The way Noel looked at Owari changed slightly, and while he noticed something different about her after his previous statement, Owari couldn't figure out what would have changed and he wasn't actually all that interested either. He wasn't exactly good at reading people, after all he wasn't all that experienced with interacting with people. Because he had little people reading skill Owari didn't bother to try and figure out the meaning behind her sudden change in mood and he figured if it was important he'd figure it out eventually. As for Noel, she was wondering how to go about getting to know Owari. He seemed like a very standoffish and quiet guy, but she wanted to learn more about him. He was basically her first crush so she thought it would be a shame to just give up before trying.

She was a stubborn girl and when she set her sights on something she was the type to chase it. However they were also in a bit of a serious situation at the moment so it was a bit inappropriate to start asking about his personal life given the current circumstances. Instead she decided to just talk about random stuff, she had always been a bit of a chatterbox and once she got talking she liked to talk and talk for as long as someone would listen. Though finding anyone willing to do so was a task in itself. As for whether such behavior was appropriate or not, she didn't think much of it. After all this was her way of relaxing and talking would help calm her nerves that were still a bit worn from earlier when she saw her life flash before her eyes about a dozen times in a row. She couldn't be blamed for wanting to relax.

Before they got to talking however, the girl with the bow could no longer hold her curiosity and she walked over to join them. She chose a spot a little off to the side of them and deliberately sat so she wasn't closer to either one of them then the other. Owari of course didn't know nor care about the significance of this small act, but Noel was a bit more experienced with nuance due to her education. She recognized that the girl didn't want either of them to misunderstand her as favoring one of them over the other in the coming conversation. The girl had done this quite casually as well and she began talking right away in one smooth motion. "I'll start by introducing myself since I had already had a chance to hear your names. I'm Rebecca Mourn, nice to meet you." Her voice was pleasant to hear, and Owari noted that she was quite pretty. She has long wavy brown hair, slightly tanned skin without a single blemish, and her eyes are a pale blue and seemed to be covered in a layer of mist making it look like she was about to cry at any moment. She gave a very casual and ordinary girl type vibe, but it blended well together and only made her more attractive. Of course Owari only noticed this in passing, he wasn't the type to focus on appearances much, but like most teenage guys it might give him pause to have a pretty girl suddenly talk to him.

“You're the one who's people will be coming in to aid these people correct?" Noel, ever the chatter bug didn't mind having another conversation partner it seemed.

"Yes, but I have a feeling mine aren't the only ones who are coming. I'm just the only one so far who has confirmed it with others." She seemed to have less positive thoughts on the matter and spoke with a hint of displeasure.

"At this point there is no reason to speak up about it. By not saying anything they won't have to bear responsibility for if something goes wrong later. Since you already took responsibility why would they?" Owari laid out his opinion openly, surprising both Noel and Rebecca. They certainly didn't expect him to lack any tact.

"Well there is no need to keep talking about these things. By the way, Owari was it? I believe you arrived later than the rest of us from further back in the tunnels. What happened over there?" Rebecca couldn't help but ask this, which seemed to be one of her main points of curiosity.

"Everyone got killed in the crash or eaten by the bugs. As for me, I survived due to a bit of my own ability and a lot of luck. After that I just escaped and came over to meet everyone else. As for the cars between mine and here, they were either empty or already torn into and emptied by force." Owari had glanced in the various cars as he ran by to make sure he didn't leave anyone to die due to negligence, however he hadn't caught sight of anyone.

"I see, what a shame. Though on the plus side at least someone survived I guess." Rebecca smiled with some effort, she clearly didn't take the deaths of people so lightly.

"I'm more curious about the people up here. The frontliners like you two have mystic arts, so you'd have to have tamed beasts, where are they?" Owari had been wondering this since he first saw the people fighting on their own.

"Because of the rules a lot of our magical beasts were held in some of the cars down the track. Because of that they are all engaged in their own battle over there. My own is mostly okay, but we've already directed them to work together. If any of us lose our magical beast and our mystic arts get weakened it would be a disaster." Rebecca was a bit worried about her tamed beast, but there wasn't anything anyone could do to help it. They all had to patiently wait and hope for the best.

