62. The Trumpet Flower

A reflex is the fundamental response mechanism of our nervous system, an involuntary motor reaction that occurs swiftly and automatically in answer to an outside stimulus.

…?

When your hand touches something hot and you snatch it back fast, or when you nick your finger on a kitchen knife while cooking and yet never cut it through to the end — that is because these reflexes are guarding your body without you ever being aware of it.

….

What in the world did your parents even teach you?

…!

…At any rate, from now on we’ll focus the training on developing your reflexes.

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People say that when death looms right before your eyes, the years you’ve lived flash past like a revolving lantern. So I once asked my father what sort of revolving lantern would flash past me before I died.

Instead of answering, he pressed a single flower into my hand. A trumpet flower, soft orange and lovely.¹

I took it and hesitated a long while, not knowing what expression I was supposed to make, because my father had never liked flowers. A flower like the trumpet creeper least of all. It was poisonous and not even fit to eat, so to him it was nothing more than “a pretty, useless thing.” In the time it took to pick one, he had a habit of saying, I should dig up one more medicinal herb.

Even so, I used to secretly hide a single trumpet flower at the bottom of the herb basket, where he couldn’t see. Luckily, I’d been born with the stamina to climb the mountains all day without tiring, so even after filling the quota he set, I had room to spare to carry a flower home.

A long tail gets caught, as they say, and in the end my father discovered me hiding them. I bowed my head low and braced for a scolding, but he said nothing at all. I wondered whether he might have come to like flowers too, but I didn’t think that was it. After all, even I, who brought one home every single day, still felt nothing much when I looked at one.

“This trumpet flower is my favorite. Maybe because it looks like our daughter?”

My mother had loved the soft-orange trumpet flowers. But from what angle did this flower look like me?

I laid the trumpet flower in my hand atop my mother’s cold gravestone, and after that I never again hid flowers in among the herbs.

The soft-orange memory flashing past like a revolving lantern shattered, and my vision filled with nothing but a cold blue glow. A livid half-moon crescent of sword-energy had arrived right behind my neck.

The Young Master told me not to let my guard down.

In the end, my father never did tell me the answer to my question.

Why did you put a trumpet flower in my hand?

I’d wondered, but I never let the words out of my mouth, because that was the first time in my life I saw my father cry. After that day I tried to smile more, enough to make up for my mother’s share too. But once I began training under Master Valerian, I couldn’t manage it anymore.

It must have been hard on him, having to take over my work on top of his own.

Senior Leo had taken over the duties I used to handle.

Did I ever say thank you?

I’d say I was sorry, but at some point I stopped bringing it up. Maybe that was because, after enough time had passed, it felt awkward to keep repeating the same apology. And so I may have come to take the situation for granted.

Thank you, Senior.

If only I could deliver my belated gratitude.

Master Valerian always said the same thing before we began training: a giddy heart invites carelessness, and carelessness would one day cost me my life. Death does not come from straight ahead, he said. So during training I cut down on my smiling and threw myself into it.

But no matter how I steeled myself, I couldn’t keep the face of Arden, the Young Master, from rising up clear before me. Every time I’d seen him, he’d been smiling, no matter what befell him. Someone doing easily the very thing I couldn’t do was someone to envy terribly. I admired him, I wanted to be like him, and that was why I’d tried to grow stronger.

To think I’d die like this.

“Elli!!”

An instant before the sword-energy reached my neck, the face of Arden, the Young Master, came into view.

He isn’t smiling.

Why are you making a face like that? It’s only the death of a single maid.

— This trumpet flower is my favorite. Maybe because it looks like our daughter?

A life without my mother changed us a great deal, and I’m afraid the Young Master’s life might be changed too, all because of someone like me.

— When your hand touches something hot and you snatch it back fast, or when you nick your finger on a kitchen knife while cooking and yet never cut it through to the end — that is because these reflexes are guarding your body without you ever being aware of it.

I heard the air sear where the sword-energy touched it. It looked like a trajectory I couldn’t dodge.

— From now on we’ll focus the training on developing your reflexes.

I pivoted my body half a turn with my arm as the axis, and the muscles in the arm holding the shield swelled abnormally. An instant before the sword-energy could graze the skin of my neck, I swung the shield back and struck it away.

— Kwaaang—!

Sword-energy and steel shield collided head-on, and a roar that left my eardrums numb shook the arena. The shockwave drove my frame back five or six steps, but my neck was still safely attached atop my body. Tasting the metallic tang of the blood welling in my mouth, I raised my head.

“Don’t worry, Young Master.” Without looking at Arden, the Young Master, beyond the wall, I spat the words out as if firmly vowing them.

“I won’t lose.”

A searing heat curled over the back of the hand gripping the shield.

The battlefield fell silent once more, and the pressure pouring out of that silence was thousands of times heavier than the sword-energy I’d just struck away. As the dust cloud lifted, a black shadow slowly revealed its identity. Gasping for breath, I fixed my eyes on him.

This time, at least, you were wrong, Young Master.

The Young Master had been certain my opponent would be a mage. But the Master Valerian walking out through the fog was a swordsman more destructive and more brutal than any magic. Why he’d come out as my opponent didn’t matter, because I wasn’t clever enough to dig out a truth like that, nor strong enough to afford that kind of luxury.

“….”

Master Valerian said nothing at all. There was no sneering venom, no tongue clicked at me in disdain, and that silence was, if anything, piercingly terrifying, because it was proof he truly regarded me as an enemy and was trying to kill me.

