Carr

I owed a lot to Valle and not just because he saved me from Johan. For a while in this world, I almost lost track of what it meant to be myself. There’s nothing more pathetic than thinking ‘There is no way I can lose, unless someone cheats.’ It is nearly always arrogance and apathy at once; excuses shielding a fragile ego so that they can accept any result and still come out of it thinking themselves as the best.

Still, I am pretty confident in saying that if I lost to anyone in this god forsaken world it would be because they cheated hardcore instead of having better skills than mine. Either stupid numbers or some sort of Legendary Skill that made the duel no longer be about fencing proper. Were I to make an early trip to my grave, it would be with the full knowledge that it the ticket was booked through unfair means. This was bad. It made me lazy, complacent.

But Valle could do it.

This guy had been thirsting, hungering for the chance to improve himself. He was born with a magical amount of swordsmanship great enough that he could have rested on his laurels and been lauded as the hero that took his backwater town into a province of the Empire through his superior skills. Yet he was a man who lowered his own stupid big fucking numbers so he could experience the thrill of a proper fight. The second after he met me and was defeated by proper fencing he immediately set upon the path of improvement now that he saw a road ahead of him.

An athletic monster who didn’t have my reservations about using this world’s magic and who hungered for improvement. He listened to every bit of advice without fail and made himself stronger, with a single minded goal of becoming the world’s greatest fencer at the forefront of his reasoning. Knowing he was gunning for a rematch with me was eerie; it felt as though a monstrous beast was chasing after me, and with every passing second it refined itself from a creature of instinct into a careful predator.

Watching his duel against Mauro made me more keenly aware of this than anything else. Maybe the day would come soon—no, perhaps the day had already come—when I could no longer beat him. Standing before him now, I no longer saw a man I was certain I could beat.

THIS IS THE BEST FEELING!

For a second I wanted to forget about the would-be assassins coming after us, about the fact we were still in that theatre while confused patrons clapped along at Valle’s performance, about the fact that Johan was after us…for just that one second, nothing else mattered.

I wanted to duel Valle.

Hey, Valle…you think you’re the only one who improved? You think if I don’t use fancy magic that I can’t improve myself beyond what you’ve already seen? You don’t know half of it. Watch me…let me show you the adjustments I have made to my technique! I looked around the crowd and was disappointed not to find any assassin. I wanted to show off my new techniques, my new style of fencing—the new sword Gilder had made for me, with Johan’s old blade as basis. This world has never seen a sword style like this before.

Back on earth I had adapted a French Grip style of fencing because it seemed to match up well against most of my opponents. It was an adjustment I made that took me to the top spot in the World Cup. Just because it was successful there it didn’t mean it was the single best style, however. It fit me at the time, my coach was an expert French Grip coach and my top opponents at the time were all vulnerable to counter attacks, which French Grips excelled at. Yet if you asked me what the ideal, strongest fencing looked like in my mind…it wasn’t the delicate counterpuncher. I didn’t want my blade to be as a wave, threading around my opponent’s delicately.

I wanted my blade to be like a bullet.

“The next assassin is mine,” I declared to the group. “I don’t care how good they are—I’m going to take him on solo, you guys hear me?”

Princess Nevada made a sound of outrage, and after glancing around looking for support, stared back at me. “That’s absurd! I—if we find more assassins we should take them on as a group!”

We? You going to fight too, Your Highness? “You seemed perfectly content letting Valle fight by himself,” I told her. “What’s different now?”

“Lord Valle can do as he wishes—he’s the strongest swordsman in this group!”

I heard Fedal make a sound, the kind one makes when they know someone just started some serious shit in a group setting. Have you no faith in me? I can have some tact. Sometimes. “I beat him twice.”

“By luck.”

“By skill.”

Gilder’s lack of social tact came of use here, where he walked between us and raised his hands apologetically. “I’m terribly sorry to interrupt—but should we maybe have some sort of plan? Your Highness? Carr?”

It was the first time I had seen the man plead while expressing concern for someone who wasn’t himself. At my nearly unbelieving stare, he added, “I…I have some business to take care of here, if you wouldn’t mind…I know it’s dangerous, but it needs to be done.”

“Does it now?” I demanded. “What’s so important that justifies near certain death? If we don’t travel together, we’re probably coming back to find your corpse. Not like you can defend yourself much.”

He looked at me seriously. “Revenge,” he whispered softly.

Ah. This I could understand. “Understood. We’ll leave you to it.”

At this Celle couldn’t take it anymore. “Hang on!”

