Mercenary (3)
A short rasp of friction, and the blade slid free of the Sword Saint's scabbard.
Absolute Boundary
The instant the Sword Saint's blade cleared its sheath, the space around them began to warp.
Above. Below. Left. Right.
Leaving no room to dodge, formless slashes came screaming in from every direction, all of them locked on Begus.
Faced with the cutting edges pressing in from all sides, Begus dropped low at once.
"No way around them."
Every angle was saturated with slashes. Better to force a single-point breakthrough than thrash around trying to evade and take every cut full-on. That was the efficient choice.
Begus raised his guard all the way to his face and drove straight into the oncoming storm.
Clang! Screeech—!
Wind-forged edges bit into the hardened surface of his arms, gouging shallow furrows through the skin he'd raised as a shield. He'd avoided a fatal wound, but the raw pain of torn flesh made him bite down hard on his lip as he kept charging.
"Kh…!"
The Sword Saint had means of attack at range. Keep giving ground and the fight would collapse into a one-sided beating — Begus taking everything the Sword Saint threw at him. So he ran, ready to eat the next strike with his body if he had to.
Watching Begus close the distance, the Sword Saint settled back into a draw stance and set her hand on the hilt again. In a soft, almost lazy voice, the blade eased a fraction from its scabbard.
Sword Saint Style — Single Flash
A soft click. The blade left the scabbard, and another slash tore toward Begus.
Even for the Sword Saint, spamming that earlier barrage of continuous cuts had been too much; only a single edge came for him this time. Same as before, Begus could read the trajectory of the distant slash. He twisted hard, slipped past the strike, and in the next heartbeat was right on top of her.
"Let's see that swordsmanship of yours up close!"
"You're… harder than I expected…"
As Begus barreled in, the Sword Saint finished drawing her blade completely. It wasn't quite the invisible draw of her earlier attacks, but even to Begus's eye it was still a damn fast unsheathing.
Blade in hand, she hopped lightly upward — then rode the wind and slid several meters back through open air.
Begus roared as he chased the figure vaulting away through empty space.
"Sword Saint! Running already?!"
"As if."
She swept her sword through the air in a wild, messy arc, and the space around her warped again. Bundles of sword-ki came flying.
They came on like a last desperate thrash. Begus had no confidence he could dodge them all, so he covered his face and ran straight at her again.
Clang! Screeech!
Bigger wounds than before carved themselves into his hardened arms. Still he didn't stop. Before he knew it, the gap between them had closed to sword-reach.
"Stop running and take my fist!"
Close enough that a swing of the arm would put knuckles on target. With his range secured, Begus cocked a fist and locked onto the Sword Saint. Power packed into the heavy blow, the flesh of his hand hardening further still.
The instant he went to throw that reinforced punch, the Sword Saint raised her blade to intercept.
A rock-hard haymaker came howling in.
"Ugh…!"
CLANG!
The Sword Saint's sword took the hit and shuddered violently, the ringing crash of the collision rolling out in every direction. She failed to bleed off the full rebound and staggered back several steps, one eye squeezed shut.
But Begus was never going to let an enemy retreat with an opening like that. He held the distance and kept swinging.
"What's wrong, Sword Saint?! Show me what real swordsmanship looks like!"
CLANG! Clang! CLAAANG!
Every time Begus's fist came down, the Sword Saint's blade screamed under the defense. She fought to break free of his rhythm, but the refined chain of blows from a man tempered by long years of fighting left almost no gap to exploit. For the Sword Saint, pure defense was all she could manage.
And as she blocked again and again, cracks began to spider across her sword.
"The blade…!"
Crack. Crrrack.
The accumulated damage had finally forced the steel to spit out its fatigue. Even a famous blade didn't have infinite durability. Strike something hard enough with rock and fractures were inevitable.
Crack. Crrrrack—
The splitting blade ate a few more of Begus's punches, then snapped clean through, leaving nothing but a short stub of steel at the hilt.
"Sword Saint! Your sword's gone. How are you going to attack now?!"
The Sword Saint's eyes went wide as she watched the blade break. She seemed more fixed on the state of her weapon than on Begus's assault.
Seizing the opening left by the vanished sword, Begus laughed wide and drove a fist straight through the gap.
