Chapter 21

Translator: Willia

It is always darkest just before the sun rose.

Was a person's life the same? Then how many people, in that deep darkness just before dawn, had despaired and given up?

So, ironically, the regret of "if only they'd held on a little longer" belonged to those who had not given up, who had survived to greet the sun.

In that darkest hour, without even a sliver of first light, four boats slid out of the wetlands on the outskirts of Grinnen, like snakes slithering forth.

Each boat carried four or five men, torches in their hands. The wavering torchlight played across the black river water.

Before long, the four boats arrived at the wharf on the south side of Grinnen. Roughly twenty men poured out onto the wharf.

They carried daggers tucked inside their clothes, but their hands held either torches or clubs.

The one who appeared to be their leader spoke to the men. In the torchlight, the upturned nostrils on his face stood out. It was none other than Pug-nose Ged.

"The Third Young Lord can't end up dead on us, so don't you dare draw your daggers. Just beat the shit out of them. Pull the youngest-looking one to the back."

Then he waved broadly, signaling them to move out.

Footsteps sounded in a ragged scatter, and the gang reached the warehouse where Valery's group was staying.

Ged gripped the handle of the great hinged door and looked back at his men one last time.

Then he wrenched the door open with all his strength.

Rrrrrrrrrattle!

His men charged in all at once, ready to thrash anyone they found inside within an inch of his life.

But in the torchlight, the warehouse held no one.

Ged stood dazed for a few seconds before he spoke. It never even occurred to him that the Black Hand might have already exposed his plan.

"......Is this the wrong place?"

That was when it happened. There came the sudden sound of someone sprinting toward him, tap-tap-tap. As he turned his head, an impact struck him like being run down by a cart at full gallop, and Ged lost consciousness on the spot.

Thud!

The one who had rammed Ged was none other than Skard. He had charged from a distance with his round shield leading, throwing his whole body into the blow.

Ged crumpled helplessly, and Skard came down on top of him.

With trained movements, he immediately drove his dagger into the unconscious Ged's belly, ripped it upward in one long stroke, and sprang to his feet.

Ged's men froze for a moment, eyes wide, trying to grasp what was happening, when another collision struck from the opposite side.

Whack!

"Ugh!"

"Whoa!"

Several men went down at once. It was Arne.

Arne, too, drove his dagger in exactly as he had practiced so many times. Blade angled slightly upward, stab into the lower belly, then slash on the diagonal.

That was in case the enemy happened to be wearing a leather vest, or some garment with blade-stopping properties.

It was simple. Lead with the shield, ram straight in, then immediately stab the belly with the dagger.

It had the drawback of killing only one man at a time, but it was certain, and if it succeeded early, the rest were bound to fall into mental chaos.

And there was someone to widen those gains and tie things off for good. It was none other than Valery, who had been hiding in a corner of the warehouse.

Short of being a true master, sensing Valery's presence when he moved as an assassin was all but impossible. And his bladework, so smooth and precise.

Valery approached like a shadow with his body lowered and swung his sword. The torchlight caught the blade, making it flash again and again.

Then Ged's men, all but defenseless, lost their heads one after another without ever knowing why they died. Blood sprayed from the severed stumps, and as the bodies toppled, the torches in their hands dropped to the ground.

"Eeeeek!"

"Fuck! What the hell!"

When the man right beside them lost his head and gushed blood, the enemies who witnessed it could not keep hold of their senses.

On top of that, it was the darkest hour before first light ever touched the sky; even lit by torches, Valery's movements were nearly impossible to track. All they could see was something dark whipping past, again and again. Whether it was a man, or a shadow.

All the while, Arne and Skard dutifully led with their shields, ramming in and killing.

After that first strike, five or six men died in an instant. Of course, those remaining could still have overwhelmed Valery's group by headcount alone, but by this point, most men had no presence of mind left for such things.

Whether their own side had more men or fewer, whether to fight back, whether to flee. Their attention could only be seized by what was right before their eyes. Their dead comrades.

"Aaaaargh!"

"Wh-what the hell!"

"Fuck!"

Even so, some flailed their clubs in a show of resistance, some simply bolted, some collapsed on the spot and did nothing but tremble; fighting on already looked impossible.

