62. The Trumpet Flower

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

…?

When your hand jerks back the instant it touches something hot, or when you nick a finger on the kitchen knife yet never let the cut run all the way through, it is because these reflexes are guarding your body without your ever knowing it.

….

What in the world did your parents even teach you?

…!

…At any rate, from now on we’ll center your training on building up your reflexes.

.

.

.

People say that when death looms right before your eyes, the years you’ve lived flash by like a revolving lantern.

I asked my father once.

What sort of revolving lantern will flash past me before I die?

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

I held it a long moment, unsure what expression I was supposed to wear, because my father had never cared for flowers. A flower like this one especially, poisonous and not even fit to eat, was to him nothing more than “a pretty, useless thing.” Pick something like that, he’d grumble, and you’ve thrown away the time it takes to dig up another medicinal herb. Even so, I would hide a single trumpet flower at the bottom of my herb basket, down where he couldn’t see. Luckily I’d been born able to climb the mountains all day without tiring, so even after I’d filled the quota he set, I had room to spare for carrying a flower home.

In the end he caught me hiding them. Keep a secret too long and it’s bound to slip out. I ducked my head and braced for a scolding, but he said nothing at all. Maybe he’d even come to like flowers, I thought, though I doubted it. After all, even I, who carried one home every single day, still felt nothing much whenever I looked at one.

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

My mother had loved those soft-orange trumpet flowers. From what angle, I wondered, did a flower like this look anything like me? I laid the one in my hand atop her cold gravestone, and after that I never hid flowers among the herbs again.

The soft-orange memory that had been spinning past me like a revolving lantern shattered, and my whole field of vision flooded with cold blue light. A livid half-moon of sword-energy had already arrived at my throat.

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

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

Why did you put a trumpet flower in my hand?

I’d wondered it, but I never let the words past my lips. That was the first time in my life I saw my father weep.

After that day I tried to smile twice as much, enough to cover my mother’s share too. But once my training under Master Valerian began, 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 meant to apologize, but somewhere along the way I stopped bringing it up. After enough time had passed, I suppose it felt awkward to keep repeating the same apology over and over. Maybe I’d even started taking it all for granted.

Thank you, Senior.

If only I could deliver my gratitude, late as it was.

Before every session, Master Valerian used to tell me the same thing. A giddy heart breeds carelessness, and carelessness would cost me my life one day. Death never comes at you from straight ahead, he’d say.

So during training I smiled less and threw myself into it. And yet, however hard I steeled myself, I could never keep the Young Master’s face from rising up clear in my mind.

Every time I saw him, the Young Master was smiling, no matter what the world threw at him. To watch someone do so easily the very thing I couldn’t do filled me with terrible envy. I admired him, I wanted to be like him, and that was why I’d pushed myself to grow stronger.

To think I’d die like this.

“Elli!!”

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

He isn’t smiling.

Why are you making a face like that? It’s only one maid dying.

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

A life without my mother had changed the two of us beyond measure. And I was 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 itself searing where the sword-energy passed through it. There was no dodging that arc.

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

I pivoted half a turn on the axis of my arm. The muscles of the arm bracing the shield swelled grotesquely, and an instant before the sword-energy could so much as graze my neck, I swung the shield around and battered it aside.

— Kwaaang—!

Sword-energy met steel shield head-on, and a roar that left my ears ringing shook the whole arena. The shockwave knocked me back five or six steps, but my head was still sitting where it belonged. Tasting the metallic tang of blood welling up in my mouth, I lifted my chin.

“Don’t worry, Young Master.”

Without so much as a glance at the Young Master beyond the wall, I spat the words out like a vow.

“I won’t lose.”

A searing heat curled up over the back of the hand that gripped the shield. Then the battlefield fell silent once more, and the pressure bleeding out of that silence was thousands of times heavier than the sword-energy I’d just turned aside.

A black shadow resolved itself as the dust cloud lifted. 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 who came striding out of the fog was a swordsman, one more destructive and more brutal than any spell.

Why he was the one facing me hardly mattered. I wasn’t clever enough to unearth a truth like that, nor strong enough to afford the luxury of trying.

“….”

Master Valerian said nothing at all. No sneering venom, no tongue clicked at me in disdain. If anything, that silence terrified me more, because it was proof that he truly took me for an enemy now and meant to kill me.

Sssss—.

His greatsword skimmed the sandy floor, closing in on me in a straight line. A shudder ran through my body. It came, most likely, from the realization that he was giving everything he had to kill me. And yet, strangely, my heart was calm. Past a certain threshold, it seems, terror turns the mind cold, as if my head had been doused in ice water.

