The moment Kent gave me the go-ahead to begin the match I dashed toward him using my Basic Concentrated Dash to move at lightning speed closing the gap between us while delivering a powerful thrust with my sword.

The new version of sprint allowed me to move stamina through my body to increase the strength of my movements just like the last one while also allowing me to concentrate a bunch of stamina in a small area releasing it all at once to gain large bursts of speed for a short time.

My sword shimmered with a faint, dark gray light while my body did the same while being slightly brighter.

I figured out that I could enhance the contraction and recovery of my muscles by flowing stamina into them while performing movements just like how I did it while using Sprint.

The motions needed to fight were a lot more complicated than the movements I needed to run and the system didn’t help me when using this self-made technique making it uniquely difficult.

This meant that the control of my stamina mixed with my melee skills often made my movements extremely sloppy with my body jerking in unintended directions and that fighting put a lot more strain on me mentally than normal.

The advantage being of course was that my movements were much more powerful.

Seeing a lot of potential in it once I tried it for the first time I began to practice it along with my normal melee drills.

Kent was caught off guard by my severe increase in speed and power since our last fight but like always he quickly adjusted himself, swatting away my attack as if it was a gentle breeze.

He visibly relaxed a bit expecting me to be sent flying.

Against his expectations, however, I stopped myself by firmly planting my feet onto the ground and redirecting the force of the blow by angling my blade on impact.

I thrust my body forward slashing at my opponent while he was still taken aback.

I almost managed to land a blow on Kent's stomach as he pushed himself back to dodge.

Applying what I learned from watching his practice match with Rina I didn’t give him a moment to breathe layering attack after attack in quick succession with my sword.

Ironically, being so up close and personal reduced the number of hits I was taking drastically as my teacher seemed way too busy dodging to be worrying about launching a counter-offensive.

Since I was attacking so fast it also meant that a lot less thought was being put into each individual attack.

I was having a lot of trouble remembering to not only pump stamina into my muscles but to also do it in a neat and orderly manner that matched my movements making my technique even sloppier.

To reduce the amount of thinking I had to do while still making effective attacks I simply tried to redo the moves in the sword drill that I learned while periodically stabbing and slashing at the closest body parts he had to me to not make my movements too predictable.

Paying particular attention to the head and torso as those had less mobility than the limbs making attacks aimed at them harder to dodge.

[Congradultions …]

I heard the system give me a notification but I didn’t have time to think or listen to all of my senses hyper-focusing on what I was currently doing.

Right, when I thought I was actually putting my teacher into a corner he simply gently smiled at me as if satisfied then all of a sudden his movements changed.

“Great job, I really didn’t expect that you would get this far this quickly, it's time for me to up the tempo a bit,” Kent said to me in an even tone.

When he had originally fought me and my sisters he barely moved his body making small steps and adjustments while precisely swinging his sword to block our attacks.

Now however he completely changed his rhythm blocking and dodging my attacks while layering on precise hits of his own putting some of his body weight into his movements rather than just stationary waiting for an attack

It honestly felt like when you're fighting a boss in an RPG and all of a sudden they get their second health bar once you thought you had already defeated them.

It was a lot harder to keep on pumping stamina throughout the body when I was using it to frantically dodge and block attacks rather than the practiced drill moves I was using before.

The only reason I wasn’t being thrown around like a rag doll similar to my first spare with him was due to in small part my increase in experience and to a much larger degree, I almost doubled physical stats.

Despite Kent's attacks having an extreme increase in intensity from last time forcing his blows away was much easier than before.

That being said my stats were not quite able to make up for the overwhelming difference in weight and more importantly height.

His reach was more than double mine making his attacks incredibly hard to counter for me.

Looking on the bright side, Kent didn't have to use this level of skill when fighting Rina so I was finally officially ahead of her again, which was nice.

The strategy I was using which worked excellently up till now quickly became obsolete.

I couldn’t even move back to collect my thoughts or to come up with something new as whenever I tried Kent would quickly close the distance and deliver a sharp blow interrupting my thoughts.

I kept on being pushed back further and further, the people who were currently watching the dual, that being the couple of the maids who had a free hour and my sisters, had to move out of the way to give the both of us some space.

I was pushed so far back in fact that my back hit the wall and I had no idea where I was supposed to go.

Kent seemed to be intent on finishing this right here and right now, the intensity of his attacks getting more and more powerful with each strike.

