Barbarian's Adventure in a Fantasy World-Chapter 338: Total War (3)

A short while before Ketal reached the Demon King’s Castle, another champion had stood before its gates. His name was Alejandro, a Hero Swordmaster.

“Have you sent the word?” he asked without taking his eyes off the black walls.

“Yes. I delivered our position to the Tower Master! They should arrive soon,” the mage behind him replied.

“Good.” Alejandro lifted his chin and studied the fortress. “So this is the Demon King’s Castle.”

It was not large by the standards of stories and legends. In size, it could have been mistaken for a mortal citadel. What set it apart was the pressure that leaked through the stone, an oppressive weight of power so dense it felt like a storm held under glass. Even from this distance, Alejandro could tell what waited inside. Demons were gathered there, and they were not sleeping.

“It is a killing ground,” he said softly. “No rash moves. Form a defensive line and hold until the others arrive.”

The order went out with brisk nods. Men and women hurried to their places. The walls did not answer with arrows or flame. The castle simply watched. That stillness deepened Alejandro’s frown.

“Are they waiting for us to break formation and attack on their terms?” he said. “They’re cautious.”

A voice answered as if the air itself had grown a tongue. “We have no need to be impatient. Killing you is not our purpose.”

Steel rasped free before thought finished forming. Alejandro drew in the same motion he turned, a clean unsheathing that filled the blade with Aura until it sang. He struck at the source of the voice. A Hero-class cut carried the power to split stone and sky, and the blow would have done both. However, the strike slid aside as if it had touched oiled glass.

“All the same,” the dry-voiced demon said, tone almost lazy, “we have time to tidy away the guests who arrived early.”

The withered demon raised his sword, the motion as effortless as a yawn. The blade gleamed and darted for Alejandro’s chest. For a heartbeat, he saw the end approaching and understood that he had moved too late. 𝐟𝕣𝗲𝕖𝕨𝗲𝐛𝗻𝗼𝐯𝗲𝚕.𝗰𝚘𝐦

“Lord Alejandro!” someone shouted behind him, and several of his people hurled themselves toward the demon in a desperate, interposed rush. The demon’s sword twitched, as if shooing gnats.

There was a single stroke. Necks split, and heads slipped from shoulders. They were all Transcendents, yet none could even begin to answer that blade. Their deaths were not in vain. In the fleeting instant they had purchased, Alejandro tore himself free of the killing line.

“You... you,” Alejandro breathed.

The demon had stood beside him, and he had never noticed. It was possible only because the demonic presence was almost nothing at all, a thread so faint that any ordinary named demon would have been embarrassed to possess it. And then came a display of swordsmanship that bordered on the miraculous. There was only one being who could wield a blade like that.

“The Demon of the Sword. Caliste,” Alejandro murmured.

It was the same Demon Lord of Hell who had nearly killed both the Tower Master and the Saintess of the Sun God. Alejandro laughed once under his breath.

“I am honored far beyond my rank. In that case, I cannot retreat, can I?”

Reason said to fall back and live. However, the will that had made him a Swordmaster refused. Since the day he had touched steel, he had chased the peak. To meet the one who sat on that peak and refused the opportunity was worse than death.

Alejandro lifted his sword in both hands and brought it down with everything that he was. There was no carelessness in the cut. He had prepared routes for every response he could imagine and had committed to none so that he could answer whatever came.

Caliste lifted his sword as if to humor him. He met the descending blade with a small turn of the wrist. Alejandro had time for a single bewildered sound.

“What...”

His sword broke like a rotten branch. Caliste’s blade did not slow. Alejandro tried to flow to the side and felt the air lock around him. Caliste took a single step forward, and that was all. It was enough to seal every escape.

I’m going to die here, Alejandro thought, and still the mind performed the work it had trained to do. Angles flashed and fell apart.

Suddenly, the sword whispered through his neck. The Hero Swordmaster who had taught hundreds, whose name had crossed the continent on other people’s tongues, fell with his head a breath ahead of his body.

***

“I saw bodies on the way here,” Ketal said later, when the din of the larger battle rolled like weather behind them. “Throats cut through clean while the rest of the flesh was unmarked.”

