The Mirror Duel
Ramang Stradimus.
If Messi had to name the single most threatening person he had encountered when he first crossed paths with Ereb's party in Benuda Village, it would be him, without question.
"Sir Ramang."
"Haha. You don't mind having me as your opponent, do you?"
It wasn't that he minded, exactly. Wariness was closer to the truth.
The rank-and-file knights of the Ahental Knights would not have been difficult to face. Most of them sat at the Brave stage, or at best the early Lavish realm. Messi himself had reached Brave, and with Enzo Muete's physical capabilities he was in a position to clash even with those of a higher realm.
But Ramang, standing at the very edge of Lavish with Sword Expert just ahead of him, looked like he would be a tight match.
What came out of Messi's mouth was another matter entirely.
"How could I mind?"
"Heh. That's a relief. Truth is, I volunteered for this."
Ramang flicked his wrist as if loosening up. The remark was puzzling.
"You wanted to spar with me? I had no idea."
"No, it wasn't so much that I wanted to spar with you. I wanted to go up against that talent of yours."
"?"
Wasn't that the same thing?
Ramang went on.
"Thirty years ago, a boy took the Squire test. The results were disastrous. Dead last. He claimed he was working hard, but his aptitude was rather pathetic. Still, the commander at the time saw something decent in his character and accepted the boy as a Squire."
"Is this about you, Sir Ramang?"
"When a man tells a sentimental story like this, you're supposed to play along and pretend you don't know."
"I was a science major, so..."
"Science major? Haven't the faintest idea what that means. Anyway, I thought to myself then: someday, I'll swap out that Squire results sheet."
"So you're going to use me—someone with good Squire test results—as a sacrificial lamb to console the young boy Ramang of your childhood. That's the story? Isn't that a bit much?"
"When you put it that way, I sound like the villain."
Well. That was the intention, wasn't it?
Messi had no intention of quietly serving as anyone's consolation. He spun the wooden practice sword with his wrist and loosened up in turn.
Whether or not he sensed that resolve, Ramang muttered as if he had put himself on the spot.
"Ah... I've gone and thrown kindling on the fire. Should I have kept my mouth shut?"
"Shall we begin?"
"That's what I was hoping for."
Flick. Flick.
As both men flicked their wrists out of old habit, the spectators in the surrounding stands startled.
Even if Sir Ramang does it... how is Sir Messi doing the same?
The fact that Messi displayed the telltale mannerism of someone who practiced Ahental Swordsmanship could lead to only one conclusion.
He had learned Ahental Swordsmanship?
"Who dares leak our family's swordsmanship to that man?"
Ayres spoke up, anger in his voice. But the answer came not from a knight. It came from the viscount.
"He just watches and copies, I hear."
"What?"
"That's where Ramang first recognized Sir Messi's talent. He says the boy simply watched and copied it. Can you believe that?"
Ayres was dumbfounded. If an advanced sword art could be copied just by watching, every dog and stray in the kingdom would be using it.
Wait. Didn't it take me three years just to perform Ahental Swordsmanship?
Ayres found himself, for no good reason at all, turning over the pages of his own childhood.
They watched each other, hunting for an opening. Meanwhile, Messi's mind was racing.
The longer he exchanged blades with Ramang, the more the loss would be his. Just because he could imitate the man did not mean the imitation became the real thing. Messi knew his own talent well. It was exceptional—and he recognized its limits just as clearly.
Pull him into something he doesn't expect, and finish this as fast as possible.
A crack of displaced air. The moment the decision settled, Messi took the first strike. He kicked off the ground and shot forward, and Ramang, as if he had been waiting for exactly that, swung his sword.
The Ahental blade scattered like a man shaking out his hands—the distinctive rapid-draw form that began the instant the sword left its rest. Messi met it head-on. This was what he had been aiming for. He put everything he had into the wooden practice sword and clashed.
The problem was that Messi's "everything" was one-tenth of Enzo Muete's full power. There was no world in which a mere practice sword could withstand that force.
Both wooden swords shattered on cue, bursting into a spray of splinters. Messi released the ruined hilt in the same breath and drove straight into Ramang's range. He saw the knight's eyes go wide.
In that instant, a brawler from Pakitan was reborn in Ramang's arms.
"?!"
Messi abandoning his sword for close combat was unexpected enough. When precise brawling arts erupted from him, Ramang was even more startled. As the fists of a hard puncher who had killed more than a few men were reproduced through Messi's body, Ramang wove his head and shoulders in a tight, practiced rhythm and slipped three beats of punches.
But a high kick came driving up from a blind angle as if it had been waiting there all along. Ramang threw both arms up and guarded his face. It was a sight utterly foreign to knightly combat.
