Chapter 39 - Flags Flutter and Soldiers Dance with Swords (2)

"Eyes, feet, hands."

Ragna said.

"You begin with your eyes, move your feet, and end with your hands. A sword does."

He did exactly that.

By seeing with his eyes, he predicted his opponent's movements, moved with his feet to take position, and the sword merely moved to finish it.

WHOOSH.

In the next real battle, he put that into practice himself.

Because he predicted and dodged instead of seeing and dodging, the enemy's line of attack could not reach Encrid, while Encrid's line of attack reached the enemy.

Thrusting out his sword was only a matter of confirmation.

STAB!

The sword pierced the man's throat.

When he pulled the sword out to the side, muscle, nerves, and blood vessels were cut, and blood gushed out in thick pulses.

As soon as Encrid killed the enemy soldier, he rolled across the ground and smashed the pommel into the shin of another soldier standing beside him.

CRUNCH!

The man was not wearing any separate guards, so of course the bone broke.

"Guh!"

The collapsing man thrashed.

Encrid pulled out a quarrel that had fallen nearby and drove it into the man's heart.

Because of the armor, the arrow only sank halfway in.

As he got up, he stomped down hard on it with the sole of his foot.

With a stabbing sound, the quarrel sank in all the way to the end of the shaft.

He lifted the dead man with one hand and tilted him to the side.

THUD THUD THUD!

The quarrels lodged in the corpse.

Here, Encrid made a small mistake.

One quarrel grazed his thigh with a sharp flick.

If his mobility dropped, it would be difficult to rampage among enemy soldiers.

Even so, he did as much as he could.

Thirty-two.

In a single day, he had killed two more.

And that was despite making a mistake midway through.

'Eyes, feet, hands.'

He saw with his eyes, moved with his feet, and ended with his hands.

It seemed it would be good to learn it a few more times in real battle.

Encrid did just that.

And through the todays he repeated, he also roughly grasped the enemy's movements.

'They protect the flagpoles.'

While doing so, they circled around in one direction.

If he charged straight ahead one day, the next day he ran to their left.

He had never once broken a flagpole, but he had come close enough that it seemed just within reach.

Encrid felt thirsty.

He felt that something was lacking in him.

'Can I not do it alone?'

If so, he only needed to bring Rem or Ragna with him, but stubbornness welled up in him.

He had learned proper swordsmanship and had practiced it.

He wanted to take one step farther here.

He was not getting impatient, but the thought kept coming to him that it was time to move forward.

'I'll try it first.'

If this turned out to be nothing more than stubbornness, he could judge differently afterward.

Encrid had the opportunity he had gained by repeating today.

"Shit, what the hell are you?"

After several battles, he came face-to-face with an enemy Platoon Commander.

It was not a face he knew.

The man was one he was seeing for the first time, and he had grown his beard like a rat's whiskers.

"What do you think?"

Encrid answered with a faint laugh.

No one could act this boldly in the face of death.

The rat-whiskered man from the Principality of Aspen gulped and thrust his spear.

“Damn bastard.”

* * *

After dying and waking up, it was training again.

“A speedy recovery.”

Once the concepts of eyes, feet, and hands became familiar, Ragna moved on to the next stage.

What had started as an attempt to get accustomed only to the fundamentals had somehow reached the history and concepts of swordsmanship.

"Fortunately, what you learned, Squad Leader, has the same roots as mine."

Put simply:

A proper and precise sword.

"I copied the style of one particularly decent instructor among my instructors, so I guess I really was lucky."

Encrid spoke nonsense that did not even hold up, but Ragna had no choice but to believe it.

Otherwise, it made no sense.

He could accept that Encrid's skill had improved in a single day.

If Encrid had kept training the fundamentals alone but simply had not known how to use them, such a thing could happen.

Of course, that too was an extremely unusual thing, but he could simply stop paying attention to it.

He decided to let it pass under the same idea that the basics of Northern Heavy Swordsmanship had settled into Encrid's body.

What was the point of nitpicking?

The Squad Leader had never questioned his past.

Then he had to do the same.

"Do you know it? The Oniak Sword Technique."

At Ragna's words, Encrid nodded.

The Oniak Sword Technique.

It referred to the Righteous Sword, Heavy Sword, Confounding Sword, Swift Sword, and Flowing Sword.

To put it plainly.

A straight and precise sword.

A heavy and fierce sword.

A sword that beguiles and shakes.

A fast, ever faster sword.

A soft sword that lets things flow away.

Five hundred years ago, an unparalleled genius was born.

