Not Even Close

Gwen slowly waddled back as Zack did the same. They took their distance as Felix was in the middle to watch from the sidelines. He was finally about to watch someone else suffer Gwen's tricks, it wasn't fair that he had to suffer all those times.

Zack's confidence was through the roof, seeing that Gwen was only a Tier 2 Mage, the disparity between them was night and day. As he was about to get ready to start the spar, Gwen suddenly shouted at Felix.

"Felix, give me a sword!" Gwen covered her mouth with her hands, similar to a megaphone so that her voice could be heard at a further distance. Felix was slightly confused but he followed up to what Gwen wanted. He looked around and saw a patrolling guard, he dashed to right beside him and took his sword.

The guard was startled and was about to sound an alarm when Zack calmed him down. He didn't understand what Gwen was trying to do with that sword but he didn't mind it at all. It was interesting to see such a young girl like her wield a sword that was as big as her.

Finally having a sword in her hands, she tightly gripped it and physically enhanced her strength while also lightening the weight of the sword in her hands. She had silently cast this since her understanding of these basic spells had already reached full mastery. Now, her preparations were finally complete.

"Lady Gwendolyn, were you a… Swordsman?"

"Me? No, I just dabbled a little bit in it. I wanted to practice something, you don't mind me showing off a little bit, do you?"

Zack realized that with the disparity between them, it wouldn't be fair for him to straight up oppress her. Understanding the meaning behind her words, Zack agreed, "I'll take on any attack you give me. Don't worry about harming me, I'm confident in my abilities."

"Oh? That's impressive. If you can actually block all my attacks then I guess I can't recruit you, huh?"

Zack's ears perked and ideas started popping up in his head, 'If I beat the famed child of the Aria family then wouldn't that mean that my fame would spread throughout the lands?'

Thinking even further, Zack proposed, "How about this, Lady Gwendolyn, if I cannot block all your attacks then I'll obediently follow under you. But if I manage to block everything, how about you reward me with one of my wishes? I won't ask for anything that's too much."

Even as blatantly unfair as this fight was, Zack still had the audacity to bring up this proposition. If anyone else heard this then they would be thinking of how suicidal Zack was, taking advantage of someone from the Aria family. Even so, he wasn't about to fully take advantage of her, something that the Aria family wouldn't have cared about, such as an Archmage Tier Grimoire, was something he could definitely receive.

Thinking of how powerful he would immediately be once he received an Archmage Tier Grimoire, he erected a barrier that was fully blocking everything around him.

"Heh." Felix was amused at how naïve Zack was, despite being a prince, he still hadn't figured out how terrifying the Aria family was.

"I guess it's time for my warmup." Gwen stretched her limbs, and surprisingly her clothes stretched alongside her, making it so that it didn't tear when she moved around. She found this extremely comfortable and decided to immediately use her first move.

"First Sword: Light the Darkness." Gwen's sword seemed to have created a small star at the tip of her blade. Zack was shocked at how terrifyingly talented Gwen truly was, to learn such a sword technique was well beyond what even he could fathom at this moment.

Understanding that Gwen was using her 'strongest' move at the start, Zack decided to also use his strongest barrier to block it.

"Rubber Dome." A gooey substance started to surround Zack as his entire person was submerged into this gelatinous substance, waiting for Gwen to strike.

As Zack was confidently waiting inside his protection, an extremely cold tingling aura appeared right behind him. It was Gwen, she had entered through the gaps during the creation of the spell. The signature lighting flash appeared, and she was there.

"You should really defend yourself against this." Gwen's first sword technique was first and foremost, a movement technique that finds the path of least resistance towards her destination, meaning that she would almost instantaneously appear wherever she wished, and at this moment she tore through Zack's flimsy protection and appeared inside it before it could fully form.

As the sword was about to strike Zack, his instincts kicked in, "Rubber Dome." Another gelatinous dome appeared right before Gwen's strike, and instead of its previously flimsy form, he focused the manifestation of this spell into one concentrated area, blocking Gwen's strike.

Immediately right after, Zack dissolved the outer barrier since it was of no use to him. If he didn't do so, he would be imprisoning himself with a monster. Gwen saw this opportunity and happily continued on.

She kept using the First Sword to teleport all over the place, sometimes right behind Zack, others, directly in front of him. Zack truly was a genius, to be able to hold back Gwen's nearly imperceptible strikes with nothing but his instincts and battle sense.

"Seems like it's not working." Gwen showed a worried expression yet the exhausted signs that Zack desperately wanted to see did not appear.

"Second Sword: Beyond the Stars." The tip of Gwen's sword seemed to have bubbled up, multiplying this speck of light into numerous others, similar to how the stars from the night sky looked. This was the first destructive sword of Gwen's sword technique, the most terrifying aspect of this sword was how tricky it was.

Gwen used the First Sword to enter Zack's personal space and immediately used the Second Sword to strike at the previously deflective dome. At first, Zack was still confident that his defenses would last but when Gwen's sword finally had contact with his barrier, the initial impact was deflected as expected but for some reason, he could feel another strike, twice as strong as the previous sword. He was able to barely deflect the previous sword strike yet one more time, an impact that was four times stronger than the first strike hit his barrier utterly cracking it.

Zack felt threatened and had no choice but to take drastic actions, "Weightless. Levitation. Weakness. Force- Guh." Zack still hasn't mastered his spells enough to make them chantless, rendering him unable to fully cast everything in his arsenal.

Due to Zack's quick thinking, he bottled up right behind the remaining barrier he had left and flew to the skies, using Gwen's sword strike as the driving force to do so. Being weightless, he didn't feel much of the impact and with a levitation spell, he wasn't the main force that was struggling. He weakened Gwen's sword strike as much as he could, yet he was still up in the air, so high that he could see the entire Jiana Kingdom.

Gwen saw Zack fly away and was slightly annoyed. "That's unfair! I thought he was going to stand there and take it!"

"I don't think-" Felix awkwardly tried to explain to Gwen why Zack did it. Gwen wouldn't understand just how powerful her strikes were since you would only really understand the terror if you faced it yourself. A power that kept increasing unless you broke through it by force or crumbled under its pressure.

"That's it, where's my… there you are, my Glimmering Dagger." Gwen raised her index finger, using the mana within the Glimmering Dagger, and without hesitation, swiped down. Zack, who was still in the air, felt gravity envelop him to such an extreme degree that he lost all control. From the skies, Zack, who was still enveloped by his barrier, shot down straight to the ground like a meteor. Completely unstoppable.