Paragon of Skills

Chapter 244

Garros takes a deep breath.

He anchors his boots into the mossy dirt. The ground is soft, but he digs in until he feels something solid underneath. His sword hand is steady. Incredibly, impossibly steady. His teeth chatter so hard it hurts the roots.

He’s always been nervous—since he was a child.

Whenever he faced an instructor in training or a monster threat in real life, he always felt this deep fear.

The traitorous student lets out a distorted, manic screech.

It does not sound human. The vocal cords are warped by the dark sludge crawling up his throat.

The pitch climbs until it cracks, and then the student is already moving.

He launches himself forward. The black sludge on his forearms hardens mid-stride into jagged blades, attacking Garros blindly.

There’s no training in that stance anymore, Garros thinks to himself, sidestepping an attack.

He comes from a long line of warriors—he knows what an expert warrior looks like.

Whatever disciplined martial forms the student once learned have been abandoned entirely. He swings with a deranged, animalistic ferocity. Both sludge-blades hack at the air in wide, sweeping arcs. Trees catch stray strikes and split open, making their bark explode.

He plants his feet and refuses to yield the space between the traitor and Jacob. The clearing behind him is where Jacob stands.

I can’t let the Leader of Champions take care of everything, he thinks. I need to do this myself. This… this monster has to be eliminated.

He remembers the Blackmoon Jaguar. The grueling, desperate fight that felt like it would never end. He remembers Jacob's voice cutting through the panic: keep your center of gravity low. Use momentum against them.

Garros deliberately drops his weight, bending his knees and bringing his sword upward, parrying the erratic strikes of his enemy and counterattacking, scoring large wounds that, however, soon regenerate.

The half-monsterified student pants, looking at the blood on his body and the black sludge filling up the gaps.

“Still pathetic!” The student launches himself again at Garros, keeping his bladed arms behind his torso until the last moment, trying to bisect Garros in two.

Once again, Garros, with his body moving smoothly from all the training back in Seredain and now with Jacob, parries and is suddenly within the guard of the student, whose arm are now open widely.

Blue mana surges through Garros's arms.

It condenses along the edge of his blade in a hard, bright line.

[Hardened Mana Blade]

Garros hits the half-monsterified student frontally, leaving a deep wound that partially splits the enemy from their nose to their hip.

The traitor staggers sideways, a wet gasp tearing from his distorted throat. Dark ichor sprays from the wound in a thick line across the mossy ground.

Garros stands in the center of the clearing. His chest heaves. His uniform is torn in several places.

At this moment, Garros wishes his father had come for the tournament like many other parents have done.

Adjusting his grip, he thinks, Father, you’d be proud of this.

***

Years Prior

A young boy walks alongside his older brothers through the grand halls of the Blackmere estate.

Their father leads them in silence. His boots strike the marble in a measured cadence that none of the brothers dare to match. They walk behind him in a loose column. The brothers are older, taller, already carrying themselves like soldiers. They have spines straight as arrows and chins that rarely move toward the ground. Of course, other than the boy, who’s not strong enough to keep up with the training, everyone is in full-armor as is custom for the Blackmere Family.

The boy has to half-jog to keep up.

His legs are shorter.

Every few steps he falls behind by a pace and has to quicken to close the gap. No one slows down for him. No one even looks back.

They pass through the gates of the estate and into the streets of Seredain. The capital is wide and built of Mana-infused white marble.

Stone buildings line the road in long, unbroken rows. Banners hang from the walls—gold sun on white field, the emblem of the Kingdom of Light. Citizens step aside as the Blackmere family passes. Some bow. Most simply stare with in quiet reverence.

They are heading toward the central plaza.

They arrive at the statue.

Stark Blackmere.

The Hero of Light.

It towers above the plaza. Carved from radiant white stone that seems to glow faintly even under the overcast sky. The sculpture depicts him mid-stride, one foot forward, sword raised above his head. Light pours from the blade in frozen cascades of stone. The sculptor captured the moment just before the swing—the instant where all the power in the world is gathered in one arm and one edge.

Garros stares up at the face.

Strong-jawed. Calm. Eyes fixed on the horizon, seeing something no living person can. He has seen this face before. On smaller statues dotting every major road and fortress throughout the kingdom. Everyone in Seredain knows this face. It is the first thing travelers see when they enter the capital's borders and the last thing soldiers see before they march out to fight the Undead.

In the central plaza, the statue is taller than a house.

The father gathers his sons at the base.

