A Monster Wearing a Man's Skin
“......”
The other swordsmen froze solid at the sight of their comrade collapsing in a spray of blood.
What did we just see?
They had come from the same sword guild, and so they knew exactly what their companion had attempted. Deflecting an incoming attack sideways to redirect it, then counterattacking in the same motion — that technique was practiced in any number of sword guilds.
So why had it failed?
In the swirling confusion, Gasro managed to scrape together a conclusion.
“That man's strength is anything but ordinary! Don't lock weapons with him!”
Gasro had seen it clearly. When the mace came swinging down, it had exploded with force — like an arrow loosed from a bowstring. It was impossible to believe, but...
Still, if the man's raw strength were superhuman, then what they'd just witnessed made sense. However unbelievable it was, when only one explanation existed, you had no choice but to accept it.
'Don't lock weapons with him?'
'I know knights fight brutally, but still...'
The swordsmen glared at Johan as they thought it through. Knights' swordplay was savage, yes — but there were limits, and they had never seen a technique that simply bludgeoned its way through with raw force alone.
Skill overcomes strength.
It was a maxim they'd heard so often it had worn grooves into their brains, and never had it felt emptier than it did right now.
Could skill truly hold up against overwhelming power?
'That ended faster than I expected.'
Johan, for his part, studied the swordsmen too. The exchange just now had surprised even him — he'd assumed they would trade blows a few more times.
The men facing Johan had fought him as though he were an ordinary man. That had been an unforgivable mistake.
When facing Johan, you had to treat him as a monster.
A monster wearing a man's skin. And not just any monster — one that, if it got its hands on you, would tear your body apart with monstrous strength.
'Hmm.'
Johan could feel the swordsmen's wariness, naked and undisguised. It was plain as day that they meant to give ground the moment he charged.
A brief standoff.
'One, two. Three.'
Reading an opponent's breathing was no great challenge. The moment felt right, and Johan hurled the mace in his hand like a bolt of lightning.
“Gah!”
It was as if a stone fired from a trebuchet had come screaming at them. The swordsman, his body already frozen stiff, took the mace square in the chest and went rolling backward. The way he lay sprawled and motionless on the ground did not look promising. Johan calmly drew his longsword.
The swordsmen faltered and retreated another step. The mercenaries closed in around them.
“Ga-Gasro... what do we do? Do we really have to keep fighting that?”
“...I surrender!”
“What in the hells are you doing!”
The garrison commander shrieked in outrage, but Gasro had already brought his longsword up to the man's throat. Another quick-witted swordsman moved to seize the commander as well.
The fact that enemies had penetrated this far meant the outer walls and gates had already fallen. In a situation like this, dying to protect a garrison commander was a fool's bargain — surrender was the better path. Nothing else mattered much; face that monster head-on, and he was certain death right here and now.
“Sharp instincts. Strip their weapons! If any of them tries anything clever, feel free to cut them down.”
At Johan's order the mercenaries swarmed forward and disarmed the swordsmen and the commander alike. Johan looked down at the struggling commander and spoke.
“Tell me the situation inside the keep.”
“Shut your mouth! I swear to the gods, I'll tell an invader nothing. When reinforcements arrive, you and your rabble will...”
Gerdolf drove his fist into the commander's gut. The man retched and heaved, coughing up everything he'd eaten the day before. Johan turned to the swordsmen instead.
“Anything you can tell me?”
“Yes, sir! Plenty!”
“You traitorous...! This is what comes of lowborn scum! We paid you all that silver! And your precious sword guild demanded even more on top of it...”
“Still unwilling to surrender?”
Johan asked, looking down at the commander. Instead of answering, the man spat at him. Johan gave a small nod.
“Kill him.”
“Sir?”
The mercenary holding the man down faltered. One look was enough to tell that the commander was nobly born.
He wasn't a high noble with lands of his own, but even a minor title made a man an awkward one to kill for a mere sellsword. The custom was to capture men like this, not execute them...
