Who Says I'm Saving Him?
"Who's there."
Betchel swung the point of his sword away from Arthur and leveled it at Arendt.
Perched on the wall, Arendt tilted his head with a crooked grin.
"The dashing knight who appears at the moment of crisis."
At that glib attitude, Betchel's brow furrowed deep. Arthur's expression had gone equally sour — and he was supposedly on the same side.
Arendt glanced sideways at Arthur and added, "Well, to some people I might be a traitorous little bastard."
Reading the barb laced into those words, Arthur felt the last sliver of relief he'd been holding onto evaporate on the spot.
Betchel's frown deepened further as he muttered darkly, "So you're this young knight's companion. Here to rescue him, are you? But even with you joining in, it will accomplish noth—"
"Oh, that's a misunderstanding."
Arendt waved his hand briskly, cutting the man off mid-sentence, then tilted his head with utter nonchalance and let it slip out. "Rescue him? Me? That person?"
"……"
"Why would I? There's not a single pretty thing about him. And I don't owe him that kind of loyalty."
For a heartbeat, even Betchel seemed at a loss for words.
The other enemies, who had been pinning Arthur down with their blades, likewise had no idea what to do — they simply darted their eyes back and forth between the suddenly appeared Arendt and Betchel.
Arendt studied their flustered faces for a long moment, then twisted his lips. "But I suppose you all still have a job to do."
"What?"
"The moon's awfully bright tonight."
Arendt lifted his chin and gave Betchel a careless nod. Bathed in moonlight, his golden eyes gleamed cold and sharp.
"It makes your faces wonderfully easy to see, too. I could just run straight to the Imperial Palace and describe every detail of you — faces, clothes, the lot. And who knows? Maybe someone would pay me a reward for it."
Betchel's face froze solid.
With a short, flickering laugh, Arendt rose to his feet. Standing perfectly balanced atop the wall, straight-backed, he looked down at Arthur.
"Senior, I don't know — run for your life and do it well, or just die right there. Either way, I'm off."
And with that, Arendt leapt clean over the wall.
Tap-tap-tap.
The sound of him sprinting away rang out through the quiet alley.
The first to move was Arthur. Gritting his teeth, he seized the moment his enemies' attention wavered and knocked aside in one stroke every blade aimed at him.
Claaaang!
Staggered by the unexpected attack, the men stumbled backward. Arthur kicked off the ground, vaulted the wall in a single motion, and tore off in the direction Arendt had vanished.
Betchel's grip tightened around the hilt of his sword. "Catch them. Take them alive. I'll skin them myself while they're still breathing."
"Yes, sir!"
The men, jolted back to their senses, snatched up their weapons one by one and gave chase. Betchel glared with sunken eyes at the place where his subordinates and the two knights had disappeared.
"A shallow little trick……"
"How did you even get here?"
Arthur shouted the question as he sprinted after Arendt, who answered without so much as a glance back.
"That's classified."
"You lunatic! You can't just climb over it like that! Unauthorized departure from the palace means summary execution, you idiot!"
"Oh, come on, they wouldn't actually execute me. I do have the small credit of saving a man who was ready to throw himself on the ground and die for no reason."
"……"
Arendt's voice was already packed to the brim with sarcasm and contrariness, but tonight it carried a peculiar undercurrent of irritation, plain for anyone to hear.
On that particular point, Arthur couldn't have argued even with a hundred mouths, so he simply clamped his jaw shut.
Arendt shot a quick glance backward. The presence of their pursuers, having caught up faster than expected, was vividly close. He clicked his tongue in displeasure.
"Tsk. Faster than I thought."
"What's the plan?"
"Good question. They've seen both our faces now, so running is pointless."
"So we have to finish this, one way or another."
"Then I'll see you in a bit."
Instead of answering, Arthur simply quickened his pace until his shoulder was flush with Arendt's. And together, the two of them slowed their steps — just slightly.
Four enemies in total were trailing behind them.
At the next fork in the road, without a word of warning, the two kicked off the ground and split in opposite directions.
The pursuers floundered for a moment, then divided in half and set off after each of them.
Arendt glanced once toward the side Arthur had taken, then confirmed who was chasing him. "Ugh. Who'd have thought I'd end up brawling in some back alley."
Hand on his sword hilt, Arendt slowed to a deliberate stop. When he abruptly planted himself, the pursuers faltered in confusion — and Arendt drove into them at full speed before that hesitation could recover.
