Chương 37: The Girl Who Couldn't Be Hit

The fifty-catty greatsword screamed through the air, dragging a storm of ochre dust behind it, crashing down toward Astra's skull with enough force to split an armored carriage in half. BOOM! The granite floor cracked open into a half-meter crater. Stone dust exploded outward in every direction. But Golan's blade found nothing but empty air. Astra hadn't drawn her sword.

She'd simply tilted her head one centimeter to the right — just enough for the razor edge to graze a lock of her ash-grey hair by a hair's breadth. The wind off the blade whipped her rough cloth sleeve, but her feet, still planted in those scuffed leather boots, hadn't moved a fraction of an inch. Golan's eyes went wide. A veteran swordsman with 1. 8 million Combat Power didn't believe in luck. He roared, twisted his wrist, and swept the greatsword in a lethal arc aimed straight at the girl's waist. Whoosh!

Astra dropped her knees slightly, her whole body bending like a willow branch in the wind. The fifty-catty blade passed less than an inch above the tip of her nose. Whoosh! Whoosh! Whoosh! Golan unleashed thirty-six killing blows in ten straight seconds. Each strike shredded the sand into swirling funnels of dust. Every cut aimed for a vital point — throat, heart, knee joint, windpipe. And through the entire storm, the grey-haired girl drifted like a ghost. She used no mana.

No protective aura, no defensive barrier. Every dodge was reduced to its barest minimum — a tilt of the head, a drop of the shoulder, a fifteen-degree pivot of the heel. Not one wasted motion. Not one wasted drop of sweat. Up in the west VIP section, Lucian bit into his apple and started counting off details on his fingers, his expression growing more twisted by the second. One: according to Sylvia's briefing, she was an orphan found near the edge of a forest. Textbook trope.

Two: center of gravity kept low, footwork with zero wasted inertia — the stance of a wild wolf stalking prey? (Textbook backstory.) Three: every time she dodges, her wrist angle is auto-copying and optimizing Golan's own sword line? (One-glance skill mimicry, classic.) Lucian pressed a hand to his forehead, swallowing his bite of apple like it was a mouthful of gravel. Oh, this is bad. This girl's a walking compilation of every tired hero trope he'd read in his previous life.

Who wrote this script for her and phoned it in this hard?! Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings. Down on the arena floor, Golan had started gasping for air. Thirty-six full-power swings through empty space had drained his mana reserves badly, and the arm holding his greatsword was starting to shake from muscle overload. The instant Astra caught his breath catching for exactly 0. 2 seconds after a missed swing, she stepped in — half a step forward.

She drew the plain, dull iron sword at her hip. No ring of steel. She simply flipped it in her grip and tapped the flat of the blade, once, gently, against a pressure point on the back of Golan's right hand. Clack. A dry little knock, light as chopsticks tapping a bowl. The hand holding his greatsword went completely numb. His fingers sprang open on their own. The fifty-catty blade dropped straight down, burying itself in the loose sand.

Astra slid her iron sword back into its burlap sheath, stepped back, and bowed at a perfect ninety degrees to the frozen, dumbstruck knight in front of her.

"Sorry about that. I didn't mean to hurt your hand." Golan stared at his numb hand, then at the sword stuck in the ground, then at the girl's sincere, utterly guileless face. The sheer humiliation, combined with the mana backlash surging through his system, sent his blood pressure spiking. Splat! Golan coughed up a mouthful of fresh blood, eyes rolling back, and collapsed onto the sand — unconscious from pure rage. The entire arena fell into absolute silence.

None of the hundred thousand spectators dared say a word. A match between a 1. 8-million-Combat-Power fighter and a 400, 000-Combat-Power fighter had just ended with the weaker side never throwing a single attack — only dodging thirty-six sword strikes, then tapping her opponent once and making him so furious he coughed blood and passed out. In the honored seating, the Grand Mages of the Academy of Magic shot to their feet, whispering to each other in bewilderment.

"Is she using some kind of invisibility artifact?"

"There's no mana fluctuation at all! She's running on pure body reflex!"

"It can't be... that's 'Divine Battle Instinct' — that only exists in myth!" Down on the floor, the referee raised a trembling hand into the air.

"Competitor Golan is unable to continue! Winner... ASTRA!" The crowd's cheering exploded late, but thunderous once it hit. Every eye, every arcane recording lens, turned toward the grey-haired girl, who waved back at the crowd with visible awkwardness, then dug into her pocket to check whether her half-eaten sweet potato had gotten crushed while she was dodging. Up in the VIP section, Lucian tossed aside his apple core, his dark eyes narrowing into sharp, thin lines.

His old finance instincts told him one thing: numbers this strange always had something underneath them. A body with only 411, 000 Combat Power on paper had no business owning joint control and neural reflexes clean enough to dodge thirty-six strikes from a 1. 8-million fighter without any visible change in her breathing or pulse. Something was being hidden. Something enormous, absurdly so, buried underneath that rough cloth. Layered Focus: Activate.

Spell Control: 95, 200, 000, 000 points — opening full micro-perception bandwidth. Lucian didn't blink. From a fingertip hidden beneath his cloak, a wave of mana perception thinner than a ten-thousandth of a strand of hair — invisible, leaving no sound, no air pressure — shot across the two-hundred-meter arena and swept straight through Astra's soul and mana channels, the very instant her foot touched the sand.