He was a child born to a small farm, and he was truly a genius among geniuses.

After all, starting at the age of nine, that genius killed the petty bandits who attacked his farm with nothing but a fire poker.

At only nine years old, he killed adult bandits, men said to know how to use a sword.

And twelve of them, at that.

"So this is swordsmanship."

The nine-year-old child was precocious.

They said it was because he had lost his parents at a young age.

Eastern Qi Sword

Later, after hearing that a young child had killed twelve bandits with nothing but a fire poker, a noble went to find the child.

He took that child in as his adopted son.

And so the surname Oniak was attached to the child's name.

Leonesis Oniak.

That was how the genius gained his name.

Leonesis was born with talent granted by the heavens, but he was also born with misfortune to match.

Around the age of ten, he came down with an illness that drained the strength from his limbs.

It was an incurable disease that no magician, doctor, or healer on the continent could treat.

It was a disease that would paralyze his entire body before he turned twelve.

Even though he had fallen ill, House Oniak did not cast Leonesis out.

The unfortunate genius might have been forgotten just like that.

But when Leonesis turned twenty, while paralyzed from head to toe, he drew a new line in the history of the continent's swordsmanship.

He compiled every sword art that had appeared up to that point, divided them into five categories, and synthesized them.

That was none other than the Oniak Sword Technique.

Righteous Sword, Heavy Sword, Confounding Sword, Swift Sword, and Flowing Sword.

Though he could not use his body, he rewrote the history of swordsmanship.

And this was also the beginning of the history that transformed Oniak into the empire's greatest house.

The school of swordsmanship Leonesis created was passed down generation after generation, and now it had hardened into established orthodoxy.

Nowadays, people often spoke of them divided into Northern Heavy Sword, Central Righteous Sword and Flowing Sword, Western Swift Sword, Southern Confounding Sword, and Eastern Technical Sword.

The continent was broadly divided into five parts, and the development of weapon arts differed in each of those continents.

"There is a technique I developed to use Northern Heavy Sword. It will probably be more useful than beast guts."

It was a today with the same sunlight and wind as always.

That day, Encrid learned a new technique from Ragna.

From Rem, Heart of a Beast.

From Jaxon, Sense of the Blade.

And Ragna taught him something called Concentrate on a Single Point.

"The principle is simple. Forget everything around you, put your opponent in your eyes, and concentrate on what you are doing. Do not put anything else in your eyes. Just concentrate."

The explanation was a complete mess.

"The foundation of Heavy Sword lies in its fundamentals. It has aliases such as the sword that breaks even when blocked, the sword that cannot be dodged even when known, and the sword that pours all its strength into a single blow. You just do that. By concentrating."

If that could be done just by concentrating, then what were the ones who could not do it supposed to be?

"I will teach you a bit of the trick."

Along with those words, Ragna's sword became a ray of light.

After changing swords, it should not even have been accustomed to his hand yet, but Encrid could not even see the blade.

He could not even see the arm bending like a whip.

Only in the instant something flashed, something passed beside his neck.

SLIT.

The blade grazed the skin of his neck.

The sword had been so fast that he only realized after the skin of his neck had been cut.

The nape of his neck grew hot.

Blood trickled down.

"You bastard, are you bullying the Squad Leader?"

Rem appeared at some point and glared.

Encrid brought a hand to his neck.

'I nearly died.'

It had been that dangerous a blow.

After all, Ragna had cut away his skin at a speed he could not even see.

"They say that in the moment of death, a human concentrates dozens of times harder. I am helping."

"You crazy bastard. What is he supposed to do with a technique after he dies learning it? You must not know the Squad Leader, but it took him a loooooong time to learn Heart of a Beast. Got it?"

He was emphasizing something strange, wasn't he?

Wasn't that "looooong" a little too long?

When Encrid tried to say something, Ragna snorted.

"Because the teacher was bad."

"Huh? What was that, you want me to plant an axe in your head?"

Rem raised one hand and held it behind his ear as he spoke.

"I am not an ignorant barbarian. My teaching method is rational."

Rational, he said.

Encrid thought about the meaning of that word.

Whether it was Rem or Ragna, to him, they were not much different.

"But if you're from the polar people, aren't you a barbarian too?"

Ragna's skin was white and his eyes were red.

Those were the traits of the polar people, the northern people.

"Do not put me on the same level as western barbarians. It is offensive. Extremely."

"... Fine, just drop dead. After you die, I'll personally go all the way north and bury you."

If left alone, it seemed they would go at it again.

Encrid stepped in between them.

