System of the Beast Slayer [litrpg Adventure]
Copyright© 1999 by CaffeinatedTales
Chapter 241
Night in the forest.
Before the campfire, shadows danced with the flames. Two Witchers circled each other on a clearing in the wood, two pairs of slit pupils, strange and beast-like, fixed upon a single point.
Like beasts stalking each other’s flesh.
Kael suddenly sprang forward in a great lunging charge, dead leaves flying up beneath his feet. The Viper steel sword split down through the air from overhead with a shrill hiss, cleaving toward the wraith before him.
Yet a steel sword lighter, narrower, thinner, brushed across the spine of his blade and sent out a spray of brilliant sparks, shedding the force of the Viper steel sword with perfect economy.
Using the toes of his left foot as a pivot, Flavius dragged his blade and turned his body clockwise, slipping free of the sword’s momentum. Then, ghostlike, he drove a thrust toward Kael’s waist from the side.
Kael jumped back, but the Cat School Witcher clung to him like rot to bone, following close, his point never leaving the vital lines of Kael’s body.
Kael simply planted himself where he stood and set the Viper steel sword whirling so tightly that it formed a curtain of steel before him, smothering that darting wraith in its sweep.
A string of sharp cracks burst through the night above the forest.
Flavius seemed wrapped in mist. He moved so swiftly he looked like an afterimage, as though two men were striking from different angles at once, battering again and again against the steel curtain.
Like waves hurling themselves against a seawall, one after another without end.
Every time Kael caught a blow, Flavius slipped back, opening space to avoid the Thunderbolt of his counterstrike. Then he turned with feline suppleness, shifted angle, and cut at his flanks and back.
The sparks bursting from blade on blade lit the forest night.
The swordsmanship of the Cat School Witcher was stripped to the bone. He used no gaudy feints, no wasted flourishes. Every strike sought only speed, precision, and ruthlessness, one clean killing stroke.
It was the sword of assassination, hidden within shadow.
Without realizing it, cold sweat had risen on the Viper School Witcher’s brow. He could only rely on the greater strength in his limbs to endure, stubbornly holding the defense and snatching the rare chance to counter.
A pity. Flavius moved like an eel slick with mud. Every counterstrike found nothing but air.
The battle burned hotter and hotter.
They remained deadlocked for a long time.
At last, unable to break through, Flavius lost patience. In one instant he leapt back, gripped the steel sword in both hands, raised it above his head, then spun around.
That stroke carried the full weight of his body and all the force he could pour into it, driving the opponent back step by step.
Then Flavius opened into a circling Sword Dance, ceaseless, tireless, the blade spinning, the wrists spinning, the body itself spinning, setting the air into violent trembling and whipping up dead leaves.
His steps moved forward with it, turning him into a storm of steel. In each instant he cut at least five or six times, and the biting edge of the sword-light reached over a chi beyond the point, engulfing both him and his foe.
Kael could not dodge in time. The Sword Wind sheared away a lock of his hair, and after enduring it for barely two more seconds, he rolled flat across the ground and escaped the circle of battle.
“That’s enough, Griffin, hold.” Kael formed Quen, yellow light flowing over his body.
And Flavius’s spinning sword came to a stop five chi from him.
Flavius drew a deep breath and slowly sheathed the blade. Those few short seconds of Sword Dance had drained him more than every move before put together. Sweat now soaked him from head to toe.
“I lost,” Kael said. In swordsmanship alone, he had been completely suppressed. Yet he was not discouraged. If Signs and other means had been added...
The other three Viper School Witchers clicked their tongues in amazement. Kael currently ranked third in swordsmanship among the Viper School, and none of them had expected that this suddenly appeared Witcher of the Cat School would suppress him so thoroughly that he had been forced to bring out Signs.
That was no common thing.
Still, none of the Viper School men felt disheartened. A contest of swordsmanship was not a fight to the death. Real battle changed in an instant, and who would win in truth remained anyone’s guess.
“You’re no slouch either, Kael,” Flavius said with approval. “Of everyone I’ve crossed with, your swordsmanship ranks in the top ten ... Had we kept going, I doubt my stamina would have held much longer.”
“No need for false modesty. You won this bout. But I have one question, what was the origin of that swordsmanship you used at the end?” Kael drank from the bottle to settle the slight gloom in him.
“A secret sword of the Cat School.” Flavius said no more than that and fell silent. The Witchers did not press.
Every school had its own secret arts. The Viper School had venom, the Cat School had swordsmanship, the Griffin had Signs. Among the Witcher schools there was an unspoken rule, such arts could be passed only within the school itself. To reveal them willingly to outsiders was treated as betrayal of the school, and the consequences were worse even than Berengar’s betrayal.
“And who is the one you say ranks first in swordsmanship?” Kael’s curiosity had been stirred.
Flavius sat back down by the fire, and there was a trace of old feeling in his voice. “He is one of the leaders of the Cat School, Treyse.” Plainly, there was some unforgettable history between them.
“Well then, we’ve talked, and we’ve crossed blades. Let me hear the rest of Roy’s Trial of the Grasses.”
...
The next morning, when dawn crept over the eastern horizon, the Witchers came out of the tents.
There were still more than ten horses left wandering in the woods, remnants of the bandits’ camp, but this was wilderness. Even if the Witchers took the horses, they would find no place to dispose of them, so they let the matter go.
The bandits had also left behind a fair sum of stolen money in the camp. The Viper School Witchers did not touch a coin of it and left it all to Flavius as spoils, since he was the one who had killed them.