17
Al and Arakiya, full of doubt and vigilance, arrived back on the island in short order. They were headed for the control tower—although it was purely circumstance that made Al stick with Arakiya. He wanted to pay her back for saving his life, but once he felt he’d fulfilled his debt, he planned to part ways with Arakiya. To live a different life.
By this point, he’d already told her how to lower the drawbridge, helped her get around the island, and given her enough clothing that people wouldn’t just dismiss her as a pervert. He thought that all amounted to quite a bit of help. He didn’t have much debt left to pay off.
“Hrgh!” As Al watched, the short-haired man before him crumpled, blood gushing from his head. Another man who had been talking to him reacted with shock at the sudden and violent death of his conversation partner. But it wasn’t Al’s job to tell him what had happened—or to soothe his wounded heart. Instead, he snatched the knife the startled man had at his waist, grabbed it in a reverse grip, and stabbed the man in the heart with it. Then he twisted hard.
The two guards died without a sound, within five seconds of each other. Maybe they could continue their conversation in the next life.
Al made an impressed sound as he wiped the blood off the knife on his shirt. “Phew. Turning invisible. Now that’s an unfair advantage.”
“And you… You’re stronger than I thought. Even though you have only one arm,” the barely visible Arakiya responded. He thought maybe her assessment was a little too honest, but he chose to take it as a compliment.
Whatever the case, the guards’ outfits were too bloodstained to be wearable, so it looked like Old Man Al was going to have to continue this stealth mission in his half-dressed state. “Man, they really did take over this island, didn’t they?” he said.
“You thought I was lying?”
“Let’s say I hoped I was…dreaming.”
Al hadn’t loved anyone on the island—he hadn’t even had any friends. No, that wasn’t true. The guard Orlan had been his friend. Al mourned his death from the bottom of his heart. But that was it. After ten years as a sword slave, Orlan was about the only person Al felt any affection toward. Otherwise, there really wasn’t anything here for him. The reason he’d hoped it was a dream was because of the way everything had been turned on its head, including Orlan’s life.
“Wonder what I’ll do next…”
To at least some extent, there would have to be changes on the island once this was all over. The one thing he’d wanted to stay the same had already changed, and there would be more changes to come. If they were unavoidable, then why would he stay here? What had he even accomplished in the decade of his life that he’d spent on this rock?
“Jack shit, that’s what. I ain’t done jack, and I probably won’t in the future, either.” He’d spent his days like grass blowing in the wind, like a leaf scudding across a pond at the behest of the breeze. He’d never even had the imagination to picture what might be waiting for him at the end of it all…
As Al stood by the guards he’d taken out, Arakiya suddenly spoke. “There.”
Al held his breath and looked in the direction she was pointing. He saw flagstones, the control tower surrounded by walls both natural and man-made, and standing at the foot of them…
…was a very, very large figure, her back to them.
“ !” Al almost choked, seized by a feeling like his heart was caught in a vise. He hurried to hide in the shadows by the wall. He’d only poked his head out for a second. There was no way someone with their back turned could have noticed him, never mind Arakiya. But imagine if she’d been looking in their direction at that instant.
“Huff…huff…” Al became aware of his own ragged breath as he put a hand to his chest, which suddenly hurt again.
He had looked death in the face time and again and lived to tell about it—yet at this moment, he was overwhelmed by an almost irresistible terror of death. It wasn’t that he was afraid of experiencing suffering and despair over and over. He could face them hundreds, even thousands of times so long as he knew they would end eventually. But what if it never ended? Al—Aldeberan—knew that in this world, there were some enemies who could not be defeated. Some walls that could never be scaled.
The Empress of the sword slaves was one of them.
“…Ha!” With that thought, Al laughed mockingly, getting his frozen thoughts back into motion. What made him so certain that she couldn’t be defeated, couldn’t be overcome? Al wasn’t the one who had to fight her. He’d told Arakiya that there would be a moment when he’d done enough to pay her back. The time for him to run with his tail between his legs had come.
He knew that if she saw him, she would come to kill him again. He didn’t want to spend another second within range of her poisonous fangs—he wanted to get out of here.
“Hey… Young lady… I’m real sorry, but this is as far as I go.”
“ ” Arakiya didn’t say anything.
“She’s already almost killed me once… Hell, more like a hundred times. I can’t find it in me to do anything about her.”
That was how Al told Arakiya that he was leaving the battlefield, fully expecting her to berate him as an ingrate. But even if Arakiya attacked him in a fury here and now, it would be better than going up against that monster in another death match. That monster might be an impassable wall, but Arakiya—he thought he could find a way to beat her.
It turned out Al’s nerves were for nothing. Arakiya said simply, “Mmm. Understood. Thank you.”
Her plainspoken response left him blinking, but he detected no change in Arakiya’s attitude. She accepted his cowardice as naturally as anything else and simply factored him out of the fighting strength she had at her disposal.
This also, however, indicated that she wasn’t going to back down in the face of that beast…
“Listen, kid, give it up. No one’ll blame you. ’Least, I won’t. You hear me, right?”
“She is probably strong.”
