Duel #7
Every swing of the blade left someone bleeding, painting the empty air with thick, vivid lines of red.
With each strike, the knights’ pain-choked screams rang out across the training grounds, enough to make any listener’s brow crease.
Eighty. Ninety.
The architect of that carnage kept her promise to Duke Kilinaire: even as the count climbed toward ninety, she had not produced a single corpse. It was the result of a technique that left an opponent’s life hanging by a thread while thoroughly crushing him—and of Helena’s own skill, which had grown almost beyond recognition.
Of course she was not unscathed. Scratches marked her here and there, but they were trivial. If anything, the stinging of those cuts helped clear her head and sharpen her focus.
“Hah… haah…….”
The tenth and final squad—the last offerings—stepped onto the field. From the moment thirty men had fallen, these knights had discarded all complacency and honed their nerves to a razor’s edge; now, watching their comrades sprawled in disgrace, they too gripped their swords with naked tension and charged.
Duke Kilinaire watched the nightmare unfold and felt his insides burn black. Knights he had scraped together from every corner of the noble faction, the neutrals, even from beyond the kingdom’s borders, were collapsing one after another beneath a single woman’s blade.
“If only that lowborn viscount’s son weren’t here…!”
Resentment flooded him. Without that miserable wretch there would have been no feud with Duchess Krauser in the first place, no reason for his heart to race like this. He could have gone on as always—manipulating his subordinate nobles, scrambling for interests, expanding his power.
Albus Kilinaire could only stew in that fury, struck as he was by a bolt from the blue. Yet one careless mutter of his would decisively twist a board that had been hopelessly stacked against him.
“Ghk—ghuh…….”
The finish line had been right there—and she had made a mistake this absurd!
Helena bit her lip hard. She had toppled the ninety-ninth knight; one more and it would have been over. Her nerves were wound so tight that she had caught even Duke Kilinaire’s tiny whisper, and for an instant her reason snapped.
The reason needed no explanation. Murderous intent had erupted like a volcano the moment she heard anyone belittle Zion Altram, the man she loved beyond reason.
Whether some pitiful knight died meant nothing to her. What chilled her heart was the crushing emptiness of knowing she had lost because of it. The knight she had driven her sword through the heart of had died on the spot, and the notary had therefore declared Kilinaire the victor.
Good grief.
I stared at the sword buried deep in the knight’s chest and felt a profound regret. With only one man left after the ninety-ninth, Helena had accidentally cut the last one’s life short. She had fought brilliantly, sweating rivers, only for the tower she had so carefully built to collapse in the blink of an eye.
Even the motion of pulling her blade free, even the heavy steps she took toward me, carried no strength.
From Kilinaire’s side the outcome was pitiful in the extreme. They had fielded a hundred knights; most of them had had their careers as knights ended forever. It looked less like a victory than a humiliating farce.
Still, a win was a win. One glance at Duke Kilinaire’s face—its earlier contortion smoothing out—made that clear enough. There was no denying it. Those had been the terms from the start.
“Sorry… I’m so sorry…….”
Tch. Poor thing.
Helena looked at me with hollow eyes, lips trembling. Her breathing, only mildly elevated before, was now ragged; her hands shook.
Losing a victory by a single momentary slip—of course she felt wretched.
I couldn’t fully share the emotion, but I knew exactly what state she was in and what she needed to hear. She had forgotten we were in public and slipped into casual speech; she was past any self-control.
“You worked hard. You were magnificent. I’ve fallen for you all over again.”
Perhaps not the words one should speak in front of knights being carried off on stretchers, but for me Helena came first. I had no reason to care about the gazes of knights I had never met or the ones frozen in fear.
“B-but if I just hadn’t made that mistake…….”
“I actually think it’s fortunate. If you and Ellen had won easily, there wouldn’t have been any room for me to step in. Then I couldn’t keep the promise I made to fix my own mistake myself.”
I wasn’t exactly eager to take the stage, but half of that was sincere. If I had only meant to watch from a distance, I would have relaxed the moment I brought Ellen along.
“Fortunate…?”
“Yes. Fortunate.”
When I smiled first, as if I truly meant it, Helena seemed to gather her wits little by little. The trembling stopped; light returned to her eyes.
“Really…?”
“Really. So now that it’s my turn, I’ll make sure I win and come back.”
I squeezed her hand firmly, then climbed onto the training ground. Sending our side out first had also been part of the agreement with Duke Kilinaire.
That said, the arrangement wasn’t entirely unfavorable. Whichever side went first, the opponent still had to be put down, and with no Master among them it hardly mattered who stepped forward. They might have tried dragging mages from the Magic Tower, but those people weren’t used to personal combat; they wouldn’t have been much help. In that sense Ellen, with her spirit magic, was a distinctly foreign presence.
“Has the viscount’s son let fame go to his head and lost all sense? Marching into a duel like this without even armor—what a joke.”
