A Grand Spectacle
Silence.
Nothing but silence.
A cold stillness hung in the air, as if even God Luce had shut his mouth.
It was only then that Laios realized he had fallen into a trap.
That was roughly how the passage went.
It was because he recalled that line so quickly that Arendt realized he had been caught inside the trap laid within the barrier.
Not that it helped much.
He could have spared a quip like 'Tch, a barrier, of all things' but the situation didn't exactly call for it.
"You cheap, shady old bastard……."
Arendt swore under his breath as he steadied his sword.
No enemy was visible anywhere.
They must have used an Invisibility Scroll.
"……!"
A blade came flying at his throat again, and Arendt knocked it aside with his own.
KAANG!
With a dull clash, whoever had been blocked by his sword stumbled backward.
In the brief moment he allowed himself relief, a sinister chill brushed his flank. He twisted away in a hurry, but the invisible dagger hissed past, slicing a long garrison across his arm.
"Aw, shi——"
Pitter-patter.
Crimson drops of blood fell to the ground.
He had no time to feel the pain, though. The whum of a blade closing in again forced him to scramble backward.
Even amid all that, he couldn't help being a little impressed with himself for dodging on pure instinct alone.
'They're aiming cleverly around the vitals.'
It seemed these people wanted to toy with Arendt rather than kill him outright.
He parried another dagger.
KYAANG!
A clamorous ring of steel tore through the air, and in its wake his momentarily scrambled head settled into calm.
'Think.'
Of course, calming down didn't mean the situation wasn't still dire.
Arendt cast a sideways glance at the dagger lying on the ground. Judging from where the attacks had come and when, there were two swordsmen, at least one throwing daggers — and counting the one who'd charge in dagger-in-hand, at least four in total.
The problem remained that he still couldn't see where the attacks were coming from.
There was exactly one way to break an Invisibility Scroll.
The trouble was that it was a move only someone like Laios or another knight commander could pull off.
'A violent burst of mana.'
Arendt gripped his sword tightly.
Laios had shattered a barrier outright by unleashing fierce sword qi to tear through the very air, then subdued the enemies using Invisibility Scrolls.
But for Arendt, whose mana reserves were a fraction of that, it was a fantasy.
He did have other means, technically. He just didn't much care for them.
'Not even sure it'd work, anyway.'
Even as his mind raced, the enemy gave him no breathing room. At the sudden presence lunging from the front, Arendt leaned back — but there was an enemy behind him as well. A sharp sting, and this time a long wound opened across his left cheek.
It meant his window to hesitate was short.
"Tch."
Arendt steadied his sword, then sharpened every sense he had to a needle's point.
Thud.
He felt them kick off the ground and rush in from every direction at once.
In that instant, he drew up his mana, and the frostbite chill he had grown so familiar with spread through him. Thin ice bloomed from his hand, creeping slyly outward, expanding its domain until — before he knew it — his entire blade was wrapped in pristine white.
The moment the assassins closed to within arm's reach, Arendt wasted no time on the opening and swung his sword in one great arc.
A blinding-white trajectory split the air.
CRACKLE.
Faintly, the sound of something freezing burrowed into his ears.
And then, a moment later.
A few steps away from Arendt, assassins wearing dumbfounded expressions emerged into view.
Two of them, disguised as royal guardsmen with swords in hand, and two more dressed as servants, daggers drawn. Four in all.
Arendt slowly squared his stance.
Spread out around the spot where he stood, a flawless white frost had settled over the ground. Even his own bloodstains on the earth had frozen solid.
This was not the kind of skill a newly minted apprentice knight should have been displaying.
At the sight, the assassins couldn't help but feel their spines run cold.
A breath slipped out through the gap in Arendt's lips, one that hardly matched the moment.
"Oh. It actually worked."
"……"
At that perfectly bland remark, delivered so out of place, the assassins went blank for an instant.
Oblivious or not, Arendt simply flexed his hand open and closed a few times, turning his freshly frozen white blade this way and that as if it were some fascinating novelty.
"Insane. Why is the floor frozen?"
"……Magic? No — sword qi?"
One of the assassins dressed as a royal guard muttered in a daze.
Only then did Arendt properly look at the assassins who had surrounded him.
"Good. That's that, then."
"What?"
"You saw it, so now I can't exactly let you go home all nice and polite."
Crack. Crack.
Arendt tilted his head side to side, popping his neck.
Ah, that line came out a little off…… the thought struck him a beat too late, but it was already far too late to take back.
"I'm not great at holding back, so even if you die, don't go blaming me."
"……Kid's got an awfully high opinion of himself."
The assassin who seemed to be their leader flicked a glance at his comrades.
Their shock lasted only a moment; they too recovered their composure and reset their stances.
The Invisibility Scrolls were useless now, but their opponent was still just one man. And not even a full knight — a barely seasoned apprentice with almost no real combat experience.
The instant Arendt loosened his body into a relaxed readiness, the assassins kicked off the ground once more.
Arendt twisted aside and let the attack slide past him with ease. The instant a man's back flashed open through the sweep of a blade, he drove his fist forward and slammed it square into the assassin's face.
