Beast Slayer Online: Initialization
Copyright© 2026 by CaffeinatedTales
Chapter 19
The next morning, old Aaron lay on his bed of hay and cracked his eyes open, still half-lost in sleep.
His clouded gaze swept the empty room as it always did.
But when it passed over the hay bed by the door, and found it deserted, his eyes snapped wide awake.
He shot upright, ignoring the grumbling complaints of his aged wife beside him, dragged a coat over his shoulders, and rushed for the wooden door.
“Where is he? That Witcher, gone already?!”
Anxiety tightened old Aaron’s face. It was not impossible.
Put himself in the man’s boots, if someone saddled him with a thankless task that cost more than it paid, he would run too, if he could.
“No. He can’t leave. I have to...”
The fishery still needed expanding, the promise of greater catches hung on this very matter. How could the man vanish now?
Still muttering, old Aaron yanked the door open.
And the moment it swung wide, the village elder, the most widely traveled man in the settlement, stood there with his mouth agape, frozen on the threshold.
Dark clouds still smothered Velen, a thin drizzle drifting down without pause.
Lannor stood in the rain, holding the School of the Bear steel sword he had taken from his master.
The bright, straight half of the blade was leveled forward, raised beside his cheek.
The young Witcher’s gaze was utterly focused.
Old Aaron had never seen a famed swordsman in his life, at most a tax collector under some knight and the soldiers he led.
Yet in that moment, he swallowed hard, and a thought rose unbidden—
“ ... too steady.”
The sword was held too steady.
Even a man who had only ever gripped a fishing spear or cast a net could feel it at once.
The young man’s hand on the hilt was steady to the point of something unnatural.
A man carries, somewhere beneath thought, a sense of what his own body can and cannot achieve.
So in Lannor’s homeland, even when people glimpsed a craft they had never heard of in their lives, once a master of that craft showed a fragment of his skill, the viewers could not help but gasp.
They might not know how much effort it took to reach that level.
But instinct told them all the same, I could never do that, not in this lifetime. The gulf is too wide.
And from that instinct, admiration and awe rose of their own accord.
Old Aaron felt it now.
In Lannor’s hands, the straight, gleaming blade was like the surface of a windless lake.
Had it not been raining, it would have been impressive enough. In the rain, the unnatural stability became even more apparent.
Raindrops struck the blade as though they were hitting stone laid upon the ground.
In old Aaron’s stunned silence, a deep breath sounded from Lannor’s chest.
Then the sword and body began to move.
It was a peculiar form of swordsmanship. His center of gravity shifted between left foot and right, yet never both at once, transferring through spins and lateral hops.
Even a layman could see it. Compared to the swords of knights, this style prized agility above all.
After all, the monsters a Witcher faced often struck with force no less than a full-armored heavy cavalry charge.
No one could withstand such blows head-on. Only nimbleness kept one alive.
The frequent shifts of balance dulled the smooth flow of force, weakened raw striking power, but the rotations within the technique made up for it.
Centrifugal force was a swordmaster’s closest ally.
A blade set “whirling” could carve full arcs, and at such tremendous angular velocity, if one made proper use of the tip, where linear speed peaked, it could even cleave a man in plate armor clean in two.