557 years of the Empire calendar [26 years later]

United Provincial Republic [Alias ​​of the Republic of Shanqian]

Guitucheng

It was a midsummer afternoon, cloudless.

The sun turned the entire city into a steamer, causing all living beings to lose their vitality.

"If you persist, you will win soon." Winters, a third-year officer at the Army Officer Academy, told himself.

He bit his lips tightly, desperately restraining his instinct to breathe with his mouth.

[Winters Montagne]

Breath! The key is breathing!

Winters tried his best to maintain his abdominal breathing and actively control the rhythm, so that every inhalation and exhale were as long as possible.

Air with body temperature sprayed out of the nasal cavity and hit the inner wall of the fully wrapped helmet, with a stinky smell of sweat when returning.

With the current temperature, it should be a good time to take a shower and enjoy the cool air.

But in this oven-like hot summer weather, Winters was wrapped tightly.

He was wearing a complete set of cotton armed clothes close to his body, and the outside of the armed clothes was wearing a set of training armor.

This set of training armor was a cavalry plate armor removed from the corpses of the nobles during the sovereign war thirty years ago.

Because the Army Department wants to save as much teaching expenses as possible, only these second-hand goods are available for officers.

Of course, Winters used not the armor of the great nobles, and those gorgeous and sophisticated high-end goods were taken home by the generals as decorations.

The officers used the armor of the knights who were truly rushing to the front line.

These little nobles at the bottom sold their ancestral property for war horses and armor, and followed their lords and swords to make a fortune with their family cavalry and spears and swords.

[Forthland Mountain Front, today's Union Republic]

They believed that the enemy was nothing more than a rebel group of vendors, serfs and craftsmen.

But it was vendors, serfs and craftsmen who laughed to the end, and knights could only bury their bones in a foreign land.

No one remembers who they are, no one remembers where they came from, leaving only this set of armor with bullet holes and scratches to prove that they had existed.

These armors have simple appearance, no decoration, and most of them are not polished. But they have the advantage of solid materials because their quality is related to the user's wealth and life.

The people from the Army Ordnance Bureau took away all the accessories below the armor and gave them to the cavalry units as brand new leg armor.

A batch of left shoulder armor was removed from other captured armors and replaced the original right shoulder armor of these armors.

The right shoulder armpit of the cavalry armor left a gap in order to facilitate clamping the cavalry rifle, and the Ordnance Bureau did not want to make more trouble and then create a batch of right shoulder armor.

"Anyway, the shoulder armor is not different from the front and back!" That's what they said.

The Ordnance Bureau registered this batch of second-hand assembly as [Newly made high-quality three-quarters] and sent it to the Land Court for use by officers and students.

Many of the armors were not filled with the gaps made by muskets, but the gaps were hammered flat.

It is not a big problem to have a few more gun holes, after all, officers will not wear these armors to the battlefield.

What tortured the officers was not the bullet holes in these armors or the weight of these armors, but the excellent thermal conductivity of iron armor.

In winter, your body temperature will be taken away quickly. In summer, external heat will be efficiently transferred to the inside of the armor.

Winters now seemed to have just been fished out of boiling water. The cotton armed clothes under the iron armor absorbed heat and sweat, and were tightly attached to his back.

Sweat flows down from the forehead and will penetrate into the eyes from time to time, making the eyeballs so painful.

He was wearing a helmet and couldn't reach out to rub it, so he could only endure it.

Whenever he was wearing these training armors older than him in midsummer, Winters thanked the bureaucrats of the Ordnance Bureau for not filling in the holes in the armor.

After all, with them, ventilation can be better.

In every swordsmanship class, the more holes the training armor is, the more popular it is. This is why.

The officers responsible for handling this group of armor twenty years ago probably wouldn't have thought that his laziness would do good things instead.

This batch of armor has been used since the date of the establishment of the Army Officers Academy until today, for nearly thirty years.

In the predictable future, Winters' juniors will continue to torture.

