Game Mindset

At Lu Xiu's urgent command, the samurai general, who had been brimming with murderous intent and was about to follow up with a second downward slash, instantly turned into a frozen statue.

The long blade gleaming with cold light stopped less than ten centimeters from Lu Xiu's forehead.

The oppressive pressure vanished.

Lu Xiu pushed the blade aside, then lowered her head to look at her hands. Her palms were numb, and the webbing between her thumbs and forefingers burned with pain.

"What the hell was that strength?"

Lu Xiu ducked around the blade hovering above her head, propped herself up with her own sword, and stood, somewhat dazed.

Wasn't this supposed to be like hammering iron?

Wasn't this supposed to flow as smoothly as spilled mercury?

Damn it... I'm the iron here, aren't I?

It had to be said.

This was vastly different from what Lu Xiu had imagined. Although Resident Evil had combat, firearms were ultimately the focus.

There was barely any melee weapon combat.

Much less blade-on-blade clashes like this.

In this most direct contest of strength, the weakness of Lu Xiu's poor foundation was completely exposed.

She had absolutely no experience in this area.

More importantly, this was an acting instance. Players' attributes and skills could not be brought in. Though Lu Xiu had set up corresponding mechanics for the instance, and the protagonist Wolf was no ordinary person, meaning his overall attributes were not inferior to the enemy's... players still had to know how to use that strength. For example, how to maintain balance while blocking, how to redirect force, how to exert force at the instant blades collided, how to coordinate hand and eye, how to become one with the weapon.

And clearly, Lu Xiu understood none of that.

She had simply taken it head-on.

"Again!"

Because it was acting mode, pain feedback still existed, but she would not be injured as she would be if she had actually entered the instance.

Very soon.

The pain in the webbing of Lu Xiu's hand faded. Still unwilling to accept it, she summoned the system panel again and prepared to restart.

She refused to believe it!

As the command was issued, the frozen world instantly shattered and reassembled.

The pitch-black samurai general returned beneath the banner.

This time, Lu Xiu did not bounce around in place. Instead, she charged straight at him with her sword raised.

The samurai standing amid the wind and snow saw Lu Xiu and made exactly the same movements as before.

He bent down and drew his sword.

Clang—

Accompanied by a crisp scrape of metal.

He drew his long blade again, gripping the hilt tightly with both hands as he assumed a stance.

Having learned the painful lesson of being crushed beneath Mount Tai.

Lu Xiu did not rush to block this time. Instead, she widened the distance slightly and observed his movements.

The samurai general maintained his opening stance. He did not rush to attack either, but slowly approached, waiting for an opportunity.

Lu Xiu stared at him intently, recalling the rhythm of playing games in her previous life... After all, she knew next to nothing about real-life melee combat. The scene before her had been built entirely according to the game in her memories, then generated by the system.

She could only search for a way to break the situation through those incredibly clear memories of the game.

Then.

She actually remembered something: deflecting was not merely rigid blocking.

She recalled that when the game had exploded in popularity, her intense curiosity had led her to look it up. Real melee combat did seem to have deflection techniques—redirecting an opponent's attack trajectory to dissipate force rather than blocking it head-on. That was similar to the game mechanic of actively swinging one's blade to knock aside an attack.

Did that mean she could likewise swing her sword to alter her opponent's attack trajectory and redirect the force?

Swish—

Perhaps growing impatient.

The samurai general finally stepped forward and raised his long sword high.

This time, Lu Xiu did not foolishly stand there and endure it like before. The instant his blade came down, she swung her own sword as well, trying to deflect its edge.

Clang!

Lu Xiu crouched down again.

...The facts proved that understanding it in her head did not mean her hands understood it too.

And her situation was rather special. Her own attributes were not high, and she still needed to adapt to the boost in strength brought by playing Wolf.

"Stop!"

"Again."

Third attempt.

The Samurai General raised his long blade high. The familiar whistle of tearing air rang out once more as a heavy, powerful downward slash came crashing down, swift as thunder.

Now!

In that split second.

Lu Xiu did not panic as she had the first two times. Instead, she shifted half a step aside. No longer trying to meet the blow head-on, she snapped her wrist the instant the long blade came down, angling her own sword upward in a precise diagonal stroke.

Clang—

A sharper, more resonant clash of steel than any before suddenly echoed through the wind and snow.

Lu Xiu's palm was still slightly numb, but most of the brute force that should have sent her flying had unexpectedly been diverted along the path of her upward-slanting blade.

Sparks burst forth, dazzlingly bright.

"Success!"

Lu Xiu's eyes lit up.

The satisfaction from that real feedback felt far better than pressing the block button ten thousand times in front of a screen.

However, reality was far crueler than any game.

Before the smile on Lu Xiu's lips could fully form.

The Samurai General let out a beastlike grunt when his powerful strike missed. His tower-like body spun with the momentum of the empty swing.

The heavy plates of his armor scraped together with a piercing screech.

Then, he leaped into the air.

A jumping slash!

