Proof upon a Wooden Sword
"Please wait."
"You still have more to say?"
"You ought to give me at least a chance to prove it, shouldn't you?"
Kaiser glared at that.
"A waste of time."
"It isn't a waste. On what grounds are you so certain I'm lying in the first place? Do you have proof?"
I raised my voice to match his. He was master of the ducal house that held the Empire's south in its grip, and a Swordmaster besides—one of the greatest knights alive. Words like mine were far too insolent to throw at a man like that. Even so, I had nothing to fear. From what I remembered, Lucas had always talked back to Kaiser this way.
Kaiser's face set, hard and silent. Anger rolled off him. Before that fury could find a voice, I spoke first.
"There's no need to be so angry. Proving it isn't even difficult. We only have to spar once, right here."
"So you want to thrash about one last time. But these petty tricks of yours—"
His words broke off. Mother Katrin's hand had come to rest upon the duke.
"Even a condemned man is granted the chance to speak in his defense. Would it not be proper to give him at least a place in which to prove himself?"
What she said was simple good sense. Kaiser clicked his tongue, lightly, as if the whole affair had become a nuisance.
"…You're not wrong. Very well. Walter."
"Yes."
At the duke's call, the old knight who had been standing blankly at my side stepped forward.
"Bring an apprentice knight. I will have him spar with Lucas."
He said it without so much as asking whether I agreed. Walter nodded.
"Whom would you prefer?"
"Anyone. Surely there isn't an apprentice knight of our house inferior to Lucas."
"Understood."
Walter left the council chamber, and before long he returned with a man at his side.
"Greg Benheim. An apprentice knight who entered service under Commander Velloa this year."
At the introduction, Greg dropped to one knee and offered the duke his respects. He looked to be in his late teens, much of an age with Lucas—a solidly built young man who, at a glance, had trained in earnest for years.
"Do you mean to hold the spar here?"
The chamber was wide enough for a bout, but Walter clearly disliked the thought of swordplay among tables still littered with quills.
"It hardly matters. It will be over quickly."
Kaiser answered as if it were nothing. At that, Walter said no more. He drew Greg to his feet and pressed a wooden sword into each of our hands.
"These."
"Prepare yourselves, then."
I looked down at the wooden sword in my grip. Instead of being thrown out of the ducal house on the spot, I had made myself a stage on which the mood might still be turned. So far, everything had gone as I intended. But could I, as I was now, beat that apprentice knight?
I studied Greg. He had already raised his sword into a proper guard—an unwavering point, a stance set firm. That alone told me he was a knight who had the fundamentals well in hand.
An apprentice knight is the class you get the moment you first make a knight-type character. If Greg is on that same level, his Strength on the status window will sit near ten—twice my miserable five. And that's strength alone. Set against this wretched body, the gap in every other respect will be considerable.
Even so, I didn't despair. This much was well within what I could handle.
"I'm ready."
I let the sword hang loose as I answered. Walter's brow tightened for an instant, but he soon stepped back several paces as if nothing were amiss.
"Begin!"
Almost as the shout left his mouth, Greg charged—a bold thrust driven dead straight. He had judged me a stranger to the sword and meant to end it in a single stroke. I lifted my blade and lightly knocked the point aside. The thrust aimed at my throat skewed off its line and grazed past my flank.
Shock flared in Greg's eyes, but he had no time to be surprised. His arm was stretched forward, and now my sword was seeking his stomach, curving in a smooth arc.
Slow.
The blade's speed was absurd. This dull lump of a body couldn't keep up with what my mind commanded. In that gap Greg barely slipped the hit and retreated, and the blow that should have buried itself in his solar plexus cut nothing but empty air.
"…This is bad."
I clicked my tongue. I'd known from the start that the body was in poor shape, but not like this. It seemed a body that had done nothing but eat—never trained, never even walked as it should.
Greg, meanwhile, fixed me with a harder stare. They had called him an apprentice knight, yet he was a more proper knight than I had expected. His movement was clean, and his sense for the fight was not bad.
Even so… there's no reason I can't win.
I steadied my breath and let the sword hang once more.
I've fought plenty of battles where the body wouldn't obey.
I was a man who had spent his life fighting every kind of monster beyond the Gates. Out of all those battles, how many times had my body ever been whole? A sword through the arm. Too much blood lost. Poison. A binding skill. There had been more fights than I could count in which I couldn't even hold myself upright, and next to constraints like those, a sluggish body was nothing at all.
Greg came in again, this time with care, the blow approaching from the outside. I gave ground and watched it straight on.
Tak. Tak. Tak.
In the family council chamber, where until now only voices had passed back and forth, the crude crack of wood on wood rang out again and again. Kaiser watched Lucas and Greg with a face that gave nothing away.