"As for me, I have yet to tame a magical beast. My mystic art makes use of my inherent affinity and I haven't found a magical beast that suits my needs as of yet." Noel also explained her own situation after Rebecca was done. Though what she said was a bit surprising.

"An inherent affinity? Quite rare." Owari remarked without much fuss. Inherent affinities while rare aren't unheard of and maybe one in a hundred people will have one. The fact that someone like Noel had one wasn't too shocking to him.

"It must be a strong affinity with how powerful your mystic art is." Rebecca gave a sigh of regret. She herself had an inherent affinity for ice, but it wasn't strong enough to support her current mystic art on its own and only served to enhance it. "By the way Owari, although you don't have a mystic art do you happen to have a tamed beast yet?"

"I do, it's a moth type though so it's still in its cocoon and hasn't hatched." Owari pulled out the ghost eye cocoon and showed it before stowing it away again.

"Moth type? What kind?" Noel asked with some interest.

"It's a ghost eye moth. They have good sensory abilities which will help out in the field." Owari didn't really hide his reasons, though he also didn't give out everything.

"I think I've heard of it. It's quite the ordinary low-level beast though." Rebecca cut in. "I'm a bit surprised, with your ability you should easily have been given a few offers by some groups. If you had joined any one of them then they would have offered you a good magical beast and even a mystic art to use." Although her tone was casual, she was clearly probing Owari. Although he obviously missed this, and probably wouldn't care anyway. Noel did catch it though and it caused her to be slightly more guarded against Rebecca for some reason.

"I didn't get any offers. Not that I went around showing off. I prefer my freedom and I wasn't interested in tying myself down to a group. Even if I have to suffer a bit I'd like to at least give independent hunting a shot." Owari responded without much thought, it wasn't something he felt was worth hiding.

"I see." Rebecca spoke with some regret. "If you ever change your mind then the sapphire agency would be willing to give you a chance." She suddenly pulled out a business card and handed it over to Owari.

He glanced it over and put it in his pocket. "Don't be surprised if it gets destroyed in the coming fight."

"Right." Rebecca suddenly came to herself a bit and realized she had been a bit too quick to try and recruit him. After all they were still in a life or death situation and it would be bad if things had gone poorly and it affected either of their mental states. Perhaps she wasn't as experienced as she had thought.

"Do you really not have a mystic art?" Noel suddenly asked to help change the topic.

"Hm? No I don't. Why? Is it that surprising?" Owari was completely unbothered by the change in topic.

"It's just surprising you can cut those damn bugs without one." It was actually Rebecca who responded to him, but Noel nodded as well.

"You just have to put some strength into it. Once you get past the initial bit of resistance their insides are very weak." Owari clearly didn't think of his actions as being impressive. It was true he had done quite well considering, but he had been forced to push his body to the breaking point not to mention he burned out quite quickly.

"You make it sound easy, but even with my mystic art I had trouble breaking them open." Noel sighed with mixed emotion.

"It's probably because armor like theirs is resistant to blunt force. In fact piercing a single point would probably be the best method due to the amount of force focused on a small space. Though if you hit them hard enough you could probably rattle their insides." Owari gave his analysis of the bugs' strengths and weaknesses, he had been calmly determining all of this as he fought them and over these few hours of rest he had figured out a general idea of what they had going for them and what he could exploit.

"Focus on a single point?" Noel suddenly seemed to think of something before holding one of her gloved hands in front of her face. She extended one of her fingers and after a moment it vibrated a bit and seemed to hum with energy. "I think this would work. How embarrassing for me to have not been able to think of such a simple solution. It seems you've helped me improve myself once again." Noel gave Owari a grateful but complex smile.

"Sometimes people miss the simple things right in front of them, it's part of being human. Or something like that." Owari shrugged and accepted the gratefulness, he figured even if he tried to play it off she would be too stubborn to accept it. He may be a bit inexperienced with interpersonal relations, but at this point he had figured out she was the stubborn type.