Ketal had recognized more than one face.

“One of them was a man I knew in passing. Alejandro, I think. He challenged me while I was crossing the continent hunting Necrobix. I was in a hurry and refused, but I told him we would cross blades another day.” Ketal’s mouth turned rueful. “I suppose I have failed to keep that promise. Was it your work?”

“Was that the name?” Caliste’s voice held no interest either way. A Hero Swordmaster’s best strike had not earned a place in his memory.

“It does not matter,” Caliste said, and finally pushed himself up from the battered chair by the gate. “What matters is you.”

He spoke without heat, the way a man recited a list. “Abyss is preventing the gods from intervening. Materia is conducting the rite to summon the Demon King.”

That left a single Demon Lord of Hell who could move freely.

“If you bring me down, the gate opens,” Caliste said. He was the last door. He was the gatekeeper. “If you fail to bring me down, the gate stays shut.”

All around them, power broke itself against power. The Mortal Realm tore at the walls. The demons on the parapets threw everything they had back down. Somewhere within that black fortress, a ritual climbed toward a godlike name.

“If you kill me, we lose,” Caliste said. “If I kill you, we win.”

“A fight for the fates of the Mortal Realm and Hell,” Ketal said, and felt his heart thud hard enough to be a sound. He stood in the middle of a story that had been promised to him since he first read about swords and gods. His hands tightened on the axe. Eagerness rose like heat. Caliste’s mouth bent at the corners, the closest thing he ever gave to a smile.

“In that case,” he said.

“Let’s fight!” Ketal replied.

He stamped once. The charge that followed made Alejandro’s last sprint look like a child hurrying to dinner. Ketal fell upon the gate with an axe that could split a mountain range and let the ocean through. No power in Caliste’s body could meet that head on.

Yet, Caliste neither yielded nor leapt away. He lifted his sword to meet the descending edge. In the strike, Caliste’s sword moved at an odd angle, neither parry nor block as mortals performed them. The motion caught the mass of the axe and turned it, poured it into a curve that spent itself in the air beside his shoulder.

Caliste’s feet had not shifted. Ketal recovered without breath and lifted the axe in a rising cut. The sword rolled over and around and met it, turning the bite aside with a touch as neat as a seamstress’s hand.

“Still a miraculous swordmanship,” Ketal said, and meant it.

Strength met technique and was turned aside. Ketal knew the old proverb—that finesse triumphs over force, that the limited overcomes the strong. He had seen it a hundred times in stories: a wooden sword diverting a strike meant to cleave through armor, as if fiction itself obeyed another law of physics. He had never expected to feel it rise through his arms and settle in his bones.

The axe blurred from savage to smooth and back again. Caliste’s blade remained a single calm line that shifted only as much as it needed to. After a handful of exchanges, Ketal saw the shape of Caliste’s intent.

“You are playing the doorkeeper in earnest,” he said. “You intend to stand and defend, not gamble your life on a duel. It suits the purpose. Your task is to hold me here.”

“Our purpose is the Demon King’s descent,” Caliste said. “I do not need to die with you to fulfill it. I would give a great deal to set that aside and fight you with nothing held back, but that is indulgence. I failed once already. I will not ruin the plan by chasing my pleasure.”

“A shame,” Ketal said. “I have the same problem.”

He exhaled, and Aura rose along the curve of the axe like frost climbing a window.

“The Abomination’s authority,” Caliste said, his eyebrows flickering.

The Abomination’s power killed what it touched. Unless a defense was as particular as Necrobix’s had been, nothing could endure it. Ketal stepped in and struck. The plan was simple. He would carve through blade and body and end this at once.

Caliste lifted his sword the way he had before. Steel met Aura, but the sword did not break. It moved with the same odd grace, turned the authority as if it were nothing but weight, and slipped the edge toward Ketal’s stomach in the space that opened.

“Ha,” Ketal said and rolled his hips out of line, feeling the kiss of air where the cut should have been. He stepped back once and found Caliste studying him with real interest.

“You avoid even that,” Caliste said. “Fine reflexes.”

“You did not chip,” Ketal answered, more to himself than to his opponent.

