Sunlight poured over the castle walls, baking the packed dirt of the courtyard until it was hard beneath their feet.
Karl stood in the center of the courtyard, his full plate armor gleaming beneath the sun.
The suit had been stripped from Walter’s body and refitted only yesterday.
The pauldrons had been widened by two finger-widths.
The faulds had been narrowed slightly.
The leather lining around the elbow joints had been re-riveted.
Brom and Tod had spent most of the afternoon making the alterations, with Brom cursing after nearly every hammer blow.
Karl lowered the visor of his helmet, reducing his vision to a long, narrow slit of light.
He hopped twice in place, his armor clattering loudly.
As soon as he landed, he bent his knees and leaned forward.
Almost without losing any momentum, he burst into a sprint.
From the main keep to the courtyard wall, he pivoted, turned, and charged back again, his steady breathing escaping through the narrow slits of the visor.
Brom stood beneath the low awning of the smithy, squinting as he watched Karl run.
His thick, stubby fingers absently rubbed through his beard.
“The pauldrons aren’t restricting him,” he muttered to himself.
“The faulds aren’t catching on his knees.
Good.”
Karl came to a stop and picked up a blunted training sword from the weapon rack.
It had once been an old sidearm discarded by the recruits, its edge ground away for practice.
He swung it twice one-handed.
The blade sliced through the air, leaving behind a fleeting blur.
Then he shifted to a two-handed grip and brought it down in a high overhead cut.
Mid-swing, the sword stopped abruptly.
With a twist of his wrists, the blade swept horizontally before halting once more.
Every strike stopped precisely at its furthest limit.
The inertia of the heavy plate armor tried to drag his shoulders and waist forward, yet his powerful core held it firmly under control.
He planted the tip of the sword into the ground and gave a slight nod to the equally armored veteran standing opposite him.
Click.
The veteran lowered his visor as well.
Karl made the opening move.
His sword slashed diagonally downward from the upper right.
The veteran met it with his own.
The collision didn’t sound like two swords striking.
It sounded like someone hammering the great iron bell of a cathedral.
Dust shook loose from the courtyard walls and drifted into the grass growing along their base.
The veteran caught the blow, then let his blade slide down along Karl’s, cutting toward his fingers.
Karl instantly loosened his grip, shifted his hold, and rolled the hilt.
The crossguard caught the veteran’s blade.
Both men pushed at the same time.
Steel scraped against steel, producing a shrill, grating screech that made everyone’s teeth ache.
The clash of iron swords drowned out every other sound in the camp.
The bellows at the forge stopped pumping.
A carpenter froze with his hammer hanging in midair.
Everyone stood rooted in place, staring blankly at the duel unfolding before them.
Among the crowd stood a single man.
His hair was gray-white, cropped close against his scalp.
His shoulders were broad, and his back remained perfectly straight.
He was one of the prisoners who had walked out of the slave ship’s hold several days earlier.
A chipped Temerian lily badge still hung from his belt.
He had neither thrown it away nor polished it.
Old Gott stood there, one hand gripping his belt, his eyes locked onto the battle in the courtyard.
Karl and the veteran continued trading blows.
The two figures, clad in iron-gray plate, whirled together like twin storms of steel.
Every collision rang out like a blacksmith’s hammer striking an anvil.
Karl’s sword chopped down toward the veteran’s left shoulder.
The blade scraped across his breastplate, carving a long, pale streak into the steel.
Using the momentum of the sidestep, the veteran surged forward.
Reversing his grip, he slammed the pommel toward Karl’s visor.
Karl tilted his head aside.
The crossguard scraped across his faceplate in a shower of sparks.
The veteran’s rear foot ground a half-circle into the dirt as he whipped his blade upward in a rising slash.
Karl caught it on his own sword and counterattacked in one smooth motion.
Clang!
Clang!
CLANG!!!
When the two battered old swords collided for the third time, the impact exploded in a burst of sparks.
Both blades shattered simultaneously and flew through the air.
The air itself seemed to hum from the force of the collision, the ringing lingering long after the broken steel had fallen silent…
Old Gott swallowed hard.
He knew exactly what this level of swordsmanship meant.
And precisely because he knew, he found it unbelievable.
During his years of service in Temeria, he had witnessed swordsmen whose names were immortalized in poems, tournament champions, and even witchers whose cat-like eyes watched every movement.
Their blades moved so fast they scarcely seemed human.
But there wasn’t just one person like that here.
Slowly, he turned his head.
His gaze shifted toward the group of veterans leaning casually against the courtyard wall, arms folded as they quietly watched the duel.
