64. Like A Single Painting

— Pajijik—!

The Aerondight’s blade, still locked against Valerian’s greatsword, crumbled into dust. With it the towering phantom of Kairon winked out, and the phantom of me, the one that had been speaking with Elli, dissolved like smoke as well.

My body sagged limp against Seraphina’s arm. White vapor poured endlessly from the corners of my mouth, my eyelids heavy as though lead weights hung from them. I bit down hard and clung to the thread of consciousness that threatened to snap at any second.

Not yet.

Silence swallowed the arena.

When Kairon’s phantom vanished, Valerian swung at empty air, bewildered.

“…!”

Before long he turned his head and found Elli, half-buried in the wall.

— Kigigik—.

The screech of sand grinding against greatsword gouged into our eardrums and rang through the arena.

And in the very instant Valerian raised his sword to take off Elli’s head…

— Hwaaak—!

The solid red barrier scattered into the air like a mirage.

“…!”

The moment the barrier lifted, Seraphina, who had been holding me up, shot forward at explosive speed. Her sword, trailing only a blue afterimage, met Valerian’s falling greatsword head-on.

— KWAAANG—!

Sparks flew, and the whole arena shook.

I forced my trembling legs to move and staggered toward Elli. The savage clang of blade on blade rang right beside my ears, but I kept my eyes fixed stubbornly ahead and walked.

“…Young Master.”

Slumped against the wall and covered in blood, Elli looked up at me and spoke in a tearful voice.

“I’m sorry… because of me… the trial…”

I dropped to my knees in front of her, almost collapsing, then reached out a trembling hand and carefully peeled the bloodied strands of hair from her face.

“You did well.”
“…What?”

Challenging the Abyss again a month from now was, no matter how I turned it over, out of the question. The Crown Prince’s coming-of-age ceremony fell the very next month, after all. And with everything else piled on top of that, the heir’s seat could be written off as fully out of reach now.

Who cares.

But to my eyes, the breath of the girl still alive before me burned far more vivid than any despair at having failed.

“I told you to survive, no matter what. You carried out my order perfectly.”

As long as you’re alive, the chance always comes around again. A challenge can’t always end in success; when failure arrives out of nowhere, what matters most is a heart that hasn’t broken. And keeping it unbroken is only possible, first of all, if there’s still breath in your body.

“Thank you for staying alive.”

Fat teardrops fell from Elli’s eyes. I wiped them away with my sleeve as I spoke.

“For now, let’s move.”

Seraphina’s and Valerian’s blades were still clashing without pause. The two of them were the strongest figures in the house after the head himself. Sounds I could scarcely believe came from swords at all grazed past our ears.

My own body was far from normal, but I couldn’t leave Elli here any longer. I wrung out every last drop of strength and carried her to the waiting area. Every muscle screamed, and the aftermath of the sudden hypothermia left my fingertips trembling, but I couldn’t stop.

“Young Master, because of me…”
“Don’t talk. It drains your energy.”

I barely made it and set her down with care. Beyond my open field of view, the collision of two prodigies was swallowing the arena whole.

“Will the lady be all right?”

Instead of answering Elli, I kept my eyes on the scene before me.

Seraphina froze patches of the arena solid with ice magic, then ran across the slick sheets, savaging Valerian. He smashed the ground apart, straining to catch her as she flitted away from him like a gnat.

Seraphina, hunting openings with dazzling footwork; Valerian, bearing down with crushing weight. If I had to capture it as a painting…

It would look like a single lion chasing a blue butterfly.

Of course, what filled the arena now was nothing so delicate as the fluttering of butterfly wings.

— KWAAANG—!

When Seraphina’s sword wound a violent current around itself and loosed a blade of wind, Valerian answered in kind, hurling a wind blade to meet it.

— KWAKWANG!

The two wind blades collided and birthed an enormous storm at the center of the arena. When it cleared, the two had locked blades once again, as if it could be no other way, sparks scattering.

…Strong.

Seraphina and Valerian were evenly matched rivals. The title of Imperial Knight Commander was being proven in full, here, by the sheer force of her arms.

Locked in the taut deadlock, Seraphina broke her silence.

“It seems you don’t feel afraid.”

She was plainly needling Valerian, who had thrown a fit at the sight of Kairon’s phantom. But once again he fell silent, like a doll emptied of feeling.

“The reasons, the pride, the purpose each of us hones a blade for may all differ, but…”
“…”
“From your blade right now, I feel nothing at all.”

With that, her offensive turned a degree fiercer still and drove Valerian back.

— Kang! Kang! Kang!

Before he knew it, Valerian had lost the thread of his attack and been reduced to scrambling on the defensive. As he was pushed back one-sidedly, he drank in the dark-red heat-shimmer that had been wreathing his body.

His body, having absorbed the dark-red shimmer, swelled as though it would burst. Seraphina didn’t so much as blink at the change. If anything, as if to mock him, she pushed her offensive a notch faster still.

Had Seraphina been holding back her strength all this time?

I realized that what she’d shown in training, or while helping me, had been no more than the tip of the iceberg. And the more I marveled, the more Valerian’s face twisted.

Had he sensed, by instinct, that he’d lose if this kept up?

Eve, who had been holding her breath, gasped. In the same instant, I caught his intent.

“It’s a mutual-destruction strike.”

Valerian had deliberately exposed a weakness to bait Seraphina’s attack. The opening was a fatal gap, wide enough to cost him an arm, yet thoroughly calculated. Rather than sacrifice that arm for nothing, he meant to take Seraphina’s neck with the sword in his other hand. Trade flesh, sever bone, carried to its very extreme.

