Executioner
Executioner
They were strong.
It didn't matter that Richard had become a Master—that didn't change the reality.
A fist wrapped in acceleration too fast for the eye to follow, paired with a fist that delivered heat and shock. Both were beyond reproach.
Even Richard, who hadn't faced nearly as many priests as the others, could tell this level of strength was among the highest he'd ever seen.
And yet Richard won.
The reason was simple.
A Master stood before them, and as long as they were Warrior Monks,
they couldn't suppress the will to make an offering of him.
From there, the outcome wrote itself.
Loim and Demis threw everything they had at Richard, desperate to offer him up. Richard fought back.
He used every tool he had—his newly acquired techniques, their impatience, every advantage he could seize.
He clawed his way to victory by the thinnest of margins.
By the end, it had stopped resembling a fight at all.
It was nothing more than a struggle to survive.
So it took Richard a long moment to register where he was.
Snapped trees littered the area. One trunk, broken mid-fall where someone had kicked off it to deliver a spinning strike, leaned precariously against another. Richard had been slumped against it, unconscious for a spell, before his eyes opened.
Loim, the Warrior Monk, hung impaled through the chest on another half-broken tree. His head lay torn from his body on the ground—no question he was dead.
Demis had met a similar end. He'd failed to contain Richard, who had parried every attack while steadily building speed, and eventually been overwhelmed by a chain of blows so rapid that Richard had been carving pieces out of himself to keep it going.
The mana tattoos on Richard's body were completely drained, but he realized he'd won against two Warrior Monks and let out a faint, exhausted laugh.
—Kugung!
A thunderous crash, not far off. Still caked head to toe in the blood of the Warrior Monks, Richard walked toward the sound.
He cut through the forest and emerged into a scene that looked as if someone had scooped up a battlefield and transplanted it here.
Kwaaaaang!
Another explosion. Splintered trees flew through the air, and at the center, a knot of figures tangled with a single Warrior Monk came into view.
Then he saw the rest—the ground littered with broken and sheared trees, and the bodies of other Warrior Monks, carved apart.
A Warrior Monk with one eye gone and an entire arm missing, still smiling faintly as she swung her greatsword.
The ankle on one side was crushed and useless, yet she was driving it into the ground as a pivot, still lashing out with her weapon.
The scene had the feel of something being whittled away, ground down slowly. The scars on the landscape told the story. Richard stared at those scars, dazed, then looked at the humans facing her.
They bore no wounds.
Only an inescapable weariness hung on them.
"Lord Aslan!"
A woman's voice rang out as she deflected an attack with her spear. The man called Aslan swung his sword in response.
The blade's trajectory warped strangely, bending space. The Warrior Monk twisted at the final moment, minimizing the area it could shear away.
Shreds of flesh scattered as she erupted in maniacal laughter. She flipped her body, throwing her entire balance into a greatsword swing that gouged through the earth, sending a storm of debris hammering toward them.
The woman wielding the spear spun it with uncanny precision, batting the flying stones aside. But a clever strike slipped through the curtain of dust the Warrior Monk had thrown up as a smokescreen.
A sword slash bleeding in from the upper left, as if seeping through a crack. A strike that corroded the entire left plane. It drove toward the woman, and Aslan stepped forward to meet it.
Kaang!
"Kgh—!"
His sword was knocked aside with a swallowed grunt. Aslan tried to close the gap, but a long arcing cut forced him to abort his step and barely parry.
Jjaeng—a metallic ring, and Aslan was sent flying. Richard finally understood the situation.
Their goal, if possible, was to win without dying or taking serious wounds.
Unlike Richard, who had fought desperately to kill two Warrior Monks and protect his master's remains, barely surviving,
these people were already thinking about what came after.
Absurd as the goal of killing an Evil God might be, they were treating it as a serious objective.
For that distant aim, they were fighting to come through this without injury.
