"You're slower than you used to be," Yulo said, his tone neither mocking nor kind — just true.
The two men stood in the courtyard's hollow, their breath rising like ghosts in the pale morning light. The mist had thinned, yet the air still carried that strange stillness before a storm. Around them, hundreds watched in silence. Even the birds had vanished from the trees.
Yonas chuckled softly, rolling his shoulders as if the years of burden weighed only as much as his sword. "Maybe," he said. "Or maybe you're finally fast enough to notice."
Yulo smiled faintly — the kind of smile that belonged more to memory than to the present. "You never change, brother."
"And you always do," Yonas replied.
For a moment, there was no tension — only two men who had shared the same fire, the same blood, the same childhood sparring matches under the same old cedar tree, for a mere moment they remember it all and they remember how it all come to this, now the only thing they share is blood. As the air shifted, so did their eyes. Familiarity gave way to reverence, and reverence to distance. The ritual demanded it.
Steel rose again.
The dance resumed.
Their blades clashed in a storm of light and weight. The Dàdāo roared through the air — each strike heavy enough to shatter bone — while Yulo's Tachi moved with god-like precision, redirecting force instead of meeting it. Sparks scattered across the stone like fireflies before dawn.
To the untrained eye, it was chaos.
To Abel, watching from the edge of the courtyard, it was… language.
A language he didn't yet understand.
The sound of the Dàdāo carried differently this time — less like a weapon and more like a voice. Every impact seemed to speak something: power, duty, fatigue, and something else, something Abel couldn't name — sorrow, perhaps.
Yonas stepped forward, pivoted, and brought the flat of his blade low, parrying a clean stroke from Yulo. Their gazes met — brief, piercing, and full of words neither man could speak aloud.
"Still holding back?" Yonas murmured.
"You'd call it respect," Yulo said.
Yonas's jaw tightened. "Respect doesn't dull the edge."
"No," Yulo said, lowering his stance, "but sometimes it keeps the blade from breaking."
The ground cracked beneath them when they met again. Dust spiraled, sunlight flickered through the drifting haze. To Abel, it was like watching two forces of nature — fire and tide — learning, for a heartbeat, to coexist.
And then something changed.
Yonas exhaled. It wasn't a sigh — it was a release. The kind of breath that precedes something irreversible.
His eyes darkened, not in malice, but in gravity. The tension in his shoulders eased, replaced by an unnatural calm.
Yulo stepped back instinctively. "...You're serious."
"I have to be," Yonas said quietly. "They need to see."
The crowd had fallen utterly silent. Even Abel forgot to breathe.
The wind began to circle the courtyard, carrying with it faint whispers — the kind that weren't really there but made the mind tremble anyway.
Yonas raised his Dàdāo slowly. The blade caught the light — not just reflected it, drank it. Every etching, every dragon motif along the steel, began to shimmer faintly gold. The silk at the hilt fluttered, though there was no gust strong enough to move it.
Abel frowned.
He didn't understand what he was seeing.
"What is—" someone whispered behind him.
"Quiet," hissed another. "He's using it."
Use what?
Then Yonas spoke a single word — a name.
"...EIDEN."
The courtyard seemed to tilt.
Abel's breath hitched. His eyes couldn't track the movement. One instant, Yonas was there — the next, gone.
He didn't blink. He couldn't. His senses rebelled against him, trying to make sense of something they weren't built to see.
The mist bent around Yonas's form, drawn inward, compressed by an unseen gravity. The air turned sharp and heavy, filled with a hum that scraped against the inside of the skull. Even Yulo's stance faltered — from fear.
That name.
That technique.
Eiden.
It wasn't just a strike.
It was the memory of one.
The blade moved once — or maybe it never moved at all. Abel couldn't tell. All he saw were footprints where there hadn't been any a second before, faint streaks carved into the ground, and then — a sound.
Not a clash. Not a cry.
A tear.
Reality itself seemed to draw breath and flinch. The pressure wave that followed slammed into Abel's chest, sending a rush of wind through the entire courtyard. Banners snapped, tiles cracked, and still, Yonas hadn't taken a second step.
Yulo's Tachi hung in the air, frozen mid-parry. For a heartbeat, the entire world waited.
The ground between them split — a thin, clean line stretching several meters across the courtyard.
Perfect. Precise.
Unnatural.. Unreal.
No flame. No light. Just aftermath.
Abel's mouth went dry.
He'd seen Stipo fight until the air burned; he'd seen masters move faster than thought. But this… this was different. This wasn't speed. This was inevitability.
The Dàdāo lowered, steam rising faintly from its edge.
Yonas's chest rose and fell with the slow, deliberate rhythm of someone who had just carried centuries in a single swing.
Yulo stood unmoving, his Tachi trembling just slightly — a line of red marking his cheek, shallow but precise. A warning, not a wound.
His expression didn't falter. "You shouldn't have used it."
Yonas smiled, tiredly. "I had to remind them."
"Or yourself?" Yulo asked angrly.
Yonas didn't answer.
The crowd still didn't move. The elders' eyes glimmered — some with reverence, others with fear. The technique of a clan head was sacred, rarely witnessed, never spoken of aloud. To see it… was to remember the old stories. The dragons. The burning skies. The extinction that had bought their peace.
Abel swallowed hard. He hadn't even seen the attack. He'd only felt the echo of it. And even that had shaken him to the core.
So this was the power that ended the age of beasts.
The power that built empires and erased them, a clan technique.
He couldn't decide if it inspired him — or terrified him.
Yonas exhaled, planting the Dàdāo into the earth. The blade hissed faintly as the steel met the cracked stone. The golden engravings dimmed back to quiet bronze.
He looked at Yulo, and for the first time that morning, there was something like sadness in his face.
"Thank you," Yonas said.
Yulo tilted his head. "For what?"
"For reminding me that I'm still human."
Yulo sheathed his sword with a single motion, the sound cutting through the silence like a seal closing. "Then don't forget it again."
The wind carried their words away.
Abel stared at the mark carved into the earth — that thin, perfect line that didn't bleed dust or stone, only stillness. He didn't know what to call what he felt. Awe? Fear? Maybe both.
He wanted to look away but couldn't.
The world felt wider now. He felt smaller — yet somehow, not weaker.
Somewhere inside his chest, his own energy stirred faintly, uncertain but alive.
As if answering something ancient that had just awakened.
And for the first time since he could remember, Abel didn't flinch from it.
He listened.
To be continued…