Chapter 121 - Resolve (2)

Kyle had always been able to split the earth with his sword strikes.

So the ground had split open in Area 5.

Did that mean Kyle was in Area B-5 right now?

"Hilde, sit down."

Ami tugged on my arm. There was considerable force behind it, and I reluctantly lowered my head. But instead of sitting, I met her eyes.

"Did you see that attack too, sir?"

"Yep. I’ll show you, so sit yourself down."

"What?"

How was she going to show me?

Puzzled, I sank down where I stood, and she took her phone out of her pants pocket. She tapped the earring that sat snug against her ear.

"This earring is a body cam," Ami explained as my eyes widened.

"It might make you a little dizzy, but the footage came out well."

She was right. I watched the recorded battle as though reviewing dashcam footage. The video from her earring played on the phone screen. Her rapid movements were dizzying, but I could make out what was happening.

The battle in Area B-5 played out before me.

Its scale was incomparable to the fighting here. There were creatures and Badgers everywhere. Unlike the utter free-for-all in Area 7, they had proper formations. They seemed to have split their forces, with another couple of Badger units charging into the creatures from the opposite side of the frame.

The Badgers had the upper hand.

The camera caught Chen taking aim at a creature. Huge, grotesque limbs filled half the frame. I couldn’t quite tell what it was, only that it was green and writhing. Just as Chen was about to fire his bazooka at it, a sword strike came flying in.

["What the hell?!"]

Something like a white wave split the earth.

["Get out of the way!"]

KRA-KA-KA-BOOM!

What was that?

"We never did find out who attacked us," Ami murmured beside me.

I drew back my craning neck, then raised my chin to look around. At some point, the seniors had gathered behind Ami and me to watch the video. Their shadows lay thick over us.

I soon turned back to the footage.

I studied the chaos on-screen: the alarmed Badgers, their disarray as they tried to find whatever had attacked them. Then I reached for the screen and rewound to the moment the attack began.

"You couldn’t find whatever launched this attack?"

"The portal opened just then," Richard replied gravely to Yun’s question.

"So we focused on withdrawing. That was the plan, after all. And there wasn’t another attack."

"Right," Ami said as she watched the footage I kept replaying. "I went up into the sky to look, but I still couldn’t find whoever did it."

It was definitely Kyle’s doing.

He must have hidden somewhere. He would have known perfectly well there was no point in revealing himself. With the portal open and the Badgers fleeing, showing his face would have done him no good.

But something was strange.

This was unmistakably Kyle’s sword strike, which made it all the stranger.

What in the world...?

I tuned out the seniors’ conversation behind me and focused on the video again. Oblivious to the passage of time or anyone speaking to me, I kept replaying it, from the moment the sword strike appeared until it vanished out of frame. I rewound it over and over to check whether I had seen it correctly.

But no matter how many times I watched, it was just as I had seen.

I’d thought my exhausted eyes might have been playing tricks on me.

But however I looked at it, this was...

... Huh.

What was this?

What the hell was this?

"What are you staring at so hard?"

My mind was dragged back to reality.

It was Walker, who had been standing silently beside me. He seemed to have been watching me while I was absorbed in the video. Riccardo stood with his back half-turned to me, but I could tell he was listening for my answer too.

I had been acting strangely, admittedly.

But I wasn’t in any state to explain myself properly.

Kyle’s sword strike had so thoroughly captured my attention that I barely felt any pain. I couldn’t feel the exhaustion that had gripped my body, or the cold that had made me hunch my shoulders.

I met my senior’s eyes distractedly, then lowered my gaze to the video.

"I was looking at the attack."

"What’s there to look at?" Walker asked in a low voice.

I rewound to the start of the attack.

Well.

"If you look here..."

Strange as it was.

"It isn’t traveling in a straight line."

Ami turned toward me. Yun, Richard, and Tvein stopped talking and looked down at me too. Jonathan Kudo, who had been tending to his sword beside Riccardo, and Aki, who had been perched beside Ami, whistling, also went still.

But I ignored the reactions around me and played the video at half speed.

"Can you see how crooked it is?"

"No."

"You’ll see it if you look closely."

Not that Walker seemed inclined to look closely.

I didn’t mind. I could see it clearly enough myself: an attack that should have traveled straight instead moving in little jagged sawteeth.

Like a roughly cut edge.

