Klad darted towards Jika without a second thought, she promptly dodged him without breaking a sweat.
He kept pushing forward, slashing, stabbing and cutting. Moving his arm from top to bottom, left to right and yet she dodged all of his continuous attacks without even unsheathing her sword.
"Not bad. Not bad at all. You don't have much of a form, but you could kill someone not as experienced as me if you took him by surprise."
Klad twisted his body in a spinning attack, feeling like a snake that was trying to revolve around his pray to which Jika simply landed a clean fist without much movement on Klad's face, which rocketed him backwards towards the wooden wall.
"Ouch. That hurt."
"Don't be a big baby kid, I know it didn't hurt. Now keep coming at me, we need to make use of the time we got."
After Klad kept trying to hit her and ended up getting hit instead, Jika finally started with her corrections. They were mostly about his footwork and handwork, yet the most important thing she mentioned actually surprised Klad.
"You lack hesitation." She said as Klad took a break while laying on the floor looking at the sky.
"I lack it? Isn't usually the other way around?"
"It is. Yet you don't hesitate at all, which is also a bad thing. You don't leave room for countermeasures in case your attacks don't work. You bet everything on one attack."
"I guess my habits are slipping a bit into my attacks."
"Everything slips into your attacks, even yourself. Swordsmanship is a mirror of who you are."
Klad wasn't so sure about that, she sounded mostly like a junkie for fighting. He really doubted that his poor dagger skills were related to his personality, but to Jika's credit he didn't really know how swordsmanship worked.
"If that's true then could I get a grasp of someone's personality just by looking at them fight?"
"Yes. You need to be skilled enough to be able to read it or they have to be proficient enough for you to be able to sense it."
"Ugh. It sounds complicated."
"It isn't. Look at this."
Klad stood on his arms, with all of his muscles that had been aching since the morning now had the pain multiplicated from the training, he stared at her.
Jika raised her sword slowly with her right hand, tilting the tip of the sword backwards while Klad stared at her with a skeptical look on his face.
And then he saw it.
The sword struck down the earth like a god that was punishing its creations. Heavy blows that seemed to pierce even will itself.
Klad felt it.
He felt the weight of the sword stabbing down, piercing along the enemy, breaking his ribs and destroying its organs.
He felt the weapon rip through the shields of the enemy, destroying it and breaking their arms in the process.
He could see it. He could feel the lack of empathy coming from the sword, which only meaning was not to pierce, but to slay.
Not to kill, but to conquer.
Jika stopped her movements quickly after, heavily breathing.
"Jika! You were right! I could feel it."
"Yeah." She was taking a lot of breaths in order to talk. "It's quite a taxing technique but very useful. I haven't used it myself a lot these days, but I know it."
"Do you think you could teach it to me?"
Klad knew he had absolutely no chance of learning that technique. Or at least at that moment it was not doable at all, even more so because he felt like the dagger was his weapon, or at least for now he didn't see himself fighting with a spear or a sword.
"Ha–Ha! You make funny jokes Klad!"
"I was not joking."
"Then I'm sorry to tell you that you would be executed for even knowing this technique."
"Wha–What?! Is that a thing? You can get killed for knowing how to perform an attack?"
"Is much more complex than that Klad. Besides there's a more vital point than knowing the technique. This is not a normal one, which is why is illegal to even know it."
"What? Why? Is it like a heretic technique that only followers of the Cursed God know of or something like that?"
"Hahaha! Nothing like that Klad. More like the opposite."
"The opposite?"
"Yes. This is an orthodox technique, the most of them all. This is the Blessed Inquisitors technique."