Confrontation

Now that radios and telephones had both come into general use, you might well wonder what anyone still wanted with a crystal orb. But they had one point in their favor: they ‘couldn’t be traced’. So magic devices like this one still had their uses, and the crystal orb called ‘Farsight’, which the Prince and the Administrative Minister were peering into, served exactly that purpose.

“What will you do, Your Highness?”

Rad spoke up, chewing on some nuts he’d brought from who knew where. The mere fact that he could snack like that while watching Deathwish get lynched by a pack of Knights probably said everything about the man’s character.

In the crystal orb, Aiden had stepped out in front, with Katya behind him.

“I didn’t expect the Lionhearted’s consort himself to cut in. The situation has become awkward.”

For a man calling the situation awkward, his tone was overflowing with composure. The Prince, who had been watching it all beside him with his chin propped on his hand, gave him a sidelong look.

“You sound like you expected it.”
“No. The situation itself is the part I didn’t see coming.”

Rad picked the thread back up, leisurely tipping his chair back.

“I’d assumed Deathwish would kill at least half the bastards I sent. Her resistance is far gentler than I expected.”

“…”

“We need some justification before we can launch a political attack, and at this rate it’s a total washout. That part I didn’t foresee either.”

The Prince’s eyes narrowed. The ‘dying’ Rad spoke of meant the Knights who had just thrown themselves at Katya as a pack. He had sent them himself, yet he sounded deeply sorry that none of them had died, as though he’d sent them out counting on exactly that from the start.

“You’re closer to a viper than a strategist, Rad.”
“I appreciate the compliment, but no matter how good a strategist is, in the end he never gets the final say.”

Rad smiled faintly and went on.

“The decision is yours, Your Highness. I only offer the methods.”

“…”

“So say the word. What will you do about the Lionhearted’s consort?”
“Let me hear your recommendation first.”
“We hit him.”

The Prince stared at him, dumbfounded.

“…The Lionhearted’s consort himself? If things go wrong, there’ll be no cleaning up after it.”
“Is that so?”
“You did the analysis yourself. His handling of supernatural powers is grotesquely good, but his combat technique isn’t even beginner-level. It’s dreadful.”

So a handful of Knights against a human like that was far too much force to throw at someone you weren’t allowed to hurt even in jest.

“As long as he isn’t hurt too badly, it should be fine, shouldn’t it? And he doesn’t look like he’ll go down that easily, either.”
“On what grounds?”
“We built that plan using things as hard to come by as Suppression Pillars, and that man threw the whole thing off.”

Not that Rad could be sure. But from the look of things, it was that man’s doing that Deathwish had turned so moderate, too. They had even gone out of their way to use something as rare as sorcery so that no pursuit team could follow her, and hadn’t he come chasing after her alone regardless? Both of the reasons Rad’s own plan had been twisted at the root traced back to that man.

Without question.

He was a human hiding more than he showed.

“…Are you saying we should be wary of him because he might get in the way? Enough to obstruct the great undertaking?”
“We’re not at that stage yet.”

His voice was flat, and it settled the conclusion in one clean cut.

“My own view is that the man’s a con man.”

That was exactly how far Rad’s analysis of Aiden Kellermain went. Ordinary. Trying hard to be ordinary. Had never once done rough work, and had rarely so much as been dragged into a fight. A lucky, commonplace fellow who just happened to be sitting in that seat.

“Then it doesn’t add up. Why pay so much attention to a mere con man?”
“Because there’s a good chance we’ll end up paying attention to him from here on.”

As he said it, Rad’s glistening blue gaze stayed fixed on the Aiden inside the crystal orb.

“…For someone who’s lived an ordinary life, he seems to be wielding power a little ‘beyond his station’.”

In his irises, a strangely glinting blue light was combing over every inch of Aiden’s face.

“Against several Knights… he could never possibly win. But he might at least show us something interesting, don’t you think?”

We’re to fight?

Levant checked back, bewildered, on the order that had come flying in from the other side of the comm.

Hitting the people around her was one thing, but Levant knew as well as anyone how enormous the risk was in hitting the Lionhearted and her consort directly. They had already been briefed, and that included just how much fighting strength the opponent had.

To be sure.

