Chapter 100

His sword felt like lead in his hands. Just maintaining his stance and keeping the blade from sagging was an exercise in pure exhaustion.

Even for Harold, whose daily training was nothing short of inhuman, his physical limits were fast approaching.

The battle had been raging for over an hour. Had he been merely fighting, he could have handled it, but a life-or-death struggle against an opponent of equal strength was a different matter entirely. Wielding a heavy longsword for this long was taxing his mental fortitude as much as his muscles.

Harold might have had the advantage in speed, but Vincent’s strikes were precise and devastating. Even a single clean hit through his guard would be enough to end the fight. To make matters worse, that precision was only sharpening as the duel continued.

Harold had been forced to block several times when evasion was impossible, and the sheer mass and strength behind Vincent’s swings allowed damage to bleed through his guard. His left hand was so severely numbed that he had long since lost his grip on his black straight sword, leaving it forgotten on the cavern floor.

While he was relieved to know he could at least block the attacks without being cleaved in two instantly, his entire body creaked in protest, and his face threatened to contort with agony.

Gasping for air and bloodied from countless minor lacerations, Harold was the very definition of battered. The intensity of his clash with Vincent had reached a fever pitch.

Vincent raised his massive greatsword—a weapon reminiscent of a zanbato—high above his head. Based on the distance between them, Harold should have been safe, yet the blade suddenly pulsed with a pale blue aura. Recognizing the danger, Harold immediately leapt back to widen the gap.

Ignoring the distance, Vincent brought the sword down with a thunderous impact.

The ground shattered, the stone floor peeling upward with a heavy, crushing roar.

The raw power was absurd, but the true threat lay elsewhere. Immediately after the sword struck the earth, the space surrounding Harold began to warp. It was high-density compressed air, a vacuum created by the sheer pressure of Vincent’s swing.

An instant later, the air turned to plasma and detonated.

"Blast Dust Sword."

It was one of the few long-range skills Vincent possessed in the Original Story.

Harold evaded the explosion by a hair’s breadth. In the game, the attack power wasn't particularly high, but that was only "by Vincent's standards." It was not a move anyone should take willingly.

Furthermore, in the game, the skill only generated a single meter-wide sphere of plasma at a fixed distance. Here, the plasma erupted randomly in a wide, fan-shaped arc from the point of impact. The area of effect was significantly larger than in the Original Story and far harder to dodge; the delay between the spatial distortion and the explosion was less than a second.

Getting hit even once meant an almost certain follow-up that would end the life of the victim.

Since when does swinging a sword generate plasma?! Harold nearly spat the complaint aloud, momentarily ignoring the hypocrisy of a man whose own movements already spat in the face of physics.

On second thought, they were both equally guilty. This was a fantasy world, after all.

Despite appearances, the situation was at a stalemate. In fact, considering Vincent was more heavily injured than Harold, one could argue Harold had the upper hand.

Through a meticulous hit-and-away strategy, Harold had been chipping away at the gaps and thin points of Vincent's armor. He had already managed to shatter most of the reinforced plating beneath the outer shell.

The proof was in the visible wounds and the steady flow of blood staining Vincent’s form.

(And yet, he isn't slowing down at all...!)

If anything, Vincent was adapting. He continued to mutter "Priority to elimination" in a broken, hollow tone. With neither reason nor ego left, he was likely ignoring pain and fatigue entirely, which explained why his performance hadn't degraded.

Usually, someone in such a state would become reckless or predictable. While Vincent’s expressionless mask reminded Harold of Lilium or Ventus, his fighting style was far from their mechanical, linear patterns.

Harold's initial plan was to use feints and distractions from outside Vincent's reach to create an opening, dive in for a strike, and retreat. However, after several repetitions, Vincent had begun timing counters to Harold's lunges.

When Harold dodged the counter to continue his assault, Vincent used the counter as a feint, predicting Harold’s evasion and catching him where he landed.

He hadn't been able to dodge that one. Blocking it with his sword had sent him flying several meters.

If Lilium and her cohort were industrial robots repeating a pre-set program, Vincent was a machine learning through AI. The difference was night and day.

As the fight progressed, Harold was finding it harder and harder to land a blow.

(...Wait. Is he actually learning?)

It had started as a metaphor in his head, but a localized bad omen—the kind that had been depressingly accurate since he’d possessed Harold—reared its head.

If it were true, then Harold was facing a killing machine that didn't flinch, didn't stop regardless of damage, and actively learned its opponent's habits. Combined with Vincent's natural high-spec stats, he had the power of a one-hit-kill and the durability of a fortress.

