Re:Zero Arc 9 Chapter 26 - Sword Demon vs. Crimson Sakura

The fierce sword aura hanging in the air filled the room to bursting, and her skin prickled into gooseflesh, no joke. Her mind had been trained to stay unshaken in most situations, but even amid a run of the unforeseen and the unexpected, a moment like this had to count as the exception.

"—Wilhelm Trias."

Rolling the name he had given around in her mouth, Yae Tenzen quietly sharpened her guard. They had crossed blades only once, but the opening exchange had ended with his kick slammed into her, and Yae was the one on the back foot. Even after leaping backward to kill the impact, the damage from that kick had settled heavily into her slender frame. Had she not given ground, it might have left a boot-shaped hole in her stomach. To drive a kick like that into a young lady without holding back... just as he himself had said, the man could hardly be called a gentleman. The fitting name for this old swordsman had been waiting for him in this kingdom for over forty years. Namely—

"—to think the Sword Demon himself would make an appearance! I'm so thrilled to meet a celebrity~. The tale of how you avenged your late wife, why, it's the very pride of the kingdom's sword, isn't it~?"

"..."

"Oh my? But if I remember right, I heard there was an unexpected reunion with your wife after that! What happened in the Water Gate City must have been ever so painful, hm? My heart goes out to you, boo hoo hoo."

"..."

Raising a finger to the corner of her eye, Yae made a show of weeping while she watched his every move. Under her crimson gaze the old swordsman, Wilhelm, stood tall and composed without the slightest waver, a crystal-clear sword aura running through the two swords in his hands, his eyes fixed on her. In the quiet light of those blue eyes, Yae understood that her attempt to trample his heart without a shred of decency and rattle him had misfired. All she had done was play the part of a nasty woman.

"...From what I'd heard, I pictured you as much more of a hothead, you know~."

Apparently that couldn't be relied on either. Her source had been none other than Heinkel, so if even his information on the man who was supposedly his own father was of questionable reliability, what on earth was she meant to expect from him? She should have just put him on Felt-sitting duty instead of Dragon-sitting duty. Then, if Heinkel had let Felt slip away, she might have had grounds for disposing of the girl and grounds for cutting Heinkel loose, both at once. And the reason Yae was thinking such things—

"Apart from that old geezer of a Village Chief, there really shouldn't be many people who can see through my concealment—Felt, did you get up to some mischief, by any chance?"

"Now that's way outta line, even for you. You know better'n anybody I can't do squat here."

"..."

"I ain't done nothin' but yap at you. That's every last thing I got in me right now."

Felt answered from the corner she had backed into, her voice edged with some anger at herself. She wasn't the type who could pull off anything as clever as faking anger. If she had acting skill fine enough to control even the tremble in her voice, then hats off to her for fooling Yae this thoroughly. So Yae merely gave the steel wire looped around Felt's neck a light tug, just enough to remind her it was there,

"Please don't go thinking about running away, okay? I'd hate for your darling little head and your body to have a tearful parting."

"Tack one more onto the spanking count. Also, I ain't one to talk, but..."

"Yes?"

"You ain't got time to be lookin' away right now."

Felt stuck her tongue out with a "bleh," and her total lack of cuteness was exactly what made her cute. But Yae didn't need to be told. She hadn't taken her guard off Wilhelm once. —Still standing in the same spot as before, Wilhelm had yet to settle on how to deal with Yae's unfamiliar steel wire technique. Which was only natural.

—Most shinobi arts were specialized for catching the opponent off guard. That was precisely why a shinobi's skills, which were made for killing, were called arts, unlike a warrior's techniques, which were made for fighting. Yae's steel wire technique was the prime example. The more seasoned the warrior, the more caution they took over how to fight. And while they did, laying trap after trap after trap, layer upon layer like a spider's web, was the true calling of a shinobi—

"—Four moves."

"—? What's that?"

Yae's brows drew together, unable to read the meaning of the words that had suddenly left Wilhelm's lips. To her question, Wilhelm gave no reply. —But he did give an answer. His eyes narrowed faintly, and the sharp sword aura he loosed sliced through her whole body. That was his answer.

"—!"

