Executioner
Executioner
—A deep, rolling boom.
The sound rolled in from behind him, so distant it barely registered. Aslan had no idea what had caused it or how, and he didn't have time to wonder. He tightened his grip on his sword.
Clang!
A thrusting attack. He deflected it with Purity and sent it skipping wide. For a heartbeat, he thought she might stagger back. She surged forward instead, the downpour of strikes coming in like a rain of fangs.
Clang-clang-clang, clang!
The saw-blade's hilt locked around Purity's white edge, its blackened steel carving dark arcs through the air as the two blades collided. Aslan fended off every attack, clinging by a margin measured in effort and pain.
Shing!
A blade kept coming for the back of his neck, again and again. He managed to turn aside the shark-tooth edge, but that was all he could manage.
No room to counter.
The problem was distance, pure and simple.
After countless clashes of white light and ink-black steel, the two of them finally paused. Sweat ran cold down Aslan's face.
"Magnificent. Almost enough to make me want to offer you up."
The leisurely murmur didn't belong to Aslan. It was a woman's voice, low for a woman, but unmistakably feminine in its timbre.
The speaker stood more than four meters away.
A greatsword two meters long, wielded as freely as a one-handed blade, in the hands of the Executioner.
Born talent and forged skill married to that sword allowed her to hold a kill zone that was impossibly wide, impossibly precise, and brutally lethal.
Four meters of kill radius. A distance from which Aslan couldn't muster a counter no matter what he tried. He clicked his tongue and abruptly threw his body sideways.
An arrow whistled in from behind him. The Executioner flicked her eyes toward it.
Shriek—clang!
She snapped the long, short-spear-sized arrow out of the air with a downward stroke that made the blade seem to bite down on the shaft.
Beyond the cut, splinters of wood and shards of metal scattered. Dust bloomed.
All of it masked the Executioner's vision and opened a gap Aslan could exploit. He saw his chance and was halfway into his lunge—
Crunch!
—when her strike chewed through the space in front of his face and forced him to stop cold.
One-armed and still the sword was preternaturally quick. Of course she could fend off any follow-up counter easily.
Aslan coiled to charge again, then glanced past the Executioner and ripped a feather free, hurling it. Anything to pull her gaze away.
"Hyah!"
A girl's battle cry rang out, and a boulder came flying.
The Executioner tracked the dirt-caked stone with a sidelong glance and pivoted her body in a single fluid motion.
Ink-dark light drew a swift circle. Rock and feather shattered apart. As debris pattered down, Rumel drove through the gaps.
She'd finished off the warrior monks and rejoined the fight. Her spear thrust forward, and the Executioner tilted her head aside to evade the strike.
Rumel's eyes tracked the path of that dodge as she twisted the shaft, caught the butt of the spear, and hammered a rapid chain of thrusts. One breath, multiple strikes, a flawless flurry.
And still the spear tips caught nothing. The Executioner had pulled her head aside to dodge, and when the next thrusts chased her, she turned that lean into torque for her sword.
She snapped her hips out of the dodge and cut: a diagonal slash from above. Rumel saw the blow closing in a split-second flash, eyes widening. She threw the spear up to block.
Clang!
"Ngh...!"
The strike hammered the spear shaft and crushed downward. Rumel's expression hardened. She clenched her teeth and her knees buckled.
This wasn't a quick slash. It was pressure.
The Executioner caught the spear shaft with that saw-bladed edge, pinned it, and bore down with her full weight, as if she meant to pulp Rumel along with the weapon—a three-meter warrior monk grinding a body into the earth.
Another moment and Rumel would be a crushed mess of flesh. She barely held the saw-teeth away from her skull—
And then her eyes went round.
Fay had slipped under the spear shaft like a shadow.
"Yap."
The elf had flown low over the ground and crossed her twin swords beneath the shaft. She thrust upward with both blades and heaved. The saw-blade bounced off the spear and the whole weapon jumped high.
The elf kicked back into the darkness and yelled.
"Eri!"
"Yeah, I know!"
Ereta was already coming. She charged in the moment the saw-blade recoiled, axes whirling in both hands. The Executioner started to bring her sword down on her—
Clang!
—and Aslan stepped in front of it.
He struck the saw-blade with Purity and pressed it down. Ereta took the opening, winding up a heavy upward stroke.
A blow aimed straight for the skull. The Executioner blocked it with the sword's hilt.
White sparks burst from the metal. The Executioner twisted her blade, freed it from beneath Purity, and swung hard.
A whistle of cloven air. The clashing ring of white light and ink-dark steel. Ereta wove through the gaps, striking with her axes whenever the sword paused, or battering aside attacks meant for Aslan.
Two masters moving in a sequence so precise it was almost choreography. Anyone watching might have called it a guaranteed victory. It wasn't.
When Ereta pinned the blade down, the Executioner twisted free. When she crouched low and swept at their ankles, Aslan blocked with Purity. When he tried to counter, a vicious kick forced him back.
The instant he gave ground, the Executioner cut downward—and when that single stroke was intercepted by Rumel's thrust, she disengaged without hesitation and swung toward Fay, who was already coming at her throat.
Even after neutralizing Fay's ambush, only one thing remained.