To make matters worse, the brainwashing had altered his combat patterns, rendering Harold’s knowledge of the Original Story nearly useless.

"Hmph. So what?"

He spat the words out just to act tough. Yet, through the filter of Harold’s persona, the mutter sounded like a declaration of supreme confidence.

Paradoxically, that encouraged the man inside—Kazuki.

If there were no known patterns to follow, he would simply have to force the opponent into a new one. If the enemy was going to learn his movements, he would use that learning against him.

Harold Stokes could do it. Kazuki knew that better than anyone.

Harold flashed a daring, arrogant smirk. In the next heartbeat, he exploded from a standstill into top speed.

Air Dash. He had first used it in earnest against Ritzelt, the Sarian mage. Back then, he had nearly broken himself just to change direction mid-air, but years of refinement had allowed him to master high-speed Three-Dimensional Maneuvers.

His current speed was incomparable to those early days. Yet, even so, Vincent was tracking him.

Knowing he was being read, Harold dove into the lion’s den. He kicked off the ground at max speed, then kicked the air itself to bank around to Vincent's rear.

He aimed for the neck. The vital spot was armored, of course, but his goal wasn't to kill or even deal damage—it was the act of "slashing" itself. Just as Harold predicted, Vincent intercepted the strike with his left gauntlet.

Since the start of the fight, Vincent had consistently used his gauntlet to guard against unfamiliar attacks. If Harold repeated the exact same sequence three times, Vincent would invariably switch from a block to a counter on the third attempt.

Harold evaded and circled behind him again to launch another strike.

Vincent swung a backhand with his left arm to brush him off. It was a checking maneuver rather than a committed strike.

Still, even without a sword in that hand, the blow was sharp and heavy. Catching it meant a broken posture, followed immediately by a finishing blow from the greatsword.

Harold saw it coming and chose to take the hit anyway. Even a glancing blow was enough to break a bone if he didn't brace for it.

The moment he endured the impact, the real threat—the greatsword—came whistling down. A direct hit would be fatal.

Harold dodged it by the narrowest of margins.

But instead of leaping backward as he usually did, he stepped forward, grazing the descending blade as he slipped past.

It was a gamble. He didn't have the luxury of a proper counter. If his timing had been off by a fraction of a second, he would have been cleaved from the skull down.

Had his sword not been enhancing his physical limits, he wouldn't have made it. Even so, he felt the ground beneath him shatter as he slipped through the jaws of death.

He emerged, once again, at Vincent's back.

He couldn't counter-attack yet. The exchange had lasted less than a second, and the sheer concentration required to evade had left him unable to transition into an offensive stance.

Harold backed off to reset. That specific trick wouldn't work again. The battle had dragged on this long because Harold had been forced to cycle through tactics, failing to land a finishing blow while Vincent slowly mapped his behavior.

And, inevitably, on the third time, Vincent would have his number.

(That’s why the third time is the key.)

Steeling his nerves, he repeated the sequence. The second time was even tighter; the wind from the greatsword rushing past his ear was deafening. He saw a scrap of his own coat, sliced clean off, flutter to the floor by Vincent’s feet.

Vincent was definitely getting faster at tracking him.

If he tried it a third time, he would be cut down. If Vincent had any cognitive function left, he surely realized that too.

Failure meant death. The very thing Harold had feared and fled from for years was finally standing right in front of him.

But he couldn't run anymore. To live, he had to dive head-first into the abyss.

(...I'm a bit late to the party. I should have steeled myself for this long ago.)

Harold understood it now. He hadn't been fighting his fate of death; he had been hiding from it.

By using his "switch," Kazuki had offloaded his terror onto the remnants of Harold's soul while he himself stayed safe from the psychological weight of mortality. The Vincent standing before him was the price for that cowardice.

That was why Kazuki—no, Harold—had to do this now.

He needed the resolve to fight alongside the soul of Harold Stokes. The resolve to stare fate in the eye.

Original Story knowledge, Harold’s innate talent, and Kazuki’s will. Without all three, he stood no chance against Vincent, much less Justus.

"Here I come, you puppet!"

Harold threw himself into the abyss for the third time.

He circled, dodging the slash Vincent unleashed with mechanical perfection. He took the rear again, but on this third iteration, Vincent’s reaction was instantaneous. A backhand blow flew toward him before Harold could even ready his blade. He used his sword as a shield to catch the impact.

Everything was exactly as before.

The greatsword was already descending from above. There was no room to step forward, and no time to leap back. So, Harold stayed put.

And then, he spun. Using his left foot as a pivot, he performed a single rotation, shifting his body exactly one person's width to the left. The massive blade shrieked past him, missing his skin by a fraction of a millimeter.

