Who Said There Were Only Three?
One wrong move and I'm actually going to die here.
Wiping the blood splattered across his face, Arthur glared straight ahead.
The man who had charged onto the battlefield and cut off his path filled his entire field of vision. From the man's perfectly upright stance, Arthur could sense no opening whatsoever. His bearing alone set him apart from the ragtag rabble swarming around them.
This was an opponent Arthur couldn't confidently beat even one-on-one. And on top of that, having to hold off wave after wave of mercenaries meant his mental focus was bleeding away with every passing second.
Whether he'd noticed Arthur gradually running out of steam or not, the man clicked his tongue.
"You've had the misfortune of serving a poor master."
Beneath the stiff tone lay an unmistakable thread of pity. Even as he caught his breath, Arthur curled his lips into a sneer.
"Is that your way of introducing yourself?"
"Quite the foul mouth, for a son of the imperial palace."
"You clearly haven't met a young master with a truly filthy mouth, or you wouldn't be saying that."
The words tumbled out of him on instinct, but somewhere in the back of his mind, an uneasy thought nagged at him—that he'd just sounded exactly like Arendt.
There was no time to wallow in pointless reflections, though. Arthur parried a blade flying in from his side and cleaved a mercenary's throat in a single stroke.
The man's comrades didn't so much as flinch as he dropped dead in an instant. They trampled right over his corpse, surging forward in a never-ending tide.
Laios seemed to have already pushed his way near the keep, and Licht—there was no telling how far he'd been driven, because he was nowhere in sight.
Damn it all.
Gripping his hilt tight, Arthur raised his sword aura, mowed down the mercenaries charging at him in one sweep, and kicked off the ground toward the man he'd been trading words with.
Claaaang!
Once more, two blades crashed together with tremendous force.
Arthur was thrown backward, but he rode the recoil and pressed his attack even harder.
Several exchanges flew by. Absorbed in the enemy before him, Arthur felt a threat prickle at his instincts and whipped his head down just in time—a spear burst out from behind him, grazing his cheek by a hair's breadth.
Seizing on his broken stance, another attack came flying at him from the front.
"This is impossible, I swear!"
The foul words finally burst out of him. Arthur lopped off the spearhead, ducked his head to evade the strike, and blocked the blade come rushing at him yet again.
Kaaang!
Sword met sword, and a harsh screech of steel tore through the air. The two men locked into a contest of strength, each shoving against the other with everything they had.
Their skill was evenly matched—but Arthur, already worn down from fighting countless enemies, was naturally at a disadvantage. Step by step, he began to give ground.
He gritted his teeth and held on, but holding on was all he could manage.
A calm voice drifted over the crossed blades.
"You've held out well. So give up now. No one will fault you for it."
Arthur said nothing.
"I say this out of respect for a young life. For three men alone to take this fortress is impossible."
The soothing, child-coaxing tone kept droning on, while between them the swords ground against each other with an ugly skreek, skreek.
"Your commander's strength is well known to us. But facing our own captain is another matter entirely."
"……"
"That you ran all the way here knowing full well it was a trap, all to save a single apprentice knight—that devotion commands my respect. Still, it is the outcome of one's actions that separates courage from recklessness."
In other words: what the knights were doing was recklessness, nothing more and nothing less.
"Surrender, and I will do my utmost to see that your life at least is spared."
"Let me just say one thing first."
But what came out of Arthur's mouth was neither a surrender nor a curse—it was a cold, cutting laugh.
"Who said anything about three?"
"……What?"
For a moment, the answer came back blank, as if the man couldn't comprehend what he'd just heard.
Arthur didn't bother suppressing the strange, delicious thrill that ran through him. Twisting his lips into a smirk, he let the tension drain from his body and let the enemy's blade slide harmlessly past his side.
The man was no pushover, of course—he recovered his composure in an instant and tracked Arthur's movement with his eyes. But then, the very next moment—
Thud.
A sword flew in from an entirely unexpected direction and skewered him through the heart.
"……!"
