Transmigration: I Made A Deal With A Man in Yellow

I reset my stance and tried again.

This time, I moved slower.

One step.

Pivot.

Shift my weight.

Then move again.

After repeating it several times, the movement slowly started feeling less unnatural.

Friede used these light steps to glide across the battlefield, either closing the distance or retreating before I could properly react.

Even when she moved backward, she rarely gave me an actual opening.

That was something I hadn’t noticed during the fight.

Whenever she retreated, I assumed she was giving up ground.

She wasn’t.

She was baiting me.

Several memories immediately came to mind where Friede had slowly drifted backward, making it look as though I had forced her onto the defensive.

Every single time, I followed her.

And every single time...

I got punished for it.

"Ah."

I stopped moving.

"So that’s what you were doing."

I had thought I was pressuring her.

In reality, she had been deciding exactly where she wanted me to stand.

Sometimes she would retreat just enough to make me lunge forward, then suddenly reverse her momentum and counterattack.

Other times, she would dodge one of my attacks while keeping her scythe moving, causing me to assume I had an opportunity to chase her.

That mistake had earned me more than a few cuts.

She wasn’t simply dodging.

Her dodges were attacks as well.

I remembered one particular movement where she had avoided my strike by pivoting around her lead foot.

Instead of stopping afterward, she continued rotating her body and allowed the momentum to whip her scythe around toward my neck.

I had barely ducked beneath it.

Another time, the same movement had almost taken my arm off.

I planted my lead foot against the ground and tried copying the rotation.

My body turned, and the scythe followed behind me.

Swoosh!

The blade swept around in a wide circle.

I frowned.

Too wide.

I tried again, keeping my elbows closer and making the pivot tighter.

Swoosh!

Much better.

The rotational force made the scythe feel lighter than before, and suddenly I understood why Friede could produce such powerful swings without relying entirely on physical strength.

"Centrifugal force..."

Interesting.

I repeated the movement several more times until I could perform it without almost throwing myself off balance.

Her aerial movements were another problem.

Whenever Friede bent her knees deeply and lowered her body, she was usually preparing to launch herself somewhere.

Sometimes it was a sudden gap closer.

Other times, she would leap high into the air and change her attack halfway through the jump.

That had caught me off guard repeatedly.

Normally, once someone jumped, their movement became much easier to predict.

They couldn’t suddenly change direction without some kind of ability.

Friede compensated for that by controlling her body and scythe so well that I couldn’t immediately tell when she intended to attack.

She would leap, raise her scythe...

And wait.

That tiny delay was enough.

I would dodge based on when I expected the attack to come, only for her to strike a fraction of a second later.

Or sometimes she wouldn’t delay at all.

She was messing with my timing.

"Oh, you’re a baiter."

I couldn’t help but smile.

That explained a lot.

Her entire fighting style was filled with small traps.

Sometimes she made me believe she was dodging when she was actually positioning herself for another attack.

Other times, she deliberately showed me an incoming strike and forced me to defend against it, only to change direction at the last moment and attack the opening my defense had created.

Even her recovery after a heavy swing was calculated.

I replayed several memories and noticed the same pattern.

Whenever Friede committed to a powerful attack and missed, she would lightly step backward on her toes while pulling the scythe close to her body.

That single movement returned her to a defensive position almost immediately.

That was why I had never been able to properly punish her missed attacks.

There was barely any recovery time.

"So even when you miss, you’re already preparing for me to counterattack."

That was annoying.

Very annoying.

I continued replaying the memories until another pattern became obvious.

Whenever Friede lowered herself unusually close to the ground and compressed her stance, I needed to get away from her immediately.

That was usually followed by one of her explosive forward leaps.

Sometimes she attacked with the scythe.

Sometimes she grabbed me.

And sometimes...

I rubbed my chest as I remembered several particularly painful encounters.

She punched me.

Despite having slender arms and hands that looked almost fragile, Sister Friede’s physical strength was ridiculous.

I had learned that lesson several times already, especially after the punch that had crushed my ribs and lungs.

