Master of the Spear
Master of the Spear
"Do you even recognize me?!"
A woman's voice, thick with fury. She pitched her voice low, but beneath the strain it was clear and unmistakably feminine.
A voice that suited the face of someone who had once been a noble lady. She clearly hadn't spent much time shouting—her voice cracked even in the middle of a scream.
It might have been almost comical if not for the rest of her. The hatred twisting her features cut deep. The rawness had weight.
The target of that rawness was Tormule. His eyes bulged in shock, head drooping as he retched blood from his mouth.
"Y-you... should be dead...."
He lifted his head mid-sentence and spat out a mouthful of blood. It splattered across the woman's face, and she did not flinch. She did not step back. She twisted the spear.
"Gurk...!"
Tormule was dying. No—he was dead already.
Aslan registered the spear thrust that had cleanly pierced the heart and made to lunge at Tormule's adjutant.
Before he could, a Warrior Monk charged in, forcing him to pull his weight back and retreat.
"Protect Duke Tormule!"
More Warrior Monks surged forward. The woman took one look at them, kicked Tormule's spear up under her arm, and dropped her own weapon.
Aslan's judgment came fast.
'The traitor wasn't her. It was Tormule.'
He moved the instant the thought formed. He tightened his grip on the hammer and rushed the Warrior Monk. A low swing knocked the blade aside.
Clang!
The ringing metal had barely sounded when Aslan's foot slammed into the monk's knee. The leg buckled, the monk crashed down, and the hammer fell like a slab of iron.
Every motion took less than a breath.
Crunch!
The skull caved. Bug ichor oozed through the split armor.
The kill took one second. Aslan was already shouting.
"Angie, Ereta! Hold them off!"
The knight who had been meant to intervene if things went wrong was pinned outside. The tomb's outer chamber echoed with clashing steel, screaming, and bellowed orders. Aslan clicked his tongue.
Angie nodded and threw herself at the Warrior Monks. Ereta stayed tight on her flank, axe cleaving. The din of steel and splitting flesh filled the chamber.
"Protect Duke Tormule! Kill them all! Offer them all up!"
A countering shout from the Warrior Monks. In the same moment, something punched through the wall.
Kraaaaang!
Stone fragments sprayed as the arrow tore through. It was the size of a short spear. Aslan recognized the shot instantly.
Tiyamal's sniper fire impaled two Warrior Monks and hurled them aside. Aslan raised his voice.
"Hold until support arrives from outside!"
Thud. Thud. Kra-thoom!
Arrows kept coming, smashing through stone. Warrior Monks were skewered indiscriminately, bodies thrown across the floor. Through the entrance Count Sholukund had used, mercenaries and Warrior Monks poured in.
Count Sholukund's corpse was trampled into little more than ground meat. Aslan clicked his tongue again.
'Was this the play from the start?'
He could piece it together. This had Count Warpol's fingerprints all over it.
Count Warpol and Count Sholukund were ancestral enemies. Their cooperation had always been an alliance that could never hold.
And precisely because they had forced that alliance, they had been watching each other with paranoid intensity.
Count Sholukund had planned to make a ceasefire pact with the Emperor, get reinforcements, and crush Count Warpol. Count Warpol had made a different bargain with the War God—and arranged Count Sholukund's assassination instead.
This was what made priests so troublesome.
Slow priesthood came about through partial transformations over time. But when a god reached out directly and mutated the target, there were no warning signs to catch.
The War God was a god you could negotiate with. If the War God had stretched out his hand and offered a deal to Count Sholukund's retainers or mercenaries, there was no way to detect it and no way to stop it.
'They got me.'
Aslan had his advantages. The War God had his own. Weaker gods survived by being cunning. The relatively weak ones had their methods.
Aslan cursed the War God under his breath and adjusted his grip on the hammer. The battlefield plunged back into chaos.
Warrior Monks burst through walls on all sides while mercenaries mutated into new converts mid-step. Tiyamal's arrows hammered through stone and flesh without pause, busy skewering monks one after another.
Ereta's axe faithfully shattered armor and weapons, splitting monks apart. Angie, drenched head to toe in blood, caught spear-blades on her own body and beat her enemies to death. The floor ran slick.
Aslan worked the gaps. He threw daggers to back up Angie and Ereta. He swung the hammer and killed monks. Somewhere in the methodical butchery, the tomb began to collapse.
Rrrrrumble...!
A sound that seemed to shake the bedrock itself. Cracks spidered across the ceiling. Below them, the woman and Tormule faced each other.
Tormule's body was already changing—whether he had accepted it or not, the Bug's flesh was claiming him. The woman had Tormule's white-iron spear tucked under her arm. They measured each other.
"How... are you alive...? I burned... everything...."
Tormule groped for a fallen monk's spear. The woman's voice came out cold with rage.
"Even in the underworld I couldn't rest. The things you did boiled my blood and wouldn't let me sleep. So I crawled back."
Not literally true. It was the kind of thing you said when hatred had eaten everything else. Tormule, his mouth still dripping red, thrust his spear.
