Moonlit Escape (5)
A clearing carved out by blasting every tree in the vicinity to splinters.
In that alien hollow—empty of a single trunk despite lying deep in the heart of the forest—Griffin raised his sword. From the blade he lifted, crimson branches stretched high into the sky.
Sword aura in the shape of a crimson thorn tree.
A red thorn tree took root in the middle of the woods. Griffin’s motion as he raised the sword was slow, yet it held not the slightest gap. Najin, who had been about to drive into an opening, furrowed his brow.
He could not see it. No gap at all.
He sensed at once that this was different from everything Griffin had shown so far. This was not basic swordsmanship. It was the martial art a single warrior had honed across an entire lifetime. From Griffin’s stance came that kind of pressure and precision.
Najin’s instincts screamed.
Fall back. Now.
Giving ground to an opponent about to unleash a great technique was plainly a bad move. But if he had no means of receiving that sword, a bad move was the only move left.
Thud.
Najin stamped the earth and forced his body to a halt. Momentum still dragged him forward, yet he drove off the ground and leapt backward. In the end, the judgment proved right.
Griffin swung.
The crimson thorn tree flung out its boughs.
The sound that rose with the cut was not the clean swish of a blade parting air. It was a great crack, as though something vast were being torn apart. Wind roared; dust billowed. When the dust settled, the ground itself lay split open.
The spot where Najin had stood a heartbeat earlier—and the earth within five paces of Griffin—was carved with sword scars in the shape of a thorn tree.
And Griffin’s sword did not stop. Rooted in the earth, he swung the thorn tree. He looked less like a knight wielding a blade than a giant ripping a colossal tree free by the roots and flailing it about.
Crack!
The ground split. The weapon in Griffin’s hand was a longsword of roughly a hundred twenty centimeters, yet the moment it wore the crimson thorn-tree aura its length and breadth more than tripled. Aura carried no weight, only repulsion, so the speed of the swing was scarcely different from that of an ordinary longsword.
From Sword Seeker onward, common sense begins to break.
Najin now felt that sentence he had once read in his very bones. A greatsword more than three meters long was being swung at the speed of a longsword. The instant those extending branches touched him, they would shear flesh and bone alike.
He rolled across the ground, kicked off the dirt, eyes wide as he read the motions a fraction ahead—yet evasion alone could not carry him through.
An attack he could not dodge finally came.
Najin thrust his own sword to meet the crimson thorn tree sweeping sideways. Even with his aura output pushed to its absolute limit, the moment it clashed with Griffin’s, Najin’s aura was scraped away at terrifying speed.
Ka-ka-ka-ka-kak!
He was losing in repulsion.
Losing in density.
He gripped the hilt with all his strength, yet the violently shuddering grip felt ready to tear free of his hands. A wet crack as a finger bent the wrong way. He could not receive this. Stay like this and every one of his ten fingers would snap.
Najin clenched his teeth and drove off the ground.
The instant his feet left the earth he was flung sideways through the air. If he could not stop it, better to be thrown clear—that was the calculation.
Boom!
Hurled far away, Najin barely managed to roll and rise. His arm was numb; his fingers throbbed. The aura that had been stripped almost to nothing no longer cast a fierce light. It only flickered short and weak, like a torch burned nearly out.
“Kh—hngh.”
Najin had already been flogging his body past its mana capacity just to keep his balance. His ruined insides screamed, and from the deep shoulder gash opened at the very start of the fight, dark-red blood poured without end.
The situation was the worst possible.
He was cornered; his opponent remained whole.
A sweet whisper coiled around Najin’s ear. Draw Excalibur. Draw it and you might yet win, might you not? Yet he had no intention of yielding to that whisper. It was the last resort.
A power still far too vast for him to handle.
If he leaned on it, if he reached for it every time he was driven into a corner, he would never grow. And if he drew it here, even if he scraped past this moment, only a greater trial would come. Najin steadied his breath and thought.
Turn the mind. Find the answer.
Think of a way to survive this ironclad knight.
What I lack is… aura.
Everything else he could somehow patch. The greatest problem was that he simply could not receive the other’s sword. The gap in aura. And the only method that might close that gap was one.
Mindscape—the landscape carved into the heart.
A concrete form to pour into the aura.
Fail to summon it and he died. Walking the razor edge between life and death, Najin reset his grip. But how? How was he supposed to interpret and grasp that vague phrase—pour the mindscape into the aura?
Don’t overthink it.
In that moment, Merlin, who had kept silent all this while, spoke.
