The Barther Family (2)

The reek of blood stabbed at my nose. A dizzying stretch of field swept past my eyes. Still running, I drove my sword into an undead’s neck, set the blade against the neckbone, turned my body, and took the head off.

— SHUNK!

My speed still had not dropped. I brought the sword down like an axe on the head of another one lying face-down, then stamped on the blade where it had bitten through the flesh and into the bone, and with a dull sense of bone giving way, the head came free.

There’s no end to them.

They are not the kind that turns you undead if they bite you. But no matter how many we killed, the number of undead was plainly not going down.

Two realistic possibilities.

Either magic that holds the undead at a fixed number unless the caster cancels it. Or magic that turns any human who has taken a certain degree of damage into one of them.

There is nothing to be done about the latter for the moment, so the only move worth trying is to remove the spellcaster, Morten Barther.

“Tairen Beloa! Cut down the mage!”

If someone has to kill Morten Barther and stop this disaster, then it has to be Rodrik Barther, not me.

A violent gust blew up all at once, strong enough that even the reek of blood and the clash of metal, which had settled thick over the battlefield, faltered for a moment. And with it, Rodrik vanished from my sight in an instant. Movement like the wind, quite literally.

— SHWAAAAK!

In a bare few seconds Rodrik had crossed a distance that would take twenty at a dead run, and his sword came down. Morten Barther was not there. He had slipped the blow with the same magic.

Storm meets storm. Winds savaging the whole area collided with each other and set the air trembling.

Step into that and I’d be minced meat in a heartbeat.

I shoved my left hand into the mouth of an undead lunging at me and tore its jaw away, then stamped down on the flailing thing’s skull and burst it.

“Everyone who can hear my voice, fall back!”

I have no authority to command here. Even so, the mercenaries who recognized me began pulling back without argument. The mercenaries moved, so the regular army moved, and soon the whole force was in motion.

“Those with shields to the front; those with spears, hold the undead off from behind them!”

Before long a wall of shields had gone up against the undead. A spear cannot kill undead. But what was needed now was not the killing power to destroy them; it was the long reach to keep them from closing.

A fair number of the troops had survived the undead’s indiscriminate attack. Holding out against the undead assault with these men until Rodrik dealt with Morten Barther was the crux of this battle.

Throwing magic around so freely would be awkward to explain afterward, but isn’t surviving the present moment the first thing that matters?

— FWIIING!

Wind condensed to its very limit raked Rodrik from head to foot. He raised a gust and turned the slash aside; his wind and Morten Barther’s met, and the current that shot up into the air scattered high in the sky.

Riding the wind once more, Rodrik moved at a speed the eye could hardly follow, and Morten Barther swept everything ahead of him away with a counter-wind. The two condensed winds met and a roar went up, and the shock was enough to lift every trace of fog from the area.

Rodrik’s sword canceled out the slashes that came flying next, and then he shook the currents of the air. A moment later Morten Barther came flying toward him as though dragged. Rodrik had raised a gust behind the mage and shoved him forward. Before Rodrik could swing, though, Morten Barther struck him on a diagonal, sweeping everything around him away, and a blow like a giant hammer flung Rodrik far off.

So he compresses the wind and uses it like telekinesis?

In overall proficiency Morten Barther looked to have the advantage. He shaped slashes out of the air and balled the wind up to strike with; his range of options felt a little wider. Far off I could see Rodrik pushing himself up.

He’s short of a decisive blow.

Unlike Morten Barther, Rodrik has only his sword to attack with. Unless he could send out slashes of his own, the fight could only become a game of tag.

It was then.

— PHWAM!

No sooner had I thought it than a sharp shriek of split air grazed past Morten Barther. Rodrik had shot the wind off like an arrow. Perhaps the attempt had been forced; the point where the wind split the fog sat a fair way wide of him.

This time Morten Barther was the one who rose into the air. Riding the wind as Rodrik had, he charged. Rodrik set his stance and loosed wind after wind, and a flick or two of the mage’s hand scattered them all. Then the gathered air drew together at Morten Barther’s gesture, and before long a huge sphere hung in the empty air.

Nothing good comes of being crushed under something like that.

“Shield-bearers, hold the line. Anyone who can handle a bow, all of you forward.”

A body was thrown together on the spot, mostly archers with a few mercenaries mixed in.

“Loose at the lord until you have nothing left. The rest, nock to the string the moment you see arrows in flight.”

Morten Barther has to be disrupted, one way or another. A tighter interval between volleys would have been better, but with every moment pressing, they shot in two alternating shifts.

The instant Morten Barther closed on Rodrik and made to swing the gathered wind, the soldiers’ arrows came pouring down on him. While he hurriedly warded them off with wind, Rodrik pulled back. With that, a great shackle had been clamped onto Morten Barther, who now had to deal at once with the rain of arrows coming down without letup and the wind Rodrik kept shooting at him.

Still not enough.

But there is still no finishing blow. And with the arrows to stay clear of, closing in to cut him down with a sword would be impossible.

