Global PvP Tower: I Can Infinitely Merge My Units

Logan came back to himself slowly. The water around him was warm instead of cold. Sunlight filtered down through the pond’s surface in broken gold ribbons.

He broke the surface a moment later, gasping once out of pure reflex, before his own body caught up to the fact that nothing was actually wrong with it anymore.

He flexed both hands. He rolled his shoulders. Nothing cracked. Nothing ached. Nothing so much as twinged the way it should have, after whatever his own bones had just gone through.

’Fully healed.’ He let out a breath, half relief, half disbelief. ’Just like that.’

Elder Rishin sat exactly where he’d been sitting before, cross-legged at the water’s edge, watching him with the same unreadable calm as always.

"You died for a second." He said it like a plain fact, nothing more. "Your body couldn’t keep up with what you were asking of it."

Logan pulled himself out of the pond, dripping, and didn’t wait for more.

"I’m going to train you for the next three days." No preamble. No buildup. Just the statement itself as Elder Rishin spoke. "If you succeed, I’ll pass down my sword art in full. If you don’t, you’ll leave with nothing but whatever you already knew coming in."

Logan didn’t hesitate. "I won’t fail."

Something that might have been the ghost of a smile crossed Rishin’s face, gone again before Logan could be sure he’d actually seen it.

"We’ll see."

"First lesson." Rishin rose to his feet without seeming to push off the ground at all. "Your sword should carry you. Not the other way around."

"Right now, every swing you throw starts in your arm and stops there too. The rest of your body just comes along because it has to." He held up one hand, fingers loose. "That’s backward. The power needs to come from everything you are, not just the one limb doing the obvious work."

He didn’t draw a weapon. He simply moved one hand through the air, slow and unhurried, and the wind that stirred around the motion carried a weight that had nothing to do with how fast his hand had actually traveled.

Logan drew Grimlord’s Blade and tried it himself, a slow, deliberate cut through open air. It felt the same as it always had. He also had learned about this, at least he tried to learn how to swing the sword properly, but it wasn’t in the realm that Elder Rishin just showed.

"No." Rishin didn’t even watch the whole swing. "Again."

Logan swung again. And again. Hours bled together into the same repeated motion, Rishin correcting him with a word or two each time, never more than that, never any gentler than that either.

His shoulder burned first. Then his forearm. His grip had started slipping on the hilt, sweat and frustration both working against him in equal measure.

"Wrong." Rishin said it the same way each time, flat and final. "Your hip hasn’t moved properly."

Logan adjusted, overcorrected, threw a swing so wide it nearly spun him clean off his own feet. Rishin didn’t comment on that one at all. He didn’t need to.

Somewhere past the thousandth attempt, something shifted. The swing came out of his hip instead of his shoulder, momentum rolling up through his whole spine before it ever reached his arm, and the air in front of the blade actually pushed back against his own face for the first time.

"Better." One word. It was enough.

"Now. Attack me again." Rishin settled back into his usual stillness. "But don’t just attack. Watch what I do when I answer you. Feel it, if you can. If you can’t even comprehend what I show you, you can’t forget about the sword art."

Logan came at him the same way he had before, and Rishin turned every strike aside the same way he had before too, that same gentle, oppressive pressure meeting each attack and putting him back on the ground a moment later.

But this time, Logan tried to actually watch instead of just reacting.

There was something underneath the motion. Not a technique. Not a stance. Nothing he could point to directly. Something that existed in the space right before Rishin’s hand actually moved, as the swing had already happened somewhere else first, and this was just the part Logan’s eyes were fast enough to catch.

He couldn’t hold onto it. Every time he thought he’d caught the edge of it, it slipped, and he was back on the ground with stone biting into his spine.

"That thing you almost felt just now." Rishin’s voice carried the same flat calm as always, but something about it made Logan’s stomach drop anyway. "That’s Sword Intent. You have twenty-four hours to actually perceive it. Not almost. Not partially. All the way. If you can’t by then, you have no talent for the blade, and nothing I teach you after this point will matter."

Logan’s throat went dry. Twenty-four hours to awaken something he hadn’t even had a name for an hour ago, or walk away from all of this with nothing.

’Then I’ll do it in less than that.’

He didn’t stop. He couldn’t afford to.

Hour after hour, he threw himself at Rishin over and over, ignoring the growing ache in every joint, ignoring the dozens of times his back found the same patch of stone. Somewhere in the fourth hour, his hands started bleeding from how hard he’d been gripping the hilt. He kept going anyway.

Once, close to sunset, he thought he’d caught it. A shape, faint and gold, hanging in the air a fraction of a second before Rishin’s palm actually moved. He lunged toward it, certain, and it dissolved the instant he reached for it directly, dumping him on the ground harder than any of the falls before it.

’Not like that, then.’ He picked himself back up, jaw tight. ’Stop reaching. Just watch.’

By the time the sun started dipping toward the horizon, that flicker of something before Rishin’s swings had stopped being a flicker. It stretched longer each time, a half second, then a full one, then almost long enough for Logan to actually do something about it before the strike landed anyway.

It happened somewhere past midnight. Exhaustion and pain had both burned down into something almost peaceful, his own mind quiet enough for the first time all day to actually notice what had been sitting right in front of him the whole time.

Rishin’s hand moved, and this time Logan saw it. Not the hand itself. The decision behind it, sitting there plain and obvious a full second before the motion actually started, an intention with a shape and a weight all its own, separate from the body that would eventually carry it out, and giving it a whole another layer of power.

Logan’s whole body went still.

"There it is." Rishin’s voice carried something new in it, not quite warmth, but close enough to it. "Sword Intent. You have it now. Late in the day, but well within the window."

The system voice he was used to hearing inside the game rang outside this time.

[You have awakened a Special-rank Talent—Sword Intent.]

[Sword Intent]

Rank: Special (12%)

Effect:

—> Sword Intent is the will behind a sword made so concentrated that reality begins to respond to it as though a sword were actually present. It is a meaning of sword given to the form of sword. All types of Sword-related effectiveness +12%.

"T-This...this actually doubles my power if I reach 100% progression in it?" Logan was in disbelief.

"Indeed."

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