Chapter 251: Sword Festival (IV)

…When Gray’s attention was solely focused on me.

Why did he have to get his talent stolen? And was even thrown out of the D’Aurélion Family…?

Why him…?

If it wasn’t him… we’d probably have been fiancées by now.

I swung my sword at another beast that jumped from the branches above without really looking at it.

Splat.

The thought alone made my chest feel tight in a way I didn’t particularly like.

I remembered the day I found out.

I was twelve.

A servant had mentioned it in passing, the way servants mentioned things they thought weren’t important, and I had stood in the corridor outside my father’s study for a long time after that, not moving, just standing there with that information sitting in my chest like something swallowed wrong.

Gray Vireux D’Aurélion.

Talent stripped, and expelled from the family register.

Just like that.

Like he had never been there.

I cut through two more beasts without breaking my stride.

Splat, fwip!

The D’Aurélion Family.

I let myself think about them properly for exactly three seconds, which was about as long as I could afford before it started affecting my breathing.

The strongest duke family for more than a century…, and they threw him out like he was nothing.

Like he was nothing.

My grip on my sword tightened.

’When I ascend to become the Empress… I’ll make sure that their family disappears out of the fucking map.’

Another beast came from the left.

Splat!

I exhaled slowly and made myself let go of the grip tension before it became a habit.

’Focus. That’s later. This is now.’

Now was the forest, where one hundred and fifty spots and four hundred and seventy three participants and whatever was currently—

…Swish!

I stopped walking as I heard a sudden movement.

“What… is this?”

The shadows between two of the larger trees were moving against the direction of the sourceless light, pooling slightly.

I stood very still.

The shape that stepped out was small.

Smaller than I expected from the presence I had felt, barely reaching my waist, slight and thin-limbed with the jerky, deliberate movements of something that was confident in a way its size didn’t immediately justify.

Red skin.

Dark eyes that caught the pale forest light and returned it as something dimmer.

Two small horns above its temples, curved slightly backward, unmistakable.

My hand tightened on my sword.

An imp.

Lowest tier of demon classification.

Individually, barely a threat to anyone at my level.

But imps didn’t come alone.

And imps didn’t appear inside a sealed festival dungeon without being put there by something considerably above their own classification.

I looked at it.

It looked at me.

“Ellen warned me…” I mumbled to myself.

The imp’s dark eyes didn’t move from my face.

Swoosh!

The imp moved first.

It launched itself at me with its arms spread wide, its mouth open, not caring about any single move that I made.

They were demons made to hunt in groups, with no intelligence whatsoever.

I didn’t move back.

I brought my sword up, let the sword qi build along the edge for exactly half a second, and released it in a single horizontal arc.

SHHHHK!

The crescent of qi left the blade clean and fast and the imp didn’t have time to understand what it was before it passed through it completely.

Splat!

Two halves. Two separate directions. The red skin split like it had always been two things pretending to be one.

I looked at it.

It’s the weakest type of demon for a reason.

Then I heard it.

Not one sound, many sounds from all around me.

Coming from every direction with the specific overlapping quality of things that had been waiting rather than approaching, as if the first imp’s death had been a signal rather than an incident.

I turned slowly.

Ten.

I counted them without meaning to, stepping out from between trees and rising from the undergrowth and dropping from branches, their red skin catching the pale forest light, their small horns identical to the first one’s.

Ten became twenty before I finished counting.

“Twenty? That’s fine… I can handle twenty,” I sighed in relief.

But then, twenty became forty.

I gritted my teeth.

Forty became sixty.

“…Okay.”

Sixty became a hundred, pouring from between the trees in a continuous stream that didn’t seem to have a bottom to it, the forest filling with the sound of their movement, that low collective breathing that a large group of small things produced when they were all focused on the same target.

A hundred became two hundred.

I gritted my teeth.

I could handle twenty at the same time. Maybe twenty-five if I was being generous with myself and the conditions were good.

Two hundred?

I would die trying.

I was honest enough with myself to admit that without it taking very long.

“…Fuck. I need to get away from here until someone notices this!”

Fwish!

Obviously, I decided to run away.

I went left because left had the thinnest concentration when I turned, three imps instead of a wall of them, and I cut through all three without slowing down.

Shhk, splat!

Three splats behind me.

The rest followed.

The sound of two hundred imps moving through a forest at speed was something I was going to remember for a long time whether I wanted to or not.

To make things worse, the low continuous rustling of the imps moving was somehow worse than something louder would have been.

I pushed more qi into my legs and ran faster.

An imp dropped from a branch directly in my path.

Fwip!

I cut it without breaking stride and its two halves fell to either side of me as I passed between them.

Two more from the left.

Splat!

Another from the right.

Shhk!

Keep moving, Seraph!

Don’t you dare stop!

I wasn’t stopping.

A group of seven had gotten ahead of me somehow, cutting through the trees faster than I had accounted for, forming a loose line across my path with the collective confidence of things that understood numbers.

I didn’t slow down.

I released a wide crescent of sword qi at full output and it passed through all seven in a single arc before I reached their position.

SHHHHK!

Seven splats.

I ran through the gap before the halves finished falling.

Behind me the horde hadn’t thinned. If anything the sound of it had gotten larger, more imps joining from deeper in the forest, drawn by whatever signal the first one’s death had sent.

’How many are there?’ I thought.

I didn’t have a good answer for that.

My lungs were starting to register the effort.

Not badly, not yet, but the awareness was there, as I felt my body getting weaker due to the continuouns use of Sword Qi

In my current realm, the Sword Qi is literally a double-edged sword since I don’t have enough inner strength to fully release it.

This is why, only at the King Realm, one can only fully comprehend and use it.

“Tsk…”

An imp grabbed my ankle.

I looked down, genuinely surprised, because I hadn’t felt it coming and that was embarrassing.

Shhk!

I cut its arms off at the elbow without breaking my stride and it fell away behind me making a sound I didn’t feel particularly bad about.

I kept running.

The trees were getting denser ahead, the roots more irregular, the canopy closing back in until the light dropped to almost nothing.

I had to slow slightly to manage the footing and the half-second I lost to that was enough for the leading edge of the horde to close the gap behind me by ten meters.

Too close.

I sent another crescent backward without turning.

Fwip!

The sound it made passing through the front rank of the horde was not clean like the single targets.

It was something messier and louder that I didn’t look back at.

Screaming… lots of screaming.

’Good,’ I thought, and immediately felt slightly guilty about thinking good at a sound like that.

I kept running anyway.

Then the ground changed.

The roots thickened suddenly, rising out of the soil in interlocking ridges that crossed each other in every direction, and the trees pressed so close together on either side that the gap between them was barely a person wide.

The path I had been following, if it could be called a path, narrowed to nothing.

And ahead of me, a rock face… it was sheer and tall, covered in the same dark moss I had noticed earlier and found pretty.

I found it considerably less pretty right now.

I stopped with my back against it and turned around.

The horde filled the space between the trees from edge to edge, a solid mass of red skin and small horns and dark eyes all pointed at me, the forest behind them moving with more of them still arriving.

I looked at them.

They looked at me.

’Well,’ I thought.

I raised my sword.

’…This is not ideal.’

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