Paragon of Skills

Chapter 245

The training courtyard of the Blackmere estate is empty.

The torches have burned low. Their flames cling to the last of the oil, throwing long, trembling shadows across the stone walls and the row of practice dummies that stand in a line along the western edge. Everyone else went to bed hours ago from the servants to the instructors, and, of course, his brothers.

But Garros stands in front of the center dummy, sword in hand.

He is alone. It is long after midnight. His father told him that tomorrow at noon he will be tested to determine if he is a true warrior. If he passes, he will be permitted to continue formal instruction alongside his brothers. If he fails, the question of his future will be settled, and his father will recommend that he be sent to the clerical order in the eastern quarter of Seredain, far from the battlefield and far from the family name.

Garros has been out here since sundown.

He is practicing one movement. The same movement, over and over. The Dawn Thrust. The First Form of the White Sky Cypher.

It is a single piercing thrust. The most basic technique in the Blackmere bloodline’s martial art. The foundation that every other form is built upon. His father told them at the statue of Stark Blackmere that this was the blow the Hero of Light perfected into the strike that killed the God of Shadows.

His brothers mastered it within weeks of being shown.

Garros has been trying for months.

He runs through the motion again.

Plant the back foot. Drop the hip. Drive forward. The mana is supposed to flow from the core, through the chest, down the arm, and into the tip of the blade in one unbroken line. It concentrates into a single point of light at the moment of contact. That is what makes the Dawn Thrust lethal. That is what separates it from an ordinary stab. The white flash at the tip. The piercing force that punches through armor, through hide, through divine flesh—well, he doesn’t have the Sword of Light like Stark Blackmere, but… maybe he can start by learning this at the very least.

He can feel the shape of it. He understands it intellectually. He has watched his brothers perform it hundreds of times. The white flash. The clean puncture through the dummy’s chest plate. The way the mana sings when the form is correct.

But every time he executes it, something dies between the intention and the result.

The mana stutters halfway down his arm. It hits something—not a wall, not a block, just a place where the flow goes thick and slow, like water pushing through clogged roots. The blade arrives a fraction too late. The tip hits the dummy but there is no flash. No light. No piercing force. Just a dull impact that barely dents the surface.

His hands are blistered and bleeding through the wrappings. He has been doing this since sundown.

He tries again.

And again.

Some attempts feel closer than others. A few times, for a single heartbeat, the mana almost flows correctly and he sees the faintest ghost of white light flicker at the blade’s tip before it dies. It sputters. It reaches. It almost catches.

Then it collapses.

He does not understand why.

His body knows the form. His blood carries the Cypher.

He should be able to do this.

Why isn’t this working? Garros tightens his fist on the sword’s hilt.

Every child of the bloodline is expected to perform it before their tenth year.

But Garros… he can’t make it work.

The night soon turns into day.

Varn Blackmere, Garros’s father, finds him at dawn.

The man stands at the edge of the courtyard in silence for a long moment. His armor catches the first gray light of morning. He watches Garros drive the sword into the dummy with exhausted, desperate thrusts. The boy’s form has deteriorated over the hours. His back foot drags. His hip drive is late. The thrusts are fueled by nothing but willpower and the refusal to stop.

The tip keeps hitting the same spot. There is a shallow dent in the dummy’s chest plate where the blade has struck a hundred times without once breaking through.

Garros does not notice his father until the man speaks.

“Garros.”

The boy’s arm freezes mid-thrust. He turns. Varn stands with his hands clasped behind his back.

The father’s voice is not cruel. It is tired and factual, which is worse.

“You are the weakest this family has produced in living memory,” his father says. “Effort without result is just noise.”

Garros opens his mouth. Nothing comes out.

The father looks at the shallow dent in the dummy’s chest plate.

“If you cannot perform it by instinct, then the bloodline did not take root in you the way it should have.”

He pauses. His jaw shifts slightly, the only sign that any of this costs him anything.

“You will never learn this technique,” the father says. “Go to bed. You were not made for fighting. I will be speaking with Abbott Percival to arrange for your transfer.”

***

Jacob opens the Black Grimoire and speaks a single phrase in the old devil tongue.

His eyes flash red as he presses his palm against Garros’s chest.

Primordial Magic floods into the boy’s body.

The effect is immediate and violent.

Dozens of shadows rip themselves out of Garros’s skin. They pour from his arms, his back, his neck, his legs—dark, writhing shapes that look half-formed, like the silhouettes of fingers and mouths. Some of them almost have faces. They claw their way free from the inside of his body as if they have been buried there for a very long time and have finally been forced into the light.

They scream.

The sound is unbearable. It is pitched at a frequency that shakes the leaves off the nearest trees and makes the moss curl. Garros staggers, gasping, his hands clutching at his own chest. The shadows keep pouring out. They dissolve into the air like smoke hitting sunlight, shrieking as they go.

Then they are gone.