Those who dared to resist were chosen as Valery's first targets, and in an instant they took fatal wounds and died.

Amid it all, one flustered enemy spotted a small-framed figure. The thought that flashed through his mind was the Third Young Lord, and reckoning his only chance of survival was to take a hostage, he reached out to grab him.

Naturally, Knut dodged. But his dodge was nothing more than a casual step to the side, so the enemy kept trying to grab hold of him however he could.

He never managed it. His neck flared hot, the strength drained from his arms, and choking suddenly as if he had plunged underwater, he could only sink to the ground.

At some point, without his ever noticing, his throat had been cut deep, and the blood surging out had blocked his windpipe.

"Kack! Kh! Krgh!"

Looking coldly down at him, Knut said,

"Are you stupid? Who's going to let you grab them when you come at them that openly?"

"Y-Young Lord! Are you all right!"

Yorik, who had done nothing but hide, shouted from behind the cargo crates, apparently worried about Knut after all. Knut gave the dagger that had just killed the enemy a light toss his way and said,

"Clean it."

And with that, it was over. The torches all lay scattered on the ground.

Arne and Skard fought in a style that spent their full strength, so they were panting a little. Still, both had trained bodies; they were nowhere near so drained that they couldn't lift a finger.

Valery, bloody sword still in hand, said to the two of them,

"Better than I expected, huh? I thought you'd freeze up and not even be able to move."

"......"

Seeing blood was not an everyday thing, but working as a guard in a city meant seeing all manner of ugliness, so they were hardly raw novices in their very first fight.

Valery approached a survivor who sat collapsed and shaking. Several torches lay fallen behind Valery, and backlit as he was, the face the man saw was pitch black.

His eyes seemed to glow. The man couldn't tell whether the eyes themselves were glowing or merely reflecting the firelight. Either way, the only emotion ruling him was fear.

Valery wiped his bloody sword against the man's clothes several times. After cleaning it thoroughly, he sheathed the blade and spoke.

"Answer well and I'll let you live. Waste my time and I'll kill you. Understood?"

At that, the man nodded quickly.

"Is Creed among the men who came tonight? Your boss."

The man shook his head.

"No? He really does keep his head down, doesn't he. He sends twenty of his men and doesn't come himself?"

There was a reason, after all, that Duke Sven had failed to deal with him for so long.

"Hey, Yorik. Bring me a fistful of salt."

"Huh? Ah, yes."

Yorik, who had been staring aghast at the sprawled corpses, hurried over with the salt.

Valery personally drew the enemy's hand over, pressed the salt into it, and said,

"Take it back and share it with your boss. When day breaks, we'll be handing out salt to people again, so if your boss wants more, tell him to come and collect it. Got it?"

Valery jerked his chin, telling him to go. When the man still seemed slow to catch his meaning, Valery even patted him on the shoulder a few times, as if in encouragement.

The man apparently never dreamed he would survive; for a good while, even through his fear, he wore a dumbfounded expression.

At any rate, he pulled himself together, returned to the wharf, and climbed into a boat. He tucked the salt into his pocket and rowed away into the distance.

"......Can it really be this easy?"

Skard said, looking around at the corpses. He seemed somehow giddy, brimming over. His heart was pounding with excitement, plainly enough for anyone else to see.

Nearly twenty corpses. Three men, four men, had done that. Even having achieved the result with his own hands, he seemed to find it hard to believe.

Beating an enemy with greater numbers, that could be managed one way or another; but doing it without a single casualty, and in so short a time, was what Skard could not believe.

"In a battle of numbers, momentum is everything. Inflict casualties in the opening clash, and unless they're seasoned veterans, their spirit breaks and they can't fight."

Valery said this as he set one of the torches in the hearth inside the warehouse, where the peat charcoal lay.

Put simply, it was a tactic of surging in all at once so the enemy couldn't collect themselves. And if heavy casualties were inflicted while the enemy was still reeling, there was no foe in the world that could not be beaten.

Easy to say, of course; as the numbers grew and grew toward the scale of armies, it only became harder. But Valery was the one who had done all of it, earned an undefeated name, and become a king.

