The Grand Sword Master's Mark
"Whew. That was almost a disaster."
Once the eye patch was finished, I headed straight for the Empire, where the main cast lived.
I was walking along the roadside when I spotted a lavishly decorated carriage escorted by knights.
That crest… is that the Rosehart family?
A golden rose on a black field, ringed by black thorns.
Yep. Rosehart. So Evelyn must be riding in there.
Right beside the carriage, a female knight with blue hair tied high was riding her horse. A long ponytail streamed behind her, and a longsword hung at her hip. She kept far closer to the carriage than the other knights, guarding it at near arm's length.
And that would be Sera.
I hadn't expected to run into the villainess before meeting the protagonists. Getting tangled up with that foul-tempered woman would be a headache in every possible way, so I was just about to slip away.
Hm?
Far off in the underbrush, something rustled — and the gleaming eyes of magic beasts flashed into view.
Eh, nothing much happened in the original story. They'll handle it themselves. Sera's right there, after all.
They'd already spotted the beasts and were snapping into a defensive formation. As far as I knew, Sera was a Sword Master — a pack like that wouldn't pose any real threat.
I turned my back without a second thought and started walking. That was when a desperate shout rang out behind me.
"My lady!"
I spun around on pure reflex. A magic beast I hadn't noticed was charging straight at the carriage.
There was one more?
It slammed into the side of the coach.
CRASH!
The impact sent the draft horses into a panic. They reared and bucked, and the carriage tipped hard to one side. The door flew open and Evelyn scrambled out in a hurry.
The problem was what came next.
The magic beast locked onto Evelyn the moment she tumbled free of the wreck, and its gaze swung straight to her.
She's… going to be fine, right…?
No matter how I looked at it, there wasn't a single knight near enough to protect her. Even Sera was far off, locked in combat with the rest of the pack.
A single hypothesis flashed through my mind.
Don't tell me this is because of me?
Maybe the beasts had sensed my presence, panicked, and bolted straight into that mess. Animals sometimes recognized a superior predator on pure instinct.
I didn't waste time thinking it over. I dropped into a draw stance, kicked off the ground, and launched myself forward like a bolt of lightning. My blade took the charging beast clean through the neck — and before the head had even finished separating from the body, I was already back where I'd started, sword sheathed.
A few drops of blood had spattered my clothes from the rush, but I didn't particularly care. Better that than letting a major character from the original die.
Evelyn had a considerable influence on the protagonists' growth. If she died here, there was no telling how badly the plot would warp — and if the heroes failed to stop the coming catastrophe because of it, I'd be in trouble too.
But my worry turned out to be unnecessary. Sera came flying in at high speed a heartbeat later and intercepted the beast's attack. Her follow-up strike landed, and the creature split along the cut I'd already made — torso and head falling apart cleanly.
For a fraction of a second, bewilderment flickered across her face. Then it was gone.
"Did I stick my nose in for nothing? She handled it fine without me."
I'd clearly underestimated her. She was one of the Empire's few Sword Masters, after all.
"Can't be helped. I'm just too strong."
A tiger never notices how tough an ant is.
Still — judging by Sera's expression just now, she already knows she wasn't the one who made that cut.
Not that it mattered. She would never imagine I was the one who did it. And even if she somehow reached the truth, I'd never cross paths with them again.
Once I'd confirmed Evelyn was safe, I turned back toward the capital and kept walking.
Even after arriving in the capital, the events of that afternoon refused to leave Sera's mind.
"…I'm certain it was around here."
She narrowed her eyes and turned the pages of an old book one by one.
Hours had already passed since they'd reached the capital. After arriving at the Rosehart Mansion, she had checked on Evelyn's condition and handed the remaining escort duties over to the other knights.
Ordinarily she would have stayed at her lady's side. But something from that day simply would not leave her head, so she had asked Evelyn for permission to step out for a while.
"Go ahead."
The permission came more easily than expected.
"But be back before dinner. You've been spacing out the entire way to the capital. What on earth is bothering you that much?"
"…Was it that obvious?"
"Extremely."
With that, Evelyn waved her off as if she couldn't be bothered. Freed by the borrowed time, the first person Sera sought out was the Rosehart Knight Commander — one of the Empire's most renowned Sword Masters, and a man who had held a sword far longer than she had.
She broached the subject of the man she'd seen that afternoon carefully.
"A blind swordsman?"
The Knight Commander raised an eyebrow as if he'd never heard of such a thing.
"Yes. Have you ever heard of swordsmen like that in the Far East?"