He was a multi-ability user who wielded several supernatural powers, which made him a threatening, powerful opponent. In fact, the power flowing around his body right now was as strong as it could be.

But.

His combat experience is at a paltry level.

They had already heard, through leaked information, about the fight he’d put on some time ago at the exchange ceremony with the Tribal Confederation. His power was inscrutable, but his knack for wielding it was crude beyond compare. Anyone who had ever honed a combat technique even once would have agreed.

In that respect.

“—We have no intention of killing you. So don’t put up any pointless resistance.”

Levant drew a bead-shaped ritual implement from their coat as they said it and crushed it then and there. A translucent wave spread out in every direction, and every supernatural power inside its range visibly lost its force: the Knights’ ki, the divinity in Katya’s body, every kind of power Aiden was giving off, all of it.

“—”

Aiden’s eyes narrowed.

His way of fighting leaned, at bottom, on high-output supernatural power. It hadn’t vanished entirely, granted, but merely having its force shaved down meant he’d be going in with a tremendous penalty. The Knights’ ki might be shaved a little too, but the combat technique they’d cultivated their whole lives was untouched. The device had no doubt been brought along to single out Katya, yet it worked on Aiden just the same.

“Fight it out and nobody comes away looking good. Stay quiet.”
“Is that right?”
“That’s right. As I said, we have no intention of killing you.”

Hurt him a little, beat him thoroughly, drive him off, and that was that. If he had a brain, he’d hardly throw himself at this many Knights with his greatest strength broken.

“I’d set aside the notion that your standing as the Lionhearted’s consort will keep you safe. Officially, right now, we’re ‘people who aren’t here’. And whatever happens in this place is ‘something that never happened’.”
“For people who gang up with swords on someone who isn’t even resisting, you’ve got awfully long tongues.”
“…It’s necessary.”
“I’m sure it is.”

At that, Aiden drew his sword and answered evenly.

“Then, necessarily, you can do the same to me, can’t you?”

At that, Katya, who had been sitting quietly behind him all this while, went round-eyed.

“—Wait, you’ll end up—!”
“It’s all right.”

Beneath those words lay a resolve without a fingernail’s worth of his usual easygoing, pliant manner. It would be fair to say it was full of rage, a rage brimming with the will that these bastards, at least, were getting their skulls crushed.

“Why do you think I train, and drill, and bust my hide gathering strength?”

Come to think of it, it was obvious. Gathering strength for the main quest, growing, copying skills, all well and good. But at bottom, why did he build up strength at all?

“I drill so I can beat up bastards like these.”

Whoever the opponent was, whatever was behind them, whatever they were after.

Family, friends, relatives…

It was to protect the people inside Aiden’s own ‘fence’.

“What’s the point of having a friend otherwise?”
“What…?”
“Try leaving it to someone else once in a while.”

Katya’s eyes went wide all over again, while Levant let out an incredulous snort, certain the man was no match for them, and jerked their chin at the nearest Knight.

“—You know the drill. Don’t kill him.”

Without his supernatural power, the man was a corpse. There was no need to tense up. Subdue him without going too far, and that would be the end of it.

“Understood.”

The others nearby raised their swords too, looking indifferent. They plainly shared the view that pouring this much force onto someone of his caliber was overkill. Then the Knights sprang out all at once, and a combined assault came rushing in from every side like a thunderbolt roaring down a mountain.

And.

“…?”

That was about when they felt something was off. Anyone would have. Aiden wasn’t doing anything at all, just standing still, and it made no sense whatsoever. He stood bolt upright as if he’d been nailed to the spot, as though that were perfectly fine.

However much their supernatural power had been held down, these were Knights who’d thrown their whole lives into honing combat technique, and their movements lightly surpassed the limits of a human being. Attacks no ordinary eye could follow came flying in from every direction.

And yet.

Aiden’s gaze.

The eyes of a man known to have not one scrap of combat experience were keeping up with every last sword trajectory, tangled together like a skein of thread.

“…!”

Gooseflesh broke out all over Levant’s body.

Before long.

“You lot said everything that happens here is ‘something that never happened’. So, the other way around—”

Along with those words.

“—it doesn’t matter what gets done to you lot, does it?”

In an instant, the Knights charging him in unison were flung out in every direction. They scattered and went down like cardboard sent flying.

