Executioner
Executioner
Defending open ground with protection as the objective meant surrendering the initiative from the start.
Even the most elaborate fortifications were meaningless if the enemy simply bypassed them. A counterattack could be thwarted just as easily. The best option was to draw them in.
Fortify a position, make every preparation, then make it the place the enemy was forced to attack.
That was Aslan's current aim.
"They're coming."
Tiyamal's voice rang out, and Aslan raised his bow.
A weapon captured during the civil war, around the time he'd fallen into Bolen's tomb. For a long while it had done nothing but ride alongside his pack, unused. He nocked an arrow and drew a second shaft.
An arrow fletched with feathers from the Wings of Stymphalos — he set it on the string and drew the bow in a single swift motion.
Unlike Tiyamal's stance, which looked as if he were shouldering a mountain aside, Aslan drew from beneath, the bow angled upward as he aimed. Holding the slanting bow steady, he exhaled.
A strained creaking rose from the weapons. Tiyamal drew his own bow as though shoving a mountain down onto himself, and the two bows sang different tones.
"Here they come."
Tiyamal's voice came again. Beyond the humming of the bow-limbs, the sound of rapid approach swelled. Aslan held the angled bow and released the string.
The simplest way to draw an enemy out was a well-placed shot.
Two arrows sliced through the air side by side, and beyond the dense treeline a figure emerged.
The Executioner.
Taller than Tiyamal, twin Executioner's Swords in hand, blood weeping from her eyes — a Warrior Monk.
Tiger-stripe patterns marked her body. The two arrows flew at the hornet-like Warrior Monk: one screaming through the air, the other trailing in its shadow.
The Executioner swung both weapons at the projectiles closing on her heart and head.
Her arms and legs swelled. The distended muscle vanished so quickly it left only afterimages. Then came the noise of destruction.
A grinding shriek — a resonant clang.
The mist clinging to the forest split, clearing the view for a heartbeat. Through that gap, two blades carved wide arcs.
Heavy and honed to a razor's edge, Tiyamal's arrows shattered against them. The blades danced in a smooth circle, flowing like a performance.
Trees toppled, cut down in the sweep. Aslan watched and saw the Warrior Monks following behind their leader.
Before they could join the fray, the forest around them collapsed in a cascade of crashing timber.
The monks scattered, dodging the falling trunks. Not many emerged; they were Aslan's remaining companions.
Everyone except him and Tiyamal. Everyone they could field — three Masters and the Last Descendant of the Ancient God, all that was left with Itar and Richard absent.
They charged the Warrior Monks and swung their weapons. The Executioner heard the sounds and twisted what remained of a human face over the insectoid traces.
A monstrous grimace — and still she surged toward Aslan.
He glared at the charging monk and leveled his bow.
His other hand held his five remaining arrows.
Aim and draw happened in the same instant. All five shafts flew at the Warrior Monk who had nearly closed the distance.
Thump — thud-thud-thud—thump.
The shots fell like a percussive phrase. Nearly simultaneous, the arrows scribed dark streaks across the air.
The Executioner swept a blade through their faint afterimages.
A scream of metal — and the arrows ricocheted away.
Shafts snapped, feathers drifting free. The moment they hung suspended, Aslan's hand touched his cloak.
Every feather stopped in midair.
Those that had scattered across the ground from broken arrows, those still fixed in shafts from earlier volleys — all of them halted, then oriented themselves as if staring at the Executioner.
And shot forward.
Feathers from deep in the forest; feathers around her that reversed course to shear past her from every angle. Every arrow Aslan had fired converged on her.
The Executioner clicked her tongue, tightened her grip on the twin Executioner's Swords, and twisted her body.
Muscle bulged instantly. Swollen tissue, compressed beneath chitin, snapped taut and contracted. A storm of blades followed.
A slicing hiss — a screech of clashing steel.
The storm scattered the feathers.
The movements were so fast they left no visible trace, but Aslan could read them by the precursors and the aftermath.
The Executioner had whipped both swords with quick, cunning precision and blown the feathers outward.
Through the drifting plumage, her silhouette shot forward.
His ploy had been shut down, but no trace of alarm touched Aslan's face. He retreated.
Widened the distance, fumbled at his quiver. In the split second it took to grip an arrow and draw, the Executioner lunged.
She bore down on him. A straight-arcing chop — when the Executioner's Sword had nearly reached his skull, Aslan thrust his bow into its path.
The bow that a Warrior Monk had once used, the bow that had languished in Aslan's possession for so long. It finally fulfilled its purpose in its owner's hands.
A sickening crack.
The limbs snapped and shattered. Aslan twisted aside through the flying bone fragments and barely evaded the blade.
It carved into the earth with a wet crunch. By the time the weapon pulled free, Aslan had been hurled bodily aside, rolling across the ground.
"Hey — stop!"