But unlike the previous times, the greatsword did not hit the floor. It stopped mid-air. Vincent had learned; he had anticipated that Harold would try to take his back again and had shortened his swing to avoid the recovery lag.

This was the result of Vincent’s optimization. He predicted the next move and adjusted his actions to match.

But what happened when the target did something outside his learned patterns? The answer was carved in the countless scars on Vincent’s body.

Almost all of them had been inflicted at the start of the battle, before the "AI" had enough data to optimize. This fight was a race against time; the longer it lasted, the more the scales tipped in Vincent’s favor.

However, there was a flaw in this learning process: it was entirely reactive.

Vincent responded to attacks, but he didn't proactively use his own attacks to bait or lead his opponent. Perhaps that was the limit of the technology controlling him.

Regardless, Harold’s current position was an "unexpected pattern." He had moved to the outside of the sword arm. Vincent couldn't bring the blade back in time, and his left arm—his primary defense—was at the furthest possible point from Harold.

The problem was that Harold was now deep within Vincent’s personal space without any momentum. He didn't have the leverage to land a strike powerful enough to stagger the giant and start a combo.

Normally, he would use a Secret Art or magic, but those required a brief moment to channel mana. At this range, against this opponent, even a split-second charge was an opening he couldn't afford.

So, Harold chose a third option. Neither a sword strike nor a spell.

He lunged with his bare hand.

It was a palm strike, faster than any sword swing, launched like a jab. In the game, Goudashou was a mere utility move used for linking combos. With a left hand that could barely hold a sword and Vincent’s legendary defense, it shouldn't have done a speck of damage.

—If the move were the same as the one in the game, that is.

"Goudashou: Thunder!"

The moment his palm struck Vincent’s jaw, a surge of electricity erupted from Harold's hand.

In the eight years he had spent struggling to survive, Harold had mastered every skill from the game. He had tried to learn moves from other characters. And beyond that, he had worked tirelessly to invent new ones.

Goudashou: Thunder was one of them.

To be fair, it still didn't deal much damage. To output enough voltage to be lethal would require the same charge time as any other spell.

So, he had discarded the power in favor of speed. He timed the electrical discharge to trigger the exact microsecond his palm made contact. It wasn't enough to kill, or even to burn.

But it was enough. It was more than enough to paralyze the muscles for a single, precious heartbeat.

No matter how brainwashed or numb to pain he was, as long as his body was biological, he could not override a physiological reflex. Even in this world, Vincent was still human.

"...!"

Vincent didn't cry out, and his face didn't move. But just as Harold planned, he froze. In a duel of this caliber, a single second of paralysis was an eternity. It was a death sentence.

By the time the rigidity left Vincent's limbs, it was far too late.

"Thunderclap Slash!"

The Secret Art, fully charged during that window of stillness, slammed into Vincent’s midsection. The sword itself became a bolt of lightning, doubling the giant over. He tried to raise his head, tried to swing his sword, but the threat was gone.

Harold didn't give him a chance to recover. He unleashed a relentless storm of strikes, each one gaining power from the last.

A diagonal slash seared through the armor; a thrust sent him reeling. A roundhouse kick shattered the exposed midsection, and before Vincent could even begin to fall, Harold’s blade swept upward from behind. As the giant was launched into the air, Harold blasted him with a Thunderbird.

The combo didn't stop. Harold knew he couldn't afford to be merciful. He didn't stop until his strikes numbered a hundred.

As Vincent’s body hung at the peak of the arc, Harold thrust his sword toward the ceiling. The tip erupted in a blinding radiance.

This was Harold’s ultimate technique. In the game, it could wipe out sixty percent of a level-capped protagonist's HP in a single hit.

Bolts of lightning arced from the blade’s tip to meet a rift opening in the ceiling of the ruins. The two points of light connected, a pillar of divine wrath skewering Vincent’s body.

Harold swung the sword down, cleaving the air and the man within it.

"Rending Thunder!!"

A roar of thunder, far too loud for the confines of the cavern, shook the ruins to their foundations. The shockwave kicked up a localized sandstorm of dust and debris.

As the air cleared, only one figure remained standing.

His breathing was ragged, his body spent, but his voice remained as arrogant as ever as he looked down at his fallen foe.

"A fitting look for you, Vincent. I win."

---

Since this is the landmark 100th chapter, I wanted to show off the protagonist’s cool side.

This is a scene I’ve been wanting to write ever since Harold first imagined fighting Vincent back in Chapter 13, so I’m very satisfied with how it turned out.