“Tch.”

Her usually blank face twisted with cold contempt. She drove in close against Valerian’s chest and cracked the pommel of her sword precisely against his wrist.

— Puhk—!

With a dull sound, Valerian’s greatsword spun through the air and dropped to the ground. In the same instant, the flat of Seraphina’s blade slammed roughly into his chest and drove him down to the floor.

— Kuung.

Valerian crumpled, twitching briefly. The muscles that had bulged with such force shrank back like a balloon losing its air, settling into their normal state.

Seraphina looked down at him without a single hair of her composure out of place.

“Wait!”

I dragged my body, reeling from the aftermath of the hypothermia, and ran out shouting. Seraphina had raised her sword with a frigid glare and, without hesitation, aimed it at the space over Valerian’s heart.

Was this the look she’d worn back when she tried to kill me, after I collapsed from having Lucius’s poison transplanted into me?

In that moment I understood exactly why she and Lillian had once quarreled.

“If we take him to Big Sis Lillian, it can be fixed!”

In truth, whether bringing him to Lillian could restore Valerian was anyone’s guess. Releasing someone whose reason was being controlled by another was uncharted territory even for her. But I could hardly nod along to “He’ll be a problem if he wakes up again, so let’s kill him?” either.

“…”

I swallowed dryly, waiting for Seraphina’s answer.

After a long silence, Seraphina slowly withdrew her sword and nodded.

Phew.

She gave in more easily than I’d expected.

Seraphina looked down at the fallen Valerian.

“Take Valerian and return to Lillian.”
“And you, Sister?”
“I must meet, in person, the true culprit who designed this vile farce.”

A chill rose off her body. Seraphina, who normally never let an emotion surface, was genuinely enraged.

I could guess the reason for her anger.

Was it simply grief at seeing a family member reduced to this? No. She wasn’t warm enough to let her feelings be moved by a word like “family.”

What had set her off was, most likely, the shameful thing Valerian had done: a move no Valerian in his right mind would ever have stooped to, even in his dreams. That wretched suicide-strike, flinging out one of his own arms as bait for the sake of a win.

To a knight, the body itself was a weapon. A one-armed swordsman might exist somewhere out in the world. But to a knight sworn to protect and serve, losing an arm amounted to retirement, a sentence handed down. And so the act of mutual destruction had probably struck Seraphina as something deeply vile.

Either way, I grabbed the unconscious Valerian by the legs. There was no carrying that enormous bulk princess-style, the way I had Elli.

“Wait here. I’ll be right back—”

Before I could even finish.

“That’s far enough.”

The robed man stood barring my path, having appeared from who knew where.

“You have forfeited the challenge. So return, quietly, the way you came.”

His finger leveled at Valerian beside me.

“Leave that minion and go.”

I stared blankly at the man in my way, then spoke.

“You promised, clearly. That for the final challenger — for Elli’s opponent, at least — you’d field a mage in keeping with the established order.”

At my words, the man’s head tilted to a grotesque angle.

“You saw the power that cut that girl’s shield in two with a single stroke. If that looked to you like the strength of pure swordsmanship alone, then how very unfortunate.”

A slimy snicker leaked out from beneath the robe. Unlike before, he made no effort now to hide his hostility.

“The art of swinging dark-red heat-shimmer to swell the muscles and wring strength to its very limit. If that is not magic, then what is it? That minion played the part of a splendid mage in this contest. So there is not a single shred of falsehood in the promise.”

Eve had been analyzing that ominous heat-shimmer around Valerian in real time. It had taken her a little while, but she’d finished pinning down its true nature completely.

“That ominous mana wreathing my brother — it isn’t his own power, is it? It’s nothing but a dirty little trick you people pulled to wring strength out of an unconscious man by force.”

I rode the momentum and drove the wedge in deeper.

“It was you who went on about a knight order’s tactical deployment and said you’d send out a mage. But how did that turn out?”
“…”
“You’re the ones who soiled the board by puppeteering my brother. So this challenge is void.”

At my grilling, the whole arena fell dead silent. The hem of the man’s robe stirred weakly in the sandy wind.

“But here’s the thing. Can it really be said that only our side broke this rule by borrowing outside power?”
“…What?”
“In the same way, you too summoned the phantom of the head of House Arne and shattered the flow of the duel.”

The man’s finger swung to point straight at me.

“Are you not, likewise, an accomplice who defiled this arena?”

Behind the robe, his eyes glinted.

“Since each of us has smeared the other with filth, debating who is in the right is meaningless. So I shall proceed by the rules. You failed the challenge, and that minion will be returned to his master.”

The man’s argument was pure stubbornness, start to finish.

“Don’t make me laugh! Who said I’d let you do whatever you please?”

The instant I shouted, Seraphina’s blue blizzard coiled around the arena.

“…So you’ll obstruct me to the bitter end.”

The man’s body floated up into the air, and he snapped his fingers lightly. The arena’s spectator stands, empty until now, filled in an instant with pitch-black darkness, and within it thousands of glinting eyes flashed. Hundreds of archers had drawn their bowstrings taut and were taking aim at us.

“At last I can kill you. Loose.”

At his curt command, a rain of arrows that blackened the sky poured down toward us.

An overwhelming quantity, nowhere to dodge, nowhere to hide.

But.

“Who do you think you’re touching — that’s my family!”

Together with a shout from somewhere, vines erupted out of the ground.