Master of the Sword
Master of the Sword
Clang!
Metal met stone. Two edges, honed to lethal sharpness, struck sparks on impact—their materials mismatched but equally deadly.
Before the sparks could fade, the arc of the incoming blade twisted and collided again.
Clang, clang!
A flurry of glinting steel. Sword aura rippled with an artistry that drew breath into every exchange, dense and sustained. The crimson longsword and the stone sword rebounded from each other, and a fist shot through the gap.
A dull crack.
The punch, thrown in the split second after the stone sword's swing, rode the razor's edge of human physical limits. Even without hip torque, it struck hard enough to shake a man to his core.
Dmitri, the man holding the crimson blade, barely registered the stone sword arcing toward his skull—the haze blanketing his mind smothered everything.
Clang!
He defended again, slipping his blade into the path. The stone sword recoiled, twisted once at the wrist, once at the waist, and hurtled back at him.
Another collision. Every exchange pushed Dmitri onto the back foot. He was being read, redirected, forced back. Each time their swords met, the truth sank a little deeper.
A monster.
The sheer force of the man named Aslan.
But Dmitri refused to break. He retracted a thrust that had uselessly split the air and slashed downward. Aslan met the descending strike with a rising block and extended his hand.
Thwump!
An invisible shockwave burst from his palm, slamming into Dmitri's face and staggering him. Aslan watched his balance fracture, twisted his hips, and drove a leg through the gap.
Bang!
"Hurk..."
Dmitri's body folded sideways. A turning kick had slipped past his guard and hammered his ribs with precision.
No time to trap the leg or cut into it—the attack was too fast, too surgically placed. He tumbled across the ground.
"Heh... heh..."
Even the pain was fading now. Dmitri dragged himself upright, the truth settling into his bones.
Something's wrong.
It was the same realization he had every time he fought Aslan. Every single time, the thought surfaced.
That strength isn't natural.
'But so what? A strong opponent is no excuse to quit.'
Dmitri rose, wiped the blood trickling from his lips, and tightened his grip on his longsword. Then he threw himself forward.
The attack he chose was a short, fast cut aimed at the neck—a slash that felt almost like a thrust. Aslan drew his arm back and blocked with the hilt of his knife.
The strike rang off the knife's hilt with a clang. As the blade angled down to slice through fingers, Aslan's other hand seized the stone sword's edge.
The grip reversed. The blade that had touched the hilt was dragged down and deflected. Aslan was hunting for the single heaviest strike in swordsmanship: the killing blow. The reversed sword rushed toward Dmitri.
A sickening thud.
Too late to recover and block. Dmitri raised his arm to intercept and felt his elbow shatter.
A horizontal killing stroke. That left an opening. Dmitri thrust upward with the blade he had been forced to lower, and Aslan met the thrust with his reversed sword, driving it aside.
He struck down like a harpoon, and the edges met with flawless precision, sending the thrust skidding away.
Precise. Powerful. And fast.
Matching an incoming thrust edge-to-edge was difficult. Against a master who stood among the elite of the elite, it was nearly impossible.
Yet Aslan performed that near-impossible feat with casual ease. A bizarre pinnacle of technique, as freakish as it was absolute. Aslan held that level of skill in the palm of his hand.
And that was not all of it.
A dull, jarring impact.
"Guhk...!"
Whenever Dmitri barely dodged or blocked a swift and merciless attack, something even faster followed—hand-to-hand combat that finished the sequence.
His head snapped back, and he caught a glimpse of the elbow that had clipped his chin on the upswing.
If he hadn't jerked his jaw up at the last possible instant, the blow would have shattered the bone and knocked him out. Only a master of Dmitri's caliber could have absorbed that.
Aslan's side kick flew at the staggering Dmitri. It sank deep into his abdomen, and Dmitri lifted his body at the moment of impact to bleed off force.
He rolled across the floor, spitting out the blood filling his mouth.
Damn, he's strong. Like something out of a nightmare.
Dmitri slapped his head sharply to chase away the blurring edges of his vision. His body, searching for rest, jolted back to life. He straightened.
He gripped the longsword in both hands and raised it high. A slight twist of the wrists shifted the classic stance into something personal. This time, he faced forward. He leveled the blade at Aslan and let the blood from his mouth run freely.
His chances were slim.
'Makes sense. A man who's been brawling with priests barehanded since forever—can't exactly be weak. He's a real monster.'
A bitter smile tugged at his lips. He glanced at the flail still hanging untouched at Aslan's waist and let out a hollow laugh. Aslan wasn't even fighting seriously.
And yet he was this overwhelming.
'His technique is peerless, his unarmed strikes are lethal, he has strange magic-like tricks, and there must be plenty of techniques he hasn't shown yet.'
The skills Aslan called perks, the ones the world knew as Aslan's art. Techniques whose existence you could recognize but never hope to answer. Just recalling the ones Dmitri knew was enough to tighten a fist around his lungs.
He lowered his sword with rigid calm and looked at Aslan, who had settled into a stance facing him squarely.