The evidence was clear: every member of Aslan's party Richard could see had taken only minor wounds.
And because of that, they couldn't turn the tide easily.
As if they were waiting for someone.
As if the arrival of one more person would flip the whole fight.
Richard watched them for a moment, then stepped forward as if drawn by a spell.
"Ha, hahaha! Ha!"
The Executioner laughed as she swung her blade. She threw her entire weight into attacks so fast they barely left an afterimage. The long greatsword accelerated from close to her body, its speed building with every strike.
She was terrifyingly skilled in chaotic melee.
It had been the same when her master, Ithar, had fallen.
A defensive radius woven from two swords. Any attempt to penetrate it led to crippling wounds or death.
Aslan barely deflected a descending blow, and Richard knew he was the only one who could break this stalemate.
So he advanced. The crunch of his footsteps and the ragged breath leaking from his crushed ankle drew every eye.
"You—!"
The most dramatic reaction came from the Executioner.
Because Richard stood there, battered and exhausted, his hands drenched in the blood of Warrior Monks.
The evidence was unmistakable. The look of a man who had just survived brutal combat. The hollow expression on his face.
The Executioner saw it—the marks of battle, the context, the truth buried in it—and moved.
The judgment took less than a second. A sliver of a moment so brief even a master's Gap Closing couldn't interrupt.
A man who had killed two Warrior Monks—two of the stronger ones. She had no time to offer a prayer to the War God or confirm that he was a Master, but the aura around him was undeniable.
'A Master.'
The disciple of Ithar, Master of Combat. And now a Master himself.
Ithar's technique was a near-perfect art of defense.
That defensive art could serve as the key to sealing the Executioner's already certain defeat.
'No. I'll use it. Everything I've done to buy time has been for this moment.'
The Executioner's judgment was instant. The blade tip she'd been about to drive at Aslan faltered.
Buuung!
She wrenched her body around.
Absorbing the recoil with her hips, she pressed down on her mangled ankle for leverage and swung.
A slash surging up from the waist, aiming for the throat. By the time it reached the blade's tip, even the Executioner's own eyes couldn't track it.
Her second full-force neck slash of the day.
A killing blow meant for Aslan—not a feint with a trick hidden inside, but a genuine lethal technique.
And Richard was lowering his arm, unable to even react. The strike's aim was obvious.
'Take his head, then step back and use wide swings to drive off anyone looking for an opening. After that, narrow the angle of return...'
A warrior who had transcended the first-class level calculated countless possibilities in a single instant. The Executioner was that kind of Master.
She had beaten the Collector and accepted the War God's pact with both arms severed, becoming a Warrior Monk.
This time would be no different. Another victory. She was already tracing the arc toward it when she finally sensed something wrong.
Richard's stance was shifting.
A beheading strike too fast for even her Warrior Monk eyes to see. Few priests could block this blow.
No human should be able to perceive it. Aslan had managed, but only through his inhuman technique.
The strongest Master of Combat in history—he was an exception.
So what was happening here?
The Executioner couldn't understand.
She could only watch as Richard stepped back and avoided the blade tip as though he'd known it was coming before she threw it.
A blow that could behead through a block, through a catch, through a parry.
She'd prepared this move for Ithar. She'd been that confident.
No matter how brilliant Ithar's Adaptation was, she'd believed this one technique was unbreakable.
So when Richard didn't even try to deflect it, she was thrown into confusion.
The blade missed him by a hair. Richard's hand moved the moment it passed.
The jet-black tattoos crawling up his face flared crimson, and his fist, carrying acceleration, slammed into the flat of the blade.
Kaaaang!
The Beast of Tiyalmisof was a single-edged sword. A single-edged saw-toothed blade.
The spine wasn't sharpened. Naturally, the fist that struck it broke—but what that broken fist achieved was beyond imagination.
That strike, the audacity to slam the spine of the blade, had Ithar's Adaptation woven into it.