"Here it comes," Yae thought, and in that instant she threw every finger of both hands into play without a flicker of hesitation, lashing the Sword Demon with wire strikes meant not to subdue but to slaughter. The no-kill order Al had handed down only needed to be honoured in the end. If she went in to kill and he survived, so much the better; but an attack thrown with the intent to spare him would never work on this opponent. And so the wires came from every direction, then from sixteen, from thirty-two, divided finer and finer into a crushing net with no gap to escape through. Against it, Wilhelm flashed the blades in both hands—

"Ooooohhh—!!"

The wind whipped up by his twin swords literally kicked aside the oncoming lines of slaughter. His blades moved so fast that every collision of sword and wire reached her as a single sound, and the sparks they threw gave Yae the illusion that her eyes were burning. Overwhelming sword pressure had stopped her opening strike, but her wire arts did not break off. She let out slack from the wire spun from her rings, ready to split her next attack still further, and in that instant, right in front of her eyes, a piece of the room's "floor" was cut loose and stood on end.

—What rose up was a section of the floor that had been sliced along its edges, then stepped on at one end so that it tipped its face up. The "floor," as large as a luxurious bed, hid Wilhelm from Yae's sight.

"—"

There was a tremendous stamp, and the "floor" was kicked straight at Yae. In the cramped room there was no gap to slip away through, so Yae shifted the angle of the wires worked by her left hand to meet the charging "floor." Rather than cutting it, she bound it, bounced it and sent it flying back. Carrying all the force of the kick, the "floor" made its return trip faster and deadlier than its outward one, bearing down furiously on the Sword Demon in its path to smash him away. And that—

"Huh?"

A sharp, piercing crack rang out, and Yae's eyes went wide at the sight of the "floor" pinned in midair. Its momentum had grown, and its force had multiplied by its weight. Yet the Sword Demon met the "floor"'s rebellion by setting his sword point at the exact centre of its mass without the slightest error, cancelling its force in midair and stopping it dead. It was a divine feat, beyond anything human hands should be able to accomplish.

Yae, too, had spent much of her life being hailed as a prodigy beyond the reach of ordinary people, and that was exactly why she could tell. —Even in old age, the Sword Demon's swordsmanship still held its ground in the realm of the divine.

"Three moves."

As Yae held her breath, Wilhelm murmured from the far side of the "floor" hanging in midair. Hidden behind the "floor," modest in width but generous in height, Wilhelm was invisible to her. But the advantage of steel wire lay in delivering attacks to places that could neither be seen nor reached. She sent her wires curving around the "floor" to drive the Sword Demon out from behind it, to the left or to the right. And whichever side he broke out on, wires were already strung there—

—The next instant, a sword point pierced the "floor" in midair and shot toward the tip of Yae's nose.

There was the ring of steel striking steel, and the sword was launched at a speed to rival a mighty bow. He had struck the pommel of the sword that held the "floor" in place, driving the blade clean through it. Faced with an arrow less unexpected than unthinkable, Yae gave up on snaring the sword with her wires, nudged its path aside by a hair, and tilted her slender neck to avoid a fatal wound. The point passed right beside her throat, and the sword buried itself with a thud in the wall at her back, just beside her.

She had dodged it. And even in that split second, Yae had not taken her eyes off the Sword Demon. Which was why she realised at once that she had made a mistake.

The sword had sunk deep into the wall just to the right of her neck. —Her escape was now limited to the left. And there—

"Ruaaahhh—!!"

Springing off the "floor" as a foothold and kicking off the ceiling for speed, the Sword Demon came down on her with his blade. The downward cut drove in a straight line for her life and bit deep into Yae's left shoulder.

△▼△▼△▼△

Wilhelm van Astrea. —No, Wilhelm Trias was staying in the capital in search of a way to cure his master, Crusch Karsten.

In the battle against the Witch Cult over Priestella, the "Lust" Sin Archbishop had poured a vile poison into Crusch's body that ate away at her flesh and mind, and she still writhed in a torment like a curse. Even Ferris, who bore the title of "Blue" as the finest healer in the kingdom, had been unable to ease her pain, and only recently had a ray of light broken into that ordeal. Crusch's condition had not improved dramatically. But word had come that a means of opening the way to that possibility now existed: the path to the Pleiades Watchtower was open.

