64. Like A Single Painting

— Pajijik—!

The Aerondight’s blade, still locked against Valerian’s greatsword, crumbled to dust. Kairon’s imposing phantom vanished in its wake, and then the phantom of me, the one that had been talking with Elli, went up like smoke as well.

My body went limp against Seraphina’s arm. White vapor kept leaking from the corners of my mouth, and my eyelids weighed a thousand tons, as if someone had hung lead from them. I bit down hard and clung to the thread of consciousness, because it could black out on me at any second.

Not yet.

Silence settled over the arena.

With Kairon’s phantom gone, Valerian flailed at the empty air, looking bewildered.

“…!”

But before long he turned his head and spotted Elli, buried in the wall.

— Kigigik—.

Sand and greatsword ground together with a screech that gouged at 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 it lifted, Seraphina, who’d been holding me up, shot out at explosive speed. Her sword left nothing but a blue afterimage as it 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 clash of blade on blade rang right beside my ears, but I kept my eyes 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 sank to my knees in front of her, close to 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 out of the question, however I looked at it. The Crown Prince’s coming-of-age ceremony was the very next month, after all. And with everything else I had to deal with on top of that, the heir’s seat could be counted as fully out of reach now.

Who cares.

Far more vivid in my eyes than the despair of failure was the breath of the girl still alive in front of me.

“I told you to survive no matter what, didn’t I? And you followed my order perfectly.”

As long as you’re alive, the chance will always come around again. A challenge can’t always end in success, and when an unexpected failure comes, what matters most is a heart that hasn’t broken. But not breaking 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, and I wiped them with my sleeve as I spoke.

“For now, let’s move.”

Seraphina’s and Valerian’s blades were still clashing without pause. They were the two strongest people in the house after the head of the house himself, and sounds I could hardly 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, so I squeezed out every last drop of strength and carried her to the waiting area. Every muscle I had screamed, and the aftermath of the sudden hypothermia left my fingertips trembling, yet I couldn’t stop.

“Young Master, because of me…”
“Don’t talk. You’ll wear yourself out.”

I barely made it there, and I set Elli down carefully.

Out where my view opened up, the collision of two prodigies was swallowing the arena whole.

“Will the lady be all right?”

Instead of answering Elli’s question, I stared at the scene in front of me.

Seraphina froze patches of the arena solid with ice magic, then ran across the slick sheets of ice, savaging Valerian. Valerian smashed the ground apart, struggling to seize her as she flitted away from him like a gnat. Seraphina hunted for openings with dazzling footwork, and Valerian bore down with overwhelming weight.

If I had to capture this as a painting —

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

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

— KWAAANG—!

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

— KWAKWANG!

The two blades collided and birthed an enormous storm at the center of the arena, and where the storm cleared, the two of them had, without fail, locked swords again, sparks flying.

…Strong.

Seraphina and Valerian were evenly matched rivals. So the title of Imperial Knight Commander was indeed being proven in full by the force of her arms.

In the midst of that taut deadlock, Seraphina broke her silence.

“It seems I do not frighten you.”

It was plainly a jab at Valerian, who had thrown a fit at the sight of Kairon’s phantom. But Valerian, once again, only fell silent like a doll stripped of its emotions.

“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 those words, Seraphina’s offensive grew a degree fiercer still and drove him back.

— Kang! Kang! Kang!

Before he knew it, Valerian had lost the thread of his attack and was scrambling on the defensive. And as the push turned one-sided, he absorbed the dark-red heat-shimmer that had been wreathing his body.

With the heat-shimmer inside him, his body swelled as though it would burst. Yet Seraphina didn’t so much as blink at the change. If anything, as though mocking him, she raised the speed of her offensive another degree.

Had Seraphina been holding back her strength all this time?

I realized that what she’d shown during training, or when helping me, had been no more than the tip of the iceberg.

The more astonished I grew, the more twisted Valerian’s face became. Had he sensed, by instinct, that he would lose if this kept up?

