Settlement
Settlement
I killed twenty guards in the temporary detention center.
What did it matter? That much wasn't difficult once you reached Expert. The problem was when they all swarmed at once, but ordinary soldiers, if they came at you one by one, could never beat an aura user. Above all, these were men who'd survived watching soldiers swept away like fallen leaves before Demonfolk on the battlefield—that level of strength was nothing to them.
If they'd believed that every guard had been beheaded in a single stroke each, maybe they'd have thought a little differently, but they couldn't.
I beat the Hero.
He was nothing more than a brat the Empire had coddled and raised, anyway. Even if an oracle had descended and called him the Hero, so long as he couldn't split the earth and tear the sky by himself, he was only human in the end. Going by the rumors alone, he was just a wild dog—they'd simply assigned grand meaning to a fight between kids of roughly the same caliber. If the Hero had truly been polished enough to be deployed to the front lines, there was no way the Empire would've left him idle.
If they'd cast off the complacent notion that the Hero was merely a symbol and exercised caution, maybe they'd have thought a little differently, but here too, they couldn't.
I saved the princess in the string of incidents at the academy.
Wasn't it nothing more than shoving aside a princess about to be thrown through a gate and going in her place? The courage to risk his life and save a noble was admirable, but it had nothing to do with actual skill. Even the Demonfolk member that appeared then was torn apart by the First Princess's personal guard, so its level couldn't have been much either.
Everyone regarded and judged it that way. As always, rumors were bound to be exaggerated. Eldmia Ega must have extraordinary skill, but in the end, he was just overblown rumors.
If they'd known that the First Princess had personally traveled all the way to the Kingdom to find him, and what process the Demonfolk killed by her personal guard had gone through to appear there, they could never have thought that way. But with their lack of information, they couldn't.
The top-priority execution order that had come down, and the fact that six Experts seasoned in war against Demonfolk had been deployed—those too must have been nothing but measures to ensure the job was done.
Having experienced the Demon King's Army, they knew the kingdom's reality and humanity's limits well. Even if transcendent heroes were appearing here and there, those people radiated Aura and Mana so enormous you could tell from far away.
By consolidating all that information and experience, they had reached a conclusion.
Eldmia Ega would never become a physical threat.
And now, they were paying the price for acting on a wrong conclusion.
'How?!'
The question 'How?!' flashed first through the minds of the five remaining knights, but none of them voiced it. They had to assess the situation quickly, not waste time speaking.
They'd let their guard down, yes, but that speed was outside the norm. Still, it was a technique seen more often than one might think on the battlefield.
Someone who'd noticed it was the double acceleration that skilled fighters pulling off bizarre feats showed off shouted.
"Double acceleration! Stick to him!"
"I'm going in! Cover me!"
Double acceleration was certainly a wondrous skill, but it meant nothing if the distance wasn't right. More than anything, it was closer to a subtle art born from differences in aura handling technique, not some high-level skill you could only use after reaching a higher realm. Each of them had fought on different battlefields, but having experienced battle, they recognized that fact clearly and re-gripped their swords for a full-scale encirclement.
Allowing a surprise attack right before their eyes was a painfully costly mistake, but there wouldn't be a second.
The first opportunity would come after the opening clash of swords. There would be a split-second gap as attack and counterattack flowed; they would aim for that opening, slip in, and kill him in one stroke. This, at least, was a coordinated assault they could execute with the most confidence, even without exchanging words.
But when they began charging in, what they witnessed was the afterimage of Eldmia's sword shining and the sight of a comrade with a blade buried in his throat.
"Ghk, khhk!"
There was no pulling back now.
So they rushed forward, and while rushing, they quickly thought—past the comrade dying as he vomited blood, past Eldmia indifferently withdrawing the glowing blade and turning his gaze on them.
In order to understand what the hell had just happened.
The answer was clear. Swordsmanship so orthodox it was terrifyingly sharp. There had been no mistake from the knight who'd thrust in first. It was just, just that Eldmia had been far too fast.
Because the exchange had happened so instantaneously that there wasn't even time to mix in a feint, the moment the reflexive counter ingrained in their bodies was attempted, Eldmia's sword writhed around like a snake and pierced their throats.
A counter so textbook it could have gone straight into a swordsmanship manual. They'd experienced many battlefields and duels in their lives, but this was the first time they'd seen a counter flow as though it had been choreographed in advance. They clenched their teeth.
Something had gone very wrong. The intel was wrong, or that bastard wasn't human.
"How the hell is that a fifteen-year-old little shit?!"
"If you guys had split even your sleeping hours over seven years and trained, maybe you'd manage this much? Bit late now, though."
Swordsmanship was a skill.
And a skill, though there would be individual variance, was ultimately nothing more than something anyone could learn.
Sometimes a category called geniuses distinguished themselves, but their genius usually began to diverge from the point of applying those skills. There were even geniuses whose every physical ability—comprehension, reflexes, and so on—was innately superior, but those people didn't use the swordsmanship of the mediocre.
That was how they knew. 'That' was the work of a seasoned master, with no room for argument.
Judging solely by the polish of his swordsmanship, he was superior to most knights, and what that implied was terrifying.
"Left side!"
"...Right side!"
Had they been too overconfident in their skills? Or had the mistake been thinking in such a thoroughly ordinary way?
None of that mattered anymore. The enemy was a master who didn't even properly grant them the chance to cross blades even once. With two of them already dead, the method to kill such an enemy—for them, there was only one.
