The Duke’s Reborn Daughter Sometimes Chooses Violence.

We had four days left before the Expedition.

I had been training every free second I had, and I knew my friends had been doing the same. This was the first time that I’d actually set aside time for ‘training’. The results were somehow both better and worse than what I’d hoped they would be.

“Do it again,” Violet growled. She was a rather stern drillmaster whenever we did this.

I listened, condensed mana all along my arm. As I prepared to attack, I glanced at the giant rock in front of me, almost as tall as I was, there  that Anias had dug out from inside the ground. Determined, I slammed my fist into it, twisting my hips as I did so. The recoil shot up my arm, but I managed to punch a hole clean into the stone.

I looked at Violet, even as I knew this wasn’t quite what she had in mind. Violet sighed deeply and stepped forward.

“I’m telling you, you need to let your mana go ‘boom’ as you punch! Do you think a monster cares that you punched one tiny hole through it?!”

“Depends where,” I said dryly.

Violet rolled her eyes, took a deep breath. She slammed her own fist into the cube a second later. The whole thing exploded into hundreds of pieces as soon as her fist made contact.

“There. Doesn’t matter where the damn hole is, don’t ya think?” Violet said, just as dryly.

“Point taken.”

I knew what she meant. You had to let your mana explode outwards right at the moment you punched something. The problem was the timing. Too early, and your punch didn’t have much force behind it. Too late, and all you were doing was pouring your mana into the hole you’d just made. I could get it every now and then, perhaps every one in three attempts?

“This is completely unfair!” Damian growled from somewhere next to me. He was in the sparring arena proper, swinging at seemingly nothing at all.

He swung a gauntleted fist at empty air, only for a mop of blonde hair to appear behind him and punch him in the side. Sere vanished again before Damian could turn around.

Frustrated, Damian gathered mana and sent bursts of rock shooting outward in all directions. One rock struck something invisible and dropped to the ground. Instantly, Damian dashed toward the spot where it fell.

The more you grew used to Sere’s Gift, the more you could start to understand it. The ‘forgetfulness’ that came with it wasn’t as strong, though it was never less than disorienting. Despite that, in a fight that lasted only a moment or two, it was hard to imagine any Gift being more deadly than hers.

“You’re distracted again, aren’t you?” Violet said. “You think I’ll nag you forever?”

I grinned. “You sure about that?”

She rolled her eyes.

“I’m working on something in my head,” I told her. “Though I can’t quite figure it out. Haven’t been able to find anything in the library either, so I’m stuck.”

Violet punched my shoulder. “What are you talking about?”

I sighed, stretched my hand to the side. A second later, and a rusted blade materialized in my palm. “This.” I gestured. “The blade gave me a hint. On how I can use it and my Gift together, but there’s no point to a hint if you still can’t figure the thing out. I need to learn how before the expedition, but….” I trailed off.

Violet glanced down at the Godblade and looked back up at me. “Don’t tell me I have to say something this obvious.”

“What?”

“If the damn thing gave you a hint, then the damn thing could give you another one,” Violet said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.

It…it actually was the most obvious thing in the world. I stared at her and then down at the Godblade. It didn’t speak, though a light thrum did run up my arm.

“Thanks,” I said.

Violet nodded. “Well, hurry up and figure it out. Don’t expect me to carry you on my back forever.”

“Mean. I was hoping you would,” I joked.

Oddly, Violet pointedly turned away from me. Her cheeks were faintly pink. “Well, I’m going to try and help them. You uh…do whatever the hell it is you do.” She hurriedly marched away, leaving me alone.

I stared down at the Godblade, moved over to an empty patch of grass, away from the stone Violet had just shattered. I sat down, cross-legged, as I put the blade on my knees.

“Let’s see….” I murmured. “So, how the hell do I make this work?”

I let myself slip into some of that bubbling anger. I didn’t need to stretch my thoughts far. The incident with the Soup Kitchen was reason enough. The blade glowed white on my lap.

I waited for the Godblade itself to say something at first. When it didn’t, I decided to reach for my Gift.

