Chapter 47: The Chasm
Oswald's foot came down and the floorboards shattered under it.
His body dissolved into a gray smear, blade wreathed in blinding white light, and drove forward point-first. This strike was faster than everything that had come before it by an order of magnitude — the air tore open around it with a high, screaming whine, and every flame in the room flattened sideways under the pressure of its passing.
His silhouette flickered across the space in front of the Witch, and then four slashes erupted from four directions at once — front, back, left, right — a net of death sealing off every possible line of retreat. This was the technique he kept buried at the bottom of the box. Forty years, and it had never once missed in a real fight. Even an Orichalcum-tier would eat this on first sight.
Tink.
One sound. Soft and clear, like a fingernail flicked against the rim of a wineglass. It even had a faint echo.
Oswald's body froze two meters behind the Witch, still locked in his thrusting posture, sword point extended at the empty air ahead of him.
Half a second passed.
Then, with a wet tearing sound, the fabric over his right shoulder bloomed crimson in an instant. Blood geysered out in a single spray — hot and dark, running down his shaking arm, sliding over the hilt, dripping onto the floor in fat, deliberate beats.
His vision shook.
When? When had she drawn? No — that wasn't a draw. She had parried all four slashes and delivered the counter in the same instant, run him through the shoulder, and he hadn't seen any of it.
He hadn't caught the movement.
There wasn't even an afterimage to follow.
The Witch stood with her back to him. She lowered the mana blade unhurriedly, its cold blue edge angled toward the floor. There wasn't a single drop of blood on it.
Oswald clamped a hand over his shoulder. Warmth pumped out between his fingers no matter how hard he pressed. He ground his teeth, spun, and struck again.
He threw a storm of steel at her—overhead cut, diagonal slash, horizontal sweep, thrust, rising cut—a desperate flurry that carved gashes into the floorboards and sent sparks flying off the walls. Every lethal arc simply melted into nothingness, batted away with the casual indifference of brushing off dust.
One blade after another, everything he had — and every strike was turned aside. Not blocked. Turned aside. Her blade would touch his with the faintest tap and his entire strike would come apart at the seams, his sword sliding off in some absurd direction like the bones had been pulled out of it. The attacks from behind, she didn't even bother to turn for. She simply flicked a hand back and swatted them away.
A few more exchanges and his breathing had turned into a wet, dragging rasp. Sweat rolled down from the white line of his hairline, past the corner of his eye, into his mouth. Salt gone bitter.
His sword was getting slower. It had been getting slower for decades. It was only in this moment that it had slowed to a point he could no longer pretend not to notice, and his body simply would not answer anymore.
He caught himself on one knee, one hand braced against it, heaving great, ragged gasps of air. Sweat dripped from his chin and struck the floorboards, punching out little dark circles one after another.
Only then did the Witch turn around, unhurried.
Those gold eyes regarded him quietly. Her posture was identical to how she'd stood at the very beginning. Breathing even. Stance loose. The hem of her coat hanging still against her legs. Forget being winded — there wasn't a single drop of sweat on her.
She just asked, mildly:
"Are you finished?"
Oswald's whole body went rigid. His throat worked once.
"Then it's my turn."
His heart clenched into a fist.
The gap.
He'd fought his entire life. He knew this feeling far too well — the one where you stand at the lip of a cliff and look down, and the abyss is looking back up at you. If he took the next blow, he was going to die. He knew it the way he knew his own name.
He threw his sword to the floor and raised both hands over his head.
"Stop! Stop, wait—" The blade clattered against the boards. His voice cracked clean in half, the syllables coming out shrill and hoarse from somewhere at the back of his throat. "I yield! I surrender!"
The Witch's movement halted.
The point of the mana blade stopped in midair, less than an inch from him. She tilted her head a fraction, and something faintly like confusion flickered through her pupils.
Little Uri, what do I do about this one?
She asked through their mental link, her mental voice dropping into a soft, clueless whine.
Then she lowered the sword and stood there, silent.
The silence stretched a few seconds. Not long, objectively. But in Oswald's perception it was dragged out into something enormous, and he had no idea what she was waiting for.
Then, a voice echoed directly inside her mind. Level and cold.
It's "Scribe.not 'Little Uri'." Uriel’s psychic transmission was flawlessly deadpan. "And don't worry about whether he's surrendering. After everything escalated tonight, letting him walk out that door alive is a liability. He'll organize the next scheme. The Cult's resources, its contacts, its supply line for the elixir — it's all inside his head. Letting him go is the same as laying everyone we care about on a knife's edge.