Sssss—.

Master Valerian’s greatsword skimmed the sandy floor as he closed in on me in a straight line. A shudder ran through my body, most likely from realizing he was giving his all to kill me. And yet, strangely, my heart was calm. Was it that once terror crossed its threshold, funny enough, it felt as if my head had been doused in ice water?

I know.

I closed my eyes, then opened them. Don’t think of this as a fight with my life on the line. Master Valerian’s stride, the faint tremble of his shoulders, the spacing of the fingers gripping the greatsword’s hilt: I’d already lived through this duel more than thousands of times.

This is nothing more than one more piece of training.

This past half-year, Master Valerian had not treated me as a human being. Starving me, beating me, depriving me of sleep, he’d forged me into nothing but a wall to block his swordsmanship. All those days of being driven dozens of times to the threshold of death now flowed through my veins like a single ingrained habit.

Just as Arden, the Young Master did.

The image rose in my mind: the back of the Young Master, who had fought a three-headed beast and yet spared its life to the end and made it his ally. I wanted to do the same. I want to end this match without killing the master who tempered me, and without dying myself either.

Master Valerian’s greatsword fell in a vertical drop, a sweeping cut that looked as if it would cleave the arena in two. I angled the shield up at a slant.

Take it head-on and it’ll shatter me, but deflect it and I can let it slide off.

Clang—!

Greatsword and shield clashed, and sparks flew. I’d deflected it successfully, but my wrist screamed, and I had no room to spare to listen to that scream. I took one more step and bored in close into his guard, inside the arc of the greatsword, then thrust my foot into that small opening of his that only I knew.

Thwack!

My kick struck him cleanly in the abdomen, and Master Valerian’s body was dragged backward until at last one knee touched the ground.

“…I’m going all out now too.”

Eve’s voice came through, threaded with astonishment.

I could scarcely believe the sight before my eyes either. The peerless Valerian, brought to one knee by a single kick.

In truth, I’d thought Elli had lost her life to that surprise attack a moment ago. That savage sword-energy had flown in while her back was completely turned, and I’d judged that dodging it was impossible. But Elli pulled it off. She’d hauled the shield up with superhuman reflexes and, against all odds, even manufactured a chance to strike back. She must have taken an internal injury that twisted her guts in the process, yet her eyes were blazing brighter and fiercer than ever.

The hero of House Arne once called the “Blue Lion,” and the hero of the Empire, the “Black Bear,” who had stood against him with nothing but a shield like a mountain. History may never have recorded a victor and a loser in their duel, but the very figures who’d carved that history into their own bodies were now clashing once more, here in the heart of the Abyss.

— Kwakwang—!

No matter how fiercely Valerian swung his greatsword, Elli blocked it without so much as a flinch. The battle between them was ferocious, and yet, as though they’d choreographed every exchange, neither one took any serious wound. Valerian unfurled a brilliant sword-dance and Elli moved her shield in time with it, and it was like watching a well-staged performance.

This much?

Maybe Elli’s true value hadn’t lain solely in her low DV stat after all.

“Even the Empire’s most celebrated knights couldn’t stand against Valerian on such even footing. And for a girl that small to take the weight of that greatsword and bore into his guard, no less.” Seraphina, watching from beside me with her arms folded, marveled along with me.

Once my worry over Elli’s safety had eased somewhat, a question I’d been putting off all this while bored its way into my head.

Why on earth is Valerian here?

By what circumstance had he turned up as the third minion of Eligos, the arena’s master? The simplest hypothesis was that Eligos had defeated him and made him a puppet. But recalling the martial might of the Valerian I’d faced firsthand, that was a vanishingly slim possibility.

And the wrongness didn’t stop there. The Cerberus growling at my feet in the shape of a Doberman was, by rights, supposed to be the sentinel guarding the second gate, so there was no reason for Eligos to go out of his way to drag Cerberus, the guardian of his own stronghold, into the arena. Then what of this situation, where Valerian had been reduced to a will-less puppet?

An outside force has intervened.

That was the conclusion I settled on, because there was no way the rules of this arena would be broken to this degree unless someone had artificially intervened.

That repellent being who’d worn Eve’s skin, who’d tried to kill Arden and Lillian. If “That One” the puppeteer revered like a god, in other words the mastermind behind all of this, was involved deep in the depths of the Abyss, then the story changed.

…I might have been dancing on a board those guys built from the very start.

The head of the house’s trials. The subjugation of the Abyss beneath the Arne domain. We’d set foot in all of it believing it was a fair competition conducted under the head of the house’s control. But the mastermind had planted a curse in Arden’s body, and by ceaselessly showing Lillian horrific nightmares, they’d driven her into isolation. Astonishingly, this entire scheme had unfolded right under the nose of Kairon, the head of the house.

Recalling their meticulousness and audacity, one chilling hypothesis flashed through my mind.

What if their aim doesn’t stop at simply taking my life and Lillian’s?

What if they’d seized on this head-of-the-house trial as their chance at the house’s key figures? Valerian and Seraphina, Lillian, and me as well. What if burying all of us at once here in this Abyss was the “true scenario” they’d designed? We weren’t taking a trial right now. We’d walked into a vast slaughterhouse on our own two feet.

Over Valerian’s frame as he gazed indifferently at Elli’s shield, a viscous, dark-red mist was rising up like a heat-shimmer. The instant Elli saw it, she broke into a run toward him without a moment’s hesitation.