The Duel
The Water Breathing technique uncovered from House Breyna.
There was a reason the family's breathing art had vanished from the world.
A man who mastered it would be castrated.
Unable to father an heir, there was simply no way to pass it on. You could call it the ill-fated house that died the very moment it created its own technique.
Not that House Breyna, the ones who dug it up, cared in the slightest.
Why, you ask?
They were a mage family, after all.
And there was never any shortage of men hoping to become knights.
For a commoner with no noble blood, it was practically the seat of dreams.
Typical of a duke's house, too proud to bother training its knights with a standard breathing art.
The Huben before him was one such commoner.
A merchant-cutting strike at blistering speed. Neville parried the blade aiming for his temple with the flat of his sword and countered toward the shoulder. Huben retreated swiftly, resetting his stance, and Neville stared at him with dead eyes—at the blue aura rippling over the man's body.
The aura of water. Its trait: bleeding.
To stop the bleeding from a wound, one had to force the lingering aura out of the injury first. In a one-on-one duel, there might be time for that, but if a crowd swarmed you at once, it was impossible. A genuinely troublesome trait.
Huben came in again, blade sweeping up from below. Neville twisted his body aside to evade and went for the waist.
*Clang—*
Huben blocked it as if he'd been waiting for exactly that. Using the recoil of Neville's parried blade, he spun his whole body—a sword strike riding the momentum of that rapid rotation, aiming for Neville's head.
House Breyna's swordsmanship inverted the force of every clash. Like a dance, it whirled with each turn; when the opponent blocked, it spun back the other way, and when they evaded, it quickened its rotation to keep the assault coming. A vicious, relentless tempo crashed down on him. Neville staggered backward, blocking and dodging as he gave ground.
'Kill him!! Kill him, Huben!!'
Celine watched the scene with a radiant smile. The trash of a man who'd dared to deceive her. It was astonishing how he'd hidden his strength, how he'd set this whole stage—but it only meant something if he won. There was no way that fool scurrying around the edge of the training grounds, doing nothing but block and retreat, could possibly prevail.
'In the end, you're useful to me somehow, idiot.'
After all, the man had fed her four full years of information on House Valkian. Nothing particularly groundbreaking, but useful all the same. She couldn't extract any more from him now, but she had one more spy anyway. Once the Emperor died, Valkian's collapse in the coming war was a foregone conclusion. If this duel ended in victory, nothing stood in the way of Breyna's future—no, of *her* future.
Celine let a greedy smile curl across her lips. Helena tilted her head, sensing something off. Anna watched with a blank expression. Kaiser's mouth twitched upward in amusement. Haiben had gone rigid, feeling that something had gone terribly wrong. And Huben, oblivious to the spectators and their array of expressions, was utterly certain of his victory.
A five-star who'd hidden his strength? Even so, the man was no match for him. He himself had focused solely on training and reached the rank of five-star at a tender age—there was no losing to a green boy.
The sword grew only more ferocious with every rotation. Try to block it, and the wooden blade would shatter; try to evade, and the edge grew crueler still. Without even needing proper technique, he was crushing the duke's son with fundamentals alone. Here, in a space watched by beautiful noble ladies and dukes themselves, he could feel it—*he* was the protagonist. If the young lord before him knelt, a higher salary and glory would surely follow.
"I can't bear to watch this any longer."
Neville's low murmur. The expression of a man bored to death.
Something was wrong. Why wasn't he struggling?
The question burst out of Huben before he could stop it.
"What was that?"
The answer that came back was not words, but action. Neville slipped past Huben's blade with room to spare and kicked him in the thigh.
*Crash—*
With an ugly sound, Huben toppled sideways. The water aura wrapped around his body had failed to stop it.
The humiliation of falling. A twinge of pain. And the next attack he was certain would follow. He rolled clumsily forward and scrambled to his feet.
"So he mops the floor for me too. With a water aura, I suppose that counts as mopping."