Thwack!
Gerdolf swung his short warhammer in a compact arc and caved in the commander's skull. Where the man had come from, what family he belonged to — none of it mattered in the slightest.
An order's an order!
The name Slaughterer hadn't been given out as a joke. Gerdolf, having snuffed out the commander's life, then turned and strode toward the mercenary who had been holding the man down — and seized him by the throat.
“Gk—Gerkh! Lord Gerdolf! What are you doing!”
“What's the meaning of this, Gerdolf?”
“This one didn't follow orders.”
“I did! I was merely startled, sir!”
“Let him go.”
At Johan's word, Gerdolf released the man at once. The mercenary sucked in a ragged breath and spoke.
“Forgive me, Lord Johan. It will not happen again.”
“Forget it. You followed me this far — am I to doubt your loyalty now?”
At those words the mercenaries wore expressions of deep, tearful gratitude. Grateful or not, Gerdolf had already grabbed the next man and raised his warhammer again. When Gerdolf's arm went up, the swordsmen panicked.
“Wh-what is this! You said you'd let us talk!”
“Ah. My apologies. This one's an exceptionally devoted knight, you see. Now — what exactly is happening inside?”
“The walls were attacked, and the commander was about to lead the relief himself.”
“Is the castellan inside the inner keep?”
“Yes...”
“Do you know where?”
“Well, as for that...”
Johan made his decision on the spot.
“We're going in. We take the castellan first!”
The soldiers of Ulrike's camp, waiting in reserve, soon noticed that something was off. Several enemy soldiers had come fleeing out of the fog — straight toward them.
“Are they... running away?”
“What? That's ridiculous, there's no way... wait. They actually are.”
The defenders, who had stumbled lost through the fog and had the rotten luck to bolt directly toward Ulrike's position, screamed and fled off in a new direction.
“What in the world is happening over there?”
“Someone has to open the gates before we can get in...”
A few knights muttered in visible confusion. The plan had been to take the sally port, send in the mercenaries, and summon the rest of the force.
For a moment they wondered if the operation had gone wrong — but with enemies fleeing out of the castle, that hardly seemed to be the case either.
“Isn't the battle still going on?”
“We can't see a thing in this fog...”
The fog made the attackers hesitate too. Then Stefan stepped forward.
“We must send relief now!”
“......”
“......”
The knights wore expressions of profound skepticism. Had anyone else said it, they might have agreed — but coming from Stefan, for reasons none of them could name, it was strangely hard to swallow.
“Let's watch the situation a little longer.”
“And what if Johan dies while we wait?”
“Sir Johan is hardly the sort to die that easily. Besides, he appears to be fighting right now, so...”
“Then how about relief goes with only the soldiers Sir Stefan brought?”
Suettelg, who had been listening in, offered a compromise. If Stefan's own mercenaries were to go, the knights had no grounds to object.
Back among his own camp, Suettelg looked at Stefan and spoke, his face full of astonishment.
“That's a rather decent idea you've come up with. In conditions like these, the enemy will be just as thrown into confusion — get close enough and they won't dare strike you down easily.”
“Ah... y-yes, that's exactly what I was thinking. Of course.”
Stefan, naturally, had thought no such thing.
It had been the same when Johan returned from his negotiations with Ulrike — Stefan simply could not bring himself to trust the woman.
— Ulrike truly promised to spare your life?
— Well, she might change her mind some drunken night and decide to kill me after all, so it's best I don't go lurking around her.
— ...And the Tax Rights?
— She says she'll pay in gold, deeds, and goods in kind. To be handed over as soon as the siege ends and she returns home.
— Did you actually meet Ulrike? She's not someone who caves that easily...
— I don't know what history you two share, but from what I saw, Lady Ulrike didn't strike me as the sort to break her word without cause.
'Did this bastard seduce her in the little time they had?'
