The Assassin's Last Chance
"Finally..."
Deep in a cave the bandits had taken for a stronghold, a man's lips curved into a crescent in the dark.
He was utterly ordinary to look at, the sort of face that slipped from memory the moment you turned away. The bandits called him Jack. He had joined them only a month ago, a greenhorn by every appearance they could see. His true trade was assassination — and not the common kind. He belonged to the guild known as the Shadow Blade, and he had climbed to the level of a 3-Star Knight.
"Guh—!"
His pitch-black sword took the head from a bandit already sprawled on the ground. Corpses lay thick around that one, but Jack paid them no mind. He only stared at the mouth of the cave.
"How in the world is he still alive?"
Waiting in the dark for the man who would come, he muttered it to himself. Lucas. His target, and an enemy he could never forgive.
Jack had killed him. He was certain of it. His own blade had ripped the man's belly open from behind, and he had driven steel into that dying heart until the last breath was gone. He would stake more than ten years as an assassin that not a single step of the work had gone wrong.
So he had returned to the guild proud, convinced the mission was finished — the delicate task of assassinating the infamous eldest son, carried out in the very lands of House Roenheim, a knightly house of great renown. He reported the success to the guild, and to the client as well.
Then, only a few days later, word struck like lightning from a clear sky. An investigator the guild had sent to confirm the contract testified that Lucas was alive and well.
Jack protested furiously. He even heaped insults on the guild and the client together, demanding to know whether this was some scheme to cheat him of his fee. It was not. Lucas really was alive. Unbelievable as it seemed, the truth came out soon enough: mere days after the assassination, he had carried out a mission for the ducal house.
Jack scrambled for an excuse. He insisted the family had put forward a stand-in to hide the fact that Lucas was dead. No one believed him. Thinking it over, even he had to admit the story was a stretch too far to swallow.
It was no exaggeration to say the entire Empire knew how House Roenheim treated Lucas — the eldest son cast off as a wastrel, a rotten breed openly scorned among the nobility despite the terrifying weight of his house. Why would the ducal family go so far as to field a double just to keep a man like that alive?
In the end he had no choice but to accept that Lucas lived, and in a single moment he became a liar.
What followed was a nightmare in itself. The client canceled the contract outright, claiming their trust in the guild had shattered, and demanded an enormous indemnity on top of it. The assassination guild was thrown into uproar. They meant to dispose of him entirely for destroying their reputation with a false report, and Jack could not simply sit and wait for that end.
He went straight to the guild master and dropped to his knees. For the guild's honor, he begged one last chance: this time he would bring back Lucas's head, and he would take no payment for it.
By a mercy he hardly deserved, the guild master — a comrade of ten years — granted the plea.
Humiliated, Jack moved at once. First he wandered the territory and left traces of himself behind, fretting the whole while that the gap in time might keep anyone from noticing. Fortunately, it was not long before word reached him that someone was investigating those traces.
Time passed. In the meanwhile he took shelter with a band of brigands he had happened upon. A rabble of drifters gathered from every corner of the Empire was the perfect place to hide what he was. Even after his trail had been looked into, Lucas remained silent for a long while, but Jack did not grow anxious. He waited quietly for the moment. Patience was the virtue an assassin needed most.
And at last, today, his quarry took the bait. Lucas appeared at the very place Jack had been waiting, with nothing but one clumsy escort knight at his side.
Jack had a fair guess why the young man was examining the ruined village first. He was hunting Jack, and dealing with the bandits here along the way. Knowing that, Jack had decided to build a stage for himself. He cleared the bandits out first. They were people he would have had to dispose of once the assassination was done anyway, and removing them was no great labor.
Perhaps a month of taking on every menial chore had been worth something after all. Slipping a lethal poison into the morning meal had not even required a clever trick, and the ones who realized too late and drew steel were no match for a man who had reached the level of a 3-Star Knight.
"You bastard—!"
The last of them twisted his face and drew his blade. He was no more than an apprentice knight, but he possessed an aura core, and in this heap of trash that had been enough to play at being the boss. Jack took that boss's head in a single stroke. With a dull thud, the severed head struck the floor. He looked at the man's final expression and felt no guilt at all.
"The preparations are done."
In the cave gone suddenly still, he watched the entrance. He did not have to wait long. Lucas appeared at the hour Jack had expected, glancing about with his knight. They had clearly thought the place would be crawling with bandits, and the unnatural quiet left their confusion plain on their faces.
Watching them, Jack shifted his grip without a sound. A curved blade, shaped like a crescent moon. Then he measured their level once more. The pulse of mana coming off them was pitifully faint. Lucas had not even formed an aura core — a complete novice. The escort knight beside him had not reached two stars either.
Even so, Jack did not relax. He still did not understand how Lucas had survived. Until that mystery was solved, he could not lower his guard.
"Let's go in."
Lucas's voice reached him. Knowing nothing, the young man walked calmly into the bandits' cave. Step by step, those footsteps drew closer. A few more, and he would be inside the range where death could be delivered for certain. Jack held his breath and waited, for the single stroke that would take the man's head.
At last, the moment came. Lucas stepped, utterly unguarded, right in front of the shadow where Jack was hidden.
"—!"
