Reincarnated As A Dragon With A Godly Inheritance

He shrugged. "Your enemy won't dance to your whims."

"Fine." Taria unleashed her essence. Her eyes glowed, and yellow light flowed around her, not in thin layers this time, but as a wave of bursting radiance.

She took a step forward and vanished.

"So fast!" Thalso turned on instinct, raising his sword. Metal rang against metal as Taria slammed her spear down on his blade.

The floor cracked beneath his feet. Such strength! She must be using her full core patterns. Strength and Lightness combined.

Then came the furious thrusts, driving Thalso back step by step. He simply couldn't fully defend against such speed, and without armor, he knew he'd already be bleeding in several places.

"You win," Thalso said.

Taria stopped. For a moment, it almost seemed as though echoes of her spear, shadows of strikes, still hung in the air.

"She's been holding out on us," Kaedros called across the room to Rauk. They had stopped their own fight with their instructors to watch.

"Seems so," Rauk replied, smashing another golem that Chef had sent his way.

Thalso laughed. "That she did."

Taria was breathing hard, her body slick with sweat, her training robe clinging to her frame. But she was grinning. "That was my most powerful technique. I combine strength and speed to the maximum and strike the opponent—sometimes in a single thrust, sometimes in multiple thrusts that seem to come from everywhere at once."

"Hmmm," Thalso said. "Single thrust?"

Taria coughed. "It might seem like a single thrust, but it's actually seven, packed so fast together it looks like one."

Thalso dusted at his already spotless armor. "How fast?"

This time Taria grinned. "Seven thrusts, three blinks."

Thalso nodded. Three blinks for seven thrusts was something immense. Combined with her strength, it was deadly and he was glad he was the one training her.

If the first thrust didn't work, the second would. And if that failed, there were still five more. Seven strikes packed into one relentless assault.

"But using that much strength and speed so quickly will drain a lot of essence."

"That's the price of a good technique," Taria replied.

"Have you named it yet? No? Then I'll gladly offer one—if you don't mind. What about Whispering Rain?" Thalso cleared his throat awkwardly.

Taria's smile was bright and free, full of gratitude for his training and the motivation he'd given her. She bowed deeply. "Then it is Whispering Rain."

To mark the moment, she lowered her spear until the tip hovered just above the floor. Yellow light wrapped around her, flowing like a living thing.

Then she performed Whispering Rain.

If you didn't have eyes sharp enough to track her, you would have thought it was a single thrust, but in truth, the spear struck the same spot seven times within three blinks.

The ground exploded, shards of stone flying as a smoking crater formed at her feet.

Rauk heard the loud bang of Taria's technique and saw the way the floor shivered, but he had his hands busy defending himself against the golem that carried and used weapons with the well-practiced swiftness of their master, Chef.

But Rauk was familiar with their fighting style, so he danced among them with nothing but his long sword covered in grey arcane that rippled with the energy of the spatial.

The energy was sharp, and each swing of his sword sent golem body parts flying.

Chef watched from her place, surrounded by rocks the size of small houses. She had made a portal earlier and offloaded the rocks.

Idly, she sipped from her bottle and, with her other hand, molded more golems that jerked to life, immediately going after Rauk.

"This is no challenge for you, eh?" Dark eyes glittered as she drank more, then finally left the bottle to dangle by her waist. She pulled the large knife from her back.

Chef jumped on a sizable rock and floated up, then froze and hissed. "I'm supposed to fight you with the power level of low rank two."

Rauk watched, baffled, as she floated back down, opened her portal, and pulled all the large rocks back in, leaving only one house-sized rock behind.

Even the golems had been cleared.

Then she raised her knife. The knife was the size of a short sword with a single shiny edge. "Let's begin."

The rock shuddered and broke, pieces floating around her as an invisible current moved her clothes. The pieces shifted and molded until long rocks like stakes with sharpened tips faced Rauk.

She brought down her knife, and the rocks fired at him with terrible speed, but he wasn't bothered because [Heaven's Breath] surrounded him, a spatial smoke of grey.

The rocks slammed into the shield, sounding like stone against metal, but they bounced off to Rauk's relief. Chef had followed her attack.

Her knife parted his shield like butter, and it was all he could do to take her next strike with his sword. His hand vibrated, warmth running through it, so he returned with an overhead swing of his own, grunting in satisfaction as he watched Chef give ground.

Rauk's sword was a massive chunk of metal the same height as him, both edges gleaming with a sharpness briefly covered in spatial energy. Each of his swings carried enough weight to split three heads together without any arcane.

Rauk carried and used the sword with one hand.

Chef narrowed her eyes as she kept defending, not getting the opportunity to get close to him because of his reach. Their steel rang in the room as their weapons scraped against each other.

She had to get close to him to take a swipe with her knife, and the weakness of Rauk's weapon—despite its power—was that once you got inside his guard, it was finished.

So Chef gestured, and a large chunk of rock floated above them. Then she used a formation for the first time; the rock molded into a platform that tried to crush Rauk.

With his sword raised to block the platform from above, Chef drove in, her knife seeking flesh. A blurring sword flashed in front of her and darted back as a series of slashes stopped her.

"What?" Chef growled as she hopped back. "How can you cut my rocks and fight me at the same time?"

Rauk didn't dust away the small rocks covering him, making his hair white with grit. "You think I did not notice my sword's limitations? It's long and can only be used in a wide area, and the fight ends when you get inside my guard because of it."

Then he grinned and pointed his sword. Instead of the length of metal the same height as him, what he was holding was a short sword, the tip looked as if it had been cut straight off, trailing grey smoke.

At the same time, the other end of the sword—tip first—flashed in front of Chef, driving her back as if Rauk himself held the sword and not that half of a sword just hung in the air.

"You see? I can hide half of my sword in space and make it smaller. Also, use the other half to fight. It's complex since the sword isn't cut into two," Rauk brought up his sword, and the other half did as he was doing, as if they were connected by some unseen force. "See?"

Chef grunted, hiding her impressed expression behind a scowl. "And so? It's just like you are holding a long sword. Nothing special!"

Rauk grinned, and the upper half of his sword that was close to Chef disappeared, vanishing in a cloud of grey smoke—only to appear behind her, straight for her neck. A small hardened rock stopped it from reaching her.

"So you can do that?" Chef narrowed her eyes. It was hard to keep her expression stoic. "You can control the other half sword independently? It would have been nice if you could add more swords."

Indeed, Rauk had stored two swords in his spatial space that he had tried to control, but it seemed he couldn't with his current core. No matter!

Rauk exploded forward, his sword shorter than before, and met Chef with a smile on his lips. They fought, each trying their best to get past the other's defense, but it was difficult.

Chef was faster than Rauk, but now that Rauk was using two swords, he easily kept her back as each weapon worked simultaneously.

It was hard, though, he had to stretch his mind to keep the formation that allowed him to "cut" his sword without actually cutting it, and he had to send a constant stream of mental commands to make it move as he wanted.

Even now, Rauk was slowing down as the pull on his core became massive, especially with the sword arcane blast he was preparing.

Then he did the Flow, readied his core, and unleashed an arcane blast, the big one, with both swords.

Arcane sword blasts, several times taller than Chef, appeared in front of her and behind her simultaneously. Too close and too fast for her to dodge, the force slammed into her with enough arcane to cut rocks in two.

But the two arcane blasts just washed off her like water over an egg. Her eyes glowed a thick green, and she smiled. "You win, Rauk. I've been forced to use more than low rank two."