Chapter 266 - A Hunch Bordering on Certainty

The assassin disguised as a middle-aged noblewoman felt her mouth going dry. Every time the blue eyes of the black-haired man following so casually behind settled on her, a chill ran through her. 'Here.'

The moment she entered the reed field, she tried to hide. It was time to lose him and demonstrate her own specialty.

That was when it happened. BOOM! A deafening report. What was that? She instinctively drew her dagger, leveling the poisoned blade before her.

Suddenly, a shadow fell over her. It came right after a sound like a leather drum bursting, or a thunderclap. Her immediate reaction to the noise was admirable, but that was all she could manage. "This is the place, right?"

The woman looked up at the incomprehensible question.

A brilliant flash of lightning struck above her.

Her thoughts ended there. People whose heads had been split in two could not think, after all. Activate the Heart of the Superhuman, kick off the ground to close the distance, then bring the sword straight down to split the assassin's skull.

Simple, but none of the assassins had expected such decisiveness. Wasn't this when he should catch his breath, watch for hidden assassins, and worry about the traps they had prepared?

Instead, he charged in and cleaved her head. Blood spattered all around, flecking Encrid's clothes red. He marveled anew at the sword in his left hand.

'This was just a sword she carried around?'

Once again, he realized how extraordinary the dwarf's craftsmanship was. It lacked a masterwork blade's keen edge, but it was solid and reasonably sharp. He especially liked the thickness of the blade. He could knock aside almost anything with its flat.

He didn't merely like it; the sword was immensely practical. He hardly needed to carry a separate guard sword. In short, this was a sword he could use in all manner of situations. Standing in the reed field, Encrid admired his sword, then let the hand holding it hang at his side. At the same time, he drew another sword with his right hand. SHING! A blue-gleaming blade emerged. He now held The Tutor as well, once a demon sword, but now simply a masterwork harder and sharper than any other.

With both hands lowered, he surveyed his surroundings. The men among the reeds were so well hidden that he couldn't see so much as the tips of their noses.

Was that a problem?

No. He was merely curious.

What gave them the confidence to attack him like this? WHOOSH! WHOOSH! WHOOSH! Three round, ball-like objects flew overhead and burst directly above Encrid. BANG-BANG-BOOM! A dull gray powder fell onto the parched reeds below. They collapsed in a rustling tangle.

Poison powder.

Encrid had already moved away. This was precisely why he had made such a noisy leap to kill the assassin disguised as a middle-aged woman. Encrid was already highly accomplished at individual combat tactics. Why wouldn't he be? The Valen Mercenary Sword Technique belonged to the category of illusion swordsmanship founded on such tactics.

Added to that were physical ability and perception that had advanced far beyond their former level, combat experience, and everything he had learned through repeated todays.

Above all... 'They're clumsier than Jaxon.'

Among his sparring partners was Jaxon, a towering figure in the art of assassination. His sword always came swiftly, silently, without a hint of its approach.

The days Encrid had spent struggling to fully perceive it had not been wasted. His formidable senses encompassed everything around him. At the very least, he instinctively detected any human presence within his range of perception.

If he thought an enemy might be over there, one was. If he thought something might come flying from a certain direction, it did. He stepped lightly off the ground and launched himself forward. All manner of things rained down on the place he had occupied, but they were useless now.

Jack, a Black Blade bandit who had just taken a whistle dagger in each hand, gaped in shock.

When had he gotten here?

Encrid stabbed. THUNK! Through the assassin's throat, out again, then briefly back into the sheath. SHING! He grabbed the man by the collar and flung him aside. As the body sailed through the air, blood streamed from its neck in a long arc.

They were well beyond the reach of the poison smoke.

Encrid veered sideways and ran, his body racing along with terrifying, silent speed. RUSTLE-RUSTLE-RUSTLE! The sound of reeds bending over swelled around them.

"Fuck!"

An assassin shouted. A man trained to carry out his mission in silence no matter what had cried out involuntarily.

And why wouldn't he?

That thing was a monster. They might be the first-rate assassins Black Blade boasted of, but they were no match for this. Wouldn't killing a monster like that require the master of Georg’s Dagger, reputedly the continent's foremost assassins' guild?

His question was short-lived. A broad blade was suddenly upon him, cutting through his neck. SWISH! THWACK! His severed head floated into the air.

Among reeds that hid them from the waist down, the assassins felt terror. BOOM! But their hands did not stop. To live, they had to kill him. That fact had not changed.

They released poison smoke and hurled poisoned darts, throwing knives, and throwing axes. Several pressure-operated pouches also burst, scattering poisoned spikes.

Everything had been prepared to kill one man. Encrid knocked aside what needed deflecting and dodged what needed dodging. His senses had surpassed human limits, to the point of telling him what to do next.

'Half a step behind.'

Twisting at the waist, he drove a short, sharp elbow strike into the head of a man who had silently drawn close. CRACK!

The impact rang out. The assassin specialized in slipping silently behind his targets. His head burst. An eyeball popped free under the pressure and rolled across the ground. Blood and brain matter spilled from his split skull. Pink brain peeked shyly through the gap. Encrid didn't spare the man he had elbowed even a glance. The impact alone told him his opponent was dead.