Jack did not miss it. A blade dyed black with aura surged forward as if swallowing even the light, and he was already certain. This one stroke would drop Lucas's head. He did not doubt it for an instant.
And yet—
A sharp crack of impact rang out, and the killing stroke was stopped. Since when had those eyes been on him? Lucas's sword, raised and wrapped in a blazing red aura, was meeting Jack's blade head-on. The first blow having failed, Jack fell back on reflex. Lucas watched him for a moment, then let his gaze roll down to the curved sword.
"So it was you."
He smiled, cold. The killing intent carried in that sneer sent a chill up Jack's spine. For an instant he doubted whether the thing standing before him was truly Lucas. A month ago, the man had never given off an air like this.
"Young Master!"
The escort knight cried out a beat too late and moved to step in, but Lucas raised a hand and stopped him.
"Stay back. This isn't someone you can handle."
To Jack, the situation was almost laughable. The first stroke had failed to take the head, but Lucas was still no match for him. Wasn't he a swordsman without even an aura core? He would have been better off using that escort as a shield and running. And yet here he was, stepping forward with no sense of his own place — truly the foolish wastrel people said he—
"Hm?"
There Jack felt a sudden wrongness. The killing stroke he had just thrown was not something a man without an aura core could have blocked. Only then did he look Lucas over carefully again, and he understood what the wrongness was.
"What—!"
A core that had not been there was there now. Had he imagined it? Bewilderment surged up in an instant, but Jack was an assassin who had been through every kind of fight, and he mastered his feelings at once, coldly reassessing the man's strength. What he felt from Lucas was a single aura core. And yet the aura leaking from it was so powerful he could hardly believe it belonged to a 1-Star Knight.
With only one aura core, aura on the level of a 2-Star Knight...? How in the world was he hiding this?
It was astonishing, but not incomprehensible. Wasn't Lucas the eldest son of House Roenheim, a knightly house whose name rang across the world? There might be some hidden trump Jack simply did not know.
Even so—!
Nothing changed. Jack was a 3-Star Knight. However outstanding Lucas might be, he was only a 1-Star, and the gap between them was the gap between heaven and earth.
"—!"
Not doubting his advantage for a moment, Jack surged in again. His curved sword, wrapped in pitch-black aura, tore through the air like a black wind. That sword was no ordinary blade. It had been forged from a special metal found only in the desert — hard, and yet flexible as rubber. Every swing made it whip and ripple like a lash. Ordinary swordsmen dismissed it as a weapon too difficult to handle, but Jack had made the curved blade his main arm precisely because of those irregular movements.
And yet Lucas met the attack perfectly. Jack could not hide his shock. Even knights of his own level usually faltered the first time they clashed with the blade's peculiar motion. To answer it this naturally — and worse, the counters that slipped in between those exchanges were chillingly sharp. The speed and force inside them were, at best, those of a 2-Star Knight. The sword-path they drew, however, was more profound and more lethal than that of any knight he had ever seen.
Is this the true swordsmanship of House Roenheim...!
Jack ground his teeth on an absurd misconception. Even so, there was no need to grow hasty. Lucas was holding his own, but the advantage in raw power still belonged to Jack. Every time the blades met, Lucas's crimson aura was shaved away by Jack's black aura — clear proof that Jack led in the force of his aura and in pure strength alike. All that remained was to press the man down with that power, steadily, until he broke.
He had just foreseen his victory when an impact beyond anything he had imagined slammed into the curved sword, as if a bomb had gone off.
"Khah!"
The shock swept him up and flung him backward, helpless. What in the world had just happened? Even then he did not lose his sword. He barely righted himself and glared at Lucas, thinking for an instant that the man had used some coward's trick — that, unable to win with the blade, he had tried to seize the momentum with a magic tool pulled from somewhere.
That was not it.
"What...!"
The moment his eyes took Lucas in, he lost his composure at last. The man's cores had increased by one.
"Look at his face."
I sneered at the assassin, frozen as if he had seen a ghost. From his side of it, though, the shock was fair enough. An aura core was no different from an organ of the body, and one had appeared out of nowhere — and now there were two.
This was the fruit of all the training until now. I had become a 2-Star Knight in every sense of the word, and I was handling two cores exactly as I pleased. Of course, it had not been training alone. What had helped most was the consumable draw that refreshed every month.
This rotation's featured item had been an Elixir of Supreme Growth. Unlike the old growth elixirs, which came with a cap on one's stats, this one massively increased growth experience for exactly one day, with no numerical limit.
Naturally, I had poured Blue-White Stones into the draw until I pulled it. And on the very day I was given a demon-subjugation mission that promised a flood of experience, I fought without rest from dawn to dark and wrung every last drop of the elixir's effect out of my bones. The result was this.
A low thrum filled the air. The two aura cores set into the blade and the grip of the Wailing Blade resonated with each other and poured out their might. The aura, which had once looked like flame, had grown so deep and thick that blood itself seemed to be running down the sword.
"Y-you—!"
Even seeing that, the assassin did not give up. He charged again. It did not seem he had failed to grasp my strength. He simply had some desperate reason he could not retreat from here. I brought my sword down on him.
The assassin's curved blade had been rushing in with a graceful ripple, wrapped in black aura. It was cut clean through, steel and all, as if it had never been whole.