Chapter 55
The Great Axe
Mary confidently turned her attention back to the yard after realising that Sylvia would likely not be able to find the currently hidden princess, at least not without making it obvious that she had done so. Immediately, the hidden princess realised that something was severely wrong, that the atmosphere of the yard had turned incredibly strange.
Mary looked on at the knights, baffled at their inactivity; it was a stark contrast to the clash of steel and aggressive shouting that had been occurring prior to Sylvias' sudden appearance.
The princess frowned as time continued, and yet the knights did not return to what they were doing. Nor did they call out to the slowly approaching maid.
Mary glanced at Sylvia again, and her frown deepened, noting that the slow approach seemed remarkably deliberate, and then turned her attention back to the knights.
The knights remained where they stood, totally motionless. It was, Mary reflected, a somewhat bizarre sight to see: dozens, perhaps even hundreds, of heavily armoured knights doing nothing at all but standing in what Mary was coming to realise might have been fright.
It was at that moment that Mary began to understand the bizarre atmosphere that had descended upon the training yard since the maids' planned appearance.
The knights were afraid, Mary realised. They were utterly terrified of the slowly walking silver-haired maid.
{We had heard that Sylvia had killed a few knights.} One of the second minds recalled the gossip of the maids, referencing the knights who had harassed Alice.
{Those knights were supposed to be new.} Another answered with a reminder.
{We assumed that newer knights would be weaker.} A third agreed.
‘We came to see how strong the knights and Sylvia were… I think we can broadly guess who might be stronger here, given their dread is so thick I could drown in it.’
Mary watched as the maid arrived at the centre of the yard, the knights flinching back like battered dogs.
Sylvia glanced around the field, and for a brief instant, Mary could not be certain if her eyes had paused when they swept past the princesses' hiding place. To the princess, it felt as though Sylvia had paused, but this perception might have been influenced by her expectation that the maid would notice her presence.
As far as she knew, Sylvia shouldn’t be expecting Mary to be present to watch what was going to happen.
The so-called “training session” that the maids had all been gossiping about.
Mary couldn't see the other maids, but maybe they were watching from a palace window.
From her position, Mary could see the silver-haired maid side-on, and so she, along with many others in the yard, saw Sylvia slowly begin to smile.
At that smile, an expression that seemed to promise violence and pain, Mary felt her blood chill. Later, Mary would tell herself that what she saw could only be called a smile by technicality; the correct muscles moved, and the maids' mouths did upturn.
And yet, the hidden princess found herself shivering in a way that had absolutely nothing to do with the snow that surrounded her.
The already palpable aura of terror that had been radiated from what should have been confident and strong royal knights instantly spiked, and Mary watched as some of them carefully began to try to back away.
Syliva moved again; much like her journey into the training yard, it was another slow and deliberate movement, but unlike before, where she was walking, this time the maid was moving her arm into the air, apparently preparing to grasp something.
Immediately, Mary focused on the maid intently, directing as much mana as she dared into her eyes.
This was a trick that the maid had taught her; of course, Mary had guessed something like it was possible but dared not risk experimenting until the maid had started directing her.
As she had expected, directing her mana into her body parts would increase their capability; in the case of her eyes, this meant that it would increase her perception. With the correct focus she could increase the distance she could see or even how slowly she perceived the world; it was, Mary could admit, truly an amazing ability.
One that she would continue to work on, despite the apparently slow gains.
This was the reason why she was here. In the end, Mary had snuck outside to better understand the strength of the knights and her maid, as far as she was concerned; missing anything in what was to come would be a completely unforgivable sin.
With this in mind, the princess did not blink; she consciously refrained from blinking, and she was certain that she had not blinked.
Yet Mary still missed what happened, whatever it was.
At one moment, the maid's hand was completely empty, although she was clearly moving to grab at the air. The next moment, she was holding what, by some definitions, could be called a double-headed axe, although, unlike a normal axe, it was something that would be wielded by normal, reasonable people.
This thing was a massive slab of a weapon, something that Mary was certain was completely impractical.
Mary could not help but look on in disbelief as the weapon appeared from nowhere. Later, Mary would reasonably assume that Sylvia had some sort of hammer-space to store her equipment; it would even explain some of the things she had witnessed if nothing else.
But at the moment that she revealed the capability, Mary found her mind blanking, something that did not improve as she continued to watch the maid.
Sylia one-handedly swung the enormous axe around with a shocking ease, the maid apparently ignoring what should have been a massive, perhaps even unliftable weight. And yet, Mary frowned as she watched; Sylvia was swinging the axe at a much slower speed than what the knights were previously moving, which was something that Mary could now perceive with her enhanced perception.
Something told the hidden princess that this relatively slow speed would not last for long. Otherwise, the knights wouldn’t have been so utterly terrified of the woman.
Eventually, apparently satisfied with her ability to swing around something that absolutely should not be able to move in such a way, the maid stopped swinging and instead laid its handle gently on her slight shoulder.
