Chapter 16
—
At the far end of a narrow, winding alleyway.
“Here, here!”
The child who had been tugging urgently at Charlotte’s skirts stopped dead — and, as if switched off, the wailing that had been pouring out only seconds before cut off entirely.
“Wh-what’s wrong? Where’s your mother?”
After a moment, the child dashed away from the two as if fleeing.
“Be careful.”
Dale reached out quietly and checked Charlotte before she could react.
“Oh dear, what do we have here!”
A shadow detached itself from the stone wall at the alley’s shaded end, flashing several short blades in its hand as if to show them off.
“What on earth brings a noble scion to such a filthy place?”
Other shadows that had been hiding stepped out in quick succession and closed around the two, hemming them in.
‘Five in total.’
One was a higher-ranked thief, the rest a few rungs below him. They hadn’t formally learned the knightly aura techniques, but by their own methods they made use of aura. Enough strength to handle a couple of the duke’s retinue, at least.
Experience honed in the gutter is not something to be dismissed.
Dale coldly counted their number and level. Charlotte, belatedly grasping the danger, put her hand on the sword hilt.
“You should step back, Young Lord.”
At that, the senior thief — Jade — spoke.
“Our interest is, fundamentally, that little girl.”
“…!”
Charlotte’s face hardened at the words.
“We will not hand over the Orhart heiress to scum like you.”
“Hah! How noble, a chivalrous knight protecting a lady.”
Jade sneered.
“But Young Lord, there are times and places for everything.”
We will not lay a hand on the duke’s scion. So withdraw quietly.
Leave the girl behind.
That, in short, was their meaning.
“……”
Dale said nothing. Charlotte glanced at him; for an instant there flickered a faint doubt — would he leave her?
“I, Dale of Saxen, have sworn on my house’s name to protect the Orhart heiress.”
Therefore—
“Don’t worry.”
“D-Dale…”
Dale smiled and answered.
“You promised.”
He had promised to protect her in the name of the Saxen house until one day her sword could reach the hearts of holy knights. That promise.
“All right then—time for the world to taste a bit of bitterness.”
Jade clicked his tongue softly at that and the negotiations ended.
What remained was force.
Their plan was simple: subdue the duke’s eldest without leaving major wounds, take the girl alive, then signal their men. Just as they were about to give the order—
Dale extended a finger.
Magic began to surge along his fingertip.
‘Magic!’
Dale was a prodigy of the duke’s house, gifted beyond measure with sword and sorcery. Realizing that magic would reach them, Jade stomped the ground.
The five thieves rushed in together, the boy and girl the center of the charge.
In a fight with a mage, distance is life. No matter how talented Dale might be, he was only nine years old; he could not match the veteran blade of someone like Jade.
That’s how it should have been.
Whoosh!
Then the wind came.
‘Wind?’
No — it wasn’t wind. In a place where even a breeze did not move, Dale’s cloak began to flutter violently.
One of the men, failing to grasp the meaning, lunged to take Dale down.
“Move aside, you idiots!”
Jade felt a chill run through him as he took a step back.
Swish!
A blade of shadow sprang up at Dale’s feet. A pitch-black spike shot up and plunged into the throat of the attacker darting at his back.
Through the hollow of his neck.
“Ghk—!”
Blood splattered everywhere with a wet sound.
“That’s four.”
Without even looking, Dale murmured — his voice flat, devoid of emotion.
The shadow blade: the first form of his artifact, the Shadow Cloak.
But it was not the end.
Dale snapped his fingers toward the corpse pierced by the spike.
Dark power ran along the shadow blade like a conductor’s wire.
Crack.
The dead man’s body twisted into an unnatural angle. His corpse began to retch.
“Ughh—ugh—ugh!”
All manner of organs poured from his mouth.
Heart, intestines, lungs, stomach, rectum — life’s pointless parts for someone already dead.
Then, into the empty cavity of the corpse, a shadow rose from Dale’s cloak and slid in through the throat.
