Chapter 285 — Something I Can Accept (1)
The truth.
The instant those words appeared, I smiled as though I were about to cry.
I couldn’t tell whether I felt relieved because the answer sheet had finally been placed in my hands—
or because I was finally allowed not to turn my back on these people.
“I’m sorry.”
“…M-Mage, this isn’t your fault—”
“I’ve ended up with a reason to go.”
But at the very least, I no longer had any reason to hesitate.
Rustle.
The disguise skill deactivated, and my body regained its original color.
Since I was wearing gloves and long sleeves, the soldier didn’t notice and scream or anything like that.
The soldier was focused solely on my words about leaving.
“That cannot be permitted……!”
But a mere soldier wasn’t going to stop me.
I put strength into my legs.
Bang!
My leg strength, somewhat weakened by the penalty but still vastly superior to an ordinary person’s, used the window frame as a foothold and launched my body upward.
Tap.
In an instant, I landed on the rooftop of the building across from me.
“What in the—!”
The soldier’s voice faintly reached me from behind as I ran across the roofs.
I could only hope the poor guy wouldn’t get punished too badly.
That was probably asking too much, though.
“Hup!”
Still, I was hardly in a position to worry about someone else.
While enjoying a brief glide through the air after another leap, I drew several items from the subspace bracelet.
Combat boots.
A breastplate engraved with magic.
And a spare longsword.
Naturally, I didn’t ruin the moment by stopping and putting on my shoes like some idiot.
When withdrawing something from the bracelet, as long as I satisfied the condition of “taking it out into sufficient space,” I had a fair amount of freedom in deciding exactly where it emerged.
In other words, if I calculated properly, I could equip things directly onto the relevant parts of my body, just like a game character instantly changing equipment.
Using that, I equipped everything I needed without slowing down.
Just in case, I removed the wig and excluded the coat that symbolized the Demon Knight.
This appearance would inevitably become wanted after what I was about to do, but I still wanted to hide the fact that the Demon Knight was capable of disguising himself and acting to this extent.
People would inevitably be suspicious because of my height and the similarity in the power I wielded, but there was still a definite difference between certainty and uncertainty.
After creating that final margin of doubt, I passed startled people and reached the area around the wall.
The penalty that had gradually loosened while I ran restored strength to my legs, allowing me to leap several meters in a single bound.
Tap.
Instead of using the stairs built for climbing, I jumped onto the wall.
Red exploded across my vision.
“Therefore, die.”
It came from the bodies of the falling soldiers.
“The world will be better for it.”
And through that spray of blood, teal hair rippled.
In front of those jeweled strands lay a dark-indigo-haired man sprawled face-down on the ground, apparently having fallen.
Amusingly enough, I recognized both of them.
「N-No.」
But I didn’t need to think about which one was the enemy and which one needed saving.
「That person. Anyone but that person. He can’t die.」
The screaming voice chose my target for me.
“Keep your word.”
Clang!
With the sunlight behind me, I cast a shadow over the top of the wall.
My sword stopped the teal-haired knight’s attack.
My loosely tied brown hair fluttered over my shirt.
“…Atia?”
“Yes, I thought you’d be coming around now… You are……?”
The teal-haired knight’s eyes widened slightly.
Whoosh!
At the same moment, she reacted like a beam of light and tried to slash my body with the dagger in her other hand.
With the Young Lord collapsed on the ground, it was an awkward trajectory to avoid with footwork.
And my longsword was already locked against her main-gauche.
Clang!
But I possessed the godsend known as the subspace bracelet.
A dagger summoned in an instant knocked her blade away.
At the same time, the wrist holding my longsword rotated, nullifying the interference.
It was a trick I’d learned in Manhappelt.
My leg stepped forward as I swung the longsword.
“How?”
She avoided the horizontal slash with a light backstep.
Judging by the distance she created and where she chose to land in relation to the nearby soldiers, it was by no means a desperate evasive maneuver.
“How are you……?”
Yet despite dodging so cleanly, the person who had done it didn’t look composed at all.
It was as though enormous confusion had descended upon her.
Even the smile she always wore had vanished, leaving only a cold stare.
“How can you be Wrath? Deception and falsehood may have been your first name, but how can poverty……?”
I had no idea what she was talking about, but the fact that she immediately said Wrath meant this had to be something Great Demon-like.
Or maybe one of those seventy-two knights immediately below them.
“You’ve made something strange again, you gloomy bat bastard.”
Even if she was neither, at the very least, the moment she attacked the Young Lord, it became obvious she wasn’t an ally.
So before she could recover from her confusion, I charged straight at her.
I put the dagger back away and gripped the longsword with both hands.
“Wait, don’t tell me?”
“You made something neither human nor demon.”
One step.
The distance between us transformed into a range where I could unleash a one-sided attack.
The sword I’d been holding over my shoulder like I was carrying it there traced a semicircle and shot forward.
My target was her head.
I moved while already assuming that even if she knocked the sword away with her dagger, I would rotate it with a snap of my wrist and continue the attack.
Clang!
As expected, the dagger’s edge and the longsword’s edge knocked against each other.
“Ha.”
At the instant she let out a sharp laugh, my sword traced an inverted U and slashed in from the opposite direction.
Clang!
The dagger in her other hand stopped that attack.
“So… this makes sense. Yes, now it makes sense. At last, every contradiction in your actions can be explained.”
Despite suffering one-sided slashes because of my superior weapon length and reach, she eventually recovered her smile.
Reflected in her emerald eyes, I could see myself squinting slightly.
“It was not only you, Wrath, who deceived them.”
Clang!
In an instant, the two daggers crossed around my longsword and trapped it.
While the blade was caught between dagger edges and guards and couldn’t move either way, she slid forward and swung an arm.
