at a low Tier 3, well below Rhys’s power level, but in comparison, Rhys was beaten up, on the verge of death, and his trash star flickered inside his core, on the verge of going dark. His Tier fluctuated from moment to moment, sometimes surging to Tier 4, other times dipping below Tier 3. He’d overstretched the boundaries of his power, and he was paying the price for it. Rhys took a deep breath, trying to steel himself to fight, but every piece of him protested the action. Blood still stained his robes and face from his earlier strain, and his head pounded, his eyes dry and achy. His core walls trembled when he tried to muster his strength, weak and flaccid. Even circulating mana through his system hurt, let alone impurities. It was taking everything he had to keep from polluting himself when he usually didn’t’ even have to think about it. He was in no shape to fight.
But Laurent couldn’t possibly stand against the Sword Saint. The man strode forward, and Laurent drew his sword, but the gulf in power between them was apparent even at a glance. There was nothing he could do to stop the Sword Saint.
Bast was nowhere to be seen. Same with Lira, Sable, and Mouse. Mirai’s emanations had dropped to almost Tier 1, and Grave had backed away, taking the two of them into the background and even further from the spotlight. It was just him. Him, the Sword Saint, and the politician.
Someone. Anyone. Is there anyone who can help us? Rhys wondered. At the same time, he reached out to the void. Maybe, if he was lucky, he—
A strand of energy pierced through the void and touched his core again. Then another. Another. The same as when they’d given him energy throughout him handing the cores back, the people he’d assisted passed a little more of their energy to him. In the back of the room, too, the discarded cores who no longer had a body to return to lifted off the ground and flowed into Rhys. Their power nourished, not his trash star, which struggled to convert pure mana to filth, but his original core, the one the Empress had torn out of him. More and more energy flowed in, as more and more people reached out to him. They had helped him when it benefitted them, and he understood that; but now, they were just giving back as thanks. Helping him out, when they stood to gain nothing from it, when they were purely assisting Rhys and helping him survive.
Warmth welled up in Rhys’s heart. The certainty that he’d done the right thing surged in his heart. He hadn’t made everyone happy, but he’d done right. He’d restored things to the way they should be, and given people back the power they always should have had, whether it was stronger or weaker than what they’d had before. For those who were stronger now, naturally, they wanted to assist him; but even some of those who had weakened gave him some of their power. Their core was theirs. They’d been born with it, and it was inherently part of their body. Rhys felt it as much as any of them: there was a comfort, a certainty, that came with having your own core back. He understood. It was right. Natural. As it should be.
More and more energy flowed into him. The pinhole widened to a pencil’s width, then a fountain pen. It kept enlarging as more and more people heard his cry and gave back, pouring their power into him. He took a deep breath, and his eyes shone with mana. His original core, the core he’d thrown away and given up on, glowed as it took on more and more mana. Golden core after golden core formed as the power flowed in, the gap to the void now as wide as a golf ball. His core filled, then threatened to overflow. Rhys gritted his teeth and fought against the pain of his worn-out body to condense the energy down, down, down. A new tiny gold orb materialized in his core, and the power kept flowing. It was all he could do to keep pushing down, keep condensing, keep creating new orbs. His entire core filled up with tiny orbs as he condensed the mana down again and again to keep it from overflowing his core, and then the outside glittered in gold, and golden light began to enclose the outside. It trembled, on the verge of breaking through to the next realm, the light almost closing completely, but something held it back. A single empty spot at the very top of his core, where the power couldn’t close over in gold. A bottleneck. Something prevented him from reaching the next step, like a cap, a blockage.
The power kept flowing, and kept flowing, entirely beyond his expectations. Gratitude welled up in Rhys’s heart. They didn’t even know how bad the situation he was in was, and they were still willing to help him out. Everyone… thank you so much!
He took all that power and held onto it. Held onto it, building it up, building it up, until it was ready to burst. More. More!
The energy began to peter out, but it was already enough. This would have to do. He’d take this, and throw it at his trashy original core, that even he had thrown away and abandoned, and polish that trash into something that truly shone.
