Danmachi: The Focalors Familia — Chapter 51

Chapter 51: The Teachings of God Takemikazuchi

Noah knew that crossing blades with Takemikazuchi would yield a massive harvest of experience points.

To accommodate this, the Familia restructured their daily routine. Neither Hyacine nor Robin were frontline fighters; forcing them through the grueling crucible of martial arts would be a pointless endeavor. Instead, Tifa staggered her schedule with Noah. They would take turns—one enduring the War God’s tutelage while the other led Robin and Hyacine down into the Dungeon.

They still needed to eat, after all, and the steady influx of Valis from the labyrinth was absolutely vital. More crucially, they couldn’t let their own pursuit of strength bottleneck the growth of their supporters. Even without Noah’s overwhelming presence, Tifa’s sheer combat prowess, backed by Robin’s utility and Hyacine’s healing, ensured the party would face little genuine danger as long as they remained on the upper floors.

“Then, let us begin.”

Takemikazuchi wasted no breath on pleasantries. With a casual, almost lazy flick of his wrist, he spun his wooden training sword through a tight flourish, letting the blunt tip drift until it pointed directly at Noah’s chest. “Attack me.”

Noah didn’t hesitate. He immediately sank into his stance, his aura sharpening into the cold, murderous intent he had inherited from Alfia.

Yet, the very second his boots planted into the dirt, Takemikazuchi shook his head.

“Incorrect.”

The god’s voice was flat, devoid of its usual warmth. “Your stance exists solely for the sake of slaughter. It strips away all extraneous movement to maximize lethal efficiency, but in doing so, it discards your foundation. It discards adaptability.”

Takemikazuchi dissected the flaw with surgical precision. “Against weaker foes, you can execute them in a single strike. You can even dismantle mindless monsters through sheer technique. But the moment you cross blades with an Adventurer of equal or greater caliber, that rigid efficiency will bleed into glaring openings.”

He lowered his blade slightly. “Simply put, your swordsmanship is meant for butchering monsters. It is not meant for fighting people.”

Before the final syllable even left his lips, Takemikazuchi vanished.

A sharp, electric numbness flared through Noah’s wrist. The longsword was violently wrenched from his grip, spinning wildly through the air before embedding itself with a heavy thwack into the mortar of a distant stone wall.

Noah’s pupils contracted to pinpricks.

He hadn’t even tracked the movement. Takemikazuchi was already standing flush against his side, the edge of his wooden sword resting lightly against Noah’s jugular.

“A sword is merely an extension of the arm,” Takemikazuchi murmured, his tone perfectly even. “But if you cannot even command the arm itself, then the sharpest extension in the world is entirely meaningless.”

The War God pulled his blade away, casually driving it into the packed earth beside him. He raised an empty hand, curling his fingers in a silent beckoning. “Today, I will teach you how to survive after you have been disarmed.”

Noah drew in a slow, ragged breath, forcing the shock down into the pit of his stomach. He mentally discarded the rigid framework of a swordsman, mobilizing every ounce of kinetic energy in his muscles as he lunged forward, adopting the fluid, grounded stance of a brawler.

What followed was an unmatched descent into absolute hell.

Noah witnessed firsthand the terrifying reality of a “God-realm” martial artist.

His basic stats—Strength, Agility, Dexterity—utterly eclipsed those of the deity standing before him, given that Takemikazuchi’s divine power was strictly sealed by the laws of the lower world. He had trained under Alfia, absorbing the highest tiers of combat theory and lethal technique.

Yet, against Takemikazuchi, Noah was reduced to a toddler stumbling through his first steps—clumsy, predictable, and almost comical.

Every strike he threw, whether a blistering straight punch aimed at the jaw or a deceptive, low-angle sweep kick, was dismantled. Takemikazuchi neutralized the kinetic force in ways that defied logic, using simple, minimalist shifts in posture. The god seemed to read the future, stepping into the most critical blind spots a fraction of a second before Noah even committed to the motion. With the barest application of use, Takemikazuchi shattered Noah’s center of gravity, disrupting the generation of force before it could even travel up his kinetic chain.