You already know what to do.
“You’ve already experienced the trigger.”
Merlin said.
“The pure-white aura you’ve been able to draw since the battle with the demon knight—that is a fragment of mindscape.”
The place where she sat was deep darkness.
Najin’s unfinished inner world.
“Mindscape is the landscape painted in the heart.”
When she opened the eyes she had kept closed, what Merlin saw was Najin’s interior—the landscape of his mindscape.
“The memories that burned deepest into you, the things you wish to become, the things you want to seize—those are what it is made of.”
When she had first settled here, all Merlin’s eyes could find was darkness stretching past the horizon.
No longer.
She could see them.
The landscapes that had begun to take root in Najin’s mindscape, the outlines that had started to firm since the fight with the demon knight—those landscapes were clear to her. Walking among them, Merlin whispered to him.
“What was your beginning like?”
As if answering the question, the landscape stirred.
What had been only outline grew sharp. It was the landscape of the subterranean city. The dark, sunless underground city. The place Merlin walked had, in an instant, become the city that lay at the lowest point of the world.
A span of barely ten paces.
A landscape carved into a very narrow range.
Far too little to fill this vast space, yet for now it was enough. One must not grow greedy from the start. Merlin continued whispering to Najin.
“What did you wish to become? Star, knight, pride, honor. Chew over the words lodged in your mind. Paint them as landscape.”
Light glittered.
“You said it yourself. That there was a knight who shone even in the lowest place.”
The glittering light rose in the center of the underground city. It was pure white. A light that symbolized a certain knight who had never lost his pride and so could shine to the very last.
“You swore to that light. That you would hang a star in the highest place. Yes—where no stars could be seen, you dreamed of stars.”
Another light rose.
It glittered high in the sky. The pure-white star hung at the lowest point, and the platinum star hung at the highest. Gazing at the two stars that braced Najin’s mindscape, Merlin smiled.
“A place where stars cannot be seen.”
The landscape of the underground city grew clearer still.
“An oath with a knight who never lost his star.”
The pure-white star hanging low pulsed fiercely.
“A star that shines from the highest place.”
The platinum star hanging high blazed with brilliance.
“And what you hold in your hand is a sword. Even if it is not Excalibur—does that matter? You were chosen by Excalibur. You received the recognition of the Sword of Selection. And inside you there are already two shining stars.”
So, Merlin whispered,
“Swing it while drawing the stars, and that is the sword of stars.”
Merlin stopped walking.
Before her lay the pure-white star. The fiercely flickering star flashed once, vastly bright. In that single burst of light every surrounding landscape evaporated. Yet Merlin knew it did not mean extinction.
That landscape had simply moved—from Najin’s interior onto the blade of his sword.
Merlin closed her eyes again. When her eyes were shut, what she saw was the world through Najin’s sight. Through his vision she looked at the sword he gripped. Pure-white aura blooming along the blade.
That aura somehow resembled a star.
Aura that resembled a pure-white star scattered white particles as it rose.
The fight refused to end cleanly.
Griffin furrowed his brow.
He had even drawn upon the swordsmanship of the war hero Arta Trigardian, yet contrary to expectation the bout only dragged on. By every means available the youth kept slipping past the blade. Bleeding, wrecking his own body, he was buying time.
Griffin would never lose.
But if the fight stretched this long, he could not complete the mission.
To him that was as good as defeat. No matter the circumstance, fulfilling the duty his lord had given was what he called knighthood. Griffin stamped the foot he had raised and closed on Najin.
He would have to settle it.
And so Griffin called up the landscape that formed the root of his own mindscape.
It was the withered thorn tree that stood in the garden of House Arvenia. From the time Griffin was a boy the thorn tree had always held that place. The knight who had taken Griffin as his squire had called that tree the guardian tree of Arvenia.
A thorn tree that had kept its post for more than three hundred years.
Gazing upon that tree, Griffin had swung his sword. Years had passed; the master he served had retired; Griffin had become a knight, reached the realm of Sword Seeker, and risen to the seat of Knight Commander.
Decades had flowed by, yet the guardian tree of Arvenia still stood in its place.
Because he had swung his sword for decades while looking upon that guardian tree, a thorn tree stood tall within Griffin’s interior as well. An upright giant that simply carried out whatever its master desired.
That was what Griffin believed a knight to be.
Mindscape stretched along Griffin’s sword.
A still greater tree—now a thorn tree more than five meters tall—he swung. There was nowhere left to flee. So that Najin could not simply be shoved clear as before, Griffin brought the blade down from high above.