Plate crashed into plate with a sound like a struck bell.
"Ohh!!"
The noise set the whole gathering ablaze. But Ramang was still Ramang. Even if his understanding of this kind of fighting was thin, his body had been drilled through such extreme repetition that the movements came anyway. Knowing a high kick was a large motion, he threw his own weight into Messi's body instead.
Armor slammed into armor. He hooked Messi's remaining supporting leg, meaning to dump the weight to one side and bring him down. Ground fighting in the style of wrestling was part of a knight's repertoire too. If untrained Messi fell into that tangle, the advantage would swing to Ramang.
That was how it should have gone.
"?!"
He doesn't budge?
Ramang shoved with mana behind the motion, and Messi's body still did not move—like a boulder that had put down roots.
Messi's voice reached him, almost cheerful.
"If you throw yourself into my arms out of nowhere... my heart skips a beat, you know."
From high to low, Messi's right hook dropped toward Ramang's face and landed. He had tried to slip it. The damage still came through the rattling helmet. He hauled his body back as far as it would go, and his legs were already threatening to give out.
It had only grazed the helmet. And his head was spinning.
Incredulous, Ramang pulled desperately away and flung one arm out.
"Hulan! Give me a real sword!"
Hulan, who had been watching until he was suddenly named, unfastened his blade and threw it. Ramang, teetering on the edge of going down, snatched it out of the air.
Sword-light flashed. Ahental Swordsmanship unfurled in a tight net, checking Messi as he closed the distance, and Messi had no choice but to check his feet. Trusting in brawling arts alone to press in would have been a mistake. Ramang's swordsmanship made him several degrees more dangerous than the man who had just been in his arms.
Ramang held the gap, let out a short breath, and gathered himself.
"A real sword, all of a sudden. Isn't that cheating?"
"I failed to account for that strength of yours. Who would have thought a wooden sword would shatter like that. I'll allow an exception."
In truth, if they kept fighting with wooden swords, the same close-quarters brawl would keep unfolding. Using a live blade was Ramang doing himself a favor. Pretending to be generous while barely securing his own hide—in a fight, the man was more of a sly raccoon than he looked.
Messi took a sword in haste from Ohens, who stood beside Hulan, and drew the knight's blade.
All of it in barely a minute. The quality of the fighting that had erupted in so short a span left the spectators short of breath.
I have no choice but to settle this with the sword, then.
Unfortunately, he had not been able to finish things inside the situation he had wanted. Ramang, sensing as much, closed in fast.
The rapid sword launched. Three forks of wind came for head and waist, and Messi's hands grew busy. It was Ramang who was striking with savage force—and it was also Ramang whose body shook violently every time the blades met.
In that moment, even Ramang cursed inwardly.
Damn it. This feels like chopping down on a solid iron ball with a knife.
Since when had Messi's strength become this monstrous? Ramang offset the recoil pouring through his frame with the mana inside him and poured Ahental Swordsmanship out in a fierce, unbroken chain. When Messi met the five-cut sequence—shoulder, arm, leg, belly, head—blow for blow, Ramang felt the muscles in his sword arm begin to tremble.
Is this what it would feel like to cross blades with that troll?
After returning from the Forest of Resentment, he had dreamed more than once of how powerless he had been before that monster. The nightmares were almost always the same: a single exchange with Enzo Muete, and the reason they were nightmares was that the instant the swords met, Ramang's entire upper body went flying. Feeling a similar sensation in just a few passes with Messi sent a crawl of cold sweat down his back, as if the dream itself might step into the training grounds and reenact itself.
Even so, this is only personal strength. I just have to deflect it and keep fighting.
Without realizing he had already put his finger on the right answer, Ramang began to bleed the shock of Messi's sword off at cunning angles. That same deflection had shone in more ways than one when he had fought the General Ant. It did so again now. It was experience built over decades of living with a blade and stacking spar after spar. He felt he could handle Messi's strength with this deflection alone.
Messi's strength, that is. And only that.
This—this bastard...
After putting in several attacks, Ramang faltered. Messi had started deflecting in exactly the same way. He had learned it in a matter of minutes.
Yes. This was the terrifying talent he had wanted to fight.
Ramang smiled and thrust. Messi thrust in the same shape.
Rapid sword met rapid sword in a steady, ringing rhythm. Each man struck. Each man bled the shock away. They moved so alike it was as if a mirror had been set between them, and a murmur of awe ran through the stands.
Ramang's realm was clearly higher. In raw mana he should have overwhelmed Messi outright. And yet Messi was covering the gap with nothing but his body. That was the mark of a monster.