With his hands clasped behind his back, he begins to speak.

“After today’s shameful session of training, you clearly forgot where you come from,” the father says, looking up at the stone face, “this man is the strongest warrior our family has ever produced. The strongest warrior this kingdom has ever produced. When the Undead hordes threatened to swallow Seredain whole, when the kingdom stood on the brink of annihilation, it was Stark Blackmere who faced the God of Shadows’ Incarnation.”

He lets the name sit in the air for a moment.

“He killed a God,” the father says. “Or at the very least, he banished the God of Shadows for over a thousand years.”

“You must understand what we are training for and fighting,” the father continues, his harsh gaze sweeping across his sons. “The God of Shadows was a being of absolute darkness. He commanded legions of the Undead. His very presence rotted the land and turned the living into thralls.

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“Before Stark Blackmere's era, this kingdom lived under constant siege. Entire generations were born and died never knowing peace. Always fighting back wave after wave of the dead that walked.”

He pauses. His jaw tightens.

“Mothers buried their children,” the father says, his voice dropping lower, “and then fought the things that climbed out of other graves. The God of Shadows was not just a military threat. He was an existential one. He wanted to drown the world in death and make Seredain his throne where he would watch this macabre spectacle from!”

Every son flinches when they hear their father’s armor creak under the pressure of the man’s fist clenching too hard.

“Stark Blackmere marched against the God of Shadows with an army behind him that he knew would not be enough,” the father says. “He walked past the front lines. He walked into the dark alone. And he struck the God down with a technique of such blinding, overwhelming power that it shattered the divine form and sealed his influence away for a millennium. It wasn’t just the Rainbow Skill he wielded, but the Martial Art Skill that sits in your bloodline… the White Sky Cypher.”

The father lets the silence stretch.

“Anyway, one thousand years of prosperity followed,” he says. “The hordes receded. Seredain flourished. Cities grew. Children were born into a world where the dead stayed dead.”

His voice darkens.

“But the God of Shadows was not truly destroyed.” The father turns from the statue and looks at his sons directly. “That’s why it’s so important that you all master the White Sky Cypher.”

The father's tone shifts from reverence to something harder. More demanding.

“Stark Blackmere knew this,” the father says. “He understood that his victory was a delay, not a conclusion. So before he passed, he issued a challenge to all future heirs of the Blackmere bloodline.”

He holds each of his sons' gazes in turn. One by one.

“Surpass me.”

The father raises one hand toward the statue.

“A prophecy say it will be our strongest who’ll find Stark’s Rainbow Skill—and that can’t mean anything but the fact that it will go to the one mastering the White Sky Cypher,” he says. “His greatest technique. His most powerful Skill beside the Sword of Light. He encoded it into the Blackmere lineage itself. Waiting in the marrow and the mana channels of every descendant.”

His hand drops.

“It will lead, one day,” the father says, “to a worthy heir who’ll find the Sword of Light and finally kill the God of Shadows.”

The older brothers stand tall, their eyes burning with ambition and competitive fire.

They exchange glances — each of them silently measuring himself against the statue, against the legacy, against each other.

Garros looks up at the statue. He does not feel ambition. He does not feel fire. He feels the immense, crushing weight of the stone face staring down at him, and all he can think is how impossibly far away that height seems.

Garros looks down at his own small hands and says nothing.

***

The sickening sound of wet tearing snaps Garros back to the present.

Garros blinks, keeping his sword raised.

The traitorous student is split almost entirely in two, the left and right halves of his torso barely holding together by a sliver of spine and flesh. He should fall. He has to fall.

But the body doesn't collapse.

Instead, a wet, guttural clicking noise bubbles up from the student's ruined throat.

Garros watches, the breath turning to ice in his lungs. The thick, dark ichor spilling onto the moss stops pooling. It begins to flow backward. The black sludge that coats the student’s arms and throat boils, erupting from the edges of the massive, gaping fissure in his chest. It stretches across the gap like hundreds of writhing, tar-like fingers, grabbing onto the severed meat and bone on the opposite side.

Crack. Snap.

Garros takes an involuntary step back as the student’s severed ribcage is violently wrenched back into alignment. The sludge acts as a grotesque, living suture, stitching the two halves of the boy together in seconds. The flesh melts and fuses under the dark webbing.

The student rolls his neck. The bones grind together with a sickening crunch.

Garros’s heart hammers against his ribs.

The cold sweat of absolute terror instantly soaks his back.