It looked vulnerable at a glance. It was anything but.
Dmitri knew that stance well.
The former Master of Combat's stance. Immovable center.
Aslan took a single light step forward, his balance absolute, ready to crash into violence at any instant.
Dmitri had fought Aslan seven times, and every time, the same thought formed.
This strength is different from the priests' kind of strength.
A priest's power was like a natural disaster.
Raging flames, seething lava, ferocious life force channeled into unique and overwhelming abilities. It was strong in the way an earthquake or a wildfire was strong—simple, elemental.
Aslan's strength wasn't simple. It was complex.
Fighting him felt like trudging through a bottomless swamp.
Once you sank into that swamp, there was no way out.
You could thrash and claw, and still there was no way out.
Dmitri felt the malformed bloodworm squirming in his chest, forcing a path toward his heart.
He didn't have much time.
Boom. Boom. Boom-boom!
The bloodworm hosts crashing against the barrier at the tunnel entrance multiplied. The corpse of the bandit leader Torek lay cooling on the floor. In the chill of pooling blood, Dmitri smiled.
Aslan's expression, by contrast, was cold. His teal eyes betrayed almost no emotion.
Only a detached killing intent registered there. The mechanical gaze of a man eliminating a threat.
Looking at Dmitri with those eyes, Aslan sighed, a note of regret in it.
There was no other way. Once the bloodworm consumed the heart, there was no coming back—not unless you became a priest.
The heart was the root of life.
Aslan adjusted his grip on the sword and blinked. In that single blink, that sliver of an instant, Dmitri lunged.
He committed his whole body. He flipped the blade that had been poised high, spun his arm in a wide arc, and swung.
A strike that accelerated from behind his back and surged upward from below. A diagonal rising slash. Aslan watched the blade coming and extended his own.
Skreee-clang!
The edges met with a shriek. Metal and stone spewed sparks. Heavy. But nothing he couldn't handle. Aslan pressed the flat of his blade forward and twisted his wrist.
He redirected it. The mysteries of extreme unarmed combat bloomed inside his swordsmanship. The deflected strike skidded wide. Dmitri smiled, flipped his wrist, and absorbed the recoil through his hips. Even as his vertebrae creaked in protest, he grinned and swung horizontally.
A grinding shriek of steel on stone.
Aslan caught the incoming cut with a sideways glance and a blade angled sharply. The crimson sword flared bright in the dim tunnel, then ricocheted low, wrenching Dmitri's stance wide open.
He didn't stop. Dmitri knew that if he didn't fight now, he would never get another chance to cross swords with Aslan.
This was the last fight. He didn't want regrets in his last fight.
His spine screamed. His wrist snapped under the strain. Still, Dmitri moved.
Aslan's stone sword descended from above, stabbing down where the deflection had left an opening. Dmitri spun before the blade could pierce his crown.
He used the momentum Aslan's deflection had given him. His ankle ligaments tore, his back shrieked—and he spun anyway.
He burned his life.
Clang!
"You...!"
A full-rotation diagonal slash. He knocked the descending stone sword aside. Through the shower of sparks, Dmitri smiled. His lips were smeared red with blood, one eye half-eaten by the worm—and he smiled.
His reason was dissolving, but he kept moving. Burning what remained of his life, the pinnacle of his technique bloomed from Dmitri's sword.
Aslan's expression hardened. Amid Dmitri's smile, their blades clashed again.
Clang!
He caught a downward chop and let it slide past, deflected a thrust with the flat of his blade, locked a horizontal cut and twisted it aside, used the knife's hilt to block a thrust that came writhing from the locked edges.
Blood streamed from Dmitri's eye. His wrist broke and bent backward. His heart, nearly devoured, barely pulsed. Yet Dmitri finally reached Aslan.
Dmitri's swordsmanship was purely his own. Forged in combat, layered through battle after battle. Facing the towering wall called Aslan, he pushed his hard-won art one step further.
His old sword paths were already sealed off. So he abandoned them. He reversed his grip on the crimson blade.
The reversed red edge rode up the stone sword's length.
A heavy, wet crack.
A screech of grinding steel, then a slicing hiss.
The red blade climbed like rising fire. The stone sword thrust out as though in counterpoint. In the instant the stone blade bit into Dmitri's chest, the crimson longsword carved a line across Aslan's right eye.
As blood dripped from both wounds and splashed onto the floor, Dmitri smiled through the gush of red from his mouth.
His hand trembled faintly. The tip of the knife held in reverse grip wavered.
A creature without a heart can't move. That's the rule. But Dmitri had already abandoned his humanity. He was becoming a bloodworm host.
For just a moment more, he could act without a heart. He raised the trembling sword high and drove it down.
Mutual destruction. That was the goal.
His last dregs of fighting spirit and life force poured into that downward stab.
And then the shadow coiled at Aslan's feet flickered.
"Shadow Flip."
A low voice spoke, words that sounded like a decree against the laws of the world. Before Dmitri could parse what he'd heard, Aslan moved.
