An Engineer's second chance (Mushoku Tensei: Jobless Reincarnation x OC)

What Lies Beyond Effort

[Orion/Alastor POV]

It's winter now, and I've come a long way in my sword training. I'm now officially a Sword King, and Eris is nearly at advanced. Currently, Ghislaine and Eris are sparring and Rudy is sitting off to the side looking glum.

Ghislaine - "I'm surprised you could react to that feint. You could reach Advanced rank soon."

Eris - "You mean it?! Yes!"

She runs and hugs Ghislaine, Rudy starts to look excited and points to himself and they look away awkwardly, then he goes back to looking glum. I walk up to Eris, putting my hand on her shoulder.

Orion - "You're doing good. You'll be an amazing swordswoman in just a few years at this rate. Anyway, Ghislaine, I would like to spar to see where I stand in terms of strength. With our actual weapons instead of the practice weapons, there will be one rule though. No deadly strikes, that means heart, head, and lung attacks. We can use any and all skills."

Ghislaine - "Are you certain you want to do this?"

Orion - "Absolutely."

Ghislaine - "Alright then. I'm in."

We then walk to our positions, with 40 feet between us we stop and Eris counts down.

Eris - "3!"

I put my hand on the Star Saber's hilt, Ghislaine grabs the hilt of her sword.

Eris- "2!"

I flare mana enhancement to 25%, Ghislaine gets into a stance. Looks like she's going to dash for the first strike.

Eris - "1!"

I lower my stance into a more defensive one.

Eris - "Begin!"

Ghislaine dashes forward, I swing the Star Saber, letting an energy wave off to distract her, making her jump up. I dash into the air to meet her and swing the Star Saber in a downwards strike, forcing her to block and subsequently getting slammed into the floor. I rotate myself in the air and kick of a solid air platform, propelling myself toward Ghislaine. She recovers and blocks again, and we enter a stalemate temporarily before I overpower her and continue my assault. horizontal, vertical, and diagonal slashes from all directions have her struggling to keep up. I make an obvious slash and she blocks it, but I simply keep the slash moving through the block and I end up stopping before her neck. It was over in less than a minute, and I won it.

[skip to later in the day]

After the training session and my duel with Ghislaine, I went back too my room to work on the drawings for the cargo freighter while the others continued with their classes. By mid afternoon I had finished the drawings that I had left to do, given it shares a lot of components and parts with the bulk freighter. I decide to head down to the library to look for a book to read in peace, and I find Philip in there as well.

Orion - "Good afternoon, Philip."

Philip - "Oh, good afternoon, Alastor. What brings you here?"

Orion - "I just came to do some reading, you got any suggestions?"

Philip - "Say, do you want to learn new languages?"

Orion - "That might be handy actually. what languages are there?"

Philip - "There's the human language, obviously, then there's beast god language, which the majority of beastkin speak, Demon god is spoken by the demon races, Fighting god is spoken by humans on the Begaritt continent by humans and is very similar to standard human language, then there's sky god and ocean god, but those you don't really need to know, and we don't have any of their books here."