“No probably about it. She’s the real deal. She’s at least the third or fourth strongest living creature I’ve come across in my lifetime.”
“What are the first and second?”
“Don’t wanna think about ’em.”
They had one thing in common—all those monsters had made his heart feel as if it was freezing solid in his chest. Just thinking about facing them made him die a little inside. After all, it had been impossible. No matter how many times, no matter how many hundreds or thousands of times he battled them, it would still be impossible.
For he knew that in this world, there were some walls that were impossible to pass.
“Listen, kid—,” he began, but his middle-aged-man sermon couldn’t stop the rash young woman with a future.
“Bye,” Arakiya said, and then her almost-invisible body merged with the wind as she made for the control tower, literally as quick as the breeze. The lanky fighter ahead still had her back to them; she was gazing out at the lake. Arakiya was just about to slip by her when—
“Weeell, now. What an odd breeze.”
Arakiya was not going to simply slip past. Some people were superhuman; they lived in a world beyond ordinary experience. The Hornet was one of those people. What subtle shift had she detected in the wind? Whatever it was, she turned and brought her blades—her very arms—straight through the breeze. The swipe looked broad, undirected, but it struck Arakiya square in the chest. It would have cleaved her in two if she had taken the blow undefended. But she detected the aura of oncoming death and floated into the air, dodging the blow.
That was not, however, the end of the dance of death.
“Well! Well, well, weeeell!” The Hornet almost seemed to be singing as she continued her danse macabre, the evil rolling off her.
“ —!” Arakiya, one with the wind, could move better and faster than could possibly be expected, but the Hornet pressed her with merciless strokes of the swords that were her arms until Arakiya was nearly cornered. She tried desperately to evade the spiral of death—she was obviously fighting a monumental battle, but the Hornet was still only playing.
Which was not to say she wasn’t enjoying the fight. Murder was her hobby, torment one of her favorite pastimes. Thus, the exchange of attack and defense that enabled her to corner Arakiya was all part of a ritual for her pleasure.
“I…,” Al started, but he couldn’t bring himself to say it out loud. I told you so. She’d been rash, yes; it had been obvious that this was what was going to happen. But it had been Al’s choice not to stop the young woman by force.
Of course, there was a distinct possibility he wouldn’t have been able to stop her even if he’d tried—but that was how people who only had one chance at life thought about things. It didn’t apply to Al.
If he’d wanted to, he could have stopped her. And yet he hadn’t.
Al had no desire any longer to spend himself trying to bend the wills of others. That was why he’d watched the girl go to a battle in which he knew she would die, why he only observed the fight knowingly, and why he would watch as the girl met her blood-soaked end.
“ ”
Something deep within him ached; it was like a tremendous weight was going to crush his heart. If this was a symptom of the stress of facing something deeply difficult to bear, then why was he standing here, watching something he didn’t want to see? Not for any heroic reason like wanting to see out the consequences of his choices. He wasn’t a big enough person to have important reasons like that.
He was just a middle-aged man with a pitiful excuse for a weapon and a lifetime of somehow avoiding any mortal wounds—though he still bore the scars of so many others. His spirit was broken. He couldn’t even dream.
He had no reason to fight and nothing that would drive him to win. No motivation at all to struggle against anything.
And yet Al—
“Oh.”
“Well!”
The great blade came down in a strike that was impossible to avoid. Blood danced into the night sky.
The half naked girl’s bond with the wind was broken; she stumbled backward and collapsed on the flagstones. The Empress of the island of the sword slaves looked down at the blood-spattered girl and gave her a sweet smile. “You are just the cutest little thing, aren’t you? I don’t recognize you… I wonder how you got here.”
“ ”
The Hornet cocked her head in curiosity, but the girl said nothing, only fixing her with a single scarlet eye blazing with hostility. The Hornet smiled even wider.
Dripping blood turned the girl’s lovely silver hair red and stippled her brown skin, which seemed to pulse with the fight.
The Hornet raised her blades, savoring what she was going to do next…
“All right, that’s enough,” someone said just before she could bring the weapons down. Who was interrupting her fun?
Her annoyance vanished, though, when she saw the owner of the voice. “Well, well, well!” Her eyes widened as she registered the moonlit figure with pleasure.
Like her, he lacked his full complement of limbs; like her, he had that unusual black hair; and like her, he had managed to survive in this place of death…
“Aldeberan!” she said.
“Don’t call me that,” he spat. “Bah, who cares? I’ve got a feeling like I want to die.” He leveled his dagger at the Hornet. A short, crude weapon, its reach much shorter than the huge sword he usually used. And thus, the man who had fled from her in the arena, the man who had only just avoided being critically injured, came at her again.
“Well! This is unexpected. I didn’t know my sweet little Al was such a hot-blooded man!”
“I’m not a hot-blooded anything. The girl’s just too pretty to let her die so young…and the sight of her blood on that silver hair made me sicker than I expected. And…”
“Yeeees?” the Hornet said, drawing out the question.
Al scowled, but then he chuckled darkly. The Hornet smiled back, a pleasant thrill running down her spine.
As they stood there grinning at each other, Al said, “The stars were… Naw. It’s my temper that’s bad today.”
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