If they could borrow the power of the "Sage" Shaula, one of the Kingdom of Lugunica's Three Great Heroes and said to be all-knowing and all-powerful, they might learn how to remove the poison tormenting Crusch.

"If it's to save Lady Crusch, I'll sink my teeth into a rock if I have to. What other choice is there?"

Wilhelm had no words with which to rein in Ferris, who leapt at the news as though clutching at a lifeline. Last year, the Witch Cult had stolen Crusch's "Memories," leaving her greatly changed from the woman she had been, and Ferris had stood by her with complete devotion, supporting and helping her. Ferris must have known a great deal of anguish and bewilderment in the process of rebuilding that relationship from nothing. That anguish had gone on for nearly a year, and only now had a bond of trust formed between the two: different from before, but unshakable even in its difference.

And Capella Emerada Lugnica, the Sin Archbishop of "Lust," had ruined it all.

Crusch's torment in the aftermath has already been told, but Ferris, keeping vigil at her side, was every bit as painful to behold. So when word came that Subaru's party, bound for the Pleiades Watchtower, had succeeded in reaching the tower, a hope far more piercing than mere admiration seared through Wilhelm and the others.

Something felt off about Subaru and the others not bringing the news back in person, but there was no prying deep into the affairs of another faction. All they had heard was that trial journeys were being made, to ensure passage to and from the tower could be relied upon. Unable to sit still, Wilhelm and Ferris had come to the capital to learn whether those journeys had succeeded and, if fortune allowed, to plead for a place in the next group bound for the tower. And there, in a room of the noble residence kept for visiting dignitaries—

"—There is something I must bring to your attention, and something I would ask your help with."

So it was that the young man who served as domestic affairs officer for Emilia's Faction laid out for them a calamity that threatened to shake the very foundations of the kingdom, and gave Wilhelm two names, the reason he would take up his sword.

"Ruaaahhh—!!"

Kicking off the ceiling, he drove a skull-splitting downward stroke into the red-haired girl, that formidable Shinobi. Her ultra-fine, threadlike weapons scattered their menace in bewildering variety along erratic paths. The longer the fight dragged on, the likelier a fatal slip became, so he had forced a swift decision; this was the result. The cut that bit into her entered at her left shoulder and should have torn straight on through to her right flank, a diagonal slash cleaving her life in two.

"—!"

In that instant the girl clenched her teeth hard and her body sank into the floor— No, she did not sink. The floor itself had been sliced apart by wire and came to pieces. Her body dropped into the depths first, and Wilhelm was left to follow after.

His hand shot out on reflex, wrenching from the wall the sword that had pinned the girl in place, and he had both blades again. He had not managed to sever her left shoulder, but the wound was deep all the same. The moment a Shinobi slipped from sight, they became five, ten times more troublesome than when they could be seen; that was what made them so dangerous. In other words—

"—I finish this here."

The words came from Wilhelm and the girl at once, with no arrangement between them. Falling into the pitch-black hole that gaped open into the earth, Wilhelm caught the gleam of light slanting into the dark and saw, for a single instant, wire glinting. Strung like a spider's web through the shaft that ran down into the depths was a lethal fury of wire.

△▼△▼△▼△

Falling backward toward the depths, Yae bound her left shoulder with steel wire to stem the bleeding. She had let a blade sink rather deep into a maiden's soft skin, but the purity of her life had not been taken, so it counted as safe, she told herself like a sore loser, even as she marveled at the sheer might of the Sword Demon's swordsmanship.

The first move, blocking Yae's steel wire. The second, kicking the cut-up "floor" at her. The third, pinning the "floor" Yae sent back. The fourth, using the sword driven through it as a decoy and cutting in. Just as he had declared at the start, she had come within a hair of being killed in four moves.

"Honestly, it's nothing but horrid old folks...!"

The "Wicked Old Man," closest to her and the worst personality of the lot; the old man of the Giant Tribe who had pushed Al to within a step of ruin on the plains; and the Sword Demon, standing at the summit of the sword with no regard for his years. Every old person Yae could call to mind on the spot had never learned the meaning of mellowing.

To begin with, it was the way of the world that a life's flame could gutter out at any moment. Simply by living long in such a world, the old had already won out in the culling of lives.

