* * *

It was always darkest just before sunrise.

Was human life the same? If so, how many people had given up in despair at the deep darkness, just before the sun rose?

Ironically, then, the regret of thinking, If only they had held on a little longer, belonged to those who had refused to give up, survived, and lived to greet the sun.

In that darkest hour, without even a glimmer of dawn, four boats slipped out of the marshes on Gringen’s outskirts like snakes slithering from cover.

Four or five people rode in each boat, carrying torches. The wavering flames illuminated the pitch-black river.

Before long, the four boats reached the landing south of Gringen. Roughly twenty people piled ashore.

They had daggers tucked inside their clothes, but their hands held either torches or clubs.

The apparent leader addressed the others. In the torchlight, his forward-facing nostrils were particularly striking. It was none other than Ged the Snub-Nosed.

“We can’t risk killing the third young lord, so don’t draw your daggers. Just beat the living fuck out of them. Pull the youngest-looking one out of the way.”

He swept his arm in a broad gesture for them to follow.

Amid a jumble of footsteps, the gang reached the warehouse where Valeri’s party was staying.

Ged grasped the handle of the large swinging door and glanced back at his men one last time.

Then he hauled it open.

RRRRRATTLE!

His men surged inside, ready to beat anyone they found senseless.

But the torchlight revealed no one inside the warehouse.

Ged stared blankly for a few seconds before speaking. It never occurred to him that the Black Hand had already exposed his plan.

“... Is this the wrong place?”

That was when he heard someone suddenly running toward him, footsteps pattering rapidly. As he turned his head, an impact almost comparable to a traffic collision knocked him unconscious.

THUD!

The person who had slammed into Ged was Skard. He had sprinted in from a distance behind his round shield, then hurled himself bodily into Ged with all his might.

Ged went down helplessly, with Skard landing on top of him.

In one practiced motion, Skard immediately drove his dagger into the unconscious man’s belly, sliced upward, and sprang to his feet.

Ged’s men froze for a moment, eyes wide as they struggled to understand what was happening. Then another collision struck from the opposite side.

WHAM!

“Urgh!”

“Whoa!”

Several men fell at once. This time it was Arne.

Arne, too, thrust his dagger just as he had practiced over and over: point angled slightly upward, stabbing into the lower belly, then cutting diagonally.

They did it that way in case their opponents wore leather vests or other clothing that offered protection against blades.

It was simple. Charge straight into them shield-first, then immediately stab them in the belly.

The drawback was that it could kill only one person at a time, but it was reliable. And if the opening attack succeeded, the rest were bound to be thrown into confusion.

There was also someone who could build on that success and finish the job decisively: Valeri, who had been hiding in a corner of the warehouse.

Unless one was a master, detecting Valeri when he moved as an assassin was almost impossible. And his swordsmanship was astonishingly smooth and precise.

Approaching low to the ground like creeping dusk, Valeri swung his sword. Its blade flashed in the torchlight.

Ged’s virtually defenseless men lost their heads without even knowing why they were dying. Blood spurted from severed necks, and as their bodies collapsed, the torches in their hands fell to the floor.

“Eeeek!”

“Fuck! What the hell!”

Seeing the man right beside them lose his head and spout blood was enough to drive the attackers out of their minds.

Besides, it was the darkest hour, before even the first light of dawn. Even with torches, they could barely make out Valeri’s movements. All they could see was something dark flitting past. Was it a person, or a shadow?

Meanwhile, Arne and Skard steadily killed their enemies, charging into them behind their shields.

Five or six men died within moments of the first attack. The survivors still overwhelmingly outnumbered Valeri’s party, of course, but most people were in no state to think about that by this point.

Did they have more men or fewer? Should they fight back or run? Their attention could only fix on what lay right before their eyes: their dead companions.

“Aaaaargh!”

“Wh-what is this!”

“Fuck!”

Some at least tried to resist, swinging their clubs wildly. Others simply fled, while still others sank to the floor and trembled. Any further organized fighting already seemed impossible.