The sword that had met the Abomination’s authority had not suffered a nick.

“I’m assuming that’s your authority,” Ketal said.

“My sword,” Caliste answered.

He was the Demon of the Sword. His authority was a single blade.

“The power to cut all things dwells in this sword,” Caliste said, and the words did not sound like a boast. “Its hardness is my will.”

As long as his will did not break, the blade would not either. If the authority could not kill the will, it could not kill the sword.

“So you are more trouble than you look,” Ketal said, smiling.

The Abomination inside him clicked its tongue.

“Do not take that tone with me,” it said. “If you were using my true authority, a sword like that would splinter like kindling. The fault is yours.”

Ketal laughed and let the Aura fall.

“Fine. Then we do this the straightforward way.”

“Come,” Caliste said.

“Gladly.”

They moved at once.

***

The axe carved the air again and again, drawing dozens of paths in the time it took an ordinary man to blink twice. Each path had enough force behind it to flatten a fortress tower. A lesser Hero would have been pieces after the third. Even the Tower Master’s layered wards would have cracked under that torrent.

Yet, Caliste did not give ground. He coaxed each stroke away with the flat or the edge, let it slide, let it slip, carried the violence to the side, and set it down intact. His body received storm after storm and never lost balance. Where the axe wrote fury, the sword wrote footnotes that set everything in order.

Sparks flew. A long, thin line opened toward Ketal’s throat. He brought the axe up and batted the point aside, prepared to press. The sword did something peculiar instead of rebounding. It stayed with the axe, clinging to the edge like a magnet.

“Oh,” Ketal said, surprised into delight.

He tried to shake the blade off, but it did not fall away. Caliste stepped into him, exactly as if he had been waiting for this contact.

The sword rode the long edge down. It traveled toward Ketal’s fingers, intent on taking the first joint.

Ketal released the haft and felt the steel skim across the wood where his knuckles had been. He turned his empty hand into a fist and drove it at Caliste’s face. The Demon of the Sword bent at the waist and set the side of his blade across his brow.

The strike landed. The impact shoved him all the way back to the threshold stones. He snapped his wrist and looked up.

“What monstrous strength,” he said. “I doubt even the God of Strength would fare well against you.”

“Thank you,” Ketal replied, and reached out to catch the axe as it fell.

He stepped, put weight behind his shoulder, and threw. The axe spun in a heavy arc. Caliste started to move aside out of habit, then realized where he stood. The gate was at his back. If he dodged and the weapon struck the doors, they would not hold. If he tried to stop it with brute force, the gate might fail anyway.

He extended his sword, and metal met metal. Caliste’s arm traced a small, fluid circle, the blade gliding with effortless precision. The point slipped into the inner curve of Ketal’s whirling axe, and that subtle motion pulled the arc tighter, turning its power inward. Ketal’s eyes widened.

The spinning axe changed its path and went past Caliste’s shoulder without touching anything, tightened its own loop, and returned along a perfect line.

It came at Ketal just as fast as when he’d thrown it. He reached out and caught the haft, the force he’d poured into it driving him back three steps across the sand. Then he dug in his heels and laughed—sharp, bright, and half in disbelief.

“What did you do?” Ketal asked him.

Caliste had used his sword to redirect a thrown axe without bleeding off the force. The stored violence came back to Ketal with none of the shine dulled. Seeing it with his own eyes did not make it easier to accept. He doubted he could teach himself to repeat it if he had a year and a thousand tries.

Ketal was not angry. He was, purely and completely, impressed. And it told him something he needed to know.

“I will not break you with strength,” Ketal decided.

If raw power could solve this, the last exchange would have solved it. He thought, briefly, about calling the Dragon Tongue and decided against it. He had learned enough to charm a sky, but he had not lived with that language long enough to put a Demon Lord down with it.

He looked at Caliste and saw a mirror held at a distance—a single weapon, a body disciplined to move without thought, technique set against the world itself. It was like staring at his own footprints in the snow, at the place where everything had first begun.

“In that case, let’s go back to the beginning,” Ketal said.

Ketal slid his right hand down the haft until his grip shortened and the heavy axe sat closer to his body.