The Weapon Genius: Anything I Hold Can Kill-Chapter 94: The Bonds We Build

The notification hovered just in front of his eyes.

[Weapon Bonding Available]

Jin blinked at it, brows raising slightly. "Bonding, huh?"

He looked down at the weapon in his hand—sleek, sharp, and new. The twin-edged blade glinted faintly in the early light, the metal catching just enough of the rising sun to glow.

"Didn’t know this was a dating sim," he muttered.

Still, curiosity pulled at him. He focused on the prompt.

[Attempt Bonding with Current Weapon?]

"Yeah, sure. Let’s see what this is about," he said aloud, voice low. He accepted the prompt mentally—

[Insufficient combat resonance. Bonding failed.]

Jin lowered the blade with a faint frown. "Then why ask in the first place?" His voice dripped sarcasm.

He waited, as if the system would offer an explanation. It didn’t.

No follow-up. No more prompts. Just the quiet hum of the air around him and the distant stir of wind cutting through the trees past the walls.

He rolled his shoulders, gave the blade another look. It felt good in his hand. Well-balanced. Dangerous. And yet... sterile. Like it didn’t know him—and apparently, the feeling was mutual.

Jin sighed and returned it to his inventory. A clean shink of light dissolved it from his grip.

"Alright, onto the next one."

With a flick of his thoughts, he summoned the weapon he was most familiar with—the three-section staff. The metal bars and cords materialized in his palm with a familiar tug of weight. He spun it once around his back, let it wrap behind his shoulder, then whipped it forward and caught it across both hands.

His body remembered the motion. So did the bruises from practicing it over and over.

"Let’s see what you’ve got."

[Attempt Bonding with Weapon?]

This time, a pause.

[Usage History Detected...]

[Resonance Level: Moderate]

[Bonding Failed – Combat Imprint Insufficient.]

Jin stared at the message for a long moment. "Huh."

He adjusted his grip, letting the staff settle behind his neck, elbows resting lazily over the bars like a towel rack.

"Guess beating people up isn’t the same as making a connection."

The system remained silent. As always.

Jin exhaled through his nose and flipped the staff over one shoulder, catching it mid-arc. The motion was smooth, natural. If anything had been part of his growth these last few weeks, it was this.

"Still..." he murmured, rolling the metal again in his palm. "I did like using this."

The three-section staff had saved his ass more times than he could count. From blocking blade strikes to tripping enemies, deflecting bullets, even improvising grapples—it had become second nature to him. A weapon that danced more than it struck. But even so, the system said it wasn’t enough.

"Combat imprint insufficient."

Wasn’t that just a fancy way of saying: "You don’t know me well enough yet"?

He clicked his tongue and gave the staff one last spin before dismissing it.

Then his fingers flexed.

Something tugged at the back of his mind.

A memory?

No... not a memory. A sensation. Like being watched by something you’d forgotten. A loose thread, long buried, now brushing against the inside of his thoughts.

He exhaled slowly.

"...Fine."

He summoned it—not with the same practiced familiarity as the others, but with a kind of quiet resolve.

The broken katana appeared in his hand.

Its hilt rested firm in his palm, but the blade itself... jagged. The clean line of the weapon was abruptly severed a third of the way down. The edge was dulled from disuse, the steel marred by faint scratches.

He stared at it in silence.

The weapon he’d bought way back when. The first thing he ever spent points on. At the time, it had felt like an investment in survival. Now it looked like a rusted reminder of how little he’d known back then.

And still...

Still.

There was something here. Something that hadn’t left him. Something that, maybe, hadn’t given up yet.

[Weapon Detected: Katana]

[Note: Weapon is damaged. Bonding may result in unstable synchronization.]

[Proceed anyway?]

The warning glowed soft blue across his vision. Gentle. Cautioning.

Jin stared at it.

He tightened his grip just slightly. The katana’s broken edge caught the light—faint, but sharp.

"Yeah," he muttered, more to himself than the system. "Let’s try anyway."

He didn’t hesitate this time.

Mentally, he confirmed.

For a second, nothing happened.

Then the world around him shifted.

The air pressure dropped.

The hairs on his arms lifted as something—some pulse—radiated from the katana. The weapon buzzed faintly in his hand, not a sound, but a pressure, like thunder held still.

Jin took one step back—but the ground didn’t catch him.

His heel met nothing.

[Bonding Initiated.] freёnovelkiss.com

Jin plummeted through the dark.

His first thought wasn’t panic—it was confusion. A raw, jagged confusion that scraped against his nerves.

The sky had vanished. So had the ground.

The training yard, the rising sun, the echo of wind moving through the trees—it was all gone.

Replaced by... this.

A void.

An endless, directionless abyss.

His stomach twisted, weightless in a way that made his instincts scream. He couldn’t breathe—no, he could, there was no pressure, no wind tearing at his skin, but the sensation of falling—of the world rushing past him—refused to stop.

"What the hell is this?!"

His voice echoed, but not like it should have. It didn’t bounce—it stretched. Warped. As if the sound itself was being unraveled and pulled in every direction.

His grip on the broken katana tightened.

The weapon remained steady in his hand. Unmoving. Cold.

"System—hey, system!" he barked, kicking his legs reflexively even though there was no resistance, no surface, no up or down. "What is this?! Where am I?!"

