Using Sacred Edge without a full Iron Will Charge buildup should have been impossible.
At Leo’s current cultivation level, Sacred Edge needed preparation — at minimum a few seconds of charge before it could be deployed. That was simply how the skill worked. How the inheritance ring had encoded it. How every senior knight who had ever used it understood it.
But Leo hadn’t charged it the normal way.
He had used Blazing Reprisal instead — feeding its accumulated force directly into the Light Sword’s core, converting offensive energy into the compression that Sacred Edge required. It was a workaround that shouldn’t have existed, a bridge between two skills that weren’t designed to connect. The fact that it worked at all said something extraordinary about the depth of understanding behind it.
Up on the platform, Han Qian was the first to see what was actually happening.
He stood up.
"This boy is actually using Sacrifice." His voice had dropped to something between disbelief and alarm. "He’s going that far?" A pause, his eyes narrowing. "What was Caden Ashford thinking, sealing that into the ring? If anything goes wrong—"
He stopped himself. Looked more carefully at what was unfolding below.
Then, slowly, he sat back down.
Because he had also just remembered something Han Qian had not known when he first began worrying — that Leo’s innate spiritual energy sat at the 97th level. A number without precedent. A foundation so extraordinary that the calculations which applied to every other knight simply didn’t apply to him. Caden Ashford had not been reckless. He had known exactly what his son could carry.
Sacrifice was a seventh-stage secret skill, learnable by both Shield and Veil Knight paths. Its function was absolute and its cost was real: the user’s blood merged completely with their spiritual energy, forming a single unified force that bypassed the limitations of their current cultivation stage entirely. For those precious seconds, the gap between stages ceased to exist.
The price was equally absolute. Use it wrong — hold it too long, push it past the body’s threshold — and the blood drained completely. Death, or something close enough to it that the difference didn’t matter much.
No knight used Sacrifice in a tournament match.
No knight used Sacrifice unless they were protecting someone who mattered, or facing something that left no other choice.
Leo had used it because Zane Merrick hadn’t been fighting at full strength.
That was the whole reason. Not desperation. Not panic. Leo had felt it — in the weight of the exchanges, in the precise economy of Zane’s deflections, in the way each counter arrived perfectly calibrated rather than fully committed. Zane had been holding back, testing, evaluating. And the moment Leo understood that, something in him had gone very still and very cold.
Being assessed was not the same as being fought.
He had not come this far to be someone’s training exercise.
The gold-red radiance that erupted from his body was different from anything he had used before. It didn’t have the clean brightness of Sacred Edge or the blazing warmth of Golden Sun Cleave. This was something rawer — saturated with something that felt almost like grief, like fury, like the particular loneliness of a knight who had decided to stand regardless of what was standing against him.
Zane felt it before he understood it.
The danger sense that every serious cultivator developed over years of real combat fired hard and sudden, and Zane did not waste time questioning it. He launched Vanguard Rush at triple his previous speed — not held back, not measured, committed — his twin claymores crossing in front of him as Radiant Cross Cut deployed at full force mid-charge.
It was a skill combination that approached sixth-stage power. His strongest opening.
Leo didn’t dodge.
His Flame Sword came up horizontal across his body. Sacred Guard — but not the Sacred Guard that had appeared in earlier exchanges. The gold-red light of Sacrifice had transformed it into something that should not have been able to stop what was coming.
It stopped it anyway.
*BANG—*
The collision detonated across the arena. Leo’s feet didn’t move. His lips split at the corner and blood ran freely down his chin, but his body absorbed the full force of Radiant Cross Cut without giving a single step of ground.
Then he walked forward.
One step. The Light Sword rising. The atmosphere around it filling with something blood-red and blazing — Sacred Edge, running through Sacrifice’s amplification, the two skills intertwining in a way that had no name in any record the Ironveil Order kept.
Zane’s eyes went wide.
He recognized it now. He understood what Leo had done, what it cost, what it meant that Leo had chosen to do it in a ranking match against an opponent who hadn’t even been trying yet.
*He did this for his honor.*
Not for the win. Not for the ranking. Because the moment Leo realized he wasn’t being taken seriously, he had decided that his dignity as a knight mattered more than his safety as a person.
Zane raised Sacred Guard. The blood-red Sacred Edge crashed into it and drove him back five full steps — the most ground he had conceded in the entire match.
He could feel it clearly: the spiritual energy behind that strike was no longer below his own. Sacrifice had equalized them. Not exceeded — equalized. Leo’s extraordinary innate foundation meant that the skill’s amplification effect brought him precisely level with a genuine fifth-stage cultivator.
Which meant every exchange from this point forward was equal.
Then the white light appeared on Leo’s chest.
A soft pulse, almost gentle-looking, completely at odds with everything else happening in the arena.
Immediately after, a matching red light appeared on Zane’s body.
Lock — the sixth-stage knight skill usable by both specializations. Any attack launched by the user automatically tracked the locked target, bending trajectories, adjusting angles, making evasion far harder than it should have been.
From the platform: "A Saint Spiritual Furnace." Han Qian’s voice was openly astonished now. "He’s using the furnace to suppress Sacrifice’s aftereffects while simultaneously deploying Lock. The boy is managing three overlapping systems at once while bleeding."
The gold-red radiance surrounding Leo lifted higher as Lock took hold. Both swords swept outward and he began to spin — Condensing Spiral Blade returning, but different now. Deeper. The Sacred Edge running through it turned each rotation into something that hit with accumulated force rather than distributing it evenly, the spiraling motion building toward a single devastating concentrated strike.
Sacred Edge feeding into Condensing Spiral Blade under the effect of Sacrifice.
Zane had no clean counter for this. He knew it immediately.
He launched Ascending Dragon Strike again — the same skill that had disrupted the Spiral Blade the first time, deployed faster now, with no held-back force anywhere in it. The golden dragon screamed downward at the spinning figure below.
*BANG.*
Different result entirely.
The dragon hit the edge of the spiral and was torn apart. Not deflected — torn, the rotational force shredding it into dispersing light as the Spiral Blade continued turning, following Zane’s position through the Lock effect, closing the distance even as he tried to create it.
Zane felt something he hadn’t felt in years of serious competition.
Pressure.
Real, genuine, inescapable pressure from someone whose cultivation was lower than his own. The Condensing Spiral Blade was building — each rotation faster than the last, the Sacred Edge component sharpening with accumulated momentum — and the Lock meant that the angles he would normally use to create distance and reset weren’t available.
*This strong.* The thought arrived simply, without decoration. *Under Sacrifice, with this skill combination, he’s actually pushed me here.*
He planted his feet and committed fully, both claymores rising, everything he had going into the defense that had to hold — because if the Condensing Spiral Blade reached full speed with Sacred Edge running through it and Lock keeping it on target—
The dragon’s roar echoed across the silent arena.
And Leo’s twin swords kept turning.