The fight went on and on.
Spear and two-handed axe tangled, struck, and cut.
To define that process in a word, it went like this.
'It is as though I am bewitched by a ghost!'
The Sambala tribes believed in ancestral gods.
Which was why they didn't say things like this if they could help it......
But right now he simply couldn't think of it as anything else.
That was how uncanny and strange it was.
The spearmanship this greenhorn in front of him unfolded.
"Khahap!"
The barbarian warrior swung the two-handed axe.
The greenhorn blocked it with the spear shaft.
By rights this should have ended it.
It was entirely a matter of course for aura to sever the shaft and make two pieces of the greenhorn along with it.
And yet it didn't.
Astonishingly, the greenhorn was using mana too.
But the biggest problem was the emptiness.
Wheeet—
This time as well.
The greenhorn's body, having blocked with the shaft, went sailing back.
And there was no sensation whatsoever in the hand that swung the axe.
As though he had brought it down on a passing wind.
The most troublesome point above all.
It was that the greenhorn's offense and defense were unified into one.
Because of which, the greenhorn's defense was not defense.
It was defense and attack, attack and defense.
The same right now.
While being flung backward, he seized the spear tip and brought it down like an axe.
Combine the length of an arm with the length of a spear and you get tremendous reach.
Naturally more than enough to reach the barbarian warrior.
"Kuhyaaah!"
Whoom—
Evasion was the same.
The barbarian warrior gripped the axe in both hands and drove it down.
An attack with his whole strength behind it, like splitting firewood!
But the greenhorn's response was simple.
He just dodged.
Only, by a single hair's difference.
As said before, offense and defense as one.
At the same instant he evaded, he abruptly reversed his grip on the spear.
The longspear, gone somehow behind the greenhorn's back.
And from there — shk!
From the barbarian warrior's standpoint the attack's starting point had shifted in an instant, so it was a thrust that seemed to come shooting from outside his field of vision.
And still he managed to react.
Any later and his eyeball would have gone.
"You! You!"
With all that, it was no wonder he was losing his reason.
But the more he did, the more he danced to Delam's intent.
Delam extended the spear one-handed, as though swinging it.
He dodged that, and immediately came the follow-up.
With wrist strength alone Delam flicked the spear whirling upward, then stepped forward and swapped his grip from blade end to shaft end.
The next step in the sequence was, of course, a strike.
THWACK!
Struck across the jaw with the shaft, the barbarian warrior staggered back.
The barbarian warrior was, in truth, at his wits' end.
All the years he had accumulated up to this age were meaningless.
The movements were like a clown's, and strangely he couldn't dodge them.
It was a spear of exactly two meters and he couldn't judge the distance.
Retreat, block — nothing was of any use.
A succession of feats he couldn't believe even while seeing them!
A phantom, quite literally; a ghost.
"What in the world are you doing right now—!"
But there was something else entirely that truly enraged the barbarian warrior.
Namely the greenhorn's attitude.
In the middle of a fierce battle.
The greenhorn would now and then close his eyes or gaze off into the distance.
Meaning his mind was elsewhere.
"......"
Sure enough, the greenhorn gave no reply, as if he hadn't even heard.
His stopping just now had been a mechanical act as well.
His opponent stopped, so he stopped.
In fact this was an impossible thing.
To let his mind wander in a situation that was not overwhelmingly in his favor but overwhelmingly against him, in a battle where one slip meant death?
But Delam was actually doing it.
It was an extremity of concentration possible only for Delam — who had witnessed and authored countless deaths and, at the last, transcended even that.
So why was his mind elsewhere?
The reason was simple.
'My limit isn't far off.'
That was Delam's judgment.
A body not yet ripened, insufficient mana.
And in that state he had cut down dozens of enemies.
And then run all the way to this place on top of it.
He was less than perfect to begin with, and now he'd met a barbarian warrior.
The barbarian warrior's skill was not especially high.
Low-grade, if you reckoned it in knights.
'And a single low-grade knight can comfortably handle twenty armed soldiers, or fifty poorly armed ones.'
Considering that, he was a truly formidable enemy.
And he had already exchanged dozens of passes with such a barbarian warrior.
As a result Delam's body was now a wreck.
His mana had long since been used up.
The state of it was that he was forcibly dragging out the mana barely pooled at the bottom of his heart, down to the last drop, to reinforce his body.
Had it not been Flurex Arts, which pursued the utmost in stability, he'd have been coughing blood from mana depletion already.
The fight, meanwhile, was stalled.
Delam was overwhelming him continuously, but the problem was the fatal blow.
He only made the man bloody; he couldn't actually kill him.
So the answer was one thing.
'I need another method.'
So he searched it out.
If mana was insufficient, and his body, and even technique wouldn't work......
How on earth was he supposed to bring down the mass in front of him?
In a knight-versus-knight fight, of course, there is no method.
Unless someone helped from the side.
'That's how it looks by common sense.'
In which case he could dig at the uncommon side.
And as it happened, wasn't there one?
That tremendous thrust he'd shown at the training camp.
The [wind] that had been speaking to him all along.
He still couldn't handle it freely.
He merely recognized the fact that some [energy] which had made it possible lay quietly asleep inside his body.
Which was why he hadn't factored it into this fight either.
A power he couldn't use consciously was meaningless.
But now there was no method left.
The last card he could play was that alone.
So he had been concentrating on it all through the fight.
The lucky part was the fact that he was crossing the line of death right now.
