Sword Master, Yuel Razian (1)

After the black mage Faube came the battle with Kaufman.

Dragging a body worn thin by consecutive fights against powerful foes, Najin trudged through the underground waterway. His steps were heavy; his eyelids kept sliding shut of their own accord.

I feel like dying.

Najin let out a long breath. Excalibur’s regenerative power and the potions helped, but mental exhaustion and mortal wounds were not the sort of things that mended on the spot.

Still, the work had to be finished.

He recovered Faube’s corpse—the one he had flung aside while fleeing Kaufman—and started the long climb upward. By the time his boots finally left the waterway and touched open ground, dawn was already breaking.

Early morning light, warm and gentle.

After so long underground the sunlight felt almost alien. Squinting, Najin blinked twice before his eyes adjusted enough to take in the scene around him.

“······.”

“······.”

At the mouth of the underground canal a crowd had gathered—Inquisitors of the Holy Blood Church and the mercenaries assigned to support them. Several spotted Najin and turned.

Then: Huh?

Their eyes went wide as they stared at him, then wider still when they saw the black mage’s corpse he was hauling. Shocked voices spilled from their mouths.

These were the same people who, only an hour earlier, had been checking gear and reviewing the plan for the descent. What they found instead was a situation already resolved, proven beyond doubt by the corpse trailing from Najin’s hand. Even the usually composed Inquisitors stood open-mouthed. Najin exhaled slowly, took a few more steps forward, and laid the body at the feet of his employer, Hite, who stood among the mercenaries and Inquisitors.

“Heavens······.”

Hite let out a long, admiring sigh.

“Truly remarkable work.”

What Hite had asked of Najin was simple: finish the job as quickly as possible—or, failing that, weaken Faube as a vanguard so that no more Inquisitors would die. Najin had accomplished both with perfect thoroughness.

It was exactly the swift, clean resolution Hite and the city’s lord had wanted. Yet events refused to stay quiet.

Because deep beneath the city they had discovered the workshop of Kepalon—the seven-circle black mage who had once terrorized the Empire.

The very next day, the Holy Blood Church moved.

After only the most basic first aid for his critical wounds, Najin collapsed into the guest room Hite provided and slept the entire night through. The rest cleared the mental fog, but the wind-holes punched through his body were another matter.

He really tore me open.

Kaufman had been a Sword Seeker. True to that reputation, not every hole he had drilled had finished closing. Still, Najin’s recovery already exceeded human limits; it would not take long.

He wrapped the healing wounds in fresh bandages and stepped outside. In the reception chamber, people waited for a full account.

“The process of subduing Faube, and a detailed explanation···.”

Najin answered every question—how he had slain Faube, how the pursuit of the fleeing mage had led him to Kepalon’s workshop. Of course the Inquisitors had already pinpointed the site themselves; unnatural breaks in the blood trail had done the work for them.

“Heavens···.”

Hite groaned as he listened. Church intervention was now inevitable. Yet he could hardly lay the blame on Najin. With a heavy sigh he asked,

“And Sir Kaufman Teosis?”

Najin had returned from the waterways alone. Kaufman’s body had never been found. After a brief silence Najin spoke.

“He fell in battle. Against the black mage.”

That was the answer he had chosen. Revealing that Kaufman had been a hunting dog of the Church and that he himself had killed the man would only complicate everything.

Not yet.

Only when he possessed the strength, the power, and the justification to tear the Church down would the contract Kaufman had handed him see the light of day again.

“···I see.”

Hite pressed his fingers to his brow. According to Najin’s testimony, Kaufman had died to the fourth-circle spell Hunger of the Dead while pursuing Faube into Kepalon’s workshop. The spell turned its victims into thralls that crumbled to dust the moment the caster died—perfectly explaining the absence of a corpse. The Inquisitors’ own findings matched: traces of the spell, cast using prepared sacrifices as mediums, remained throughout the workshop.

Everything lined up. Still, for Hite—who now had to announce the death of a White-grade adventurer and absorb the consequences of a wildly misjudged threat assessment—the news was pure gall.

This is our failure.

The damages the Cambria Foundation would demand would not be small. Hite’s brow furrowed deeper.

“You have done well. The commission will be delivered through the Central Guild of Cambria.”

With that he left the chamber, his footsteps uncharacteristically heavy, sighing all the way down the corridor. Najin watched him go, then reached for the newspaper lying on the table, curious what a single night of sleep had wrought.

The moment he opened the front page he understood why Hite had looked ready to die of ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠heartburn.

