Mid-Rank Priest Volkman (2)
Watching Volkman's reaction, Najin was certain.
His plan had worked.
Looks like the plan took.
Seems that way.
Right after accepting Volkman's commission, Najin had researched the Sword Church. Merlin's knowledge, the rumors that circulated about the order, even the related texts—information on the Sword Church had been relatively easy to dig up.
They were not a closed society. They were a public one.
Piecing what he had found together, Najin had reached a single conclusion before the work even began.
I can show a certain amount of my talent.
Of course he knew that talent of his could be read as a threat. He also knew that if he simply stole a noble house's secret sword arts and copied them to someone's face, things would get extremely complicated.
Even so, he had revealed his talent in front of Volkman because he was certain. Certain that with the Sword Church, at least, it would be allowed.
"Haha. A youth overflowing with passion."
"Look as much as you like. Just don't come too close. It could be dangerous."
From that earlier exchange with Volkman, Najin had confirmed it. The information he had gathered on the order was not wrong.
The Sword Church does not hide its swordsmanship.
Men who poured decades—or their entire lives—into the advancement of the sword did not particularly mind their techniques being exposed to the outside world.
Even if someone stole the order's arts and developed them in their own way, the Church would clap and celebrate the fact. A new path for the sword had opened; that alone was enough for them.
I told you. It's a gathering of weirdos.
Merlin said.
They're lunatics who figure that as long as swordsmanship advances, that's all that matters. Their whole way of thinking is a little different.
The priests of the Sword Church.
What they valued above everything else was the advancement of swordsmanship and the training of swordsmen. Turning that over in his mind, Najin recalled the precepts of the Sword Church he had confirmed in the books.
He had succeeded in catching Volkman's interest.
What remained was to use those precepts to draw the man in. Recalling the plan he had laid in advance, Najin stroked the hilt of his sword.
If luck is with me...
He would be able to copy an even wider range of techniques.
Watching Volkman's back as the man swung his sword, Najin licked his lips. He had no intention of learning a few simple techniques and going home. Volkman still seemed to have a whole store of techniques he was keeping hidden.
If I'm going to steal them anyway...
Najin smiled.
I'll strip him down to the last scrap.
When the last of the orcs had been cleaned up, Volkman let out a long breath. Beads of sweat stood on his brow, and the air he exhaled came rough. Even for a Sword Expert, facing orcs without aura was no simple task.
But that was exactly why it was training.
Lean too long on aura's superior cutting power and the edge of the blade itself grows dull. Every time these drills confirmed the sharpness of swordsmanship he had honed over long years, Volkman felt a genuine pleasure.
So under ordinary circumstances he would have been grinning by now—
"..."
Volkman did not smile.
He turned his head without a word. Something was nagging at him. Behind him, a young man was stuffing the heads of the orcs Volkman had cut down into a sack.
The youth who had given his name as Ivan.
Before the orc hunt had begun, when the young man had asked if he could watch the swordsmanship up close, Volkman had answered readily that it was fine. The youth had looked like someone who did not neglect his training, and Volkman had liked the attitude of someone who wanted to learn.
So I gave him permission to watch.
Volkman's eyes narrowed.
The movement the young man had shown a moment ago still flickered through his mind. As if he had sensed the goblin charging from the blind spot of Volkman's vision, the youth had moved before Volkman could even shout a warning.
That much he could write off as good instincts.
The problem was the swordsmanship that came after.
The linking of stances and their circulation. The seamless flow of offense and defense born from that circulation. That had been the swordsmanship Volkman himself had shown the youth—the foundational arts of the Sword Church.
Of course the techniques themselves were not rare.
The order's swordsmanship was widely known, and the four basic stances in particular appeared even in common sword manuals one could buy anywhere.
But...
Volkman pressed hard at the space between his brows.
The reason the Church did not mind making its arts public was that not just anyone could copy them. The order's sword was something completed only through long years of training and repetition.
Every small motion was pared down; years were spent repeating the same movement until a single stance was mastered. The precision of those finished stances was the true essence of the Church's swordsmanship.
A sword that only effort and time can complete.
It was not something you could simply watch and reproduce. Even if you stole the techniques, you could not steal the years poured into training them.
That is how it should be.
So what of the movement that youth had shown a moment ago?
The swing itself had lasted only an instant, but Volkman had seen it clearly. The young man's stance had been perfectly set; the linking of stance to stance had been smooth.
The weight carried in his stepping foot.
The angle of his arm and the arc the tip of the blade described.
The breath he exhaled and the direction of his gaze.
Even the way he gripped the sword.
All of it had been thoroughly mastered. The refined motion the youth had displayed was not something that could be finished in a day or two.
In other words...