Taking all the energy at once, he hammered it all at that bottleneck. The gold energy trembled, shook—and then surged, and the last span of un-golden core at the top of his original core turned gold, and his power surged. His cultivation stabilized, landing at a firm Tier 4. And as for his trash star, all the leftover energy that had broken through the bottleneck, then had nowhere to go nourished the trash star and his original core alike, baptizing both in a flood of extra mana—extra mana, or in other words, discarded bonus trash mana. Both his original core and the trash star drank it in, glorying in the bonus mana.
Rhys didn’t know what his cultivation looked like, with two cores both at Tier 4. From the outside, did he look like a Tier 4, or a Tier 4 and a half? Or even… a Tier 8?
He snorted at that thought. I doubt that. Tiers grow multiplicatively or even exponentially, not additively. His body was still battered and broken, but with everyone’s help, he’d managed to Tier up. His body had incidentally gained benefits from Tiering up, and was stronger and more fit, but the damage he’d incurred by forcibly pushing himself past his limits for so long and flirting with the void to give everyone their original core back wasn’t so easily healed. He wasn’t at a hundred percent power, but he was far stronger than he’d been moments ago. Far stronger than Laurent.
This all had happened in the space of a few seconds, so fast that it was hard to express; the surge of power, his rush to Tier 4, even breaking the bottleneck, all happened between when the Sword Saint started walking toward them, and when the man raised his sword. Rhys snapped back into reality just as the sword started to fall and jumped forward, raising his own sword to block.
To his surprise, the Sword Saint hesitated. Rhys blinked, then frowned. Is there still some of the Sword Saint in there? He might faintly recognize me, even if he’s never met me.
Rhys lifted his head and looked directly at the Sword Saint. “Sir, my name is Rhys. I’m a close friend of your apprentice, Bas… Solaire. Surely he’s mentioned me?”
The Sword Saint turned his head ever-so-slightly toward Rhys. His brows furrowed slightly. Something like faint recognition shone in their depths, and he stopped his sword completely.
He’s in there, somewhere. There’s something wrong with him, but he’s in there, Rhys thought, taking a step back and pushing Laurent with him. Come to think of it, he’d caught a glimpse of Sable and Lira fighting the Sword Saint earlier, and surviving; not only that, but fighting back. The two of them were Tier 3 and 2. They couldn’t stand up to a Tier 4, let alone the Sword Saint. The fact that they’d been able to survive, even dodge attacks… the Sword Saint was in there, somewhere. He knew he was being used, to some small extent, and he was holding back, fighting against whatever control he was under. Rhys just didn’t know how he was being controlled, or what was controlling him, or else he might be able to help. As it was, he could only try to communicate with him from afar.
Rhys put a hand to his heart. “Listen to me. I gave everyone their cores back. There’s nothing left to fight over. Sword Saint, sir, please. Lower your weapon. We don’t have a quarrel.”
The Sword Saint lowered his sword. He stared at Rhys, the furrow in his brows deepening. His lips moved, as if to speak.
“Luc,” the man in purple snapped.
The Sword Saint’s eyes turned dull again. Once more, he raised his sword.
“Ah, hey! We were talking.” Rhys lifted his sword, but this time, it was his turn to hesitate. He used poison, impurities, filth. He was suited to killing, or at least maiming his foes. But an earnest, righteous battle, a duel where he didn’t want to main or kill? He didn’t even know how he would begin going about that. Even back in the tournament, he’d struggled to fight without killing or permanent harm, and back then, he’d been far closer to a pure martial build, without the full extent of filth and harmful techniques he had now. The Sword Saint wasn’t someone he wanted to harm. As far as he could tell, the man was under some kind of control, some curse or mind effecting spell, and he didn’t deserve to be wiped out with the extreme prejudice that was the only thing Rhys could use.