Like a living snake. Slithering out from the shadow at his feet to take on an independent form.
The second form of the Shadow Cloak.
“Krrrrreeeeek!”
A shadow parasite.
“Hungry, hungry, hungryyy!”
The voice that had been echoing as a phantom whispered in his ear now roared through the corpse’s vocal cords.
Crack!
A rib — no longer needed to protect organs — jutted up like a blade from the dead man’s hand.
A gleaming white bone sword.
Recalling the basics of the dead-soldier rites his father had taught him and combining them with the cloak’s malevolence, Dale birthed a new revenant. A shadow soldier struck the ground.
There was no need to give explicit orders. Drawn by the hunger rooted in the corpse and the will of darkness taking hold of its host, it moved on its own.
Dale’s Shadow Cloak continued to flutter where not even a breeze should be moving.
It was dangerous to approach.
“Stop that corpse!”
Jade ordered his men and reset his grip on the blade.
He could not calmly deal with this as if it were the duke’s blood. Any hesitation now would mean their heads on the block. Whatever responsibility his organization would ask of him later could wait — there was a neck here that could be cut in an instant.
──Could this be all the work of a nine-year-old? No. Having survived a lifetime in the underworld, he knew by instinct.
What the child’s hand now produced.
It was not the kind of thing to be explained away by being a prodigiously talented duke’s scion or the son of a towermaster. It was bleaker, meaner, without an ounce of nobility — pure, unadulterated malice.
“You monster…”
Gripping his blade, Jade stamped the ground and poured aura through his body, gaining speed beyond human limits. The daggers in his hands fanned out.
But the countless jet-black shadows that had risen from the ground met his blade like shields.
‘This is the opening!’
The shadow blades that the cloak could form would be proportional to the amount of magic behind them. No matter how gifted the duke’s son might be, he would have expended a lot to hold that defense.
Slash!
Dodging the spikes rising from the ground, Jade charged.
He scattered his throwing knives in a fan to force the cloak to spend magic on defense before he closed. The tempo snapped and distance was reduced.
“──.”
Cold element condensed at the tip of Dale’s finger.
Even so, a bolt of magic fired at point-blank range would, in Jade’s experience, be avoidable. Masterful killers could dodge a bolt fired right at them. No matter how enhanced by formulas, magic lacked the stopping power and velocity of a real arrow.
That was what he thought — until Dale uttered words he could not begin to comprehend.
“Double barrel — twelve gauge, 00 buckshot.”
Ice crystallized along Dale’s fingertip; Jade focused on reading the trajectory of the frozen projectiles.
But when the great mass of ice shattered and scattered into nine ice pellets, then fired—
“…?!”
It was nearly impossible to escape the shot pattern of ice fragments scattered like shotgun pellets.
Countless shards ripped into his body, yet Jade did not fall back easily.
He gritted his teeth through the agony of his flesh being torn and his organs crushed.
‘Not yet… not yet…!’
‘Not yet.’
He had buffed his body with aura, and Dale’s ice bullets were still not comparable to gunshot stopping power.
Clinging to life by a sliver and coughing up blood as his insides burned, Jade moved his legs.
Zero distance.
‘I’ve won!’
Confident of victory, Jade readied his sword. He had no idea then what the ‘double barrel’ Dale had murmured meant.
Double barrels. To understand the child’s incomprehensible phrase in this world, one might call it:
─memorize (spell-loaded).
Bang!
At the last moment — literally a shot fired at point-blank range — a twelve-gauge buckshot, in the form of ice pellets, scattered anew.
‘This monster…’
There was no longer a human shape there.
But the fight was not over — to call it a fight was to call a massacre a duel.
“Hungry, hungry, hungryyy!”
Shadow soldiers brandished bone blades that had burst from torsos like hooked claws. When their white-edged bone sliced into one thug’s belly, the entrails gushed through the gap.
Leaving screams behind, Dale turned his head without glancing at the carnage behind him and looked down at Charlotte, whose legs were trembling.
“This is your first time seeing someone die, isn’t it?”
