After the match ended, Klein began to rub his eye, wondering what had just happened to him. Before he could work it out, Delane called out to him.
Delane cheerfully greeted his brother, asked how long he had been watching, and said that Klein should have told him he was coming to the demonstration. He awkwardly claimed that he would have tried to fight Dalton a little harder if he had known Klein was watching.
Klein quietly observed his so-called half-brother and admitted that Delane was actually impressive. Good looks, excellent talent, a great personality. Klein then asked Delane why the collateral branches had come, wondering aloud whether they were here to squeeze money out of the main line.
Before Delane could respond, the Duke interrupted them, commending Delane for doing a great job and praising him for mastering the family's meteor sword technique. The Duke was Heinkel Rheinland, Delane and Klein's father, and the seventh Duke of Rheinland. From the way Heinkel looked at Delane and praised him, Klein guessed that Delane must be the last shred of pride the man was holding on to.
Just then a knight of Rheinland named Dunkel also praised Delane for his mana control and his precision. Dunkel proudly declared that no knight of that age could even attempt what Delane had achieved. Delane tried to be humble, but Heinkel reminded him of the final words of their ancestor Berkel, which stated that a knight of Rheinland must always be the greatest in the empire. He told Delane to carve those words into his heart and use them as a yardstick from that day forward.
After Delane thanked him, Heinkel turned to face Klein, which made Klein uneasy. Heinkel placed a hand on him and felt no mana inside him at all. Klein apologized for being mediocre, but noticed that Heinkel did not seem angry with him. That was because such feelings were reserved for someone with potential, and since Klein had none, Heinkel probably considered him worthless trash, not worth the strength it would take to be angry.
Dunkel then begged Heinkel to spare Klein, explaining that Klein's poor aptitude came from the years he had wasted at the monastery. The audience began to gossip about Klein's poor skills and to compare him with his half-brother. They also began to trash-talk the main line for being incompetent, and they used that as an excuse to argue that the collateral branches should take over.
While everyone was talking trash about Klein, Heinkel comforted him, telling him that there were other paths to take besides the path of the sword. Klein, for his part, did not care about the insults. What he could not stand was that the family the great Berkel had fought for was finished. He could not accept that this greedy, trashy bunch was the same lot Berkel had risked his life for back then.
Soon afterward, Delane, Heinkel and Dunkel left the hall, and trouble immediately found Klein.
Seeing that Klein's backers had all gone, Dalton started mocking him for having no aptitude for swordsmanship. As Dalton kept provoking him, Klein turned around and tore into him for what he had been doing to women behind the scenes. That infuriated Dalton, who could not understand how Klein knew, since he had been so careful to keep it quiet. Dalton had been paying the girls off to keep things under wraps, and somehow Klein had found out about it anyway.
Dalton tried to attack him, but Klein effortlessly tripped him up and sent him face down into the ground. Klein then turned away, ignoring Dalton like a piece of roadside trash, and called him out for being a sore loser because Delane had defeated him.
That only infuriated Dalton more, so he insulted Klein's mother and called Klein an illegitimate brat. Pissed off, Klein turned around exuding killing intent, and Dalton was terrified by the expression on his face. But Klein was only giving him that death glare because of the blatant disrespect, and not because Dalton had insulted the mother he had never met.
Klein was angry that Berkel's descendants had fallen so far that insignificant trash could pick on them. He could not understand why the family of the hero who had killed him had declined to this extent.
Fortunately, before Klein's anger could get out of hand, Dunkel stepped in and warned Dalton to back off. Still fuming, Dalton decided to leave, but not before calling Klein a coward for using a knife to intimidate him. Then he stormed off like an annoyed rooster, while Klein and Dunkel quietly watched him go.
After Dalton left, Klein asked Dunkel for a spare sword.
Later that night Dunkel handed him the sword. He wondered aloud why Klein needed a sword at such a late hour, but Klein ignored the question and began swinging it around, mimicking Delane's movements from earlier.
Dunkel guessed it must be the meteor sword, and Klein confirmed it, then told Dunkel to go on ahead without him. Dunkel agreed, though not before advising Klein to be careful playing with a sword. As he prepared to leave, Dunkel reasoned that Klein must be doing this because he had regrets about never learning swordsmanship. He believed it was far too late for Klein to grasp anything, since he had no mana, and those who could not use mana could never become knights. Beyond that, the meteor sword was a secret art, and nobody had ever officially taught it to Klein, so even if Klein could replicate the sword path, Dunkel believed he could not copy it.
Meanwhile, Klein focused his senses to remember what he had seen Delane do earlier. For some reason he could not explain, the memory was vivid in his mind, as though the technique had been a part of him for a long time.
Klein began to replicate everything effortlessly, even the flow of mana. Soon the energy around him began to crackle, and it reached all the way to Dunkel, who was taken aback. Dunkel turned around, wondering whether Klein had really replicated the technique, but before he could work it out, Klein unleashed the meteor sword in full. The resulting strike split a giant boulder, and Dunkel, who had witnessed the whole thing, was left speechless.
Still in shock, Dunkel called out to him, while Klein stood there very pleased that the technique had actually worked.