The wind tore apart at his ears as Leo surged forward at astonishing speed, charging at the girl not far ahead.
Almost the instant the sprint began, Leo noticed the change in himself.
It was a speed worlds apart from before.
It was an unbelievable burst of acceleration that could never have happened in the past.
His body was light as a feather, his senses had turned beast-keen, and his thoughts seemed to have sped up several times over in this hair's-breadth moment, leaving him with enough room to even feel surprised.
By the time Leo came to his senses, he was already in front of Ais, seeing the faint surprise welling up in the girl's eyes too.
The distance between them wasn't far, yet the speed Leo showed still seemed to startle the girl, leaving her movements a thousandth of a second slow.
And that fraction of a second was all Leo needed to seize the initiative.
The short sword sliced through the air, turning into a cold arc of light, and slashed at Ais at tremendous speed.
That high-speed slash made the startled Ais's eyes narrow in an instant, and her body moved almost on reflex, swinging the scabbard in her hand to meet it.
Sparks flared, and a sharp gust spread out like a shockwave.
Leo's short sword crashed hard against Ais's scabbard and the two bounced apart, both their sprinting bodies stalling at once, no longer pressing forward.
But Leo didn't stop, as if he'd long anticipated his attack would be blocked. He instantly dropped low and accelerated again.
His figure dissolved completely into an afterimage, circling to Ais's flank like lightning, swinging another stroke at her shoulder.
Ais reacted fast, even faster than Leo, taking action almost the moment he swung. She flipped the scabbard around to block the blow, sending sparks bursting at her side.
Leo's figure still showed no sign of stopping. With one strike thwarted, he dashed off again, circling around Ais.
Like a whirlwind spiraling, Leo whirled around Ais at top speed, swinging the short sword in his hand again and again as he ran, sending streak after streak of sword-light at her.
The sword-light came one after another, wave after wave, like a great sweep of flashing blades glittering around Ais, slashing at every part of her lovely body.
Shoulder, chest, stomach, back, thigh, neck, heart, even her head. Leo, just as before, had no intention of holding back at all, every slash aimed straight for Ais's weak points and vital spots. Anyone who didn't know better, seeing this, might even suspect Leo was trying to put the doll-like girl in her grave.
But it came back to the same thing: this was only because Leo trusted that an attack at his level could never possibly do anything to Ais.
Sure enough, in the face of Leo's merciless attacks, Ais kept her expression blank throughout, merely moving her wrist and turning the scabbard to block every last one of those slashes.
No matter which blind angle Leo's sword came at, Ais seemed able to see it, to catch it clearly, blocking it with ease.
She could even find chances to counter amid Leo's relentless, seamless assault, threading the scabbard through what seemed an endless stream of sword-light to cut at Leo's body.
This time, though, Leo wasn't going to be hit so easily as before.
The scabbard came at him like a blurred whip, fast and sudden, shrinking Leo's pupils to pinpricks.
But those pupils, shrunk to pinpricks, were different from before. At the last possible instant, they smoothly caught that afterimage.
So Leo's body stalled abruptly, his upper half dropping back in a flash, and in a limbo-bend posture he dodged that whistling blow.
"You dodged..."
Seeing this, Ais's expression went blank for a moment.
And in that very instant, Leo, still bent back at the waist, swept his sword up at Ais, going straight for her ankle.
Ais reacted, leaping to put distance between herself and Leo while dodging the strike.
Leo pressed his advantage, kicking off the ground to lunge in Ais's direction, launching another dizzying assault on her.
In an instant, the courtyard, where sunlight was about to come pouring down, filled with the endless ringing of clashing metal.
In the face of Leo's relentless, seamless assault, Ais's responses were both sharp and steady, keeping her distance from Leo while ceaselessly blocking the slashes coming her way.
Leo's assault was fierce, ferocious, yet Ais could still take it all in stride, not letting a single streak of sword-light through her defensive line to touch her body, keeping herself untouchable the whole time.
But as time passed, Ais also noticed that Leo's assault wasn't slowing down. If anything it kept getting faster, as if accelerating, his speed, his technique, his reactions and all the rest constantly quickening.
It looked like he was transforming.
It looked like he was evolving.
"Different..."
Completely different.
The Leo of this moment was nothing like the Leo from before, not the same person at all.
This made Ais accept that fact with mixed feelings.
"He really did level up."
Lv.2 was no unfamiliar territory to Ais.
She'd reached that height eight years ago, and now far surpassed it, well able to treat it as nothing at all.
But the thought that the man in front of her had been an ordinary trainee a month ago, one too weak to truss a chicken, who hadn't even received Falna yet, made Ais utterly unable to keep down the complicated feelings in her heart.
What was more, only yesterday this man had still been sparring with her looking not much stronger than an ordinary person, and now he was showing strength as though he'd been remade from the bones out. It genuinely left Ais feeling complicated, even at a loss.
Ais even noticed, with some surprise, that although he'd only just leveled up, the strength Leo displayed was quite considerably different from the Lv.2 she knew.
Compared to other freshly leveled-up Lv.2s, Leo's attacks and his speed both came out a cut above.
And he was still constantly growing stronger, constantly growing faster.
"Is he... adapting to his own power?"
As one who'd been through it herself, Ais could tell easily enough what kind of state Leo was in now.
He was working hard to master the abilities that had been greatly strengthened upon reaching Lv.2.
After a Rank Up, adventurers generally ran into this situation: the sudden, sharp increase in their own strength threw body and mind off their established track, causing mind-body dissonance.
