Imperial First Horn (6)
Alderan Basaglia swung his sword.
First Horn—Triumph.
In a world that seemed to have slowed to a crawl, Alderan’s blade moved. With every span it advanced, the landscape shattered around it. Najin understood, in that instant, that nothing could seize or halt that sword.
Sword Saint Caron had once told him: to a Sword Master, the blade was a single brush. To paint the world in the colors of one’s own mindscape—that was the extreme of the sword. The proof stood before him now.
The Imperial First Horn was the empire’s vanguard. The prow that opened the way at the very front. The sword Alderan Basaglia now wielded was none other than a projection of himself—an existence that smashed through everything in its path. The blade of a transcendent who swung with absolute confidence in his own being surpassed anything Najin could have imagined.
It was different. To compare it to the Triumphant Sword he had once swung without even wrapping it in aura would have been an insult; the gulf between them was that vast.
Najin tried to gauge its range. He could not. He tried to predict the shape of the aura that would erupt from the tip. That, too, eluded him. In this moment his foresight of the future became meaningless. Najin, who had always fought by reading what was to come, found himself pinned to the present.
Well—of course.
In the end, the foresight Najin possessed was only the prediction of a near future drawn from information his two eyes had already seen. But the Triumphant Sword now descending was a strike that fell from beyond providence, unbound by common sense, by law, by anything at all.
How could one predict something free of the world’s rules? Najin accepted the fact with humility.
And so he looked to the present.
Najin drove power into his planted foot. He gripped his sword until his fingers threatened to crush. Every star carved into Excalibur blazed, each one spilling its story without discrimination or restraint.
There was no time to pick and choose.
His heart hammered wildly. He drove his mana to its absolute limit. His aura shone brighter than it ever had; his stance was more perfect than it had ever been. As the Triumphant Sword came crashing down before him, Najin answered. There was no need to ask what technique he would use.
First Horn—Triumph.
It was the sword he had learned from Alderan Basaglia himself. Even as he swung, Najin corrected his form by watching the knight before him. The blade he unleashed traced a path that matched Alderan’s trajectory with perfect precision.
Two swords, swung along the same arc.
Dozens of meters of empty air lay between them. That was the distance that separated the two. And yet the blades that should have cleaved only empty space were, impossibly, caught there. A clear metallic clash rang out.
Across dozens of meters, sword met sword.
Aura had met aura along the trajectories they had drawn. The platinum-gold aura that had fallen from the sky, parting clouds, collided with the paint-stained aura of the other. From the point of impact, cracks raced outward through space itself.
They shattered. They broke. They tangled and tried to devour each other.
Najin resisted Alderan’s aura as it sought to shove his own blade aside. He clamped down hard on the trembling sword. His fingers bent with a wet crack. The rushing wind pressure raked his body and blood sprayed free.
Najin ground his teeth.
He knew it as well as anyone. As he was now, he could not surpass the Triumphant Sword as Alderan himself performed it. If the contest of pure strength continued, he would be the one to break. That much was not beyond him.
Even so he clenched his jaw and held on, because even if he was driven back, he would not collapse entirely. At the very least he could force a crack into that perfect aura.
Crack.
And the fracture he created would become the foundation for the attack that came after him. Believing that, Najin swung without a thought for what would follow.
Someone was there to answer that expectation.
Gerd stepped lightly forward and laid his own strike atop Najin’s aura. The older man’s aura braced the blade that had been steadily losing ground. The moment they barely achieved balance, Gerd took another step—this one heavy.
Boom.
This time he poured the power he had held back from the first strike into the second. The earth split around the foot he planted. The air itself shuddered. Gerd gathered every current of that force into a single blade and swung.
The first strike had been delivered one step behind Najin.
The second was delivered one step ahead of him.
The trajectory of the sword that had been falling from sky toward earth changed. To alter a blade’s path once it had already begun to move placed a monstrous burden on the flesh. The old man endured it. A body that had swung a sword every single day for more than two hundred years absorbed the full recoil of the technique.
Gerd’s sword shone.
The blade reversed the path it had already traveled.
The old man walked the same road his master had walked. Like his master he had become the Imperial First Horn; he had swung his sword for the empire; he had whittled himself down for the empire. And so Gerd had come to understand Alderan’s life.
What did it matter if he had never fully inherited the man’s sword? By living the same life as his master, Gerd had contemplated what the empire’s sword truly was. He had pondered and agonized over it for years beyond counting.
This was simply the answer he had found at the end of that path.
