It took a second for the man to process what Adonis had just said. The moment he did, he turned on him in a rage and tried to run Adonis through from behind, shouting something.
But his shout quickly turned into a full-bodied scream.
The sword dropped from his hand, followed by a number of smaller objects that scattered across the ground—the man’s severed fingers.
A sword with the Question mark had appeared in Adonis’s hand. As the man turned to attack him, Adonis had chopped off the fingers on his sword hand, leaving only the thumb. It was a blindingly swift slash, faster than the eye could follow.
“You son of a—!” the black-furred man shrieked.
Severed fingers could be reattached with sacred ashes, meaning he wasn’t outraged by the injury, so much as screaming out of frustration and fury. He picked up his sword with his other hand and charged at Adonis.
But Adonis moved several times faster. He passed by the man again, adroitly dodging the attack, his sword not moving to intercept the slash but flashed through the air like the wind. The other men’s eyes widened in shock as they stood there frozen to the spot. They couldn’t believe what just happened. Their leader stumbled, only to stop dead still where he stood. A sword was protruding from his back.
The man turned, dumbfounded. The arm that should have been holding his sword was gone—instead, dangling in front of him, his hand clenched around the hilt of the sword thrust into his chest.
Blood gushed out from between his clenched teeth. His mouth fell open, unable to stop the torrent. He coughed up his guts, a raw stench hanging in the air.
“Hrrrk…”
A moist sound left the man’s lips—just as his body suddenly burst into flames. The sword’s spell had activated. The other men were too stunned by what had just happened to do anything. It should be impossible for a sword to turn on its wielder. Even if he’d only just reclaimed it, it was originally his family sword, bound to him by blood. It was inconceivable that it would harm him.
Yet standing there, watching their burning friend, they couldn’t say that. Even if the man wanted to draw a weapon, his arm and fingers had already been cut off. He screamed and floundered on the ground, burning painfully, but the more he thrashed and convulsed, the faster he lost what remained of his strength.
No one helped him. No one was in a state of mind to even consider it. Having moved past the leader, dispatching the man with astounding skill, Adonis swiftly twisted his body and stabbed another man deep through the stomach.
How had he done that so quickly? Of course—when Adonis had gone around giving the men their swords, he’d gone in order of the men who surrounded him, positioning them along the gentle slope. They tried to surround him again, but Adonis raced between the thick trees too swiftly, and none of them could catch up.
“I knew it would turn out like this,” Adonis said, stabbing another one.
“I knew someday things would end up like this. Today just happens to be that day,” he whispered to a fatally wounded man he’d just cruelly cut down.
Ultimately—or in fact, to begin with—Adonis had shown his face in town for this exact reason. The men understood this and became enraged. Yet even then, they couldn’t help but dance to Adonis’s tune. He brutally killed them, one by one, and the more of them that died, the more panicked and afraid the rest became.
They hadn’t underestimated Adonis’s skill with the sword. That was why they had confronted him with so many people and tried to surround him. But they hadn’t expected him to be this good. It was a fact they realized far too late, and it sent a shiver down their spines. Adonis was on a whole other level. He had been born with a talent for the sword and grown up in the Collins family, the wardens of the Catacombs, learning their intricate sword techniques.
He wasn’t like them, who’d only become Solists because it paid well. Adonis differed from them by his very nature. In their eyes, he looked like an aberration. Normally, being able to freely wield another person’s sword without a bond of blood connecting them to the wielder required a high level of resonance with the sword. For that reason, the emotion Adonis harbored for these swords was what scared them the most.
The greater one’s resonance with a sword, the greater their pain or shock was if they lost their sword or it became unusable. It would leave a scar on their heart. But this young man, with his heart shut off to the outside, had blocked that emotion.
Adonis hardly ever sparred with or fought fellow Solists. He didn’t trust the swords enough. The fundamental idea of Schwertmusik was to let the swords ring out and play music with one another. It was only by crossing blades, by clashing with other swords, that they could be used as both a sword and an instrument. Only in doing so could the weapons and the Solists who wielded them grow.
Adonis’s fighting style completely disregarded that. He didn’t try to raise the swords he wielded, instead using them as disposable objects. He saw them not as subjects to empathize with, but tools to kill.
He accepted this loneliness, which isolated him even from the swords he held, like it was perfectly natural—no, at this point, he didn’t even feel that. His heart was so shut off it had become like a machine, discarding any will for pleasure. All he sought was to tear into his opponents and end their lives, with the only change in Adonis’s expression being a twisted, gleeful smile.
This ghostly visage and his bold way of living that seemed to acknowledge he was no longer a person struck fear into them. But there was no escaping anymore.
Even so, one of them turned around and tried to run away—and the moment he did, he was gripped by a terror several times stronger. He ran, crying with regret at having turned his back, but still, Adonis’s blade pierced him where he was most vulnerable.
The man screamed, and Adonis moved swiftly, flinging the sword in his hand. He didn’t just throw it, though; the sword reacted violently, leaping out of his hand like an arrow. It struck the man dead in the back of the head, pinning his face to a tree trunk.
The sword then exhibited the effect of its spell, vibrating violently and tearing the man’s head apart from the inside out using air pressure. His skull and brain spattered against the tree, having burst apart like overripe fruit.
With his head crushed, the man’s body slumped to the ground, sliding against the tree, spasming in its death throes. The sword stuck into the tree had also been affected by the spell’s effects and was heavily damaged. It cracked, then shattered, scattering fragments over the corpse’s back.
Adonis didn’t even turn to look at it. Activating a spell with the sword skewered into an opponent’s body was a skill that took a great deal of resolve in the first place. The powerful effect of its spell could severely affect the sword itself, and even the wielder. But Adonis discarded his swords and sometimes even broke them himself, injuring and destroying his blades just as he did to the body of his opponent.
The sword’s silent, wordless scream, and the agonized howl of the fatally wounded Solists on the ground echoed around him, stirring the treetops. Leaves and grass were dyed in red, and that suffocating stench of blood hung in the air, riding the wind to spread through the woods as more and more Solists were slain and left to die.
It was a picture of hell. A war of swords—brutal, utterly devoid of pleasure, where he killed people for the sake of murder and maimed people just to inflict pain. And throughout the massacre, not a single drop of blood fell on Adonis.
When he was the only one left standing, a strange cry echoed through the trees.
It was his own voice.
The emotion Adonis had been holding back thus far released like a dam breaking. His stone-faced expression collapsed, his glistening eyes became almost perfect circles, and his mouth opened so wide it looked like it would tear his jaw off as he screamed with his fangs exposed.
The lone survivor, a Minotaurus man, went pale from the terrifying sight. In one moment, Adonis was laughing and crying, gripped by rage and drunk with glee. His emotions exploded, and the sword in his hands screamed. By now, his gloves were tattered and falling apart, and his ten clawed digits had turned that eerie rust-like red as they gripped the hilt. Held in his bare hand, the sword rapidly dulled, a dark stain spreading across it. The blade contorted, the tip split apart, and the grip twisted into a hideous shape.
“I knew this would happen!” Adonis howled. “Ever since the day I first came to Park! Since the moment I became a Solist!”
The Minotaurus man jolted, freezing up. He knew that he would be killed for sure should he turn around, so with his last bit of tragic resolve, he held up his ax and shouted back.
“You think we’d ever consider you a Solist?! You’re a monster! A devil lower than any beast—!”