I hit him, Garros thinks, panic fraying the edges of his mind. I stepped perfectly. I read his momentum. I used the White Sky Cypher's evasive forms flawlessly to get inside his guard!

But as the half-monsterified student raises his bladed arms again—the edges now serrated and gleaming with an even darker, denser concentration of sludge—he feels an even stronger aura.

“You forced my hand!” the student shouts. ”You forced my hand, Garros! I wanted to savor this, to watch the 'Fake Champion' fall first, but you... you've made me waste too much time! You'll regret ever stepping into this clearing! You'll regret being born weak!”

The traitorous student takes a step forward, his boots sinking into the dirt. The sludge on his arms begins to boil and expand, thickening until his hands are replaced by massive, jagged obsidian claws.

The student’s body begins to undergo a violent, final metamorphosis.

The student's uniform shreds as his ribcage expands outward. Four additional, spindly limbs made of hardened sludge burst from his back, clicking like insect legs.

The student's face melts. The nose and mouth merge into a singular, vertical maw filled with rows of needle-like teeth.

Garros takes a stumbling step back, his boots catching on a tree root. He looks at his sword, then at the nightmare standing before him.

The crushing weight of his father’s words from the central plaza in Seredain echoes in his mind: “Our bloodline produces the strongest... if you cannot master the Cypher, you are nothing.”

The student is gone.

There’s only a monster behind now.

And a pretty terrifying one.

The monster launches itself forward but Garros can barely evade it now, despite his improved footwork and reflexes thanks to Jacob’s teachings.

The worst thing is that the monster’s aura is now climbing beyond Intermediate Platinum Rank.

Jacob stands a few paces back, arms crossed over his chest. His eyes don't follow the monster; they are locked onto Garros’s every twitch.

Something is wrong. Garros's strikes land with precision, but they lack the explosive force they should have. Every time Garros attempts to channel his mana into a finishing blow, his circulation stutters. It’s a rhythmic, mechanical failure.

Jacob has been directing this boy's body for hours. He knows the exact ins and outs of Garros’s Skills, but something is definitely off. He can feel it in his guts.

‘Analyze,’ Jacob commands mentally.

The Grimoire gives him a bunch of information he doesn’t care for, that he has to batter away.

Jacob’s frown deepens and he pushes much harder into the Grimoire, much harder that he has ever done since he has had the Rainbow Skill. A fun fact about Rainbow Skill is that despite them not having a level, there’s an effective mastery one can exercise over them. And since Jacob absorbed the Star Metal, he can exercise more control than before.

Way more.

Slowly, a dark web of Death Mana appears all around Garros’s body. It’s so imperceptible and subtle that without the Grimoire Jacob could have never found something like that.

It’s threaded into the very base of Garros’s swordsmanship.

Wait, no… it’s coming from one his Skills—

The fully monsterified student almost takes Garros’s head off after its aura climbed up to the very Peak of Platinum Rank.

A heavy, sludge-coated blow slams into Garros’s guard, sending him skidding across the mossy dirt. He collapses to one knee, chest heaving, his sword arm trembling with exhaustion.

He looks back at Jacob, his eyes brimming with a devastating mixture of frustration and shame.

“Jacob... I’m sorry,” Garros wheezes, his voice breaking. “I’ve lost. I can’t... I can’t push any harder than this. This is my limit... I’m just not enough.”

Jacob finally uncrosses his arms.

“Stay down for a second,” Jacob says.

In a single, fluid motion, Jacob vanishes from his spot. He reappears directly in the path of the charging monster and delivers a palm to it.

The shockwave of the impact sends the corrupted student skidding backward across the entire clearing, his obsidian claws furrowing deep trenches in the earth.

The student snarls, the sludge bubbling furiously as he recovers his footing, but he hesitates. The sheer gap in power Jacob just demonstrated is enough to pierce even his maddened bloodlust.

Jacob turns his back on the monster and looks at Garros. His expression is serious, focused.

“Your martial Skill is cursed, Garros,” Jacob says plainly.

Garros stares up at him, uncomprehending. “Cursed? The… the White Sky Cypher? What? Are you sure? Wait, that thing is about to attack us again. Sorry, Jacob, I wanted to do this myself but—”

Jacob raises a hand, summoning a Black Grimoire.

“You are going to finish this by yourself, Garros,” Jacob says with a smile. “It just so happens that I have a little spell that will help you dispel this curse.”

The pages of the Black Grimoire begin to flutter open on their own.