Master of the Sword
Master of the Sword
The world, smeared with black, slowly kindled back to white. The bandit opened his eyes. His memory of when exactly he had closed them was so hazy that he had to stare blankly into the air for a long moment.
As if groping through his thoughts, he gazed silently, and his eyes, gummed with sleep, gradually cleared.
What came into focus was a girl.
"Aslan, this bastard's awake!"
'Who...? Ngh, my head...'
Even the girl's silhouette remained blurred as a splitting headache lanced through his skull. The bandit gritted his teeth, groaning, and shifted his body. The ropes wound around him pulled taut with the motion, jostling whoever was behind him.
"...Hngh! Ah— ngh."
A familiar voice, just now stirring awake. The bandit registered it as his companion's and let out a stupid grunt.
He was bound.
Bound to his companion's body, to be exact.
As that realization settled in, several footsteps approached.
A low voice rose from their center.
"You with us?"
The restraints were meticulous. Fingers tied, ankles, wrists, torso—all secured, leaving him with no options. At most, he could bend or curl a little.
He waited, assessing the situation, and his blurred vision slowly clarified.
When it fully sharpened, four figures stood before him.
A one-armed man, a girl of no great height and a woman, and a small girl.
The small one was unmistakably an elf.
Memory trickled back. The suddenness of losing consciousness had fogged his last moments, but now they surfaced. The bandit sat dazed for a moment, then his face twisted.
"You..."
Slap!
Before he could bark out a credible threat, the one-armed man swung. The back of a hand cracked against the bandit's cheek, knocking a healthy tooth clean from his mouth and snapping his head sideways.
"Nnghh..."
Blood dribbled from his lips; the dislodged tooth rolled across the floor. The man who had delivered the slap wore a briefly flustered expression that passed almost before it formed.
"You'd better choose your next words carefully."
"D-do you have any idea who I..."
"None. And I doubt you're anyone worth knowing. Same goes for whoever you answer to."
At that flat dismissal, the bandit spat out a mouthful of blood. The red-flecked saliva glistened under the sunlight striking the ground.
Aslan, the one-armed man, watched it spread, then seized the bandit by the hair.
"So let's keep this simple. Answer a few questions. If you manage that well enough, you might walk away with all your limbs intact. That's a fairer deal than the one you offered me, don't you think?"
The bandit coughed and rolled his eyes.
At the edge of his vision, a girl caught his gaze. The elf he had brought, the one he'd meant to sell. Brown hair and green eyes.
The elf was fidgeting anxiously, watching him get beaten.
The bandit curled his lips into a blatant sneer.
"Fu—"
Crack!
Aslan yanked the man's hair down and drove a knee up into his face. The bandit's nose collapsed with a wet crunch as blood gushed.
It streamed from his mouth like a creek, and his eyes—hit harder than he realized—had gone from blurred to black.
"Fine. If that's your choice, I accept. I'll bury you with my own two hands."
It had been an instinctive gamble that pushing back harder would work. The outcome suggested otherwise. Blind in one eye, the bandit shuddered as a pained groan reached him from the body pressed against his back.
He belatedly pieced together what had happened. While he'd refused to talk, they must have worked his companion over without mercy.
A sharp sense of peril flooded him. Swallowing spit and blood, the bandit spoke.
"W-wait."
The words came out mushy, his broken teeth making his speech leak. But Aslan heard him and lowered the knee he'd been about to swing again.
"I'll... I'll tell you everything. J-just don't kill me. I'm..."
"If you'd started like that, you could've saved yourself a beating. You're high-maintenance."
Aslan released his grip on the man's hair. The bandit, trembling, managed to force out the question.
"What do you... wanna know?"
"Simple. Information about your organization. What you've been doing in Randy Gorge, why you've been doing it, how things have been around here lately. And..."
Aslan let the words trail off, his gaze flicking toward the elf. The bandit tensed, eyes rolling again.
"How many elves there are."
Hearing the question, the bandit understood at once: his companion behind him had already spilled a great deal of information. The elf had also talked quite a bit.
What would happen if he lied was obvious.
Sweat beading cold on his skin, the bandit answered.
"We... we're slavers. Mostly we grab people from the Kingdom of Bida and sell them in the Kallus Empire."
But he had to start with the obvious. He needed to probe Aslan's reactions, search for a way out.
The bandit was a man whose instincts had long been calibrated for survival above all else.
"Keep talking."
Feeling the slack weight of his unconscious companion against his back, the slaver continued.
The organization wasn't large. Maybe thirty people at most. Too few to handle monsters, and most were non-combat personnel.
Their day-to-day work was capturing slaves and selling them. Sometimes minor goods like travelers or fallen nobles, sometimes high-risk, high-value merchandise like cultists, Dragon-kin, or Beastmen.
But the prize they coveted above all was elves.
Elves offered ease of management: they didn't resist, didn't need to be fed or watered to stay healthy. Their unsullied minds made them easy to educate, and they didn't run, so recapturing them was never an issue. With a human slave, you had to knock them senseless from behind and break their will through prolonged despair. Elves required none of that tedious theater. You just asked them to follow, put them in shackles, and told them what to do. Done.
Despite their powerful bodies, exceptional physical abilities, and ageless immortality, they were a species whose instinct for struggle had been excised. Capturing and selling them carried little risk and vast returns.