Those who resisted became Valeri’s first targets, receiving fatal wounds and dying in an instant.

Amid the confusion, one of the panicking attackers spotted a smaller figure. The third young lord immediately came to mind. Thinking a hostage was his only chance of survival, he reached out to seize him.

Naturally, Knut moved out of the way. But all he did was take a casual step to one side, so the attacker kept trying to grab him.

He never managed it. A burning sensation flared across his neck, his arms lost their strength, and suddenly he could not breathe, as though he were drowning. He could only crumple to the floor.

At some point, his throat had been cut deep. Blood gushed from the wound and blocked his airway.

“Cough! Ack! Grrk!”

Knut looked down at him coldly.

“Are you an idiot? Who’s going to let you grab them when you make it that obvious?”

“Y-young lord! Are you all right?”

Yorik, who had done nothing but hide, called from behind a cargo crate, apparently worried about Knut all the same. Knut casually tossed him the dagger he had just used to kill the attacker.

“Clean it.”

And that was the end of it. Every torch lay on the ground.

Arne and Skard were panting a little, since their fighting method required all their strength. Still, both had trained bodies; neither was so exhausted that he could not lift a finger.

Holding his bloodied sword, Valeri addressed them.

“You’re better at this than I expected. I thought you’d freeze up and be unable to move.”

“...”

Bloodshed was not an everyday occurrence, but serving as city guards meant seeing all sorts of things. They were hardly complete novices facing their first fight.

Valeri approached a survivor who sat trembling on the floor. Several torches had fallen behind Valeri, and their backlight left his face black to the man watching him.

His eyes seemed to shine. The man could not tell whether they glowed on their own or merely reflected the flames. Either way, terror was the only emotion left in him.

Valeri wiped his bloody sword on the man’s clothes. After cleaning it thoroughly, he sheathed it and spoke.

“Answer properly and I’ll let you live. Try my patience and I’ll kill you. Understand?”

The man nodded rapidly.

“Is Creed here among the men who came today? Your boss.”

The man shook his head.

“Really? He’s unbelievably cautious. He sends twenty men and doesn’t come himself?”

There was a reason Duke Sven had failed to deal with him for so long.

“Hey, Yorik. Bring me a handful of salt.”

“What? Oh, yes.”

Yorik, who had been staring in horror at the scattered corpses, hurried to fetch the salt.

Valeri took the attacker’s hand himself and placed the salt in it.

“Take this back and eat it with your boss. Once it’s light, I’ll be handing out salt again. Tell your boss that if he wants more, he can come and get some too. Got it?”

Valeri jerked his head to tell him to leave. When the man still seemed slow to understand, Valeri even patted his shoulder encouragingly.

Apparently he had never truly expected to survive. For a while, he looked bewildered as well as frightened.

At last he pulled himself together, returned to the landing, and climbed into a boat. He put the salt in his pocket and rowed away.

“... How can it be this easy?”

Skard surveyed the corpses as he spoke. He looked elated, almost overwhelmed. His heart pounded so hard with excitement that the others could practically see it.

There were nearly twenty bodies. Three people—four people—had done this. He seemed unable to believe the result, even though he had helped achieve it with his own hands.

Defeating a larger force was something one might somehow manage. What Skard could not believe was that they had done it so quickly, without suffering a single casualty.

“When it comes to fighting numbers, momentum matters. Inflict casualties right at the start, and unless they’re seasoned veterans, they’ll lose their nerve and be unable to fight.”

As he spoke, Valeri placed a torch in the hearth containing peat charcoal inside the warehouse.

Put simply, the tactic was to overwhelm the enemy in a single rush, denying them any chance to recover. Inflict heavy casualties while they were still reeling, and there was no enemy in the world you could not defeat.

Of course, that was easier said than done. As the numbers grew to the scale of armies, it became harder and harder. But Valeri had accomplished all of it, earning an undefeated reputation and becoming king.