Up until now, she had been watching the stage carefully to make sure none of the confused crowd turned their attentions to us while they continued to shake Valle’s hand and congratulate him on a ‘most excellent performance.’ I frankly had no idea if they understood Valle had just actually killed a man for real—what the hell were this world’s standards? Maybe they thought it was part of the show. Maybe they were psychopaths. I’m sure the question would have been interesting to some, but I hardly cared.

“Let’s establish some goals here,” Celle started. “Listen, since we are in the Arcship…the crime scene is also here. Gilder, you know someone who sponsors Max Relampago and his team right? Have you sent them a letter ahead of time?”

“I did,” he answered promptly. “They seemed to agree to terms, we just need to agree on a time.”

The unspoken was obvious: that we were aboard the ship at all likely meant this mysterious sponsor had entrapped us here with the duel in mind. Nonetheless, the assassin’s presence just now indicated they cared little if we perished in the process. They can just collect the gold off our corpses if that happens. I imagined that happened a lot aboard this floating den of sin, anyhow.

“So, Gilder, I’m sorry about your revenge plan because I’m sure that’s very important but we need you to meet up with the sponsor first to arrange the details of the duel. Once we win the team match, we will have enough gold to purchase the crime scene and with it prevent Johan from being crowned Emperor. That’s priority number one.”

Now and forever I will remember the sort of nostalgic, bittersweet smile that Gilder flashed in response. “There’s no conflict. Those two are related.”

Where had I seen that smile before…Ah! It’s the one I show when talking about Johan. “Then you will go there,” I told him.

“We can’t have him die,” Celle said. “So…we need someone to escort him, at least.”

Isabella shrugged. “I’m not doing anything, really,” she said in a quiet voice. “So I might as well. Besides,” she said, tapping at her sword, “I have a new sword I’d like to test, so I’d love if we were attacked by assassins at some point.”

She did have a new sword. Where had she gotten one? Had Gilder made her a new one too?

Celle considered this for a moment. “Fine. Isabella seems pretty strong—”

“—I am, thank you for noticing—“

”—So it should be fine to leave the setting up of the match to her and Gilder. Maybe we should all stay together, but…”

Surprisingly, it was Princess Nevada who shook her head. “No…the sooner we get things done, the better. If we can get it done faster by splitting up, we should.”

Oh, but when I suggest fighting the assassins one-on-one you act like I’m the madman, okay. “Okay, but do we have a second task to accomplish? Because if we don’t, we might as well stick together.”

“We do,” Celle said slowly. “I lost my eight skill when Johan stole my [Investigation],” she said quietly. Without thinking, I approached her and put my hand on her shoulder. The loss of her skill still haunted her. “So I need to see a priest to replace my skill with another one…I only have seven right now. There’s something else I’m going to need if I’m going to solve the crime.”

“Replacing?” I whispered. “The hell do you mean?”

“I told you before!” Celle snapped at me. “Don’t you remember?”

“Proudly, no.”

“There are sixty-four skills in this world. Everyone is born with access to all of them, but they have different starting amounts. You may swap out which skills you have at any given moment by talking to a priest, but only the ones you have with you get stronger when you use a [Levelling Sphere] so most people just stick with the same set for life. Now that Johan stole my most precious one though…I…I need something to replace it. Not going to be as good, but I might need something to give us an advantage so I can at least try to solve that impossible murder.”

I had wondered about this. At first I had thought this world ran on some sort of bizarre, absurd, nonsensical logic…but the more I learned about it the more I began to see there was something resembling a pattern behind it all. God wasn’t merely an empty term but a living being of presumably corporeal form who met up with the Emperor after every coronation. Moreover, the way the economy revolved around [Swordsmanship] seemed too perfectly designed to make swordplay important. If priests are channeling God’s power…or his desires, more like it…I was on the verge of a conclusion here but I could not take that last step.

Instead, I focused on something else Celle said.

Celle had used that term, ‘impossible murder’ many times before to describe the Emperor’s death and I didn’t know why. In a world with magic, was there truly anything truly impossible? The question bugged me, quite frankly. “Hey, Celle, what do you mean by impossible? How did the Emperor die?”

I felt the others become disconcerted at the wide grin she showed. She licked her lips as if readying herself for a meal, opened her eyes wide and said, “A caped and masked gentleman entered his room for a scheduled meeting with him—well, I say scheduled but the guards tried to stop him—the two had a loud argument from inside, then there was a loud sound. The guards finally managed to break down the door which had been locked from the inside and found the Emperor, bleeding out on the floor, dead.”

