White Night
A solid stone wall.
That was how Daeun felt when she looked at the one-armed swordsman.
You could reach out and touch it. You could even try to climb it.
But the wall standing in her way was too high, too solid to scale or bring down.
“Haah… haah….”
Clutching her shoulder as blood dripped steadily from it, Daeun dragged in ragged breaths.
Beyond Canaria’s expressionless face, a hint of displeasure flickered briefly across her features.
Was it because Daeun was weaker than Canaria had expected? Or because it was painful to watch her being pushed back?
I hope it’s the latter.
Daeun told herself it was the latter, but she still couldn’t be sure. She knew how unforgiving Canaria became whenever she taught swordsmanship.
She took a deep breath in, then let it out.
After several rounds of breathing, her rough panting gradually settled.
And with it, the excitement burning in her chest cooled as well.
Fine. Let’s admit it.
Canaria was right to call it impossible.
The man was one step above her.
Until then, they had been more or less evenly matched, and… her attacks had been defended reasonably well….
None of that mattered.
What mattered was that Daeun’s sword couldn’t break through the man’s defense, while the man’s sword had broken through hers.
What should I do?
She had tried everything she could think of.
Even her most practiced moves, even her highest-powered skill, had been rendered useless.
If this had been an unassailable fortress, she might have given up already. Instead, it was just high enough to be maddening—close enough to seem possible, yet impossible to reach.
What would Canaria have done?
Without meaning to, Daeun thought of the strongest person she knew: Canaria.
Even when Daeun sparred with Canaria, her sword never reached her.
No, maybe saying it never reached her wasn’t quite right.
Every time they sparred, Daeun had been too busy defending against Canaria’s blade to even try attacking.
There had been times when a strike she thought she’d blocked would slip away as though it had melted, aiming straight for her neck, and times when a thrust so fast it seemed to split the air had chilled her to the bone.
Mm. Yeah, this is impossible.
As she replayed their sparring in her mind, Daeun shook her head vigorously.
To her, Canaria’s swordsmanship was like magic.
You could see the coin appear inside the cup after it had vanished, but you had no idea how it had reached that result.
That was why, even if Daeun wanted to imitate Canaria’s swordsmanship, she simply couldn’t.
It was one thing to be disappointed; it was another to give up entirely. Daeun searched for a different way.
Should I mix in more feints? Or maybe abandon defense and go more aggressive….
Her overclocked brain felt so hot it seemed ready to go boom at any moment.
“You seem to be thinking a great deal.”
It was the man’s voice that brought Daeun’s spinning mind to a halt.
“I understand now. You’re one of those called Apostles.”
“That’s right.”
“No wonder your swordsmanship is so poor for your level.”
“…Poor, huh….”
She already knew she wasn’t great, but she’d thought she’d improved a lot under Canaria’s guidance.
Now, from the first man she’d ever met, she’d been punched right in the solar plexus.
The man himself watched her stagger with a look that seemed to ask what on earth was wrong with her.
Then he set aside his confusion and said, “You know I’m missing one arm, yes?”
“If I had eyes, I couldn’t possibly miss it.”
“Then you also understand I’m vulnerable to attacks from my left side.”
“Well….”
Even Daeun, who wasn’t very experienced in battle, understood that much.
“If you know all that, why don’t you target my weakness?”
“Huh?”
The man she’d just been crossing blades with was saying that?
What’s more, the thing he was saying was why she wasn’t attacking his weakness, so Daeun’s brain failed to keep up, and she dumbly blurted out the question.
“Are you pitying me? Even without one arm, I’m still stronger than you. You’ve felt that yourself, haven’t you? Do you have room to spare for pity?”
“No, I wasn’t pitying you….”
Just as Daeun was about to deny it, she hesitated.
Whenever she swung her sword, the blade would sometimes fly toward his left side.
Of course, those attacks had been blocked too—but his reaction had been slower than when she targeted other areas.
Why hadn’t she gone after his empty left side?
As she wrestled with the question, Daeun found the answer in a corner of her vision.
The chat window, full of every kind of taunt imaginable: Are you attacking a disabled person?I, R, cowardly and on and on.
Most of it was probably meant as a joke, just to tease her.
She knew that.
And yet.
“I see.”
This wasn’t childish make-believe or some game for other people’s amusement. It was a desperate struggle in which they tore at each other’s weaknesses with everything they had.
After dismissing the chat window, Daeun raised her sword, and the man mirrored her by taking his stance.
The exchange that followed was fiercer than anything they’d done so far, and far more merciless.
“Ngh…!”
The man came crashing straight toward her heart, and Daeun brought her sword down hard from above.
The force shook the tip of her blade, and as her balance collapsed, she was about to roll across the ground—
Whoosh!
—when she planted her hand on the earth and spun her body around, whipping out a kick.
If he’d still had his left arm, the attack would never have worked, but after spending all the offensive means he had on parrying Daeun’s sword, the man had only two choices left.
Dodge, or endure the blow.
He chose to evade.
That was how powerful Daeun’s kick was—too powerful to treat it as a desperate strike from a ruined stance.
Pure physical strength.
An attack that made full use of the Apostle’s advantage.
“I think you’re finally starting to understand.”
Exploit your own strength; strike at the enemy’s weakness.
As though she had finally grasped the fundamental law of combat, a faint smile touched the man’s lips at Daeun’s attack.
But only for a moment.
He wiped the smile away and readjusted his grip on the sword.
“Even so, you’re still clumsy.”
Knowing a weakness existed and failing to compensate for it was stupidity.
Besides, the man’s weakness was so glaring that, as Daeun had said, anyone with eyes would notice it immediately.
