Convincing (5)
"Anyway. You heard that, Number 73? Congratulations. You're a failure, but you've been spared disposal and further experimentation."
"……"
"Why aren't you smiling?"
"I am not a failure."
"Ah. Pride wounded, is it?"
"I am…!"
"You are a failure, Number 73. You received the blood of a being called the origin of magic, yet your talent for magic is rock bottom. They say they purged the Demon Energy, but the output you can produce is still only at the human limit. And as a final result, even your constitution draws attacks from fellow demons… Ah, but you were never a demon to begin with, so what can one do? Then again, you're not human either."
"……!"
"It would serve you well to know your place. Your original may well have been a rebel of the heavens—but that does not make you a rebel of the heavens."
"I—I…"
"If you mean to aim for the sky, come back when you possess a rank that matches the ambition. Though of course, you never will."
"……"
Emerald—Gyemyeong—quietly raised her sword.
Rebellion. The word she herself had spoken, the word she herself had mocked, was cut clean from the blade the moment it left her lips. Even if the entire world sneered at her goal, she was the one person who must never sneer at it.
A single act of compliance was not defeat—but a single act of resignation was the starting gun of subjugation. And she would never, under any circumstances, yield to the one who was her source.
"…Ah. Is that so."
She regarded her opponent's dubious expression and pressed strength into the tips of her toes. Thick enough that the soles of her feet would not tear, yet thin enough not to hinder the flexibility that was her specialty, the leather boots creased and bunched beneath her.
Bang!
In a single bound the surrounding air shattered, scattering its fragments like debris.
Clang! The instant blade met blade, what sprayed outward was the wreckage of shorn mana.
It was a phenomenon that only appeared when those capable of condensing mana until it was visible to the naked eye—and of sustaining that condensation for a long time—clashed swords with one another.
Green and black motes of light scattered like brilliant gemstone dust.
Slash!
But she was not satisfied with that alone.
Gyemyeong used every tool at her disposal.
The whip. A length of roughly one and a half meters burst the bodies of the insects just rising around her and used their remains to blind her opponent's vision.
In exchange her white clothes were soiled, but she accepted it. She was too weak to preserve a lofty purity above the clouds to the very end. She hated to admit it even unto death, but reality was reality. The very words she would never have had to hear if she were strong—What reason do you have to cling to a demon under treatment like this?—were proof of her station.
She was not, at present, a person who could afford to choose her means.
"Kh…!"
The one mercy was that her opponent's schooling was shallow and his sword dull-witted. Against the truly dim, or against merely average skill, this would have been enough—but not against Gyemyeong.
She used the moment his vision was blocked to drive straight into his upper body. He hastily caught the rapier's tip on the flat of his blade, but she only pressed harder.
Her rapier, Forbidden, would not break—not ever.
For this was the sword for which Cain, who crawled the lakebed, had offered his scales; for which Hawa, the featherless bird, had forged it in cold flame; for which Adam, who exhaled white breath, had tempered it; and for which Abel's sacrifice had completed it.
And so Gyemyeong trusted that her blade would not snap, and shoved her opponent back. The slick mud of the ground began to slide both swords and people wholesale.
Eyes of a similar color flew wide in alarm.
Kiiing!
In the midst of that scene Gyemyeong drove power into her foot. Crunch. She smashed through a ghoul's skull and drove her boot deep into the mud, planting herself hard against the earth. There was no slide from the rebound.
She looked at her opponent, who had been shoved farther back than she had, and at the two blades that had separated because of it.
Bang!
Her whole body leapt again. Slash! In that brief instant the whip cracked out, checking and bursting the vermin around her.
Beneath the spray of flesh and blood, Gyemyeong struck her opponent's sword once more.
She aimed for the weakest point of the blade. Clang! Her rapier collided with his sword again. She could see with perfect clarity how he rolled his eyes this way and that, wary that she might slide her blade and thrust into him.
