A Public Execution
Loatan seized his trembling hands. The shock of it was still ringing through him.
I was the one who struck... so why was I the one sent flying?
It defied belief, but the sensation when his sword had come down on his opponent had been that of striking steel. The blade had been wreathed in the radiant shimmer of mana unique to the Brillant realm — a blow incomparable to any ordinary downward cut, an attack that should have split the man in two. And yet...
The instant I connected, some strange rebound shoved me away.
He forced his thoughts into order and took stock of where he stood. The complacency in his chest grew heavy. That single exchange had taught him something. His opponent had a card to play. This was not a man to take lightly.
A rush of sword-wind swept the dust aside as Messi cleared the air between them. Loatan could see it plainly now: his opponent had not taken so much as a speck of damage.
"Hmm... as expected, even a single downward strike of Crombell swordsmanship is this ferocious. Doesn't that make it difficult to control your strength?"
Insolent bastard. He sees one technique and talks like he already knows everything.
The man wasn't a pushover — but he wasn't stronger than Loatan, either. At best, he was Lavish. And yet here he stood, in front of a craftsman who had honed his art for decades, running his mouth as if he knew it all.
Irritation flared hot in Loatan's chest. He didn't pause. He went straight on the attack.
The sword came around. The first cut was light, aimed at the throat. The second and third, targeting shoulder and arm, carried several times the weight. He was demonstrating, quite deliberately, a masterful control of force.
Crash. Crash. Crash.
Messi turned the Brillant's heavy descending blade aside, this way and that. It was a technique Ramang used often — pressing the body close to the sword and channeling the opponent's force outward, bleeding it off to the side. He had used it against the ant general. He had shown it in his spars with Messi. There was no reason Messi couldn't copy it. And because the technique only grew easier the better one's physique, it was ideally suited to a man who had received Enzo Muete's physical data.
Whether the constant deflection had begun to grate on him, Loatan let a sneer touch his mouth.
"Did you provoke me just so you could sit there on the defensive?"
A thrust came for Messi's heart. From that first thrust it accelerated, then accelerated again. Loatan's blade became a streak of white light, hunting every vital point on Messi's body. Messi struck it aside, bled it off, or simply stepped out of its path.
When this had gone on for nearly several minutes, a chill began to creep up Loatan's spine.
What is this...? How is he reading my attacks this completely?
It was wrong. His opponent had not taken his eyes off the tip of Loatan's sword for even a fraction of a second. The blade grazed past Messi's cheek — and even in that instant, Messi's pupils tracked it all the way through.
Having grasped that much, Loatan tried to pin Messi's foot with his lead step as he attacked, locking him in place. Messi read even that, and shifted his feet, and was gone. It was as if the man already knew how Loatan was going to move.
Loatan's composure began to fray.
I can't land a single attack? On a healer?
No. He needed to revise that thought. His opponent was not "just a healer." He was simply a master.
And the pressure radiating from those eyes was only growing. It had started from the moment Loatan realized Messi's gaze was fixed, quite steadily, on his flank.
...!
His heart dropped as if he had just read a passage from a horror tale.
He's doing it on purpose... He sees the openings and still refuses to attack?
The longer Loatan pressed his assault, the larger his movements had become — and the openings had grown with them.
"Hah... hah..."
Only then did he feel it: sweat pouring off him like rain. The pressure his opponent gave off was shrinking his body in on itself, to a degree that defied reason. He felt like a coward, and he could not even say why. His limbs were going slack. He seemed, impossibly, to have become weak.
He looked around. The knights and soldiers within thirty feet were watching as if this were entertainment. At first they had worn the startled look of men impressed by his sword. Now they were snickering. They looked like people at a festival — not witnesses to a sacred duel between knights, but spectators at a slave-gladiator's death throes.
I see... They were never going to grant me a knight's death. I was the only one who believed that.
The other-race in front of him was smiling too. The corners of his mouth were lifted, and his eyes were bright with curiosity, as if to ask, Is that all you've got? He looked like a child smiling in pure delight at a small insect.
Loatan was certain.
This is a public execution...
Messi was extracting the essence of Crombell swordsmanship from Loatan.
He had been able to watch Ahental Swordsmanship to his heart's content in the Forest of Resentment. Crombell swordsmanship had never afforded him that opportunity. The style that paired best with the Crombell Mana Cultivation Method could only be the swordsmanship of that same house — a sword art that had grown alongside the method through long years, shaped to fit it. Of course Messi wanted it. That was why he had spent some five minutes observing, holding on with Ramang's deflection technique.
Not a bad haul. I learned several things for certain.
Loatan was a man who had reached Brillant ahead of Ramang. His mastery sat at a high level.