At first he had thought the spar nothing but a waste of time. Lucas—his son, and a headache besides. Had the whole thing not begun with that brat's absurd lie, that he had learned the sword by means of the house's jewels? Kaiser had taken it for more empty talk, the same dodge Lucas always used when he wanted out of a corner.
But that was not what this was.
Lucas's sword knocked Greg's aside once more. The sight of him was nothing anyone could praise, not even out of courtesy: that bloated bulk heaving, breath burning all the way up his throat, gasping from the mere effort of swinging a wooden sword. And yet there was something that could not be denied.
…There is an edge to it.
Swordsmanship lived inside this spar. Lacking, unsightly—yes. Even so, in the blade that met Greg's attacks and answered them, the path of the sword showed clear.
But how…
Kaiser narrowed his eyes. Lucas was his eldest, and in truth a son he had long since cast aside, vicious and lazy enough that one might as well believe a demon dwelt in him. There had been a time when Kaiser, and the whole ducal house with him, had tried to mend that nature.
Lucas would not so much as pretend to listen. Whip him like a beast's whelp and he changed only for the moment, then slipped back to what he was. In the end even Kaiser had given up. He could not hand the house to such a son. He had only been waiting for the right time to drive him out.
And now that same Lucas was showing him the sword. The body made it clumsy, but Kaiser walked the path of the sword himself, and he could tell. This was not the work of a day or two of practice. It had been nearly half a year since he had last laid eyes on the boy. Had Lucas been training in secret all that while?
Have you finally decided to try something, even now?
The duke let out a bitter sigh. Even if he had, the age for achieving greatness with the sword was already long past. Too late to change the ducal house's measure of him—Kaiser's own included. Too late, for that matter, to change the outcome of this spar.
Greg, the apprentice, was exactly as skilled as expected: a promising young knight of the caliber to enter the Roenheim Knight Order, finest in the south. Lucas, who seemed to have trained for half a year at most, could not beat him.
"When defeat is obvious in any case…"
The mutter had barely left him when Greg, who had been probing while holding his distance, crossed the line. He kicked off the ground and closed in a rush, meaning to finish it, and his sword came down from above like lightning. Kaiser's eyes lit. A bold stroke, and a sure one—worthy of an apprentice knight. Until that instant he had not doubted the wooden blade would break Lucas's head.
Then something happened that made him doubt his own eyes.
Lucas twisted that heavy body and extended his sword to meet the descending blow. The crack that followed rang strangely clear for wood that ought to have sounded dull. He had not taken Greg's strength head-on. With an exquisite angle of the blade, he let the force slip away to the side—a technique no novice swordsman could ever be expected to show. Greg's attack sheared past into nothing, and his body pitched hard forward.
Lucas did not miss the opening. He drove his bulk into Greg, who had come right up against him. He seemed to have wanted a shoulder tackle, though a body that soft could not put much real force behind it. The weight, however, was genuine. Greg was flung back and went down.
"Huff… huff…!"
Lucas hauled in breath after breath and set his sword against the fallen man's throat. The victory was his—not by luck, and not by chance, but by swordsmanship so plain that no one in the room could deny it. Kaiser's eyes went wide. For a long while, nothing but a heavy silence hung over the chamber.
After that, the family council that was supposed to decide my punishment simply fizzled out. Winning the spar against Greg and proving my skill had something to do with it. More than that, though, my condition was a wreck.
"Hoo… I nearly… died… haa…!"
All I had done was swing a sword a few times. Even after I made it back to my room, my breath kept climbing into my throat, and the taste of blood rose at the back of it. Dizziness followed, and my vision blurred as if I were anemic on top of everything else. Stamina so wretched it was almost funny. I rested for a while, then barely managed to get off the bed, and ground my teeth.
"Whatever else comes first, I build stamina."
To think even ordinary life was this hard. I had taken a Stamina of 1 far too lightly.
A knock came at the door, right on cue. It was Walter.
"Are you all right now?"
Still lying down, I answered with nothing but a nod. He did not so much as twitch an eyebrow at the rudeness.
"Then get up. His Grace the Duke summons you."
I didn't ask why. The council had reached no conclusion at all; this would be the cleanup. I had things to say to the duke myself.
"Fine. Let's go."
I followed Walter without complaint. We did not return to the council chamber. The door that opened before us was finely carved and unmistakably expensive—Duke Kaiser's office. No one else was inside. I left Walter in the corridor and went in alone.
"You called for me."
"Where in the world did you get swordsmanship like that?"
The moment he saw me, Duke Kaiser asked it outright.
"As I told you, I learned it in exchange for jewels."
"No. That cannot be. If swordsmanship could be bought with wealth, every man alive would be a knight. So speak. From whom did you learn it, and since when?"
His glare was sharp. They called him a Swordmaster for a reason. As expected, he had noticed that something had changed.