A wet slicing sound.
His thorax split open. The blade already lodged in his heart carved two simultaneous paths through his body. The edge slipped sideways, cleaving lung and flank, while the upward return shattered his collarbone and sent blood fountaining.
"Heart Piercing."
A sickening squelch.
Aslan's leg, sheathed in pale-blue light, buried itself in Dmitri's thigh. A low kick. Agony detonated through the muscle. Bone broke, flesh pulped. His body collapsed.
Collapsing, Dmitri wrenched his sword up on pure reflex. Aslan's blade was already descending.
"Knight Slayer."
The edge gleamed black.
The diagonal slash passed through the crimson blade, through the shoulder, and the arm went dead. Dmitri felt his sword slip from his grip and lifted his head.
Aslan stood there.
Leg still hazy with light, poised.
Dmitri smiled. With his last breath, he spoke.
"Beautiful."
And closed his eyes.
The familiar sound of thunder rolled through the tunnel.
"Thunder Call."
Krrrr-rrrrrrack!
In the next instant, Aslan's foot met Dmitri's face. His body snapped sideways and flew, tumbling violently across the floor before slamming into the debris choking the tunnel.
A tremendous, echoing crash.
Aslan stood amid blooming clouds of dust, one eye closed, leg still extended.
He lowered his leg slowly, and the dust began to clear.
Beyond it, the hosts were waiting. They were crawling out of the rubble, lurching to their feet.
"Ah—ah, fuck!"
Angie's voice shattered the spell the duel had cast. At the far end of the tunnel, a bloodworm host launched itself toward Aslan.
Aslan watched them come and bent to pick up Dmitri's sword.
A blade in each hand, he steadied his breathing with unhurried calm.
"Aslan! They're—!"
She was shouting something, but he paid it no mind.
The bloodworm hosts charging in were many. At least twenty. They tore through the narrow, darkened tunnel, scrambling to devour him.
Aslan looked past them.
Past the sunlight pouring down from high above.
He murmured to himself, low.
'If I were you, I wouldn't waste an opening like this.'
The worms surged forward. Behind him, Angie and Ereta sprinted toward him. Aslan let his swords hang loose at his sides.
'I taught you better than that.'
He spread both arms. The woman and the girl closing in from either side halted at the gesture. The bloodworms rushing him were thick enough to clog the tunnel even to a one-eyed observer.
Most of the worms had died or fled into hosts. A swarm that lost its mother forced itself into hosts as a desperate measure to create a new one.
That meant a swarm without a mother could be eradicated if you just killed the hosts. One of the cleaner methods for dealing with the troublesome parasites.
Moreover, the bandits here had been wiped out long ago, and the elves were already rescued.
Dmitri—the most dangerous variable—was dead. And every remaining host was packed into the bottleneck of a mine tunnel.
A narrow space where someone with sufficient leaping power, elastic strength, explosive speed, and sword aura could slaughter them all.
'Isn't that right, Fay?'
At that moment, the sunlight at the tunnel's far end split open around a flash of steel.
Two blades.
A soft thud, then the sound of ripping flesh.
The twin swords spun. They raked across throats and pierced hearts. And they kept moving.
A plain ash-gray dress fluttered. A barefoot girl kicked off the wall, twisting her body mid-air. A full-moon arc traced by the swords bisected two hosts on a diagonal.
They dropped, clutching at hearts that had been precisely torn apart.
The scene looked like sunlight bleeding into the tunnel, ricocheting from wall to wall, and butchering the hosts as it went.
And through it all, blood-red curls whipped and scattered.
Slash. Cut. Pierce. Tear. Gash. Cleave. And cut again.
Two swords, and the leaps generated by kicking off wall, ceiling, and floor—that was the engine of the carnage.
Dozens of hosts were torn apart in the same breath, as if the small frame were shedding power far too vast for its size.
Patter-patter-patter.
The sound of shredded flesh raining down filled the silence that followed. In that quiet, Aslan looked at the girl standing amid the ruin.
She looked about fourteen, her blood-red curly hair tied in twin tails. Her eyes were blue-violet.
Despite the blood she had spilled, the ash-gray dress wrapped around her body was spotless.
Her two feet, planted in the aftermath of slaughter, were clean and bare. Only the blood pooling around them proved she belonged to the material world at all.
An Elf swordsman.
A fighting Elf.
The Master of the Sword.
"Fay."
The Elf girl whose name he'd spoken smiled with pure brightness.
"Hi!"
A cheerful greeting. The corner of Aslan's mouth tugged upward in a faint smile, and the girl beamed back at him. Her blue-violet eyes curved into soft crescents.
"It's been a while!"
She walked toward him, parting the blood, closing in. The sight was uncannily familiar to Aslan.
She stopped right in front of him. She was grinning, her blue-violet gaze wide open. What filled those eyes was unmistakable warmth.
"Fay missed Aslan. Did Aslan miss Fay?"
The girl giggled as she spoke, still holding twin short swords dripping with blood.
