Hawk's Eye, Kaufman Teosis (4)
Blade met blade.
An archer whose hand and shoulder had been carved too deep to draw a bowstring. A battered swordsman who could no longer call forth his aura. Neither man was anywhere near fighting fit, and the sheer volume of blood they were losing made the situation even worse.
Drip. Drip.
Violent motion tore open wounds already half-closed; fresh blood sprayed from the rents. Two wrecks of men thrashing through a blood-soaked melee usually looked pathetic, almost comical. This fight did not.
Clang. Kaaang. Skreeeeech!
The ring of steel on steel, the grind of edge against edge, erupted again and again—several times in a single second. Far from ugly, the noise was almost dazzling. Sparks leapt from the clashing metal and mixed with the flying blood.
Their feet tangled in a frantic dance. One would drive in, only to retreat; the other would seem to give ground, then slip sideways to threaten a flank. Both hunters’ eyes were bloodshot, fixed on any opening that might let them tear the other’s throat out.
Thud.
Najin stamped down and swung. The moment his boot struck the floor, blood geysered from the hole punched through his thigh, yet his stance never wavered. The longsword came in at blistering speed.
Kaufman angled his machete and caught the blow, letting the edge slide along the flat. Before he had become a ranger he had been an imperial soldier, a swordsman drilled in the empire’s style. He simply preferred the long shot; that was the only reason he had set the blade aside.
But Kaufman was still a ranger.
And Najin was a Sword Expert standing on the very threshold of Sword Seeker.
Even if raw strength favored the older man, swordsmanship belonged to Najin. He had watched the techniques of a Sword Saint with his own eyes. Every flaw in the forms Kaufman threw at him stood out in sharp relief.
If he could see it, there was no reason not to punish it.
The longsword that had been sliding along the machete suddenly whirled, wrapping around Kaufman’s blade. Force and angle reversed in an instant; Kaufman’s eyes flew wide.
Shhk!
He twisted on pure reflex, yet the tip still grazed his face. Blood sprayed. Kaufman clicked his tongue. Better not let this stay a pure swordfight.
He glided back, opening space, and flung a dagger. Clang, claang—Najin knocked the spinning blade aside and stepped in. At that exact moment Kaufman slammed the dagger still in his hand against the machete.
Engraving release—Magic Bullet.
The target was the blue-hued dagger Kaufman held. The daggers that had earlier bounced past Najin’s back flared sapphire and barked like guns. Blue lances of force hammered into Najin’s spine.
Thud-thud-thud-thud!
Blind-side shots, fired at close range. The spell was too weak to punch through him, but the impacts were more than enough to wreck his balance.
Stance shattered. Najin staggered.
A hunter never missed such an opening.
Kaufman closed and swung the machete. Just as the heavy blade was about to bury itself in Najin’s shoulder, the youth forced his shock-locked body to move. Joints cracked like breaking sticks under the strain.
He barely managed to parry. Kaufman refused to surrender the momentum he had seized. He drove Najin relentlessly, never allowing him the breathing room to unleash a proper technique. The exchange ceased to be a sword duel and became something closer to a brawl.
A slash would suddenly become a kick; an elbow would smash toward a temple while a knee drove upward. Blade, fist, and foot blurred together; now and then another dagger spun out to create a fresh variable.
Najin did not simply endure.
Accumulated wounds had slowed his reactions, yet his eyes tracked every twitch of Kaufman’s body with perfect clarity. Blows he could not avoid he took on non-vital flesh, then immediately snatched the next move.
Grab.
He seized the flow Kaufman had claimed and made it his own. If the older man wanted a street fight, Najin had no intention of refusing.
You’re not the only one who’s good at this.
Najin had confidence in a dogfight. At his core he was still a hunting dog.
The damp, lightless air of the underground aqueduct smelled of Atman. Memory flickered through him—days lived hand-to-mouth, bare-knuckle brawls against men two or three times his size just to survive until morning.
A dogfight? Fine. Come on, then.
We’ll see whose neck drops first—yours under my teeth, or mine under your blade.
That was a question only the next few moments could answer.
While the brawl raged on, Kaufman felt a growing sense of wrongness. Fifty years of killing on battlefields had taught him what a dying man looked like. This did not add up.
How the hell is he still moving?
He backed away from the madly charging youth, baffled. To Kaufman’s eye, Najin was a walking corpse.
An arrowhead still buried in his gut. Skin blistered by the earlier explosion. A hole through his side, another through his calf; blood poured from both. Shafts still jutted from his back and shoulder, left there because there had been no time to pull them free.
The lesser cuts and bruises were past counting. Injuries like these should have dropped him from blood loss long ago.
Kaufman had seen soldiers drag a few more enemies down with them while they died. Even those men had never kept fighting this long. Tens of seconds, at most.
And the boy in front of him?
Tens of seconds had become minutes. He was still swinging a sword cleanly—if anything, he seemed to be getting faster.
What in the world…
Stabbed, blasted, kicked—he simply rose again and charged. Did the pain not reach him? No; Kaufman could see the truth. Najin’s jaw muscles stood out like cables; blood leaked between teeth clenched so hard they threatened to crack.