With the death god swinging his scythe back and forth in front of his eyes, Delam's concentration could only be at its absolute peak.
The same went for the unidentified energy sleeping inside him.
It felt dozens of times more sensitive than usual.
And now—
"Sorry, you waited a while."
Saying that, Delam picked up a sword from the ground.
Then he threw it high into the sky and kicked off the earth.
FA-BA-BAK!
Despite having no mana, his closing speed was tremendous.
An agility exactly as though he'd become a single strand of wind!
"So now at last you mean to fight properly? Though what you do remains ignoble to the end, unworthy of a warrior!"
And with that the barbarian warrior swung his axe.
The sword Delam had thrown high a moment ago was knocked away.
CLANG!
He couldn't help admiring how the boy had thrown it that high with that body.
But wasn't it a move far too plainly visible?
And then, immediately after.
Spit.
"Uurgh......?"
The barbarian warrior felt at his own throat.
Along with gurgling blood, he felt an empty hole.
There was nothing to look at.
He had been run through to the back of the neck.
Stagger, stagger.
The expression on the retreating barbarian warrior's face.
There was less the terror of death in it than bewilderment.
When he looked ahead, the greenhorn — no, the warrior — had at some point stopped there with his longspear extended straight toward him.
But he had heard no sound at all.
And even now the man was far too distant to reach him.
How in the world had this attack......?
"The wind opened a road for me. All I did was extend the spear along the road it made......"
"What......?"
"There's just a thing like that, you bastard."
He'd named it as well.
Ultimate art — the Soundless Thrust!
A little unimpressive, but a perfect name.
Since it was indeed soundless, and indeed a thrust.
Delam walked slowly over and pushed the barbarian warrior.
The huge frame, whose breath had stopped even before the push, went over backward.
WHUMP!
And there was one more person going down.
Delam too sank to his knees on the spot and collapsed.
Thump.
He tried to get up leaning on the spear, but it was beyond him.
His body wouldn't listen.
Stamina, muscle, mana, and even that power he didn't understand.
It was the result of scraping every last bit of all of it right down to the bottom.
"This thing's strong, all right... but it's a filthy... pain to use."
Delam's consciousness dimming.
At his ear the horn of retreat went on sounding.
BWOO— BWOO— BWOO—
***
The Kingdom of Fior was not defeated.
No — it was defeated, but... at any rate, it did not lose.
It sounds like nonsense, but it was the accurate way to say it.
Initially the Kingdom of Fior was pushed back wretchedly.
Not only the line infantry's fight but the mages as well.
The knight forces alone had the advantage, but not to the point of overwhelming, so by anyone's reckoning defeat was a settled matter.
-Sir Roel has come!
But in the battle's latter half.
Things changed when a certain knight order set foot on the field, not a moment too late.
The knight order led by the kingdom's only [Sword Master].
A Sword Master was not a human being.
He was rather a calamity in human shape.
The apex and the ultimate of all knights, rampaging in earnest.
Before him, the barbarians were quite literally swept away.
But the barbarians didn't simply sit still either.
Thanks to the deployment of the legendary Rune Master, Tamuka.
A being who could not be compared to a Sword Master in raw combat power, but who exerted more than that on a battlefield of many against many.
Thanks to which the battle ended with neither victor nor vanquished.
They had each landed one blow, fair and square.
"The losses are severe."
A woman knight murmured while looking around the battlefield.
Plate mail, and a greatsword slung across her back.
The woman knight was, at a glance, no ordinary talent.
Her insignia proved that above all else.
Since it was the mark of a member of the knight order led by the Sword Master.
The mission handed to the woman knight was the defense of the ground in front of the command element.
The role of guarding against any assassins or raids there might be.
And then, in the middle of that defense, soldiers came running up.
-S-Sir Knight! Save us!
-Be at ease. If you have come this far you are safe...... The command element is a little farther on, so keep your strength up.
-It isn't us! Our decurion is in danger!
-Hm? Your decurion, you say — are you not a decurion yourself?
-Th-that's true, but... in any case, that man is different!
Soldiers never regarded knights as comrades.
Butchers of the battlefield, and nobles!
Because skill, class, and treatment all differed far too much.
With a woman knight it was all the more so.
Isn't a man someone in whom courage he never had suddenly wells up at the mere sight of a woman?
That held true even for commoners.
But was a woman knight an easy mark?
To overcome physical disadvantage and become a knight required talent, effort, and a ruthless heart enough to make nothing of male knights.
Which was why there were a considerable number of rutting fellows whose heads had come off by summary judgment after trying something with a woman knight.
The formula was [woman knight = death].
-And they still cling to me like this?
But hearing the circumstances, it was understandable.
A barbarian warrior encountered during the retreat.
In the middle of common soldiers being mercilessly slaughtered, the decurion leading the group had stepped out alone and blocked his path.
Telling them to run while he held him......
"A fine fellow. I ought at least to find the body and bury it."
The woman knight murmured it and looked around the battlefield.
She did not, of course, imagine that decurion was alive.
He was a decurion who was a mere conscript by origin.
Whereas his opponent was a barbarian warrior acknowledged in Sambala.
Practiced in mana, and by all accounts a master of the axe.
It was a fight that was no contest to begin with.
"Around here, is it."
Sure enough, walking a while farther, she saw a giant's corpse in the distance.
Covering a bared upper body, dense, filthy tattoos of every kind.
The distinctive garb of a barbarian warrior.