It wasn't a move born of any particular plan. He was simply operating on a rough guess as to how the original Arendt must have fought.
The instant his first stride landed, his half-drawn sword caught the brilliant moonlight, sliding smoothly free of its scabbard to carve a light arc through the air. And then the hardest part of the hilt — together with his fist — slammed into the face of the man charging at him head-on.
Crack!
One went down without even a scream.
The next instant, a blade came down toward Arendt's shoulder. He wrenched his body aside in a hurry. Whoosh — the edge grazed past his chest by a hair.
"I'll carve off your arm so you can never lift a sword again."
"Pass."
To that vicious curse, Arendt gave a light, breezy reply.
Clang!
Their swords collided. The man tried to force Arendt back through sheer power — only to find that his own blade would not budge. One of Arendt's hands gripped his blade's forte; the other had clamped onto the man's own edge.
"What the—?"
Then, in the next breath, a piercing wave of cold surged up, and the man's fingers let go before he even knew it.
Clatter!
The sword hit the hard ground with a metallic ring and went rolling. The man reflexively checked his weapon — and the blood drained from his face. Somewhere in that instant, it had become a lump of pure white ice. If he hadn't let go in time, his hand would have been an ice sculpture right along with it.
"That's the Frost-Tinged—"
The cry of shock never reached its end, because Arendt's fist drove into his solar plexus with a heavy thud.
Having dispatched two men in the blink of an eye, Arendt sheathed his sword in one clean motion.
"Not bad at all."
He'd always been confident with his body, but feeling this light and responsive even mid-fight was genuinely surprising. It was thanks to the original Arendt having forged his frame as a swordsman — the talent that had won him a place in the Imperial Knights at so young an age was apparently no lie.
"Now, then. Next up is……"
Kicking the fallen men aside into a heap, Arendt cast his gaze down the alley.
Thud. Thud.
Footsteps of a different weight carved themselves out of the darkness. He waited a moment, in no hurry at all, as a hulking figure walked slowly out into the moonlight.
"So you had no intention of running from the start."
"Interpret it however you like."
"It was expected you would follow this man rather than flee — but I hadn't counted on you being the one he'd follow."
"That's a bit of an overestimate."
Arendt shoved his hands deep into his pockets and answered with studied indifference.
Betchel's grip tightened around his sword.
Something's wrong with this one.
He thought back to the moment the young man had first popped up. Every gesture had oozed the particular fussiness and irritation of a sharp, high-strung person — with flashes of youthful recklessness to match his unlined face, no less. And yet now, face to face, the only thing he could feel radiating from the young knight was a calm, settled chill.
It was a genuinely subtle difference. And yet to Betchel it looked exactly as though the man had swapped out his face entirely.
And besides……
Betchel rolled only his eyes, glancing at the sword lying on the ground. From tip to hilt, it was sheathed in pure white ice.
"……It's you. The one who reported us to His exalted Imperial Majesty."
The certainty was already baked into the accusation. Arendt didn't bother answering. Betchel's brow knotted tighter.
"That plan was communicated only to the central leadership and those who move with them directly. And that item of yours —"
Betchel glanced once more at the sword on the ground, then shifted his gaze back to Arendt. His eyes came to rest on the young knight's gloves: leather gauntlets covering wrist and palm, with white fingertips left bare. At a glance, they looked like perfectly ordinary equipment.
"The Frost-Tinged Touch. The only people who know it exists are our own."
Arendt simply met his gaze in silence, eyes empty of any emotion at all.
Betchel ground the words out between his teeth. "Are you a traitor?"
"Well…… from your side of the fence, I suppose that's not exactly wrong."
Arendt scratched at his bangs and answered airily. "So what are you going to do about it? You said it yourself earlier, didn't you? Tell me who leaked the information, and I'll let you live. Planning to honor that?"
"It would be lovely if I could. Unfortunately, we don't leave traitors breathing. That's the rule."
Shing.
Betchel's sword drank the air again. On the face of a man who had been nothing but boundless, businesslike cold — as if merely doing the job assigned to him — overt fury and bloodlust now settled like a shadow.
"I'll be taking the Frost-Tinged Touch back with me."
For an instant, Betchel's figure seemed to vanish from the spot entirely. The next moment, he was standing directly in front of Arendt's nose, both hands raised, his sword crashing straight down toward the young knight's head.