No response.

Not even a flicker of text.

No prompt. No instructions.

Just the sensation of falling, his thoughts spiraling with him.

"You’ve gotta be kidding me," he muttered, teeth clenched. "This is how I die? Out of all the crap you’ve thrown at me—boss monsters, dumb quests,system users high on power—and now this?"

Another minute passed.

Then another.

Still falling.

Still no end.

No walls.

No sky.

No gravity—but the illusion of it was real enough to make his chest tighten.

A drop of sweat rolled up the side of his face, vanishing into the dark. Jin’s breath came fast, shallow. He was trying to keep calm, but this was a new kind of terrifying.

He could fight an enemy.

He could punch, block, think his way out.

But this?

There was no enemy here. No fight.

Just falling.

"Okay, okay," he muttered, voice strained. "Let’s think. Weapon bonding. Right. Cool feature. Sounds great on paper. Why the hell didn’t I listen to the warning?"

He cursed again under his breath, twisting his body in midair, trying to orient himself even if there was no real direction. His mind raced back through everything—every system message, every strange prompt, every weird mechanic that came with this new world.

Nothing had warned him about falling forever in a void.

The katana pulsed once in his hand.

A soft, low hum. Vibrating just slightly in his palm.

His eyes dropped to it instinctively.

It was the only thing here that felt real.

He tried to focus on that.

Not the void.

Not the silence.

Not the suffocating sense that he’d fallen out of the world entirely.

Another tremor ran through him—not from the katana, not from fear.

From something else.

The light.

He blinked.

Was that—?

His body twisted in midair, weight pulling him in a direction he couldn’t name. He squinted into the distance—into the depths of the void.

There was something there.

A shape.

No—a surface.

Faint.

Shadowed.

Like the idea of ground more than ground itself.

But it was there. Maybe a few hundred feet below him. Or a thousand. Or ten.

"Wait—" Jin started, but his voice cracked.

His fall began to slow and the closer he got to the shadowed surface, the heavier the air became.

The void thickened, pressing in from all sides. Like he was being funneled—squeezed—toward whatever was waiting below.

The katana pulsed again.

And now he could hear something else.

Not just the hum.

Whispers.

Indistinct. Wordless. But old.

It wasn’t a language, at least not one he understood. But it made his stomach twist. It made his skin crawl.

The kind of sound you heard only once you were too far in to turn back.

"Yeah," Jin muttered, eyes narrowing as he felt the pull increase, his body speeding up again—

"Definitely should have listened."

And then—

He fell straight into the suface.

Before he could think to slow himself, he hit it.

But it didn’t hurt.

The smoke held—like landing in a breath. It bowed beneath him, then spread outward in a perfect ripple, flattening into something solid. Something real.

Jin pushed himself to his feet, eyes narrowed. His fingers tightened around the broken katana in his grip.

The space around him stretched in silence. And slowly, almost reluctantly, it began to unfold.

Mist curled up from the ground in long, languid ribbons. Buildings formed from it—twisted, ancient structures with curved rooftops and black wood, lacquered but cracked. Pagodas loomed in the distance, warped and leaning like they’d grown too tired to stand. And above it all, rivers of water floated midair, unmoving, reflecting a fractured sky that shimmered in impossible colors.

The entire space pulsed—like a memory that didn’t know how to finish.

The ground beneath him felt stable now. Black stone, polished and strange, carved with patterns he couldn’t recognize. Circles intersecting triangles, thin calligraphy etched so precisely it looked like it had never been written by hand.

Jin turned slowly, one step at a time.

No sound followed. Not even his own footsteps. But the pressure—the sense of being watched—it was growing.

He raised the broken blade, keeping it low but ready. Whatever this place was, he hadn’t been invited. That much was obvious.

"Is this what bonding is supposed to look like...?" he muttered.

No answer came.

He took another step. A torii gate floated in the air ahead, its red pillars broken at the base, suspended in place by nothing. Beyond it, a narrow bridge led to what looked like the remnants of a temple—or something like it. Its roof had long since collapsed inward, but it stood like a monument anyway.

Proud.

Enduring.

The wind shifted. Only—it wasn’t wind. Just the sensation of air moving without sound. The mist responded before he did, curling away from a point ahead. Something else was coming.

Jin stopped walking.

Then a shape stepped into view.

Tall. Broad-shouldered. Barefoot, yet silent.

He wore a blood-red hakama, tied tight at the waist with black cord. His upper body was bare save for old wraps across his forearms, revealing a torso built from sheer force—every muscle dense, corded, sculpted with the kind of strength no amount of training could casually achieve.

Long silver hair, tied behind his head, spilled down his back like woven moonlight. Ash clung to his skin like dust that refused to wash away.

In his left hand, a katana.

Whole.

Unbroken.

And almost identical to the one Jin held—if it had never been damaged.

The man’s eyes locked onto him. Cold. Sharp. Colorless.

He didn’t speak at first. He didn’t have to.

Every step he took forward made the silence more suffocating. Jin didn’t move. Couldn’t. The air itself resisted the idea.

Then—finally—the man stopped.

Just a dozen paces away.

"You are far from welcome," the man said, voice low and unhurried. It cut through the silence like a blade of its own, every syllable deliberate. "State your name, trespasser."