Chapter 4: Holy Sword(Excalibur) Equipped
Leon had no strength to react. No breath to spare for whatever sound might have wanted to come out. He simply lay there and read the words as they hovered before him, his mind turning them over slowly in the fog.
Then the light came.
It started at the dull grey sword lying forgotten on the blood soaked floor beside the dead pig. A flicker first, barely noticeable, the kind of thing easily dismissed as a trick of the dungeon’s dim lighting.
Then it intensified.
Golden light poured out of the blade in a sudden, brilliant flood, warm and overwhelming, filling the corridor from wall to wall and pushing every shadow violently aside.
It came with no sound but felt enormous regardless, the kind of presence that made the air feel different, heavier and charged and full of something that had no business being in a low rank dungeon.
The footsteps ahead stopped.
Ran stopped.
All of them turned back, shielding their eyes against the golden blaze, staring at the source of it with expressions that had forgotten entirely how to be casual.
Then, as suddenly as it had erupted, the light pulled back.
Dimming steadily, retreating, folding back into nothing until the corridor returned to its usual flat and unremarkable darkness.
[Legendary Draw: Holy Sword (Excalibur)]
The dull grey sword was gone.
In its place was a sword that had no business existing in a dungeon like this.
A great sword, enormous and perfectly proportioned, its blade a deep and lustrous gold that caught the dim corridor light and gave back something far richer than it received.
The handle was black, wrapped tight and clean, and running across it in patterns were intricate blue designs that moved along the grip and up toward the base of the blade like something between craftsmanship and language.
Like whoever had made it had been trying to say something and had chosen beauty as the medium.
It stood out against the blood soaked dungeon floor the way a flame stood out in a dark room.
Nobody spoke.
For several long seconds the entire party simply stood there, every one of them locked in place by the sight of it.
The golden light radiating from the blade was soft now, not the blinding flood of moments ago but a steady, breathing glow that pushed gently against the darkness around it. Warm and constant and somehow alive feeling in a way that made the air in the corridor feel different from how it had been before.
Even Ran was still.
Then his eyes changed.
The golden reflection of the sword’s light played across his face and illuminated the expression beneath it clearly.
Pure, undisguised greed.
"That sword..." His voice came out low and slightly uneven, like he was still catching up to what he was seeing. "...is mine!"
He didn’t fully understand what had just happened. That much was written plainly across his face as he stared at the great sword gleaming on the dungeon floor.
Leon had killed an E-rank monster. A grey pig. A wounded, slowed, barely functional grey pig that the party had already damaged on their way in. That was the sum total of what had occurred.
And somehow that kill had produced this.
A sword that radiated golden light and carried blue inscriptions and looked like it had been pulled from somewhere that had nothing to do with E-rank dungeons or grey pigs or any of the ordinary machinery of the awakener world Ran operated in daily.
He didn’t understand it.
He didn’t need to.
What he understood was that this sword was here, and it was extraordinary, and there was absolutely no version of events he was willing to accept where he walked out of this dungeon without it in his hand.
He moved fast, reaching down toward the handle with one hand already closing around where the grip would be.
However, the sword moved, rising up from the floor before flying directly to Leon.
His hand came up.
Nobody could have explained how. His body had been completely motionless for the past several minutes, drained entirely, lying broken and cold against the dungeon floor with zero H/P and no visible capacity for movement of any kind.
However, his arm rose anyway, slow and trembling violently, shaking with the effort of simply existing in an upright enough position to receive what was coming toward it.
His fingers closed around the black handle.
The golden light exploded outward the moment contact was made, but softly this time, not the blinding surge from before.
It spread from the blade and poured across Leon’s hand, up his arm, and then covered him entirely, wrapping around his body like something warm and deliberate that knew exactly where it was going and why.
Leon felt it hit him.
It was not like anything he had a word for. Not strength in the way he had understood strength before, not the ordinary sensation of muscles responding to effort.
This came from somewhere deeper and arrived everywhere at once, rushing through him like a current that found him hollow and simply filled every part of him that had been empty.
He had not known he could feel like this.
He hadn’t known this existed.
[Holy Sword (Excalibur) Equipped]
[STR: +1200, AGL: +1500, VIT: +2500, MANA: +3000, END: +1000]
Leon’s eyes went wide.
He looked at the sword first. Then down at his own hand gripping it. Then at his body, where the golden light still clung to him in a soft, breathing glow, covering him from his fingers all the way down to the dungeon floor beneath him.
His mouth opened slightly.
’So much... power.’ he thought.
It didn’t feel real. None of it felt real. The strength moving through him was so far removed from anything his body had ever produced on its own that it registered almost as foreign, like a language he had never spoken suddenly arriving in his mouth fully formed and fluent.
Every broken rib, every claw mark, every bite wound and bruise and point of damage the dungeon had stacked onto him over the past hour still existed somewhere underneath it all.
But they felt distant now.
Buried under something far larger.
"Hand me that sword now!" Ran’s voice cut through the golden haze like something thrown hard.