Never judge a book by its cover, I guess.

I opened my eyes and looked at the black scythe in my hands.

I wasn’t going to master Sister Friede’s fighting style today.

That was impossible, and pretending otherwise would only get me killed again.

But I didn’t need to master it.

I just needed to understand it well enough to stop falling for the same tricks.

The next time she drifted backward, I wouldn’t blindly chase her.

If she pivoted on her lead foot, I would know a rotational attack was probably coming.

If she lowered her stance, I would prepare for her to suddenly close the distance.

And most importantly, I needed to stop treating every dodge she made as an opening.

Against Sister Friede, even retreating was part of the attack.

I tightened my grip around the scythe and returned to my stance.

"Alright."

I pictured Sister Friede standing in front of me again.

"Let’s go through it one more time."

Then I moved.

I followed every single movement she had used during our fights, or at least tried to.

But it wasn’t easy at all.

In my mind, everything she did looked effortless.

But it only looked that way because she made it look easy.

After all, she was a veteran.

She had been fighting for so long that even both of my lives combined couldn’t compare to a fraction of her experience.

Okay, now I’m talking too much about her toes.

But yeah, you get the comparison.

For her to reach that level of skill, she had most likely failed and lost countless battles.

After all, to become great at something, you needed to fail countless times.

So I knew she must have trained endlessly to reach such a level with the scythe.

I didn’t know how many attempts it had taken her, but I was pretty certain most of her skill had been forged through battles where a single mistake could’ve killed her.

Back in those times, the world of Estoria was extremely dangerous.

Kingdoms hadn’t been properly established yet, and most of the world was ruled by abominations.

People had to fight horrors and other dangers every single day just to survive.

They didn’t have as many powerful humans as we did now, nor had the other races joined hands with humanity to fight against the monsters.

Humans were among the weakest back then, and throughout the millennia, there had been many times when they had almost been wiped out completely.

So the world back then was no joke compared to now, where nobles tried to flex their power against one another.

Nobles in those times didn’t have the luxury of worrying about things like that.

They had to worry about survival.

That probably explained why young warriors from that era were far more skilled than many people from the current generation.

If you were weak, you simply wouldn’t survive in that era.

Sister Friede had been a powerful warrior.

A warrior forgotten by time.

And a failed hero who had been forgotten along with it.

As the hours passed, I learned more and more about Sister Friede’s movements.

Thanks to my Gift, [Calm Mind], my thoughts remained clear no matter how mentally exhausting the task became.

So I kept analyzing our fights without much difficulty.

But understanding her techniques in my mind was completely different from making my body perform them.

The mind wasn’t the same as the body.

Nevertheless, I kept going until I reached my limits.

I swung the scythe again and again, each swing cutting through the air with a loud swoosh and leaving a dark streak behind it.

Every once in a while, I looked over my shoulder just to make sure Sister Friede hadn’t come out of the church to kill me while I was training.

She was probably wondering what I was doing.

Well, I’m training to beat you!

My figure blurred forward, backward, and sideways as I repeated the movements over and over again.

Time passed.

And I was tired as hell.

Since only my soul was here instead of my real body, I didn’t need to eat.

I could get tired, but I couldn’t get hungry.

I felt like one of those immortal cultivators who didn’t need to eat anything for hundreds of years and only needed Qi to stay alive.

I had no idea how many days had passed.

I didn’t have my pocket watch with me, and I couldn’t tell whether the sun was out because the dark clouds above never disappeared, leaving the entire place constantly dim.

The training never stopped.

I swung my scythe until calluses formed across my hands, until my wrists ached, and until the skin on my palms turned red.

Until sweat covered my entire body.

And fucking hell...

I stank.

There was no water around for me to take a bath, and I didn’t have my spatial ring with me to pull any out.

"Now I just smell like Ezio!"

Days turned into weeks, and the smell became so bad that even I had to cover my nose.

But a bad smell wasn’t going to stop me from training.

...

Meanwhile back at the ruins...

Ezio scratched his left ear which was suddenly itchy.

"Huh, is someone talking badly about me?"

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