Eve, who’d been watching with bated breath, gasped in surprise, and in the same moment I grasped his intent.

“It’s a mutual-destruction strike.”

Valerian was deliberately exposing a weakness to bait Seraphina’s attack. The opening was a fatal gap, fatal enough that he’d have to give up an arm, but it was thoroughly calculated. In exchange for sacrificing that arm, he meant to take Seraphina’s neck with the blade in his other hand. It was the extreme tactic of giving up flesh to sever bone, to the letter.

“Tch.”

Her usually expressionless face twisted with cold contempt. She bored in close to Valerian’s chest and struck his wrist precisely with the pommel of her sword.

— Puhk—!

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

— Kuung.

Valerian collapsed in a brief convulsion, and the muscles that had swelled with such force shrank back to normal like a balloon losing its air. Seraphina looked down at him without a single hair of her composure out of place.

“Wait!”

I dragged my body, still staggering from the aftermath of the hypothermia, and ran out shouting, because Seraphina had raised her sword with a frigid glare and, without hesitation, taken aim at the area around 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?

It was a moment that made clear why she and Lillian had quarreled.

“If we take him to Big Sis Lillian, we can fix this!”

In truth, whether 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 dry spit and waited for Seraphina’s answer.

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

Phew.

That was an unexpectedly easy compliance.

Seraphina looked down at the fallen Valerian and spoke.

“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 from her body. Seraphina, who normally never let her emotions show, was genuinely enraged.

I tried to infer why. Was it simply grief over a family member ending up like this? It couldn’t be. She wasn’t a warm enough person for the word “family” to sway her emotions. What had made her erupt was probably the disgraceful display Valerian had put on. A Valerian in his right mind would never have committed such an act, even in his dreams: a wretched mutual-destruction strike, throwing out one of his own arms as bait for the sake of victory.

To a knight, the body itself was a weapon. There might be a one-armed swordsman somewhere out there, but to a knight whose duty was to protect and serve, losing an arm was as good as retirement, a sentence passed. So perhaps the act of mutual destruction had struck Seraphina as deeply repugnant.

In any case, I grabbed the legs of the unconscious Valerian, because there was no way to carry that enormous bulk princess-style, the way I had with Elli.

“Wait here. I’ll be right back—”

I didn’t even get to finish.

“That’s far enough.”

The robed man was barring my path, having appeared who knew when.

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

His finger pointed at Valerian beside me.

“Leave that minion and go.”

I stared blankly at the man blocking my way, then opened my mouth.

“You promised, clear as day. You said that at least for Elli, the final challenger, you’d keep to the established order and prepare a mage.”

At my point, the man’s head tilted at 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 beyond the robe. Unlike before, he was baring his hostility nakedly now.

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

Eve had been analyzing, in real time, the ominous heat-shimmer that had wreathed Valerian earlier. It had taken a little time, but she had finished grasping its true nature completely.

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

I rode the momentum and drove the wedge in.

“You’re the one who went on about a knight order’s tactical deployment and said you’d send out a mage. So how did that turn out?”

“…”

“You’re the ones who soiled the board by puppeteering my brother. So this challenge is void.”

At my interrogation, the entire arena went dead silent. The hem of the man’s robe swayed weakly in the sandy wind.

“But tell me this. 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 pointed straight at me.

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

Beyond 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.”

This guy’s argument was sheer obstinacy.

“Don’t make me laugh! You think anybody’s going to let you do whatever you want?”

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 into the air, and he lightly snapped his fingers.

The spectator stands, empty until then, filled in an instant with pitch-black darkness, and within it thousands of glinting eyes flashed. Hundreds of archers had drawn their bowstrings and were taking aim at us.

“At last I can kill you. Loose.”

At that short command, a rain of arrows that blackened the sky poured down toward us, an overwhelming quantity, with nowhere to dodge and nowhere to hide.

But.

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

Along with a shout from somewhere, vines erupted from the ground.