Chapter 46: Is That the Holy Sword?
The last of the documents curled black and fell apart.
Recruitment pamphlets, contact letters, coded correspondence — all of it reduced to cooling flakes of ash in the iron brazier. Oswald watched the final embers die, then crouched and raked through the remains with two fingers. No legible characters. No partial seals. Nothing.
He straightened up.
The filing cabinet had been emptied. The desk drawers stripped. Every material trace of the Curse Cult's presence in his office had been systematically reduced to nothing. He allowed himself a single slow exhale.
Done.
He smoothed the front of his uniform, adjusted the scabbard at his hip, and turned toward the door.
He made it one step.
"And where do you think you're going?"
The voice came from behind him and rooted his feet to the floor. A woman's voice — every syllable chilled before it left her lips, precise and unhurried and utterly without inflection. Despite everything he'd survived in four decades of combat, despite the Mithril-tier reservoir of mana coiled behind his sternum, something cold pressed flat against the back of his neck.
Oswald spun around.
There was a woman sitting on his desk.
She wore a dark military coat — black and gold, layered with sashes and epaulettes and trailing silver embroidery that caught the last of the daylight. One leg was crossed over the other. Both hands rested loosely in her lap. She sat with the settled composure of someone who had been there for a very long time.
His mind moved fast.
When did she get in? He hadn't heard anything. The door had been in his peripheral vision the entire time. Every window was sealed — save the one that student had gone through — and he'd confirmed that himself. So she'd been here before him? Impossible. He'd checked the room on entry. Again while feeding documents into the fire. And once more during his confrontation with the boy calling himself Ed.
Three separate sweeps of the room, and each time it had been empty.
Which meant she had entered within the last five seconds. While he was walking to the door. Without sound, without any disturbance in the air, without triggering a single thread of his passive mana sense.
Five seconds. A sealed room. A full-grown adult. Sitting on his desk.
His fingers tightened without his permission.
Right. So that's how far it's fallen.
He couldn't even detect someone entering an office anymore. No wonder his blade had felt wrong when he'd lunged at that student — he'd barely been able to feel his own sword arm. He needed that elixir. He needed it yesterday.
He looked at her and answered her question with one of his own.
"Who are you?" His voice came out harder than he intended. "What are you doing here? Did the Cult send you to clean house?"
He pushed the last part out before she could respond.
"I haven't done anything to betray them."
The lady rose from the desk.
It was a slow movement. Deliberate. Her boots touched the floor with a single clean tap, and she turned those gold eyes toward him — still and cold as hammered metal, utterly without human warmth. The heat bleeding in from the window seemed to drop ten degrees from the direction she was looking.
"I am the Holy Sword Witch."
A beat of silence.
"I have come to reap those who have fallen into the dark."
Oswald stared at her.
Then he laughed.
Not a polite laugh, not a bitter one — a real one, the kind that starts in the chest and forces its way out whether you want it to or not, ragged at the edges with something that might've been exhaustion, or contempt, or both.
"Big words for someone I've never heard of."
He drew his sword and leveled it at her, the tail end of the laugh still hooked in the corner of his mouth. The curl of a man who had, over the course of a long career, watched far too many righteous-type champions announce their noble purpose right before he put a blade through them. Hunt those who fall to darkness. Sure. He'd heard that speech in five different languages and three different dialects.
"All right, Holy Sword Witch." He steadied his grip. "Let's see what you've got."
The lady glanced downward.
Her gaze swept the desk surface and came to rest on the small side table beside it. She reached over without urgency and picked up a thermos — an ordinary insulated one, green and slightly scuffed, the kind sold at every general goods stall in the capital.
She held the body in her right hand. Her left palm settled flat against the lid.
Then she pulled.
It was a slow, deliberate motion — like drawing a blade from a scabbard. And as the lid separated from the body of the thermos, the air around her palm began to hum.
Mana moved.
Not drifted. Not pooled. It moved — visibly, with direction and intent, streaming toward her open hand in thin luminous threads, condensing, hardening, taking shape. Cold blue light spread from the rim of the lid outward, meter by meter, until it resolved into a full sword-length blade of pure crystallized mana. Impossibly sharp at the edges. The air along the cutting line splitting into a faint white mist.
She held the thermos by the body. The mana blade extended from the lid, pointing steadily toward the floor.
If Uriel had been in that room, he would have lost his mind completely.
He'd seen this exact thing in a franchise that apparently didn't exist in this world. The color was even right.
May the Force be with you, he would have whispered, tears streaming down his face.
Oswald's laughter stopped.
He had studied mana-shaping for thirty years. He'd sparred against mages who specialized in conjured weaponry, watched Astral-tier swordsmen construct blades mid-duel. He had never — not once — seen someone pick up a thermos and produce that. The mana density was wrong. The mana density was grotesque. It defied every established law of Aether manipulation he had studied for thirty years. The blade didn't flicker. It didn't strain. It sat in the air as naturally as if it had always been there, and she wasn't even using her good hand.
It wasn't a display of skill.
It was a warning.
This is what I do casually. With a thermos.
His throat moved.
"That's... your holy sword?"
The lady looked down at the mana blade extending from the thermos lid. She considered it for a moment with that same blank expression.
Then she shook her head.
