3 bar menu

Volume 1 Chapter 2 Part 12

However, he wasn’t taught how to fight against an Artist who would casually jump into a crowd of dozens of soldiers all by herself as if that was the most obvious thing to do!

「TAA! 」

Petr let out another dejected shout.

「Has he gone mad? 」

The female warrior grumbled to herself.

Then suddenly she leaped backwards, turned around, and stabbed one of the soldier’s thigh with the  spike-shaped end of her weapon.

「Gyaa! 」

A scream reverberated throughout the battlefield as the soldier fell to the ground clutching his leg.

「Do not atta ck her without thinking! 」

Petr called out to his fellow soldiers, and even the older ones obeyed the order of someone as young as him, because they all knew that getting hit by Lassic for abandoning their orders or getting a long and sarcastic sermon from his  contracted Mage Moreno were preferable alternatives to death.

Of all the fleeing soldiers, two more fell over and screamed after being stabbed in the leg just like their comrade before them.

(Could it be that she does not want to kill us?)

Petr thought to himself. If that’s really the case they should all probably consider themselves lucky, but that does not change the fact that having your leg pierced so deeply by such a sharp spike must probably hurt like all hell.

(I don’t like the possibility of dying, but I also don’t like to feel pain either.)

Now that push has come to shove, he has no choice but to run away. There may be a time when as a soldier and as a man he should put his life on the line for the cause, but no matter how you think about it, now is not that time.

「Surround her! 」

Petr ordered his soldiers again, and when the enclosure was completed, he let out a low-spirited shout again.

「N-no, I’m losing my strength… 」

The female warrior seemed confused. But that was also more convenient for them.

「So this is your doing, eh? 」

Then she leaped forward towards Petr. She looked right at him as she tried to swing her weapon down onto his head. No matter how you look at it, it was a blow full of legitimate intent of a predator to kill her prey.

Petr stood his ground, and drove his spear into the earth below him, raising its pointed tip towards the woman who was rapidly descending onto him. He bend his body as far back as possible and prayed that the spear would pierce the woman first before she could blow his head into million pieces. This was the standard stance of a cavalry charge that he was taught and he really hoped that it was going to work… but his tactic failed and the tip of his spear did not pierce the woman, because she changed the direction of her fall while still being in mid-air.

(H-How can such a thing even be possible?)

Petr cried in his mind.

Normally such a thing would be impossible, but in the world that they were living, the one that was filled with Chaos, it was something that could be perfectly possible. After all, Artists were the people who were willingly engraving Chaos-filled marking onto their bodies in exchange for supernatural abilities

「You put up a good fight. 」

The woman suddenly approached Petr, put her hands on his cheeks and kissed him on the lips. However, in the very next moment, her hands slipped around his neck and tightened around it. His eyes have darkened and he was about to lose consciousness.

「Pierce her… by running through me! 」

Petr desperately raised his voice as he put his arms around the woman. And his fellow trained soldiers carried out the order that they were given without hesitation.

The woman hastily let go of Petr and brushed away all the spears that they were thrusting out towards her from every direction.

In the meantime, Petr rolled away from her woman, coughing and trying to catch his lost breath.

「Come on, let’s fall back! 」

And commanded his soldiers to retreat, for real this time.

「He is beyond annoying… 」

The woman muttered to herself and then called out to Petr:

「But I like it. My name is Aishela! After the battle is over, let us be friends! 」

(ABSOLUTELY NOT!)

Petr thought to himself while he was still coughing violently, and just thinking about what was going to happen to him after this battle was going to be over filled him with a sense of dread and hopelessness.

「Tou! 」

Only after they managed to reposition themselves far away from the armored woman did Petr let out another dejected shout.

*          *          *

「The hell is wrong with that guy? 」

Seeing a long-haired man in a black uniform running towards them at high speed without a sound, Lassic David unintentionally raised his voice.

「Allow me to welcome you, Lord Lassic David and his entourage. 」

When he got close enough to them that they could hear him without any issues, the man in black clothes stopped in his tracks and delivered an elegant greeting to Lassic and his party.

「My name is Irvin, and I am a humble servant of Lady  Siluca. It is on my mistresses orders that I have come to welcome you with all the respect that you deserve… 」

And then, Irvin produced a pair of daggers out of thin air as if he was performing a magic trick meant to entertain the guests at a party.

「… and serve as your opponent in this battle. 」

「Are you… a Shadow? 」

Among the servants, those who serve their masters with their special abilities are called 「Shadows」.

「I am merely a Chamberlain right now. 」

「Yeah, and guys like you are truly the worst. 」

Lassic spat those words out with disgust. A Chamberlain is someone who acts as an assassin, a spy, a thug, and does literally everything that his or her master orders them to do. And since he called himself a chamberlain so casually, as if it was nothing to write home about, then that has to mean that the abilities that he possesses are going to be nothing to scoff at. Instead of a regular human, it would probably be better for them t think about him as an Artist with superhuman strength.

(Why in the hell would a Chamberlain be serving a Mage?)

Lassic’s expression turned into a bitter one, and then he realized that the face in the man in a  black suit looked familiar to him.

(If I remember correctly, this guy used to be close to Archduke Matthias…)

When he inherited the Crest from his father, he had an audience with Archduke Matthias Kreische of Waldrind once. At that time, the figure of this man was most definitely present by his side.

(What the hell is going on here?)

Whatever might be happening here, one thing was abundantly clear for Lassic: that the man before him was absolutely the worst kind of opponent that he could have ever asked for.

「Captain Grak! 」

Lasik called out to Grak, the giant mercenary captain by his side.

「Hunnu! 」

Grak responds to him with a strained  grunt of a voice and activates the Art that was engraved upon his body. As soon as he did that, the color of his skin changed from the regular one to dark gray.

「Is that Ether? I have to say, that skin color is a little bit unpleasant to look at. 」

Irvin said while narrowing his eyes.

「Do not be fooled by this guy’s size and stature. Even if he is this far away from you, you should assume that he should be able to throw his daggers at you with inhuman speed  from all the way over there! 」

Lassic calls out to the five mercenaries  who were with him and got off  of his horse as well.

Lassic David’s father used to be the leader of a mercenary band himself back in the day, and Lassic himself was able to hire these mercenaries because of his family’s connections.

When Alexis Doucet and Marine Kreische became engaged, rumors spread that the Great War between Fantasia Union and the Factory Alliance has been avoided, and it was even put to question if there was any meaning in keeping the mercenary bands around, so he managed to hire them for himself at nothing short of a bargain price.

However,  despite that, their abilities were all decent, especially in the case of Grak, the captain of this mercenary band, who was an Artist whose Arts have unusually high amounts of Chaos imbued into them.

「You seem to know exactly what it is that you are dealing with here. 」