THWACK — the crack of breaking cartilage — and the man's face froze over white in the same breath. Struck full-on, he couldn't even manage a scream; he simply clutched his frozen features and rolled on the ground.
"Ah, damn it."
At the sensation of mana draining away all at once, Arendt's face went pale. His reserves were already in shambles thanks to the strike that had neutralized the Invisibility Scroll.
But there was no room to spare himself a moment's rest.
He dodged the assassin charging in from the right, twisted his body, and drove his sword through the one on the opposite side.
Shunk.
The man whose throat had been pierced sprayed blood and collapsed, anticlimactically limp.
Hot blood spattered across his frozen-cold skin.
Arendt ducked low.
Whum.
An assassin's sword skimmed just barely over his head.
Rolling along the ground, Arendt seized the man's ankle in that split second — and in the next, the assassin's leg had turned into a hard block of ice.
"Huh?"
The assassin's eyes went wide.
The moment after that —
THWACK!
A heavy blow slammed into his solar plexus. He slid quietly to the ground, and now only one remained.
The last assassin, catching Arendt's gaze, staggered a step backward.
Arendt flashed a grin and adjusted his grip on his sword.
"You're the one who put up the barrier, aren't you?"
"……"
The assassin dressed as a royal guard shuffled back another pace. But that, too, lasted only a moment — apparently ashamed of his own nerves, he gritted his teeth and threw himself at Arendt.
"Die!"
Arendt raised his sword and met him head-on.
CLAAANG!
Their blades collided with a violent shriek of steel. Arendt locked both feet firmly into the ground and held, while the assassin pushed back with raw, unyielding force.
No — he tried to.
As he ground his teeth and strained, he soon realized that something had gone terribly wrong.
'It's cold.'
The temperature around him had plunged all at once. The longer he held out, the more the creeping chill leached the heat out of his body, drop by drop.
Until at last — clack, clack — his teeth began chattering audibly, top and bottom.
Having watched this for a moment, Arendt remarked flatly,
"Keep that up and you'll freeze to death."
"What?"
Their locked blades were slowly icing over. By the time the assassin noticed and tried frantically to pull away, the cold flowing along the steel had already turned the hand gripping it a dead white.
The assassin's face drained of color.
"Damn it, what IS this! You little hellspawn, what in the world are you——!"
Into his struggling nape, Arendt's hand-blade drove in with a solid thock.
The man crumpled where he stood.
With even the last opponent silenced, Arendt caught his breath and wiped away the blood trailing down his cheek.
"Ha. What a spectacle."
The one with the pierced throat had spilled his blood and gone stiff as a board; the one with the caved-in face was still clutching his frozen features, kicking and squirming. The two who had simply keeled over unconscious lay sprawled where they'd fallen, each with a forearm or a shin turned stark white.
Arendt stared blankly at the scene he had produced himself, and it was only then that he noticed the sounds of the world seeping back in — the whisper of wind, the murmur of distant conversation.
His head throbbed dully, no doubt because he'd drained his mana to the dregs. He wanted nothing more than to sink down right there and heave, but he forced his body to hold through sheer will alone.
Staring blankly into empty space as he steadied his breathing, Arendt slowly lowered his gaze back to the ground.
"Tsk."
The broken bodies of the assassins came into view.
Had he not killed them, the situation would have ended with him, without a doubt, six feet under. There was no reason to pity these men, and no reason to feel squeamish about having cut a person down.
Arendt shook off the unpleasant sensation lingering at his fingertips with a flick of his blade.
More pressing than any of that was the matter of what to do about this situation now.
'Now, then…… what to do.'
Who stood behind this unexpected ambush was self-evident. Surely there was some way to turn it to his advantage.
At that exact moment, a piercing scream split the air.
"KYAAAAAH! A man's — a man's been killed!"
"Ah……"
A maid carrying a basket of laundry had gone ghost-white, shrieking at the top of her lungs.
Arendt glanced down at his own attire, then stole another look at the bodies sprawled across the ground.
His arm was still bleeding freely, leaking red in a steady trickle. One sleeve of his uniform had been dyed crimson through and through, and blood — flung from the man he'd just killed — was smeared across his face.
Which of the two, himself or the bodies on the grass, looked more frightening at a glance? There was no need to think it over.
Besides, the assassins had infiltrated disguised as servants and royal guardsmen.
Which meant —
"A mad knight has killed a man!"
……Even hearing that, Arendt had nothing he could say for himself just yet.
He pressed a hand to his forehead.
The maid, flinging her laundry aside in sheer panic, fled for her life. It was obvious that before long, the royal guard and every knight in the vicinity would come swarming.
"Sigh. Life, honestly……"
He slumped down onto the ruined lawn and looked around.
"Imagine that. A full-blown marquess, and all……"
This was the sort of man who couldn't control his temper and would take it out on a mere servant — so sending assassins over nothing more than a bruised ego wasn't the least bit strange, when he thought about it.
They were the ones who had picked the fight first.
Which meant, naturally, he had no choice but to answer in kind.