The blade came spinning in a hissing arc. The woman took firm hold of the spear at her side, brought it down against the oncoming blade, and locked the spearheads together.
Screech!
The metal shrieked. Ignoring the chill crawling up her spine, she turned her body.
A rotation—the setup for a Spiral Spear. It was a clever turn that used the opponent's own attack, and it became an attack itself.
Thwuck!
The spear drove home carrying all that rotation, aimed at the nape of the neck. Tormule twisted aside just enough to save his life—and lost an arm.
When the armored limb tore free, what sprayed out was not blood. It was Bug ichor.
And with one arm gone, Tormule had no way left to defend himself. No way to strike back.
"I am the grudge of the land you trampled, and I am its spearpoint!"
The woman screamed it the moment she saw the opening. The voice was hot with fury and hatred, cold as frost with killing intent.
What followed was a technique so cold it bit even through the heat of her rage.
She swung the spear wide. At a glance, it looked simple. It was not.
Aslan, having just beaten one Warrior Monk to death, had glanced over at the woman's shout. He saw it.
The swing bled in from outside Tormule's field of vision. By the time Tormule registered the blade and thrust his shaft to block, the spear had already retracted and realigned—dead center.
Straight at Tormule's throat.
Shrrrick!
The blade punched through his neck in a long, driving thrust.
Tormule staggered, ichor spilling. He clung to the spear shaft, still refusing to let go of life. The woman's hand went to her waist with something like contempt.
There was a shortsword there, elaborately decorated. A noble blade, the kind that served as a house sigil or an heirloom.
"Don't look at me with those filthy eyes...!"
Sssshikt!
The shortsword slashed horizontal. It carved across the eyes. Tormule made no sound. He was blind now. Trembling, he tried to pull the spear free.
The blade tore sideways and out. The wound gaped. He clutched at his own throat. His face went bright with terror.
"Die!"
Shthuck!
The shortsword came for him again—horizontal, wrist reversed. It struck with a force no noble lady should possess, and it took the head clean off.
Brown hair fluttered. The severed head rolled across the stones. His dead face was frozen in shock.
The woman stared at the corpse and dragged in a ragged breath. Then she shut her eyes tight, the way people do when the revenge is finally over.
Rrrrrumble!
The fight wasn't over.
The moment the dead man's body dropped to its knees, the floor began to split.
Everyone who heard that cracking sound went still. Then stone fell from the ceiling. Mercenaries were crushed where they stood—wet thuds, sickening cracks, bodies flattened into pulp. Angie screamed through the chaos.
"Fucking hell—you said this place was solid! Aslan! We have to get out!"
Angie had scouted the tomb beforehand. She shouted it while gesturing urgently. Aslan nodded, and before he could stop himself, his eyes went to the woman who had killed Tormule.
She had lifted her head.
She was looking at the ceiling.
Stone was coming down. A massive slab of ceiling. Heavy enough to pulp a human being without effort.
Even if she moved now it would be too late. She did not move.
She looked at the falling stone and closed her eyes.
A hollow expression spread into a bitter smile.
Aslan did not know the details. He did not know why she had killed Tormule or what lay behind it.
He understood the situation well enough.
She had finished her revenge. She had no regrets left. More than that—right now she was trying to die.
She was accepting death like someone with no hope left.
Aslan shut his eyes.
'Jeojang.'
In the accelerated cognition of a decelerated world, he thought fast.
Tormule had been a lower priority, but he was still a master—Aslan had meant to recruit him.
Tormule was dead. And before he died, whether he accepted the War God's offer or not, he had started taking on a Bug's body.
Worse, he was no longer the Master of the Spear. The Master of the Spear was the woman standing over his corpse.
The War God had effectively acknowledged that this woman's skill surpassed Tormule's.
Her ability was undeniable.
So undeniable it was almost baffling. How someone who looked like a noble lady had acquired such skill was impossible to guess.
That could wait.
What mattered now was that she had not been colluding with the priests.
The priests had tried to stop her.
She was definitely hostile to the War God.
The odds were high that her relationship with the gods was clean.
He did not know the exact circumstances, but her skill likely came from raw talent.
If he let this woman die, could he find the next Master of the Spear?
Would that next Master of the Spear be untainted by priestly dealings?
The deliberation did not last long. Aslan slipped out of the decelerated world and opened his eyes. He was already moving forward before the thought finished forming.
He saw what he was doing and finished the thought anyway.
If saving her had a clear benefit, and his own heart was inclined to save her, then there was no reason not to.
In all his years, Aslan had never once let a life within reach die if he could help it.
'Thunder Call.'
He reinforced his legs. Planted his feet. Dropped his stance. The thunder rolled.
KRRRAAAKOOOM!
Acceleration. Aslan launched forward. The speed was almost too fast to follow. The boom and the blur drew every eye in the chamber.
The armored woman's included.
She thrust her spear on pure reflex. Even reflexive, the strike was lethally precise.
A normal human being would have been skewered in the next instant. Aslan was not a normal human being.
Aslan was the Master of Combat.