"That's why geezers an' grannies are trouble, see. Go thinkin' old folks're weak or brittle, an' you get a whole parade o' fools landin' in the grave 'fore they ever get old 'emselves. Mind, that's a bit rich comin' from me, a Shinobi who's lived this long bein' the exception o' exceptions, eh?"

Remembering the cackle of the Village Chief, a man who had survived an especially brutal road, made her cheeks twitch. Steal the enemy's eyes, confound their heart, bind their feet, take their life: that was the essence of the shinobi. Yae had been a model student in the arts of confounding the heart as well, but she knew that on that front she lost to the Village Chief's years of seasoning. She probably wasn't nearly as twisted as he was, and she didn't expect to live long enough to get that twisted. In fact, Al had nearly killed her once. She didn't expect that kind of luck to hold again and again. A miracle like that, the passing whim of a kind-hearted monster.

"—"

Chasing the falling Yae, Wilhelm pulled his sword from the wall and dropped into the shaft after her. The Sword Demon moved with a certainty that suggested he had real combat experience against shinobi too, and Yae aimed an endless litany of grudges at the Vollakia Empire, which had probably sent shinobi after him at some point, and at the shinobi who had come before her and failed to kill Wilhelm back then. She compressed all of it into a single breath and let it out, and something inside her switched over with a click. Her field of vision widened, letting her see through the underground dark as clearly as by daylight.

It was the fruit of training to adapt to the dark of night, a kind of bodily control that manipulated the blood flow around her eyes to alter how she saw. In a field of vision gone from black to gray, the Sword Demon stood out in white, and Yae spread her hands, having finally dragged him onto her own ground—

"—I finish this here."

The very same words, spoken at the very same moment, and yet neither of them smiled or showed the least surprise. Each had decided to kill the other. Now that psychological attacks had proven pointless, all that remained was to leave every art of confounding the heart behind and pour body and soul into reaching the other's life. And this was the place Yae had prepared for exactly that: the Crimson Sakura's killing field.

The hollow beneath the Barielle Villa was not something Priscilla had ordered when she remodeled the building. It was a parting gift from the original owner, Leip Barielle. Priscilla's late husband, said to have nursed a pathological distrust of others and a festering suspicion, had prepared for the worst not only at the villa he built in the capital but at the mansions and hideaways in his own domain as well. This shaft leading underground was one of those precautions. It had originally served as an escape route for slipping outside unseen, but Yae had sealed it off in advance in case enemies used it to get in, and since she was at it, she had left the deep shaft itself intact.

Yae had never met the man, and felt nothing but appalled disgust for Leip, who had reportedly forced a young, beautiful bride like Priscilla to marry him and then tried to seize control of the nation's affairs with his wife as his puppet. Still, she sympathized with the urge to prepare for every possible calamity, and had gratefully helped herself to it.

A scaffold built for slaughter, strung with steel wire, where only Yae could fly freely. She had slipped into the capital so she could go to Al's aid the moment he needed her, and she had kept Felt, whom she dragged around to keep an eye on, in that particular room precisely so this contingency could be put to use. And so—

"—From here on, I won't be holding back. Not even with my feet."

As she said it, Yae drew up her knees, slipped the shoes off her feet, and stretched out toes sheathed in black hose. She spread the five toes of each foot and launched steel wire from the rings fitted on them. Holding back with neither hands nor feet, quite literally, deftly working all twenty digits at once, Yae Tenzen loosed her perfected arts of slaughter to run rampant in the dark—

"—"

A short fight suited both of them, and both of them knew it. Still falling, Yae hooked a knee over one of the strung wires, cut off her momentum and flipped around, then sprang off the wire's tension inside the cylindrical shaft, which was like a great well, and began her attack.

With an acrobat's lightness, Yae danced like a petal caught on the wind. Her flowing dance was accompanied by silver threads that lured anyone entranced by it to their death, and wherever she danced, flowers of blood bloomed from those who had been treated to the performance. Hence, Crimson Sakura. A crimson cherry blossom, beautiful and cruel, flourishing on the blood that ran from fallen corpses.

"—!"

The ferocity that had made that epithet famous was unleashed without mercy, slashing Wilhelm all over as he surrendered himself to free fall, his blood and flesh spraying into the air from beneath his finely tailored clothes. The wind of his twin swords, swung as he fell, stirred the loose strands of her hair, and Yae was almost exasperated by the Sword Demon's eye. Unlike wire, a sword reaches only as far as the arm that swings it. On this prepared scaffold, Wilhelm had no choice but to stay on the defensive.