At that moment a whirlwind rose around Rodrik. It looked like preparation for something, and Morten Barther raised a wind against it, but the rain of arrows still coming down was bound to throw that wind off.

The moment the whirlwind gathered to a single point and Morten Barther twisted his body.

— KA-BLAM!

An explosive roar burst out, tearing the air to shreds. He had made the wind bigger and set it spinning. If the earlier attack was an arrow, this was closer to a modern bullet. Morten Barther twisted his body and barely evaded it, then hurriedly got clear.

I’ll have to pin his feet down.

The one move that could deal a fatal blow was settled. What remained was to stop Morten Barther moving, so that Rodrik could land it for certain. Arrows alone are not enough. In the end someone had to step onto the board directly and get in his way.

I’d meant to stay out of it if I possibly could.

“How many arrows are left?”
“We can fire about ten more volleys!”
“Keep shooting. I’m going out there.”
“What? But if you take a stray arrow…”
“Ignore me and shoot. If an arrow reaches me, that means it reached the lord too, doesn’t it?”

With that, I broke into a run toward Morten Barther. The grassland was open with nothing in the way, and still it would take a good many seconds to reach where he stood. Meanwhile he was warding off the arrows falling from above and batting away Rodrik’s wind besides. Wholly taken up with defense, he showed no room to attack.

One volley of arrow-rain passed, and as Rodrik raised his hand, my body, running across the grassland, turned as light as wind. From his place across from me with Morten Barther between us, he seemed to have noticed me. With every step the view ahead collapsed. A pressure crushed my whole body, and far ahead the shriek of split air being shoved aside came to me faint and distant.

For this moment at least, I too became a single streak of wind—

— SHUNK!

—and drew an arc so keen it stung the eyes, as though everything were being sucked into the sword.

“Kh—!”

Bright red blood poured from Morten Barther’s severed arm. He had reacted even to my sword, which had come in from behind him as though I were folding space to run through it. In that instant he had twisted his body and given up one arm in place of his neck.

“Your reactions are quick for your age.”

“…I’ll take every one of your limbs off and leave you crawling.”

Of course, even with my arms and legs off, there would be no crawling for me.

His reactions are far too fast. Is this magic as well?

I gave a shrug.

“You raised your child well, I’ll grant you. No worries about an heir to inherit the domain.”

Morten Barther raised his one remaining hand, but a wind-arrow came flying at once and grazed past his head.

“Ngh! You goddamn bastards!”

In the distance I heard arrows beginning to fall. Morten Barther ground his teeth.

“Filthy dogs, the lot of you! I’ll kill every one of you!”

In an instant every wind died away. Instinct told me he was about to pour every scrap of his remaining magical power into this one attack. Soon the air began to shake, and in a moment a storm that snapped arrows like twigs swallowed Rodrik and me.

I drove my sword into the ground, and Rodrik wrapped himself in a whirlwind. Then scars opened not only in the air but on the ground as well, like the claw-marks of an animal.

Magic that grinds everything away with a mighty storm joining earth to sky.

Arrows were out of the question; even I could not move a single step. Morten Barther stood in the eye of the storm, watching me with a lofty calm.

That was all I needed.

— PHWAM!

A shriek of split air, cleaving the savage storm. With a single shot, Rodrik’s wind bullet tore apart countless walls of wind and slashes and punched clean through Morten Barther.

“Khuk!”

What had been needed was to pin Morten Barther’s feet, and the time for Rodrik to prepare a finishing blow. The whirlwind he had raised was never there to block the storm; it was there to launch the wind bullet.

Morten Barther brought up blood and crumpled. Beyond the slowly subsiding storm I could see Rodrik.

“…I never want to fight a mage on my own again.”

His whole body slashed to ribbons for not having defended himself, he limped over.

“So it’s finally over?”

Even at this moment the soldiers are locked in a bloody fight with the undead. There was no time to dawdle. Rodrik and I moved in to finish off the fallen Morten Barther.

“Khuk! Khuk!”
“There’s still life in those eyes, so you must have plenty left in you.”

“…”

Rodrik raised his sword.

And before he brought it down—

“Don’t look so triumphant.”

—the dying Morten Barther opened his mouth.

“This war is your defeat.”

“…What do you mean?”

“Have you forgotten? Killing me was never the object of this war.”

An ill foreboding surged up. Morten Barther had gone down, and the undead too would soon be cleared away. Then what on earth is my instinct warning me about?

“Siltrein will have fallen by now.”

“…What?”

“I sent your elder brother Lashar to Siltrein. You dragged out every soldier you had, so it will have been over long ago. Did you think all that was left was to take Esmartin?”

Rodrik’s elder brother had gone to Siltrein. He had probably arrived long before we even reached this place. One person moving alone is naturally bound to be faster than several hundred crowding along together. All the more if that individual is a mage.

“Morten Barther.”

The whole world filled with a ringing in my ears. My heart feels as though it will shatter.

“You’d better give up any idea of running quietly off to hell.”

Lilian is in danger.