A calm indifferent look plastered his face as he did so.

He sent a devastating blow to my left shoulder

After bearly managing to parry away that attack I made the split-second decision of rolling to the side of my opponent trying to get off of the wall.

This was a terrible decision.

First off, I was not and have never been a very athletic person even if I worked out a lot in my past life.

While I described what I did as a roll, it was more of a sudden ungraceful fall to the left.

I even hit my forehead on the floor and hurt my left wrist due to the awkward way that I landed.

Luckily enough while it hurt I didn't seem to sprain anything and it wasn't my main hand that took the damage otherwise this fight would have been over right then and there.

I still managed to get away from Kent long enough to catch my breath but I think I would have honestly been a lot faster if I just ducked to the side and didn’t have to pick myself up off the floor like an idiot.

In any case, a valuable lesson was learned.

Don't try to do something fancy when you don’t know how to do anything fancy.

I dropped my sword down to the floor and ran to the left corner of the room picking up my training glaive, which I had left on the wall before this fight started precisely for a moment like this one.

“Hmm, I don’t think that the reach you will gain from using a pole-arm is going to compensate for your lack of skill with it. Especially considering how good you have gotten with the sword already in such a short time” Kent looked at me first in surprise due to my strange maneuver and then disinterest due to my change in the weapon which I used.

I gripped my glaive tightly, running disorderly towards Kent using Sprint to enhance my speed while preparing my body to attack.

Right when I reached up close to him, I thrust my glaive forward with as much grace and fluidity as my body would allow aiming for his waist as it was an easy target to hit at my height in comparison to his.

The fluidity and speed of my movement caught my teacher off guard as he hastily had to send his body out of the way to get away from my glaive.

Perfect

I quickly went for a downward slash to capitalize on his mistake when I noticed that he had recovered extremely quickly.

He was already back on his feet and in a perfect fighting stance before I even had enough time to lift my glaive above my head.

Not perfect

Kent uncharacteristically took advantage of my mistake hitting me on the left side of my head with a quick and brutal slash making it crystal clear that he would no longer be quietly waiting and bracing himself for an attack from me.

As I fell to the floor I made sure to grasp my glaive as tightly as I possibly could so that I wouldn’t drop it as I fell down.

I flipped my body to the side hoping to pick myself off of the carpet but my teacher was right there slashing downwards onto where I had just been hitting the ground with an audible bang.

I practically ran off of the floor trying to put some distance between the two of us but he didn’t relent for a second, stepping quickly toward me while maintaining his battle form.

Layering attack after attack before I had the chance to breathe.

Head

Left Shoulder

Knee

Stomach.

I was somehow managing to just barely dodge every single one of his attacks while frantically trying to think of what to do next as the melee got more and more brutal notifications rang through my head at deafening speeds.

While I wasn’t paying attention to what any of them were saying my skill and power when using my body and the glaive in my two hands were increasing drastically.

I was discovering new aspects of myself, my weapon, and combat in general with every waking moment.

I felt more like I was surfing the internet learning about a new topic than it felt like I was in a battle.

What my melee teacher had taught me in our relatively short time together rang through my mind now more than ever.

One battle no matter how short was worth more than 10 hours of training.

Whenever I tried to get into position to launch an attack of my own he would close the distance sending a powerful blow in my direction forcing me to break my form to dodge.

The constant threat of being hit in the face sent my mind into panic mode so much so that I couldn’t think straight.

The exhaustion from all of my movement from earlier was finally getting to me.

Right then both Endure and Quick-Witted started to drip in a bit of clarity into my mind and body, not enough to stop me from feeling like I was about to throw up and die but enough so that I could think a coherent thought or two.

“You keep pulling surprise after surprise out of your sleeves today. Not only were you able to improve by leaps and bounds with your sword technique in a matter of weeks but you were also able to pick up the spear to a similar level of skill in that short of a time frame” Kent said flabbergasted by what my ability to keep up with him even though he was holding back.

I didn’t answer him, my mind was too preoccupied with so many different things for me to properly be able to process what he just said.

I tried to remember my original plan, skipping some steps and going straight onto what was supposed to be the finisher.

Most of the stuff I planned was meant to be used in a situation where Kent took on a defensive posture and allowed me to set the pace of battle using stuff like a rapier or a sickle and chain in the situation I was currently in however would be suicide.

