To Me, You Were Like the Sun
A sword made of steel.
It is a deadly weapon in its own right, even without a honed edge.
All the more so in the hands of those who, through relentless training, can wield it with complete mastery—squire candidates, apprentices. Even those who have never received formal investiture, the undeniable reality remains: they are perilously capable combatants.
For that very reason, even a practice iron sword must never be swung at full force toward an opponent. Ordinarily it is swung through empty air, or in sparring—purely for the sake of cultivating real-combat instincts—stopped just short of contact, or halted at the line where it barely grazes.
The point, in short, is training in control, application, and improvisation through practice.
And then it goes one step further.
Don protective gear, and the movements can grow more aggressive, chaining strike into strike. Direct contact is permitted; even the pretense of a cut is allowed without objection.
And then one step further still.
The moment mana enters the equation, everything changes again.
So if one wishes to swing and strike with a sword as one would in true battle, for the sake of training—without exception, the hand takes up a wooden sword. And even then, whether the tip is blunted, or shaped with a modest edge, or ground with terrible care so that it could genuinely pierce—that rests solely on the choice of each trainee and the discretion of the swordsmanship instructor.
And Cariel—
…had always loathed blades of steel. Had always shied away from them.
"Even in lawless territory, you would show me such pitiful a manner?!"
And so.
As if cleaving moonlight, as if brushing past it, as if deflecting it away—a great half-circle drawn wide, yet the blade's keen trajectory came hurtling in like a squall. To the Cariel of the past, it would have been a thing of utter terror.
"……."
He was still afraid.
No—let him correct that.
Disgusted.
…Now it was merely disgust, nothing more.
He met her assault, having drawn his own sword as well, but refused to lock blades, slipping his body aside instead. Unlike the arming sword she held—a one-handed blade—his was a longsword, usable with either one hand or two.
The shape of both swords resembled a cross.
In an age before the knight had ever come into being, a certain king thought thus: footmen striding across the ground had clear limits. Excellent for defense, to be sure—but to dominate a battlefield, that alone would not suffice. So his thinking reached further: the need for mobility. And a step beyond that—a host that could command and collapse the enemy's own mobility. The king came, at last, to understand the necessity of a professional order of mounted warriors.
Not merely men who climbed atop horses—there were already plenty of those.
One day, the king summoned his vassals and spoke.
"I shall grant you lands. There you shall raise horses and livestock, and govern the people. Devote these to the rearing and training of warhorses—and you yourselves, as warriors, shall likewise submit to their cruel training."
"Thus, when war calls upon us, your strength shall be needed. Answer that call."
……
Even so, the concept of the knight as this age speaks of it had not yet been born. But this era was unmistakably the age of the warrior-noble. Battles and wars between nations only magnified the necessity and professionalism of such forces.
And in later years, when the Demon Realm invaded under the Demon King, these warriors performed magnificently. But their numbers were few. They were heroes who could stand one against a hundred, one against a thousand—and still, they were too few.
And then.
When the chaotic disorder of ruin briefly receded, another problem surfaced. Warriors were, by definition, legally sanctioned and publicly recognized armed powers. King, commoner, or slave—it made no difference; they committed lawless acts without end. Even the fleeting peace could not go unpoked by the butts of their spears, and in the end, the spearheads turned upon their own countrymen.
They coveted privileges. They coveted territory. Some seized the food and treasures of others. Some went so far as to abduct the people of neighboring lands, enslaving and selling them.
It was, in truth, an age of pure savagery.
"The times have changed—and where is it written that anywhere is therefore safe?!"
Elhermina's sword was exceedingly nimble. The defining trait of a one-handed blade is that it can be used in more varied, more freely unpredictable directions than one bound and controlled by both hands. Given sufficient strength and the wielder's proficiency, it becomes a tremendously threatening instrument of war.
CLANG!
"Ngh!"
Swords, by their nature, cannot meet so lightly as that. Even when they do meet, it is only at the very tips, barely overlapping or catching on one another. Like the knights and warriors of fables and stories—calmly crossing blades at a range where breath could be felt on the face, close enough to hear each other breathe—that sort of stalemate, that kind of contest of strength, is in reality an exceedingly rare thing.
For if either side erred by even a hair at the moment of contact, both would be cut and pierced, or one would be overwhelmed outright. At such extreme proximity, even a blunt weapon of moderate length becomes unreasonable—a short blade or dagger is far more advantageous, and failing that, the bare instruments of close combat: fists, the back of the hand, elbows, knees, legs. Headbutts are possible; clawing is possible; even biting is possible.
No matter how evenly matched the skill, in the end, a sword's outcome never changes: cut deep or cut shallow, cut is the only result.
"Show me already, Cariel! Your strength! You were so confident of yourself—was that not why you chose to resist?!"
It was not.
But there was no choice. The situation had pointed, all along, in a single direction.
"Kgh!"
And yet the strange thing was this: none of his tricks worked on her. Not once did she lose her center; far from staggering at the crossing of blades or feeling any confusion, she only pressed him harder, fiercer with every exchange.
Each time he moved his sword to defend, she hammered down upon it again and again—not striking at his torso, but with the fury of one intent on shattering the blade itself.
CLANG! KANG!
The shock racing up the blade traveled through wrist and elbow joint, into the shoulder… and went no further. Instead—
What the hell is this strength….