Following the elbow strike, he hurled the gladius forward with all his strength. His left hand swept a semicircle through the air, and the spinning sword, a disc when seen from the side, buried itself in another assassin's head with a thud. Seeing an opportunity, two assassins coordinated from either side and cast a net. By the time it unfurled overhead with a swish, Encrid was already pulling free the sword he had thrown. It was the union of the Heart of the Superhuman and advancing footwork. The step called a lunge carried a swordsman forward. Into that he mixed a slope step, ordinarily a long, diagonally forward step used to evade an opponent's attack.

He simply combined them as the situation allowed. Passing steps and gathering steps too. He made no particular distinction.

To these he added absurd strength and thigh muscles capable of withstanding it. An advancing step became a sprint ending in a stab. A sideways slash drew a long line through an entire stretch of reeds.

Put more simply, Encrid was using swordsmanship against the entire group of assassins. He had merely expanded its range enormously.

He did not know it, but this was how a proto knight-level swordsman fought many opponents at once: a method of slaughter founded on swordsmanship. It was only natural. Encrid had reached his present level through the skills he had learned and mastered. Thus, he moved and fought on the foundations of the various sword styles he had practiced and learned from those around him.

Into these he mixed the Flowing Sword Technique he had learned. His weapon's excellence compensated for the lack of force.

Of course, strength was relative. "Gah!"

To the assassin caught by that gently advancing blade, it was nothing less than a blow from the reaper. Despite armor with an impact-dispersing spell over the chest, he knew a couple of his ribs had broken.

Raw strength had broken the spell. Calling it brute force hardly did it justice.

Encrid's strength increased by the day, and now he had the Heart of the Superhuman as well. He had nothing to envy a Frog for. 'What kind of brute...?'

How could anyone be this strong?

Encrid casually followed with a second attack. Through the combination of his footwork and the Heart of the Superhuman, he vanished from the assassin's sight for an instant.

What should have been a simple sidestep to gain the flank became, to his opponent, a ghostlike act of teleportation.

He vanished in a flicker, and blue lightning struck the assassin's crown and passed through.

Another assassin died. Poison mist spread in patches, but Encrid paid it no mind. In fact, he even held his breath, burst straight through a cloud, and killed an assassin with a Zimmer-style stab.

"Ghk, you c-crazy..."

He had forced his way through poison smoke to do this?

The assassin, who had been holding out inside the smoke with an antidote in his mouth, went to his god with "crazy" as his last word. Encrid kept moving, both swords lowered toward the ground. RUSTLE-RUSTLE...

SWISH-SWISH-SWISH! Countless reeds fell to the blades. He was advertising his exact position.

It didn't matter. He wanted them to see him and attack. If they threw something instead of simply hiding, pinpointing them became much easier. The outcome was clear. Of Black Blade's group of more than fifteen assassins, only two remained.

"We picked the wrong target."

Their leader, a first-rate assassin, spoke. His name was Barcelo. He had drifted into Black Blade from the eastern continent, and had once been called an assassin on par with the guild known as Georg’s Dagger.

The best of the best.

His specialty was getting behind opponents and tearing open the backs of their skulls with claws.

Yet even Barcelo could find no opening in Encrid. Every time he circled the man or changed positions, Encrid's eyes flicked toward him. 'He can see me?'

Those senses were preposterous. He could detect the presence of a first-rate assassin? How?

And so Barcelo was pinned down. The other survivor had already been fleeing for some time. His duty was to put distance between himself and the fight, then report what had happened.

As he fled, something suddenly caught his neck. He gave a strangled grunt, his neck broke, and he died. Soak tanned leather in oil, heat it over a fire, and apply a special chemical. Repeat the process several times, and it became a thin but sturdy tool.

The fleeing man had caught his neck on it and been lifted off his feet. His neck bent under his own weight, and the person holding the leather cord twisted and pulled, snapping it outright.

The assassin's body rose into the air, then slumped to the ground. A man appeared as though rising from the fleeing assassin's shadow.

Jaxon, with his reddish-brown hair.

"A little late."

With that, he headed toward the place where Encrid was running wild. A Fairy had arrived a step ahead of Jaxon.

"Am I late? Or is my love too swift? Love is always swift, striking my heart and passing through without a sound. I don't believe I'm late."

The Fairy Company Commander stood at one side of the reed field as she spoke. Encrid sensed her presence, but left her for the moment and faced his last opponent.

The leader stood motionless.

Encrid had recognized it from the start. This bastard was on a different level from the other assassins. His footwork, every trick he used to conceal his presence, was different. Finding him wasn't difficult. Encrid's intuition had already surpassed ordinary limits. Even when he could hear no breathing and detect no presence, his Sixth Sense told him someone might be there.

And there they were. He could feel them merely directing killing intent toward him.

It was purely a matter of intuition, made possible by the sensory arts, but his opponents could hardly be blamed for calling it cheating. But what could they do? Jaxon, who stayed at Encrid's side, was a mad genius in this field, one who added hard work to his natural gifts.

