I Became a Mesugaki (9)
I'd been sprawled on the ground, and now I staggered back to my feet.
How many times had I collapsed because my body couldn't keep up, when the pathetic knight hadn't landed a single clean hit on me? At least ten, I was sure — I'd been counting until then. After that I got tired of counting.
I took a deep breath, brushed the dirt off my face, and lifted my head.
The knight standing across from me couldn't hide the grimace on his face.
No matter how angry he was, wasn't he supposed to keep his composure in front of the young lady?
Really, what a pathetic excuse for a knight. No wonder he'll never pull off a Cinderella story and turn his life around.
"Just give up, my lady."
"Make me give up, pathetic knight."
"You're going to hurt yourself at this rate."
"Is subduing a girl without leaving a single mark too hard for you? How pathetic, just like I thought♡"
At my taunt, the knight clenched his jaw.
Ahaha. Is he actually going to swing for real this time? Huh?
Some noble knight he is. A eunuch knight — now that's what would suit a guy like him.
I let out a breathless laugh as I tried to steady my ragged breathing.
Quite a lot of time had passed since I'd started this spar with the pathetic knight.
I didn't know exactly how long. But seeing how the crowd of onlookers had grown — knights, soldiers, maids, everyone welcome — it clearly hadn't been short.
"Shouldn't somebody stop this?"
"I'd like to, but the young lady ordered us not to interfere."
"Still, though."
"Just wait. The Knight Commander is..."
I had never been as grateful for Lucy's notorious reputation as I was today.
Because she'd been such a little terror, the people who should have stepped in to protect their mistress were hesitating.
If Lucy had been nothing more than an ordinary girl, someone would have broken us up long before things got this heated.
And if that had happened, my goal — landing at least one hit on this pathetic knight — would have gone unrealized.
My breathing had mostly settled.
My body was still heavy, but thanks to the conditioning drills from a few days back, I wasn't completely unable to move.
Even now, I could swing my mace as much as I liked.
Gritting my teeth, I charged forward.
The knight might have been pathetic in many ways, but he was a knight all the same.
Even while seething from my provocations, he seemed determined to fulfill his duty, and he taught me the fundamentals of fighting.
Never stop moving your feet.
Always be thinking about what your opponent will do next.
Don't watch their hands — watch how their arms and body move.
Never lose sight of your opponent's movements. Keep your eyes on them at all times. And so on.
To me, who'd known nothing of real combat, he drilled in a whole list of rules I absolutely had to follow.
His methods were anything but gentle, granted, but it was also true that I'd improved a great deal because of them.
Compare the me from this morning, swinging her mace blindly, to the me right now, and you'd think they were two different people.
Not that it mattered — I still couldn't land so much as a scratch on this goddamn pathetic knight.
And the pathetic knight was strong.
He pressed me without ever giving me room to attack, and even when I flailed my mace around in desperation, he dealt with it effortlessly, as if he'd known it was coming.
I didn't want to admit it, but to the current me, the pathetic knight was an overwhelmingly unbeatable opponent.
Even after provoking him relentlessly through all those exchanges, pumping my stats sky-high.
Wouldn't it have been wonderful if this were a game on my PC?
If it were, my old veteran instincts would have put this pathetic knight in the dirt ages ago.
Even though I'd closed the distance right up to him, the pathetic knight didn't move his sword.
He'd been like this for a while now — deliberately restraining himself from attacking.
Probably out of fear that he'd lose control of his emotions and make a mistake.
And so, unlike before, I was free to swing my mace to my heart's content.
The pathetic knight silently absorbed every blow I threw.
Sometimes dodging, sometimes deflecting — his movements were so polished that they shut down my attacks perfectly.
Keep this up, and just like before, I'd run out of stamina mid-assault and collapse. Which meant I needed to create an opening.
And as for how to create one — well, I'd already thought of something.
"What's the matter?! Pathetic knight. Planning to just block all day?!"
"Yes. That's the plan."
"Ha♡ So all you can do is scramble to block? Weak♡"
A flicker of tension crossed the pathetic knight's brow, and the speed of his wooden sword increased.
Even accounting for the provocation baked into the Mesugaki skill, wasn't he falling for it way too easily?!
The knight's offensive began.
A relentless chain of strikes hammered against my shield, each one barely survivable thanks to my wildly boosted stats.
He really is holding nothing back!
The center of my shield is caving in!
How hard are you swinging that thing?!
Following the guidance of the Iron Wall skill, I deflected the knight's blows while searching for my chance.
The moment the enraged knight poured in more power than usual and swung his sword.
The moment he moved his blade assuming I would block it.
Certain that such a swing could never be stopped in time, I lowered the shield that had been protecting me.
And there it was — the knight's startled face.
He had swung fully expecting me to block.
He may have tempered his strength, but it was still a heavy strike, easily enough to overwhelm my guard.
And in that moment, I had simply dropped my shield.
Even earlier, when I'd thrown everything into my offense, this man had never once let his blade touch me.
He was the type so afraid of making a mistake that he held back his attacks entirely.
So if it came down to his blade actually hitting me, he would stop it somehow. I was certain.
It was a gamble.
A gamble staked on his skill, and on my belief that he still had his emotions under control.
A gamble that, if it failed, would leave me wounded by that wooden sword — that much was obvious.
In that instant, I heard the people around us suck in their breath, but I wasn't afraid.
Look. Just like you always wanted — the blade is inches from my face, and my eyes are still open.