And in that instant—
Najin, who had been fleeing all this time, stopped dead in place. The halted youth suddenly lifted his sword above his own face. Griffin knew that motion. It was the posture certain knights—or the knights of Atanga—took almost as habit before drawing up their aura.
The act of offering the sword salute to steady the heart.
The moment the salute ended, pure-white particles bloomed along Najin’s blade. At a glance it looked no different from the aura before, yet Griffin felt something had changed. The aura that had nearly guttered out was scattering light once more.
Yes.
It was scattering light.
White particles flowered to full bloom with Najin’s sword at their center—exactly like a star shining in the night sky. In that moment Griffin’s eyes flew wide. Not a mere mass of light but aura that had taken form. The shape was still unstable, incomplete, yet there was no doubt that the youth’s mindscape had been poured into it.
He had touched a fragment of Sword Seeker.
Cornered, walking the tightrope of life and death, Najin had at last set foot in a realm he had never reached.
Ka-ga-ga-ga-gak!
Crimson thorn tree and pure-white star collided.
Until now Najin’s sword had been helplessly driven back, but no longer. Scattering particles, Najin’s blade sheared through a branch of the red thorn tree.
It was only one of the dozens of boughs that had stretched out. Yet the fact that it had been cut mattered.
Confirming the cut, Najin’s eyes snapped open.
He had a means of resistance. That meant he could at last unleash every technique he had been unable to use. Najin kicked off the ground and charged Griffin.
Slash!
He beat aside the giant’s branches, sometimes shedding blood, and closed the distance. A single step cost him several more gouts of blood, yet Najin did not care. There was one thing, however, that he had misjudged.
The difference in experience.
Najin had only just touched a fragment; Griffin had already stood in the realm of Sword Seeker for more than ten years. Though he could not hide his astonishment, Griffin continued to swing his sword with steady precision. He was still the one who held the upper hand.
The mindscape dwelling in Najin’s blade was slowly evaporating.
Its edge was sharp, yet he was still a brat who did not know how to swing a sword that carried mindscape. The gap in experience decided the match. Najin fought desperately, but by the time he reached striking distance, aura no longer clung to his edge.
Time was up.
It’s over.
Thinking so, Griffin swung to finish it—when a sharp whistle cut the air and an arrow came flying from somewhere. Eyes wide, Griffin swept his sword to knock the shaft aside, yet the impact still drove him and his blade a step backward with a heavy thud.
Looking at the arrow that had driven into the earth, one saw a shaft that could only be loosed from a greatbow no ordinary strength could draw.
What rose in Griffin’s mind was a famous knight of House Trebache. A Sword Seeker who wielded a greatbow. That man had surely loosed the shot. Immediately after, the thunder of warhorse hooves rolled through the forest.
“Hold.”
The approaching mounts. The ringing voice.
Griffin looked around.
Those who arrived on warhorses were the knights of the marquisate. They leveled their swords at Griffin.
Their arrival was faster than he had expected, and that meant his defeat. Griffin let out a long breath and slowly lowered his blade. With the marquis’s knights now present, he could not continue the fight.
And in the very moment he was about to lower the sword completely—
Griffin’s gaze fell, almost by accident, upon what stood before him.
There the youth remained, caked in blood, frozen in the exact posture of a heartbeat earlier. Still holding the stance for a cut, still breathing hard. Looking quietly at that posture, Griffin could not help a dry, incredulous laugh.
He possessed neither foresight nor the talent to read the future from an opponent’s motion.
Yet he had enough discernment to recognize the form. It was a technique of the Sword Church, optimized for counterattacks at close range—a technique that smashed the hilt of a blade that no longer held aura and broke the opponent’s stance.
At the final, final instant he foresaw that the aura would die and set his stance for the counter?
Even if Griffin had brought the sword down as planned—
Could he truly have taken the youth’s life?
He could not be certain. Because he could not be certain, a chill even ran through him. Even if victory slipped away, he would at least refuse to be defeated. From the youth who still gasped for breath, that fierce will could be felt.
“……”
In silence Griffin lowered his sword fully.
Though they had met as enemies, that youth’s fighting spirit deserved respect. To Najin, who still had not released his stance, Griffin said:
“This is my defeat.”
Only then did Najin lower his blade. Griffin exhaled and looked at the knights who surrounded him. From here the battle would be fought not with steel but with three inches of tongue and the weight of justification.
And that field of battle was a stage far too unfavorable for Griffin.