Carr

We are unarmed…no, that isn’t even the main issue right now. We’re in the middle of the void. Does fighting even work like normal here? That wasn’t all. We were fighting against someone who was dead. That wouldn’t be a normal fight in the slightest. What does it mean that he’s showing up before us? To me, this place was just a sort of hellish darkness that trapped me for a year until I reached the sword world. Looking at a literal dead man standing across from me, though…it had to mean more. We need more info before we do something.

“Hey, zombie man!” I stepped forward with my hands held at my sides, looking around as though searching for an explanation for this. My voice stood on the edge of laughter, though frankly the situation was anything but funny. I hate being in the void. “We are perfectly fine if we are duelling to the death here, but give us some dignity—our state of undress is not exactly appropriate for a fight. Give us something to wear here.”

Isabella made a sound at this, but said nothing. Good. She understands what I’m going for. It seemed as though being summoned to the void meant you came here with less than nothing. Your own body was all you could bring here. Yet this man before us, this dead man was wearing a fine set of clothing. If he handed us something to wear, we could see what made the cloth so different here.

“My eyes have been on you the entire time, Ashen One. I would not disrespect a lady—my father raised me better.” Martim’s tone was dry, nearly offended.

Isabella stepped forward, and true to his word the man maintained his eyes on me. “Then don’t disrespect my request—a cloak, and a sword.” Her voice was commanding, even if I knew she had no better idea what was going on than I did. “Then we can get started with this fight.”

There was a pause. “I will grant you one, but not the other.”

Martim put his left hand into the skeletal horse, his right hand still pointing a blade at us, and pulled out two pieces of cloth, tossing it absently in our direction. We both caught our respective cloaks before they had landed on the ground—if the dark nothingness beneath us could be called such—and immediately studied the fabric. It doesn’t feel like anything I’ve ever held before. It looks like cotton, but it feels rough…almost like scales. What the hell is this?

“Don’t try to understand it,” Martim said. “It is merely cloth that belongs to the place where nothing does.”

What does that—no, that doesn’t matter right now. We have enough info to worry about later. I wrapped the cloak around me. The texture was rough and uncomfortable, but it provided enough cover for modesty’s sake—though that was hardly my number one concern at the moment. Looking over at Isabella, who had also adorned the cloak, she appeared to share my concerns. We still don’t have weapons…

“Doesn’t feel fair without a ref,” I said. “Or the Eye.”

“This is not his territory.” A ghost of a smirk crept up on the man. There was no arrogance in his features, more like a tired amusement. “Do you think that information will do you any good, Ashen One? That either of you will be able to realize something that will change how this will end? Make no mistake. This will end with Lord Johan at the top of it all.”

Isn’t he already at the top? What does that… I shook my head. “I am afraid you overestimate me. When it comes to complex things like that, I don’t even bother trying my dude. I don’t know enough about this world to make any clever deductions or anything. But I know that when it comes to a fight”—I assumed a fencing stance—“I will always figure out what I need to do to win.”

Isabella cross-stepped toward me, her eyes fixated on our opponent. “What he’s saying is—we are idiots. But Celle is a genius, so all we have to do is survive this and bring her this information. She’ll figure out the rest.”

We had expected Martim to dismount from his ghostly mare, but the manner in which he did so unnerved us. It felt less like a hop and more like he floated downwards. It was not readily a supernatural motion, but the way he raised a leg over the horse and then dropped to the ground without so much as bending his knees on the landing felt most eerie. “It is time, then—Devil’s Chosen, Ashen One. You will die in your admitted ignorance.”

“I have to say, I think I preferred Swordsman of Zero to that name,” I shouted back instinctively. “Why have people started calling me that? Did my title change?”

“No,” Isabella replied. Both of us maintained our eyes forward. “Think the first one to say that was God.”

“Oh, you’re right.” The thought hardly seemed to matter, yet it bugged me and I could not help saying, “I get that God just wanted to give me a weird nickname because he’s sort of weird, but why is this guy calling me the same thing that—”

Martim took one step forward and there was weight behind it. The sound he produced made it clear he was ready to accelerate into an attack at any moment. Oh? Guess we stumbled upon something important…I will make sure Celle finds out about this later. For now—!

It was time to fight.

“Allez,” I said, smirking.