He'd been certain the man would press in and attack. Instead, Huben was staring at him with the sword still resting on his shoulder. As if he were pathetic.
Humiliation burned. Veins bulged at Huben's forehead.
"Why, you—! A man without honor has no right—!"
"Says the man crawling on the ground."
"Shut up!!"
Face crimson, Huben rose in an instant. He abandoned the notion of subduing the boy and swung his sword with every intention of killing.
The water sword. First Form: Severing Waterfall.
Aura detonating up through his blood vessels, swelling the blade, then cutting down with full force. If the opponent retreated, rotate and flow straight into the next form; if they tried to block, carve through the blade along with them.
"Doesn't that make you dizzy?"
"Guhk—!"
An ordinary opponent chose one of two options: block or evade. But Neville evaded Huben's sword, closed the distance in a flash, and kicked him in the waist.
*Crash—*
Huben went down again. Without letting his guard slip for a second, he rolled and rose once more. And there was Neville again, regarding him with that same pitying look. Scratching his head, he spoke.
"Are you a knight or a maid, by any chance? I like to think I'm not one for stereotypes."
"*Pfft—*"
Helena clapped a hand over her mouth too late. Everyone had heard it—the laugh that had escaped her purely, uncontrollably.
"Isn't my little sister adorable? Far prettier than Celine, too."
Neville beamed at Helena, as if the duel meant nothing to him at all—idle chatter on a casual stroll.
"O-older brother, when you say such things…"
*I'm so happy.*
Helena murmured it under her breath, covering her face. Haiben's and Celine's expressions curdled. Kaiser and Anna watched Neville without a flicker of feeling. And Huben, ears blazing red with humiliation, sprang upright and roared.
"You—! Focus on the duel!! How dare you insult me—*ghk*!"
Neville's kick to his abdomen cut the sentence short. As Huben clutched his stomach and tried to retreat, Neville closed in and whispered.
"I'm the heir to a ducal house. And a eunuch dares speak down to me?"
"You little son of a—!!!"
Neville leapt back out of range of the hastily swung blade.
*How on earth did that man find out about the breathing technique's side effects?*
And more than that—he was saying the problem wasn't Huben's rank, but his castration? His mind spun at discrimination he'd never seen or heard of in his life. His master was watching him with a rotten expression. *If I lose here, what becomes of me? Was all the training I piled up meaningless? How do I get out of this?*
Countless questions flooded Huben's head. And a brain broken by panic made the worst possible choice.
"I'll kill you for real."
Blue aura sheathed the wooden sword.
*Coating a blade with aura in a duel?*
That was an admission of defeat—the act of stuffing one's own honor down a latrine. Haiben pressed a hand to his temple, shaking with rage and shame. Celine jolted at Huben's sudden lapse, then nursed a flicker of hope that perhaps Neville really would die. And not a single soul of House Valkian moved to stop the charging Huben—because Neville was smiling brightly, black aura coiling around his sword.
That twisted smile was the face of a hound.
At the sight of it, Helena felt heat pool low in her belly—and a desire to tighten his leash. Kaiser smiled contentedly. Anna found herself puzzled by her own pounding heart.
"You drew first."
"SHUT UP!!!"
As if done hiding anything, Huben spun all five of his rings. The color of the aura on his blade deepened. With a rotation, his sword cut for Neville's neck—and this time, Neville swung his own.
'You utter fool!!'
The number of rings was absolute—in the realm of raw, colliding force rather than footwork. Now that shabby wooden sword of his would shatter, and his head would roll across the ground. It was certain.
*Thk—*
Huben's imagination did not come true.
The wooden blade he'd been sure would splinter was perfectly intact. Rather, *he* had been the one overpowered. Looking again, the aura that had been erupting from Neville's body was gone—only a frigid black gleam remained, wrapped tight around the sword alone.
'The lunatic.'
It meant he was sending the bare minimum of aura through his blood vessels. And he'd still pushed Huben's blade back. That was possible? The man had cheated somehow. In the middle of a duel—the coward!
