The Master Handled It Quickly
The imperial knight Valen was the very same man who had once delivered the Hero candidate Sera to Jade. And now that knight was seeking Jade out once more. If the previous visit had been to bring Sera, this time it was the opposite. He had come to take Jade to the imperial palace. More precisely, to kidnap him.
The Hero candidate Sera has wiped out the imperial shadow.
Medusa. Who would have imagined the imperial family stood behind that assassin guild…? What mattered was that the Hero candidate Sera had annihilated Medusa. And there was no chance the Emperor would simply shrug and say, “Ah, so that happened.” It had been a clandestine organ the Emperor himself had poured enormous secret funds into creating. The financial loss was bad enough, but losing a tool that could reliably keep the high nobles in check was enough to make any emperor’s eyes spin.
A man who, sensing danger to himself, was perfectly willing to slap the title of “Hero candidate” on children and send them to die would never have concepts like karma or poetic justice rattling around inside his head.
The Emperor’s mood turned foul. Yet he could not raise the matter publicly. To do so now would be no different from advertising that the imperial family had been the power behind Medusa. And that would be the same as the Emperor himself announcing to the high nobles who had long lived in terror of the “imperial reapers,” “All right—now is the time for revenge!” He could not act rashly.
There was another problem as well: the Hero candidate Sera herself.
The Hero candidate project had been little more than a panicked, “We have to do something—anything,” scheme. In other words, though the imperial family had started it, they had never truly expected it to produce spectacular results. If a real Hero emerged from it, wonderful; if not, well, that was that. That had been the level of their expectations.
Yet the Hero candidate Sera had appeared on the world stage with terrifying speed, achieved results with equal speed, and was absorbing the people’s hearts wholesale. As a result, popular support for the Hero candidate kept swelling, until it reached the point of threatening to overturn the imperial family itself.
It had all happened in the blink of an eye. Left unchecked, a single word from the Hero candidate Sera could shake the imperial house—so completely had the empire’s current begun to revolve around her.
In the end the imperial family found itself unable to move against the Hero candidate Sera openly, yet equally unable to leave her alone. And so they settled on a pattern as old as power itself.
Backroom schemes.
They could not touch the Hero candidate Sera directly. Therefore they would target someone at a remove from her. That someone was her master, Jade.
The imperial family had underestimated him. The keywords “A-class mercenary” and “expert-rank” did not, in their eyes, amount to anything truly formidable. An expert-rank fighter was something an imperial knight could handle.
The real problem was that they could not freely deploy their core forces. With the “imperial reapers” and Medusa gone, the high nobles who had long nursed grudges under those shadows might make any number of moves—no one could say. Therefore the imperial family judged that Valen, an expert-rank imperial knight who already knew Jade from having delivered Sera to him, was the right man for the job. They issued a secret order and sent him quietly.
“This, too, must be for the empire.”
The heart of the empire was the imperial family; therefore whatever the imperial family wished to do surely contained a righteous will for the empire’s good. Valen accepted the secret order without the slightest doubt. As an imperial knight he had no right to refuse an imperial command in the first place, but he never even thought to question it. Absolute loyalty without a shred of personal opinion—he did not find that strange. An imperial knight was the sword of the imperial house. For a sword to harbor doubts was unnatural, so he simply stopped thinking.
As the sword of the imperial family, he need only realize the imperial family’s justice.
He believed that with a simplicity so hollow it was almost pitiful, and he believed it with all his heart.
That was why, even upon receiving the order to kidnap the master of the Hero candidate Sera, he never once considered it wrong. Everything was for the imperial family, and what was for the imperial family was for the empire, for the nation. And so, without a flicker of doubt, he set out to commit an evil act. The elementary truth that no justification can ever cleanse an evil deed was something this imperial knight neither knew nor even suspected.
…I can’t get in.
He could not enter the mountain that held Jade’s hermitage. Every path was blocked by traps and magic of every kind. It was beyond what one man could force. Yet requesting support was also impossible. The secret order had been clear: handle it alone and in secret. So rather than attempt a reckless breakthrough, he chose to wait.