Tiyamal shouted, bow aimed as if to cover the opening. The Executioner raised her sword high.
And a dissonant warning screamed through her brain.
Tiyamal was aiming. But he wasn't shooting. An arrow sat on the string, everything ready to release — and still he held it.
Waiting for an opportunity?
No. Despite the shout, Tiyamal's face showed no urgency.
Instinct fought reason. Intuition backed instinct. At the last sliver of thought, the Executioner wrenched her head aside.
"Purity."
'Moon Splitting.'
The arrow in Aslan's hand — a feather that looked like nothing more than an arrow — transformed. In a blink, a shift so brief it barely existed, it became a greatsword and lunged.
A long blade-trail stretched like a reflection of the moon cut across dark water.
White light gashed the air where nothing should have been.
Through her one remaining eye the Executioner saw the flash — saw it curve toward her neck — and brought her sword up too late.
A shriek of tortured metal.
Weapons imbued with the War God's own power — their durability was beyond anything ordinary steel could dream of, enough to shatter normal arms on contact. That was why the Executioner understood exactly what was happening now.
Her Executioner's Sword was being shaved away as if plunged into a furnace.
Sparks and metal fragments leaped from the blade, the edge dissolving. Eyes flying wide with shock, she twisted her frame — trying to escape Purity's shearing arc.
'That cutting power is absolute madness...!'
The weapon given by the War God, being severed in a single pass. The blade bit into the ground, scooped through earth, and came back around — sharp enough that even the soul of whatever it touched seemed at risk of being cleaved. The Executioner flung herself backward and stared at Aslan.
Vivid black hair, teal eyes. Uncommon coloring — and she recognized him at once.
"Aslan...!"
The Master of Combat.
In the moment of recognition a flood of speculation surged — had something happened at Itar's dwelling? — but she crushed it all.
Letting the ruined Executioner's Sword hang limp, she leaned forward and used the momentum to sprint.
Sword raised high, her eye rolled white in its socket.
Even with a narrowed field of view she could read it: Tiyamal was about to fire. She hurled what remained of the sword — little more than a hilt — straight at the arrow aimed for her nape.
A metallic howl.
The collision slammed the hilt aside, but the arrow didn't break. It punched through and kept coming. That brief delay was enough.
"Hrraaaaaah!"
A howling roar as she dodged the arrow and accelerated. Three meters of bulk kicked off the ground and closed the gap. Tiyamal's face was pure dismay as he yanked a hand-axe free and threw it.
It struck her shoulder with a wet crack.
She took it. An axe wouldn't kill her. Ignoring the wound, she swung.
Momentum translated through her core — she twisted her body sideways, halting as if aiming for Aslan's flank.
Dust kicked into his face. In that instant, a grey crescent strobed across the air.
A horizontal sweep of the greatsword — its weight enough to crush a human skull with a mere graze, a technique the Executioner had spent a lifetime refining.
A simple sideways slash — so simple it defied mockery — but its power and precision were anything but simple.
Neck slash.
The air seemed to warp around the strike, a thunderclap of displaced atmosphere.
Instinct told Aslan this wasn't an attack he could block.
If he blocked with Absorption, Absorption would break. If he blocked with Purity, he would be sent flying. Judging by the Executioner's displayed leg strength, flying meant dead.
But he didn't need to block. There was another way.
The blade streaking toward his throat was lethally fast — too fast and too heavy to stop. Even if he stopped it, he would lose his center.
So he chose not to block. He lifted Purity instead.
'Thunder Call.'
The radiant white blade flared brighter, and a sudden thunderclap tore through the air.
CRACK-BOOM!
In the dust cloud ringing with thunder, before the Executioner could even process it, Purity met the Executioner's Sword.
A grinding shriek — the blade eroding, Purity being forced back. Before either edge had moved an inch, a shockwave burst outward in a ringing circle, hurling the dust away.
CLANG.
Thunder Call's nature was repulsion. True to its foundation, the Executioner's Sword flew violently backward.
"Ngh—?!"
She held onto the weapon — and that was the only mercy. Her stance crumpled, balance shattered.
The Executioner crushed her frustration behind clenched teeth, absorbed the recoil through her hips, and brought the Executioner's Sword back down.
A ringing crash.
The descending blade locked against Purity. They bound and held. The distance shrank. Blades entangled, they moved with cunning small shifts.
A serpent's motion aimed at the Executioner's neck. She saw the white radiance eating into her steel, saw the corrosion spreading, and ground her teeth until they ached. Her body swelled.
Push him away first. She had to make distance. Escape that impossible cutting power.
She heaved, muscles bulging, and hurled Aslan's blade aside with a violent wrench. His body bounced and tumbled across the ground.
Dust bloomed where he rolled. Before it could settle, the Executioner leaped in.
She closed in to bring her high sword down — and a fresh prickle of danger made her arch her back.