Naturally, Yae, who could move through the dark at will on her wires, would never go near Wilhelm, hampered as he was and dragged down by gravity. She would keep to a middle distance his sword could never reach, no matter what, and rain wire attacks on him one-sidedly. Before she finished dancing a single piece. Before the Sword Demon reached solid ground and regained his freedom.

Yae's arm rose, unhurried. Blood sprayed. Yae's slim legs traced the wall, the empty air. Blood sprayed. Yae's slender body twisted, arching back to its limit. Blood sprayed.

Each time Yae's dance drew nearer to completion, the Sword Demon, unable to ward off every lash of wire, was stained deeper in blood. His legs, his torso, his shoulders, his neck, his cheeks, his forehead: the keen steel wire licked wounds into each of them, and bleeding, the Sword Demon was beckoned on toward death. But—

"—What na~sty eyes."

The gleam in them, alive with that frighteningly clear sword aura, had not let his will to fight cloud in the slightest.

"..."

Besides the wires Yae wielded with both hands and both feet, there were the threads already strung throughout the shaft. It went without saying: if he let himself be absorbed in dealing with Yae and carelessly brushed a limb against one of those taut strands, he would lose the limb, and if it caught his neck or torso, it was farewell to his life. For Wilhelm, this great hole was now no different from the jaws of a magical beast he had leapt into without a second thought. The fangs would shave away his flesh, the tongue would sip his blood, and in the end he would drop into the stomach and have his life dissolved. —Yet his were not the eyes of a man pointlessly struggling against despair like that.

"Still, there isn't much you can do, is there?"

Even setting that gleam aside, Yae did not rate the Sword Demon so cheaply as to think it would end here. She had long since tossed Heinkel's assessment of Wilhelm far away as worthless, and judged him instead by what she had seen with her own eyes: the man in the thick of a struggle where lives were at stake.

And so, against the Sword Demon falling helplessly through the dark, she watched for two attacks. One was that he would kick off the wall of the shaft and unleash a blow to match the one that had knocked her down here. The other, just as he had shown above, was that he would hurl a sword straight at her life. Which of the two it would be, she learned so soon that even a blink would have been time wasted.

"—Hss."

The instant her outstretched, black-sheathed toes traced a circle and opened three lines across Wilhelm's cheek, the Sword Demon swept both swords straight down to knock the wire aside, and his sturdy legs moved in rhythm, planting the sole of his shoe against the wall. A slight bend of the knee was enough to gather all the power his legs needed, and the Sword Demon was about to dash across the empty air—but just before he did, he flung both swords from his raised arms, and they streaked toward Yae's life.

Two streaks of silver light raced through the air at her, and Yae evaded them within the flow of her dance. Using the strung wires as a foothold, she flipped over, and the blades passed a hair's breadth beneath her crotch and along her arched back, leaving her unscathed. Then she lashed the wires from both feet at the Sword Demon, who came flying in after his swords. Having let go of his blades, with no means to meet the wires, Wilhelm twisted his body, shielding his head, and slipped through the mesh of threads with minimal damage. But Yae was already gone from the path of his charge. She had bounced away on her wires, out of reach of the empty-handed Sword Demon.

That made both of the moves she had watched for, and she had stopped them both—but it was too early for relief.

"—Ooooohhh!"

Having kicked off the wall and missed Yae, Wilhelm reached the opposite wall of the cylindrical shaft. Buried there were the twin swords he had thrown earlier; he seized them and kicked off the wall again. Chasing Yae, who had fled up and to one side, Wilhelm shot upward with the speed of a bullet. —And he kept going, kicking off the far wall, flying to the opposite one, then back again, over and over, closing in all at once on Yae as she rose in her dance.

"You're joking...!"

Wilhelm was coming after her with brute force piled on brute force, and Yae's throat quivered with shock. Climbing by kicking off the walls in triangle jumps was something Yae could do herself. That alone was nothing to be surprised at. What was astonishing was that the space where Wilhelm was doing it, again and again, had been strung with countless steel wires by Yae's own hand. Naturally, leaping without the leisure to inspect the way ahead meant risking a strand that would cut him to pieces. Yet Wilhelm did not fear it. Why? —Because he had already passed through this space once on the way down, had marked where every wire hung, and was leaping so as not to touch them.