They watched the duel, but their expressions didn’t look like they were witnessing a hard-fought contest between equals.
It looked more like they were watching two comrades warming up.
Twenty-two.
Old Gott remembered what the scholar in the camp had told him.
He’d said the giant was their commander, a prince of the Calradic Empire from a land called Calradia.
These men were his Household Knights, who had drifted to this continent alongside him after surviving a storm at sea.
That night, Old Gott had been squatting beside the campfire.
After hearing the story, he’d simply finished the porridge in his bowl, wiped his mouth, and said nothing.
Princes, household guards, storms, shipwrecks…
He’d heard stories like that before.
In military camps, taverns, and harbors, every deserter claimed he’d once served a king, and every mercenary captain insisted he was the descendant of some fallen noble house.
Old Gott would always just smile and let the tale pass without comment.
But now…
He wasn’t so sure anymore.
On the training ground, the two men stared at each other for about the span of a single breath before simultaneously raising their visors, revealing sweat-soaked faces beneath.
At the smithy, Brom flicked a fleck of soot from his beard and muttered a curse.
“Damn it…
the joints need another layer.”
He wasn’t looking at the men.
He was looking at the armor.
The explosive exchanges and violent impacts he’d just witnessed had already been broken down in his mind into repeated stresses on every connecting joint of the plates.
His conclusion was simple.
Needs to be redone.
No one spoke.
The courtyard fell silent for a moment before everyone dispersed and returned to their own work.
Brom withdrew his gaze and crouched beside the forge.
The charcoal inside the furnace glowed a deep orange-red.
Spread out before him was an old sheet of parchment covered in charcoal sketches.
It showed the outline of a human figure.
Except it towered over an ordinary man by a considerable margin.
Its shoulders were nearly twice as broad, and its chest bulged outward like the iron hoops around a barrel.
Measurements crowded every available space, many of the numbers erased and rewritten several times until charcoal smudges stained the entire page.
Brom picked up a charcoal stick and added another set of measurements around the shoulder socket.
“The padding inside the pauldrons has to be thicker.
His gaze shifted to the chest.
“The breastplate will have to be forged from enough steel for two suits of armor.
One isn’t enough.
It’ll have to be forge-welded, with the seam running straight down the center.
Add a raised central ridge—it’ll hide the weld while strengthening the whole structure.”
He looked up at Rhoen, who was walking back from the training grounds.
His eyes traveled from Rhoen’s massive shoulders to his waist, then down to his forearms.
“Tsk.
Just the raw materials will cost twice as much as anyone else’s.
Twice the iron.
Twice the charcoal.
Twice the labor.
And that’s before counting the extra work for forge-welding and riveting.”
He picked up another sheet of parchment.
This one contained the design of a sword.
The blade was exceptionally long.
The crossguard was perfectly straight, and the grip was wrapped in leather.
At the end of the hilt sat a simple counterweight.
The entire weapon was devoid of ornamentation, looking more like a slab of iron that had simply been cut into the shape of a sword.
“This is a sword?
The hell it is.
It’s a damn city gate bar!”
Tod was crouching beside the quenching trough, replacing the water.
Curious, he leaned over for a look.
His lips twitched, but he didn’t dare say a word.
Brom set the blueprint down and looked at Rhoen as he approached.
Rhoen reached out, picked up the drawing, and examined it carefully.
“Can you make it?” Rhoen asked.
Brom considered the specifications on the blueprint, then looked Rhoen up and down again.
The man was built almost like an ordinary troll.
He snorted.
“I can.”
He pulled the drawing back from Rhoen’s hands.
“But don’t expect it anytime soon.
Forging, riveting, quenching, tempering, grinding…
and whatever the hell these notes are…”
He glanced at the annotations.
“Embedding dimeritium into the armor, alloying a certain proportion of silver into the greatsword…
Your equipment’s oversized enough that it won’t compromise the strength of the materials…”
“But every single step will take longer than making ordinary weapons or armor.
One mistake, and I’ll have to start over from scratch.”
“You’re not even a witcher.
What’s with all these weird requirements?”
Brom frowned, added another line of notes along the edge of the blueprint, then looked back up at Rhoen.
“This is Velen.”
“Who knows what we’ll run into in the future?”
Rhoen didn’t elaborate.
He simply looked at him in silence.
“One month.”
“And don’t come rushing me halfway through.
My workshop doesn’t produce flawed work.”
Rhoen nodded once.
Brom lowered his gaze again and returned his attention to the blueprint.