"I feel like I've become invincible or something."

Apparently in much the same state of mind as Skard, Arne even had the trace of a smile playing on his face.

He grieved for the sacrifice of innocent people; when it came to fighting enemies, he was every bit as merciless as Valery and Skard.

As if he still had strength to spare, Arne kept rolling his shoulders and cracking his neck from side to side. Because he felt how effective he had become. The feeling of seeing proof, in the results, that all his training hadn't been in vain.

It was as good as the fulfillment of what Valery had once told him. That he would come to have faith in himself.

But the mission was not yet finished; it was only beginning.

The pitch-black sky was slowly steeping in the light of dawn.

A fistful of salt. A gigantic man sat in a chair draped with tiger hide, staring down at the fistful of salt laid on the floor.

He was big not from fat, but from a frame born large. In height and bulk alike, he must have been twice the size of an ordinary man.

His loose hair hung down to about his shoulders, and his beard, plaited into two braids, reached his chest.

Above all, his eyes were fierce. Flames seemed to blaze in them, and whether the kindling was greed, or some grudge against the world, there was no way to know.

He was Creed the Ball-Ripper, the self-styled Creed the Terrifying.

"Twenty men marched in and got wrecked by four?"

Creed's voice was like a rough echo rolling out of a cave.

"Th-that is, it was five, actually. That much I saw for certain."

"And Pug-nose?"

"......Dead."

At that, Creed gripped the armrests of his chair hard enough to snap them, trembling. A grinding crunch could be heard.

"You fucking bastaaaaard!"

After shaking for a long moment, he suddenly bellowed at his underling, and it truly sounded like the roar of some great beast.

The kneeling underling felt a terror as if his life were already forfeit.

Creed shot up from his chair. To the man kneeling below, it was like a mountain heaving up out of the earth.

Creed raised his foot as if to stomp the man flat then and there. But in the end he did not; he quietly set the raised foot back down.

He gathered his reason again and asked,

"Four men tore through twenty...... Did they send knights? I thought they wouldn't, for fear they'd drown in the water? Or did the Third Young Lord really hire swordsmen on his own and bring them along?"

It seemed he hadn't survived Duke Sven's relentless hunting all these years for nothing; for all his bulk, he apparently knew how to rein in his feelings and put his head to work.

"What did it look like to you?"

Creed asked the underling. He was the survivor, after all, the one who had seen it with his own eyes.

"One was huge, and one was well-built. The two of them led with shields and pressed in from both sides, and there was one swordsman, younger-looking than you'd expect. But his bladework, it was downright unearthly, truly. Every time something flashed before my eyes, another head came off. The other two...... seemed to be the Third Young Lord and a servant."

"......So you're telling me three men did this?"

"Th-that is, the one swordsman's skill was just so tremendous......"

"So not three. You're telling me one man did this?"

"......"

The more the underling spoke, the more cornered he felt.

But Creed had not meant to berate him. An uneasy feeling had crept over him, then a sudden jolt of clarity, and his wariness surged.

He decided that, first of all, he must not act rashly; he needed to find out in detail exactly who this swordsman was. But at his underling's next words, he lost his reason entirely.

"Ah, and, that swordsman said something. That when day breaks, they'll hand out salt to the people again. He said if you go too, Boss, they'll just give you some?"

"......What did you say?"

"Th-that if you go too, Boss, they'll just give it to you......"

"Who gave them the right to hand out salt!? Do I look like fucking shit to you!? Huh!?"

Astonishingly, Creed seemed to already count Valery's group's salt as his own; unable to contain his fury, he kicked the underling square in the head.

Thwack!

Being so massive, and nimble besides, his kick carried tremendous force. The underling was knocked out cold in a single blow and sent sprawling.

"Bring me my weapon! They dare take the salt!? I will not forgive this!"

Creed shouted. At that, his trembling underlings brought him his weapon.

It was something like a short spear, a kind of billhook, its blade broad and curving slightly downward into a hook. It had the look of a thing well-suited to ripping something open, and it was the weapon that had earned him the name Ball-Ripper.

Creed pushed aside the tent flap and stepped out.

Dawn was breaking. As if swaying in that light, the reeds stirred gently.