“Locked from the inside?” I asked. “Well, what about the murderer?”

“That’s the thing!” Celle exclaimed, her eyes beaming. “He wasn’t there.”

“He was hiding, then?”

“No. The guards inspected the room and didn’t find the space for anyone to be hiding there.”

“Then he left the room somehow?”

“No. There was one door leading into the room and the guards were watching it the whole time—and it was locked from the inside on top of that.”

This was getting puzzling. “Windows?”

“Only one, but it wasn’t big enough for a person to fit through. Not an adult, anyway. And it faced the ocean directly from forty feet above the water. Stone was smooth as well, no one could have climbed it.”

I was getting exasperated. “Well, then some bullshit skill was used? With magic they could’ve been invisible or flown through the tiny window or—“

“That’s just the thing.” Celle raised a finger as if lecturing a classroom. “The manor is quite unique in that it has an alarm system. Whenever a [Skill] of any sort is used, it triggers. It is most useful at preventing assassinations that way or at least preventing the assassins from escaping. Hence, the manor was often used as a meeting spot for important nobles such as the Emperor himself…and Johan. And this alarm system didn’t go off once.”

“Huh…” I had to admit, this was most puzzling. “That seems…mysterious. Any guesses who did it?”

She looked at me and I held up my hand in the universal gesture of, ‘Yes, right, the obvious answer.’

“Johan?”

“Probably. No one thinks so though,” Celle said, bitterly. “That’s why I was fired. Was told to stop messing around…everyone thinks it was a legend.”

“As in, they think a storybook killed him?”

“They think a monster did it,” Celle said simply. “That the monsters from three hundred years ago, from before God cleansed the lands, came back. That some slimey, inhuman creature from centuries past entered the moonlit room…that if you were to have pulled off that mask off that gentleman you would have found nothing but smoke. That it seeks revenge for its kind and it ripped the Emperor alive, cutting off his still-beating heart as revenge for what his ancestors have done. Would explain why his guts were hanging out when I got there, that’s for sure.”

Monsters…extinct monsters…God…did this creature that calls himself ‘God’ extinguish all those monsters with his powers? There was so much to unpack there but so little time. Dammit, why wasn’t I using our alone time more wisely to get caught up on this world’s history? We had nearly two weeks of travel time, what were we doing that was more important than this?

I remembered reading books quietly, talking about what each other liked, cooking some food together, playing some card games…poking fun at each other….

Totally worth it and I regret nothing.

Though I should probably still ask her about some things later on.

“Do you think those extinct monsters came back? That they killed the Emperor?”

“Hell no. Even if they came back at some point they would still have tripped up the Skill Detector and—“

Here we became increasingly aware of Princess Nevada sobbing uncontrollably. It wasn’t merely that she was crying—she was on her knees, sobbing so much it appeared like she was having some difficulty breathing. At the same time, she covered her mouth with her hands, trying to minimize attention drawn to herself, conscious even at that stage that we were being sought after by assassins.

We were sort of talking about her father’s death in gruesome detail. Uh…that is kind of our bad, isn’t it? I looked at Celle who looked equal parts horrified and guilty. None in the group said anything for a while. I wanted to comfort the princess but I was the one who helped put her in that state and she hated me to start with, so my comfort likely wouldn’t have been appreciated. Mercifully, Valle started to approach us, having finally finished talking to the many patrons in the theatre.

There was no sign of the princess’s crying slowing down.

“Change of plans,” Celle said quickly. “Gilder, Isabella—go set up the match. I’m, uh, going to see the priest.”

“Hey do you need a bodyguard?” Fedal asked. Without waiting for an answer, he added, “Oh boy, I’m glad you do. I’ll come with you.”

“Fantastic,” Celle replied. In something between a mutter and a hurried whisper, she added, “Hey, Carr, you and Valle take care of her and uh apologize to her later. Make sure she’s okay.”

“What happened to not getting separated unless we had to?” I demanded. “Did that just change because you don’t want to deal with how awkward this is—do you seriously prefer assassins to—CELLE!”

But it was too late. She flashed a smile at me, the kind that says, “Yeah, I’m being unfair, but you’ll forgive me later,” then ran ahead with Fedal. Without another word, Isabella and Gilder took off in the opposite direction. I uselessly held out my hand toward both groups, as if hoping they would wait for me. Goddamn it.

Valle arrived beside us, looked at the crying princess, then around at where the group used to be, then raised an eyebrow.

I sighed. “Look man, I don’t even know, okay?”