Pain came, fast and red. I grunted and almost tipped over. A spasm ran through me, even as my chest heaved. The trembling lasted for a few seconds before it slowly died down. The blade was a rusted trophy on my lap again.

“That’s rude,” I grumbled, sitting up straight again.

Two. Kings.

The Blade growled into my head.

“Yes, you’ve said that so many goddamn times,” I grumbled. Took a deep breath. “Two Intents. Clash. Laws. That’s what you said, wasn’t it? I’ve been thinking about this all this time.”

I paused for a second. It was odd to talk to an invisible impression in my mind. There was no way to tell if it was actually listening, or, well… if it even could listen. A dull thrum went through my head, and so I continued.

“Your Gift is…your Intent, isn’t it? It’s how your Intent maps from you onto the world, using mana. Intent is a painter, a Gift is a paintbrush, and mana is the paint.” This was the conclusion I’d come to after days and days of reading. No book I’d read ever spelt any of this out. Instead, it seemed there were as many theories about mana and Gift as there were Gift users.

I got the impression that it was different in other Kingdoms, but I had no way of verifying that from here.

“Well? Am I right?” I asked the empty air. Waited.

Right. Track.

I might have asked the question, but I hadn’t at all expected an actual answer. The Godblade might have been in my lap, but its pressure was still in my mind. I felt it more acutely than I normally did.

“So I’m right,” I murmured. “But…I get it now. You can’t have two painters fighting over the same canvas.” This was doubtless the reason why you couldn’t have a Godblade and a Gift at the same time. It wasn’t a matter of difficulty or luck. It was simply an incompatibility.

“So then…how the hell did you bond to me in the first place?” I demanded, raising the sword up.

It didn’t answer this time. I shook the rusted metal. It still didn’t answer.

“If this is a law of the world, then how am I supposed to break it?” I said. “There’s nothing here that a clever plan can fix. You gave me a hint. What’s the point of hinting at the impossible, you stupid sword?”

Trick.

The Godblade whispered. I stared at it for a long moment. Then, I started to laugh. It was a choking kind of laugh. The Godblade didn’t have an answer for me. It simply wanted me to trick the world. Trick the same laws that bound it in the first place.

“Defiance is a heavy thing, isn’t it?” I murmured.

The blade glowed white in my hand. Not just a pure white, a white tinged with the slightest pink. It might not have sounded helpful, but it was.

Tricks just so happened to be my speciality, after all.

“If you’re asking me to trick the world, that at the very least means that a trick is possible in the first place.”

I took a deep breath. If I were the only person who could have a Gift and a Godblade at the same time, then that meant the exception had to exist within me. I had come from a different world. Was that it? I didn’t think it was. Mainly because I had started to develop the faint suspicion that I wasn’t the only one here from Earth.

It was almost certainly my Gift then. Back then, in the Auction House, I had all but emptied myself of everything. I was a painter who had chosen to leave the canvas altogether, creating just enough space for the Godblade to take root. Perhaps it wasn’t just my Gift. Perhaps it also had to be this blade in particular.

So, I needed to trick the world with my Gift then.

“Signal theory, maybe?” I murmured. “If my Gift is a signal to the world, and the Godblade is another signal, then….”

When two waves collide, there are two possible results. If the two signals are of the same frequency but opposite phases, they cancel each other out. If the Godblade was raising my anger and determination, then my Gift, which I used to turn these feelings down, was as opposite a phase as you could get.

I reached for the mental knobs, this time trying to turn my anger up.

Bad. Liar.

The Godblade hissed, followed by a flash of blinding pain.

I had tried to match the two signals instead, hoping that one would feed off the other rather than getting in its way. That didn’t work.

“Heh. Would have been too fucking easy anyway, huh?” I murmured to myself and slowly sat up straight again.

It didn’t feel like I was on the completely wrong track, however. Not enough to abandon this and approach the solution from a different angle.

“What if I didn’t try to touch my ‘feelings’ at all? If the Godblade works on my Perceptions, then Sensations might slip by.”

This was another concept in Signal Theory. Two signals could coexist in the same place if they were on completely different frequencies, such that they never interacted with each other at all.