"Is that a lesson learned from experience or something you read in a book?" Rebecca chuckled as she joked.

"Life experience." Owari said without elaborating, which caused the two girls to feel a bit awkward. They were far more experienced with nuance and realized this was obviously a sore spot of his.

"Excuse me, but Lance needs some people to swap out." Before they could dispel the awkwardness however, someone ran in and quickly interrupted everything. The two girls breathed sighs of relief. It was always hardest to handle such awkward situations and with this he would be distracted enough to move on.

Owari stood up and answered back. "I can fight again."

The guy who came in looked over at him. "Lance said you can choose between front or back lines. Which one?" He seemed to speak with a bit of trepidation, he was one of the people who had seen Owari fight.

Owari rotated his limbs a bit and calculated some stuff. "It's best if I join the back lines." he was too injured and it exhausted him too quickly to fight at full strength so he wouldn't be able to do it for long.

"Alright." The guy nodded and looked around. "Who else can change out?"

"I can rejoin the front lines." Noel stood up beside Owari and spoke up.

"I can go back now too." Rebecca also seemed to have recovered a bit.

None of the other frontliners assented so he could only smile a bit uncomfortably and count out the backliners before leaving to confirm with Lance. Soon he came back and gave the people their orders. Owari didn't really have much to worry about, soon Noel and Rebecca carefully exchanged spots with two other frontliners and the backliners switched out. But as soon as Owari stepped out to show himself the backline was secured. Every single insect who broke the front line gunned for him ignoring everything else, and he easily cut them down. Even if he was a bit weaker than before he was still able to handle the small fry that broke the front line if they only came in a few at a time.

Owari used this time of mindlessly cutting down enemies to confirm what he learned during his rampage earlier. He realized that transferring force through his body was dangerous but could give incredible results. He wasn't happy with things how they were though. After all he couldn't afford to injure himself every time he attacked. He had also found that by using the muscles across the entire body he could subtly enhance various movements. For instance he could twist his hips and pivot his legs as he swung his sword to add speed to his swing. He could also push the ground with his leg as his sword connected with something to increase the strength of the swing unexpectedly.

However these were only the basics, things he did subconsciously but only now really thought about and implemented more consciously. There was one idea that he had been given from this however, what if he found a way to distribute the backlash of his attacks across his whole body? Although it might cause damage to him if all the backlash focused on his arm, if he could distribute it over a larger area it would become negligible at best.

With that in mind he began to think of ways to implement his idea as he cut through insect after insect. Every time one came at him Owari would test a new idea for dealing with the recoil. Of course his current method was a bit forceful as he was just using the process of elimination and trial and error to discover the method. However this was the benefit of real combat, he didn't have to spend hours swinging his sword at practice dummies. Instead he could let the fear of death and the need to succeed guide his growth and help him reach his full potential. After he had killed somewhere around 20-30 insects while testing all of his ideas he had finally gathered enough to test his first iteration.

He waited until another insect escaped past the front lines and rushed him before preparing his stance. Unlike his normal stances which had no real structure to them since he had no formal training, this one had some framework to it. His legs were positioned with one in front of the other with some distance between them, and his arms were crossed in front of his chest like she was hugging himself. His sword was in his right hand and was being held horizontally with the tip pointing behind him. Owari leaned slightly forward and changed his breathing pattern, and was finally ready just as the insect entered his range. He waited an extra moment before swinging, using his left arm to push his right arm to give a little more force to the blow.

His sword moved at such speeds he could hear it whistle and it even left behind a small trace in his vision as if his eyes couldn't keep up with it. However he still accurately controlled it and it hit the insect straight on, in a single moment the insect went from flying at Owari to being sliced in half. On top of that, unlike all the ones before it, this one's head seemed to explode as it was sent flying away from Owari instead of going past him and falling to the ground. As his blade kept some momentum, Owari spun a few times to gently use up the last of the force in his attack. After stopping he calmly smiled while observing the insect he had just attacked. His arm was also mostly fine and wasn't even sore from the attack, just a bit numb. As for how he had accomplished this it was due to a number of factors. The main reason he experienced such bad backlash was the recoil that came from striking the enemy, however he had found that by twisting or flicking his wrist in certain ways as his blade struck his enemy he could redirect the recoil back into the enemy. Like how a mirror reflects light, he reflects force through his sword.