The hammer wove around the spear shaft and deflected it. The hammer-head pinned the blade so it could not be reversed. As he pushed through, the woman's eyes went wide.
Aslan hooked her around the waist and hurled them both aside.
KrrrRUUUMBLE!
The stone missed them by a hair. The massive ceiling slab hit the floor, and rainwater began to fall through the new hole overhead.
Pattering rain, deepening fissures. The slab's impact split the floor into a web of cracks that spread like spider-silk.
They were doing exactly what spider-silk did: holding whoever sat on it.
There was no way out.
Aslan realized what was about to happen and shouted.
"Angie, get everyone out! Now!"
Angie's eyes went huge. Ereta opened her mouth to scream—
The floor gave way.
Rrrrrumble... KRAAAAA-BOOM!
It split and dropped. A sudden, immense rush of speed. Aslan fell with the collapse, plummeting down the vertical shaft of the tomb with the woman clutched against him.
Raindrops hung in the air, visible as they fell. The woman was too stunned to push him away.
They fell tangled together. The ground rushed up.
"Hah—!"
Aslan drove the hammer into a staircase flashing past on one side. The recoil spun him. He flipped his body, aimed the Wings of Stymphalos toward the ground, and folded—legs up, arms drawn inside the cloak.
SKRRRRAAAAANG!
Impact.
The shock absorption of the Stymphalos wings caught some of it. The rest tore up his spine and through his whole body. He bled off the impact with mana, but his breath still stopped. His vision went white.
Skrrr-krk-krkkk!
Feathers scattered, unable to absorb it all.
Aslan bounced. Hit again. Rolled. Hit again. He held the woman tight through every collision, shielding her.
Charrr.
On the final impact, Aslan's grip loosened. He lost consciousness.
The last thing he felt was relief that he was alive and a faint astonishment that he had actually pulled off the landing.
...Rrrruuumble....
A distant rumble woke him. Aslan opened his eyes to darkness. The collapsed ground above had sealed shut. No light reached the deep tomb. He blinked.
About two minutes by his body's internal clock. He exhaled in relief that it hadn't been longer and tried to rise.
"Don't move!"
A sharp voice stopped him.
He rolled his eyes sideways. Even in the gloom, the woman was visible.
She had the look of a noble lady. She was trying to harden soft features into something fierce, and she was holding her shortsword to Aslan's throat.
Aslan looked from the blade to the woman and back. What he could make out of her expression in the dark was confusion.
The moment their eyes met, the tip of the sword trembled.
There was no hostility in Aslan's gaze.
Aslan glanced at the quivering blade and spoke.
"Are you... injured anywhere?"
The trembling stopped. The woman looked even more lost.
"N-no. I'm not."
Aslan let out a smile that loosened his worn features and rested his head back against the stone. It was not the expression of a man with a sword at his throat.
"That's good."
The woman bit her lip even though he could see her do it. The emotions swimming in her eyes were a tangled mess.
"Why... why did you save me?"
Aslan blinked slowly and turned his head to look at her.
The noble-looking woman could tell what kind of state he was in.
'Injured and exhausted. No—the exhaustion might just be his face. The injuries are real.'
She stared at this man whose features carried something mournful, something worn, and gripped the sword with both hands to keep them from shaking.
"Y-you didn't have to save me. I... I killed your friend. I pretended to betray you... pretended I meant you harm... and I killed Tormule...!"
There was venom in the way she bit down on the name Tormule.
The hatred she felt for him was so thick that, paradoxically, she could feel her hostility toward Aslan draining away.
"It would have made more sense for you to let me die. If you wanted revenge for your friend...."
She was saying too much—confusion and disordered thoughts spilling out the things she hadn't meant to say. Things she didn't need to say.
Aslan watched her quietly. The coolness of his teal eyes made her keep talking almost against her will.
"I... have no reason to go on living anymore.... I killed Tormule... so now there's nothing... nothing left to...."
Halting words, soaked in confusion. Aslan listened for a moment and then closed his eyes.
The woman saw the teal vanishing behind his eyelids. Alarmed, she leaned closer to check for a heartbeat—
"Eek!"
—and from that lowered position, Aslan caught her by the wrist. A short, high yelp escaped her, her real voice breaking through.
Aslan had a lot he could say.
But having something to say didn't guarantee the most necessary words would come first.
If I'd known Tormule was colluding with a priest, I'd have killed him myself. No regrets there.
The more raw words came up before the necessary ones did.
Aslan spoke, still holding her wrist.
"You're... too valuable to die in a place like this...."
Their faces were close. The worn-looking man murmured it offhandedly, and the woman went still.
The crash had rattled Aslan's head. A mind that would normally have been sharp was dulled by pain and repeated impacts.
So he said something that could easily be misunderstood. A faint smile slipped out. The words came a little unmoored from context.
"Besides... does one person saving another really require a reason?"
The woman inhaled at the words delivered from so close. Aslan felt her breath and let his eyes fall shut.
He closed his eyes, and before he knew it, he was asleep.
When her wrist came free, the woman stepped back and looked at him.
She studied the sleeping man for a long moment. Then she sheathed her sword.