Duel #6
“Haha. Well now…”
The quiet rattle of the carriage wheels filled the air until Ellen’s voice, edged with a soft note of wonder, cut through it.
“What’s wrong?”
“Mm. It seems I’ve gone and gotten nervous all of a sudden. This is the first time in my life I’ve set foot in a royal palace. It feels rather strange, is all.”
“Ah… I see.”
The answer was so unexpected that I had to fight down a laugh that nearly escaped me.
Watching a woman who’d lived through so much light up like a child made it impossible to keep a straight face.
At the same time, her reaction made perfect sense. As a mercenary dragged from battlefield to battlefield, and as a Dark Elf living under constant contempt, it was no wonder she’d never had any connection to a royal palace. If anything, close ties with royalty would have been the more suspicious thing.
“There’s no need to be nervous. His Majesty is only here as a notary. And once the duel is over, we’ll leave at once—so you won’t have to worry about anyone’s stares.”
“I appreciate the consideration… but I’m not the sort of woman who lives her life minding other people’s eyes. If anything, those rough looks feel almost cozy.”
Ellen answered Helena’s well-meant words with a rough little smile. She knew perfectly well what kind of gazes a Dark Elf drew—and she was making it clear that if anyone crossed the line, she would not let it slide.
Helena only huffed a quiet laugh and gave a small nod. Ellen seemed to live by her own unshakable standards; there was no point fretting over her now. And when I thought about it, it was almost funny for short-lived humans to be offering her advice like that. This was a woman who had already lived more than twice as long as we had—and would live far longer still.
“Then I’m glad.”
“Still, I’ll take the kindness gratefully. I’ve never met humans like the two of you before. It can be a little hard to know how to deal with you at times… but it’s also surprisingly comfortable.”
Even without opening her heart all the way, Ellen cracked the door halfway and offered a gentle smile. From the perspective of those who had invited her, it was a thoroughly welcome sight.
For a moment I wondered if we were being a little too relaxed with a duel ahead of us—then decided this was better. Too much tension only led to freezing up and failing to show one’s true skill.
Not that either of these women was the type to lose that much edge to nerves.
We rode the carriage through the checkpoints and into the royal palace, eventually setting foot on the knight order’s training grounds.
There was a sparring arena larger and far better kept than the one at the Krauser estate—something that called to mind a grand stage.
—Hah! A Dark Elf…!
I kept silent, remembering the face of the soldier who’d gone pale at the checkpoint the moment he saw Ellen. It hadn’t only been him. All the way to this arena, we had endured uncomfortable stares so thick and heavy that even I, who wasn’t the target, felt my mood sour.
“Are you all right?”
“Pfft. Why are you fretting so much? Didn’t I already say these kinds of looks are more comfortable for me? Look at them. They’re so easy to read I don’t even have to guess what’s going through their heads. It’s rather pleasant.”
“…I was worrying over nothing, then.”
I was so impressed by Ellen’s composure I almost wanted to applaud her. Thanks to that, what little tension I had left drained away, and I felt nearly as at ease as if I were home. The side effect was that I almost let myself look completely unguarded.
“Duke Krauser. Are you truly all right with this?”
While I was still pulling my mind and posture back into order, Ellen asked the question, her gaze shifting between Helena and the Kilinare side seated opposite us. The swarm of knights gathered there was truly impressive—like a colony of ants.
“All right with what? Ah. You mean those knights?”
“Yes. I heard the ones the Duke will face are a hundred Experts… but the lineup looks anything but easy. Plenty of high-tier ones, and even a few peak Experts scattered among them…”
“I expected as much. It’s fine.”
Helena nodded with a confidence she rarely showed. At her core she was cautious by nature, never one to casually claim victory—yet today she looked utterly unlike her usual self.
I took it less as confidence and more as resolve. Losing left her with nowhere to go, and what I saw looked less like arrogance than a grim compulsion to clear the obstacles in her path as quickly as possible. If it weren’t that, there was no way Helena would wear an expression so cold it seemed ready to freeze the air itself.
“Ten to one, is it… Considering the size of the arena, that does seem about right.”
Helena stepped onto the sparring ground first and nodded as she watched the knights approach from the other side. They clearly didn’t relish the idea of several of them striking down a single woman—and yet their tension was plain to see. Their opponent wasn’t an ordinary woman. She was a Sword Master.
Still, I found it strange that they hadn’t thoroughly sealed the outer ring to cut off any path of retreat. Of course I understood that packing too many bodies in would only tangle their movements and leave them tripping over their own feet. But surrounding the perimeter was a different matter. All they had to do was hold their positions outside the arena.
“They probably left the outer ring empty out of a knight’s pride, or dignity—something like that.”
Ellen had somehow drawn right up beside me and murmured the words in a low voice. She answered a question I hadn’t even spoken aloud so precisely that my expression must have been easy to read.
“Is that so? From the moment they accepted the Duke’s invitation and stepped up here, I wouldn’t have thought they’d still be swayed by that sort of feeling.”
“I can’t completely dismiss the idea either. Still, that’s what I think. Or maybe they decided to come at her in turns because they were worried about getting in each other’s way.”
“So everything we’re thinking is nothing more than guesswork.”
“Pretty much.”