He was literally biting down on the agony and forcing himself forward. Watching someone that broken still close the distance sent a chill down Kaufman’s spine.
He clicked his tongue at the sheer obsession.
Combat high. Absolute focus. Call it immersion if you liked. Kaaang! He caught a blade an inch from his face and met Najin’s eyes. Bloodshot whites, pupils contracted to pinpricks.
Eyes that could freeze a man with sheer force of will. Kaufman let out a disbelieving laugh.
Shhhhk!
At last Najin’s sword raked Kaufman’s calf. Kaufman felt his own body starting to fail. New wounds. Heavy bleeding. He would have to watch for shock himself before long.
Time to end it.
Time to stake his life on a final variable.
How long had it been since he last found himself this cornered? The last time was the operation to eliminate the Royal Guard who had tried to defect…
A fragment of that old battlefield flashed through his mind. Why now? Simple. The trump card he had used then still looked viable. Kaufman moved, replaying a mission more than a decade old.
Grip.
He closed his fist around four remaining daggers at once, then slammed them against the machete in his other hand. Kiiiiing—the four blades blazed with light.
Najin flinched.
He had been burned by engraved daggers more than once already. Something was coming; he simply did not know what, so he could not answer. That hesitation was exactly what Kaufman had cultivated by carrying daggers with every possible engraving.
Until the moment of release, no one could tell which spell an engraving held. Master mages claimed they could read the runes on sight, but—
This one’s just a swordsman.
He wouldn’t understand the deeper principles of magic. He would brace for one of the effects he’d already seen. The instant he did, the trap was sprung.
Spell engravings were Kaufman’s preferred snare.
And he never let prey walk free once it stepped into one. As the daggers flared and the spells began to bloom, he hurled two of them.
Engraving release—Burst.
Twin detonations erupted right in front of Najin’s face. Through the smoke the youth reappeared, having reacted in the split-second; only soot blackened his shoulder.
Two left.
Kaufman flung the remaining pair and squeezed his eyes shut.
Engraving release—Flash.
Engraving release—Resonance.
A searing white blaze. A shriek that tore at the eardrums. The higher a martial artist climbed, the more he trusted his senses—and the more widely he left them open. Against such people these two spells were pure poison.
Vision and hearing stolen in a single heartbeat.
He had mixed the utility daggers among the direct-damage ones precisely for moments like this. Even a famed Royal Guard had died after walking into the same trap.
You’re no different.
Kaufman opened his eyes. Sound was gone, but by shutting them in advance he had kept his sight. He swung the machete—and what filled his vision was Najin, eyes already open, longsword thrusting forward as if he had known the exact angle of the charge.
…How?
The question barely formed before—
Thuck.
The longsword punched straight through Kaufman’s body.
He tried to twist free, but the wound was too deep. The blade transfixed his shoulder and his stance collapsed.
The long fight was over.
Balance gone, Kaufman slipped in his own blood and went down hard. One shoulder was carved to the bone; the other was completely impaled.
He could no longer hold anything, much less swing it. Throwing a dagger might still have been possible with enough effort, but every engraved blade was spent. He let out a hollow laugh.
“You’re a real madman.”
He lacked the strength even to sit up properly. From the floor he looked up as Najin approached, longsword still dripping.
He had lost.
The hunt had failed.
Kaufman had no intention of begging. Had the positions been reversed he would only have sneered at any plea for mercy. He closed his eyes and lowered his head, offering his neck.
If you’re going to take it, take it.
Yet the blade never fell. Instead he heard the soft pop of a cork, the sound of someone drinking. He raised his head and saw Najin upending a potion into his mouth.
“…What are you doing?”
“Doing what?”
“Why aren’t you finishing me?”
“I can kill you any time. Looking at the situation first won’t make me late.”
Najin exhaled a long breath. Steam was rising from his body. Kaufman frowned. Every minor wound—everything short of the through-and-throughs—was knitting shut at unnatural speed.
No potion, no matter how expensive, produced results like that.
The word that flashed through his mind was homunculus.
Forbidden imperial tech. Living weapons the madmen of the old Magic Towers had once brewed. Kaufman dismissed the thought almost at once. Homunculi did not hold conversations this naturally. And hadn’t the empire’s own Sword Master spent years hunting the last of them down? Kaufman doubted any of those horrors had survived that old monster’s blade.
“So the reason you’re delaying my death… is because you want to ask me something?”
“Glad we’re on the same page.”
“Funny way of showing it, stabbing for my throat like that.”
“If you died, you died. If you lived, I planned to ask.”
“Efficient.”
The cold kiss of steel against his throat. Kaufman smiled bitterly. Najin kept the longsword poised and spoke the same words Kaufman himself had once offered him.
“Even if I end up killing you, I figure I ought to hear how you lived first.”
“What a nasty hobby.”
You’re one to talk, Najin muttered under his breath, then asked the short, sharp question.
“Did the Holy Light Church send you?”