When The System Spoils You For No Reason-Chapter 40 - Forty

"You want to know the thing about being too strong?" Zeke asked, sidestepping a cut and falling into the next exchange without breaking rhythm. "You stop being able to tell whether someone is beneath you or equal to you."

Steel rang between them, their blades catching the strange, diffuse light of the Expanse. The air between them smelled faintly of ozone and hot metal.

"Well, right now, you feel superior. But with what?"

"Were you starved of attention as a child?"

Enel said bluntly.

"I don’t remember."

Zeke stuck his tounge out.

"Hmm. Amnesia. That might explain the mental issues."

"With the ability boost you’re the statistical superior. But when I add Giant’s Dominion, I overtake you. Your domain effect doesn’t touch me, so you’ve already lost part of your trump card." Zeke parried, redirected, stepped back half a pace. "You’re barely using your grandmaster swordsmanship — or your trait. But if I used Sunder, this ends whenever I want."

Clang.

Their swords met hard. Zeke used the force to push off, boots scraping lightly on the crystalline earth as he reset the distance.

"So here’s what I’m proposing: my swordsmanship is trash, and you gain nothing fighting at my level. I’ll come up to yours instead." He leveled Cassian’s blade. "Show me something worthy of the Sword Monarch."

BOOM.

"Eve."

Enel spoke the name quietly.

The blade answered. The ambient hum of the Expanse seemed to muffle itself — as if even the dungeon recognized the weight of that word. The very concept of sword in the surrounding air seemed to lean toward it, like iron toward a lodestone.

His posture changed. The air stilled.

Zeke watched, the casual ease gone from his expression, replaced by something sharper and more focused. In his mind, he reached out and pulled — Enel’s trait, Sword Monarch, followed by Grandmaster Blade Weapon Mastery.

The world shifted.

Where a moment ago he had seen a man holding a sword, now he saw lines — pathways of potential, angles of engagement and deflection, the quiet geometry of bladework made visible. Grandmaster Mastery settled into his consciousness not as knowledge but as instinct. Weight distribution, edge alignment, distance management, tempo — as natural and automatic as breathing.

He raised Cassian’s sword. A good blade. Well-made. But now it felt entirely different in his grip — not a tool, but an extension. Through the Sword Monarch trait resonating in his hand, even the borrowed steel seemed to settle, as if it finally understood what it was for.

Enel moved.

Eve swept upward in a clean, rising diagonal. No preamble. No announcement. Just the purest possible expression of cut. 𝕗𝚛𝚎𝚎𝐰𝗲𝗯𝗻𝚘𝚟𝚎𝗹.𝕔𝐨𝕞

Zeke met it.

Clang.

The sound resonated — sharp and clean and startlingly loud, two edges meeting at the exact angle where resistance transferred without absorbing. Sparks scattered between them.

Enel’s eyes narrowed a fraction. The parry was flawless. Foundational. The parry of someone who had spent a lifetime studying the geometry of violence.

For the first time — there was spunk in the opposition.

He flowed into the next form. Aurelian Flow — First Circle: Unbreaking River. Eve became a continuous weave of silver light, offense and defense wound inseparably together, each motion feeding the next like water finding its channel. Swordsmanship elevated to something approaching natural law.

Zeke’s blade met every strike. His body moved with new economy — not blocking, but redirecting, using minimum force to divert Eve’s precise lines, each step measured to hold the exact dueling distance. He was a mirror, returning Enel’s mastery back at him with borrowed genius.

But a mirror with cracks. Enel had earned this. Zeke had no experience with the sword, his new found knowledge could only help so much.

When Enel shifted from First Circle to Third Circle: Shattered Mountain, the flowing current fractured into a series of sharp, independent strikes — the river becoming falling stone. The rhythm broke. For a moment, Zeke’s borrowed mastery stuttered.

SHINK.

A line opened across his forearm — shallow, burning.

SHINK.

Another across his ribs, slicing through fabric and skin.

He was reading the technique. But Enel’s decades of ingrained instinct, his symbiotic bond with Eve, were variables no stolen trait could fully account for. Zeke was fighting with a grandmaster’s textbook in his head. Enel was writing the book in real time.

Time to improvise.

Mirroring alone wouldn’t carry him. He had to create his own moves, facing Enel with his own moves is simply folly.

As Eve descended in a brutal overhead cleave — Shattered Mountain: Peak Fall — Zeke didn’t meet it head-on. He stepped inside, angling Cassian’s blade to catch Eve at a shallow glance and steer it past, then used Enel’s own momentum to whip his sword back around in a tight, vicious arc.

His blade exploded outward in a storm of strikes — wrists, elbows, the gaps in Enel’s guard — each one feinting mid-flight, angles shifting before they resolved. Chaotic. Unpredictable. Grandmaster principles filtered through Zeke’s own adaptive, instinct-driven creativity.

Enel adapted immediately, High Specs processing the new pattern in real time. But for the first time, he was reacting, not dictating. He parried the storm — but a flickering cut opened on his cheek. Another grazed his vambrace.

A sound tore from Enel’s throat — not anger. Pure, exhilarated focus.

He abandoned strict form. Eve moved on perfected instinct, meeting chaos with refined, adaptive violence. The two blades became a storm across the crystalline clearing — silver and steel, ringing and crashing, singing a brutal duet.

It was breathtaking. It was violent. It was the highest level of swordsmanship most of the watching Aurelians would ever see.

And Enel’s experience began to tell.

He caught a micro-hesitation in Zeke’s improvised chain — a fraction of a second where creativity had lost to experience. In that sliver of frozen time, Eve moved.

Perfect. Committed. Final.

Clang — SCRITCH.

Cassian’s blade, overstressed and outmatched, snapped a third from the tip. The broken piece spiraled away, catching the light as it fell.

Eve carried through unchecked. The point dipped — a silver viper — and drove forward toward Zeke’s chest.

Zeke twisted, Martial Instinct screaming. The broken remnant came up in a desperate angled block.

SCREEE — THUD.

The blade deflected — but not stopped. It skated past broken steel and punched into Zeke’s chest just below the collarbone, two inches deep, before halting.

Silence.

They stood locked. Enel with his gaze blazing, fierce and absolute. Zeke impaled, his expression moving from stark surprise to something slower and more honest — wry, pained acknowledgment.

Slowly, Enel withdrew Eve. Blood welled from the clean puncture, spreading dark across black fabric.

Zeke looked down at the wound. At the broken hilt still in his hand. He let it go. It clattered on the ground.

"Damn." A trickle of blood at the corner of his mouth. Beneath his palm, Immortality was already threading the flesh closed. "That was actually close."

Enel lowered Eve, chest rising and falling with deep, controlled breaths — the first real sign of exertion he’d shown. His gaze didn’t leave Zeke.

"I should take your head for the insult," he said, voice cold and even. "I’ll take your arms instead."

"Hehe." Zeke straightened. "When the tiger leaves the mountain, even a dog thinks he owns it."

BOOM.

A wave of palpable pressure rolled off him as the last of the wound sealed shut.

"We did it your way." He rolled his shoulders and raised his empty, bloodied hands, curling them loosely. The air around them shifted — different weight, different intent.

"My way now."

"Fist against sword."