The workshop of a seven-circle black mage was not something that could be ignored. It was the perfect pretext for the Holy Blood Church—those who judged all things profane and heretical—to mobilize its full strength. And so the Church had moved the very instrument of its judgment: the walking tribunal known as the Executioner, Yuel Razian.

A Sword Master of six stars was coming to Regenoff. At last Najin understood the restless noise outside. ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠This was not the bustle of preparing for a festival or a celebrity’s arrival. It was the opposite.

Doors were being barred, streets cleared, shops shuttered; street vendors had already carted away every stall. Amid the clamor the city was being scoured clean. In a few hours the streets would lie dead silent.

To Najin’s eyes it looked exactly like the people of the undercity preparing to receive visitors from “Upper Town.”

The Church’s Executioner, Yuel Razian.

Najin knew almost nothing about her. He had researched every Sword Master early on, yet information on Yuel Razian was startlingly scarce.

The Empire’s First Pillar, Gerd the First Blade.

Master of the Sword Church, Sword Saint Caron.

And the Holy Blood Church’s Executioner, the butcher Yuel Razian.

She stood among the three most renowned Sword Masters of the age, yet compared to the other two the records ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠on her amounted to a handful of dust.

Origin, life, swordsmanship, aura······ nothing had been made public. Sword Masters normally revealed brilliance from childhood; of her early years there was virtually nothing. Only scattered accounts like these:

That was the entirety of her known life. A being who had existed for at least a hundred and fifty years and had become a Sword Master seventy years ago. Once a swordsman reached that height, the limits of lifespan loosened; her true age was anyone’s guess.

Everything about her remained obscure—except the blood-soaked history she had written into the Empire’s chronicles. Wherever black magic, demons, or anything profane and heretical festered, Yuel Razian walked. And wherever she walked she cut down every living thing connected to it. She killed and dismantled without hesitation, as though she savored murder itself. The ground she passed over turned crimson.

The world therefore feared her and revered her in equal measure. That was when the epithet “Butcher” stuck to her. Yuel herself only laughed and adopted the insult as her own title—because she rather liked it.

—She’s a proper lunatic.

Merlin muttered, chin propped on one hand.

—You have no idea how hard Bedivere and I screamed when her name came up as a candidate for Excalibur. That woman is just a walking human abattoir.

Her voice dripped with pure revulsion.

—To become a Sword Master you need mastery of the blade, you need to awaken a mindscape, and you need the power to shake the world with your sword. But in my era some madman once proposed a theory.

‘A theory?’

—Yeah. Completely unhinged. What was it again?

Swing the sword. Kill people. Take their blood. Listen to the final screams of their souls. Draw death itself close.

—It gets complicated if you dig into the details, but the core is this: if you kill tens or hundreds of thousands of people with a sword, you can reach Sword Master without any real technique or mindscape at all.

Najin let out a hollow laugh of pure disbelief.

‘That’s completely insane···.’

—Right? Even in my time people called the scholar who floated that idea a madwoman.

Merlin sighed.

—And the one who actually did it is this Yuel Razian. She became a Sword Master by killing—nothing more.

Neither enlightenment of the sword’s mysteries nor projection of a mindscape onto the world. Simply swing more, kill more, and stand at the peak.

“······.”

Najin fell silent.

In the distance a carriage approached, the crest of the Holy Blood Church gleaming on its side. It rolled to a stop in the deserted street.

Creeeak.

The door opened. Despite the carriage’s opulent exterior, only one passenger emerged. No escort, no retinue—the guest of honor stepped down alone.

Click.

What appeared was a woman of indeterminate age. Snow-white hair cascading to her waist, skin so pale it bordered on translucent. She was a creature of pure monochrome—except for her eyes.

Crimson eyes the color of fresh blood.

She looked straight at Najin.

The moment their gazes met, a chill raced up his spine. For an instant he saw his own head leaving his shoulders, saw blood fountaining from his body. Reflexively his left hand flew toward the sword at his hip; he barely managed to clamp it down with his right. Cold sweat slid down his back.

It was a sensation he had never felt before.

Yuel Razian’s presence was nothing like Caron’s—raw, unrefined killing intent simply radiated from her, so dense it was almost visible. Najin glanced sideways. His employer Hite had already collapsed, eyes rolled white.

—See? I told you she was a complete lunatic.

Merlin muttered, half in awe. Najin lifted his head. Far down the street Yuel Razian still watched him. Her face remained utterly blank—yet he saw the faintest twitch at the corner of her mouth.