What Encrid had learned from that genius through his repeating today had now ripened within him. "He's mine."

Encrid addressed the Fairy. He had deliberately saved this one, like a special treat at the end of a meal.

The man was an accomplished assassin. Surely his skills would be something special. The leader of the nearly annihilated assassins fitted weapons over his hands. With a pair of clicks, he donned claws on both hands and stepped forward.

"Promise you'll let me leave alive if I kill you."

At the answer that came without a moment's pause, Barcelo knew there was no way he would survive.

Even so, he kept one final move hidden. Could that man stop even this? TAP, TAP, TAP. Barcelo began running through the reeds. Poison smoke filled the space to his left, and corpses and metal littered the ground.

His target sheathed the shorter sword, took the long sword in both hands, and began approaching.

He wasn't particularly fast. None of that lightning footwork from earlier. He merely closed the distance with his sword ready. TAP-TAP-TAP!

The reaper's footsteps... RUSTLE-RUSTLE.

...formed a duet with the sound of reeds falling beneath his crushing tread. Barcelo accelerated, bending halfway at the waist. The reeds flashed past him.

Keeping low, he led with his claws and staked everything on the opening exchange.

A single blow would decide victory or defeat!

Repeating that to himself, he unleashed his secret move. POP! CRACK-CRACK! A third hand thrust out of his chest, bursting through his clothes. His chest had looked unusually thick; now a hand sprang from it.

It happened just as Encrid's sword met the claws.

This was his true trump card. The third hand was something implanted through a mystic art. As the long piece of steel in its grip stabbed toward Encrid's chest...

'Huh?'

Barcelo felt his clawed right hand refuse to obey him. The instant their weapons met, his opponent's strength pressed and pushed his claw, forcing it to move a certain way.

His claw met the dagger in the third hand. CLANG! At the same time, his left claw slashed at his opponent's head, but the man ducked beneath it. Now lower than Barcelo himself, his opponent looked up.

Barcelo saw blue light. Two blue streaks, trailing long lines like falling meteors.

A black mass framing those blue streaks from above swept past him. He tried to pull his arms back in defiance, but couldn't. SLICE! The sword that had knocked his claws aside had already severed both his arms—no, the third hand as well.

Then something like a red-hot poker gouged into his torso and rose upward.

"Aaaaaagh!"

Barcelo screamed. But it was a scream no one could hear. His mind screamed; the cry remained inside him. The third hand had given Encrid a fright.

'What the hell is that?'

Fortunately, his body and senses moved on their own. The instant he saw the third blade, he used the Flowing Sword Technique to redirect the claw into the dagger's path and ducked. It looked simple, but during the movement his eyes felt as though they were burning, and his head grew hot. His brain had overloaded as it absorbed and assessed every piece of information coming in at once.

Encrid swept his deflecting sword upward from below. It was an extension of his first Flowing Sword move, developed from observing Snake Step, Swallow Blade's flexible sword, and the like. The flowing blade carried no violent force, but a masterwork's sharpness supported it. He sliced through all three arms and advanced, driving his toes into the ground to step and spin, then thrust his sword straight in.

Without hesitation, he continued the movement, cutting upward with the blade buried in his opponent's abdomen.

The sequence was utterly smooth. To his opponent, though, it must have been a monstrous sword strike that severed his arms and split his body like lightning. After he killed the last opponent...

"What is all this?"

There was Jaxon, his soldier, who had come up to him.

"A betrothal ceremony in blood?"

And there was the Fairy Company Commander, spouting nonsense. "Whew."

Encrid let out a long breath, glanced over the men he had killed, and answered.

"Guests."

"Quite the warm welcome you gave them."

Jaxon murmured as he approached. He held a small leather pouch. Keeping it in hand, he gave the corpse's clothes a cursory search and produced something Encrid had seen before.

He now held an identically shaped pouch in each hand. He loosened a drawstring and tipped a little out. Glittering powder drifted down.

A powdered drug. "A familiar drug," Jaxon said.

At that moment, Encrid remembered the powder they had found on the Black Blade messenger in Martai. He also remembered the drug that Frog bastard had swallowed.

As far as he recalled, the two were almost identical. The feel of them, the peculiar smell.

He had noticed thanks to his habit of never overlooking anything around him. And if he knew, the member of his company standing before him would know too. Jaxon was a perceptive fellow who never let anything pass him by.

"Have you interrogated the Frog?" Jaxon asked. Everyone knew Encrid had beaten the Frog unconscious and brought him back. Naturally, Jaxon knew as well. He would also know the Frog had swallowed a drug and gone berserk.

Would chatter-loving Krais have kept quiet?

All of this seemed connected. It was only a feeling, but a hunch bordering on certainty. With that hunch in mind, Encrid shook his head. The interrogation was still to come.

"This is a conversation I'd like to join. I'll sulk if you leave me out."

The Fairy Company Commander interjected from beside them. Encrid nodded. She had shown interest from the outset. Her tone was light and laced with jokes, but the disposition shining through her green eyes was anything but light.

It seemed further evidence that this was no ordinary matter.