It was no chance discovery, no stroke of luck piled upon luck, no revelation handed down by some fateful encounter. It was necessity. After long years of torment, finding an answer was, in a way, only natural.
Master taught me the Triumphant Sword.
The old man’s two hundred years bore fruit.
I taught that sword to the knights of the empire—and beyond them, to the empire itself. I wove Master’s sword into a single blade of my own.
The old man who believed that wherever he stood was the empire, that he himself was the empire, swung his sword. How, then, could his blade be anything other than the empire’s sword?
And so if this sword were to be given a name…
The Imperial Sword.
That is what it would be.
Shhk.
What followed the Triumphant Sword was the sword of the empire. Gerd’s blade, having reversed the path it had come by, shot upward into the sky.
Alderan’s strike—meant to shatter Najin’s aura and then the layer of Gerd’s aura laid atop it—could not also withstand the second strike that followed.
Alderan’s aura twisted.
Into the crack Najin’s aura had carved, Gerd’s aura drove deep. The fracture spread. The aura that should have smashed through everything found itself seized; it could no longer bear the force and began to break apart.
Shatter.
The aura exploded. Compressed power unleashed itself in a howling storm. The earth was flayed; wind pressure hurled dirt and dust skyward. Through that curtain of dust a single line of aura came racing.
Boom—and a pivot.
Alderan stamped the ground, spun, and swung. The instant he caught Gerd’s aura, his wounds tore open. Blood sprayed. He failed to fully receive the aura that had shattered the Triumphant Sword and come for him.
His body locked. His breathing frayed. For the first time his stance collapsed. He realized, in the moment of impact, that his arm had broken.
Sssssshhhh!
Alderan slid far backward and tried to steady his breath, to reset his form. When techniques of this magnitude collided, a gap of that size was inevitable.
But there was something he had overlooked.
There was a certain boy. A boy who had always abused his body, who had driven himself past every limit, and who therefore was intimate with extremity. Because of that intimacy, the boy could make one particular choice.
In the decisive instant—when both sides were pushed to the brink—he did not choose to catch his breath and correct his stance. He chose instead to remain disordered, to drag rough air into his lungs, to flog his own flesh and charge. The boy was a knight, yes—but he was also a gambler who lived for the contest.
Victory and defeat were always decided by a single moment’s judgment.
Najin did not miss that moment.
Thud!
Najin burst through the rising dust. Bloodshot eyes, a broken arm dangling uselessly. Blood sprayed with every step, yet he paid it no mind as he sprinted straight at Alderan.
An attack launched in a moment Alderan had never imagined.
Alderan moved a step too late. The recoil from receiving Gerd’s sword made the motion sluggish. Najin, who had thrown his entire body forward without hesitation, was a step faster.
Sssssshhhhhh!
A platinum-gold trail flashed and Najin slid past behind Alderan. Not much blood flew; he had not inflicted a fatal wound. Yet the strike was worth everything.
“Didn’t I tell you?”
Najin flicked the helmet he now held and tossed it behind him.
“That I’d cut that helmet off first.”
The Helmet Knight’s helm was gone. Alderan’s grotesque face was laid bare, and across the fire-like, wavering features a single sword scar had been carved. Of his eight eyes, three had been cut.
And the instant the helmet came free—
Alderan’s body shuddered violently. Watching it, Najin thought: as expected—the helmet had been the medium.
From the start, the Helmet Knight was already a dead man.
He had finished his story and left the stage. If something had forcibly kept such a being tethered, a medium had to exist. Najin had believed that medium was the helmet and the armor.
Because—
To Alderan that helmet had been a single unresolved attachment. A radiant past he could not release, glory he could not let go, regret for his comrades, the torment of the choices he had made—all of it had been sealed inside that helm.
That was why, in his final moment, he had taken it off.
Only by removing the helmet could the Helmet Knight become a true knight.
As if to erase that story, the Revelry Emperor had forced the helmet back onto the knight who had already removed it—and remade him into a helmeted jester. She had created a corpse that still moved as he once had, drowning in his most brilliant past.
He could not leave that unchallenged.
Watching Alderan’s movements begin to change little by little, Najin raised his sword. It seemed his guess had been correct. He felt, with certainty, that this battle was finally approaching its end.
“You are a knight.”
And—
“That kind of end does not suit you.”
This is not the place you are meant to go.
So I will send you.
To the place you ought to reach—to the destination you yourself once chose with your own hands.
Together with the Star of Funeral Rites, Najin charged.