Garros stands there, swaying, his eyes wide and glassy. His body looks lighter somehow, like a man who has been wearing invisible chains his entire life and has just had them cut.

The monsterified student uses the opening to charge.

Jacob does not even look at him.

He extends one palm sideways and releases a casual, contemptuous burst of force that catches the corrupted student square in the chest and sends him hurtling hundreds of feet backward through the forest. Trees snap and splinter along the trajectory. The crashing sounds echo and fade into the distance.

Jacob turns back to Garros as if nothing happened.

“The martial art in your bloodline,” Jacob says, his voice calm and clinical. “The White Sky Cypher. It was cursed. By the God of Shadows.”

Garros stares at him.

“Every inheritor of the Hero of Light’s legacy was deliberately sabotaged,” Jacob continues, looking at the shaking boy like he is explaining a math problem. “None of you were ever supposed to reach Stark Blackmere’s level. That was the point. It was woven into the inheritance itself.”

The words do not land immediately. They sit in the air for a moment, too large to process.

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

“How?” Garros’s voice cracks. “How is that even possible? The Cypher is sealed in blood and bone. How could an enemy corrupt something that—”

“Most likely an infiltration,” Jacob replies evenly. “The God of Shadows got into the Hero of Light himself. Into his body, his legacy. He poisoned the thing Stark Blackmere passed down. Every generation after him carried it without knowing.”

Garros looks stunned. His mouth hangs open. His hands are shaking at his sides.

“It appears to be one of the main ways Gods operate,” Jacob says. His expression does not change.

He pauses.

“It happened to my own master as well,” Jacob adds quietly.

Garros looks down at his hands. The hands that could never make the First Form work. The hands his father called talentless. The hands that struck a dummy a hundred times in the dark and never once produced light.

“What does this mean?” Garros asks. “For me. Now.”

“It means you’re going to be able to use the full power of the White Sky Cypher for the first time,” Jacob says.

Garros smiles. It is weak and watery and barely holds together.

“Among all my brothers,” Garros says, “I was always the one with the least talent for the Cypher.”

Jacob smirks.

“The curse worked in reverse,” Jacob says. “The more natural talent you had for the Cypher, the harder it suppressed you.”

Garros blinks.

Garros opens his mouth. He does not know what sound he is about to make.

Before he can find out, a roar tears through the forest.

The monsterified student explodes back out of the treeline. His body is grotesquely swollen with dark sludge. The borrowed magic has climbed past everything it was before. His aura spikes—violently, sickeningly—until even Garros can feel it pressing against his skin.

Early Diamond Rank.

The student lunges at Garros at a speed far beyond anything he showed before.

***

King Skaernex leans forward in his seat so hard the stone bench groans under his weight.

On the magnified mirror, Jacob Cloud has just pressed his palm against the Blackmere boy’s chest. The Black Grimoire hovers beside him, its pages turning on their own, radiating an energy so heavy that even through the projection Skaernex can feel the hairs on his disguised human forearms stand on end.

Then the shadows come out.

They scream

.King Skaernex’s reptilian eyes narrow to slits beneath his disguise.

Primordial Magic, he thinks. That boy just used Primordial Magic.

The arena erupts into chaos. Voices crash over each other like waves.

“What was that?!”

“Did those things come out of him?”

“Is that dark magic? Is the Fake Champion attacking his own partner?!”

“No, look—look at the boy, he’s still standing—”

“Those shadows, they were inside him—”

Skaernex tunes out the noise and watches the mirror with the focus of a predator tracking wounded prey. The shadows dissolve into the air. Garros staggers but stays on his feet. His body looks lighter somehow, like a man who has been wearing invisible chains his entire life and has just had them cut.

On the mirror, the half-monsterified student charges back in. Jacob does not even look at him. He extends one palm sideways. A burst of force—contemptuous, almost lazy—catches the corrupted student in the chest and sends him hurtling hundreds of feet backward through the forest. Trees snap like kindling. The crashing sounds echo and fade.

A stunned silence hits the arena.

Then Jacob turns back to Garros and starts talking.

Skaernex watches Jacob’s mouth move. The words come through the projection with crystal clarity—the Headmaster’s amplification spell is still running, still broadcasting every syllable to fifty thousand ears whether the two boys know it or not.

…

“Every inheritor of the Hero of Light’s legacy was deliberately sabotaged,” Jacob continues, looking at the shaking boy like he is explaining a math problem. “None of you were ever supposed to reach Stark Blackmere’s level. That was the point. It was woven into the inheritance itself.”

…

King Skaernex feels something cold settle in his stomach.

If this is true, Skaernex thinks, his massive intellect turning the implications over like a gemstone under light, then the Blackmere Family’s thousand-year failure to produce another Stark was because of divine sabotage.

The Dragonkin feels an instinctual disgust and tightens his fist a bit too harshly, which creates a small shockwave that makes every turn.