The life drained from his stunned, horrified face in the span of a breath.
The man who had tormented Arthur for so long collapsed dead just like that, gone in an instant. The mercenaries around him were just as bewildered by the sudden turn.
"Wh-what the—?!"
"Where did that even come from?"
The one who had felled the man was a woman draped in a shabby cloak.
"Sir Arthur, am I late?"
"You timed it perfectly. Thank you, Commander Diana."
Diana flashed a bright smile as she flicked the blood from her blade, and Arthur smiled back.
At the same moment, screams erupted from another direction.
"AAAAARGH!"
"Damn it, who are these people now?"
The knights who had slipped in alongside her had begun their work. Casting off her ragged cloak, Helen drew her sword and bellowed her command.
"Subdue the villains!"
"Don't let a single one escape!"
These were the same mercenaries who had been floundering, unable to finish off even one man—Arthur. They stood no chance of responding properly to knights who had suddenly revealed themselves in their midst.
Watching her subordinates tear into the mercenaries with ferocious momentum, Diana let out a short sigh.
"I can't say I care for this method…… but there's no help for it. You've been through a lot, Sir Arthur."
"Not at all, Commander. I only did what needed doing."
The cleanup on Licht's side had surely begun by now as well.
Arthur glanced down at the corpse sprawled at his feet.
Turns out it wasn't a bad master who made his life hard—it was a bad junior.
Seeing as most of this damned, audacious operation had sprung from that cursed apprentice knight's head.
It was a little unfortunate that the man who should have heard this died without ever getting the chance.
There was no question about it—Arendt von Eckhart had been the one to draw his sword first. The werewolf, too, seemed to have moved on pure impulse, swept up in the chaos Arendt had staged.
Even if it meant the two sides would inevitably cross blades, all they had to do was wait a little longer, and Laios would have joined them and turned the situation to their advantage.
Any reasonable person would agree: there was no rational cause to start a fight so recklessly.
Reason. Yes—if one thought reasonably.
But the scene before his eyes now could not be explained by anything resembling reason.
Below the fortress walls, the mercenaries were being helplessly crushed by a mysterious force that had appeared out of nowhere. And directly in front of him, Laios de Winfried was slowly pushing himself up off the ground.
From the tip of the blade in his hand, blood not yet dry dripped down, drop by drop. Proof of the countless enemies he had cut down on his way here.
"Wow…… seriously, you crawled up the fortress wall? You're not a monkey, you know."
Into the depths of Blake's confusion, Arendt's awed voice wormed its way in.
Laios answered with perfect calm.
"The situation looked urgent."
Only then did the whole chain of events slowly begin to make sense.
The intelligence itself had been wrong from the very start—the part about only three men coming to this place.
The reason Arendt von Eckhart had picked a fight knowing full well the odds, and the reason he had kept provoking them relentlessly throughout the battle—it had all been to hold their eyes on him.
So that no one would notice the imperial knights infiltrating in secret and joining the fight.
Blake's lips parted.
"Impossible."
Even the meticulous Rebecca had believed, without a shadow of doubt, that only three enemies were headed this way. Even now, her eyes watching the imperial palace had never once strayed.
If the imperial knights had shown so much as a hint of slipping out the palace gates, Rebecca would have been the very first to notice.
So then how—
"Hey, Pervert Mask Number Two."
As if he'd read the thought right out of Blake's head, Arendt—who had flopped down flat on the ground—burst into a snickering laugh.
"How many people do you think go in and out of the palace gates every single day?"
"What did you say?"
"Officials commuting to work, valets, maids, merchants…… No fewer than a hundred a day, at the very least."
However thorough Rebecca was, identifying every single one of their identities was simply impossible. Slipping disguised knights in among them and sending them out of the palace was hardly a difficult feat.
They had been blindsided, completely and thoroughly.
Never in his wildest dreams had he imagined that imperial knights, of all people, would stoop to the kind of underhanded trick suited for gutter thugs and mercenaries.
