It was a close call, but we decided that it would be better to wait and leave early the next morning. If we set out immediately, we would likely make it to the castle around the witching hour. Besides the arrival time, the fact that both of us were exhausted was the final deciding factor. While both of us were elated, Snowy for her skill’s enhancement and me from the new skill, it was a shaky elation. Snowy made a tasteless porridge that we both gulped down in desperate hunger. While Snow-in-Blood did the work to seal the hunting mansion, I cleaned the cooking equipment and packed all but our sleeping gear.

The next day we broke our fast with a couple of mealy apples and then saddled up our horses. Snowy had been silent and taciturn since I met her, but this morning she was even more so. It wasn’t until I had struggled to mount my horse that her frown broke, and I earned a small laugh from the woman. While I was glad to see her in a better mood, as short-lived as the laughter was, I wished it wasn’t from my failure.

For some reason, no matter how hard I tried or what my father did, I was unable to learn the [Riding] skill. I could ride in that I could sit in the saddle and roughly direct the horse in the direction I wished to go, but my thighs and ass made it clear that wasn’t the same thing as having the skill. Our saddles made things more difficult. Instead of a lancer’s saddle, or even a messenger’s saddle, we had war saddles. The lack of stirrup would keep me from being tangled in a fall, but it made the ride far less comfortable. When I asked for a saddle with stirrups, the stable keep laughed. I guessed that this was a jest from the Baron, and I couldn’t help but think that my father told him of my lacking skill.

The morning ride was calm, and we planned to stop before noon at a small glade that ran near a stream. The meadow acted as a camping spot for traveling merchants and was where the thin muddy trail to the hunting mansion would rejoin the main road. The moment the clearing came into sight, I twisted around to try and pull my water flask from my pack.

While I was twisted around looking in the bag, Snowy shouted, “Ambush!” and shoved me off my horse.

Snowy’s shove threw me off my horse, and I landed awkwardly. My back screamed at me from the twisted position I was in as I fell. My landing torqued muscles in my back while my skull cracked against a rock in the ground. Gasping, I tried to scramble into the brush, the sound of horses screaming in pain, providing extra impetus to my movements. The squeals of the horse were preceeded by the twang of crossbows. For a moment, I almost tucked my head and cowered to avoid the flying weapons, but my father’s training screamed in my mind.

On all fours, woozy, I managed to pull the dagger from the back of my belt. I rose in a crouch on the side of the trail. The brush around me would provide only minimal protection and none from crossbows. I kept moving in the same direction that Snowy’s push sent me as I tried to find where the shots came from. Before I could see the ranged attackers, I stumbled into a man with a sword crashing through the brush near me. Behind him was a second man holding a short sword in one hand as he tried to keep his balance, one arm held out to his side. Neither man had armor, their tunics and pants were stained with mud and plants from hiding on the trail, but their weapons were fine steel.

The flash of keen metal said that they were not common brigands, but that was confused by the sub-par clothing and lack of armor. Despite my strange calm, I had no trouble keeping my weight on the balls of my feet and leaning back as the lead man tried to attack with a rough chop downward. His attack could best be described as clumsy, the weapon edge not even correctly leading the attack, the sign of someone with a weak wrist or inadequate training. There was no way this man had a Swordsmanship skill, so why was he attacking with one?

Despite the question, my training kicked in, and my hand darted out, the knife slicing along the wrist and over his thumb. The skin peeled back from his hand. With an odd floating sensation, I had enough time to watch the tip of the man’s fingernail flop over before his hand flinched back as he dropped his sword. Curling over his wounded hand, the man slowed his partner, who tried to step around him. The muddy boots both men wore stood out to me in my altered mental state. They had been crouched in the mud and brush on the side of the road for a long time. The mud had collected on their boots, and that was why they had so much difficulty moving. My boots were mostly clean from my fall from my horse into the brush.