If the Godblade only cared about my ‘feelings’, perhaps it wouldn’t care about my sensations.

I reached for the knobs that governed my sight.

More pain came, sharp and white hot. I had half expected it, and so I simply gritted my teeth, not even swaying. The dull throb took a few seconds to dissipate. Damn, but it hurt.

Clever. Not enough.

The Godblade whispered.

“Thank you,” I grumbled. “I do like to think I’m at least a little clever.”

I took a deep breath. It didn’t matter how I used my Gift then; I simply could not use it at the same time as the blade. I needed to send two Intents through my body, and it didn’t seem like there was any way to do both at the same time, no matter how I couched them.

“Wait.”

What if…what if I didn’t send them at the same time?

A lifetime ago, I had read about systems like this. It was reading for an exam that my mother had always told me I would fail anyway. If you couldn’t send two signals through the same medium, then you had to alternate sending them so fast the difference didn’t matter at all.

I stared down at the rusted Godblade resting across my knees.

If I wanted to send two signals over the same wire without them tearing each other apart, I couldn’t send them simultaneously. I had to alternate them. I had to split time itself into microscopic fractions, letting my Gift own one millisecond, and letting Vaelin own the next.

“Alright,” I murmured. “Let’s see.”

I reached out with my mental fingers, finding the familiar knobs that governed my sight and my pain. I gripped them tightly.

Click.

My vision sharpened. The blades of grass became razor-fine details.

I immediately tried to wrench the knobs back to zero, reaching for the sword’s Intent in the same breath.

Click.

The sword flared white. I was too slow. The remnants of my Gift’s signal collided with the Godblade’s Defiance.

Clumsy.

Vaelin’s whisper felt like a hammer striking the inside of my skull. White pain lanced behind my eyes, making me gasp and double over. The blade in my lap instantly reverted to rusted iron.

“Give me a second, damn it,” I hissed, rubbing my temples.

The problem was a fundamental one. Not of my Gift, but of how I’d been using it.

Turning a knob took time. Even spinning it as fast as I could, there was a transition period where the signal ramped up or wound down. In that brief window, the two Intents overlapped, and the laws of the world punished me for it.

I needed something more drastic. A single thing I could turn on or off, and take my Gift with it.

I took a deep breath, forcing my heart rate to steady. I had to change the shape of my own mind. A part of me had always known that the knobs were only there because I had wanted them there. They represented my Gift. Nothing more. I could change things if I wanted.

I visualized a heavy, iron lever. A single large switch. Up was my Gift. Down was the Godblade. My anger.

My Defiance.

On and Off. Simple. Fast.

“Let’s try this again.”

I gripped the hilt of the rusted sword. I envisioned the switch. It formed inside my mind so smoothly that it was hard to believe it hadn’t always been there. I had always been good at visualizing things.

What else was there to do but daydream when you were locked in one room?

Were Gifts truly random, or did you develop what you needed?

Perhaps it was no surprise at all that this Gift was mine. Maybe the original Esra had a similar problem.

I threw the switch up.

My Gift flooded my body. The world zoomed into blinding focus. I could see the individual specks of dust floating in the air. The sword in my hand felt heavy, dead, and entirely useless.

I threw the switch down.

The Gift snapped off instantly. The sudden blindness was a little disorienting, but the vacuum it left behind was immediately filled. Defiance rushed into the empty space. The heavy iron in my hand turned weightless.

The blinding white light of the Godblade flared to life, singing in my hand.

I threw the switch up. Gift. The light died. Enhanced sight returned.

I threw it down. Blade. Sight blurred. Power surged.

Up. Down. Up. Down.

I forced myself to go faster. I didn’t think about the pain, or the nausea, or the sheer whiplash of what I was doing. I just focused on the switch.

Faster.

Flicker.

My breath caught in my throat. It wasn’t a Click anymore.

Flicker.

The world began to split. Reality warped, dozens of times a second.

For one fraction of a second, I possessed the godlike perception to see a leaf falling ten yards away. In the exact next fraction of a second, my arm possessed the power of a God.

Flicker. Flicker. Flicker.

