Chapter 701 Fragile?
The blade felt a bit awkward in Ryu’s hand. The saber wasn’t as perfectly balanced as a lot of the swords Ryu had seen, nor was it as long as many of the polearms he had used. But, when it came to using weapons with a single arm, Ryu had more than ample strength to put it into action.
Unlike with the staff game, Ryu failed this bubble game almost immediately. While one relied on something Ryu was intimately familiar with, this was a different case entirely. The experience made Ryu realize that maybe his control wasn’t as great as he thought it was to begin with.
Of course, control wasn’t exactly the problem. Rather, Ryu innately felt that it was the type of control he was executing. Ryu felt that if someone broke down the exact mechanics of how all of this worked, he could likely do it in a single try. However, figuring it all out on your own was a different beast entirely.
Originally, it felt like this had nothing to do with the spear, glaive or halberd, and even less to do with the Great Swordstaff. But, when one thought about it, if deciding what your blade could cut with a sword was so useful, why couldn’t’ this apply to other weapons as well? In fact, it would make very little sense if it couldn’t.
Grasping this, Ryu suddenly felt that Ailsa was very much correct in guiding him to find the truths of each weapon. If he wanted to breathe life into the Great Swordstaff, a weapon with inherently so much balance and versatility, he had to have the breadth of knowledge that fit this.
*POP
Yet another bubble fell beneath Ryu’s blade, but his expression hardly fluctuated as he raised it once more to try again.
When it came to tasks requiring the movement of bubbles, if Ryu wanted to cheat, he could do so. If he simply used the flat of the blade, he could move the bubbles around. However, when it came to splitting the bubbles, that couldn’t be done with the flat of the blade.
On top of this, Ryu didn’t feel there was a point to ‘cheating’ like this. What good would there be in using the flat of the blade? At that point, he’d just become a grown man playing with bubbles rather than training. If he wanted to mess around like that, he might as well blow on the bubbles with his mouth.
Ryu had no idea that it was a good thing he hadn’t tried something so foolish. Whether it was the flat of the blade or the dull edge of the saber, both would cause the bubble to exhibit sticky properties. Once the bubble was stuck, the only way to get rid of it was to pop it. By then, you’d be right back to square one.
Obviously, though, Ryu hadn’t even considered taking this approach. If he couldn’t’ complete this circuit using the sharp edge of this saber, there wasn’t really a point to it.
*POP
The trouble was that the edge of this blade was so sharp that these bubbles couldn’t’ survive the softest of touches. Ryu tried varying his speed, but the result was the same. It wasn’t until he slowed to a fraction of a snails pace that he finally managed to touch a bubble without it collapsing, but by then, the stage lit up with a deep crimson color, signaling that he had failed.
Ryu wasn’t very surprised by this. In fact, he was surprised that he hadn’t failed earlier.
‘This approach is wrong. What’s the point of slowing my blade, it’s not like I can do this in battle. The idea is that my speed shouldn’t matter at all… Or should it?’
Ryu fell into deep thought, oblivious to the worried expression on Yaana’s face.
If one observed Yaana now, one would have thought that Ryu was in mortal peril. She held her hands to her chest, watching intently as though she was holding herself back from going to save him.
Yaana had never seen Ryu fail at anything, at least not really. This was practically a first for her and she was worried that it would be a blow to Ryu.
Seeing her worry, Ailsa couldn’t help but laugh.
If there was anyone who could see Ailsa even while she was in the Ethereal Plane, it was Yaana. As a part Faerie, she had a natural affinity for both Planes. So, when she saw that Ailsa was looking toward her and laughing, her face couldn’t help but blush with embarrassment.
‘Don’t worry too much. He gives out this perfect image to the world, but in reality I’ve lost count of how many times he’s fallen flat on his face. It’s just that his skin is so thick that you question whether it actually happened.’
Yaana was stunned for a moment before she burst into a fit of giggles. She had never seen anyone describe Ryu that way.
The Ryu she knew, even when the entire Tor Kingdom hated him, there was always a tinge of fear hidden in their eyes when they spoke of him, and that was back when he was just a little boy. His own ‘father’ feared him so much that he refused to ever allow him his Awakening Ceremony out of consideration for the likelihood that Ryu would likely one day surpass them all.
And yet, even without their aid, he did exactly that and even single handedly took the Tor Kingdom down, a Kingdom that had reigned for thousands of years, just with a few casual schemes.
Yaana felt that if Ryu ever decided to stop being so straight forward, and stopped being too impatient to spin the truth with his words, he could likely make the entire martial world dance on his blade just with his mind and intelligence alone.
But, she also knew that Ryu had grown tired of being that person. In fact, that person was never the man he had wanted to be to begin with.
He wanted to stand atop that mountain on the merit of his blade, not his tongue.
‘That’s right… What am I so worried about? Is the Ryu I know really so fragile?’
As though on cue, Ryu’s saber swung and touched upon the surface of a shimmering bubble. However, this time, there was no pop sound.