Chapter 11
Carlos let out a sigh. After instructing Greta to check on the junior knights and set the departure time, he rubbed his face wearily and walked over toward Elio.
“You didn’t actually pay to learn that, did you? Good grief, you need to get a refund immediately!”
Toby, stationed on one side of the hill waiting for the spar, pointed right at Elio and shouted.
“I l-learned, alright! Did I ever say I was good? Besides, longswords aren’t even my main weapon!”
Elio yelled back at Toby while her arms trembled. Carlos, stopping short right in front of her, rubbed his temples.
Her stance—resembling a newborn roe rather than a proper greeting for a spar—was the real problem. Could this honestly even be called holding a sword? The tip was pointed straight down at the ground.
Judging from her draw alone, it seemed she had picked up something, but she couldn’t overcome the weight of the longsword to lift it properly.
“A d-dagger! Give me a dagger!”
“What kind of spar are you going to have with a dagger?”
“D-daggers, I can actually do. With a dagger…”
“Forget it. What do you expect to accomplish with that kind of strength? You’ll get beaten to death even by a baby deer.”
“I really can do—”
“It’s even more dangerous to show off when you don’t even know how to handle it. If you can’t do it, just admit it honestly. Why pretend you know how?”
At the man’s deeply disappointed and rigid expression, Elio’s heart pounded hard and fast.
It’s not like I’m a knight. Just how skilled did he expect her to be? A wave of frustration surged through her. If I had just inherited the divine power, I’d beat you right now…!
“Commander, don’t yell at the lady. She isn’t from the academy, after all. She’s still young, and it’s only natural that she doesn’t know swordsmanship.”
Greta’s awkward attempt to dissuade Carlos only made Elio feel more humiliated, causing the back of her neck to burn hot.
“Let’s go with something a bit lighter…”
As Elio lowered the sword toward the tip of her foot, Carlos snatched it right out of her hand.
“Are you planning to shoot your own foot with your sword? Where on earth is your head—”
Carlos spoke sharply, much like he would scold a junior knight, before swallowing the rest of his sentence. He planted one hand on his hip and rubbed his deeply creased brow.
Elio pursed her lips at the man’s angry expression, her face flushing red, before turning on her heel and running toward the plane tree atop the hill.
Toby clicked his tongue as he watched Elio suddenly sprint away.
“Good grief. Learning swordsmanship, my foot.”
“Eep!”
At the wearily familiar shriek, Toby instinctively furrowed his brows with a jerk.
Seeing that the object flying toward her was a ball, Elio spun around again and began frantically rummaging through the bag on the grass.
Toby watched the scene unfold and muttered as if to himself.
“…That ball… how did she dodge that?”
“Didn’t you see? She snapped her head sideways just right and twisted her body to the right to dodge it!”
Thwack!
Toby delivered a swift, hard smack to the back of the junior knight’s head sitting next to him and muttered,
“A ball thrown from behind… she dodged it while running…?”
“Lady! My apologies! Are you hurt?”
The junior knights, who had been playing by kicking the ball with all their might from a distance, shouted out. The rustling of the swaying leaves nearly drowned out their voices.
The soundless footsteps of the man standing behind Elio drew close.
Elio frantically rummaged through the messy bag until she finally pulled something out.
The moment she drew a dagger, Carlos’s eyes, watching her, flashed chillingly.
Letting her blonde hair spill, Elio reflexively rolled across the ground. She stopped breathing, the tip of a sword resting perilously close to her ear, and looked up at the towering shadow cast over her.
“C-commander?”
Elio blinked rapidly, completely unable to grasp the situation.
Instantly, a massive chunk of iron came crashing down right before her eyes.
Clang!
With a screeching scrape, Elio’s gripped dagger slid down the razor-sharp edge of Carlos’s blue-gleaming blade.
Both her arms trembled violently. The acrid smell of iron pierced her nostrils.
How many seconds, stretching like an eternity, passed? The hair-raising screech of friction finally ceased.
The weight pressing down on Elio gradually grew lighter. With a deathly pale face, she blindly fumbled at the ground to push herself up.
Carlos reeled his greatsword back, fixing a heart-stopping gaze upon her.
The greatsword lowered behind his back shimmered sharply, as if it might strike at any second. Her heart beat in a chaotic, erratic rhythm, like a runaway horse’s hooves.
Elio thrust her trembling dagger straight toward his chest.
At the exact same time, he tore through the air with a piercing whistle.
Directly toward the center of her neck.
Thud.
A puff of pale dust rose from the densely grassed field.
Carlos kept his sword lowered to the ground as he merely shifted his chilling gaze sideways. The small blade pressing against the vital point of his neck was trembling.
One-third of his carotid artery. The precise spot where blood would gush like a fountain if punctured.
The woman, with her legs hooked around his thigh and clinging to his shoulder, was aiming right at that exact spot—at a thirty-degree angle designed for the deepest possible penetration.
Even though her hands shook violently and her eyes welled up with tears, she refused to let go of her dagger.
Carlos’s pupils narrowed bizarrely.