Even a hermit eventually needs supplies. Sooner or later the man would have to come out. Calmly and carefully, Valen calculated that Jade would leave the hermitage for the nearest village, positioned himself accordingly, and settled into ambush.
A brutal war of attrition against time.
Yet the sense of mission to complete the task he had been given carried Valen through.
And at last Jade appeared.
Thwack!
The problem was…
…that Valen realized Jade had appeared only when the attack struck him.
“Ghk!”
An arrow from a direction so perfectly chosen that the naked eye could not even register it tore into Valen’s right arm.
Shhhk!
Without hesitation Valen yanked the arrow free. Blood poured freely from the wound, but he paid it no mind. He simply sealed the bleeding with Aura.
“I never expected you to attack the moment we met again after so long.”
“You looked like you’d come for me. Hard to miss.”
“I am an imperial knight. Do you not understand what that means?”
“I understand perfectly well that you’re an imperial dog.”
“…Are you declaring a challenge against the imperial family?”
“What’s there to challenge? With the Demon King out there and the world itself hanging by a thread, what meaning or value do those two words—‘imperial family’—even have?”
Valen was not simply making conversation. When an enemy’s position is unknown, the standard method is to talk, to provoke, and to track the response. But the direction from which Jade’s voice arrived and the actual location of the man himself were completely different; the tracking failed.
Ting!
Another arrow came from a direction he had never anticipated, yet Valen met it calmly. He too was an expert-rank fighter. He had given up the first move, but he was not so soft that he would simply keep taking hits.
“My orders are to bring you to the imperial palace with as little harm to your body as possible. Will you not cooperate?”
“If a man is so soft-hearted he frets over the body of the person he’s kidnapping, he wouldn’t be kidnapping anyone in the first place… Looks like the imperial family decided I make a pretty high-value hostage. So they want to use me as leverage to turn my disciple into their dog? Having an outstanding student is more trouble than it’s worth, don’t you think?”
“…….”
The warning he had meant to deliver had instead handed over information. Valen clamped his mouth shut with an inward curse. Truly, a man who had climbed all the way to A-class in that cutthroat mercenary world—the seasoned cunning born of hard experience was nothing to take lightly. Valen had no choice but to admit it.
“Even if you flee from me, nothing will change. I will simply return with more imperial knights.”
“Hahaha. What a transparent lie. You think I never worked with the imperial family back when I was active? The imperial family hates doing the same job twice. They never even consider the possibility that their own plans might fail. The fact that they decided I was valuable enough to kidnap yet still only sent an expert instead of a superhuman tells me their situation is pretty damn tight, doesn’t it? Looks like the imperial family is shaking pretty hard. With a crisis descending on the empire, it would be stranger if they weren’t.”
“…….”
Valen revised his earlier assessment. He had dismissed the man as a mere mercenary. Of course he had expected solid skill from an A-class, but he had never imagined the man could dig so shrewdly and so finely. The prejudice that a mercenary must be crude had bred carelessness, and without realizing it he had handed over every scrap of information. As an imperial knight, the shame was unavoidable.
“I see. I underestimated you because you were a mercenary. Any further talk will only serve you more information.”
“It’s less that I’m impressive and more that you hand out information far too easily.”
“Do you think a little provocation like that will shake me?”
“Born into a good house, gifted with the sword, trained hard, joined the imperial knights, climbed to expert rank—and still just a young master at heart, I see. Just because a provocation doesn’t work on the other guy doesn’t make it meaningless. There’s a certain pleasure in needling someone who just sits there and takes it. Being a young master, you wouldn’t know that, but no shame in that.”
The moment the words ended, another arrow flew.
Ting!
This time Valen did not barely deflect it—he stopped it cleanly, as though he had known exactly where it would come from.
When tracking by voice proved difficult, he had released Aura into the air, expanding his sensory range. The Aura was draining rapidly, but he judged the cost worthwhile.
According to the intelligence, “Steel Jade” fights with a sword. The fact that he is deliberately keeping his distance and insisting on archery—something he rarely used—strongly suggests some problem that makes a direct confrontation difficult. Therefore this is a race: whether I locate him first, or whether he kills me before that.