It was truly astonishing, but Johan seemed to have won Ulrike over. Hearing his account, there was no doubt about it.
And yet Stefan still feared Ulrike. If Johan were to die, there was nothing to stop her from tearing up the agreement on the spot.
'Johan cannot die. Absolutely not!'
“Move out! Follow me!”
Fortunately, the mercenaries fell in behind Stefan without complaint.
Their employer's ally, Johan, needed saving — so they all rose without a word. Their faces, of course, were full of bewilderment.
“So the master knight can actually fight, huh?”
“Who knows... I heard he's a blind man with his eyes open.”
Whispers at his back.
Ordinarily Stefan would have exploded on the spot, but he was in no position to rage when he needed these men. Gritting his teeth, he dragged them close to the walls, his whole body locked rigid with the fear of arrows.
'The fog is too thick for them to shoot this far. Certainly...!'
He told himself that, but the terror would not fade. Worse, the top of the wall was eerily quiet — and that silence frightened him more than anything.
As Stefan wracked his brain wondering what to make of it, the mercenaries pressed him.
“We need orders, sir!”
“Do we go in through the sally port? Or climb down the wall?”
“Quiet! I'm thinking right now...”
Just then, an unpleasant sound rolled out of the fog — the groan of the castle gate being hauled upward.
“?”
“Wh-what is that?”
The mercenaries raised their weapons on reflex, but once they were up, something felt wrong.
Why would the defenders inside open the gate and come out? They should have been holed up in there, short on time even for that.
People emerged from the fog. The mercenaries looked only at Stefan and waited — waiting for orders that never came, because Stefan's mind had ground to a halt too.
“What — did you come to help?”
“?!”
The one who had opened the gate and walked out was Johan. Dangling from one of his hands was a man they had never seen before, his face a mask of blood.
Johan's party didn't know it. Ulrike didn't know it. Even the garrison itself didn't know it — but the situation inside the castle was a shambles.
The moment word spread that someone had climbed the walls in the thick fog, the defenders, convinced the wall had already fallen, were seized by raw panic.
While Johan was busy clearing soldiers out of the inner courtyard, the terror spread unchecked along the ramparts.
They were exhausted and starving to begin with. The quicker-witted few had already seized on the fog to scramble down the walls and flee outside.
Even then, things might have been salvaged.
But the garrison commander — the one man who should have rushed over to steady the troops — had come out, run straight into Johan, and died for it.
With the commander's contact severed, the squad leaders who commanded the rank and file spiraled into panic too.
One squad leader bolted, and that was the end of it.
Like a dam straining past its breaking point, the soldiers scattered in every direction, each man seeking his own path to survival.
All the while, Johan was ransacking the inner keep in search of the castellan — blissfully unaware that the outer garrison had already collapsed.
“The castellan is on the third floor?”
“Yes, sir! Yes!”
Setting aside the massive central tower, the inner keep was a cramped structure with scarcely an empty corner. The ground floor of such towers was typically storage or a kitchen, with living quarters above.
'Knowing my luck, he's probably fleeing right now.'
The castellan would know this castle far better than Johan did. A secret passage or two would hardly come as a surprise. He had to run him down and take him before the man could get his bearings.
“Is there any passage leading out of the castle?”
“W-we wouldn't know about that...”
The captured swordsmen spoke with anxious faces. With the garrison commander already cut down, not one of them had any guarantee of leaving this place alive.
They had to prove useful somehow!
“Where are you from?”
“Aren, in the Empire's heartland, sir.”
“That's a long way off. How did you end up here?”
“A levy order came down to the guild... Sir Karamap sent us this way.”
“!”
Johan flinched at a name he had never expected to hear. Karamap had sent these men here?
“Karamap did? Did you ever see his face?”
“Good heavens, no — men of our station don't stand before him directly. Besides, Sir Karamap is... hm. This is only rumor, but they say he's fallen gravely ill...”