Morning came a day early.
Nothing in the sky gave it away. The rain that had fallen all night had stopped at dawn, and the air hung damp and heavy. The stones of the low wall gleamed with water. Esteban had been standing at the upstairs window for an hour without moving, one hand around a small piece of wood in his pocket.
Below him, a chair scraped.
Then nothing.
Diego had gotten up in the dark. No light, no word. Esteban heard two soft footsteps on the wooden floor. Then the long, smooth whisper of a blade being drawn all the way out of its sheath, slowly. Then the front door, opening about the width of an arm.
"Wake up," Esteban said quietly, shaking Rico by the shoulder.
Rico's eyes snapped open at once, the way a man's do when he's spent years sleeping with one eye open.
"Hm?"
"I heard the door."
"Not the door. Something else." Esteban didn't know how to describe what he'd heard. It was a trace of something he'd learned from listening: a faint vibration coming through the wood of the wall. Steady. Distant. Rhythmic. In the ground itself.
Hooves. Many of them. Moving at a medium pace, not galloping.
Between ten and thirteen.
Diego's front yard was a rectangle about forty paces long and twenty wide, enclosed by a low wall of stacked stones with no mortar, just above waist height. In the middle of the east wall stood a single wooden gate, three arms wide. It was the only way to the door.
Diego stood two steps inside the gate.
He didn't stand in front of it. That was the first thing Esteban noticed from the window. Diego stood inside, so that anyone coming through would have to squeeze between the stone wall on the right and the empty space on the left, which he occupied himself. There was room for one man at a time, never two side by side.
His long sword was in his right hand, the blade tilted toward the ground. His face showed nothing. His left arm, bandaged, hung away from his body at a small angle that never changed.
By the time the riders appeared at the bend of the east road, Diego had been awake for less than three minutes. He didn't look at anyone.
A window appeared in the air between Esteban and the yard, faint:
[OPPONENT ASSESSMENT: 11 men]
[LEVEL: BELOW YOURS]
[SKILLS: crude combat, mixed weapons, no special abilities]
Then, beneath it, in red:
[NOTE: One opponent in the courtyard is beyond your level.]
It didn't say which one. It didn't have to.
The horses came slowly down the last stretch of road. Eleven riders in dark coats, with red bands tied around their necks or forearms. Some carried short swords. One had a long-handled axe. One had a heavy crossbow slung across his back. They stopped thirty paces outside the wall. No one dismounted.
"Old Diego!" one of them called. He rode at the front, a broad man with a yellow beard, holding his horse's reins in one hand. "The week is up. We came to hear your final answer."
Diego didn't reply.
"The boss sends his regards. He says he'll be visiting you in person this time, unless you open the gate."
Diego didn't reply.
"Come on, old man. There are eleven of us." The bearded man laughed. "And you've got one arm."
Diego still hadn't moved.
Three of them climbed down from their horses and walked toward the gate.
They weren't in any hurry. They walked like men used to having people open doors for them. Two carried short swords, and the third had an axe. They reached a spot three steps from the gate. The first one stopped and said something Esteban couldn't hear.
The moment he lifted his foot to step through, it was over.
Esteban didn't see a strike. He only saw the result.
The first man lay on his back on the ground, outside the gate, four steps from where he'd been standing. His short sword spun on the dirt with a metallic scrape. His face was turned up to the sky, his mouth open, no sound coming out. His right hand, the one that had held the sword, was twisted inward at an angle no hand should bend.
The second man was on his knees.
The third, the axeman, was still standing, staring at the place where his axe had been. It was lodged in the top beam of the gate, two body-lengths off the ground. Read this novel at novelping.com for the best experience.
Diego hadn't moved from his spot.
He had done one thing. He'd bent his right knee slightly, leaned his body half an arm's length, and turned his blade half a revolution at the wrist.
By Esteban's estimate afterward, it had taken less than two breaths.
Esteban tried to understand.
He stood at the window, one hand on the sill, his breath shortening. He had watched Rafael melt a door. He had watched a commander snap a spear in two. But he had never seen a man stand in one place and make three warriors vanish from the frame, the way you'd cross a line out of a book.
Read the step.
The skill wasn't unlocked yet. It sat in his menu, locked, the letters gray. But the need for it was so strong that something in his body moved. He didn't look at Diego's face. He didn't look at his sword. He looked at his feet.
Two feet, planted on the ground, shoulder-width apart. Not moving.
Then he saw it.
Diego's weight was shifting slowly from one foot to the other. Not as a movement, but as a quiet exchange, as if the earth beneath him were breathing. And with every shift, the line that no man could step across changed. He wasn't blocking the gap with his body. He was blocking it with what his body was about to do.
He wasn't answering strikes.
He was deciding where his opponent had to be, and then opening a door for him.
The window trembled:
[NEW SKILL: STEP READING]
[RANK: VERY WEAK]
[You can see how an opponent carries his weight, and where he will place his foot.]
Esteban looked back at the yard.
The rest had decided to charge.
Six men dismounted together and came over the wall from different sides: two from the right, two from the left, two through the middle. They wanted to surround him and put him in a circle.
Diego didn't move.
That was what killed them.