But why would she ever take so reckless a gamble? A thrust was precisely the kind of attack that invited a counter if you failed to kill in one blow—or if the angle was even slightly off.
A knight's battle did not consist of killing the enemy in a single strike. In a free-for-all where enemies stood on every side, that tendency only grew sharper.
A knight must always fight while protecting herself. Surviving was what allowed her to kill more of the enemy.
"You there."
Time, moreover, was on her side—though her opponent showed not the slightest awareness of it.
"Is it starting to get hard to breathe?"
"……?"
"Does some part of your abdomen hurt yet?"
This environment was equally hostile to them both. But if she had to choose who was in the more dangerous position here, Gyemyeong would pick her opponent without a moment's hesitation.
"So long as you carry Wrath, the curses of hunger and thirst will not fall upon you. But plague and insects are another matter."
Because this place teemed with vermin, and her opponent's body was riddled with wounds ideal for them to crawl into. More precisely: she had made it so.
"I wonder which will come first—disease spreading through your body, or the insects hatching from their eggs."
Back, shoulder, side, belly, thigh, forearm. Counting only the places cut or stabbed deep enough to show muscle, there were already this many. Factor in the contaminated mud and insects that had entered those wounds, and how long could his life possibly last?
By now a few of them were surely gnawing at some portion of his lungs or other organs.
"Cough."
"As expected."
Her prediction struck true at once. Before long her opponent began to cough up blood. Kiiing! Even then he raised his sword to block and kicked at her with his leg—there was a certain admirable quality in that.
She deflected the attack reaching for her with her blade and swung the whip. With a cunning snap of the wrist the whip tore through the air with a whistle, aiming to burst his side.
Paang! Demon Energy erupting from his body forced her whip back.
"Urgh."
After that he spat blood again.
But his expression was markedly different from when he had first coughed it up. A vast Demon Energy, mountain-great from having swallowed a demon whole, could be seen surging through his body.
"Hah—thank you."
"……?"
"If I hadn't known the cause, that could've gone badly."
And that surge crushed every tiny living thing that had been wandering his insides. Without dealing the slightest damage to his own body, it burst and killed only those small insects—nothing else.
A degree of control that was chilling.
"This is why having no sense of pain is a problem…"
"…How?"
She had never seen a human dominate energy so naturally. Not in herself, and not even when she traced the shared root-memories of the being who was her source.
"…You received Wrath's help."
Only Pride and Wrath could exert that kind of dominion over Demon Energy or mana. Gyemyeong's lips pressed tight for an instant.
"What?"
"I already found it suspicious that the usual visual effect of reinforcing the body with mana never appeared… Hah. So that was it."
"Excuse me??"
When one injected mana into the body, a portion of the mana used for reinforcement inevitably leaked outward. The more mana was expended, the more uncontrolled energy rose from the flesh like heat haze.
It had been so for her, and so for the former knight-commander of whom she had only heard tell.
But before a mastery this wondrous, even that did not occur. Gyemyeong let out a hollow laugh at the fact.
"Truly… how wretched."
No human could have reached that realm on their own. Wrath must have aided him. And for that very reason she felt all the more desolate.
A goal she had only vaguely measured had become reality and driven itself into her bones.
"Am I truly unable to reach the sky…!"
She had wanted to reach the heavens. Following the craving her foundation cried out, she had wanted somehow to break her origin and stand in that place herself.
Could she, who could not even imitate this, ever touch that supreme height? Could she stand in the sky?
"I…!!"
She gripped her sword still harder under the surge of envy and jealousy.
"Wrath's energy keeps registering nearby… Perhaps they have sensed the plan and are coming to smash it."
She knew that this envy and competitive fire only widened the distance between her and her origin—but she could not endure it.
"Just as well, then. There won't be many more chances to damage the city by leaving a card like you on the board. Might as well discard you here. The scheme will fail the moment Wrath intervenes anyway—so if you can inflict even a little more damage before then, we lose nothing on this end."