Faster. I had to get faster. Until the difference between the two signals wasn’t even noticeable to my own brain.

The two Intents didn’t clash. They merely danced in the gaps of each other’s existence.

I looked down at my hand.

The Godblade was glowing. It wasn’t a steady, brilliant white, tinged with pink. It was pulsing, so faintly and so quickly that only by flashes of my enhanced sight could one have made it out. For the world, it never wavered at all.

Clever.

The sword didn’t sound angry or condescending this time. It sounded…pleased.

I tried to laugh, but it came out as a strangled wheeze.

The rhythm faltered. I missed the timing by a fraction of a fraction of a second. The two Intents met.

The blade clattered to the grass as a chunk of useless rust. I collapsed onto my side, my hands flying to my head as I curled into a tight, trembling ball. Something warm and wet trickled over my lip. I didn’t need my Gift to know my nose was bleeding. My lungs heaved.

“Holy fuck,” I groaned into the dirt.

It was wildly inefficient. It was physically agonizing. If I messed up the timing in a real fight, I would paralyze myself and get killed almost immediately.

It was, without a doubt, the most dangerous, reckless thing I had ever attempted in either of my lives.I wiped the blood from my mouth. None of that mattered.

Because it had worked.

I stood on shaky legs. I couldn’t just stop here. I needed to get more practice.

I looked out across the training yard. The sun was dipping low, casting long shadows across the dirt.

Fifty feet away, Damian was pinned face-down by a jagged slab of rock, while Sere was caught in a headlock. Violet sat triumphantly atop Damian’s slab, looking barely winded. How she had managed that was truly anyone’s guess.

“Violet!” I called out loudly.

She paused, releasing Sere, and looked over at me.

“Let’s fight.”

I was going to die.

My back was pressed flat against the cratered dirt of the sparring ring, and my lungs heaved. The sky above me was a blur of orange and purple.

I had landed several good hits on her.

Just maintaining the Flicker for two minutes had nearly given me an aneurysm. If I used this for a prolonged fight, my brain would melt out of my ears before an enemy could kill me.

A shadow fell over my face.

Violet stood over me. She was panting heavily, sweat dripping from her chin. One of her hands was nursing a fresh, nasty-looking bruise forming right in the center of her chest plate. She stared down at me with a mixture of awe, confusion, and deep concern.

“I don’t know what the hell you just did,” Violet grunted, wiping a streak of dirt from her cheek. “But that was something.”

I tried to grin, but it came out as a bloody wheeze.

“But are you sure it’s safe?” she demanded, kicking a clod of dirt at my boot.

“Positive,” I croaked out.

Violet stared dubiously. “Remember when I said you had a screw loose?”

“Yeah.”

“Change that to all of them. You’re insane.”

I grinned and weakly raised a hand. Violet reached down and lifted me up to my feet. I felt a little unsteady still, but she held me in place.

“Thanks,” I said, glancing around. The cool evening wind brushed against my sweat-soaked clothes, making me shiver.

While we had been fighting, Damian and Sere had been sparring on their own. I had decided to bring everyone, and naturally, that meant they all needed to get stronger.

I had already sent Estovan to fetch us the finest armor and equipment that money could buy. Not just in Aelheim, but from the broader Kingdom.

He should be back in a day or so.

The sun had started to set by now, and my stomach was screaming in protest. It was time to head back. I couldn’t afford to waste a day. Not when so much hinged on the expedition.

Violet started dragging me away. She paused. I paused too.

In front of us, a blur grew larger as it drew closer. A woman. It was…Anias. She was using her Gift until she was practically flying a few feet off the ground in her rush to get to us.

Something was wrong.

“My Lady,” Anias said, stopping just shy of us, the glow of her Gift dissipating as she landed on the ground.

“This just came in. I thought you’d want to see.” In her hands was an envelope. She drew close and handed it to me.

I took it, saw the seal. It was the Greenward seal.

I opened it, unfurled and read the letter inside. I stared at it long after I’d read the contents.“What the hell is it?” Violet demanded.

I wasn’t quite sure I believed the contents myself.

“Cordelia Greenward,” I began. “Has invited me to a tea party.”