Somehow, the fact that we were in the middle of an empty void did not concern me. The fact we were fencingagain made me feel at home, at ease. This is just another fight. Of course, the fact that this was a two-on-one fight with only our opponent having a weapon made it slightly different from the usual, but it was not enough to truly disconcert me.

I put my feet in the l-shape en garde, the traditional fencing guard, but placed both hands in front of my head and turned my feet slightly more inwards than usual. If I don’t have a weapon, I’m going to have to catch his. Catching blades and me had a difficult history. Valder had destroyed my left arm to the point even now it barely did anything, but the duel against the Nameless Assassin had gone much better. This guy’s stats are quite high but…do stats even matter anymore?

“I will catch his sword,” I whispered. “The God of this world wanted me to not benefit from his ‘blessings’ when I came here without his permission, so he made sure I couldn’t even use magical swords. Fortunately for us, he was a goddamn dumbass so that means that if I grab his sword I should be able to take the stats out of that. When I stop his blade…”

Isabella laughed. “Go on. What’s the secret fencing move I have to pull off?”

“Punch him in the face.”

“Seriously?”

“Look, I’ll grab his blade and you punch him. Once I have a sword, we will be good.”

She made a face as though she wanted to debate the point, but Martim’s sudden dash forced the decision on us. Between his magical sword and his Swordsmanship he has just above 1000 points…that’s more than I can handle. Even with the peak of my reflexes, I should not be able to parry him. If I only used epee fencing, that was. Johan was laser focused on competition. He never fucked around with other types of swordsmanship—so you shouldn’t know about this either!

As he dashed at me, I unwrapped the cloak around me and held it against him, my useless left arm holding the action. You would not expect a cloak to be expected in a sword fight, but it is a deadly side weapon…albeit one that can be misused correctly. Often, you see beginners just half-heartedly tossing the cloak onto the other person and affect their own weapon instead. But it can be a mighty side-weapon.

Do you know why in swordfighting you are taught to extend your arm first and then move your legs forward in a lunge? It’s because you would not believe how easy it is to miss the attack. A small change in balance is enough to move the tip of your blade out of the way and make you go the wrong way. Here’s an exercise for you: grab a pen, then decide on a target. First, try to step forward as you are extending your arm and chances are you are going to miss, especially if you do so with any amount of speed. Now, try extending your arm and then moving your legs. Much closer to the target, yes? That’s why it’s so important to not let your balance be thrown off.

Thus, the cloak parry revolves around a simple concept: using the cloak’s weight on the weak part of the blade—the half closest to the tip—to throw it off, and if you do it properly you can even throw it off in the direction you want to. It’s not a matter of being stronger than your opponent or even faster: it’s easy enough to place the cloak there ahead of time, which was the only way I could keep up with his raw speed.

This angle…this speed…this position…dead on. I got this!

His blade spun to the side, half-pushed to my left due to the cloak. Half being the keyword—I am no expert in cloaked fighting, and the attack still managed to hit my uninjured arm slightly. I can’t let this chance slide! I reached forward to grab his sword just as Isabella leaped forward with a punch that connected with the man’s face. I was surprised to watch Martim stumble backward, especially as Isabella did not use her Swordsmanship to power her strikes in any way.

Regardless, the man stumbled backwards and I was holding a sword now. That wasn’t all, either. First, I need to grab the sword by the hilt, not the blade so that I can—there we go!

[Martim the Sinner]

[Level]: 18

[Swordsmanship]: 634 → 570

[Sword]: 402 → 0

His sword was ours now, and my curse had made it useless. I am so aggressively against what this world stands for that just getting me is like poison to those people, I thought, smiling. And his Swordsmanship is going to go down with every move. Johan’s Rules are weakening his zombie disciple. That’s good. We got this now, there is no way—

Suddenly, my left arm pulled back, my hand tightened into a fist and swung at my own face. So sudden was the move that I hardly realized what had happened, and could only utter vague curses before my arm pulled back and punched me again. This…what’s going on…? My arm punched me again, and I forced myself into a decision. “ISABELLA!”

I threw the sword at her, and as she caught it, I used my right arm to hold my left arm away from me. What the hell is going on? “What—what the hell?”

To my surprise, Isabella wasn’t even looking at me anymore. She was looking straight at Martim. “That doesn’t make any sense…why does he have another?”

“What…what are you talking about?” I asked, grunting as I struggled to contain my arm. “The fuck is going on?”