"You know what I'm going to say, don't you?"

Even though he cut in and spoke, Ragna cast his gaze past Encrid.

"I know very well that the Squad Leader is as dull as an ox of the north. But I did not know you had built your fundamentals this much."

"What did you say, you bastard? Stop changing the subject and give me your head. I'm going to plant my axe in it."

"Insane barbarian bastard."

Oxen of the north minimized their movements to endure the cold.

It was a comparison used when speaking of a person who was dull, dull to the bone.

Encrid thought the two kept teaming up to call him dull, but there was nothing for him to feel wronged about.

"You said you'd teach me the trick."

Encrid held Ragna in place with his words and turned his head toward Rem.

No words were needed.

He only had to look.

Rem huffed and puffed, but when Encrid stared fixedly at him, he snorted and spoke as if shouting.

"They said to gather!"

Then he turned around and strode back toward the encampment.

"We should head back."

Ragna said after seeing that.

As he tried to collect the sword he had drawn, Encrid grabbed his wrist.

"The trick?"

Thirst for learning was the driving force that moved Encrid.

All the more so when Ragna had just been about to teach him something new.

He had called it Concentrate on a Single Point.

Ragna said it was a technique he had improved from a secret art passed down from long ago.

Encrid wanted it.

"It will not be easy."

The fundamentals had not been easy either.

Reworking his stance, learning steps, throwing away what he had, learning anew how to cut and thrust.

Not a single one of them had been easy.

Even so, it had been enjoyable.

Exhilaration followed.

The joy of growing day by day filled his entire body.

He had said he dreamed of becoming a knight, but perhaps he had come this far simply because he liked the sword.

When Encrid held a sword and swung it, he enjoyed it enough to forget everything in the world.

As he held onto Ragna's wrist, Ragna spoke calmly.

"You must be placed in danger of death. When you feel as if you are going to die, a person's nerves become sharpened. You repeat that sharpened feeling countless times."

The trick was similar to when he had learned Heart of a Beast.

However, Heart of a Beast had wanted him to be bold even before death, while the technique Ragna spoke of, Concentrate on a Single Point, was the opposite.

He had to struggle desperately because he did not want to die.

That fear of death would make a person's nerves stand on end like needles.

'I'll combine it with real battle.'

Encrid formed a plan in his head and moved.

"It will not work just because you learn the trick."

"Tell me what it feels like when I learn it."

"It feels as if everything around you is erased and the sword advances exactly as you wish."

Ragna answered readily.

Encrid looked into Ragna's red eyes.

In his eyes, Encrid glimpsed a seriousness he had never seen before.

'What suddenly got into him?'

Ragna was fickle.

Even so, this was the first time he had ever stepped forward with such passion.

With hidden passion, with flames burning deep in his eyes, Ragna said,

"It is time to go."

Encrid also nodded.

"Right."

The battle began again, and fog rolled in.

"Sorcery? You fucking dog."

Rem got angry.

"Lower your stance!"

Ragna shouted at Encrid as he rushed forward.

Before, he had been busy trying to stop him, but not now.

He knew that, as Encrid was now, he would not be taken down by some half-baked soldier.

As Encrid ran, he once again dealt with enemy soldiers in the order of eyes, feet, and hands.

'The quarrel unit first.'

If anything had changed from before, it was that through repeating several todays, the enemy formation had become familiar to him.

No, to be precise, it had not become familiar to his eyes.

He had naturally memorized it.

Before the first enemy soldier could thrust his spear, Encrid pressed in close and stabbed upward with his dagger.

With a stabbing sound, the dagger pierced through the man's jaw and palate.

Encrid abandoned the dagger and shoved the dead enemy soldier with his shoulder.

"Uh!"

"Gah!"

The enemy soldiers pushed back behind him were flustered.

In that opening, he threw two daggers.

The flying daggers pierced the necks of two enemy soldiers.

It was astonishing skill.

He drew his longsword just as he was and used a Diagonal Slash.

CLACK!

An infantry spear shaft blocked it.

Because he had expected it to be blocked, he retrieved the sword with the rebounding force from striking the shaft and cut the throat of the enemy soldier on the other side.

SLASH!

The well-honed blade cut the enemy soldier's neck.

It was a fight once again.

Another battle once again.

A repeated today.

He fought again and died again.

And as he did, Encrid struggled desperately.

The moment he heard the trick, he understood it.

He was not supposed to face it boldly, but struggle desperately not to die.

That was important.

In the end, he probably would not be able to avoid death.

Still, that was fine.