While my mind raced, pulling ideas and concepts together, stringing each detail into a tapestry, my body seemed to move through tar. Stepping to the left of the injured man, keeping him between his partner and me, I flipped my knife around in my hand so that it faced downward. Almost delicately, my dagger drove into the now screaming man’s neck. His high pitched screams suddenly became a gurgle. As I used my new handle to pull him around and behind me, I rotated my body directly next to the second man and inside his reach. I planned to remove my embedded knife, flip it around, and then jam the blade into his body.

It felt like I had all the time in the world to plan my movements, but it also meant that I could feel everything in slow motion as the embedded knife caught on something and was pulled from my blood slicked hand. While I was inside the reach of the uninjured man, I was now unarmed. I had a draw knife behind my belt buckle, and my arm was even close to being able to draw it, but I couldn’t tell if I had enough time before I slammed into my attacker. With an emotionless mental shrug, I tucked my shoulder and drove it into his stomach instead.

The slippery mud on his boots and his attempt to scramble around his partner left him off balance when we collided. I barely maintained my footing as I tilted my shoulder and drove upward. My right knee strained in pain as I lifted the smaller man off the ground in such an odd stance. With a twitch of the shoulder to the side at the perfect moment, the man rolled off my body. His sword was barely grasped in his hand as he tried to break his fall. I didn’t bother to brace as I started to drop, I aimed my now descending knee at the man’s weapon arm and hoped for the best.

The sharp jolt of my knee landing was muted by the wrist that cushioned my fall. There was a crack as something broke, and I hoped that it was a wrist and not a knee. Strangely, nothing on my body hurt, I felt every impact, but it was muted. My assailant was silent as his mouth stretched wide to scream. The blow to his chest and the fall to the ground had emptied his lungs, leaving him mute. I aimed my next blow carefully, my attack seeming to take days. With a crunch, my knuckles impacted his voicebox. The sound as his air-pipe collapsed was disgusting, but my feelings were muted in the world of slow time I existed in.

Rising from his wrist, I snagged the sword from his no longer caring hand then drove it into his chest. Moments before the blade entered his chest, his wide eyes snapped to me and stared into my own. I could see it in his eyes. He knew he was dead. The panic. The pain.

Straightening slightly into a crouch, I looked around, trying to find the rest of our attackers. At first, I only noticed one of our horses at the far side of the glade, smeared red and flailing on the ground. When my eyes ran over Snowy, I felt a shot of concern break through the peaceful frozen world that was my mind. She had blood splashed over her body, but in the odd mental state I was in, I could tell that it wasn't her own. Splatter she had caused and so not from her own body. Despite the majority of the blood not being her own, the bolt pointing like a short flag from the meat of her arm said she was still injured.

With her facing towards me, and no one between us, I knew that she had killed her attackers and was coming to help me with my own. The deduction seemed obvious, as simple as one and one. Jumping from her bloody body and the scene, it flashed into my mind seemingly fully formed. She had left no attackers alive behind her, and there were none between us, which left only behind me. Ducking again as I turned, I scanned the forest and brush but couldn’t find another attacker.

Only two attacked me. Both with similar steel short swords. The initial ambush had the twang of two crossbows. One hit a horse and another landed in Snowy. She killed two assailants, the same as me. Their swords were probably also supplied for the job: four swords and two crossbows, two in front and two from behind.

That was as far as I got before my mind screamed, white and pain shot out of every joint in my body. I could suddenly feel every stretched muscle, burning scratch, and bruise that dotted my body. My knuckles stung where a finger had failed to tuck under when I slammed it into my attacker’s neck. My knee was throbbing in pain, the joint having twisted as I drove it into the ground and further tweaked it as I landed in my fall. There was the taste of copper in my mouth from biting my lip.

Then the knowledge that I had almost died, that I had killed two men, hit me between the eyes. I vomited, the half-digested apple from the morning dotting the ferns. Spitting the remains out of my mouth, I wiped my face with my sleeve as my ears rang from the violent expulsion. Once the blood stopped pounding in my head, I stepped away from my sick and stumbled back to the trail.

Snowy was still where I had last seen her, eyes closed as she breathed deep in her practiced rhythm, the bolt no longer in her arm and the wound slowly, but visibly, healing.

That was when I passed out.