The knight who had taken the field launched straight into a taunt, twisting his lips. The contempt on his face was so like Duke Kilinaire’s that I wondered if he might be the duke’s personal retainer.
I debated answering, then decided to keep silent. He couldn’t possibly be ignorant that no armor mattered in front of an Aura Blade; why bother saying such a thing? If he knew and still said it, that only meant he was a knight who couldn’t even draw out an Aura Blade—one less worry for me.
But the world rarely works out that neatly.
Apparently my silence wounded his pride. The moment he drew his sword he called up aura. Arrogant and foul-tempered, yes, but the way he drew and the stance he took suggested he had earned a fair measure of the duke’s trust. So much for an easy free win.
“You both appear ready. Begin.”
The king’s solemn declaration rang in my ears. As if he had been waiting for it, the knight kicked off the training-ground floor and charged.
I didn’t even know his name, but his skill was the real thing. Thanks to that—or perhaps because of it—the numbness that had settled in while I watched Helena mow down knights by the dozen finally sharpened again.
It felt a little embarrassing to think it myself… but he was only a little stronger than me. Which meant this was winnable.
“Wha—?!”
See?
He swung without much thought, yet I still slipped past an Expert Upper-class sword as if it were nothing.
“Whoops. That was close.”
Instead of exploiting the opening I put distance between us and mocked him. If I had been as fast and strong as Helena I would have driven into the gap at once and broken his rhythm, but I couldn’t be certain of my own ability, so I chose caution. There was also the reach difference between fist and blade.
“You little—!”
“Come now, why get so angry? You look like you work under the duke, but you aren’t actually mistaking yourself for the duke, are you? That would be rather above your station.”
The provocation landed beautifully. The knight’s face flushed scarlet; he roared and came at me again. His rage was obvious, yet regrettably his sword work had not dulled at all. The paths his blade traced were still fast and intricate.
“You rat bastard…! Nowhere left to run!”
He panted with murderous frustration even as he sneered. Continuous dodging had finally driven me to the edge of the training ground.
Stepping outside wouldn’t have mattered. If that had been a rule, the knights who had surrounded Helena would have lost their chance to fight before they ever set foot on the field. Still, the opponent felt cornered—perhaps because the boundary of the stage itself seemed to shrink the space in which one could move. Even with open ground beyond, fighting in a place like this made you feel that the platform under your feet was the entire world; your thinking narrowed. I was fairly sure I had read something to that effect once.
In any case, the knight licked his lips as though he already had a mouse in his jaws—but that wasn’t the only reason. The limited footing was real, and leaping down would almost certainly expose a gap.
“Die!”
If I surrendered, Helena would automatically lose. Surrender was therefore not an option, and the knight clearly knew it; he wore a triumphant expression as he swung.
“Aigoo…!”
I made a face like a man whose gambling debts had finally ruined him, yet my hand shot inside my coat. With the same motion as drawing a hidden blade I pulled the dirk I had stashed in my tailcoat and swung with everything I had.
At a glance the sword paths looked multiple and complex, but in truth there was only one. He was not actually swinging several swords at once; block the real line cleanly and that was enough.
Easy to say. If things always followed theory, no one would ever have a hard time. Someone reading my mind might sneer exactly that—but unfortunately, right then I possessed the skill to put the theory into practice. Most of that skill had been drilled into me by Helena rather than earned by my own power, but still…….
“What?!”
Edge met edge and ground together. The knight’s face went white. The situation was not yet critical, yet the sudden piercing of a major opening left him visibly rattled. And why wouldn’t it? The greenhorn who had done nothing but talk and dodge had just blocked his sword with an Aura Blade of his own.
No matter how superhuman a knight’s abilities might be, his emotions were still ordinary human ones. At least, that was how I saw it.
“Why so surprised? Never seen a dirk before?”
I tightened my grip on the hilt and, with my free hand, snatched the wrist of the arm holding his sword. I had planned this from the start, so I moved half a beat faster than he could react.
“Hmph! As if bare hands could do anything against gauntlets!”
He recovered from his shock almost at once and swung his remaining fist at me. He had clearly trained in unarmed combat as well; the punch was fast and steady. The only pity was that, compared with his swordsmanship, it lagged far behind.
“What, you think those arm bones of yours are iron?”
So I tilted my head just enough to slip the fist past, then deliberately dropped into casual speech to needle him harder. If I could wrap aura around my hand I might have crumpled even gauntlet steel, but sadly I was not at that level. I was training to coat my hands in aura, yet the results so far were meager.
Still—
That did not mean grabbing his gauntlet had been pointless. As I had said, even if he wore gauntlets, the arm inside them was not made of iron.
“Ghk—ghrrraaah…!!”
In other words, if you twisted the entire arm—gauntlet and all—even a knight would be helpless.