Arendt twisted sideways. Whoosh! The blade tore through empty air with a vicious hiss.
For the barest fraction of a second, Betchel's eyebrows lifted — then he snapped his wrist, twisting the sword to run Arendt's body through. But that strike too did nothing but carve pointlessly across the night sky. Arendt slipped away from it with another light, easy motion.
"That's the Shadow of the Strong, isn't it?"
The clear voice rang out right beside the ears of a Betchel gone rigid as stone. He turned his head slowly. He could no longer hide the shock and bewilderment on his face. Arendt stood under the moonlight, regarding him with an expression that might, to a careless eye, look like pure indifference.
"It erases your presence and boosts your physical abilities, right? Anyone who faces it blind gets cut down without being able to lift a finger."
"You……"
Betchel's face contorted. Clenching his fist, he hurled himself at Arendt — but Arendt retreated in a smooth leap and evaded the sword with room to spare.
"It seems like the perfect tool for an ambush, honestly. Overwhelm with raw power and a blurred presence, ride that momentum straight into a clean subjugation. But if you fail at that stage —"
Even as he spoke, Arendt rolled his eyes slowly, dissecting Betchel where he stood. The man's rage-flushed face flickered between scalding red and deathly pale, over and over.
A smirk tugged at the corner of Arendt's mouth. "It gets rather inconvenient for you all around, doesn't it, Mr. Betchel?"
Every word was aimed, with unmistakable intent, straight at the softest spot.
Betchel ground his molars together, kicked off the earth, and charged. "I'll shut that mouth of yours for good!"
This time Arendt drew his sword and met him head-on.
BOOOOM!
The two slammed into each other, and a colossal shriek of steel ripped the night apart.
Arendt took the full weight of Betchel's blade with his whole body and let out a short groan. Watching the young knight's arms shudder and tremble, Betchel snarled through his teeth.
"Your powers of observation are quite good — but nothing gets solved by observation alone. You die by my hand. Tonight."
Arendt said nothing. He simply curled the corner of his mouth upward — an unmistakable sneer.
Unable to stomach it, Betchel shoved him away with brutal force. Arendt didn't bother resisting, giving ground backward before springing off the earth again and charging back in at blistering speed.
Kang! Kaang!
Arendt's swift blade pressed hard, again and again, but Betchel held firm as if he were some massive boulder. He answered with cold composure.
"You can't take me on with strength. You know that as well as I do."
Unlike Betchel's artifact, which raised his overall physical capacities across the board, the Frost-Tinged Touch demanded direct contact — the name said it all. Against a gap in raw physicality this overwhelming, it simply couldn't be used efficiently.
Stepping back a single pace, Arendt wrapped his sword in a hazy blade aura. Betchel answered in kind — a blood-red sword qi, like living flame, etched itself along the length of his thick blade.
Betchel bellowed, huge and terrible. "Come, then! Green knight!"
Arendt gripped his sword with both hands and brought it down with everything he had. The two met head-on — and naturally, it was Arendt who began to give way in the contest of strength.
Grrrind. His feet, braced against the crushing force, slid slowly backward. It was the same situation Arthur had faced minutes ago.
Betchel let out a short sigh. "Pathetic as this is to say, with skill like that you talked an awful lot of trash. For a moment there, I'm almost ashamed I actually wavered."
"Sorry about that. Talking trash is my special talent."
Even as his overburdened hands shook violently, Arendt flashed that crooked smile.
And in that exact instant, Betchel felt killing intent at his back.
His nape went ice-cold. A scream of raw danger tore through his instincts. He flung Arendt off — and without waiting even to see the young knight tumble across the ground, he whipped around.
But it was already too late.
Squelch.
Arthur's sword plunged into Betchel's heart. The eyes that had blown wide in disbelief lost their light in an instant. Arthur drew the blade out of his torso with a single wet pull.
The lifeless body hit the ground with a heavy, dead crash.
Without sparing so much as a glance for Betchel's corpse, Arthur looked fleetingly at Arendt, who was shakily picking himself up.
"Hey. Head still attached?"
"Of course it is."
At that familiar voice, thick with irritation, Arthur clicked his tongue. But that lasted only a moment before a bitter smile crept onto his lips.
"Well, isn't that a shame."
"Don't mention it."
Arendt shot back flatly and spat out the blood pooled in his mouth.