Ramang, who was actually colliding with that monster, felt something even colder slide down his spine.
He's watching every movement I make and copying all of it.
He could see Messi's pupils darting, restless and precise, mirroring him like a reflection and making the match a misery. Messi had scanned Ramang's body long ago, and ever since taking in Enzo Muete's physique he could reproduce what he saw in the instant of seeing it. To Ramang, and to everyone else who did not know that, there was nothing to do but marvel at the talent itself.
As Ramang exchanged blades with the Messi who had become his own mirror, he drifted, little by little, into a state of no-mind.
There was no defeating the presence beyond the mirror—not with scissors, not with a clenched fist. But whatever he put forth, the being on the other side would match it. In that strange sense of stability, even as they traded savage blows, Ramang fell into an inexplicable illusion that this time would go on forever.
Then a thought rose in him, sudden and odd.
Messi was clearly performing the same movements, tracing the same sword path as he faced him—and it looked so insufficient.
Wouldn't this be better than moving like that?
On the back of that insight, Ramang revised the path of his blade and cut it anew. Messi returned it to him identically. After that, Ramang kept finding openings, and the solutions melted into the swordsmanship as soon as they appeared.
At some point, no sound reached him at all. He was in a wondrous world where only he and the mirrored self across from him were swinging their swords.
Ah. I see.
Only then did Ramang understand what he was doing.
He was breaking a wall. He was crossing a realm.
In answer to the insight of the sword path, the mana hole inside him writhed and began to expand. The round well of it below his navel spread, and it did not take long to take on the shape of a man.
As the realm rose, so did his grasp on mana. It was the phenomenon that came of recycling the power that had, until now, leaked away without ever gathering in the mana hole.
And that became a fearsome weapon.
The impact that reached Messi was suddenly far greater than before. He started. Deflecting it was becoming more than he could comfortably handle. The question answered itself the moment he saw the glittering threads of mana along Ramang's sword.
Of all times, he had to find enlightenment while fighting me.
The wind-pressure of the blade coming to split him was fierce. Messi met edge with edge, scraping steel down steel to bleed the force away, and answered a sword that was changing by the moment. That he could even somewhat read the opponent's increasingly rich path was thanks to the talent of Laud that he carried. And if not for Enzo Muete's body, he would already have lost the sword and had his throat taken.
There was only one answer left to him.
Use divine power.
The situation, in every direction, was against it.
Ohens's sword, unable to endure Ramang's blade and Messi's strength together, snapped. From somewhere in the stands came Ohens's wail.
"Nooo!"
Tch.
As the sword came apart in his hands, Messi fell back in a hurry and began to cast. It was a first-circle Magic Arrow. A few shafts of light-arrows streaked out—hardly a threat to a Brillant knight. Ramang swatted the magic aside with his rapid sword and drove the point straight in. A keen, cutting presence arrived in the air before Messi's throat.
A chill ran across the nape of his neck. It's over. Messi cancelled the spell he had been forming. Ramang withdrew his sword as well.
"Well done, Messi."
Ha. I lost...
Messi clicked his tongue. The taste of a first defeat was a bitter one.
Whatever Messi felt, the duel between the two men was burned deep into the eyes of everyone gathered at the training grounds. And of Ramang, most of them carried away the same impression.
A massive stone statue, holding its ground without a tremor.
A man who, true to his nature, pursued an honest sword path—and who, upon meeting Ahental Swordsmanship that prized speed, had stripped away flourish and froth and given himself to the fast sword alone.
If asked why a rapid sword, so gifted in phantom blades and transforming blades, had chased nothing but speed, he would have answered simply.
He was so wanting in talent that he had always said as much with his own mouth. But the honest swordsmanship that had traced a single path for decades answered him. Perhaps because he never looked aside, he had reached the destination faster than anyone.
His steadfastness shone. And the knight who had never known how to give up finally set his foot upon the threshold of Brillant.
Applause rolled through the training grounds and did not stop, a celebration worthy of the moment. And there was something else that caught the eye.
Messi's valiant stand in this final Squire test. That deserved high praise in its own right. Through the middle and late stages of the bout, he had fought on even terms with a Ramang who stood at the very edge of Lavish. In effect, he had fulfilled the purpose of the test completely.
"With this, it seems there's no problem with my investment."
The Viscount of Ahental smiled, satisfied, and returned to the inner castle. The retainers who followed him were of the same mind. The talent on display had been too extraordinary to oppose.
While Ereb and Erena consoled Messi over his first defeat and offered Ramang their congratulations, someone watched the scene from a distance.
It was the butler, Grotein. His eyes, fixed on Messi, were shining with a particular intensity.