To do this required a lot of control and upped the strain on his wrist. However he had a method of dealing with the strain on his arm as whole, after all even if the recoil was responsible for some of the backlash, a lot of it was the act of directing so much force through his body which it was never meant to handle. For this he had discovered that by synching his breathing with his muscle contractions in a certain way, he could significantly increase the strain his muscle, ligaments, and tendons could handle for a moment allowing him to negate a lot of the backlash on his arm. However this method of breathing was too rapid and actually caused him to burn stamina instead of increasing his stamina so he could only use it when he actually used the attack or he'd burn up all of his energy too quickly.

The result was obvious, and the reason the insect went flying and had its head smashed apart was because of the recoil that had been redirected into it. Owari felt this was an unexpected benefit and was quite satisfied. But there were obviously still flaws. First was the fact that he needed to enter a specific stance to use it, next would be the time it takes to switch his breathing method, and third would be the fact that even after using it he still had a lot of unneeded force. For the first problem he'd have to practice a lot of different stances and figure out what did and didn't work so it was all trial and error. For the second he could only do his best to train his ability to switch his breathing and his body's ability to handle the sudden shifts since a lot of the problem was simply that forcefully switching could actually injure himself. This would be easily solved by simply training his body's resistance to that specific shift in breathing method and only time was needed.

The final problem required him to use the attack in battle and gain an intuitive understanding of how much force he needed against his enemies, as well as helping him build experience and grow more efficient at transferring force so he would have less remaining after the attack went through. In the end it all boiled down to experience and training which he would build up over time. Since that was the case he didn't worry too much, instead he decided to make this his first official technique in his personal martial art. He felt once it was completed and he mastered it that it wouldn't be any weaker than a mystic art technique. So he decided to give this technique a name. Owari decided to call it the moth wing strike.

Some of this had to do with his personal preference for moths, but he also had some other reasons. For one was the speed of his strike, although most may not know this, Owari knew that moths have species that are among the fastest among insects and even rivaling and surpassing many birds. In fact the ghost eye moth he had was among this group and was a type of hawk moth who are known to be the fastest insects. Though this is only if you count normal animals and not magical beasts who have many strange individuals with magical means of enhancing their speed. However since this was a technique that didn't use mana, Owari wanted to give it some respect and name it after something that didn't need mana to be fast either.

After giving his attack a name, Owari felt much more motivated to go about perfecting it. After that he spent the next half an hour chopping up insects while testing the various limits of his technique and gaining experience in its use. By this point about an hour had gone by since he had switched in and he realized that the frontliners were all starting to get quite exhausted. It had been about four hours since Owari showed up so this was to be expected. They were switching out faster and faster at this point and Owari felt the cracks would start to show soon. It was only a matter of time before someone messed up and got everyone killed or until the hive mind used some tactic to catch them off guard and breakthrough. Things had been going too well so far and Owari could feel something was off as the moments ticked by.

However Owari wasn't as worried as he would have been an hour ago. Now that he had figured out this new technique he wouldn’t burn through his stamina as quickly in the future. In fact even though he had technically been fighting this whole time he wasn't the least bit tired. During the breaks between the insects breaking through he would control his breathing and partially meditate to consolidate his experience and rest to stay at his best for each encounter. He was actually more well-rested now then when he rejoined the fight an hour ago.

Soon enough Lance spoke up towards the backline. "Richy, go check and see if anyone can switch out!" Richy was obviously the backliner who had been acting as a liaison between Lance and those resting in the car.

Before Richy had a chance to leave, Owari suddenly spoke up to him in a lower voice to not distract the frontliners. "Tell him I can switch in for the front. You guys should be well rested by now and can handle things here." Hearing him, Richy could only nod. Although the intensity of enemies breaking through was increasing, they had been able to rest easy this whole time since Owari took care of everything. All the backliners had basically had a massive rest period over this time and now was the time to use that regained energy. Luckily even though more insects were breaking through it was still only one or two at a time so they wouldn't be overrun easily.