“…”

“…”

In a silence where nothing else remained, Levant blinked blankly, still sprawled on the ground. The blow to their body was one thing, but the shock to their mind was greater.

…Just now, what?

This many Knights.

Subdued by one man, in one instant. There was no explaining it without a yawning ‘gap in capability’.

Don’t make me laugh…!

Levant ground their teeth and pushed themselves up. Not even as a trainee Knight had they suffered humiliation like this. It had to be carelessness, nothing else. If they linked up properly again, Aiden would have no way to prepare for it.

That was how it should be.

Strangely.

“You said so earlier, didn’t you? That you won’t kill me.”

Yet looking at the man standing there with that grave gaze, Levant somehow felt that certainty shrinking away.

“You showed me some consideration, so I’ll return the favor. I won’t kill you.”
“…There’s a limit to how insolent you—”
“But here’s something I know from experience.”

Aiden muttered it with unfocused eyes. The look came on him naturally, as his reason faded without his noticing while he chewed over horrific memories.

“—You lot can’t even imagine how many ways there are to get hurt so bad you’d rather just die.”

Mostly at Meyer’s hands. Mostly in dreams. Once you’ve been beaten until you die, you’re bound to run into injuries now and then that have you begging to be killed. In that field, at least, Aiden could fairly be called a star lecturer…

“So I’ll teach you one each. Otherwise it’s kind of unfair to me.”

The instant the words dropped, the Knights flinched and drew back. They even had the illusion that the very air around them had changed in a flash.

Seeing it, Levant understood by instinct. The assessment of that man, the one they’d heard, had actually seen, and that everyone here had held, would have to be scrapped right now. Combat experience at a paltry level? Crude technique?

There’s a limit to the bullshit…!

What stood before their eyes now gave off a viciousness that only a veteran who’d crossed the line between life and death countless times could. It was a pressure so vicious that you’d believe it if someone told you he’d experienced death ‘directly’ more times than anyone could count…!

“Khh…!”

Someone couldn’t bear the pressure and shot forward, and with that the fight resumed.

In the Imperial knight orders, group combat put one thing first: several people moving as one body in seamless coordination. It wasn’t simply attacking at the same time. It was an encircling net that sealed off every angle without a gap, so that the opponent would be hunted down for certain.

But this time, too.

— WHAM!

— WHAM!!

His sword’s path coiled once through the air, and the Knights who made up the net collapsed all at once.

“Wh-what was that?”
“How the hell did he do that?!”

The technique was uncanny enough that the words burst out of them even in the middle of a fight, yet the man who’d pulled it off moved on to his next motion as if it were nothing.

“Seriously, if I don’t get to show off, it’s unfair to me…”

He ground his teeth, muttering with unfocused eyes, and swung his sword.

In a situation that called for ‘combat technique’, it was perfectly clear what feeling he was clinging to so desperately. How much hell had he gone through just to show off at a moment like this? How horrific a time had Meyer put him through? The helplessness, the pain, the despair, the resignation that nothing he did would get him out of the pain…!

And so…!

“You lot can go through a bit of it too…!”

“…”

“It’s not fair if I’m the only one who takes it…!”

“…”

It was a grudge whose aim was somehow off the mark.

While the Knights caught up in that aimless rage screamed and were smashed to pieces.

The Prince and Rad were both staring at the crystal orb, at a loss for words.

“…Shall I speak frankly?”

The smile wiped from his face for once, Rad tapped the crystal orb and spoke in a low voice. In it, Aiden was swinging his sword with unfocused eyes. But unlike that somehow deflating sight, the results playing out were enough to knock the wits out of them.

“This is something only a veteran who’s rolled around battlefields for ten years at the very least could pull off, isn’t it? Overwhelming Knights, one against many?”
“…A veteran very, very, very full of talent and experience.”

The Prince added the gloss and clutched his forehead. In truth, it was doubtful whether even a veteran rich in talent and experience, as he put it, could manage this. He was a swordsman himself, talented enough to be called a ‘genius’ in the imperial capital, and that was why he could analyze the scene so well.

Precisely.

Just how absurd it was.

“…He’s scraping it straight off.”
“What does that mean?”
“I’m saying Aiden is scraping the movements of every single person there straight off them.”