Arrows and rocks and Aslan's throwing knives all came in after. She swatted them, smashed them, split them apart, and kept her feet.
The rhythm never changed.
Almost every master they had was gathered in this cramped patch of ground, and they still couldn't bring down a single Executioner.
At a glance, it looked pathetic. Aslan didn't see it that way.
It couldn't have gone any other way.
Three reasons, each one decisive.
First: that absurd kill radius.
A sword over two meters long, wielded by a warrior monk over three meters tall—they were losing the range battle before it even began.
She covered every gap in leverage with posture and technique; targeting the openings her center of mass should have created was pointless.
Even Rumel, who wielded the longest weapon among them, couldn't close cleanly. That left ranged attacks, which meant Tiyamal—and even that wasn't easy.
As if she knew his shots were the most dangerous, the Executioner kept her gaze fixed his way and reacted with the sharpest edge.
"Tch. Humbling. Real humbling."
Tiyamal clicked his tongue and muttered, and he was right. Every trick, every shot he tried, she swallowed whole.
The second reason was her skill.
If she had just been strong, she wouldn't have been hard to deal with. But she wasn't just strong.
She was a master of chaos. At a terrifying level.
She was a warrior monk who'd never appeared in the game, and Aslan couldn't know exactly who she was—but the way she swung her sword, the stances she took, the techniques she used all gave him glimpses.
The Executioner had been an assassin on the battlefield. A mercenary.
The kind who killed high-value targets for bounties.
The kind you'd still find today if you went south to the criminal city in the Hyudeil Duchy, to the Filth Pit.
She looked like one of them.
A professional who survived, endured, and killed her marks in the chaos of a battlefield—so of course she moved like this. Of course she thrived in this kind of melee. A fighter like that, leveraging a superior body and a superior weapon with total commitment, was never going to leave an opening.
But in Aslan's estimation, the biggest reason the fight stood where it stood now was something else.
Shriek—shing!
He caught a blade rushing toward his throat and narrowed his eyes.
The sword edge was locked against Purity, yet it wouldn't cut. The blade that sprayed white sparks in every direction as it pushed him back—that was the problem.
The Beast of Tiyalmisof.
A sword he'd never even heard of. That was the third reason.
Clang-scrape, shing!
Edge locked to edge, he turned the blow aside in a glancing deflection. White sparks scattered. Aslan clicked his tongue and pulled back.
Rumel leveled her spear. Ereta wiped sweat from her brow. Fay watched silently from the treetops. Angie glanced around for another boulder and found none. Through all of it, Aslan kept his eyes on the Executioner's blade.
Not a scratch on it.
Normally, against any other sword, the answer would have been simple.
He'd cut through the blade. Or slice through the defense. Either would have been enough.
He had comrades with him. It wouldn't have been hard.
Purity could cut anything.
But that claim—the system window's description, the promise that it would sever whatever it was meant to sever—felt hollow against this blade. It wouldn't cut. It just spat white sparks in every direction.
Aslan didn't know the precise reason, but he could guess.
Judging by the white radiance it had given off when drawn, the sword was made of White Iron.
White Iron was metal harvested from the bodies of the Ancient Gods. Purity was a power bestowed by the Ancient Gods.
In that light, it almost made sense that Purity couldn't cut the remains of an Ancient God.
He couldn't say whether it was the material, or some property unique to that specific blade. It didn't matter. The phenomenon in front of him wasn't going to change just because he understood it, so he focused on the fight.
Two ways to break this deadlock.
One: a necessary sacrifice. An arm, a leg, maybe his torso—spend a piece of himself to make an opening and flip the situation.
Two: bring a joker card that could overturn the whole table.
And as far as Aslan was concerned, there was exactly one way to flip this without a sacrifice.
A technique at the absolute limit of martial arts. Something that could completely shut down both the sword and the skill bound to it.
A technique comparable to the God of War and Knowledge's own divine skill perks, born from the ordeal of ascending to godhood.
Ithar's Adaptation.
Aslan held the thought and drew his sword hand back, thrusting his bare hand forward.
He had to gamble on a possibility.
The possibility that Ithar would fight her last fight with them despite the poison. Or that Richard would arrive having mastered the technique in his teacher's final hour.
Aslan pulled up his system window and took stock of the spells remaining in his tattoos.
[Stored Spells: Equalization, Flame Wave, Dark Fog, Acceleration, Silence]
One Equalization left. He hadn't replenished his stock since the fight with Ash. This was everything he had.
Use himself as bait, or wait and hope.
He clenched his sword hand, opened it, and let out a hot breath.
"Hup...!"
Clang!
Purity knocked aside the saw-toothed blade arcing toward his skull. Through the spray of pure-white sparks, he met the Executioner's single eye.
A red eye burning with something close to carnal appetite.
Aslan looked into it and twisted his lips into a smile.
Either way, he was going to win.
A victory he would not let slip.
What remained was how to make that victory as flawless as possible.
He leaned forward and lunged. The Executioner's dark-blue saw-blade howled through the air in response.
He caught the blow and shouted.
"No one dies! We live through this and we win!"
The masters answered his words by raising their weapons. In the space between them, the Executioner's ink-light spun in dizzying arcs.