The Hidden Blade Cuts Deepest
Karamaf drew his weapon. It was a longsword, dark and plain, without a single ornament — an unremarkable weapon, almost too humble for a knight of Karamaf's stature.
Do you know why the techniques called the "secrets" of swordsmanship are never taught to just anyone?
Because if they were, people wouldn't need to pay guilds a fortune to study swordsmanship?
...Are you truly a knight's son? Granted, that's part of it — but more than that, it's because a secret, in itself, is a weapon.
With ordinary swordsmanship, not knowing an opponent's style didn't mean instant death. Swordsmanship was, at its core, simply the craft of how a person fought while holding a sword — how to thrust, how to cut, how to meet steel with steel. No impossible technique appeared out of thin air. A man who had mastered one style could hold his own against an unfamiliar one well enough.
But the arts known as secret techniques were different.
If you didn't know them, you lost.
They broke common sense entirely — techniques a first-time victim had no choice but to fall to. The gap between a man who knew one or two of these and a man who knew none was immense. Each one was, in effect, a killing technique that could take an opponent's life in the instant they faltered.
And my swordsmanship, among them, is especially suited to striking first. When your opponent knows nothing about you — when they don't know what style you fight with — it is devastatingly effective at cutting through that ignorance.
True to an assassin's art, Kaegal's swordsmanship was specialized for ending a fight in a single opening strike. Which was fortunate for Johan.
A prolonged fight favors him. I end this in one blow.
One more step.
Karamaf raised his longsword, and a suffocating pressure followed at once. It was the bearing of a man ready to respond instantly, no matter which line of attack came at him.
How do you fight a man in armor, you ask? You avoid him. The thicker the armor, the more you must avoid him. No matter how strong you are, a well-armored opponent is far too dangerous.
And if I can't avoid him?
There's no such thing as "can't." No one wears armor his whole life. So wait! Wait, and one day he takes it off.
Hm. Not much help in this particular situation.
Johan was doing precisely the opposite of Kaegal's advice.
Karamaf's plate armor felt like a fortress. The only places that looked pierceable were the gaps in his helm and his neck — and unless Karamaf was an idiot, those would be guarded perfectly.
Johan tightened his grip on the longsword. He could feel the steel keening in his hand.
Get inside his reach and drag it into grappling.
One more step. With his calculations complete, Johan closed his stride.
Now was the time to strike.
The guild's footwork — the art called Nessos' Step — unfurled from Johan's heels, a treacherous glide that carried him across the ground as though skating over ice.
Karamaf's eyes went wide at a footwork no knight should have possessed. How did a lord's son come to move like an assassin?
But that was the extent of his surprise. Karamaf had seen far too much to be shaken by this. His body settled instantly into a counter stance — the moment Johan entered his measure, he would cut him down.
Then Johan's body vanished. He had layered a second burst of acceleration on top of the first, and the explosive movement genuinely stunned Karamaf.
I lost him!
They say a first-rate swordsman intuits his own defeat before the fight even settles — that the mind, honed by experience and instinct, renders its verdict before steel ever touches flesh. That was Karamaf now.
Losing track of his opponent in a duel between swordsmen. He could not believe it.
He's even more of a monster than I thought...!
Yet Karamaf did not panic. This was no one-on-one duel fought on even terms. It was a fight for their lives.
By its very nature, Johan could not win against Karamaf no matter how many times he slipped past his guard.
Not as long as that armor held.
Karamaf needed only a single clean hit; Johan had to strike again and again, breaking through to something vital, or lose. The mismatch was so great it hardly deserved to be called a fight. Karamaf had never once entertained the thought that he might fall.
I'll grant that you're a monster. So what of it? Whatever you strike, something of yours comes off next. For all your speed, you can't land a blow and retreat cleanly in the same breath.
Karamaf guarded his neck and face and waited for Johan's attack. It didn't matter where the blow landed. The instant it connected, Johan's feet would stop — and his counter would follow.
Shraaang!
A heavy sound split the air. Johan had swung his sword with monstrous strength behind it, and Karamaf saw where it was aimed: the flank. A horizontal cut. Karamaf laughed at him.
Trying to shear through plate armor with a longsword. Even a fool wouldn't attempt it. This was where Johan's inadequate training as a knight had betrayed him. The moment that pointless swing finished, the boy's head would leave his shoulders.
Off you go.
Then came a sound.
The sound of Karamaf's armor being torn to ribbons.
Johan, having burrowed into Karamaf's guard, swung the longsword with everything he had. The blade shrieked, vomiting out the last of its strength on the verge of shattering.
Was that a mistake?
Even as he succeeded in closing the distance, doubt crept into Johan's mind.
A longsword was not a blade that could cut through anything. Its cutting power dropped sharply against armor — and all the more so when the man wearing it was sheathed head to toe in plate.
Johan was going against everything he had just been taught.
And yet...