As luck would have it, the princess was side-on from the maid, and as such, even with the distance between them, she could broadly judge the size of the weapon that her maid had decided to wield.
By the standards of a sane world, it was a massive, totally impractical thing.
Mary would estimate that the axe head by itself was twice as tall as she currently was, which meant that in firm numbers, the axe head was perhaps two full metres in width.
The princess blinked at the estimation; had she been willing to so much as whisper, she would have considered herself rendered speechless at the insane number. By every reasonable metric, the great axe was unreasonably massive, to the point that it should have been impossible to use.
As the princess stared at the mass of metal judgementally, she gave another, equally insane estimate. The length of the axe head was no less than the width; Mary would hesitantly guess that it was only slightly smaller in length than it was in width, perhaps at best one and a half metres.
At worst it would be more.
Mary shook her head in dismay, utterly convinced that Alexander would have been wholly incapable of lifting the thing at all, let alone treating it as the maid currently was.
Furthermore, while the princess could not see the axe's edge and so had no real idea of its thickness. As far as she was concerned, the logic of this new and apparently much crazier world dictated that the width of the axes edge was both equally absurd and wholly unnecessary.
It would track with how everything else on Terra seemed to be.
Despite having what looked like a sharp edge, Mary did not consider this to be a weapon suitable for cutting or slashing. Truthfully, the princess thought that a weapon of this size and weight would have been better suited as some sort of club or mace.
She could not even begin to guess the weight of such a weapon, but if it was steel, in the way that such weapons from Earth would have been, then only a small number of unaugmented humans would have been capable of deadlifting it.
None of the individuals would have reasonably been capable of genuinely using it as the weapon that it allegedly was, which, in Mary's opinion, made Sylvia's act of swinging it around like a waffle bat even more absurd.
{Even if that thing is made from some sort of super-light magical metal, it should be too heavy for a person to properly use as a personal weapon.} One of Mary's second chances was judged.
{Between the augments that she inherited from her ancestor and the strength that magic seems to allow, maybe it’s not totally impractical?} Another answered hesitantly.
{That shaft isn’t made from wood; look at it! That thing is all metal.} A third added, her tone confused.
Sylvia's chilling smile deepened into something that Mary judged to be taunting, and her maid did not disappoint her with her following actions.
The maid raised her unoccupied hand at one of the knights and asked lightly, “Well, are you going to attack or not?”
Mary looked on as the knights shuffled awkwardly; their previous confidence, the confidence that they had seemed to have while shouting and fighting each other, was apparently absent in the face of the heavily armed and yet stunningly beautiful maid.
Distantly, the princess could not help but wonder what the maid had done to the formerly aggressive knights for them to be so totally unwilling to fight her.
Whatever had been done, she suspected, it was something that she was about to learn in detail.
Mary attempted to look at the situation again, and yet all she could see was a maid standing confidently, perhaps even too confidently, in the centre of a training yard.
Completely surrounded on all sides by heavily armoured knights.
Based on her understanding of Alexander's interests, Mary believed that fighting against knights in plate armour should rely less on cutting power and more on blunt force. So, Mary reasoned, perhaps Sylvias' choice of weapon made some degree of sense from that perspective.
She could easily bludgeon some of these knights, even to death.
But Mary had already seen the knights moving, and they had been a blur. Admittedly, she hadn’t been augmenting her perception with mana at the time, but thanks to her progress with biomancy, her eyes now had a base level that was not dissimilar to Sylvias, a former B-ranked adventurer. Someone who was supposed to be relatively strong even by this world’s standards.
Mary frowned as she continued to think about the matter. While Sylvia might not have the greatest perception in the world, when compared to a specialist like an archer or scout, she was supposed to still be remarkably capable by any reasonable standard. So, Mary was confident that with her progress in biomancy, she wouldn't fall short of what the maid was capable of, at least regarding sight.
The trick with her mana was useful, but its benefits had so far been nothing truly dramatic; the leap between her old eyes and her current ones, facilitated by her biomancy, was incomparably larger than what she could currently manage with mana augmenting.
So, while she could reasonably assume that the knights were far less restricted by their heavy armour than a medieval knight from Earth would have been, she would have guessed that their extreme speed was more due to their much lighter armour than their physicality being enhanced by mana. She would have guessed that their extreme speed was more due to much lighter armour than their physicality being enhanced by mana.
The princess couldn’t yet properly judge that, and it shouldn’t matter.
Because, from the perspective of the princess, Sylvia was surrounded.
If she was willing to kill the knights – as she apparently did to some of the others – then she could potentially defend herself with wide swings that fully ignored their armour and tossed them around the yard.
But would she really be able to hit the men behind her?
{If those knights had any hope for victory, then they wouldn’t be hesitating as they are.}
Mary stopped as she heard the words and reconsidered what she was seeing.
‘That’s right.’ The princess admitted internally, ‘I’m still too used to looking at things from the perspective of a world that actually makes logical sense.’ Mary remarks sardonically.
‘But then how? Mana enhancement hasn’t proven to be that useful so far.’