He had spent a great deal of time compensating for that weakness.
A bluish mana layer spread over the man’s sword.
Swish!
“Eek?!”
Just as Daeun got back to her feet, a blue streak of sword qi flashed past her side, and she yelped before twisting away.
Slash—
The lingering trace of sword qi that she hadn’t managed to dodge left a red line across her cheek.
The sword qi that had skimmed past her smashed into the tree behind her.
When she saw the tree split cleanly in half and crash to the ground with a heavy thud, Daeun went pale.
“That’s cheating! Sword Qi is cheating!”
“Why? Can’t you manipulate mana too?”
“I can’t! I can’t do something like that!”
“I see.”
At Daeun’s shout, the man nodded.
Then he lifted his sword again.
“That’s fortunate.”
“…What do you mean, fortunate?”
“It means you have no way to oppose sword qi.”
“…Huh?”
The man answered her confusion by unleashing a volley of blue sword qi.
“Aaah!”
Daeun screamed and fled from the storm of sword qi pouring down on her.
They said the distance of the sword was the distance of the swordsman, but that was a different matter entirely when the swordsman could sheath his blade in mana.
Of course, since sword qi was launched by the sword itself, there were ways to counter it.
But Daeun didn’t know those methods, so all she could do was keep dodging.
“An opening…!”
Even so, refusing to yield the advantage, she kept her eyes bright and looked for an opening.
“No chance.”
“Ghk!”
The man had already read her movement; he blocked the blade she’d rushed to parry just as if he’d been waiting for it.
“That’s enough.”
By the time several more red lines had been drawn across her body, Canaria could no longer watch and stepped in to bring the fight to an end.
“Celine.”
“Understood.”
As holy power, warm and gentle, wrapped around Daeun and seeped into the cuts, fresh flesh began to knit together.
Her wounds vanished in an instant, and only the dried red stains clinging to her skin remained to prove she had ever been hurt.
While Daeun caught her breath, the sound of small footsteps approached her.
“How was it?”
“It was hard….”
Daeun sat down heavily, pouring all her sincerity into the words.
Canaria looked down at her and spoke in a teasing tone.
“I told you it was impossible.”
“Yeah. I should’ve listened to you.”
Daeun had realized the man had never once been fighting at full strength against her.
Just from how only his breathing had become a little rough, the storm of sword qi he’d unleashed at the end probably hadn’t even been his full power.
The world was wide, and there were a lot of monsters in it.
Feeling completely drained, Daeun flopped onto her back.
Ah, right. Dust….
She had been worried about getting dirty for a moment, but now that everything felt like a pain, Daeun let the upper half of her body drop back onto the ground.
“How was it? Still, you’ve gotten better than before, right?”
“Sweet lies, bitter truth. Which one do you want?”
“You know, I feel like we’ve had this conversation before.”
And if she remembered correctly, it hadn’t been a very pleasant one.
“Pfft.”
As she muttered sourly, a light laugh fell over her bowed head.
“You’ve improved a lot.”
When Daeun reflexively lifted her head, she caught sight of a mouth curved in a gentle arc and eyes bent into soft crescents.
Watching the pink-haired girl smile with such innocence, Daeun broke into a grin of her own.
“Then we don’t need to extend the training time—”
“If you’d trained more, you might have won.”
“…A perfectly valid statement.”
Thud.
Daeun’s shoulders sagged.
After patting her awkwardly, Canaria stepped forward.
“You kept me waiting, didn’t you?”
“Mm.”
The fight had ended so recently that they were already going into a second round, but the man’s face didn’t show much resentment.
The minor stamina he’d spent had already recovered, and despite the steady flood of sword qi, his mana didn’t seem to have been depleted much either.
Tap.
The man saw Canaria flick her sword and lunged at once.
His body, fired by exhilaration, was in perfect condition—more than perfect, in fact.
It was a speed that couldn’t even be compared to the fight with Daeun.
-!
The instant one attack was blocked, the next came in.
Head, chest, leg, then head again.
My word….
Having no choice but to stare slack-jawed, Daeun watched the swords flash back and forth at a speed almost impossible to follow with her eyes.
Even under the savage barrage, Canaria didn’t even blink as she received each strike.
The ringing clash of steel battered her ears over and over.
Canaria only ever defended; the one doing most of the attacking was the one-armed swordsman.
Planting his feet firmly on the ground, the man lashed his blade toward the girl’s neck.
In a single step.
Canaria evaded by drawing her right foot back and twisting her body, then tried to swing her sword—but the man had already withdrawn his arm and swept his blade horizontally in a wide arc.
Canaria stopped attacking at once and raised her sword vertically.
It was standard defense, the proper way to block a horizontal strike.
Slip…
“…!”
Instead of the sharp ring she had expected, there came a sound as light as feathers brushing past.
The man’s sword, swung with all his strength, slid along the length of her blade and sank harmlessly into the ground.
At the technique so close to miraculous that it had forcibly turned a horizontal force vertical, the man’s eyes widened.
Daeun’s figure flashed through his mind.
The man braced his arm against the ground and, still off balance, tried to rotate his body and whip out a kick.
But his counterattack never truly materialized.
“Hup.”
“Gahk!”
A shock wholly unlike the girl’s cute little grunt crashed into his back.
The impact drove deeper into a posture that was already collapsing, and before he could even attempt to regain his balance, the man was driven helplessly into the ground.
Srrk—
As he tried desperately to rise with one arm, the cold tip of a sword was pressed to the nape of his neck.
Feeling the hot liquid running down his back, the man loosened his grip on the sword.
“…I lost.”
That was the moment the outcome of the fight was decided.
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