WHOOM!
A hard detonation of air. The punch came in with a vicious sonic crack, and the Sword Saint clenched her teeth.
Begus was already certain of his victory.
An alley in the 13th District.
With a man collapsed in front of me, skull caved in, I made my call on the situation at once. He hadn't been down long. Odds were high Begus hadn't gone far.
"Still somewhere nearby, then."
The man's condition was enough to make anyone wince, but finding a trail this fast was a solid haul — especially this soon after leaving Brian's office. All of it thanks to the information Brian had handed over.
He'd had his own criteria for recommending bounty targets: criminals whose recent whereabouts he more or less knew, and whose next likely mark could be predicted to some degree. Begus, apparently, had fit the bill.
"Boss."
"Yeah. I'm listening."
"Didn't you say there was already someone else on the chase?"
Sinel asked from beside me, eyes on the traces of the earlier carnage. She was right. Back at his office, Brian had said the Sword Saint was already on Begus's trail.
Ordinarily, when bounty hunters' quarry overlapped, physical collisions between them were common. But if the other party was the Sword Saint, there wasn't much to worry about.
"The Sword Saint, you mean? No need to fret over her."
The Sword Saint. A mercenary mage affiliated with the Cross Network. A narcissist with self-love beyond imagination — and an extreme method actor whose entire operating principle was locked to the role of "swordsman." Even the moniker "Sword Saint" was nothing more than a title she'd given herself.
And for someone like her, there existed a single magic word that made her skin crawl just to hear it. Play that weakness right, and there was no real chance of her snatching the prey out from under us.
"Is the Sword Saint famous?"
"Famous as a self-proclaimed Sword Saint, yes. From the moment she first showed her face, she's been telling people to call her that."
"If she's a Sword Saint, she must be good with a blade."
"Doesn't know the first thing about swordsmanship. Ah — she is good at one thing, though. Holding a sword and blocking. That, she can do."
"Ah…"
Sinel's face went flat with secondhand embarrassment. That the usually expressionless Sinel could even make a face like that was a mild surprise. To her, this was probably just some weirdo waving a sword around while casting magic. In a certain sense you could call it effective camouflage for her real capabilities — but in practice it was the height of inefficiency.
She was a once-in-a-generation genius who'd mastered chantless casting from her 1st Circle days. Once she could fire off Wind Cutter with no tell whatsoever, she'd started using it to play swordsman. The exact opposite of someone like me, who hid spellwork behind telepathy.
For all I knew, she might be at her strongest with no sword at all.
"Other than that, most of what she does is…"
I cut myself off mid-explanation, sensing something off. Ragged breathing. Footsteps at a full sprint. Faint but clear, the presence of someone tearing toward us from a distance reached my ears.
"Boss?"
"Sinel."
"Yes. I caught it too."
Sinel drew the dagger from her thigh and settled into a ready stance. The footfalls grew louder, and then a figure burst into view from beyond the alley mouth.
Thud. Thud. Thud. THUD.
A man running full tilt, body hardened to stone, covered in wounds. I matched him against the photo I'd seen earlier and had a gun out and leveled on him in an instant.
Begus the Boulder. A 4th Circle mage who used Stone Skin. The Class-1 wanted criminal we'd been hunting.
BANG! BANG!
Rounds cracked off in a hurry and flew toward him. Most of the shots aimed at Begus went wide, and the one that actually hit simply bounced off his hardened hide. The rounds I'd fired as a test left only the tiny scrapes Brian had warned me about.
No way to stop him at range. I snapped an order to Sinel at once.
"Sinel! After him!"
"Got it."
Haste
Sinel cast Haste the moment she heard the order. Accelerated, she was just about to take off after Begus when a girl came spilling out of the same alley he'd emerged from.
She skidded to a hard stop, black hair whipping through the air. The girl who'd been chasing Begus spotted us, then swept her sword once through empty space.
Screeech—!
A massive boundary line carved itself into the ground a single step ahead of where Sinel had been about to plant her foot.
"Sword Saint?"
A heavy cape draped over her frame. A mechanical scabbard at her hip. And golden eyes that glittered sharp even in the dark.
The Sword Saint from every story stood right there in front of us — and in her hand was a single broken sword.