He tilted his neck toward the woman’s blade. The moment his skin brushed against it, the small blade—which had been trembling all on its own without even daring to pretend to stab him—slipped from her grasp.
A curved double-edged dagger measuring scarcely twenty centimeters…
Engraved with ancient northern continent characters from hundreds of years ago…
Whoosh. He snatched the back of the sliding woman’s neck as she slipped from his back and pulled her into an embrace.
His solid forearm supported her waist, and his large hand, veins bulging, gripped her rounded shoulder tightly.
Elio began to tremble all over like a herbivore stripped bare in front of a beast.
He pressed the bridge of his nose against the fragile nape of her neck, which looked as though it could snap under a single hand of his, and whispered,
“…Who taught you this?”
As the man’s hot breath and gravelly voice brushed against her, Elio’s damp eyelids fluttered.
“Assassination arts. Who taught you? Huh?”
The Lobitan knights all witnessed it.
The commander throwing the first strike at a kneeling lady. And the lady clinging to the commander’s back, pressing a blade against his neck.
With eyes wide in sheer horror, they vividly took in a spar the likes of which had never been heard of or seen before in this world. It was total catastrophe.
“If you ask me, that’s love…!”
Seated densely on the first floor of the inn with their heads bowed and focused entirely on eating, the senior knights glanced sideways as the youngest knight lowered his voice even further.
“Didn’t the commander deliberately swing his sword slower? And considering he just let the lady cling to his back… If you ask me, isn’t this a slightly crazy… lovers’ quarrel meant to provoke skinship?”
The knight sitting next to him let out a heavy sigh.
“No, you idiot. What about the ogre incident? Can’t you tell just by looking? It’s true the two of them spent the night together, and the commander got roped in by a woman of desire on a whim, taking out his frustration by toying with her. It’s not a lovers’ quarrel, it’s the tragic aftereffects of a one-night stand…”
“Won’t the lady utterly despise the commander now? Who on earth would like a man who throws a preemptive strike at them?”
“Exactly. The lady must be terrified and miserable right now…”
Would the future of Schönhardt—would the future of Lobitan—really be okay like this?
The gloomy gazes of the young knights darted toward the other side of the partition where the commander and the lady were dining alone.
On the other side of the partition on the first floor of the inn.
Elio was frantically moving her fork, her eyes and pupils blazing red.
Stuffing warm steak into her mouth until her cheeks bulged…
“You look rather cheerful.”
“Of course I am! This is the first proper meal I’ve had in two days!”
A bright, sunny smile blossomed across her reddened eyes.
Carlos could not fathom what was going on inside the woman’s walnut-sized brain.
“Aren’t you going to call me a bad guy this time?”
“We sparred by mutual agreement, didn’t we? You weren’t actually going to stab me for real anyway.”
“…I was the one who suddenly attacked first.”
“Isn’t an attack supposed to be a surprise ambush anyway? My big sis used to suddenly attack me all the time, too. She said swordplay comes without warning and you have to know how to dodge under any circumstance.”
Carlos’s dark eyebrows twitched. Just how on earth did that crazy woman teach swordsmanship?
“She did it all the time, so why were you shaking and crying?”
“Even if she did it all the time, scary is scary! Can’t something scary just stay scary?”
Buoyed by the relief of finishing the spar safely without injury and the excitement of having a feast right before her eyes, her voice kept rising.
Only after finishing all her beef did Elio open her mouth wide and shove greens inside.
Chewing thoroughly to avoid indigestion, she paused and lifted her gaze at the man’s silence.
“You realize it now, right? Chest size has absolutely nothing to do with athletic ability. I just lack a little muscle mass, I’m not sluggish. And having pale skin doesn’t mean my skin texture is weak, either.”
Carlos raised a single eyebrow, carefully weighing the words he had just heard.
Chest… athletic ability…?
Pectoral muscles…?
He pulled out a napkin and wiped away the plum sauce smeared on the woman’s flushed cheek.
He quickly abandoned any attempt to understand the woman’s words, whose train of thought was impossible to catch.
“Can’t you even aim with a fork? Why do you keep getting it on yourself?”
“C-commander. Please don’t just do things like this casually.”
Elio frowned and dodged the man’s rough touch, but with an impassive face, he ended up wiping away all the sauce on her cheek.
Elio glared at the man—whose actions were far too blunt and somehow almost germaphobic to be considered romantic—and whispered,
“Won’t Sir Greta get mad?”
The man’s single eyebrow rose even higher.
“At you?”
“At you!”
“…At me?”
The man furrowed his brow. He alternated his gaze between the crumpled napkin in his hand and the pouty, puffed-up young woman, then let out a sigh.
“Is that some kind of lady’s etiquette? I wouldn’t know anything about that.”
The man quietly crushed the napkin he was holding and ran a hand through his thick black hair. The midday sunlight of July stretched long across their table.
Elio bit her lip while watching his expression, her eyes darting around. She nervously fidgeted with her earlobe as if about to rip it off.
“…Aren’t you and Sir Greta… lovers?”
“Lovers? She’s a junior from the academy. Just like the others.”
“You two seemed close. Closer than the rest.”