This is your achievement. Be proud of it, pathetic knight.
While the knight struggled to arrest his own swing, I raised my mace high overhead.
Head Crusher.
The motion I'd repeated thousands upon thousands of times over the past few days.
The motion I'd kept drilling even in my dreams last night.
The knight, desperate just to stop his own sword, saw me swing the mace and couldn't get out of the way.
THWACK!
That felt good.
Struck by the mace, the knight stumbled backward, his brow furrowed in pain.
I did it. I finally did it.
I actually landed a hit!
Staring at the pathetic knight's thoroughly scrunched-up face, I raised a hand to my mouth with my shield and declared victory.
Got yourself hit, did you?
"Trash♡ Getting played by a little girl♡"
The instant that taunt left my mouth, the pathetic knight lunged at me.
I couldn't even track him with my eyes.
The moment his foot left the ground, I'd already lost sight of him.
What the—?
While I was still reeling, the Iron Wall skill screamed a warning at me.
It roared at me to raise my shield.
The instincts honed razor-sharp from the fight obeyed the skill's command without question.
KRAKOOM!
The knight's fist slammed into the spot where my shield stood.
My body left the ground.
This wasn't a matter of blocking or not blocking.
The force packed into that fist was simply beyond anything I could withstand.
As I was hurled backward, I looked into the knight's eyes.
I saw eyes consumed by rage, thinking of nothing at all.
Danger.
I flew through the air and rolled across the ground several times. Feeling excruciating pain in the arm that had taken the blow, I frantically scrambled to my feet.
My instincts were screaming that if I didn't move, I would die.
My instincts weren't wrong. The moment I raised my head, the knight was already right in front of me.
Lost to his madness, he clenched his fist and raised it high.
What would happen if that connected? I didn't know.
But it would hurt.
It would hurt so, so unbelievably badly.
Maybe even worse than the elixirs did.
The moment that thought crossed my mind, Fear Overcome swept the terror right out of my heart.
...Hah. Gotta hand it to the skill. It really earns its keep.
Fine. I'll take the hit. I'm the one whose stubborn pride about landing a blow got you this riled up and caused this whole mess, after all.
Ugh. So in the end, a mesugaki's taunts get repaid with a beatdown. Is that how it goes?
Just as I sat with my eyes closed, waiting for the knight's fist to fall, someone abruptly wedged themselves between us.
A middle-aged man, built on a scale rivaling Benedict himself, caught the knight's fist with a single outstretched hand.
"Carl, what the hell was that?"
At Forsell's words — the Knight Commander of House Aln — Carl, who had been staring at the shackles locked around his wrists, lifted his head.
Forsell kept his brow furrowed and his mouth clamped shut. Anyone could see how furious he was; the air around him was positively murderous.
"I stopped it, so it counts as an attempt, nothing more. If I hadn't, the young lady would have been seriously hurt."
"That's true."
"So I'm asking. Why did you do it? The young lady running her mouth isn't exactly news."
Instead of answering, Carl bowed his head.
"Carl."
"...I don't know either."
At that absurd answer, Forsell bit down hard on his lip and drove his fist into the iron bars that separated him from Carl.
The bars — ones that wouldn't budge even if dozens of knights threw themselves at them — buckled.
"If the man who did it doesn't know, then who the hell does?"
"I'm sorry. But I truly don't understand it myself."
Even under Forsell's seething voice, Carl couldn't bring himself to answer.
Because he himself couldn't understand why he had done it.
Carl had been born and raised in a knightly family.
From childhood, his father had taught him what it meant to be a true knight, and Carl had resolved to become a splendid knight just like him.
And so he trained without missing a single day, competed against scions of the high nobility at the Academy, and graduated from Soul Academy with outstanding results.
Those achievements earned him a place in the knights of House Aln — a post countless knights envied.
Even after becoming a knight, Carl never forgot the words his father had spoken when he was a boy.
He strove, day after day, to become the ideal knight he dreamed of being.
The reason he had first approached Lucy, too, was his aspiration to be a noble knight.
Even knowing all the vile tantrums Lucy had thrown before.
Even with his comrades warning him that people didn't change so easily.
Even as Lucy's sneering words left their marks on him.
He believed that if a member of the house he served was striving to become a better person, then he, as the knight sworn beneath them, had a duty to help — and that was why he had drawn near to her.
Yet the goodwill that had started it all had, by today, produced a slaughter.
Swinging a fist at the very person he was sworn to protect! No matter how many cruel things Lady Lucy kept saying, how could he fail to control himself!
After the incident, countless people had raged at Carl, demanding to know why he'd done it, but Carl had no answer to give. No one understood what Carl had done less than Carl himself.
"Commander. You may not believe this, but I don't anger easily."
"I know."
"At the Academy, I endured insult after insult from the nobility and never broke. On the battlefield, facing mercenaries and knights alike, I have never once let my emotions cause a mistake."
"I said I know."
"And yet the young lady's sneers were more than I could bear."
Lucy's taunts couldn't really be called vile language. Compared to the torrent of curses he'd heard on the battlefield, her barbs were downright gentle.
Compared to the venom spat at him by the Academy's nobles, they weren't even particularly spiteful.
And yet Lucy's sneers had blown away Carl's reason with terrifying ease.
He didn't know why. No matter how he turned it over, he couldn't begin to guess how things had come to this.
And so he writhed there, drowning in self-loathing.