Somehow, he felt certain he could do it. It sounded insane, but the moment he laid eyes on Karamaf, the intuition seized him: I can get inside and cut through. It was the equivalent of believing you could split a boulder by swinging a tree branch at it — not the sort of conviction you could explain to another living soul.
KWA-RAK!
Johan's arm swelled with fresh strength, and monstrous force erupted through it — a power even Johan himself had never imagined. He didn't know it, but he had almost never exerted his full strength in his life. There had simply never been a reason to.
The moment he committed everything, the longsword — barely a kilogram or two of steel — became a giant's greatsword.
Then, with a roar, the front of Karamaf's body caved in. Blood sprayed. His armor split open like torn cloth, his torso half-severed.
"Kh—!"
A scream escaped from inside the helm. Karamaf seemed less stunned by the pain than by the sheer impossibility of what had just happened. Caught between agony and disbelief, he failed to bring his raised arm down — squandering his one chance at a counter.
Johan raised his fist like a lion striking. He could feel the longsword shattering in his grip — the blade split down its length, the crossguard crushed by the force of his own strength. A shame, but it didn't matter. He thanked his loyal friend for a job well done, and brought his fist down.
A dull crack, and blood flew from Johan's knuckles as Karamaf's head snapped backward. Punching a lump of metal at full power was bound to hurt.
But for a man cut half in two, it was more than enough. Karamaf's weapon clattered from his hand as he toppled backward, and Johan was on top of him in an instant. For a swordsman, nothing mattered more than this kind of close-quarters killing — and honestly, Johan had more confidence in grappling than in swordsmanship anyway. It had been drilled into his bones long before he ever came to this world.
He seized Karamaf's helm in both hands and wrenched. With an impossible shriek of metal, the helm tore open along its side.
Beneath it appeared the cold-featured face of an elf. Handsome, but bloodied and glaring through clenched teeth — it was a chilling sight. Karamaf growled, coughing up blood.
"Gesenn... sired a monster...!"
"Says the man who came onto another's land to slaughter and burn it all."
"How in the world did you pierce the armor of the Ancient Emp—"
"Spare me. And die, elf!"
Johan had no intention of trading words with Karamaf. His fist came down on the elf's face. However great a knight Karamaf might be, no man survives a beating like that while defenseless.
Karamaf — counted among the finest knights of the Holy Empire.
For a knight of his renown, a pitifully hollow end.
Thud! Thud!
As if performing a confirmation kill, Johan hammered the man's face again and again until there was nothing left that could be called a head.
"Hoo..."
Only after snuffing out his opponent's life could Johan finally draw breath. And only then did his muscles begin to scream and exhaustion come crashing in. He had gone all-out. The fight had ended in a heartbeat, but the strain he felt was no joke — he had sharpened every nerve in his body to a razor's edge before lunging in.
"...Now what?"
Johan muttered, staring down at what had been Karamaf.
During the fight he hadn't given it a thought, but now that it was over, the waste was painful. Karamaf's plate armor sat there with its breastplate shattered and its helm torn open. It would never be wearable again.
No... I couldn't wear it regardless.
Plate armor made its owner obvious at a glance. The moment Johan walked around in it, or hauled it off somewhere to sell, his odds of ending up in serious trouble were very high indeed.
So?
I'll bury the body with the armor.
If he disposed of the corpse in some corner of this forest, no one would ever learn Karamaf's fate. Who would suspect that the man had died chasing Johan himself? There would be an uproar for a while, sure — but when they found nothing, it would die down.
And then no one would come hunting for Johan. The Eitz family was already finished; who would keep chasing one stray son?
This Empire was hardly a well-organized state overflowing with administrative reach. Its emperor was an emperor in name only — closer to a grand lord with a strong army and a few special privileges. Outside his direct vassals, he could barely project power at all. He had neither the means nor the motive to hunt down every hypothetical survivor of the Eitz line forever.
That bastard... why in the hell did he pull that stunt in the first place?
Johan spat on the ground and cursed the emperor whose face he'd never seen. From the scraps of rumor he'd overheard, the whole picture was hard to reconstruct — but he could piece together at least this much: the Eitz family had, through sheer bad luck, been fitted for a false accusation.
Sir Gesenn had gone from one great noble to the next, working hard to secure vassalage contracts — a sword for hire when there was fighting to be done, paid in land or coin. A knight's oath of vassalage, after all, was not so different from a mercenary contract.
Perhaps it made more sense to take on a few new lords and climb, rather than sinking everything into a hopeless fief. There was no law that a vassalage had to be exclusive — if one was capable, one could serve several masters at once.
Had that offended the sensibilities of his original liege, the emperor?
There was no way to know — and no need. Johan was going to run, and shed the name of Eitz, and live. That was that.
He began digging into the earth. It was for the burial.
Grrrr.
"...You again?"
Johan turned his head with weary eyes.
The black wolf was there.