“He didn’t have this when he fought Fedal,” Isabella cursed, “but—he has another one. But how? You—you aren’t supposed to be able to have more than one! You can’t see it, can you, Carr? But he has another one…a Legendary Skill!”

What? Those weird skills that triggered after a certain amount of hits, like the one Valle and the Nameless Assassin had…had it triggered after he landed that small cut? What the hell was it?

“「Dead Man’s Knock」only needs one hit to trigger.” Martim spoke calmly—too calmly. He turned his back to us and reached inside the ghostly horse’s rib cages to withdraw another sword. “Well, shall we continue?”

This guy is nothing like what Fedal said…what the hell is that ability? And wasn’t he helping Fedal until recently? What—what is going on? “Could it be that his ability is to make whatever limb it hits rebel against that person?” I asked. Shit. What the hell am I supposed to do against that? This isn’t a fair match! “Isabella, talk to me! What can you tell from looking at his skills?”

That seemed to snap her back to reality. “Carr…his Legendary Skill has a value of 638.” She paused. “And it’s not going down.”

“What?” I struggled to keep using the cloak as partial cover, and partially to wrap my own arm into submission. “Aren’t—aren’t those supposed to be getting weaker every time they are used? Isn’t that what Johan did?”

“We saw his Swordsmanship go down just a moment ago,” Isabella muttered, “so why is his Legendary Skill different? What’s going on?”

“That—that doesn’t matter right now! Look, I can’t fence when my arm is rebelling against me. You handle the fight.”

For the first time since I had known her, Isabella looked at me with a mixture of anger and fear. There was frustration in there somewhere, too, but the pure anguish in her face came as suddenly as her shout of, “Carr, I’m shit at this. I don’t know how to fence without the voices in my head! I can’t—we can’t—”

“Just listen to me!” I shouted back. “We are going to be fine. Just trust me, goddamn it. Just…just listen to me.”

I was asking for too much and I knew it. Isabella hadn’t been given the time to mourn everything—everyone she had lost. The voices, whatever they were, meant a lot for her. And Duartes…he was the biggest loss of all. She had also lost the Devil’s Sword that had given her such an overwhelming advantage before. She was having to fight without anything she had relied on until now. But I need you to do something here. What was there to say? You can do this. This is going to be easy. You are actually an incredible fencer and just don’t realize it! Just trust your own talents! Those could have helped with her morale.

But no.

Those were lies.

She didn’t have any particular talent for the sport, nor was she secretly amazing at it. Her fears were legitimate. “It’s not going to be easy. You are probably going to lose,” I said, frankly. “Since we’re going to die anyway, why not give it our best shot?”

Her shoulders seemed to drop some tension. “I can work with that,” she said softly, falling into an en garde stance. “Tell me what to do.”

“We don’t know what his skill actually does yet,” I muttered, holding on to my rebellious arm and desperately trying to keep it under control. “But his stats have dropped. So long as you don’t get hit, it should be fine. His stats are high, but you can keep up with him. When it comes to fencing, it doesn’t matter if you suck.”

“Wow, how encouraging,” Isabella replied dryly.

“It doesn’t matter if you suck,” I repeated. “You just have to suck slightly less than he does. And you do. He hasn’t learned much fencing. Whatever Johan taught him wasn’t for long and it sure as hell wasn’t enough. Your stats are low, but coupled with your fencing you should be able to beat him.”

Isabella smiled and stepped forward, placing herself between me and Martim. She appeared more relaxed now, more confident. And her stance seemed solid. For a moment, we both felt confident in this matchup.

And then we noticed.

“What…”

It was more obvious to me, who had fenced him so many times. But even to her, who had only seen him once, it was obvious. The sheer naturalness of the stance was what stood out first. He had fallen into an en garde as natural as mine—this man was not a beginner. He was a master. Even back on Earth, he would have been considered one of the greatest fencers to ever live and I could tell after only looking at him.

That was Johan’s stance.

What the hell? How is that related to making my arm act up like this? What is going on? Legendary Skills…I had never really thought about them much, but how were they different from regular Skills?

“I already told you,” Martim said coldly. “「Dead Man’s Knock」only needs one hit to trigger.”

We have to figure it out, I thought desperately, we can’t win until we do. What the hell is that Skill? What is the secret behind it? Shit, if only Celle were here…

But she wasn’t.

And we had to figure this out on our own. “Time to be brilliant idiots,” I said.

Isabella laughed weakly. “Yeah. Guess that’s the time.”