Richy went into the train and came back a few moments later. He started to exchange info with Lance about the people who could switch in. Of course he included Owari, and Lance soon made some plans and started calling out for people to exchange positions. Owari wasn't sure if it was coincidence or not but he was set to take over Noel's spot during the switch as she had expended all her mana again. Though at least this time she had decided to tap out before it became a problem, and she had avoided being injured again. Soon enough the exchange began and Owari moved over to that side of the frontlines, as Lance made the call Owari rushed off and Noel dropped back while keeping an eye on the enemy. Even though it might seem like a constant stream of enemies was rushing at them at all times, the frontlines weren't as chaotic as one would expect. While they were defensively guarding and holding position, the insects would occasionally launch an attack to probe and test their defenses while keeping them from growing too relaxed. After all the hive mind only had a limited amount of forces and couldn't afford to sacrifice all of them.

As Owari passed by Noel one of the dog-sized insects suddenly shot forward to take advantage of the exchange. Meanwhile a small swarm of support insects swooped at them as a distraction. Noel stopped and crossed her gloves in front of her chest to create the droning noise-causing all of the swarm insects to suddenly lose control. Meanwhile the dog-sized insect approached and tried to pass Owari, it seemed the swarm was meant to target Owari and the dog-sized insect was supposed to attack Noel while she was weakened and distracted with helping Owari. The hive mind had clearly found that Owari's weakness was fighting multiple fast enemies and that he excelled at one on one fights.

However it had miscalculated, not only was Noel in better shape then she had been during her last retreat, but Owari had made some improvements as well. Although the hive mind may have been aware and this could just be more of it's probing, Owari didn't focus on such things. The bigger insect tried to rush past his right side, and he quickly took a stance. Instead of a horizontal attack he held his sword vertically, with one hand gripping the sword and the other pressed to his forearm. As the insect went to brush by him he swung while using his new technique and placing a fair amount of force into the swing. However he didn't swing the blade straight down and instead came at it diagonally.

The blade cleanly sliced into the insects head and as he twisted his wrist and used his left hand to support his arm to properly redirect the recoil allowing him to not only behead the insect but to also kill most of its forward momentum and making it fall dead after a few rolls across the ground, still quite far from Noel. Owari was definitely satisfied with this technique, and although he had to accept some backlash from that attack, it was pretty negligible considering he had only forced it to help protect Noel. In comparison to what he had to do last time they were in a similar situation Owari could clearly feel his improvements and was definitely thrilled by it.

Of course his rapid improvement speed wasn't known only to him, Noel had also noticed how much his method of attack had changed and could easily tell how vastly he had improved so quickly. In her family everyone had to develop their own mystic art and weren't allowed to learn one from others, she was no exception of course. So she more than anyone here was qualified to judge another person's fighting style and talents. She was quite startled by Owari's improvement speed as he had seemingly learned an entirely new technique and already started on his way towards perfecting it in a single battle. It should be known each of her own mystic art techniques required years of practice and research to implement and get to a workable level.

She was luckier than most since she could practice early due to her inherent affinity, but the main point still stood. For a moment she was a bit jealous and even envious before she thought of something. After Owari brought it up she had been occasionally practicing a method of attack where she focused on stabbing with her fingers and although it was rudimentary it was impressive enough. It was only by watching Owari just now though and seeing how rapidly he improved that she realized her own improvement speed had been quite shocking. She suddenly had an epiphany of sorts and as Owari had before her, she realized that by fighting and using your techniques in actual battle you could improve much faster.

However this realization was a bit bitter as she realized Owari had helped her learn another lesson. Although she was a bit depressed that someone who was in the same age group as her had taught her so many valuable lessons, she quickly shook it off. If he wasn't at least this impressive then let alone her own thoughts on the matter, if her father were to find out she had even an inkling of feelings for Owari he would likely tear the world apart. Noel quickly readjusted her mood and focused on the fight. Now wasn't the time to daydream after all.