"No," she said, with complete sincerity. "This is just something temporary. For dealing with you."
The room was very quiet.
Oswald's fingers worked open and closed around his sword hilt. Open. Closed. His palm was wet.
He had been fighting since before this lady was likely born. Forty years of it — arenas, dungeons, contract work that didn't have official names. In that time, he had developed a reliable instinct for the gap between performance and reality. When someone was bluffing, the display was usually the whole act and the substance behind it was hollow.
This was not that.
When an opponent could say this is just something temporary for dealing with you about a weapon that had already made his Mithril mana sense run cold — that wasn't a bluff. That was a statement of fact.
He stopped calculating and made a decision.
His mana detonated outward.
The shockwave hit every surface in the room simultaneously — hardcovers launched off shelves, loose ash blasted off the brazier, curtains tore clean from the rod, a crack split the plaster above the window in a jagged line. Every last scrap of Mithril mana he'd been holding in reserve for years flooded through his channels and hammered against the air. His remaining hair stood on end. His coat billowed. The floorboards groaned under the pressure.
He sank into his stance. Left foot forward, right knee bent deep, blade horizontal across his chest with two fingers pressed flat to the steel.
He hadn't used this form in years. The last time had been in a dragon's nest, in a corridor so narrow he'd had to wait for it to lunge before he could move. Before that, a championship final, against the only opponent who had ever genuinely made him afraid. He only used it when he was done thinking. When the next move was the only move.
His body vanished.
He crossed the distance so fast the space he'd occupied took a moment to register that he was gone, displaced air snapping shut behind him with a sharp crack. The thrust drove upward from below, aimed for her throat — faster than the lunge he'd thrown at that student, faster than anything he'd used in years.
The mana blade was already there.
The impact hammered back through both his arms.
He didn't stop. He used the recoil to redirect — spinning right, blade carving across in a vicious diagonal slash at her left side.
Clang.
A crisp, effortless ringing of steel. The mana blade was already there waiting for him.
He lunged low to the right. Clang. A sweeping overhead strike. Clang. A feint to the left snapping into a lethal thrust to the right. Clang. Clang.
It wasn’t just that she blocked him. She hadn't even moved her feet. Her posture was exactly the same as when she stood up—one hand holding the thermos, the other lazily tucked behind her back. She was catching his strikes like an adult humoring a toddler throwing foam blocks.
Not her feet. Not her shoulders. Just that one arm, rising and redirecting with small precise adjustments, meeting every strike before it arrived as if she'd already watched the entire sequence happen and found it mildly unremarkable.
He pulled back and drove back in. Three rapid exchanges, varying rhythm — fast, slow, fast-fast, slow — patterns designed to shatter anticipation, to force a late reaction and find the gap between her recognition and her response.
The mana blade moved early every time. Not to where the attack was. To where it was going to be.
He stepped back.
He was breathing hard. She wasn't breathing differently at all.
She hadn't moved her feet once. Her free hand was still tucked behind her back. She was standing exactly as she had been when she rose from the desk — one arm forward, one arm behind, the thermos angled loosely in a grip that looked comfortable rather than braced. Like she was holding a coffee cup at a faculty meeting.
It wasn't technique.
He knew technique. He had forty years of it. What he was looking at wasn't the same category of thing. This was like watching someone hold an umbrella in a light drizzle — effortless, almost absent, the act of a person who wasn't really paying attention because the conditions weren't interesting enough to warrant it.
She wasn't blocking him.
She was tolerating him.
Oswald pulled back, and this time he didn't immediately advance. He looked at her. Then a short, dry sound came out of him — not the laugh from before. Quieter. Stripped down to its bones.
"I'll admit it."
He brought his blade up and looked at his own reflection in the steel — the shadows under his eyes, the receding hairline, the lines that hadn't been there a decade ago. None of it was hiding anymore.
"Right now, you're stronger."
He reached into his breast pocket.
The case came out. His thumbnail popped the latch. Inside, nestled in frayed velvet, was the incomplete elixir — a thumb-sized vial of something too viscous to be called liquid, too dark to see through clearly. Not finished. Not meant to be taken like this. He'd been waiting on the completed formula.
He picked it up, stared at it for exactly one second, then shoved the entire vial into his mouth.
He crunched right through the glass and swallowed the whole damn thing.
The effect wasn't immediate. Then it was. Mana surged upward through him — not the outward detonation from before, but inward, every channel tightening and overfilling, his blade drinking it all in and rising from dull silver to blinding white. His muscles swelled against his sleeves. The shoulder seam split. A thin corona of white light pressed out from his skin and climbed his coat like a tide, and his hair lifted again, suspended in the current running beneath it.
He raised his sword — point skyward, both hands on the hilt — and let the full weight of the power settle into his frame.
The Holy Sword Witch simply watched him. She kindly waited until he was completely finished with his monologue, then leisurely adjusted her grip on the thermos, finding a more comfortable angle.
Oswald stomped down.
The floorboards instantly shattered. A violent shockwave blasted outward—far stronger than the last—sending bookshelves toppling and flower pots crashing out the window into the flames below.
"Be proud, Witch!" Oswald roared, his voice echoing with the absolute confidence of his youth. "Take the memory of my prime with you to the afterlife!"