"No. Never."
The answer was thoroughly unhelpful. He seemed to consider it for a moment, then let out a short snort of laughter.
"How is someone supposed to swing a sword properly when they can't even see?"
"…"
"Forget swinging a sword — they'd have enough trouble just looking after themselves. A cane, maybe. But wandering around with a blade? That alone doesn't make any sense."
Rationally speaking, he was right. The man's gait that afternoon had been so natural that an old rumor about strange Far Eastern techniques had immediately come to mind — but a rumor was all it had ever been. If someone truly couldn't see, even walking would be harder than for most people. And to swing a sword at a speed even she couldn't perceive?
It defied common sense.
"Why the sudden interest, anyway?"
"…It's nothing."
"How dull."
Sera didn't press further. Anything more would only earn her mockery. While she was at it, though, she decided to test one other possibility — that she herself might somehow have reached the level of a Sword Master.
She knew full well how absurd the idea was. No one crossed that wall without noticing the change. Still, on the off chance, she asked the Knight Commander for a sparring match.
The result was catastrophic.
Sera paused mid-page and rubbed her side. The blow she'd taken earlier still throbbed.
Sword Master, my foot.
She hadn't landed a single clean attack. She'd just gotten thoroughly beaten. But one thing, at least, was now certain: the clean cut that had taken the magic beast's head had not been her work.
So what had it been?
The question refused to leave her, and in the end it had brought her here — to the library of the Rosehart Mansion.
She had always been deeply interested in martial arts, and whenever she had free time she would read sword manuals and old histories. Somewhere in one of those histories, she vaguely remembered a passage about strange warriors who had appeared in the Far East long ago. Warriors who had far surpassed the limits of ordinary humans.
She kept turning pages until, at last, on a sheet of yellowed paper, she found a familiar line.
"Found it."
She murmured it under her breath without meaning to and pulled the book closer.
Throughout the history of the Far East, mysterious warriors of unknown origin and untraceable deeds appear from time to time.
The eras of their appearance, the weapons they wielded, and the martial arts they practiced all differed — yet one common thread remained clear.
Whenever a nation stood on the brink of ruin, or a calamity that would claim countless lives descended, they would appear as suddenly as a comet.
"…"
Her memory had been correct. She remembered thinking it was a rather interesting tale the first time she'd read this section. Back then, she'd dismissed it as an old hero legend and skimmed past it.
She kept reading.
One account claims a single such warrior held back an army of thousands. Another states that a colossal mountain beast was felled with a single stroke of the sword.
Yet another record notes that even following their movements with the human eye was impossible.
Sera's gaze stopped on that last sentence.
Movements the human eye could not even track. The scene from that afternoon rose unbidden in her mind.
"…It couldn't be."
She shook her head almost at once. The records were far too old. Tales of one man holding off thousands, or of movements too fast for the eye to follow, were the kind of exaggeration common to ancient hero legends. The Empire itself overflowed with stories of lone heroes who had saved nations in their darkest hours.
Thinking that, she turned the page — and her eyes stopped again.
Some scholars speculate that these warriors may have been individuals who reached a certain realm now spoken of only in legend.
"Grand Sword Master."
The name of that legendary rank slipped from her lips before she could stop it — a realm said to lie beyond Sword Master, transcending the limits of humanity itself. Yet in the entire history of the Empire, not a single person was known to have reached it. Whether it even truly existed remained unclear. Believing that the Far Eastern warriors had actually attained such a legendary rank was not easy.
She lowered her eyes again.
However, across records from entirely different eras and regions, one shared trait is consistently mentioned.
Somewhere on their bodies, it is said, a mark of strange form would appear.
"A mark?"
The location varied from person to person — forehead, cheek, neck, arm, chest — and the form was never uniform.
Yet across multiple accounts, one fact is consistently confirmed: a strange pattern, clearly distinct from any ordinary freckle or scar, was etched upon their bodies.
Sera lifted her eyes from the page for a moment and pictured the man from that afternoon. Both eyes had been covered by black cloth, but most of his forehead had been visible. She hadn't seen any mark there. None on his cheek, either, or his neck.
Then…
That left the arms and the chest. His arms had been hidden by long sleeves; she hadn't been able to check. The chest went without saying.
She pressed her fingers hard against her brow.
What am I even thinking?
It wasn't as if she could just roll up a complete stranger's sleeves or strip him to check. She let out a long breath and looked back at the book. There was still one more thing to verify.