A suicidal trade. Take him down with them, then let the surviving comrades finish the job.
Still, they were Experts. As long as they charged with bodies reinforced by aura, Eldmia couldn't escape from this either. Ideally, he would die to the attacks swung left and right at exactly the same timing, and even if that failed, he would die by their comrades' hands.
From the start, their lives had been staked. All for the sake of ending this damnable war. With resolute will, the blades of the two charging straight in thrust forward, aiming for Eldmia's throat.
"The binary choice of death..."
Eldmia, who'd been watching that series of movements with an expressionless face, bared his teeth and muttered.
"...is something you can only force when your levels match."
At the same time, his sword, swinging wide horizontally, gleamed as it cleaved through the stone wall, and together with the blade thrusting at him, simultaneously bisected both their necks in a single stroke.
"At your level, not a chance."
At the sight, which could only be described as surreal, this time even the remaining two couldn't help but stop their charge and falter.
"A magic sword...!"
Not a single thing—from skill to equipment—had been correctly predicted. Could this actually be a trap set by the royal family? Cutting through a wall, a sword, and a person at the same time meant you'd have to apply a cutting enchantment to its extreme limit...
"Bullshit. It's just a sturdy sword and a sturdy body, together with Magic Power."
Just as the two of them were about to voice endless resentment at the absurd sight unfolding before them, a clear sneer spread across the face of Eldmia, who'd been utterly indifferent even after cutting down two men a moment ago.
"You lot just failed to recognize someone stronger than you and are dying because you tried to ambush him. Given how you lured me here, this kind of scene should've been familiar to you, shouldn't it? Now that the roles are reversed and you're the ones dying, what are you attaching meaning to it for and acting like victims? Just accept that this is how it goes and fucking die."
Only after four comrades were dead did they realize the reason they had been deployed.
The count hadn't merely been trying to remove an obstacle quickly, nor had he underestimated Eldmia. Eldmia had simply been an unknown enemy whose true ability was impossible to gauge, so the count had chosen the best force he could deploy on short notice.
It was just that even that best choice had been premised on a mistaken assumption of the enemy's strength.
"...Goddamn."
But the two of them didn't resent the count. It would be closer to insanity to always operate under the assumption that a fifteen-year-old boy who could unilaterally butcher six Expert-level knights existed. They hadn't believed in a madman and joined a rebellion.
A normal sense of reality had been the cause of defeat—it was so absurd they were becoming calm instead.
"If we surrender, will you let us live?"
"No. I don't really need evidence anymore, anyway."
Wiping the sneer from his face as he handed down the one-sided death sentence, Eldmia adjusted his stance. Seeing that, the two men tightened their grips on their swords with the same thought, despite never exchanging a word.
"After running from monsters on the battlefield, to end up dying to a monster in the end."
"A monster? I'm clearly a person. A person."
Along with an exasperated retort, Eldmia charged.
Watching his comrade's head fly off from the double acceleration they'd predicted yet couldn't react to, the last remaining knight swung his sword.
'That was truly art.'
The sword deflected his strike, coiled around it, and drove in almost like magic. With that as the knight's final thought, his severed head bounced off the wall and flew away.
◈
Unlike the bastards who'd died earlier, the two who'd been left at the end clearly accepted death at the last moment.
Just like Delt. Thanks to that, I guess I'd learned that the posture of accepting death had no correlation with strength, so if that counted as a gain, it was a gain.
"Battlefield, huh. Were they deserters, or returned soldiers?"
Given that they'd said with their own mouths that they'd run from monsters, they seemed to be guys who'd gone through the war against the Demon King's Army. And that meant it was safe to say their skill hadn't been enough to hold out against Demonfolk in combat.
But the fact that even though they'd returned for that reason, they'd joined Count Bosha's rebellion and aided treachery by doing things like assassination—that stirred up my doubts. What the hell for? Even if the rebellion succeeded, would the war end? Had Count Bosha joined hands with the Demonfolk or something like that, so a situation where they didn't have to fight Demonfolk was coming?
"Seems like that guess might be right."
This war wasn't a territorial war that humans had started because they wanted to. It wasn't just species versus species; one species had picked a fight against multiple races. And the lunatic who'd started that fight was currently the Demonfolk.
Unless we crawled under the Demonfolk of our own accord, a change of king wouldn't end the war.
When I'd dealt with that cursed crazy Demonfolk bastard, there had definitely been humans in the Demon King's Army, so... surrender was probably a sufficiently possible option. They weren't some twisted abyssal humans or tainted humans, but really, genuinely normal humans.
If that's the case, then in the end, the situation was no different from a war of conquest. So why had a god gone so far as to issue an oracle and command us to drive out the Demon King?
"Of all things, to be reborn in such a batshit insane era... well, saying that is a bit much when being reborn at all is a privilege."
There was no way an answer would come from agonizing with no knowledge. I half-heartedly rifled through their pockets, took the money, wiped my sword clean on their unruined clothes, and left the alley.
I'd already checked information about this alley by stopping by Zikmel's shop on the way, so I wasn't particularly worried about the corpses being used as a pretext against me. Whatever else, what they were wearing were high-quality goods, so the residents of the area—which was no different from the slums—would take care of it themselves.
Honestly, even if I was found out, it didn't matter.
What mattered was that Count Bosha had touched me directly.