It was the kind of precision that mid-rank priests, men who had repeated the same motions for decades, might possess. The youth's build and face were nothing like his own, yet when Volkman watched him move he almost felt as if he were looking into a mirror.
That was how closely it had resembled him—down to the finest habits of motion.
The realization left Volkman with a deep sense of wrongness. He copied what he saw in that brief glance? No. That was not something that made sense. Did that mean he had learned the Church's swordsmanship somewhere before?
No matter how he turned it over, no answer came.
"Ivan, was it?"
After wrestling with it, Volkman finally spoke.
He stepped toward the youth and asked,
"Have you learned the Church's swordsmanship somewhere before? The movement you just showed was of the order, and it is not something finished in a day or two. It looks as if you have trained for a long time..."
The youth was silent.
Volkman pressed on.
"If you have a master who taught you the sword, might I ask for his name?"
If this youth had a master, that man was surely a swordsman of renown. For a young man of that age to settle into stances that perfect, he would need a good teacher to correct his form.
A high priest of the Church? Or some wandering swordsman whose name once traveled far? Either way, someone who knows the order's arts well.
Who could it be?
It might even be a swordsman Volkman himself knew. He waited for the youth's mouth to open—
"..."
The youth remained silent.
At the sight of him refusing to answer, Volkman felt a flash of frustration and was about to ask again when the young man finally spoke.
"I have heard a great deal about the Sword Church."
What came from his mouth was not what Volkman had expected. Even so, it was nothing he could ignore. At one particular word, Volkman's eyes narrowed.
"They say there is a precept like this."
The Precepts of the Sword.
Just as the knights of Atanga kept the ancient knightly codes, the Sword Church had long upheld a handful of rules left by the first Sword Saint as their precepts.
The youth recited one of them.
"If you wish to speak of the sword, speak with the sword."
Volkman's eyes went wide.
Then a short, disbelieving laugh slipped from the corner of his mouth. It did not take long for that laugh to swell into a full, booming roar.
If you wish to speak of the sword, speak with the sword.
The first Sword Saint, a man of bold and unrestrained temperament, had always put the blade before words, and he had insisted that a swordsman ought to converse with the sword.
Which meant the precept amounted to this:
Why waste time talking this way and that? Just cross blades and you will know, will you not? Instead of measuring each other up, draw steel and come at me. After a few exchanges, you will understand naturally.
In short: let us have a bout of sword combat.
"An audacious youth."
A smile settled on Volkman's lips.
Not every priest lived by the precepts. Volkman himself remembered them without being bound by them.
Even so, he did not take the precepts lightly enough to ignore a swordsman who invoked them to his face. And in his own judgment, the youth was right.
"You are certainly correct."
Volkman felt a genuine interest in the young man before him, and a desire to test his skill. He knew well enough that nothing answered that desire better than a spar.
With a firm motion he drew his sword, scabbard and all, from his hip. Binding scabbard and blade tightly with his belt, he leveled the weapon at the youth.
"A priest of the sword cannot very well break the precepts. I find myself rather interested in your swordsmanship—would you grant me a spar?"
The youth offered a silent sword salute. He too bound sword and scabbard tightly, then took a single step back.
"I look forward to learning from you."
"Good. Once the spar is over, will you answer my questions?"
"As we spar, you will come to understand naturally."
"You refuse to give an inch, don't you."
Well then. Let me see what you can do.
Muttering as much, Volkman gave his sword a little tilt—a signal that he would yield the first move. Watching that easy composure, Najin smiled inwardly.
He had caught the man's interest and pulled him in with the precept. All that remained was to press Volkman hard enough to drag out the techniques he had not yet shown.
For that, he would first have to strip away that composure.
Najin stepped forward and dropped into a low stance. Volkman's eyes narrowed. It was a posture he had never seen before—and of course he had not. This was neither the Church's swordsmanship nor anyone else's.
A sword optimized for the opening strike.
A sword that seized the flow of a fight with the first blow.
It was a technique Najin himself had forged in the underground city, made to decide victory or defeat in a single breath and snatch the initiative. Something too raw even to call a proper school of swordsmanship.
But.
As long as Najin's innate sense rode with it, it became a blow sharper than anything else. He drove off the ground and launched himself. Even without reinforcing his body with mana, the strike was startlingly fast.
"...!"
Volkman's eyes flew wide.
In a single burst of acceleration the youth was already sliding into the blind spot of his vision. Volkman had expected the low-trailing blade to rise in an upward cut—but instead the youth leapt right in front of him.
The accelerated arc of the sword twisted.
Not from below to above, but a diagonal slash crashing down from above. Against that suddenly warped trajectory, Volkman's body moved at once.
Ka—gagagak!
Settling into a stance he had repeated thousands, tens of thousands of times, he caught Najin's blade. The heavy weight that traveled up through his hands left him no room for surprise before Najin was already chaining the next cut—determined not to let the seized initiative slip.