I released one hand from my sword hilt, intending to seize her arm and knock it aside.
Clang!
“The vessel itself was also a deceiver.”
“YOU TRAITOR!!”
But there was no need.
The dagger that probably would have cut my throat had to change direction to stop an attack coming from behind.
Still smiling eerily, she slipped sideways with a hint of annoyance in her eyes.
There was no reason to let her escape.
I shoved the longsword aside from the dagger holding it and took half a step back to leave the dagger’s effective range.
At the same time, I twisted the path of my empty hand, aiming for the hem of her clothing.
There was only one thing I wanted.
To grab her sleeve.
And I wanted two advantages from that.
Prevent her from swinging the dagger.
And hold her body in place so she couldn’t evade the longsword.
But that intention failed.
She reversed the main-gauche into an ice-pick grip and slashed at my wrist.
I barely avoided it, though part of my glove was sliced away.
A little worse, and my opponens pollicis muscle would have been cut through.
Clang!
At the same time, the longsword I swung with the mindset of cutting her whether or not I succeeded in grabbing her was caught between the side ring and blade and knocked aside.
The skill with which she blocked the longsword while slashing my wrist and thrusting through empty space was infuriatingly artistic.
“Ghk!”
And my attack wasn’t the only one she successfully defended against.
Even the strike from the honey-blond knight—probably a knight—failed to get past her dagger.
More precisely, the knight had to cancel the attack when the dagger shot toward the solar plexus.
“O Forbidden One.”
Leaving that aside, while all our attacks failed, she placed her empty hand against her chest as she continued slipping sideways.
Brilliant light leaked from between her palm and chest.
Then something began to emerge.
A rapier with a platinum-colored blade and a hilt carved from jade.
Slash!
While drawing the rapier, she simultaneously used the main-gauche to keep the blue-haired knight trying to stab her in check.
Once fully drawn, the roughly one-meter blade of the rapier pierced the eye of a spear-wielding soldier.
What the hell is her field of vision?
I clicked my tongue and hurried after her.
Since I had kicked off the ground the instant all my attacks were nullified, the distance between us wasn’t very large.
My sword came down toward her just after she killed a soldier.
She was using the main-gauche to keep the blue-haired knight at bay, so she would have to block me with the rapier alone.
Clang!
Crossing her arms into an X, she pulled back the left arm holding the main-gauche and somehow stopped my longsword.
Screech.
Metal scraped against metal as the distance between us narrowed.
My attempt to pull the sword free using the wrist-snap technique I learned in Manhappelt was shut down at the source when she twisted her weapon accordingly.
“Damn it!”
Worse, because she slid in toward my right side, I ended up unintentionally positioned between her and the blue-haired knight.
That meant the blue-haired knight couldn’t attack without hitting me.
Slash!
The enemy’s rapier came free along with a mangled eyeball and shot toward my head.
Grab.
But a rapier’s cutting power isn’t particularly high.
In truth, that applies to any sword that isn’t moving.
So trusting that fact, I grabbed the enemy’s rapier and forcibly redirected it.
Her main-gauche was occupied controlling my longsword, which meant she couldn’t simply stab me with that instead.
“Would the one who sought to ascend to the heavens know?”
What would have happened if I hadn’t learned even a little proper swordsmanship in Manhappelt?
In a moment where one second felt like one hundred, I watched her lips move.
“That even the vessel who seemed as though it might break but never bend was actually a talented deceiver?”
She seemed convinced that I was the “Demon Knight.”
Well.
There was hardly going to be more than one person walking around with Wrath inside their body, so once you broke the initial assumption, it was an easy conclusion to reach.
All it required was accepting the fact she was saying now:
that “the Demon Knight can act like a completely different person.”
“I too am curious. Where did your deception begin? With that unyielding nature? Or with the hatred that formed its foundation? Or was everything that defined you a lie?”
But there was no reason for me to answer and give her certainty.
While trying to infer the identity of the “one who sought to ascend to the heavens” mentioned in her words—and her own identity as well—I yanked hard on the rapier.
If she gave up restraining my longsword, I would cut through her waist.
If she didn’t, I intended to make her release the rapier, seize her neck, and break it.
Of course, in the latter case there was a possibility my own throat might get cut.
Contrary to common prejudice, a rapier could slash as well as thrust.
But she had stepped too deeply into my range.
By the time I reached her neck, even if she tried to cut mine, the guard would block the motion before the blade could properly slice.
If it had been an ordinary sword, she might have smashed me with the edge of the guard instead, but the rapier’s guard was round, making that ineffective too.
“You and the one you contain are like phantoms.”
Her face, pulled closer than normal personal distance when I dragged the rapier toward me, lifted its smile a little higher.
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“Those who never remove their masks.”
She released both rapier and main-gauche and jumped backward.
The honey-blond knight’s sword, which had been attempting another surprise strike from the side, narrowly passed in front of me.
If the knight had been even slightly slower to pull the blow, my side would have been pierced through.
Slash!
While both the blond knight and I recoiled in horror at that fact, something shot from the retreating woman’s hand.
The black object split the air like a snake and—
Snap!
—caught the handle of the rapier I had been about to throw away.
Slash!
The rapier was yanked backward and returned to the hand of the woman standing on the battlement.
In her other hand was a leather whip that reflected not even a trace of light.
Slash!
The freshly retrieved rapier happened to slice across the eye of a soldier standing nearby.
Movement that wasted not a single instant smiled faintly through the blood flowing along the blade.
“And yet, you who do not rage.”
And beneath that blood—
behind the emerald-eyed knight standing atop the battlement—
“Can you truly save this city?”
a beast of rotting flesh raised its head.
The demons began their advance.