So the slavers had seized the opportunity when the Emperor of the Kallus Empire changed. They crossed into the Kingdom of Bida and began harvesting elves.
At first, it felt like it was going well. More than that—it was going well. The work proceeded without a hitch, so they allied with other slaver groups to round up more elves.
The plan was to take the collected elves through Randy Gorge and into the Kallus Empire.
Then everything went wrong, all at once.
The slaver organizations began to be annihilated.
By someone—or by some monster.
The dead were consistently ambushed. Throats slit at the windpipe, necks pierced, hearts stabbed in a single blow. The death toll mounted steadily, and as it rose, defections increased. Those who ran were soon found dead as well. That much became clear. Staring at the mounting corpses, the slavers dug in deep inside the gorge.
Some called the unidentified presence the Monster of Landi Gorge. Others claimed it was a curse that had festered in the ravine. An irrational madness spread, and in the end, most of the slaver groups were destroyed. Only three remained, and even after hiring skilled escorts, nothing improved.
This man and his companion had been deserters, slipping away from one of those groups and heading elsewhere. The elf they'd brought along was meant to be sold to cover travel expenses.
That plan had not worked out.
The slaver, stumbling through his account, finally answered the question about the elves' number.
"Twenty?"
"Y-yeah. Twenty. There used to be more... but that monster must've taken some. They're gone."
Aslan let out a low hum.
The story didn't sit right. And not simply because the information was thin.
The number of elves was far too high. And the method of driving the slavers into a corner felt familiar.
Grinding them down by ones and twos, maneuvering the many into harsh terrain, controlling them through terror and frenzy. All while achieving the objective, efficiently reducing their numbers.
It was exactly the method Aslan himself had often used against larger forces.
An improvised version of it, at least. Back before reaching Olpasbet, he'd employed similar tactics against the mercenaries who betrayed him.
Even with that familiarity, a few puzzle pieces were still missing. Lacking full certainty, he asked.
"...The dead. How exactly did they die?"
"Wh-what do you mean, how? Ambushed in the dark..."
"I mean the wounds. Was it really just one attacker?"
"Wounds... wounds...?"
The slaver couldn't grasp why the question was being asked. His jaw trembled as he racked his brain, then answered.
"T-two. It was two. Mostly... sometimes it was one, but sometimes two..."
He babbled on, spilling words in a flood. Aslan filtered the torrent and latched onto the one detail that mattered.
"When it was two, one would've been to the leg, one to the throat."
"What? Uh... I think... maybe...?"
The bandit hedged, unwilling to commit. But Aslan judged the hesitation came from fear, not uncertainty.
One to the leg, one to the throat.
He understood now. Understood what was happening and what kind of event this was.
This attack pattern was unmistakably familiar.
Cut the leg to strip away mobility and the chance to evade, simultaneously bringing the target down to a height where the throat could be reached. Then cut the throat.
The signature attack pattern of a high-speed, small-framed dual-blade fighter. The same attack pattern Aslan had once taught to an old companion and student.
Aslan severed the train of thought before it could lengthen and spoke simply.
"Good. You've done well. Next time, think carefully before you choose what to say."
The words landed somewhere between a compliment and advice. The slaver hunched his shoulders and nodded.
Leaving him there, Aslan glanced at the brown-haired elf and thought.
Randy Gorge, where he now stood, was not far from his destination: Honningal Barony. Three weeks' travel northeast would bring them there.
North of Honningal Barony lay a land that would later host a main quest—the homeland of the elves. The place where the corpse of the God of Nature and Creation stood in the form of an ancient tree.
The Land of the Elves.
That was why Aslan had been heading for Honningal Barony.
Because the Master of the Sword, Fay, was an elf.
Aslan pictured the elf with her curly red hair tied in twin-tails, and exhaled a sigh.
He was certain now.
What was currently annihilating these slaver groups was the only elf in the world who fought: Fay.
'The reason... it's obvious.'
The time Fay and Aslan had spent together was not short. Enough to mark a person. Under his influence, she would have absorbed at least some notion of responsibility.
'A sense of responsibility. She must have decided that as a strong elf, she had to protect the weaker ones.'
If that was the case, there was no reason to hesitate. Aslan pretended to mull it over for a beat, then drew his dagger.
The small motion made the bandit flinch violently.
"D-don't kill me! I told you everything! Please, I'm just..."
Ignoring the man's wail, Aslan lifted the dagger and gave a light flick of his wrist. The bindings parted cleanly. The severed ropes thumped to the ground, and the bandit's face went slack with stupor.
Aslan looked at that stupid expression and spoke.
"Take me to your organization. I have an interest in providing sponsorship and protection."
"Pro...tection?"
The bandit's grimy eyes darted sideways, glancing at Aslan's weapons, his dagger, the party behind him—weighing odds, calculating costs and benefits.
"Wh-who the hell are you? Whatever you think you are, you're not that big a—"
"The Emperor Slayer."
"...What?"
A title with renown spanning the Northern Continent. The bandit went rigid at the words. Aslan sighed.
"Master of Combat, Aslan. Is that insufficient?"
At last the bandit understood why this man was so monstrously strong, and he swallowed every objection he had.
This was not an opponent he could face — at minimum, not alone.
He hoisted his unconscious companion without complaint and led Aslan onward.