"H-hold on—that's cheating—"
Huben felt the world begin to spin. His field of vision sank, oddly. And a body crumpled sideways, missing its head.
"Killing a man who sheathes his blade in aura mid-duel—that's just cause, wouldn't you say, Lord Breyna?"
At Neville's parting words, Huben's vision went black.
"KYAAAAAAAAH—!!"
The moment Huben's body, too, hit the ground, Celine shrieked.
"H-how could you do such a thing…!! Aah—"
And then she collapsed just as neatly into Haiben's arms, one hand pressed to her forehead.
"Celine!! Are you all right?!"
'What a farce.'
Hands trembling theatrically, Celine performed a dead faint. An act to dodge responsibility for everything she'd set in motion. Neville watched it all with cold eyes—everyone except Haiben, who was worrying over her repulsive performance with utter sincerity.
"Duke Valkian!! Set aside the duel's outcome for now—our Celine must first be—"
"That's nonsense. She's *our* hound, and now you'd try to steal even her?"
In high spirits, Kaiser even cracked a joke as he drew his sword. The air over the training grounds turned heavy.
The Sword Saint of the Empire. A monster. The one man on the continent without a match. Whatever seventh-circle mage Haiben might be, he was nothing before Kaiser. The mere fact that the sword had left its sheath had sealed off every avenue of retreat.
"My daughter has lost consciousness! She is a frail child, I say! And the duel lost its meaning the moment aura was used, did it not? I will send another man, so today, if you would only—!"
Haiben babbled, his face drained white.
*That madman actually drew his sword.*
His precious daughter needed to be laid down somewhere clean at once.
'I must return home first. Once back, I can simply weave the board again.' Even losing, if he refuted today's events head-on, he could buy time. Put his head together with his daughter, and the situation could be turned around. The teeth of that mad dog Neville were far sharper than he'd imagined.
While Haiben's mind raced, Kaiser looked at him as though he weren't worth the glance, then turned to Anna.
"Anna. Did you get the recording?"
"Completed exactly as you ordered, my lord."
"…Recording?"
"Did you think we'd be fools enough to merely *talk*? Once this recording sphere spreads, what becomes of Breyna's reputation—you can work that out yourself."
Anna raised one hand, and as if by magic, the recording sphere appeared. Shade Breathing—a branch of the Shadow Breathing used by the Shadow Unit. Wrap an object in aura, and it vanished like a lie. And upon reaching Swordmaster, one could even hide one's own body within the shadows themselves.
"…This is—!! Underhanded!!"
The instant Haiben drew mana up from his heart and reached out his hand, a fierce wind blew. His arm dropped, his whole body trembling.
At some point, the ground before him had been gouged deep. He had seen neither the swing of the sword nor the aura. The only thing he'd witnessed was the single motion of the blade being sheathed.
A warning: resist again, and you die. And Kaiser, that monster, could deliver it this easily, this casually.
"…We concede. I wish to lay my daughter somewhere safe. Let us go."
"Send them all out by tomorrow. You won't be seeing us for anything pleasant again."
Biting his lip nearly to bleeding, Haiban vanished along with Celine—glaring not at Kaiser, but at Neville.
'That decrepit old bastard. Rot, why don't you.'
And the man's own father was so terrifying he wouldn't even look his way, which was rather funny.
"Neville."
"Yes, my lord."
"The hunt is postponed one week. I have two matters I'd have you handle."
"…Thank you."
Joy and elation surged through him in waves. His father had acknowledged him, and he'd landed a devastating blow on House Breyna. Kaiser regarded Neville slowly. In those black eyes gleaming cold enough to freeze, a warm feeling passed in a single instant.
"And—well done. You are my son, through and through."
Without waiting for an answer, Kaiser turned and left.
"Haha—"
Neville wept. Watching Kaiser's retreating back, tears of joy and gratitude ran down his face.