Rad fell silent for a moment, because he couldn’t entirely follow what the Prince had just said.

“What on earth are you talking about?”
“The techniques he’s using keep changing from one moment to the next, so I can’t say anything clear-cut…”

The Prince went on, sounding dizzy. The Knights who had linked up again to bring Aiden down were just then falling away like leaves in an autumn wind.

“His footwork is Wind Talker, the sword form created by the Knight of Storms…”

A gait as light as a spring breeze. His body turned freely at will, throwing off the trajectory of every attack that rushed at him.

“In the lower body, Floating Grass, which the Wanderer of Spring used often…”

His center of gravity shifted as softly as swaying grass, and together with that spring breeze it made for movement dazzling beyond compare.

“The trajectory of his strikes is Bowstring Moon, created by the Assassin of Dusk…”

A sword strike along a straight line, concise and honest, and for that very reason quick to recover and heavy with it.

“…And he’s using all of them at once.”
“I understand those techniques exist, but what do you mean, scraped them off—”
“They’re the techniques the Knights over there use.”
“…What?”
“At the level of Imperial Knights, it’s no surprise they’ve all learned different systems of swordsmanship. That’s what a school is: each one sets out their own theory, hones it in real combat and melts their own experience into it.”

And so, in the end.

Even with the same technique, the way each person used it split a thousand ways. Even people who’d learned the same swordsmanship were bound to leave traces of their own, like fingerprints. They were movements you might as well call ‘secret arts’, with a life spent on the sword, combat experience, theory and know-how all melted into them.

“—And all of it is being ‘stolen’. In an instant.”

And yet.

The techniques Aiden was using now.

Every one of them was a movement used by the Knights who had charged him.

As if it were nothing.

He was ‘analyzing’ what they’d built up over a lifetime, exactly as it stood, and ‘copying’ it. …There was no explaining how, whatever technique he used, something like that was even possible.

On top of that.

The most preposterous part lay somewhere else. Even granting him such uncanny combat technique, it didn’t fully explain the miracle that man was working against Knights. Was Aiden’s body overwhelmingly stronger than theirs? Faster? Tougher? No. His supernatural power was propping up his body, but even allowing for that, you might as well call him weak. On physique alone, any single one of those Knights could have handled a truckload of Aidens. So why were they being smashed one-sidedly, without grazing a single hair on his head?

…How.

The Prince ran his eyes over Aiden’s movements, looking like a man about to lose his soul.

Every single one of them is the right answer?

In the heat of combat, at every fork where life and death came down to judgment in an instant, in fractions of a second, every judgment that man made was the ‘right answer’. He slipped the path a sword would take before it got there. He deflected the attacks that came flying in together. Twisting, moving, countering, subduing— at each and every instant he chose, without hesitation, the movement it was most efficient to make. At every moment he seized only the shortcut to ‘victory’.

No.

The Prince, peering closely at Aiden’s movements, revised that impression at once. There was no enterprising air of a man going for victory.

Rather than that.

Something far more desperate.

Not victory. Survival.

Aiden Kellermain.

He wasn’t fighting toward victory. He was fighting in a way that dodged every option that led to ‘death’, as though he’d already been through it, as though his whole body had already learned that anything else meant dying. A fear of ‘pain’, remembered by his nerves, carved into his muscles and branded on his soul, was what made him choose those movements by instinct.

“—”

That man.

What on earth had he been through, to approach combat like that?

The Prince was lost for words for a moment, and closed his eyes.

“…”

Before long, eyes still closed, he pressed hard at his temple.

“…Rad.”
“Yes.”
“When you looked into that man, nothing came up, right?”
“…That’s right.”
“Look into him again.”

“…”

“There’s no way he’s an ordinary con man. Absolutely not. Chances are he’s been trained since childhood at a level that shaves bone and tears flesh.”
“…The intelligence I gather has never been wrong, though.”
“Then this is the first time. That’s an order. Go and shake him down again from top to bottom.”

This time it was Rad’s turn to fall silent. While he tapped at his chin with a rare, serious expression and sank into thought, the Prince studied the crystal orb with a grave gaze.

…Where did this human spring from.

The feeling in that gaze was more complicated than even he could explain.