From the moment the helmet was stripped away and wounds began to multiply across his body, Alderan could no longer display the same peerless might as before. Even so, Alderan Basaglia remained strong—terrifyingly strong.
With a broken arm, painted in blood, injuries stacking one upon another, he still raged like a single living storm.
Within that storm two men swung their swords. Their bodies were wrecks as well, yet they hurled themselves at Alderan without pause. At first it had been Alderan who pressed them; gradually the current began to reverse.
Najin boldly inserted his body into the fray. With a sword grown even more precise, with predictions grown even sharper, he caught Alderan’s blade.
And the opening that created—
Gerd never failed to seize it. His sword was no longer a counterfeit merely imitating the Triumphant Sword. The blade completed through an old man’s life shone now in colors that belonged to him alone.
Kang! Kaaang! Kaaaaaang!
Blood sprayed. Armor split. Flesh was carved open in long, bleeding lines, yet none of them stopped.
Kagagagagagak!
Technique answered technique. Two of them swung their swords while reading the future; one drove his blade toward a present tempered upon the foundation of the past. The tangled, interwoven paths of their swords seemed as though they might continue without end.
Counter, deflect, strike aside—
Between the ceaseless clash of steel, Alderan Basaglia’s heart beat. That heart was nothing more than a mass of demonic power the demon had fashioned. It possessed no unnecessary functions such as “beating.”
And yet Alderan Basaglia thought:
My heart is beating.
The man he was now was a being taxidermied in the past—a finished existence forcibly kept from leaving, sealed at the hour of his brightest glory.
Even so—
Through the swords that struck against him, Alderan felt something. Joy? Awe toward his enemies? Or something else entirely? He continued to swing.
Kneel. Fall to your knees. Collapse.
He swung with crushing force. Under the successive blows, Najin’s knees began to buckle. In the instant he was about to go down, Najin clenched his teeth and rose again—as if he would never yield.
The Star of Unyielding blazed.
It was none other than the star he had received from Alderan himself.
Like a crossing stroke, Najin’s blade slipped past the sword Alderan had swung in the expectation that the boy would fold. Alderan’s pauldron shattered. As he was driven back, a smile touched the corner of his mouth. The more his armor was stripped away, the more the Star of Funeral Rites hammered his body, the clearer his mind became.
Something, however faintly, began to surface.
He thrust aside the sword Gerd drove at him. In Alderan’s eyes the path Gerd traced looked clumsy. As if to declare it a wrong road, he tried to smash that sword-path apart—yet for some reason it would not break.
The Star of Conviction shone.
It was the eighth star Gerd had gained on the day Najin arrived—the day he realized his life had not been meaningless, that his efforts had not been in vain.
A sword-path steeped in conviction did not snap. It struck Alderan’s body with unwavering straightness. A little more of Alderan’s armor fell away.
A little more.
At some point Alderan had begun to smile.
Show me a little more, you brats.
He could not understand the present situation. He could not even grasp why he was doing this. He could not clearly recognize the two figures before him. Yet the soul still bound to this world was speaking.
Shouldn’t you be teaching them?
The jester who was supposed to dance for the Revelry Emperor began, at some point, to move with a different purpose. He still sought to kill the two in front of him—yet the sword he swung was no longer purely for the sake of killing.
Come! Come as much as you like!
Show yourselves. Show me that you can surpass me, that you can inherit what comes after me. Otherwise I cannot step aside from this place.
He wrung every last drop from a body that was falling apart.
Once more he unleashed the ultimate technique of the Triumphant Sword. The instant the blade moved, blood erupted from every part of him. A storm howled and the entire area was overturned.
Once again the two of them received it.
As if he had known they would, Alderan charged through the raging storm.
Aura, sword, sometimes fist and greave—
He moved without rest. He smashed every one of the dozens, hundreds of sword-paths that came at him and continued the duel. That endless exchange of blades reached its end at last.
There existed a road that could not be shattered no matter how thoroughly every path was destroyed.
It was a road that came forked into two.
One was a sword that perfectly resembled his own—so much so that it seemed his entire life had been transplanted into it. Alderan found himself smiling without meaning to. Yes. I did not teach you wrongly. He smiled because his life had held value after all.
And the other?
A sword that resembled his own yet had been completed in a different form. Alderan found it beautiful. I can no longer scold you for wielding a blade that no longer suits you, can I? The thought rose unbidden, and he smiled again.
Thuk.
Two swords pierced Alderan’s heart at the same instant.