The mind couldn't keep up with the body that had rapidly grown stronger, making the precision, sense of distance, and reaction times in combat inevitably go haywire, leaving them unable to bring out a hundred percent of their current strength.
Leo had run into this same situation when he'd updated his Status before, and the mind-body dissonance now was far stronger than that previous time, forcing him to repeat and try out various movements over and over in his fight with Ais in order to clear away these sensory errors and bring body and mind back into sync, slowly drawing out the strength that should be his after leveling up.
That was why, at this moment, he gave others the impression that he was steadily growing stronger.
Facing the scabbard's afterimage swinging at him head-on, Leo dodged it with movements that grew cleaner and simpler, no longer letting Ais's attacks touch him as easily as before.
The earlier Leo, facing Ais's attacks, could basically only barely dodge one out of ten, with the other nine all landing on him and sending him flying on the spot.
But today, the number of counters Ais had launched had long passed ten, and yet out of those far-more-than-ten attacks, not one could touch Leo.
This stirred something clear in Leo, who was still ceaselessly adapting to his own strength.
"I really am getting stronger again."
That realization made his eyes grow brighter and brighter as the fight went on, his movements ever more ferocious, whether sprinting or attacking, increasingly assured and forceful.
An ordinary person, facing Leo's assault as it kept growing stronger mid-fight, would probably have long since fallen into a disadvantage, unable to keep up with his intensity.
But Ais hadn't.
She was still that same blank-faced figure, still that same offhand posture, her eyes fixed tight on Leo as though fixed on something important she couldn't tear her gaze from, blocking Leo's ever-fiercer assault in its entirety.
Only then did it dawn on Leo that as his assault grew stronger, Ais's intensity was rising to match.
That was only natural.
Sparring with a fresh rookie like Leo, Ais had been holding back her strength from the start. How could she possibly be countered by him?
So what if Leo had brought out strength worthy of being called a total remaking?
Before Ais, a Lv.5 first-class adventurer, it still didn't amount to much.
So Ais, too, was slowly unleashing her own power along with Leo's transformation, gradually raising the intensity of the spar, pinning Leo down hard, so that no matter how fierce his assault, it could never break through her defensive line.
Amid the unbroken flash of blades, Ais's scabbard threaded through who knew how many times over, striking the short sword Leo slashed in with, grinding out sparks that flared who knew how many times over.
This time, the force Ais used had clearly grown a little greater, and Leo felt a powerful surge of force transmit through the short sword, driving him back.
Leo had to leap backward, dispersing that force while opening distance from Ais.
The fierce exchange of attack and defense between the two finally got a moment to breathe, both sides stopping their movements together and entering a standoff.
Leo didn't speak, keeping his silence.
Ais, for her part, looked at him, and after hesitating, on the verge of speaking more than once, finally opened her mouth.
"Your Status before you leveled up... how high was it?"
Yes, from the strength Leo had shown, Ais had sensed that his Status before leveling up might have been very high.
Otherwise, having only just leveled up, he couldn't possibly show strength considerably greater than an ordinary fresh Lv.2.
Unless...
"Or do you... have a Skill?"
Clearly, what Line could think of, Ais could think of too.
Given the strength Leo had just shown, either he'd had very high basic abilities before leveling up, or he had some kind of Skill that raised his own basic ability values.
Only that could explain why Leo, having only just leveled up, already had strength beyond an ordinary fresh Lv.2.
At the very least, when she herself had just reached Lv.2, she'd been nowhere near as strong as Leo was now if she didn't use Magic or Skills.
"...I do have a Skill."
Leo was silent for a while, then sighed and answered honestly.
"But that Skill doesn't directly boost my strength."
At the very least, it was completely different from the amplifying, enhancing kind of Skill Ais and Line understood.
"Then you..."
Ais's expression was still complicated, that starting-to-speak-and-stopping look growing even more pronounced.
"You want to ask me why I can get stronger this fast, right?"
Looking at Ais like this, Leo finally spoke the words on her mind.
Ais said nothing, only kept her gaze fixed tight on Leo, silently making clear how much this matter weighed on her.
Getting stronger, this was an obsession Ais had carried through ever since she was seven.
Ever since joining Loki Familia, Ais's one obsession had been to get stronger, to get even stronger, to get stronger than anyone, because only then could she kill more monsters and take revenge on that final nightmare.
To that end, at the very beginning she'd pushed herself relentlessly as if possessed, willing to wreck her body for the sake of getting stronger, heedless of her own safety, as if to burn the whole of her limited life clean away, desperately growing stronger in a way that would make a person's lifespan seem to shorten.
Though compared to her past self she'd grown a good deal gentler by now, the obsession with getting stronger still remained in her heart, a thing she could never let go of no matter what.
In the past, when facing Leo, Ais rarely showed this side of herself.
But now, she couldn't hold back.
Before her was a living example of someone growing stronger fast at a jaw-dropping speed, and Ais simply couldn't restrain the craving in her heart, wanting to reach out toward that jaw-dropping rate of growth.
"How... how did you do it?"
Ais asked the question countless people had asked, only hers was heavier, more impatient.
Leo didn't answer the question right away. Instead, as if he'd heard nothing at all, he slowly sheathed the short sword and set it down, sword and scabbard together, in the shade of the tree, leaning it against Ais's beloved sword.
Then Leo went over to the nearby bench, sat down on it, and beckoned to Ais.
Ais understood at once, and like Leo, leaned her scabbard against the tree, then came over to his side and sat down beside him.
The next second, Ais heard Leo's words.
"Let's start with the conclusion. You can't raise your Status this fast, the way I can."
Leo's very first sentence doused Ais with a bucket of cold water.
Cold, and bone-deep.
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