The first result: Messi now knew he could fight someone like that without difficulty. The circumstances had changed since his spars with Ramang. Reaching Lavish seemed to have made a considerable difference. On top of that, Enzo Muete's strength and durability had made it possible to contend with an opponent a full realm above him.
And the second result—
"Hah. Hah."
The Loatan in front of him was sweating to a degree that made no sense, dragging air into his lungs in ragged pulls. He seemed not to have noticed at all that his own body had changed.
Messi had learned how terrifying Sacred Heal could be. It was a thought that had been building through three weeks of reshaping the bodies of the Ahental Knights — and now a truly cruel application of that power had occurred to him. If you could improve an opponent's body, you could just as well inflict a permanent debuff.
I can weaken cardiopulmonary function... Even I have to admit that's downright demonic.
It required, as it had today, ample time inside an opponent's body and an environment in which he could concentrate. But when those conditions were met, the effect was cruelly complete. Loatan had the look of a man searching for a reason — why his movements were growing clumsier by the moment, why he was so utterly spent. He would have lived his entire life inside a healthy, exceptional body. Of everyone here, he would be the one most panicked by these unfamiliar physical responses.
"How long do you intend to keep deflecting my attacks?!"
Loatan was pale, as if he might vomit at any second.
"Attack me, damn you! Attack! How much more humiliation do you mean to heap on me?!"
"Put a little more into it. Give me everything you've got. Just hit me hard enough that I can't deflect, right?"
"You son of a bitch..."
Loatan's trembling hands clamped down on the hilt. What followed was a downward strike like a thunderbolt — but in Messi's eyes, it was a lesser technique than what had come before. The very first cut Loatan had shown him had been more threatening, and more impressive. And even that, Messi had bounced back.
And the third result... the Einhartz Mana Cultivation Method.
It was nothing to dismiss as a half-complete art. A truly sluggish method of circulating mana — but it had one effect.
"Kh—?!"
A dull, ringing impact. A powerful repulsive force sent Loatan staggering back once more. This time he managed not to roll across the ground in an undignified heap, but the inability to identify that bizarre power was driving him to distraction.
This was the efficacy of half the Einhartz Mana Cultivation Method. A repulsion that would permit no property whatsoever other than its own slow mana.
The instant mana of a different nature tries to penetrate, it turns it around and reflects it right back... Quite a definite personality.
Until they reached Ablaze, a knight's method of using mana was the emission method — meaning they inflicted damage by projecting mana from sword or body. And so the mana pouring from Loatan's blade was being turned back on him by the distinctive repulsion of the Einhartz method. It was a phenomenon Messi had discovered by accident over three weeks of sparring with Ramang, and he was putting it to excellent use here.
Loatan was probably losing his mind right about now.
Not a single attack lands, his body grows heavier by the moment like wet cotton, and every blow that feels like it connected comes right back at him...
Loatan was a wreck. He looked nothing like the man who had begun this duel. Exhaustion had set his hands shaking; his stance had come apart. His face was scored with a dense web of red lines where dirt and stone had raked him, his hair a disheveled tangle beaded with sweat. The sweat would be stinging those wounds.
The truly absurd part was that Messi had not attacked even once. Loatan was folding under his own power; Messi had no reason to bother. And a great many people needed to see him in this miserable state.
Those watching the spectacle could hardly be anything but stunned.
"He's toying with him. That's all this is..."
"A Lavish can do that to a Brillant?"
"That's Messi, though..."
"Ah. Right. It's Messi."
Ever since the Squire test, the Ahental knights had given up on understanding Messi. How else were you supposed to explain that absurd strength and stamina, if not as some inborn freak of talent? They were already nodding along to themselves: here he was again, showing them something that made no sense. They simply accepted it. Because it was Messi.
Hulan turned to Ramang with a mischievous look.
"Commander, when are you going to go a round with Messi?"
Ramang flinched.
"W-what are you talking about? I already beat him once, didn't I?"
He wouldn't meet Hulan's eyes, hiding the tremor in his own. The other knights had no idea that, for three weeks now, Messi had used spars as a pretext to torment him without mercy. As if determined to avenge the one defeat that had ever been handed to him, Messi had persistently requested match after match.
"Ah... you're not perhaps afraid of Messi, are you?"
"Ha, haha! I am the only man to this day who has ever handed Messi a defeat. He's the one who should be afraid of me, not the other way around."
A man who had sold his conscience to say it.
If a rigid soul like him is stooping to something this cheap, he really must not want to fight...
Hulan shook his head. Even if he himself were Brillant, he would have felt no desire to cross swords with a monster like that. If Messi could toy with Loatan — a famous knight of Crombell — it meant that the Ahental knights who could still match him with a blade could be counted on one hand.