An arrow sliced past her cheek with a hiss.
"Kh... guh...!"
The close shave splintered chitin around one eye socket. The other eye was still intact. Not a mortal wound. Aslan remained sprawled on the ground.
Through the alarm, she didn't hurry. She re-gripped her sword. Evaluated. Moved.
'Deal with the archer first.'
The logic was sound. And that made it predictable.
Aslan read the trajectory she would take and, still rising from the fall, thrust Purity directly into its path.
The Executioner's mouth opened to loose a venomous spine. Purity bisected it. Through the scattering poison, Aslan and the Executioner clashed edge against edge.
He chopped down, cut sideways, thrust, carved upward on a diagonal — and the Executioner answered every stroke with quick precision.
A single Executioner's Sword — about to be sliced apart, about to be severed — blocked, deflected, and redirected each attack. She rolled the blade so the surface in contact with Purity was sacrificed, the edge spared.
Turning the angle let the metal peel away in fragments, but the sword held together.
Held together — until it couldn't.
When she barely blocked Aslan's downward slash at the cost of her blade's cross-guard, a heavy thrum pounded her ears.
THOOOOM.
The deep note of Tiyamal's bow. She'd heard it too many times. Rather than parry Aslan's next strike, she spun and swung the Executioner's Sword.
"Sorry about this."
She stared at Tiyamal's drawn bow — and found the string empty.
The Executioner's Sword carved nothing but air. Purity drew a white arc in its wake.
A full-moon curve passed through the wrist that held the Executioner's Sword and bit into the ground, and she felt a bloom of searing heat spread from her forearm.
Thud.
Then release. Then pain. The heavy sound of meat hitting the earth.
She turned her head. Her severed hand still clutched the Executioner's Sword. Blood pooled and soaked into the dirt.
"Well."
This wasn't good.
She'd lost a hand. Both her treasured weapons were gone. The wound wasn't fatal, but she saw no way out of this.
Even the fight behind her — the Warrior Monks who'd followed her — was visibly collapsing. No help would come.
The thought that she might die here drifted through her mind.
So she lifted the corners of her mouth. Despite the insect-marred face, the expression was unmistakable.
"Amusing."
She said it plainly. Even with Aslan's sword leveled at her.
He couldn't understand.
"...What's amusing?"
She didn't answer. Instead she let the raised corners of her lips tighten slowly and said, "You prepared quite a lot. Drawing us here with a sniper, splitting me from my subordinates to destroy us in detail...."
It came out of nowhere. Aslan frowned, unable to gauge her intent. She watched his wariness with an unreadable gaze.
"Did you get a count of our numbers?"
The creak of Tiyamal drawing his bowstring filled the silence. The Executioner glanced at him.
"Twenty, wasn't it?"
Tiyamal answered, his bow trained on her head. She showed her teeth in a thin smile.
"You've done your homework. Yes. Twenty. Isn't that a shame? There are only eighteen here now."
"You expect us to believe that?"
The reflex reply. Aslan glared as he spoke. She let out a loose, throaty laugh.
"Then don't believe it. But."
The Executioner reached toward her waist as she added the words.
"At the very least, when I walk into an obvious trap, I prepare a contingency. A detached force, for instance."
A detached force?
Aslan caught the implication and tensed — and in the distance, a heavy crack rolled across the battlefield.
—BOOM.
Something breaking.
He recognized the sound: aged timber construction being demolished.
'If there really is a detached force, we're in trouble. Richard and Lady Itar can't hold off Warrior Monks alone.'
It might be a bluff. But he had to prepare for it.
Aslan shot Tiyamal a look, and Tiyamal moved at once —
"Not so fast."
The Executioner's easy murmur stopped him.
She halted at a distance that checked them both and slowly tipped the hilt at her waist.
The sheath looked as though it had been forged from an enormous anvil. From it emerged a blade with a pale white luster — the Sword God.
It was a strange design, visibly far from an ordinary sword. The blade was saw-toothed, a configuration that evoked fangs.
Grrrrrrrrrr...!
And the more the blade emerged, the louder a bestial growl swelled.
After a long moment staring at the weapon, Aslan realized: the sound was metal grinding against metal inside.
Teeth meshing, scraping, shaving each other down.
The moment he understood, the sheath transformed.
Clack-CLANK.
It opened along both sides. Half the sheath folded back to engage with the exposed saw-blade, lengthening it — like unfolding a straight razor — into a vast, extended edge.
A greatsword roughly two meters long. For the Executioner's frame it was merely the length of a longsword, but Aslan knew at a glance.
This was no ordinary weapon. It was a relic of an Ancient God.
"This blade's name is the Beast."
The Executioner murmured it low.
"The Beast of Tiyalmisof."
She leveled the saw-toothed blade at Aslan, and below the cold sunlight its edge gleamed ominously.