They closed in from different directions, so none of them could strike unless the others struck too, and none of them could move unless everyone moved. In the middle of the circle, Diego waited for the one man who couldn't wait.
The first to go was from the right: a thin man with a straight sword, leaping toward Diego's weak left shoulder. The instant his feet left the ground, Diego took half a step the other way and raised the hilt of his sword, not the blade, and struck the man's wrist once. Short. Heavy.
From the window, Esteban heard it. A dry crack, like a brittle branch.
The sword fell.
The man flew past Diego at full speed and ended up face down in the dirt three paces away, cradling his hand against his chest.
The second man, from the left, lunged at the same moment. Diego turned toward him without raising his blade. He placed his right palm on the man's chest, not to push him, but to redirect him. The man's charge turned into a spin. He turned on one foot and slammed into the wall with a heavy thud, slid down it, and sat on the ground trying to remember how to breathe.
The third raised his sword, then hesitated. He realized he was the only one left who could still see. If he struck, he'd be striking with no one beside him. He stepped forward, his blade touched empty air, and he dropped to his knees from a blow behind the leg that nobody saw.
Three were left.
What Esteban saw next couldn't be counted.
Diego was moving inside a circle two steps across, no more. He never left it. He never raised his blade above his chest. Each time a man came forward, that man left the circle on the outside, never in the direction of his attack. He left broken: at the wrist, the back, the knee. Diego never hit anyone twice. When a man fell, Diego left him and didn't look.
His sword stayed relaxed the whole time. It wasn't a weapon. It was an extension of his fingers.
A rider with a red band thrust his sword at Diego's back. Diego turned half around and met the blade with his own. When they touched, Esteban didn't hear a ring. He heard something lighter. Like a blade breaking.
The man stood staring at the broken sword in his hand. It had snapped at one exact point, the middle of the blade, where iron vibrates the most.
Diego had found the vibration point.
It wasn't a movement. It was knowledge. As if he could hear the iron before it touched.
The last two of the six didn't wait for anyone to come closer. One dropped his sword and grabbed his knee, which he couldn't remember being struck, and sat down.
The window shook, and a short line of red text rose in front of him, like a warning:
[CANNOT READ STEP]
[The gap in level is too large.]
The main fight ended in the span of a few breaths.
Eight men lay on the ground with broken bones, groaning and not getting up. Three others still stood outside the wall by their horses: the yellow-bearded man, the axeman whose axe was still stuck at the top of the gate, and a third with a heavy crossbow.
Diego had killed no one.
But something in him was changing.
He had finally stepped out of his circle and walked a few paces toward the gate. There was a new weight in his stride. He was breathing loudly through his nose. On the bandage of his left arm, a red stain was spreading slowly. Then it ran down to his wrist.
The wound had reopened.
And Esteban saw the man with the crossbow raise his weapon.
He didn't think.
He found himself on the stairs. Then at the door. Then in the yard. The ground was wet under his feet. The air was cold. His ears were full of his own pulse.
He saw the crossbow rise. He saw the string pull tight. He saw the bolt's tip swing toward Diego's back, from twenty paces away.
In front of him lay a wooden post from the wall, knocked down by last night's rain. He grabbed it with his right hand, and with the force of ten running strides, pressed it into the ground and pictured a broad, thick slab, as big as a door.
[FOCUS: 12 → 11]
The wood in his hand became a rectangular wooden shield, gray, two arms wide. The instant he lifted it behind Diego's back, the bolt hit it with a deep, muffled thud.
His whole arm shook.
The bolt stood buried in the plank, its iron head poking through the other side by a finger's width, a hand's breadth from Diego's face. Diego turned to look at it slowly.
"Drop the shield," he said, dryly.
"What?"
"He won't fire again. He's got nothing left to fire."
Esteban turned. The crossbowman had lowered his weapon. He was staring at his bolt stuck in the plank, then at Esteban, then at the man standing behind him. The faces of the three remaining riders showed what they were thinking. They had thought of ten things. None of them were any good.
They started backing toward their horses.
No one chased them.
The sound of hooves faded away from the gate, then from the road, then disappeared. Left behind in the yard were eight men on the ground, a wound, bloodstains on the stones, and two broken blades.
Diego sat down on the wall, his sword across his knees, and started to breathe slowly.
"They'll be back. But not these ones." He put his right hand on his left arm and pressed. "Next time, he comes himself."
"The boss."
"Yes."
There was no fear in his voice. There was only arithmetic.
Rico finally came out of the house, pale, holding a heavy copper pot he'd grabbed without knowing why. He looked around at the wounded, then at Diego, then at Esteban standing beside a wooden slab with a bolt stuck in it.
"Is it over?"
"The first part is," Diego said.
Esteban finally let out his breath.
His hand was trembling. Something inside him had been shaking since he'd lifted that plank. But he knew one thing clearly that he hadn't known an hour ago: the man sitting on that wall with a bleeding arm was stronger than anyone he had ever met, with the exception of two. And even this man, for all his strength, had just come out of a fight he could barely win anymore.
And on the screen, in small white letters at the bottom:
[SIDE QUEST: Defend Diego's House. Part One complete (1/3)]