I went to a specific corner of the room grabbing a short sword with a weird-looking blade that had hook-like debits evenly placed along the opposite side with the edge.

I also picked up a long single-edged blade that looked like a katana.

As I grabbed onto them Kent went for a downward slash aimed for my head.

Using the short sword in my less dominant hand I blocked the strike trapping his wooden sword inside one of the debits.

It was at that moment I realized that for not the first time in this battle I had made a terrible mistake.

“You even had that time to learn a dual weapon technique and a unique one at that” Kent spoke in surprise.

The sword style I was using was one specifically designed to defeat people using a sword hence why it was what I had practiced the most in preparation for this fight with Kent.

The idea behind it was simple, using the special short sword called a semi-sword breaker which could be used to both stab, slash and most importantly trap the blade of your opponent, you would lock down your opponent's weapon making them unable to attack you.

Once that was done you would quickly use the long blade in your more dominant hand to either stab a vital spot on your opponent or simply slash downward hitting them square in the head for a fatal blow.

If your opponent tried to ignore the short sword in your off hand so that they would be able to get stuck you could then quickly block with your main weapon and deal a devastating stab to your opponent in a vital area.

It was an almost perfect solution to a one-on-one fight against someone who specialized in sword combat.

This was by far the most effective style I had to beat Kent and it was a style that failed in almost any other circumstance.

It was terrible against multiple opponents and magic as it didn't provide much in the way of defense.

It was bad against pole arms and other non-sword-based weapons and It was terrible against monsters who mostly tended to have thick hides and weird anatomy where the relatively shallow cuts and limited movements of this style of combat would not allow the user to hit any of their vital points.

So if this was my bread and butter to use specifically for fighting Kent, why would I waste time using it later when I’m more likely to be tired and Kent is more likely to be prepared?

Truth be told I was planning on using it today nor was I planning on beating Norman today the only reason I even decided to fight him was that I had to pick a time between four months of each fight and I had something I wanted to test out.

The main goal of this match was the exact same as the first, to stretch out the confrontation as long as possible so that I could get some free levels, see what types of weapons he had the most trouble fighting against and I could figure out how Kent fought more so that I could start the next phase of my preparations.

At that point, I didn’t really know what I should have been practicing since I had already completed the [Melee Generalist Advancement] depending what I saw in this fight could completely change my future practice strategy.

With that being said picking up these two weapons was more of a reflex of my panicked mind than any kind of rational decision.

What I knew for sure was that I didn’t want to lose yet I had barely learned anything about Kent except that he was willing to take our sparing sessions a bit more seriously depending on how well we were doing against him.

His sword struck at mine with an audible bang and it felt as if the bones in my hand would shatter from the impact. The strength difference between the two of us was simply too large for me to hope to properly block his attacks, especially using my off hand.

Doubly so when you consider that it was already injured from when I fell earlier.

Despite all logic and reason I still managed to keep the grip on my hand stable while trapping the sword he had in my short sword but I ended up gritting my teach so hard that I could have sworn I tasted blood in my mouth.

Holding his blade in place with my off hand I quickly got up from the floor and tried to stab at him with my longer blade but Kent’s skill with his sword was simply too good for me as he managed to slip his blade out of the debit in my short sword while still having enough time to parry away the strike from my main one cleanly.

Smiling to himself for the second time in this battle he redoubled his movements striking at me with twice as much force and with twice as much speed.

Using the weapons in both of my hands my ability to block and counter his movements had increased by leaps and bounds in comparison to how I was using the spear and the sword.

Despite this massive improvement I simply couldn’t keep up with this new level of intensity.

I was honestly completely shocked at myself for even making it this far.

Kent moved for the first time not hitting me with his blade but delivering a straight kick into my stomach something that I wasn’t expecting whatsoever.

I was sent flying back but at this point, I was very accustomed to getting knocked around so I manage to stop myself from falling to the floor.

I was not given a chance to recover or even collect my thoughts as my teacher swiftly swung at the right side of my head again.

Instinctively I blocked the attack with my main blade which again felt like I was getting hit by that car again.

Using the tiny opening that was created I tried to swing my short sword at Kent and as expected he swiftly moved back to dodge it moving completely out of the range of my slash before I could get in range to hit him.

What wasn't expected and came as a shock to everyone in the room including me is that the blade still managed to lightly poke at his stomach despite being a whole meter out of range of a slash at that point.