“What was that?!”

“Wait, what just happened?!”

“Are the Dark Champions attacking?!”

King Skaernex looks at Garros on the mirror. The boy is staring at his own hands.

How many Blackmeres threw away their lives trying to break through a wall that was never supposed to break? He wonders. How many of them died thinking they simply were not worthy?

“That’s why he could never use the Skill,” a student whispers somewhere behind Skaernex, her voice trembling.

“It was never his fault,” another says.

“The God of Shadows did this? To the Hero of Light’s bloodline?”

On the mirror, Jacob speaks again.

“Now that the curse is gone,” Jacob tells Garros, “you’re going to be able to use the full power of the White Sky Cypher.”

***

Garros feels the difference in his body immediately.

The absence of the curse is physical. It is like a pressure he never knew existed has been lifted from every vein, every channel, every joint. His mana moves freely for the first time in his life. It does not stutter. It does not hit invisible walls. It does not go thick and slow halfway down his arm.

He does not fully understand what has changed. He just knows that when he grips his sword, the blade feels lighter than it has ever felt.

The monsterified student at Early Diamond Rank crashes toward him at terrifying speed.

Garros’s feet move before his mind catches up.

They slide into the footwork of the White Sky Cypher—the same footwork his father drilled into him as a child, the same patterns that never worked no matter how many nights he spent bleeding in the training courtyard. This time, his body slots into the stances like a key turning in a lock that has been jammed for twenty years.

The Cypher’s footwork is evasive and fluid. It is built around reading an opponent’s momentum and slipping through the gaps between strikes. Garros weaves through the monsterified student’s wild, sludge-bladed swings without retreating a single step. Every attack misses him by inches.

Jacob opens his mouth to call out—an instinct to help. But he immediately stops.

Garros does not need it.

Jacob leans back against the tree and watches.

The monsterified student grows frantic. He cannot land a hit. He throws faster, harder, more recklessly—and Garros keeps sliding past every strike with the same calm, precise footwork.

The monster—formerly the traitorous student—screams like a creature out of hell.

But Garros does not hear any of it.

He is listening to his own body for the first time in his life.

For the first time in his life, his own body is talking to him.

The monsterified student overcommits on a wild lateral slash. His torso is exposed. His sludge-blades are out wide. There is a straight, clean line from Garros’s sword tip to the center of the enemy’s chest.

The same line he aimed at the practice dummy a thousand times in the dark.

Garros freezes.

For a half-second, his body locks. His father’s voice fills the gap—tired, factual, final.

You will never learn this technique.

The mana is already surging up his arm. It is waiting for him to commit. His hand trembles on the hilt.

He thrusts anyway.

Garros executes the Dawn Thrust.

It is not perfect. His back foot is angled wrong. His hip drive fires a fraction too late. The mana does not flow in the clean, unbroken line his brothers produce—it surges in a rough, uneven torrent, too much power flooding channels that have never carried this much before.

White light sputters at the tip of the blade.

It flickers. It almost dies.

And then it catches.

It’s not yet the beautiful light of an hero, but it still holds the glimmer of hope as Garros shouts with all the air in his lung.

“Dawn Thrust!”

A raw, ugly, desperate burst of light fires from the tip of the sword.

The thrust punches into the monsterified student’s chest.

The force of it sends the student skidding backward, his feet carving trenches in the dirt. The sludge around the impact point cracks and splinters. The student staggers, gasping, looking down at the wound.

And then he grins.

The dark sludge begins to crawl back over the hole. Tendrils reach across the gap, the way it has every time before.

The sludge touches the edges of the wound where the white light lingers.

And recoils.

It burns. The tendrils writhe, try again, and shrivel on contact. The darkness cannot seal what the light has touched. For the first time, the regeneration fails. The sludge keeps trying. It keeps dying.

The student stares down at his own chest with genuine incomprehension. The wound stays open. The grin is gone. In its place is something Garros has never seen on that pitch-black face before.

Fear.

The student slowly collapses forward into the dirt.

He does not get back up.

***

In the arena, there is a single beat of absolute silence.

Then the crowd detonates.

Skaernex watches the stands come apart. Students are on their feet—not just cheering, physically incapable of staying seated. They are screaming, grabbing strangers by the shoulders, shaking each other. Many of them have tears streaming down their faces and do not seem to notice or care.

The commoners, the orphans, the bastards—the ones who saw themselves in Garros’s story—are chanting his name so loudly the stone seats vibrate under Skaernex’s boots.

***

Garros stands in the ruined clearing, breathing hard, staring at his own hands.

His arms are shaking. He does not know if it is from the exertion or from something else. He has no idea the entire Academy is watching. He has no idea what he just did. He does not know that the white light means anything special.

He only knows that for the first time in his life, he aimed the Dawn Thrust at something and it worked.

He looks at Jacob.

Jacob is leaning against a tree with his arms crossed, smiling at him.