"...Stop!"

Lu Xiu got up from the ground, slapped her forehead, and looked utterly dead inside.

She had actually forgotten about the jumping slash.

Still.

Lu Xiu quickly lowered her hand... She refused to believe it! Again!

The wind and snow swept backward.

Sparks flew in reverse.

The Samurai General standing beneath the banner returned once more to his starting point.

Lu Xiu appeared before him again.

"Step dodges, step dodges—pure game mechanics. I really can't get used to this."

"He even has a backhand slash! That's cheating!"

"...Ah, and there's a sweeping attack too. I need to jump, I need to jump, I need to jump."

"Hyper armor delayed attack! Why are you holding it up for so long?! Just slash already! Slash!"

"No, it was that fast? After two slashes, he immediately follows with a thrust—I can't even see it clearly. That's not human!"

"Is a thrust counter really this hard?"

"..."

Even after Lu Xiu had grasped the trick to deflecting.

Problems still kept cropping up.

But every time something went wrong, Lu Xiu quickly adjusted her mindset and restarted once more.

And after every restart, she rapidly adjusted her strategy, avoiding the pitfalls that had troubled her during the previous attempt.

Of course.

Not every adjustment worked.

For example, the thrust counter.

Lu Xiu could never quite get the timing right. Mainly because the Samurai General's two slashes followed by a thrust came too fast. At first, it looked like an ordinary combo, but the moment the second strike landed, his blade was already thrusting forward in the next instant, leaving almost no time to react.

In the game, there were two ways to deal with that move.

Either quickly retreat and open up distance.

Or counter the thrust.

Lu Xiu chose the latter, but the prerequisite for a thrust counter was... that within an extremely limited reaction window, she had to lift her foot and stomp down on the blade of his incoming thrust.

It was practically asking the impossible, yet Lu Xiu stubbornly refused to give up.

Once she got fired up, she kept stomping, continuously adjusting her posture and trying again and again.

In fact.

Even Lu Xiu herself had not noticed.

She had always approached it with a gamer's mindset... the only difference was that instead of controlling a keyboard or controller, she was controlling her own body.

And that was a mindset most people in this world lacked when facing dungeons.

Mainly because Lu Xiu had transmigrated here, while the original owner of her body had no real experience clearing dungeons.

On top of that, Lu Xiu's first dungeon had been Resident Evil, based on a game from her previous life, and she had retained her memories while testing the dungeon.

After the initial panic, she had cleared it exactly as she would have in the game.

That naturally left her lacking any reverence for dungeons. Unlike the natives, she did not see entering one as something serious—or even dangerous.

The first dungeon she had constructed had been fine. But this second one was, honestly, extremely inhumane.

Even in a gamified world, it still seemed inhumane.

Though theoretically, some of the moves in [Sekiro] were not completely impossible in reality.

For example, deflecting blades. Real-life cold weapon combat did have techniques for knocking attacks off line.

But the demands on one's reaction speed were incredibly high. One had to judge the trajectory and respond precisely within an extremely short span of time. Ordinary people could almost never pull that off consistently.

As a result, in real combat, people preferred to dodge, or block and immediately counterattack.

As for the Mikiri Counter—stepping on a blade.

That was an entirely game-based mechanic.

In reality, it was difficult for the human body to instantly raise a leg high enough and accurately step on a fast-moving weapon. Even if one truly managed to step on it, the opponent could easily pull back their blade or follow through with a sweeping strike, making it easier for the defender to lose their balance instead.

Besides, sword attacks were generally aimed at the upper body. Who would go around stepping on blades?

So in the end.

It was a fictional mechanic designed by the game for spectacle.

This world had become gamified, but before that, it had still essentially been a normal world. There was no so-called ancient martial arts system.

So even many top players now, despite years of training and greatly improved attributes—despite being able to jump three meters high—still followed the logic of the world before it became gamified in battle. After all, only four years had passed.

Of course, that did not include players who deliberately honed their techniques, or situations where people fought by relying on skills.

Put simply.

If the dungeon constructor at this moment had not been Lu Xiu, but another native instead.

Then they most likely would not have added mechanics like blade deflection or stepping on blades when designing the dungeon, because those things went against their understanding.

Even if such mechanics really existed, they would not use them in the same situation. Their first instinct in actual combat would still be to dodge or block, then counterattack.

But Lu Xiu was different.

Her thinking was simple—this was how I did it in games!

If I made a dungeon based on a game, why shouldn't it work this way?!

I want blade deflections! I want Mikiri Counters! I want to step on blades!

Anyway, just like getting stuck on a difficult game section, she would grind it out.

Even more terrifyingly, she was quite talented... and she actually managed to learn it.

It was not luck that let her succeed once in a while. She got closer each time, and more consistent each time.

And as her attributes improved in reality, those moves could actually be performed even outside dungeons, outside of their mechanics...

Deflecting blades, Mikiri Counters, stepping on blades.

They would not merely be fictional game mechanics, but techniques that could truly be performed in reality.