Noah felt as though he were trying to punch a tidal wave or grapple a hurricane. He possessed an ocean of raw physical power, but nowhere to anchor it.

Conversely, Takemikazuchi’s counter-strikes were brutally direct and devastatingly effective.

The god offered zero mercy. Every retaliatory blow found its mark with agonizing precision, striking Noah’s joints, nerve clusters, and vulnerable soft tissue. A sickening cocktail of numbness, swelling, and blinding pain constantly assaulted Noah’s nervous system.

He was swept off his feet, slammed into the dirt, and sent sprawling time and time again. And time and time again, driven by sheer, stubborn willpower and his monstrous physical constitution, Noah dragged himself back to his feet, only to be immediately floored once more.

The only sounds echoing across the quiet expanse of the city wall were the heavy, visceral thuds of flesh striking flesh and the ragged, desperate rasp of Noah’s breathing.

Takemikazuchi was a teacher strict to the point of outright cruelty.

But he was also the absolute best.

He battered Noah until the boy was a canvas of deep purple bruises and swelling welts, looking utterly wretched. Yet, Noah knew the truth. These were superficial wounds. They looked horrific, but they did not damage his core foundation. Every time his back hit the dirt, every time his nerves screamed from a joint lock or a nerve strike, his body was absorbing the lesson in the most visceral way possible. He was committing the sensory data to memory—how kinetic force was redirected, how devastating attacks were dissolved into nothing, and how fatal openings were artificially manufactured.

This was an accumulation of combat experience so deep it defied language.

This was the pure, unadulterated tutelage of the God of War.

Seven days.

In the span of a single week, Noah’s entire presence underwent a seismic shift. If he had been a drawn, razor-sharp blade seven days prior, he was now akin to a block of dense, unrefined dark iron. All of his lethal sharpness had been drawn inward, perfectly concealed beneath a plain, unremarkable exterior, yet harboring an explosive, terrifying potential just waiting to detonate.

Naturally, the toll for this rebirth was steep.

Every morning on the city wall, a brutally one-sided beating took place.

And every evening, Noah would drag his battered, exhausted body back to the Familia’s headquarters.

Furina frequently voiced her outrage to Takemikazuchi over the state of her Familia member. She would stare at Noah’s bruised flesh with genuine heartache, puffing out her cheeks as she fiercely accused the War God of being excessively heavy-handed, bordering on outright abuse.

Takemikazuchi would only laugh it off. He accepted the dramatic Archon’s verbal barrages with good grace, offering various smooth excuses to deflect her ire.

Yet, the intensity of his daily sessions never wavered for a single second.

He refused to hold back, because he knew better than anyone else that Noah was an anomaly.

For a monstrous prodigy like this—a talent that surfaced perhaps once in a century—a conventional, step-by-step curriculum would be nothing short of a tragedy. It would only hinder him.

The perceptive gaze of the gods operated on a plane far above that of any mortal. Even without the ‘Divine Eye’ of Freya, the Goddess of Beauty, which could peer directly into the essence of a soul, deities who had existed for hundreds of millions of years could read the truth of a mortal through the subtle shift of their posture and the invisible flow of their aura.

On the very first day of their training, Takemikazuchi had recognized the terrifying nature of the youth standing before him.

The speed at which Noah digested and assimilated combat experience was staggering. The sheer velocity of his growth bordered on the absurd.

Takemikazuchi could physically feel Noah’s strength, speed, endurance, and agility refining themselves. More, his micro-intuition and fundamental grasp of martial theory were evolving with each passing day.

On the first day, Noah had been a raw beginner, entirely helpless against the god’s technique.

By the second day, he was barely managing to keep pace with the rhythm, even slipping in a few structurally sound counterattacks.

And by the third day? Noah was occasionally predicting the War God’s shifts in momentum. Although he was still easily dismantled and thrown to the dirt, that sheer rate of adaptation was enough to send a quiet thrill of shock through the heart of any deity.