Once Jack stepped through the door, everything was as he had seen from outside, darkness. Complete darkness. He was unsure of where to go since he could not see anything. He turned around and found that the door he had come in from had disappeared.
‘I didn’t hear the doors getting closed,’ he thought as he extended his hand out to touch the door. There was nothing. He only took one step through the door, no way he couldn’t touch the door. He walked back several steps with his two hands stretched out like a blind man walking to prevent himself from bumping into the wall, but there was nothing at all.
Suddenly dim light illuminated his surroundings. He could see things now. Yet, there was also emptiness as far as his eyes could see.
‘This is familiar,’ Jack thought after seeing the surroundings.. This place was a constructed dimension like the one he had fought Eldingar in.
As he was observing his surroundings, he realized something else as well. His gears. All the armors on his body were not the ones he wore when he came through the door. There were also two common-looking longswords hanging on both sides of his waist.
He tried to access his inventory but was unable to. He could open his status window though to look at his equipment stats. All the armors on his body were common grades, including the two longswords on his waist. So it was as Peniel had said before. His advantage in equipment was nullified in this test.
Since he couldn’t equip a magic staff, his Mage skills were useless here, but Peniel also said that he couldn’t use any skill at all. He unsheathed one of the swords and tried to execute Flame Strike. No fire appeared. So, standard equipment and no skills. Most of his edges had been nullified in this trial.
As he was still pondering, a figure appeared on his right. It was a figure of a fit man without any feature. His body was fully naked with a smooth surface, even his face was empty. Jack felt he was looking at a mannequin that came to life. That mannequin didn’t have any equipment at all except for one long sword on his right hand.
‘A fighting test, my favorite,’ Jack thought as he prepared to engage the doll creature. But a movement caught his eyes from the opposite direction. He turned and saw another mannequin appearing on his left. The only difference this new one had was it was holding its longsword in its left hand.
The two approached Jack with the exact same pace. Jack took a few steps back to observe the two. Seeing these two was like seeing two creatures mirroring each other. These creatures suddenly lunged.
The two had been moving at the exact same way and speed all this time albeit mirroring each other, but when they attacked, the two performed different slashes. One did a horizontal slash while the other did a vertical. Jack hurriedly unsheathed his two swords. He just barely managed to parry the two’s attacks.
Before Jack had the time to recover from these first attacks, the two each sent slashes at an angle which caused Jack to have difficulty blocking one if he blocked the other. The two continued to attack, at one time one increased in speed, the other had its pace slower. This imbalance caused Jack to have trouble following their rhythms and got hit several times.
Without any battle skills to rely on, Jack was having trouble. He tried to disengage to take time to review his two opponents better, but the two didn’t give him the luxury. One dogged after him with a string of unceasing assaults while the other circled around to cut off his path of escape.
‘Stay calm, stay calm,” Jack told himself as he continued to parry the barrages of the two. From the clashes, he estimated that the two mannequins were roughly the same stats as a standard level 30 Warrior. However, their movements and attack patterns indicated that they were better than the average martial expert standard.
During Jack’s training of the Formless Flowing Sword style inside the Valley of Tempus, he was not only shadow training all the time, but he also practiced the style against the group of Living Shadows and on some occasions, had a spar with his grandfather.
Comparing this with when he was sparring against his grandfather, these two mannequins were nothing. What caused him to suffer was because his opponents were two and the two fully utilized their duet. Jack was not alien to fighting against more than one opponent, but these two acted as if they were of one mind. Their coordination was very fluid, when one show a weak point, the other would cover for it. When one forced an opportunity, the other would capitalize on it with deadly precision. Jack had never met two distinct opponents who could cooperate to this level.
It was pointless to analyze and tried to find weaknesses in one of the two when those weaknesses were quickly covered by the other. He calmed and emptied his mind as he focused on reacting to his two opponents’ attacks. He matched each slash of his opponents with his own slash. It was sloppy at first, but he got better with each clash.
The fluidity of his Formless Flowing Sword style started to take shape with each parry. Not only that, as he tried to concentrate his mind on two separate opponents, he found that he had no problem. It was similar to when he was forming several runes in a spell formation at the same time. His mind watched both opponents with equal attention.
While his opponents were like two bodies of one mind, he was the opposite. He felt as if two minds were controlling his one body. One mind was controlling his right hand as it dealt with the opponent on the right, while the other mind was controlling his left hand as it dealt with the opponent on the left.
Each hand struck and moved without getting imbalanced or affected by the other. This was what his grandfather had mentioned as the pinnacle of dual-wielding.
Dual-wielding, whether melee weapons or firearms, though was practiced in martial arts, was almost never used in the military. The reason was its impracticality. Using two guns with each hand had a much lower accuracy rate compared to a single gun’s handling. Even for melee weapons, it was difficult to utilize two weapons at the same time. Most practiced one long weapon on the dominant hand, with the short weapon on the other hand mainly acted as support.
To be able to utilize the way he handled both weapons in his hands the same as he did now, was something that should be rarely achievable in real life. He never thought that his talent, Hundred Synchronous Thoughts, which was meant to assist him in his simultaneous rune casting, would also become a significant ability that helped him perfect this dual-wielding style.
With two thoughts engaging the two separate opponents, Jack had no problem keeping up with their variative attack patterns. Additionally, as he fought the two, he got accustomed to their mana flow. He could sense their attacks even when they got into his blind spots.
As the fight continued, he was even started to be at an advantage. He slowly changed from defense to offense, his application of the Formless Flowing Sword became more aggressive.
Each parry was followed by a slash, which would then continue on and on. His two opponents ended up being forced into defensive postures more and more. The situation had slowly been reversed.
As Jack was fully absorbed in the style, twenty-four sword light flashes in an abrupt instant. Each slash cut a deep gash at the unprotected parts of the mannequins’ bodies.
Damage numbers appeared in rapid succession. One thing that he noticed, however, the damage that appeared at the later parts was much higher compared to the first. The twenty-four slashes should have all been counted as normal attacks, so their damages should not be that far off from each other.
‘Is it some kind of combo multiplier?’ Jack thought. There had been instances where he inflicted rapid damages on enemies, but that was due to skill. Was it that if it was done using normal attacks in rapid succession, the damages were increased.
As this thought came to him, he tested his theory by unleashing the instant twenty-four slashes of his Formless Flowing Sword. The same result was seen, the damage by the end of the combos produced a higher number.
He focused himself and executed two twenty-four instant slashes back to back. However, the start of his second batch of attacks had reverted to normal. It appeared that the window required to produce this effect of combo multiplier was very short. Normal combo hits were nowhere fast enough to produce such a result. That was why he never realized this feature until now. The speed required to activate this combo multiplier was inhuman, but it was exactly what the burst type of his Formless Flowing Sword could achieve.
In other words, if his Formless Flowing Sword reached phase two where he could execute forty-eight instant slashes, the combo multiplicator would become even more insane.
With this revelation, he continued to unleash his sword style. Perfecting it with each move. Another thing he realized, in this constructed space, he didn’t get fatigued as much as he did when he performed the Formless Flowing Sword’s burst attack in the outside world.
This trial had instead become a perfect practice place for him to improve his Formless Flowing Sword style. He couldn’t wait to achieve the higher phase of this martial art.