I know.

I closed my eyes, then opened them. Don’t treat this as a fight with my life on the line. Master Valerian’s stride, the faint tremor in his shoulders, the spacing of his fingers around the greatsword’s hilt: I’d already lived through this exact duel thousands of times over.

This is nothing more than one more piece of training.

For the past half-year, Master Valerian had not treated me as a human being. Starving me, beating me, robbing me of sleep, he had forged me into nothing but a wall built to stop his blade. And all those days he’d driven me dozens of times to the brink of death now ran through my veins like a single ingrained habit.

Just as Arden, the Young Master did.

An image rose in my mind: the back of the Young Master, who had fought a three-headed beast and yet, in the end, spared its life 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.

His greatsword came down in a vertical drop, a sweeping cut that looked fit to cleave the arena in two. I tilted the shield to 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 met, and sparks sprayed. I’d turned the blow aside, but my wrist shrieked, and I had no room to spare for listening to it. I took one more step, boring in close past his guard, inside the arc of the greatsword, and drove my foot into that small opening of his that only I knew.

Thwack!

My kick caught him clean in the gut. His body was dragged backward until, at last, one knee came down against the ground.

“…I’ll be giving it my all now too.”

Eve’s voice came through, threaded with astonishment. I could hardly believe the sight in front of me either. The peerless Valerian, dropped to one knee by a single kick.

Truth be told, a moment ago I’d been sure Elli was dead. That savage arc of sword-energy had come flying in while her back was fully turned, and dodging a blow like that, I’d judged, was simply impossible.

But Elli pulled it off. She’d wrenched the shield up with inhuman reflexes and, against all odds, even carved out a chance to strike back. The effort must have cost her some internal injury, something that twisted her insides, and yet her eyes blazed brighter and fiercer than ever.

The hero of House Arne once called the “Blue Lion,” and the Empire’s hero, the “Black Bear,” who had stood against him with nothing but a shield like a mountain. History may never have recorded which of them won and which lost, but the two who had carved that history into their own flesh were clashing again now, here in the depths of the Abyss.

— Kwakwang—!

However fiercely Valerian swung his greatsword, Elli blocked it without so much as a flinch. The fight between them was ferocious, and yet, as though every exchange had been choreographed, neither one took any serious wound. Valerian unfurled a dazzling sword-dance, and Elli moved her shield in perfect time with it. It was like watching a well-staged performance.

This much?

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

“Even the Empire’s most celebrated knights could not stand against Valerian on ground so even. And to take the full weight of that greatsword, then drive into his guard — with that small girl’s body, no less.”

Seraphina, watching from beside me with her arms folded, marveled along with me.

With my worry over Elli’s safety finally easing a little, a question I’d been shelving all this while forced its way to the front of my mind.

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 theory was that Eligos had beaten him and turned him into a puppet. But remembering the sheer martial power of the Valerian I’d faced firsthand, I put the odds of that at next to nothing. And the wrongness didn’t end there.

The Cerberus growling at my feet in the shape of a Doberman was, by rights, supposed to be standing sentinel over the second gate. There was no reason for Eligos to go out of his way and haul Cerberus, the guardian of his own stronghold, into the arena. So what was I to make of it all, with Valerian reduced to a will-less puppet?

An outside force has intervened.

That was the conclusion I came to. There was no way the rules of this arena could be broken to such a degree unless someone had deliberately tampered with them.

That loathsome thing had worn Eve’s skin and tried to kill Lillian and me. If “That One” the puppeteer revered like a god, the mastermind behind all of this, was at work down here in the depths of the Abyss, then the whole 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 walked into all of it believing it was a fair contest run under the head of the house’s control. But the mastermind had planted a curse in my body. And by tormenting Lillian with one horrific nightmare after another, they’d driven her into isolation.

Astonishingly, the whole scheme had played out right under the nose of Kairon, the head of the house himself. Recalling that meticulousness, that sheer audacity, one chilling possibility 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 succession trial as their opening, to gather the key figures of the house all in one place? Valerian and Seraphina, Lillian, and me along with them. What if burying us all at once, here in this Abyss, was the “true scenario” they’d designed from the start?

This was no trial we were undergoing. We had walked into a vast slaughterhouse on our own two feet.

Over Valerian, who stood gazing indifferently at Elli’s shield, a viscous dark-red mist was rising like a heat-shimmer. The instant Elli saw it, she broke into a run straight at him, without a moment’s hesitation.