On the other hand, if it came to a fight without Rhys using his filth, he wasn’t confident he could survive, let alone win. No—even to win would be a small miracle, like when he’d fought the Empress, but even worse; the Empress was a logistician, who’d figured out a godly technique to expand her physical and political power across a large region, an incredible way to exert near-full control over her troops and conquer large swaths of land, then demand loyalty from those she conquered with little need to waste time consolidating power. But at the end of the day, she was a commander and logistician. There was nothing wrong with that. She’d accomplished great things that way. But she was no Sword Saint, no warrior lauded for their invincibility in battle and duels, not put on a pedestal as the strongest sword fighter who no one in their region or without could challenge and defeat, despite the pedestal he stood on and the attention he attracted. If Rhys used his worst, most filthy tricks, he might be able to survive the Sword Saint, but even then, he wasn’t confident in a win. To fight without… well, it was suicide.
Not to mention, I countered the Empress’s ultimate technique by building a power center that isn’t a core, and using power that isn’t mana, Rhys thought. Neither of which helped him fight the Sword Saint, who’d just cut him open without worrying about his mana infrastructure. Speaking of, right now, there was a mixture of impurities and mana running through his veins. It worked, but it didn’t want to work. The two flowed together, but they fought one another; the mana was darkened and weakened by the impurities, and the impurities were diluted by the mana. He didn’t know how he was going to resolve that, but it was a problem for a future; for now, he just had to damage-boost through this encounter and figure out a way to get out the other end.
In truth, he was a bit of a paper tiger right at this moment. He appeared Tier 4, and he was sure he could draw out a Tier 4’s power for a split second if he needed to, but his trash star struggled, still on the verge of winking out, and his core had only newly reached Tier 4, not to mention that the two powers were fighting one another in his mana veins. One good hit was all the more he could give, or take, until he had some time to resolve all the issues with his new mana system. Fighting was not the way to resolve this in his favor.
But talking wasn’t looking good, either. He glanced over his shoulder. Grave and Mirai had vanished somewhere. Extending his mana, he found Lira and Sable, then gave the two of them a little push. They got the message, and he sensed them running off. He didn’t sense Mouse at all, which was probably—actually, it was starting to worry him. Where was Mouse? What had happened to her?
“Laurent, get out of here,” he whispered.
“What? No, I’ll stay with you until the end,” Laurent pledged.
“Idiot. I’m going to run,” Rhys murmured.
Laurent raised his brows, surprised, then slowly backed away. As he retreated less subtly than Rhys would have liked, Rhys stepped forward. He pointed at the purple-robed man. “What have you done to the Sword Saint?”
The purple-robed man stared, taken aback. “You dare accuse the Alliance’s Grandmaster of using some foul control technique on the Sword Saint?”
“The Alliance’s Grandmaster…” Rhys raised his brows and gestured, waiting for the man to fill in the gap.
“You don’t know my name? I’m Virgal Noicome, the most powerful mage in the Alliance,” the man declared.
“Not another virgin. We’ve got too many in this room already,” Rhys complained.
To his surprise, the Sword Saint twitched. Rhys raised his brows and looked the man over again. He had that long dark hair that was so popular in this world, and of course the fit body that came with being the Sword Saint, so he’d assumed the man was rolling in women, but… wait, hold on, is this the kind of world where the ‘ultimate sword technique’ requires ‘bodily purity’ or something stupid like that? In other words, requires you to never hold a woman?
Holy shit, does that mean Bast’s in the same boat as me? Hold on! I need confirmation on this, confirmation stat!
The man in purple spluttered, then jabbed his finger at Rhys. “Take such filthy thoughts out of your mind. No—I’ll have the Sword Saint remove them for you. Luc!”
Once more, the Sword Saint retreated.
Rhys pursed his lips. So much for my short attempt to talk it out. He glanced over his shoulder at Laurent, to find the man almost fully out of the room. Just another few seconds.
“Hey, hey, hey, wait, hold on. Sword Saint, do you really want to do this? You don’t have to listen to that guy!” Rhys tried, just throwing spaghetti at the wall. The man didn’t react.
Uh oh. He wracked his brains, trying to come up with something, anything to throw at the Sword Saint. Just another second—!
Comments
Crimson wolf
You know what would be a trashy trope? If the sword Saint turned out to be woman this whole time and he finds out during this fight
Dante Brown
I knew the sword saint wouldn’t just kill the man who took down the empress, and gave thousands their cores back. Like he would probably scorn you for doing so. Yea the alliance is full of even more trash than the empire. It needs some cleaning.