The members of the houses that had joined this affair to pick scraps from the fight between Ahental and Crombell — or at least to chip away at the loan-shark debts they owed Ahental — were no less astonished.
"Wasn't his opponent Loatan von Wake-Loven?"
Among the knights of House Crombell, Loatan was a man in his thirties with a considerable reputation in the central territories. That a figure famous enough to stand at the next heir's right hand should be reduced to this...
The nobles who had brought their own soldiers, and the knights attending in their lords' stead, all wore startled faces. Talmud and Taliss of House Thalen, in particular, were swallowing dryly.
The eldest, Talmud, seemed to have established a clear hierarchy unlike before, and was in the middle of lecturing his younger brother.
"You see, Taliss? If you had dragged Young Master Ereb into a banquet back then and goaded a knights' duel, our knight commander would have ended up looking exactly like that."
"Th-that was a close call."
"And what's more, we committed a direct discourtesy against that man. Imagine if he had held a grudge and turned his mind to something malicious."
Talmud pointed at Messi.
"I made a terrible mistake..."
"A cultivation realm is not something one can ascend in an instant. Sir Messi already possessed this level of skill at the time — he simply chose not to reveal himself carelessly."
"If it were me, I would have drawn my sword the moment I received such an insult..."
"He is a man of a different caliber. And because we committed that discourtesy against such a person, that is why Young Master Ereb raised such a storm, is it not?"
"Ah. So that was it..."
Ereb's thuggish rampage was being given a strangely reasonable explanation. Had Messi or Ramang overheard this conversation, they would have been left utterly speechless.
It was about time to spit out the gum. The flavor had all been chewed away.
Whether Loatan had given up on lifting his sword, or was catching his breath to deliver one last blow, he had fallen back and was dragging air into his lungs for a long while. Looking at the wreck of him, he did not appear to have the mind left for the latter.
Only then did Messi raise his sword — and, keeping his distance, slide it home into the scabbard.
Loatan flinched back the moment his opponent lifted the blade, found the sight of himself ridiculous, and started to giggle.
"Heh. To think I'd meet my end looking this unsightly... fuhahaha..."
"..."
"Kill me. It seems I was fated never to leave so much as a scratch on you."
"Good work."
"Good work?"
Without answering Loatan's confusion, Messi kicked off the ground.
A faint click. The opening was, of course, Ahental Swordsmanship. He drew the sheathed blade in a single motion and sent the first strike flying. Loatan no longer had the strength to dodge even that; he lifted his sword a fraction and blocked the line of the cut. After several labored parries, the distance between them closed in a rush.
In that instant, Loatan's eyes flashed.
"I've been waiting for this!"
"...?"
Loatan drove Messi's sword outward with his own — and in the same motion released his blade and threw himself into Messi's range. It was exactly what Messi had done at the Squire test. The difference was that Loatan was a knight of long experience, and so had been able to induce a lapse in Messi's guard.
Both of Loatan's eyes filled with resolve.
This one, I have to kill. No matter what...
War between Crombell and Ahental was coming. The other-race in front of him would occupy a major place in that war. Loatan knew it by instinct.
Got— him!
He dropped his body low and wrapped Messi's legs. He meant to lift him, break his stance, and slam him into the ground back-first. After that he would mount him in a flash, hammer the face with elbow and fist, and butcher the throat and heart with a dagger so there would be no gap in which to heal.
"Hyaaaaah!!"
This one move would reverse everything! Power surged through Loatan's entire body. At this rate, lifting his opponent would be no difficulty at all.
The plan was excellent.
Then again, everyone's plans are excellent. The unfortunate part was that his opponent was Messi.
"...Ah?"
What... he's like a giant tree.
He couldn't lift him. It was the feeling of trying to topple an ancient tree whose roots were driven too deep to move. Unable to believe it, Loatan kept straining, pouring in more force. It made no difference.
The timing was already gone, and still Loatan clung to Messi's legs, grunting with the effort. From a distance the sight was so bizarre that the Ahental soldiers burst into roaring laughter. It was exactly what Ahental had wanted. Those men would no longer fear Crombell's knights. They would march out and fight.
Messi slowly clasped one fist in the other and raised them above his head.
The clasped fists fell like a war hammer.
BOOM!!!!
It was a sound no one could believe had come from a fist. Every eye went round — and when the dust settled, every mouth fell open besides.
A single blow.
The shock delivered to Loatan's back had ruptured his abdomen. He was already dead.
That was the fruit of the physical training he had done with Grotein.
It had been two-tenths of Enzo Muete's strength.