The Legendary Knight: Rise of the Primordial Dragon

Chapter 115: Mana Control

Tang!

A loud sound of metal hitting metal echoed through the dungeon as Vlad’s blade struck the sphere. The skin of his hand ruptured from the impact, his whole body shivering from the aftereffects of the reverberations.

For the next several seconds he could hear nothing but a sharp ring echoing in his ears. Once the tingling sensation left his body, he checked the sphere. Just as before, it was completely spotless.

"What the heck!" he exclaimed, his brows furrowing in frustration. "How am I supposed to slice a sphere with a wooden sword when not even a steel sword could dent it?"

He sat on the floor beside the platform, tore the sleeves of his loose linen shirt, and wrapped them around his bloody hands. The wounds from his duel against Lorenzo had only just healed the previous day, and now he had injured his hands again.

"Chloe must not learn about this," he sighed, taking out a meal pack from his inventory. He had brought several of them just in case. Food was the last thing he wanted to worry about while he was in a dungeon. But by the looks of it, he decided to eat only once a day to save on rations.

After his meal, he silently stared back and forth between the sphere and the wooden sword. No hidden mechanism, no enchantments on the sword, nothing out of the ordinary on the stone platform where the sphere was placed. If the dungeon itself offered no other way of slicing the sphere, then there must be something wrong with Vlad’s approach.

While he was deep in thought, the duel with Lorenzo strangely surfaced in his mind, or more precisely, the moment he struck the giant vine with his blade but failed to sever it completely. He had clearly put a great deal of strength into the swing, yet a single vine from a Two Ring spell had withstood it.

"Could it be..." Vlad’s eyes widened as realization struck.

He jumped to his feet, grabbed the wooden sword, and poured his mana into the blade. Or at least he tried to. His control over his mana was embarrassingly poor. Dark flames emerged from his hand and barely reached a quarter of the blade, burning uncontrollably.

While he could still hold on to that fragile control, he swung the sword down, striking the sphere with the mana-wreathed portion of the blade.

Naturally, the wooden sword shattered again.

However, instead of disappointment, Vlad’s face lit up with excitement, a smile tugging at his lips. Barely visible, but a mark had been left on the sphere for the first time.

"So it wants me to use mana to slice the sphere," Vlad sighed, feeling both relieved to have found the solution and foolish for having wasted two days finding it.

Now that he knew what he had to do, he grabbed the wooden sword and began pouring his mana into the blade. The task proved more difficult than he had thought. He could summon the mana onto his hands but struggled to maintain control beyond his body. The mana barely reached the blade before scattering, even shattering the sword in the process.

He kept pumping mana into the wooden blade again and again until he reached the verge of mana deviation.

"Th-this is a golden opportunity," Vlad murmured with heavy breaths, the sword falling from his hand. In contrast to his body’s exhaustion, his eyes burned with excitement. "I must make the most of this opportunity to improve my mana control..."

Just as he finished those words, he fell onto his back, his eyes rolling back as exhaustion overtook him.

As soon as he woke up, he channeled mana into the blade once more, stopping only after he passed out. Thanks to his Draconic Heart, his mana reserves were fully replenished after just a few hours of sleep.

It took him over two weeks just to maintain mana control over half the sword’s blade. Another twenty days to reach the edge. Still, he could only sustain it for a few seconds before it scattered away. He had enough time to strike the sphere with a mana blade, but he did not.

In the past thirty-seven days, he had come to understand what being D-Ranked truly meant. Lacing a weapon with mana was the condition for promotion to Squire Grade, an achievement some of his batchmates, like Aria Starveil, had already accomplished in less than a week after the Awakening Ritual. To attain what his batchmates reached in a day or two, he needed over a month, and even then, he could not match the same level of perfection.

Now that this dungeon was giving him the one thing he lacked most, time, he was not going to settle for mediocrity.

He spent the next several days not only maintaining the mana blade on the wooden sword but dancing through sword practice, the blade swinging around his body like a dark rod, trailing dark flames with every motion. Slowly but surely, the length of time he could sustain the mana around the blade steadily increased. He no longer had to strain to maintain control, to the point that on the fifty-seventh day, it became as natural as breathing.

On that same day, while swinging the sword around his body, even throwing it into the air and switching hands, all while still maintaining control over the dark mana surrounding the blade, a system screen materialized before him.

Ding...

[Congratulations! You have learned a new skill: Mana Blade!]

"Hah!" He struck the blade against the floor, leaving a deep gash in the stone tiles, tiles that had never borne a scratch before, no matter how much physical strength he had put into it.

He ran a hand through his damp hair, which had grown down to his nose over the past two months, and murmured with heavy breaths, a faint smile tugging at his lips, "So this is the difference between using pure physical strength and using mana."

He picked up the wooden sword from the floor and approached the stone platform where the sphere rested.

Drawing a deep breath, he infused the blade with mana, dark flames engulfing its surface. He lifted the sword overhead and brought it down onto the sphere.