With that thought Valen poured Aura freely into the atmosphere, widening his detection field. That was how he instantly registered the arrow that entered the field and swept his sword to block it.
In that very instant—
Thud-thud-thud-thud!
He sensed it!
Something was closing at high speed.
Not an arrow.
A man with a sword was racing toward him at superhuman speed!
Claaaaang!!!
“Ghk!”
Valen could not help but panic. He had analyzed that some problem was forcing the man to rely on archery—yet Jade had casually drawn his sword, closed the distance in a flash, and swung. And the strange power contained in that strike! It was not Aura, yet it possessed a density that did not yield to Aura as it crashed over him.
But! Imperial swordsmanship is supreme in close combat! You…!
“You just made the worst possible mistake!”
Shouting that, Valen moved to crush his opponent in a single exchange with the imperial swordsmanship the knight order so proudly boasted.
The instant he assumed the stance of Imperial Swordsmanship Form One—
Thuk! Shhhhhhk!
“……!”
“When a guy who’s been stubbornly fighting at range suddenly charges into close quarters, you’re supposed to think ‘Something’s up!’ and stay wary, young master.”
“W-what…!”
I blocked it.
I clearly stopped Jade’s sword!
Then why is my throat being cut, blood pouring out in a mad torrent? Why am I dying?! Why?!!
Thud.
And so the man who lived on the pride of being an imperial knight and believed with absolute certainty that that alone made him justice collapsed in an instant.
“Cough!”
“A dog only knows how to run straight ahead. It never learns to think deeply. In that sense, you really were the perfect little imperial mutt.”
“Don’t… insult me… cough!”
“A man who believes the imperial family is justice without the slightest attempt at objectivity, who follows every imperial mission as though it were absolute righteousness. Because of that he never even properly considers what he is actually doing—just pure self-righteousness… I honestly don’t know whether a man like that even has any honor left to be insulted.”
“You think… killing me… will just end it?”
“I do. Unlike what you believe, the imperial family isn’t that clean a place. If the cost looks higher than they expected, quietly declaring one knight ‘missing in action’ during a mission is something that happens all the time. Believing a place like that was justice without a shadow of doubt, and dying because of it—your situation is truly pitiful. That’s the conclusion of your life.”
“A mere mercenary… dares to insult the imperial family…!!!!!!”
Thuk!
“Of all the last words I’ve ever heard, those were the dullest.”
And so the imperial knight Valen met his end.
“I’ll have to clean this up without leaving a single trace.”
He had killed an imperial knight, yet Jade remained perfectly calm. From the recent shifts in imperial power that Master Las had told him about, from the fact that the imperial family had decided on a kidnapping yet sent only a single expert-rank knight, and from the information he had extracted from this imperial dog, it was not difficult to conclude that the imperial family currently had no attention to spare for him.
That did not mean he could have left the knight alive. Keeping him prisoner would only hand the imperial family the pretext to claim their knight had been imprisoned and pin the blame on this side. Sending him back would have been no better; the knight’s mouth would become “evidence” for every fabricated accusation they cared to invent. Simply killing him and erasing every trace was the surest course.
Needless pity and hesitation would only become a shackle around Sera’s ankle. That was the one outcome a master must never allow.
“The imperial family would have done this in secret from the start anyway.”
Would the imperial family ever issue a public order to kidnap one of its own subjects and leave evidence behind? Everything had been conducted in the shadows; therefore the imperial family could not raise a fuss even if it wanted to.
They might wish to send out a superhuman—one of their core forces—for revenge, but the world’s greatest coward, the man who, fearing the Demon King might kill him, was busy slapping the pretty title of “Hero candidate” on children and shoving them onto the battlefield, would never possess that kind of nerve.
So all he had to do was dispose of this corpse cleanly. Jade looked down at Valen, whose eyes were still wide open.
“Don’t take it too hard. The one thing mercenaries and knights have in common is that once you choose the path, you never know when or where a blade will put you in the ground. Young master, you decided to become a knight—surely you were prepared to die? If you weren’t… well, nothing to be done about it now.”
Reality had already produced this result, so no amount of wishing could change it.