It was a fearsome way of fighting, one in which abnormally superb battle sense and powers of observation lived side by side with the resolve to stake his life, without hesitation, on what he had confirmed with his own eyes. Fluttering through her dance as she met the Sword Demon plunging boldly into the storm of silver threads, Yae decided there was no help for it and reached for her trump card—

"—Nngh, hah."

Bouncing off a wire to leap high, Yae stretched out all four limbs while upside down, tangled the wires shot from her twenty digits into the wires she had strung beforehand, and drew her limbs in. Yae's skilled steel wire technique, using how the threads were entwined and the objects around her, could bind over a hundred ruffians at once in a battle in the woods. Yet even she had to put in so much strength that she thought every bone and muscle in her body would tear apart as she wrenched the wires taut all at once.

In that instant, snapped wires thrashed wildly and erratically through the cylindrical shaft leading underground. It was a cutting storm of threads that seemed to tear the whole space apart, born of a mechanism like slicing sausage with string and the tension of taut wire snapping, its paths and number unreadable even to Yae. And on top of that—

"—A capable maid always adds an extra touch!"

Beneath her, the shaft was being crushed flat by countless strikes of wire. Yae drew the rings on both hands to her lips and kissed them. And the next instant, fire ran along the threads stretching from the rings, and a beat later, the flames exploded. On top of the raging wire strikes came a searing inferno that burned everything to ash. Two trump cards turned over, and Yae's merciless shinobi arts wrapped the Sword Demon in crimson light and scorched him.

"As I thought—"

She hadn't managed to fight without killing after all, Yae thought, regretting how it had ended. But she had known that the moment the fight began. This was not an opponent she could beat while trying to spare him. Only by going in to kill did you even get a say in who lived and who died. So—

"Let's keep this a secret from Lord Heinkel—"

"—No need. He ought to know that I have come as well."

In that instant, the Sword Demon burst through the explosion, and the flash of his blade grazed Yae where she hung in midair.

"—Ngh."

A honed sword stroke swept across her torso. Unable to turn its force aside, Yae spun, flinging blood in a way that belonged to no dance, eyes wide, groaning in disbelief. What had happened was obvious. The enemy had survived both that storm of steel wire and the fire she'd added on top. The question was how. Wilhelm's last leap had gone straight up, unlike the diagonal jumps he'd made kicking off the walls. And in this shaft, there was only one way to jump like that: Yae's own method. Bouncing off the steel wires as footholds.

"How did you use my wires..."

"You showed me many times. Your wire is a frighteningly sharp weapon, but at a certain angle, with a certain amount of force, it binds instead of cutting."

Wilhelm's answer was accurate. He had seen right through the nature of her steel wire. What was absurd was that he had worked it out mid-fight in so little time, and that once again he had staked his life without hesitation on something unproven. And what made even less sense—

"Then what about the fire?"

"I cut it."

The reply was so blunt there was nothing to be done with it, and Yae let out an exasperated breath. It probably wasn't a lie. He had said it that plainly. Even as she accepted it, words surfaced from a corner of her mind. Words she had once tossed far away as useless—

"My old man's strong. Ridiculously strong. You and that Aldebaran guy are probably something else too, but even so, he's the one who scares me. That's what the Sword Demon is."

His complexes were on full display, but Heinkel's assessment had been right. She couldn't admit that Wilhelm was stronger than Al, or scarier, but at the very least he was more frightening than Yae.

—Yet in making that admission, Yae Tenzen had miscalculated.

Because it was Heinkel's opinion, she had discounted the information by half. And above all, Wilhelm's skill had grown sharper than it had been in the battles she had researched: the White Whale, the subjugation of Sloth, the defense of the Water Gate City. Yae had no way of knowing it, but he was closing in on the peak of his active years, the era in which he had defeated the Sword Saint.

And so, the battle between the Crimson Sakura and the Sword Demon that began in the Barielle Villa—

"—Raaaah!!"

—went to the Sword Demon, whose flashing blade cut the dance short before its finish and stained the crimson sakura herself with blood.