And yet it was no longer Ithar's Adaptation.
Because Ithar could never have used it this way.
An Adaptation that only someone born with a different physique could employ.
Unlike Ithar, who reached the pinnacle of the technique yet could only use it for counters, this was Richard's Adaptation—the adaptation of a man with innate martial talent and a body to match.
The Executioner was appalled. That slight tap on the tip of her blade had thrown her entire stance into chaos.
'He's surpassed the master...?'
Ithar's Adaptation was the art of yielding to the direction of force and making it your own without resistance—a defensive art.
But what Richard had just used was not defense.
It was an offensive Adaptation.
An Adaptation meant to shatter the opponent's balance and seize control of the exchange.
He was forcing compliance onto his enemy.
"What in the—!"
The Executioner staggered, appalled. The Masters didn't miss the fleeting opening.
Rumel hooked the rebounding sword tip with her spear and drove it aside, nullifying the Executioner's attempt to turn even her stagger into part of a swing.
Behind her, Fay burst out of a tree's shadow. Leaping with fierce rotation, she snatched the Storm Sword from where it stood planted in the ground and swung.
The blade was taller than she was, yet the sword-energy she released cut cleanly, shearing through the Executioner's ankle without a tremor.
"Kgh—!"
The Executioner collapsed. Even as she staggered and tried to adjust her grip, Ereta cut in. She'd drawn the axe from behind her back, stepped forward with her right foot, and swung through a full rotation.
The axe, still pressed against her flank, fired out with the momentum of that spin using minimal motion. It severed the Executioner's wrist with surgical precision.
Sword and ankle, gone.
But the venom glands and stingers remained. The moment her mouth opened, an arrow drove through her cheek.
Kudeudeuk—a shaft the length of a short spear impaled the glands and stinger in one shot. The archer who'd loosed it stood bare-chested and winked. The Executioner's face twisted.
"Hyah!"
Then a charging girl's kick slammed into her, and she was airborne.
Kung, kung, kugugugung!
She tumbled through several trees, smashing them apart. A massive frame so resilient that felling a giant tree left no mark on it. She drew breath, reaching for her final resort as she tried to break her fall—
"I've seen that before. It won't work."
Aslan was already at her landing spot, as if he knew exactly what she intended.
In his hand was the sword she'd been wielding moments ago—the Beast of Tiyalmisof.
"Take your blade back."
He murmured the words. The Executioner's severed wrist moved toward her heart, reaching for her last gambit.
'Shadow Flip.'
The shadow pooling at Aslan's feet vanished.
Chwajajajajak!
Ten simultaneous cuts carved into her body.
Her shoulder split and fell away. Her leg shattered and crumpled. Her waist gave out, and she collapsed.
The strikes had followed the muscle fibers exactly. The Executioner dropped to her knees, and Aslan moved again.
His whole body flowed. He turned his hips as if beginning a sword dance, the motion rippling from his core to his fingertips. As it traveled outward, the movement grew more violent.
As if his lower body was the hilt and everything from his torso to the blade tip was the whip.
In that instant, the Executioner recognized it.
A technique she had shown Aslan only twice.
The neck slash.
"Grr, grrraaaaaah!"
Her will to hurl herself at Aslan, screaming, meant nothing.
Kadeudeudeudeuk!
The Executioner's own technique betrayed its owner.
The sound of tough chitin splitting rang out. Her severed head lifted, then toppled separately from her body.
Thud, thud—two heavy impacts. Aslan absorbed the recoil of the swung greatsword by turning with it.
Kudeuk!
By the time his foot dug into the dirt and finally halted, he had spun a full circle, the sword tucked close to his body.
His back was turned to the head of what had been the Executioner.
The head rolled across the ground and stopped, facing that back.
Chakang!
The Beast, held close to Aslan's body, folded shut.
The sound was the slate falling to close the curtain on a life.
Hearing it, the Executioner finally closed her eyes and accepted death.