In the end we arrived at the rather hollow conclusion that all our thoughts were pure speculation. There was nothing else for it. No matter how hard we racked our brains, the duel had already begun. We could no longer intervene, and even if we figured something out, it wouldn’t produce any clever solution.
All that remained was to hope Helena would defeat them without killing anyone.
“Very well. Begin.”
With the solemn voice of the King of Soter from the seat of honor, the first curtain of the duel rose.
The knights raised Aura Blades the instant the king’s declaration fell. By the rules, the fight would end only when the opponent surrendered or died—but at least none of them would die today. Even so, their tension was unmistakable. A life that wouldn’t be cut short was not the same as a body that wouldn’t be wounded. For a knight, a crippling injury that ended their career was a fate worse than death.
They had answered the duke’s coaxing and threats and taken their places here—but no matter which way the matter turned, they had to protect their own bodies. That was a different problem from holding back and failing to show their full strength.
“Come, then.”
Helena’s voice, cold enough to freeze the blood, scraped across the knights’ nerves. She hadn’t even raised an Aura Blade; she merely twitched the tip of her sword. In every way, the posture was a deliberate provocation.
The knights facing her all thought the same thing—and still they couldn’t quite step forward.
This was not a duel with a time limit. In theory they could afford to take things at a leisurely pace. Yet the hearts of the knights on the arena floor, and of everyone watching, were burning black. The pressure Helena was steadily intensifying was crushing their chests.
“Then… excuse us!”
The knights exchanged a brief look and charged as one. More precisely, they meant to close a formation around Helena and fall on her together. With only so many people able to swing a sword at her from the front, it was the natural choice.
Excuse us, in a situation like this.
Helena looked at the clearly nervous knights and slowly raised her blade, gathering her signature Black Aura only at the very tip. She had always been extremely efficient with her aura, but this was as good as a declaration that she would cut her consumption to the absolute minimum. It also carried another meaning entirely.
You lot are nothing I can’t handle with the tip of my sword.
“Urgh…!”
Even when the gap in rank was already this vast, being mocked so blatantly was enough to make anyone’s blood boil. The knights understood her meaning perfectly and tightened their grips until their knuckles whitened. The last smoldering scraps of fear burned away, replaced by pure rage—and they poured that rage into their blades as they came at her from ten different directions at once.
Neck, shoulder, arm, ankle, leg—attacks poured in without a single opening, swung with the clear intent to kill.
Tension tightened across the King of Soter’s face. Even if she became a slave, a Sword Master’s power would not simply vanish—but if she took those blows and fell, the loss would be enormous. He had calculated carefully before agreeing to notarize this duel. It could not end so meaninglessly.
His worry, however, turned out to be utterly pointless.
“Hah…!”
When—?!
One of the knights swallowed empty air as he stared at the sword that had been knocked flying without a sound. Helena, who until the very moment they swung had been standing still, had spun once on the spot and parried every blade.
It looked, Zion thought, like the flutter of a butterfly’s wings. He had watched only Helena’s movements from start to finish, and in the space of a single short breath he saw black lines embroider the air. He couldn’t catch every last one—but he saw most of them.
“Tch.”
Helena clicked her tongue and swung toward the three knights in front of her. The two who had been behind her recovered faster than expected and came at her again, forcing her to answer even faster still.
“Gyaaah!!”
Her blade bit deep into the arms hidden beneath their black gauntlets. Because the aura was concentrated only at the tip, she avoided cutting the limbs halfway off—but the wounds were still severe enough that they might never grip a weapon properly again. The bone near the wrist had been scored.
The knights groaned and, inevitably, lost their swords.
“For the tip of a blade to tremble over something like this…”
Helena had already spun again, muttering in a low voice. There had been no hesitation in her swings—yet the tip of her sword was shaking. Because the arms of the knights who had attacked alongside them had been carved open in the blink of an eye.
“Pathetic.”
Helena was normally the type to treat her opponents with proper courtesy. But whenever Zion was involved, she crumpled that courtesy up like trash and threw it away. Challenging Duke Kilinare to a territorial war while he sat wearing that oily smile in the seat of honor across the way had been one such act. Provoking these knights without the slightest restraint was another.
And so was rolling across the ground right after batting aside a sword that had been snapping low toward her legs. She hadn’t needed to roll at all. She did it not because she was at a disadvantage, but as a setup to crush her opponents more thoroughly than necessary.
That setup was severing the tendon behind the ankle—the Achilles tendon.
“Aaaagh!!”
“I can’t—I can’t put any strength into it…!!”
When the strong cord that holds a body upright is cut, standing becomes difficult. Even Expert-class knights were no exception. If a mage treated them later, perhaps—but in this moment, it was a wound that made standing impossible.
“Hup!”
Yet Helena’s insult was only beginning. Something even more shocking seized every spectator’s gaze. She kicked the breastplates of the knights still clutching their severed ankles and groaning—and used their bodies like throwing stones.
“Guhk?!”
Perhaps because it was so sudden, so completely beyond imagination—the knights who had been aiming for Helena’s back found themselves wrapped around their comrades’ bodies and sent sailing clean out of the arena. The force was so great that the plate mail she had kicked crumpled hideously out of shape.
“Next.”
And the woman who had caused that carnage simply demanded her next opponent in a perfectly flat voice.