“I feel kind of invincible.”

Arne must have felt much as Skard did, because now he was even smiling.

He grieved for innocent victims, but when fighting enemies, he was just as merciless as Valeri and Skard.

As though he still had energy to spare, Arne kept rolling his shoulders and tilting his head from side to side. He felt capable. The results had shown him that all his training had not been in vain.

It was almost exactly what Valeri had told him before: that he would come to have confidence in himself.

But their mission was not over. It had only just begun.

The pitch-black sky was slowly steeping in dawn.

A handful of salt. An enormous man sat in a chair draped with a tiger skin, staring at the handful of salt on the floor.

He was not large because he was fat. His very frame was naturally massive. In both height and bulk, he looked twice the size of an ordinary man.

His loose hair reached his shoulders, and his beard hung to his chest in two braids.

Above all, his eyes were fierce. Flames seemed to blaze within them, though there was no telling whether greed or resentment toward the world fueled that fire.

This was Creed the Ballsack Opener, who styled himself Creed the Terrible.

“Twenty men went in and got crushed by four?”

Creed’s voice was like a harsh sound reverberating through a cavern.

“W-well, there were five, actually. I saw that much for certain.”

“What about Snub-Nosed?”

“... He’s dead.”

Creed trembled, gripping the armrests so hard they threatened to break. A creaking crunch sounded.

“You son of a biiitch!”

After shaking for a long while, he suddenly roared at his subordinate. He truly sounded like a wild beast.

The kneeling man was terrified, feeling as though his life were already forfeit.

Creed sprang from his chair. From the kneeling man’s perspective, it was like a mountain abruptly rising before him.

Creed raised a foot as though he meant to stomp on him that instant. In the end, however, he did not. He quietly lowered it again.

Regaining his reason, he asked:

“Four people fucked up twenty... Did he send knights? Wasn’t he keeping them back for fear they’d drown and die? Or did the third young lord really hire swordsmen and bring them here on his own?”

Apparently he had not survived Duke Sven’s relentless pursuit for years by sheer luck. Despite his massive build, he knew how to rein in his emotions and use his head.

“What did it look like to you?”

Creed asked his subordinate. He was a survivor, after all; he had seen it firsthand.

“One was huge, and another was well built. The two of them pushed us from either side with shields out front. There was a swordsman too, younger than I expected. But his skill was uncanny. Every time something flashed before my eyes, another head came off. The other two... looked like the third young lord and a servant.”

“... So you’re saying three men did this to you?”

“W-well, that one swordsman was so incredibly skilled...”

“So you’re saying it wasn’t three, but one?”

“...”

The more the subordinate spoke, the more cornered he felt.

But Creed was not trying to reproach him. Unease had crept over him, then abruptly sharpened his senses, sending his vigilance soaring.

He decided not to act rashly. First, he needed to find out exactly who this swordsman was. But his subordinate’s next words made him lose all reason.

“Oh, and that swordsman said something. He said he’d hand out more salt to people once it was light. He said if you came too, boss, he’d give you some for free.”

“... What did you say?”

“He, um, said if you went too, boss, he’d give you some for free...”

“Who the fuck said he could hand out salt!? Does he think I’m some worthless prick!? Huh!?”

Astonishingly, Creed seemed to consider Valeri’s party’s salt already his. Unable to contain his fury, he kicked his subordinate in the head.

THUD!

He was not only huge but quick, and the kick carried tremendous force. The subordinate flew back, knocked unconscious by that single blow.

“Bring me my weapon! How dare he take my salt!? I won’t forgive this!”

Creed roared. His trembling subordinates brought him his weapon.

It resembled a short spear, a type of billhook with a broad blade that curved slightly downward into a hook. It looked well suited to lopping something off. This was the weapon that had earned him the name Ballsack Opener.

Creed swept aside the tent flap and stepped outside.

Dawn was breaking. The reeds swayed gently, as though stirred by the sunlight.