But Winters doesn't have the extra time to pity his younger generations now.

He just wanted to pull off the burden on his body and pour cold water on him.

Before this competition, he had fought two other swordsmen.

He won and consumed a lot of energy.

This game is particularly important and difficult at the moment.

After more than twenty rounds of competition, Winters's shoulders were as hot as red iron blocks, and more stiff as the door shaft that had not been oiled for decades.

His big arm muscles were unconsciously causing his whole arm to tremble, and his hands could hardly hold the hilt of the sword.

The sword in his hand is exactly why he must wear a piece of armor in the hot summer.

Swords are probably the most subspecies weapon in the world.

The sword in Winters's hand has a relatively short history, about less than two hundred years.

It is 1.3 meters long, which is about 1.8 meters away from the distance between four fingers under the armpits and the ground.

The sword blade is scattered and has a length of nearly 1 meter.

Its sword grid is very large, two feet long.

The huge sword grid is the soul of this weapon. Without it, many sword moves cannot be used.

This sword is very long, longer than most swords. Its center of gravity is a palm in front of the sword grid, and it must be used with both hands to exert its power.

Compared to its length, its weight is surprisingly low. The sword that Winters is using is only 1.4 kg.

In most cases, officers called it a "sword".

If other types of swords appear in the conversation, resulting in confusion of meanings, the officers will call it "the sword we practice."

Or simply because it is longer than ordinary swords, it is called "long sword".

The long sword is only 1.4 kilograms, but the correct force is enough to smash the bones and split the flesh and blood.

This is also the reason why Winters risked heatstroke in the hot summer and also had to wear a complete set of cavalry armor.

Winters, and his opponents, were all used without any swords.

Winters was almost boiled in sweat, but he didn't care.

He only wanted to win this game, and to win the previous person he had not won in six years.

And now, it is the closest he has to win, and perhaps the last chance.

Through the grid observation window on his helmet, he glanced at the scoreboard on the sidelines.

He scored 17 points and his opponent scored 12 points. He has never led the opponent by as many as 5 points.

Whoever scores 20 points first wins, and Winters now holds the match point.

He repeatedly reminded himself: "Calm down, calm down, just three points."

His brain thought quickly: "If Ike wants to catch up with the score, he must take the initiative to attack. I can wait for a flaw."

With a determined heart, Winters entered the competition venue from the waiting area.

He poked his right foot out half a step, his lower body steadily, and his waist was straight. He held the hilt of the sword in front and left hand behind. His hands sank to the height of his navel, and the tip of the sword pointed upward towards his opponent's throat.

The sword technique practiced by Winters originated from the founding father, the Alliance Army Marshal, and the swordsman [Ned Smith]. One of the core contents of this sword technique is "stance".

Winters' posture at this moment is called "plow style", both offense and defense.

Moreover, he prefers to keep his sharp hands and strong side legs in front at the same time.

He knew very well that his physical strength had dried up, and his stiff posture must be funny to the students watching, but he didn't care about embarrassment.

Time always passes faster in my mind, and I think of a lot of things in my mind, but only a few seconds have passed in the real world.

Winters' opponent is approaching him in a similar posture as Winters.

As Winters expected, he held the match point and his opponent decided to play more aggressively and proactively.

Otherwise, a gambling raid in Winters could end the game immediately.

The opponent's sword tip also pointed at Winters' head, but his feet strode towards Winters' right hand, trying to occupy Winters' side position.

Winters naturally would not let him do what he wanted, and would adjust his pace.

The two of them were looking in the mirror, with the stand in the same frame and the pace was consistent, and even the breathing rhythm tended to be synchronized.

After a few steps, the distance got closer and closer, the tip of their sword began to bump.

Winters' eyes did not blink, and the sword tip began to bump, which meant that the two of them entered the opponent's attack range at the same time.

The opponent confidently took the initiative to control the long sword and Winters' long sword's strike, as if he was provoking.
To be continued...