The force refused to disperse. Nor was it absorbed whole. It concentrated on a single point, and the strain piled up in his wrist. She was striking his sword again and again, but what Elhermina aimed for was Cariel's wrist. The dulling sensation creeping into that wrist as the impacts accumulated spoke of it with brutal clarity.
She was, in other words, a true master who knew how to control her own strength. And as if even that were not enough—
Pure physical ability, you say?
She had cut off even the faint trickle of mana that would unconsciously, minutely leak forth, and attacked on inertia alone—raw muscle driving a perfectly secured parabolic arc. And yet every blow of her offense was controlled, her center held fast with each one.
"I came knowing everything! You said you would absorb another's mana, or turn it against them, did you not? Then—"
"Then use no mana at all, and be done with it!"
Easy to say.
Easy, if all one had was words.
…How was that even supposed to be possible?
For anyone whose constitution did not fail them the way Cariel's did, the reality was that it was impossible—even by intent. And yet she claimed to do it.
And she was demonstrating it with her own body.
I knew it… you….
Unbidden, the Demon King's words drifted through his mind.
……
…So that's how it is.
"Is it not already more than enough?!"
And yet why was it that she looked on the verge of tears? He was the one being beaten. Why did the one dealing the blows wear the more aggrieved expression?
She was always, in everything, earnest.
And because of what he had heard from the Demon King, he could not help but realize it—that in every single moment, she was pouring out her sincerity, her whole heart and soul.
So he knew, too, that her confession earlier had been no empty declaration. Gratitude was there, yes—and a bitterness, an absurd tangle of regret and resentment, pierced his heart and crushed his chest. But that was, in the end, his own skin to shed, his own absurdity to bear.
Resent what deserves resentment. What is the point of cursing someone for failing to save you, for coming too late?
CLANG!
"If you intend to resort to the same extreme gambit as you did with Patina—you will never escape my grasp!"
He knew. He knew it well. If he tried, he'd be dragged straight before his mother. He wasn't thoughtless enough not to understand that. What happened with Patina had proceeded with exactly that outcome in mind—since he could not harm himself, he had simply used Patina as the instrument.
At the time, he had truly believed there was no other way to land a single blow, no other way to trouble an opponent. Shattering myself to inconvenience them. How wretched. How cowardly a method. Was it a flaw in his own weakness? Or had his heart, his intent, simply twisted awry?
It was, without question,
not the mindset of a knight. Far from a hero—further still from a true Hero.
Screech—
"Where do you think you're looking?!"
The toneless voice cracked against his ear.
"Ngh!"
Even in the midst of peril, his consciousness drifted somewhere strange. Over there, beyond—far, far across a river, among children playing in a small garden, one of them picked up a tree branch. And then—flashing it upward, thrusting it high toward the sky—
He couldn't be… shouting, could he?
…Only when it was a branch, and not a sword.
Only then could the child shout it, beaming with a bright, unclouded smile:
I'm—!
I'm going to be a ―!
"Have you lost your mind?!"
A kick to the leg—not sent tumbling across the ground, but launched backward into the tree behind him.
"Kgh!"
The tree shuddered violently, groaning as if it might snap. Only because he barely managed to spread the impact across his whole body had the blow not ended everything then and there.
"Kuh…."
It was uncanny—infuriating, even. Why on earth should he be seized by such preposterous emotion? Something kept scraping at his brain, and it grated on him terribly.
Why, though?
Why did he feel, in that image, a nostalgia he knew all too well?
"No. I see it cannot be done. Give up, and be done with it."
At length—
"Come, then. Show me that wondrous art of yours. Is it truly so magnificent?"
"…Show me, just once."
In an instant, the blaze of flame wrapped itself around the entire forest. And yet—not a single tongue of fire shifted, or leapt, or transferred anywhere else. Even that was being kept under rigorous control.
Should a blaze of such magnitude erupt within a forest like this, the whole wood would surely be swallowed in flame in the space of a breath. It would be a hell of fire beyond imagining.
But this was no hell of fire. The flames that bloomed here were born solely of hostility and enmity directed at him.
The world, heaven and earth alike, dyed itself scarlet. The searing heat felt as though it were burning his entire body away—
What is this?
And yet, though the heat seized his breath and choked each inhale, his body remained utterly unharmed—in a situation where flame could descend upon him at any moment.
Its originator—
as if receiving a baptism from the god of fire itself. Radiant, transcendental, something beyond the mortal—
as though the firebird of myth had descended in the flesh—
she burned, blazing.
In perfect contradiction of itself.
Consuming nothing. Burning nothing at all.
There could not have been many occasions on which she had revealed such true mastery in the real world. Fewer still who had witnessed it directly, face to face. And fewer, far fewer, the ones fated to stand against it head-on.
"……."
Strange.
Wondrous, uncanny—but he was, in truth, moved.
"At last."
To me, you were like the sun.
That was the kind of existence you were. That light was so fierce that far from drawing near, I could not so much as look at you with open eyes. It was agony—simply seeing you. Simply being measured against you, time after time. Simply being compared.
It truly stole the breath from my lungs, again and again.
But—
"Now I can see you."
Elhermina.
El.
You—my childhood friend, my playmate from those small days—
only now, at last.