"Besides, the one who bolted out of the palace was the Commander Laios himself, so of course you never doubted it. It's exactly what he'd do."
That was Laios's reputation, as the whole world knew it. A man who braved any danger for his comrades, who never weighed his own life against justice—the knight of knights.
"After the way they tore through gambling dens, Sir Arthur's and Sir Licht's faces would've been known already, too."
Word that those three had stormed out of the palace and were racing here could only have pulled every eye straight toward them.
"And honestly, it's not so strange to be skeptical that the imperial family would bother rescuing me. Like Rebecca said—I'm not worth that much to them."
This reason, too, was simple enough.
Because he was Arendt von Eckhart—the imperial knights' one and only black sheep, their incorrigible runaway seed.
He might rub shoulders with the crown prince these days, but the mountain of infamy he'd built up over the years wasn't about to vanish overnight.
What's more, Arendt had ventured far too deep into enemy territory. Given the risk, abandoning him was an option with very real persuasive power.
That was why Rebecca had concluded that Laios must have acted on his own. But never had she imagined it would happen this fast—or that the entire imperial knight order would come pouring in.
"Commander Kendrick headed for that wolf's homeland, so their side must be wrapped up by now too. Word is, he ordered the whole village flattened the moment the security force or anyone from the palace started sniffing around. I'd bet anything the herb gatherers heading up the mountain never dreamed the disguised knights were among them."
The one who had proposed penning the knights up separately and destroying them one by one—that, too, had been Arendt.
The listener at the time had certainly been Rebecca. But in truth, it had been a message meant for the knights themselves.
Arthur and Licht go wild and draw the eyes. The knights slipped in among them split off in both directions and blow the scattered mercenaries to pieces.
Grit.
Beneath the mask, the sound of grinding teeth was unmistakably audible. Gripping his sword with all his strength, Blake glared at Laios.
Laios, in turn, took up a fighting stance and quietly met Blake's gaze. He was poised to lunge the instant Blake so much as twitched.
He had been played, completely, by that greenhorn brat. He himself—and Rebecca as well.
His whole body trembled with humiliation. Blood surged up in the fist clenched white around his sword.
There was no way left to turn the situation around.
His handpicked subordinates, the ones facing Arthur and Licht, were surely dead already. The mercenaries could never stand against the knight order, and the interior of the fortress was no doubt under their control by now.
And Rebecca—she must have been taken as well.
Even if he cut down Laios here and killed Arendt on the spot, it would mean nothing.
Worst of all, once reinforcements converged on this position, the one at a disadvantage would be none other than Blake himself.
Arendt no longer looked capable of fighting—but Warren and Laios still appeared to have strength to spare. Cutting the two of them down in one stroke would have been beyond even him.
His deliberation did not take long.
Clutching his sword in a white-knuckled grip, Blake swung it in a surprise strike aimed straight at Arendt.
Warren and Laios threw themselves forward without a moment's hesitation, cutting off his path.
BOOOOM!
The blade strike meeting Laios's sword erupted in a violent storm of force. The flagstones underfoot crumbled to dust, and the wall, unable to bear the impact, splintered and cracked.
When Arendt—who had raised an arm to shield his face from the swirling blast of wind—lifted his head again, Blake was already spinning on his heel and fleeing in the opposite direction.
"You're not going anywhere!"
Laios shot forward in pursuit.
But Arendt's hand clamped onto his collar.
"Let him go."
"What?"
Startled, Laios looked back—then quickly collected himself and whipped his head around to check where Blake had stood. But he had already vanished without a trace.
Only then did Arendt loosen his grip on the commander's collar.
The commander, who had been about to demand an explanation, caught sight of his subordinate's face and stopped short, the words dying in his throat.
It was because Arendt, staring after the spot where the enemy had vanished, was wearing a cold, twisted smile.
"If he's serious about running, we can't catch him. It was the same with Vincent."
"……"
"And they'll come to us eventually anyway, so there's no need to wear ourselves out. I can more or less see how they'll move next. Let's not break a sweat in the middle of the night."