Like the edge of a piece of paper cut with blunt scissors.

"That needlessly disperses the energy, reducing its power. And it gets progressively weaker toward the end."

At my added explanation, people leaned down for a closer look. Weight pressed against my back. Even the exhausted seniors from Area 7 came over, craning their necks.

But I couldn’t wait for everyone to spot what I meant.

I had no choice but to skip ahead, ignoring Tvein’s mutter of "What the fuck is this guy talking about?"

I still had more to say.

"Besides, if you look at the end of the video..."

This was even more of a spectacle.

"The attack splits in two."

"Oh, it does!"

This time, the response was immediate. Ami’s eyes went wide.

"It splits like a whale’s tail!"

"When that happens, it barely does any effective damage."

It was different from Hecate’s six-pronged attack.

That one had been divided from the moment she launched the sword strike, to make it impossible to dodge.

But this technique was supposed to begin as one and end as one.

And yet...

"It means whoever used the technique failed to execute it perfectly."

"Ooh. That’s neat. But does it matter?"

"So yours doesn’t do that?"

I looked up at Aki’s question. My senior sat beside Ami, legs dangling, but the gaze fixed on me was sharp.

"Isn’t it like that attack you used last time? Or am I wrong? Sorry if I am."

"Uh..."

The question was whether this was a sword strike, presumably...

I stared blankly at the shooting prodigy’s face. Then, noticing the stinging gazes boring into me, I quickly wiped the vacant look off my face.

"My skills are lacking right now too. If you filmed mine, it would probably split even more than this."

My cuts had once boasted perfectly smooth edges.

Honestly, I wasn’t confident I could produce such a clean sword strike now. As Yun had said, going so long without training had exacted a heavy price.

That was why I’d lately been putting so much effort into my swordsmanship, trying to recover my former skill. So I could execute clean, refined attacks, recalling the days when Kyle and I had crossed blades.

The moment you perfected a flawlessly refined sword strike, you attained the rank of swordmaster.

Merely being able to launch one did not make you a swordmaster. You had to perfect it. A sword strike that never strayed from its path, never dispersed its power, and faded beautifully after cutting through its target without splitting apart.

The moment you achieved that, your swordsmanship rose to another level.

The exhilaration I had felt when I reached that level.

Though now, every time I recalled it, I also realized just how far my skills had deteriorated.

But never mind me. Why had his skills deteriorated?

He seemed likely to regain his true abilities soon, and even now he didn’t seem to have declined as much as I had. Still, I was quick to detect his regression.

There was no way I could have missed it. We had been rivals from the moment we faced each other on the training grounds. Kyle and I had taken turns pulling ahead, each helping the other improve.

Even on Earth.

Until the moment we pointed our blades at each other in that vast, pure-white space.

"You use a sword?"

Kudo’s voice pulled my mind out of my memories. I saw the Badger’s face, washed in the pale light of dawn.

"Yes."

"You didn’t know?"

"Hilde’s amazing with a sword!"

Riccardo gave a disbelieving laugh, and Ami craned her neck.

"You two should spar sometime!"

To be precise, I was an idiot who could only use a sword.

Tvein said it for me before I could offer that sheepish admission. Richard added a lecture of his own, asking whether my shooting still hadn’t improved.

With so many people there, conversation sprang up quickly. I let out a resigned laugh and listened to those who had been on missions with me talking.

It was mostly about my abilities.

As I listened blankly to the mixture of lectures, mockery, and praise, the conversation soon veered elsewhere.

"What happened to the level-nine creature?"

My breath caught.

The upright man posed the question to Yun.

"It must have come here."

My training officer didn’t so much as glance at me. He merely shifted his eyes to meet Richard’s gaze. He stood at a slant on the torn-up asphalt, a lit cigarette between his lips.

"We let it get away."

The words came after a brief silence.

"Foolishly."

"You realize this is no ordinary incident."

Richard’s arms were folded, his whisper ominous.

Heads turned toward him. Richard Green had a presence that naturally made everyone gathered there fall silent and listen.

"It’s the first sighting of such a perfectly humanoid creature since the First War."

"Well, officially, yes."

"And several other creatures resembling humans have appeared recently."

Having said his piece, Richard picked up a white bundle from the ground. I hadn’t even noticed it was there.

It looked as though it might hold a basketball.

He thrust his hand inside and pulled something out.