She flipped through the remaining pages, skimming quickly until the records on the Far Eastern warriors came to an end.
"…Nothing."
No mention of a blind warrior. No account of someone who sensed their surroundings in place of sight. And certainly no record of anyone who went about with both eyes covered by black cloth.
"Haa…"
A dead end after all. She had found the records of the strange Far Eastern warriors, of the Grand Sword Master, of the marks — but not a single line that connected directly to the blind swordsman she had seen that day.
"…Was I overthinking it after all?"
Looking back, the whole theory had been absurd from the start. On the strength of a few scraps of evidence, she had decided that man had severed a magic beast's neck in the blink of an eye — and then piled on the legendary rank of Grand Sword Master for good measure.
…Even I can tell I've gone too far.
If she'd told Evelyn any of this, she would have been marched straight to a physician on suspicion of having lost her mind. More than anything, the man had been blind. That single fact alone made most of her speculation fall apart.
"That's enough. Let it go."
Sera rose from her seat. She had promised Evelyn she would be back before dinner, and she couldn't keep clinging to a baseless theory forever. She returned the book to its place and left the library.
But the image of the man with both eyes covered by black cloth still would not leave her mind.
"Still, I didn't think one eye patch would take this long."
I walked toward the capital, idly running a finger along the edge of the patch. To anyone looking, both eyes were covered — there was no way I should be able to see. And yet my vision wasn't obstructed in the slightest. There was a minor inconvenience to it, but I could see just as clearly as without the patch.
"Definitely worth the money."
I'd gone through a lot of trouble to get this thing made. From the outside it had to look completely lightproof, while from the inside the wearer needed a clear view of the world. Ordinary cloth couldn't do that, so it had required special materials and magical treatment — which meant both money and time had been thoroughly spent.
The hardest part of all, though, had been explaining to the craftsman exactly what I wanted.
"So, in other words…"
The craftsman had stared at the order form I'd handed him for a long while before slowly looking up.
"From the outside, it has to look as if the eyes are completely covered."
"Yes."
"But the person wearing it still needs to be able to see?"
"Exactly."
"…"
A long silence followed. Then he looked at me.
"Might I ask what this is for?"
"No."
"…I see."
The way he looked at me — like I was some kind of freak — left me feeling a little guilty. Not that I could tell him the truth.
Ah, well, you see, I'm going for a reclusive master concept, and for that I need to pretend I can't see.
The second those words left my mouth, the look in his eyes would have gotten a whole lot weirder than it already was.
Still, his skill was the real deal. After a few rounds of trial and error, he finally produced exactly what I'd asked for. And when he mentioned he had leftover materials, I ordered one more thing.
"Oh — then would bandages be possible as well?"
"…Bandages?"
He gave me that same dubious look again.
"Yes. I want to wrap both arms."
This time his expression went fully rotten.
Hey, hey — why are you looking at me like that? It's not Chunibyo or anything, okay?
"Hrm…"
He didn't ask for a reason this time. He just got to work. The deeply complicated look on his face was probably just my imagination.
Waiting for the eye patch and then the bandages to be finished had taken more time than expected. I'd been a little worried about that, honestly.
Don't tell me too much of the original timeline has already passed?
Starting out in the Far East meant I had no idea exactly when I'd transmigrated into this body. On top of that, gathering materials and having the eye patch and bandages made had burned through more time than planned. But seeing Evelyn and Sera just a little while ago suggested things hadn't advanced all that far. There should still be enough time before the catastrophe arrived. I still didn't know the exact point in the timeline —
Well, I'll figure that out once I reach the capital.
I pushed up my sleeve and lightly touched the bandages wrapped around my arm. They were so well made they didn't come loose easily and didn't hinder my movement at all.
And more importantly —
They're perfect for covering this.
After a quick glance around, I peeled back the edge of the bandage just slightly. Beneath it, a strange red pattern came into view — a vivid crimson mark that looked like something that would appear the moment you cut down an oni. It had been etched into both arms from the moment I'd first possessed this body.
I had my reasons for hiding it.
First:
"It's gross."
Bright red patterns sprawled across both arms were never going to look good.
And second: if I walked around flaunting something like this and someone well-versed in martial arts recognized it, things would get complicated. Very few people knew that a mark appeared on those who reached the rank of Grand Sword Master — but still.
"Better safe than sorry."
If the wrong person figured it out, my reclusive master lifestyle would be over before it even began.
I smoothed the bandage back into place and pulled my sleeve down.
Who would ever think there were marks hidden under a pair of bandages?