At least, she had never seen such a gruesome death.
“…Yes.”
Charlotte nodded with a child’s pallid face, hesitant.
Dale fought with no reserve. His skill now was incomparable to when he had sparred with only a stiletto.
Charlotte could not even set her foot to the ground with the rapier she had drawn. She felt ashamed, ridiculous.
“Ice Bullet.”
Dale aimed his finger again.
Finally, one man tried to flee without looking back; a condensation of cold element fired straight at his ankle.
Bang!
With a scream, the man’s ankle vanished and he collapsed onto the filthy alley floor.
“H-h-h! Don’t come, don’t come…!”
As the last surviving thug tried to flee, a shadow soldier closed in to hunt him.
“Come back.”
Dale snapped his fingers.
“Kreeeeeeek!”
The corpse screamed and exploded; the shadow that had used the body as host was drawn back to Dale’s feet.
Dale walked straight toward the man whose ankle had been blown off and could not move.
“P-please save me! I’ll tell you everything I know!”
“Everything you know?”
“Y-yes! I’ll tell you everything! I’ll tell you, please—”
Dale cocked his head.
“There’s nothing you can tell me.”
His eyes were very dark.
“And I don’t particularly want to know.”
His voice was flat, showing no hint of feeling.
“Why should I save you?”
He cocked his head again and then spoke as he leveled his finger.
“You monster, you filthy monster…!”
There it was again.
Bang!
With that word, the sound of screams ceased; mouths that should have screamed had been removed.
“…”
Silence settled, and Dale turned to Charlotte.
“This is the true face people fear of the Saxen ducal house.”
He wrapped his action in the infamy of the ducal name.
“And the power of the ducal house will be what keeps its promise — that it will protect you.”
“…”
Charlotte bit her lip quietly.
“Scared, aren’t you?”
“…Yes. A little.”
Charlotte nodded at Dale’s words. Her legs still trembled.
“…But you fought to protect me anyway.”
Despite her fear, Charlotte gave a small, steady smile — a quiet resolve.
“Thank you.”
She said it. No matter how frightened, she would never point at Dale and call him a monster.
“You said you would buy my future with your life.”
Dale nodded without a word.
“No, you didn’t.”
“No?”
For a moment Dale did not understand, then tilted his head.
“You taught me what a future could be.”
Charlotte gave him a wry smile.
“To someone like me who knew nothing of reality.”
Amid the scattered corpses and spilled blood—
“You gave me the hope that with my sword I could protect the Orhart family.”
She had believed there would only be despair. She had thought that even under the Saxen name, nothing would change.
She had been wrong.
Only after recognizing the true reality in which she stood did Charlotte understand the weight of Dale’s words.
What Dale had given her that day was hope greater than anything else: the hope that with her sword she could defend what she loved.
“…”
“So I will be your sword.”
She drew her rapier and continued.
“I will train harder.”
Even if, for now, she could only be protected one-sidedly.
“Until the day I can be the blade that swings for you.”
“…Reliable.”
Dale smiled softly at her.
He had thought there was no debt of gratitude to Lord Badel. Taking her in had been purely for his sake and his house — or so he had believed.
But Charlotte volunteering by her own will to be ‘Dale’s blade’ meant more than he had expected.
—
—
After the incident settled, a messenger of the ducal house delivered a letter to the Count of Brandenburg.
It bore the Duke of Saxen’s seal and signature.
‘I realize it will be a difficult journey, but I would like to invite Your Excellency to the Saxen ducal estate.’
Courteous, yet containing an unrefusable, silent pressure.
‘Please, for the sake of courtesy, do not decline.’
It was not hard to read the situation.
The plan to kidnap the daughter of the Holy Blade had fizzled into nothing; recently, the agent sent to contact the thief guild had disappeared.
“Those damned bastards, ruining things…!”
A summons from the Black Duke to demand responsibility — tantamount to walking into the maw oneself.
But when the Empire’s greatest magnate applied pressure, even the best holy knight had little choice.
