"Haha, interesting. I find your actions and your conviction pleasing. Under different circumstances, I might consider taking you as my disciple. What a pity."
Wallenstein hoisted the greatsword onto his shoulder.
The heavy steel gleamed under the fractured light of the battlefield.
He lowered his center of gravity, digging his boots into the shattered earth, and adopted the flawless stance for his signature Noble Art: Mountain-Cleaving Slash.
"I am a professional killer," Wallenstein declared, his voice devoid of malice but heavy with finality.
"I will not betray my employer over personal feelings. You cannot survive this blow. Farewell, boy."
A colossal slash illuminated the battlefield, painting the surrounding debris in a blinding, ethereal glare.
The strike sliced clean through Noah's waist.
The onlookers watched the massive, shimmering blade pass right through his torso, bisecting him in a single fluid motion.
The few people present, including the towering figure of Ouma Kurogane, saw nothing wrong with the impact itself.
It looked like a textbook execution.
Stella wore a look of shock.
The color drained from her face, leaving her trembling.
'Was Noah killed?'
In that single heartbeat, her entire world fractured into pieces!
A hollow void opened in her chest, suffocating her breath.
However, only the man who swung the blade—the One-Armed Sword Saint—revealed a look of astonishment.
He noticed the glaring anomaly.
It was not the physical feedback of the impact, Mountain-Cleaving Slash offered no resistance by design.
His ability was a conceptual interference that manipulated the very laws of friction.
It acted as a divine sword in offense and an impenetrable shield in defense.
By reducing friction to zero, any physical strike was rendered null and void against him.
Without friction, weapons failed to exert force, sliding off his skin like water off oiled glass.
He applied the same conceptual trick to topple his opponents, by eliminating the friction between a target's footwear and the ground beneath them, he nullified their fundamental ability to move.
Lacking traction, they would slip, stumble, and fall before they could even swing a weapon.
When applied to an attack, however, maximizing that friction generated immense, unstoppable offensive power.
His Noble Art, Mountain-Cleaving Slash, was just such a terrifying manifestation of this concept.
With friction increased to an extreme degree, cleaving mountains and splitting solid bedrock became a simple matter of swinging his arm.
Wielding a slash of such exaggerated, reality-bending power left no physical sensation for the user.
Anything it touched would face instant obliteration, reduced to dust on a molecular level.
That was the unshakeable truth.
Noah should be blown to pieces!
Blood and viscera should paint the ground. The blade should not pass through his physical body without resistance!
Wallenstein recognized the impossible phenomenon unfolding before his eyes.
A chilling realization crept up his spine.
How many people had he killed over the years? A thousand? Ten thousand? He stopped counting long ago.
The weak and the powerful alike fell to his conceptual ability.
He witnessed enemies dismembered and pulverized by Mountain-Cleaving Slash thousands of times.
He knew the exact visual of a successful kill.
This was not it.
...
Noah's grim expression twisted into a bizarre, unnatural smile.
Of course, he's alive.
In truth, he had never experienced such an indescribable sensation—the feeling of a weapon passing through his torso as if he were made of thin air.
"You...!"
Before Wallenstein could speak another word, Noah lunged forward, closing the distance in an instant, and pressed a hand against the veteran assassin's face.
Friction? Such a concept meant nothing here.
Under the control of the Spell-Weaver, Noah could assume any shape he desired, even altering his own internal anatomy and bone structure.
The lack of friction mattered little against a deliberate physical deformation.
His palm shifted, the bones and cartilage elongating and curving to form a literal cage, locking Wallenstein's head in place.
Eliminating friction did not alter the physical object itself.
Wallenstein's skull maintained its rigid shape. By enveloping the bone structure in a perfect, custom-fit mold of flesh and bone, Noah rendered escape impossible.
The assassin could not slip away if he was physically caged from all sides.
Both of their abilities possessed the strength to tamper with the fundamental laws of physics, but acting in tandem, Noah's Spell-Weaver claimed the distinct advantage in pure versatility.
Noah could tighten his grip and pierce the man's skull to end it right then and there.
Yet, given the vast difference in their bone density, Noah's fingers would shatter long before they pierced Wallenstein's cranium.
Recognizing this limitation, he abandoned the idea of brute force destruction.
"Why!" Wallenstein demanded, panic creeping into his usually stoic demeanor.
He threw a desperate, full-force punch aimed straight at Noah's heart.
His fist passed right through the young man's chest without a single ounce of resistance.
The assassin felt no relief at the strike.
That was the truth, since there was zero resistance.
No impact against bone, no tearing of muscle.
His knuckles touched empty air.
The young man resembled a phantom.
Wallenstein's fist passed through the torso, neither brushing against skin nor grasping a beating heart.
As a veteran powerhouse who had survived countless battles, Wallenstein retained his sharp combat intelligence and boundless imagination.
His mind raced to process the impossible physics.
"You... No, impossible. You diluted your own molecular structure?"
All matter comprises microscopic particles separated by infinitesimal gaps.
If two solid stones rest together for centuries, prolonged molecular motion causes a slow atomic exchange, resulting in a gradual, natural penetration.
Normally, manipulating molecules within the Spell-Weaver's domain remained far beyond Noah's limits.
This revelation mirrored Noah's own internal thoughts.
'Thanks, Ikki. I will borrow your strongest move for a moment!'
In his normal state, Noah's molecular interference lasted only a brief instant—similar to the desperate acceleration technique he once used to break through Ikki's signature move, Ittou Shura.
Manipulating elements at the molecular level with such reckless abandon was a feat he was once incapable of achieving.
His human brain possessed limiters designed to prevent the body from tearing itself apart.
However, if he used his magic to manipulate his own anatomy and bypass his innate survival instincts...
That was the key.
This was the Uncrowned Sword King's path of carnage, the forbidden Noble Art—
"Ittou Shura!"
The magical power emanating from Noah condensed into a raging tempest, growing so dense it became visible to the naked eye as a swirling aura.
Magic and elements clarified in his senses, feeding him an overwhelming amount of information.
He channeled every drop of his latent power to reinforce the Spell-Weaver.
The physical toll was agonizing, his muscles screamed in protest, and his blood felt like molten lead in his veins.
Time was limited.
In his current overloading state, he could maintain the ethereal form for perhaps nine seconds before his body collapsed.
Friction manipulation was a devastating power capable of securing an instant kill against almost any opponent in the world.
Yet, from the very beginning of the confrontation, Noah's Truth Seeker had analyzed the One-Armed Sword Saint's technique down to its core principles.
The right to a "first-strike kill" belonged to Noah alone!
A cold blue light flared in Noah's eyes, piercing through the chaotic mana.
Wallenstein met his gaze, and a tremor ripped through the darkest depths of his soul.
For the first time in decades, the predator felt like prey.
'What is he doing? Why am I terrified? Is this another ability? Wait—'
"..."
The veteran assassin froze mid-sentence, as if an invisible hand had stopped the flow of time around him.
He stood paralyzed on the battlefield, his mouth agape, unable to draw his next breath.
The fierce light of battle in his eyes dimmed, flickering for a fraction of a second until it extinguished.
With his soul forcefully twisted into knots by Noah's unseen power, the man was dead before his body hit the ground!
The silence left the onlookers dumbfounded.
The deafening roar of battle vanished, replaced by the howling wind.
Ouma Kurogane's expression shifted from stoic observation to guarded tension.
Possessing strength and perception that far surpassed the others present, he detected the bizarre, unnatural shift in the atmosphere.
The imposing presence of the One-Armed Sword Saint had vanished from the world of the living!