So don't spare him. Tell him the point was never to win.
The Witch took it in. Her gaze refocused on Oswald. She let her hand drop, and the mana blade lifted to point at him again. Her voice came out cold as the first crack spreading across a frozen lake.
"My objective was never to defeat you." A pause. "It was to erase you."
Oswald's raised hands froze in the air.
"The selfish are but a passing moment. Only the selfless endure forever."
The last remnant of color vanished from his face, leaving only the ashen pallor of a dead man. He stumbled back a step, his heel caught the hilt of the sword he'd dropped, and he nearly went down.
"Wait — you can't kill me! Listen to me!" The words came out fast, tumbling over each other, like he was trying to grab something before it slipped away. "I'm the headmaster of this academy. I have a position, I have standing. You kill me and the entire education system feels it — no, forget that, I mean the Alliance, the Adventurers' Guild, they'll investigate, they'll dig all the way down to the bottom! You think you'll just walk away clean from this?!"
The Witch took a step forward.
Oswald retreated another. His back hit the half-toppled bookshelf, which rocked and shed a few fire-scorched hardcovers onto the floor.
"And the Cult! The Cult will never let this go! Killing me is a declaration of war as far as they're concerned — do you have any idea how many of us there are? How many eyes they've buried inside the Alliance? You kill me and you will not know one peaceful day for the rest of your life!"
His breath sawed in and out.
"I can change! I can start over — become a new man! Just give me one chance!"
The Witch stopped two steps in front of him. Those gold eyes looked down at him from behind the visor, without the faintest ripple of feeling.
"You don't regret what you've done."
Her voice was soft as a blade drawn across paper.
"You've only just realized that you're about to die."
Oswald's lips trembled. The next plea was already lodged in his throat, but that gaze had already given him the answer. She wasn't negotiating terms. She was carrying out a decision.
His expression flipped, in the space of a heartbeat, into something else entirely. Jaw locked. The muscle at the corner of his eye — the one caked with sweat and blood — twitching in a fine, involuntary spasm.
"Fine. Fine. I lose." The pleading in his voice was gone, replaced by the raw, cornered viciousness of a man with nothing left. "But let me tell you something. The evidence — I've already burned all of it. You saw me do it. Every document, every contact record, everything that could prove I'm guilty. Ash. Gone."
He panted, eyes bloodshot, edging toward hysteria.
"You kill me now and you're murdering an innocent educator. There's no scrubbing that off you. The whole kingdom will hunt you for it. You won't escape — you'll be sitting at the top of every wanted board in the land, and you and everyone you care about will be run down to the last one!"
The Witch went still.
A flash of manic triumph shot through Oswald's eyes — he thought he'd found the pressure point, thought he'd bet on the right weakness and won. He even hauled himself a little straighter against the wrecked shelf, cleared his throat, and prepared to throw out more terms.
And then.
"Heh."
The Witch laughed.
It was a single, feather-light note of cold amusement, escaping her face like an ice pearl dropped onto a porcelain plate. She lifted her chin a fraction. The firelight danced in her gold eyes — reflecting the flames, reflecting his ruined silhouette, reflecting the entire burning room.
"I don't care." A beat. "When you crush an ant underfoot, do you stop to wonder which anthill it came from?"
Oswald's eyes went wide.
He'd seen mad ones. He'd seen the ones with a death wish, the ones who spat curses right up to the end. But he had never seen this — someone who genuinely did not care. There was no anger in those eyes. No hatred. No emotion that could be bargained with. Only a stillness he could not comprehend.
"You — you arrogant — !"
He didn't get to finish the curse.
The Witch flicked her wrist backhand. The base of the thermos carved a short arc through the air and connected dead center with the top of his skull.
Thonk.
The sound was dull and hollow, like knocking on an old coconut.
His eyes rolled up. His whole body went slack, folding like a marionette with its strings cut. Knees first, then shoulders, then face — thud, thud, thud — and then he lay still.
He hadn't quite lost consciousness. But his body had stopped answering to him, and all he could do was watch, through a blurring field of vision, as those military boots crossed the floor and stopped in front of him. The cold blue mana blade came to rest against his chest, over his heart.
The Witch looked down at him. Her voice was very, very soft — like a verdict, or the statement of a simple fact. It almost sounded like she was wishing him goodnight.
"My heart and my deeds are clear as a polished mirror. Everything I do is justice."
Then she took the hilt in both hands and pushed the blade down — punching it clean through his chest, at the exact spot where, minutes earlier, Oswald had aimed his own killing thrust at the boy who'd called himself Ed.