"Again!"
Zoro ignored the numb ache in his wrist, bent down to grab his swords, and charged once more.
Snap.
Another crisp sound. This time the strike landed on the back of his knee, and Zoro dropped straight down onto the ground in a kneel.
"Again!"
...
Ten minutes later.
Zoro lay spread-eagled on the grass in the courtyard, chest heaving as he sucked in ragged breaths.
There was not a single visible wound on him, but every muscle in his body twitched from the strain of all that wasted exertion.
Aren sat cross-legged on a nearby stone. He tapped the sole of his shoe idly with the bamboo sword in his hand.
Looking at this boy whose stubbornness had already tipped into something excessive, he could not help feeling a bit of awe.
So this was the future pirate hunter.
That sheer toughness really was beyond ordinary people.
"Why..." Zoro stared hard at the sky, unshed tears glinting at the corners of his eyes. "My strength has clearly grown, and I am swinging my swords more than ever, so why can I still not even touch the edge of your clothes?"
"Because the way you train your sword is no different from chopping firewood."
Aren stood up and looked down at him from above.
"Swordsmanship is not simple addition and subtraction. It is not that swinging ten thousand times will definitely make you stronger than swinging one thousand. The way you swing now does nothing but throw all that strength into empty air. It is meaningless."
Zoro forced himself upright, propping up his upper body with both arms. His eyes burned as he stared at Aren.
"Then how am I supposed to train?"
Ding.
[Detected: key story character Roronoa Zoro has developed intense desire for knowledge.]
[Temporary guidance mission triggered: Correct Zoro's misconceptions about swordsmanship.]
[Mission reward: Minor increase in sword comprehension, sign-in progress +5 percent.]
The system's prompt arrived right on cue.
Aren raised an eyebrow.
"Stand up."
Aren tossed the bamboo sword to Zoro.
"Look at the bamboo grove over there."
Zoro staggered to his feet and followed the line of Aren's pointing finger.
"What do you think about when you swing your swords?" Aren asked.
"Cutting it down," Zoro answered without hesitation.
"Wrong. All you think about is how to use more strength."
Aren moved behind him and adjusted his sword grip with a hand.
"Because you only think about power, your muscles are stiff, your intent is exposed, and your sword is dead."
He casually picked up a dead twig from the ground. Inside his body, that newborn swordmaster's insight began to circulate.
Chakra flowed out along his meridians into his arm, but he deliberately kept the amount in check. More than chakra, he focused on that strange new sense, that way of listening to how power moved.
"Watch closely."
Aren took a slow breath, his gaze locking onto a single bamboo leaf drifting down through the air more than ten meters away.
In his vision, the path of that leaf became crystal clear.
The direction of the wind, the pull of gravity, every force acting on it turned into data he could almost calculate.
The goal was not to smash things apart with brute strength. It was to go along with them.
Aren turned his wrist. The twig in his hand skimmed forward in an almost casual sweep.
Vmm...
There was no explosive whoosh, only a very faint hum in the air.
An unseen ripple extended outward from the tip of the twig.
There was no dramatic scene of a leaf being neatly sliced in two.
The bamboo leaf continued to wobble gently down, as if nothing at all had changed.
Zoro's eyes widened. He was about to question what he had just seen when, a heartbeat later, his pupils shrank to pinpoints.
Crack.
At the spot where the leaf touched the ground, a slate as wide as a millstone split silently in two.
The cut surface was perfectly smooth, like a mirror. Not even a grain of stone dust had chipped off.
With a single dead twig, from that distance, he had cleaved a stone?
Was that really something a human being could do?
For that strike, Aren had originally only meant to slice the airflow behind the leaf. He had not expected the system-strengthened chakra and his sword intent to resonate so strongly, leaping right past the leaf and shearing the stone beyond.
That power... might have been a bit excessive.
He stared at the severed slab of stone, faintly startled himself.
The courtyard was utterly silent.
Zoro's jaw hung slack. His gaze swung back and forth between the untouched bamboo leaf and the broken stone.
Aren flicked the twig away and clapped his hands, brushing off the dust, his tone as even as if he were discussing what to have for dinner.
"See it now? The end of swordsmanship is mastering the breath of all things."
In truth, he had only just grasped that himself.
But that did not stop him, in this moment, from putting on quite the show in front of Zoro.