The longer the spar went on, the more wrongness Volkman felt.
The youth before him was using neither aura nor mana. Mana stirred faintly in his body, but only in small amounts. And yet his movement was so fast that Volkman almost wondered whether the boy was using mana after all.
No. That is not it.
Volkman finally grasped the true shape of the wrongness.
It was the youth's eyes as he moved. Only then did Volkman understand. The boy was not fast—he was simply moving first.
Where the sword would come from.
Where Volkman himself would drive in.
As if he could see all of it, the youth stepped a half-pace ahead of Volkman and withdrew a half-pace ahead of him. The precision of that spacing left Volkman no choice but to click his tongue in admiration.
Crude. Unrefined. And yet...
There was a raw sharpness to it.
Blade-strikes keen as a beast's fangs flashed in sudden bursts. Volkman was still turning them all aside with room to spare—until the next stance Najin settled into shattered that composure.
Thud.
Driving his foot into the earth, Najin raised his sword. It was a stance stolen from Volkman himself. Taking up the defense-heavy form that had blocked his own blade several times already, Najin caught Volkman's cut—
—and linked at once into the next stance.
As if he were imitating Volkman's own movement.
It was the Church's swordsmanship. But the footwork and distribution of force with which Najin joined stance to stance belonged to Volkman alone—the habits forged through more than a decade of his personal training.
"...!"
Volkman's gaze wavered.
From a distance a moment ago he had not been able to be certain, but with blades locked at close range he could tell. That was his own sword.
Kang! Kaaang!
The more their blades met, the stranger it felt. It was like looking into a mirror. Whenever Volkman showed a new variation the mirror would shatter—only for a fresh one to appear before him in an instant.
The youth reflected in the glass copied every applied technique Volkman demonstrated.
The first attempt was rough. But the second time the same technique appeared, the arc the youth drew was perfect. Years of Volkman's own training were already steeped into that trajectory.
"Ha...!"
It was too absurd. Too impossible to understand.
Volkman let out a helpless laugh.
As the blades kept crashing together, he finally understood what the youth had meant before the spar began. When Volkman had asked who his master was, the boy had answered that he would come to know naturally as they fought.
So that is what he meant!
Gooseflesh rose along Volkman's arms.
There was no need to ask about a master.
The man crossing blades with the youth right now was already the youth's master.
The moment a technique was shown, it was stolen. And not merely the technique itself—Najin was stripping away every year of the decade and more that Volkman had invested in forging it.
Volkman was not blind to the fact.
Even knowing his foundation was being picked clean, he did not stop his sword. If anything, a smile spread across his mouth. He was enjoying this bout of sword combat as well.
I have seen more than my share of those called geniuses.
Monsters who could catch up to another man's entire lifetime in a single breath. The youth before him was surely one of them. Crossing blades with him, Volkman thought of a certain man.
A friend who had entered the Church with him—
—and who had since gone somewhere Volkman could no longer reach.
Youngest Sword Expert. Youngest Sword Seeker. Youngest Sword Master... An unmatched genius who had overturned every record in turn and stood at the summit.
The master of the Sword Church. Sword Saint Caron.
The sensation Volkman had felt when he crossed blades with Caron back when the man was still only an Expert—he was feeling it again now. The feeling of his own effort being denied. And yet the fact did not offend him.
Show me more.
This was useful to him as well.
Answering Najin's unpredictable sword was no easy task even for Volkman. With aura and mana it would have been simple, but matching pure swordsmanship alone made him a difficult opponent.
And the youth was imitating Volkman's own arts.
An imitation so precise it felt like staring at his own reflection. In the youth's mirrored movements, Volkman found flaws in himself he had never noticed before. He could see exactly which parts still needed work.
It had been a fine experience, and a fine sparring partner.
But even that was drawing to a close. With a sharp crack, a fracture ran through his scabbard. Volkman settled into one final stance—the strongest single strike he possessed, the one he had kept hidden from Najin until the very end.
Shhhhk—
His footprints scattered wildly across the field. Footwork so intricate and complex that even Najin's darting eyes could not fully track it. Sliding into Najin's guard as if on ice, Volkman swung.
A blade-flash that scattered afterimages as it struck.
Kwachik!
The instant the swords met, Volkman's scabbard shattered. Najin managed to defend, but the force of the blow sent him tumbling across the ground. When he pushed himself up, Volkman was standing there looking down at him with a thoroughly satisfied expression.
"A fine spar, Ivan."
He smiled.
"When you can handle aura... I would like to cross blades with you again, with aura wrapped around our swords."
Volkman stepped closer and held out a hand. Najin took it and rose. As the youth flexed his still-stinging fingers open and shut, Volkman spoke.
"Have you ever thought of joining the Sword Church?"