She hated—and envied—the being whose mere existence made her original use her as a discarded pawn. She needed power like that. Power that would let her stand whole; power that would answer the craving her source stirred in her!
"Why are you suddenly going ber—!"
Bang!
She drove hard against the opponent who was displaying his bewilderment.
It was not particularly easy.
Even if he cleaned up the surrounding demons for her, the sword-aura that was troublesome to deal with—and the demons that instantly filled every gap the moment she blocked that aura, hungrily eyeing her back—were quite threatening the moment she let her guard down.
Clash, clang!
But in the end she was the one who had claimed the rank of Chief Knight, and he was the one who had not.
She raised her arm against the attack stretching toward her.
Thud!
His blade pierced the empty air between her side and her arm. But as he stepped forward and she did the same, what was trapped between her side and her arm was not the blade—it was the arm holding the sword.
She pinned his arm by clamping her forearm to her ribs. If he concentrated his strength and yanked free, the hold would of course break—but that was not a great problem.
By then her rapier would already have stabbed him first.
Shhk!
Yet the instant her blade began to move, a new sword appeared in his empty hand—judging by form and length, a zweihander.
He had summoned and stored swords from empty air before, so it was not entirely unexpected.
But it would prove a decisive mistake on his part.
She drove the pommel of her rapier straight into the face of the blade. The sword, pressed by the pommel, tilted and cracked him across the head. A blade had only interposed itself in the middle; for all practical purposes, metal had struck his skull.
"Kh."
He reflexively squeezed his eyes shut and yanked his arm free. Thud! Before a longsword could reappear in that hand, her foot kicked his abdomen as if shoving him away.
"Hup."
Her rapier shot forward at high speed toward the retreating opponent. He barely managed to summon a longsword and interpose it across the rapier's path.
Clang!
In that instant a sharp metallic ring rose, and the longsword, pierced at a single point by the rapier, snapped clean through. The rebound shoved Gyemyeong back as well and left her wrist throbbing—but she had taken no real loss.
There was no better prey than a knight who had lost a weapon.
"Now—"
Of course, from what he had shown, the zweihander would still remain. But could someone who had not even mastered a basic longsword truly handle a zweihander well? If he had been skilled with the zweihander to begin with, would he ever have tried to face her with a longsword first?
"—it ends."
Impossible. And because it was impossible, her judgment was correct.
Whether his thrashing continued a little longer or not, the one who would win was her.
Her blade stretched toward his heart.
Ah—you should hear the truth before you go, shouldn't you?
All at once her opponent's eyes turned the red of a ruby.
"Whoa—!!"
Right on cue, what came flying from far along the walls was a crimson sword shining with the beauty of flame. The Demon Energy that had been roaming the empty air snared it like a fishing line.
Congratulations. There aren't many who've received my help for free.
At the same time, the mighty Demon Energy pouring from her opponent seized her feet. It burned. A fleeting illusion rattled her instincts and opened a gap of a single second.
I've done everything I was going to do for you, all right?
At last the crimson blade settled into his grip. I am going to lose. Through that, Gyemyeong received an awakening that shared her own name. She would be defeated.
"You there."
Without devouring Wrath's vessel to inherit that power, without using him to plot rebellion, she was going to die.
"May you perish together with Wrath."
It was too wretched.
Gyemyeong did not close her eyes as she accepted the black-and-yellow flames.
A blade drove into her heart.
He turned the glass tube holding the green gem this way and that as he ruminated on the past. The jewel, fracturing further by the moment, had only the final collapse of its shape left to it now.
"I wanted to know the power of a homunculus made by mixing a Great Demon's blood with a human…"
This green gem only confirmed the homunculus's condition. It did not report its location or circumstances. That was truly a pity. If it was going to die anyway, he would have liked to know at least how—and with what reaction—it died.
"Are you dying with arrogant eyes, I wonder? Or thrashing to the last?"
Perhaps its death would even resemble the death of the one who had provided the blood.
Crack!
The gem shattered completely to pieces.