Chapter 56
B-Ranked Tyranny
Mary forced herself to stop her wool gathering the very moment she saw the knights move.
For a short second, she misunderstood the intent of the knights; watching them, she mistakenly believed that maybe they had regained their confidence; for a moment, the princess honestly thought that they might have been about to attack Sylvia, as, to her mind, the supremely confident maid had taunted them too much.
But she was wrong.
Instead, the hidden princess watched as all of the gathered knights shifted awkwardly once again. And then the princess witnessed another baffling event; every single one of them simultaneously flinched.
The now much more confused princess turned her attention back to the confident maid and, to a degree, understood what had caused such a reaction, although it would only be after the coming training session that Mary would truly realise what it was she was witnessing.
The knights were scared, and before her, she began to understand why.
The bone-chilling smile that had been present on the maids’ faces had, in the short time that Mary was focusing elsewhere, shifted to something that was altogether more annoyed.
“Well, if you big, strong knights aren’t going to come to me,” Sylvia started to say mockingly, “then I shall have to come to you.”
Mary felt herself gulp involuntarily, something that she was rather certain she shared with the gathered knights. Knowing that the fighting was about to begin again, the princess forcefully pushed her mana enhanced perception as high as she felt that she could safely manage.
That enhancement to her perception, relatively slight though it was, was completely unhelpful in what happened next.
Mary knows for certain that she hadn’t blinked, and yet she still missed the moment it began, whatever that moment was. As far as the princess could see, Sylvia hadn’t stirred into motion, not in the way she saw the knights doing before.
Nor did she suddenly become a barely recognisable blur.
Instead, Sylvia had simply vanished for a single unnoticeable instant.
It was a vanishing act that Mary had seen before; she had even asked about it several times before, only to receive non-answers in reply. And as such, the princess had been forced to reach her own flawed conclusions about what it was that she occasionally witnessed. As such, for over a year now, Mary had assumed, mistakenly as it had turned out, that the vanishing act that Sylvia sometimes employed was some sort of teleportation spell.
It wasn't; she was sure of that now.
As far as she had been concerned, that hadn’t been an unreasonable assumption; after all, the sheer speed that would be required to otherwise pull it off was utterly mind-boggling. It represented a level of physical capability that, as far as Mary had been concerned, could not be adequately explained, even with magic in play.
And then there was the matter of breaking the sound barrier. Sylvia had used that vanishing act in doors, and it was a feat of pure physicality.
Then why was there no other evidence?
But Mary, in the instant between moments, became reasonably certain that what she had just witnessed was absolutely not a teleportation spell. It wasn’t any sort of spell at all.
With her improved understanding of magic, with her senses vastly improved since the last time Sylvia had done her vanishing act, with both her regular sight and her mana sight pushed to her current absolute maximum. What she saw was no spell activation; there was no flowing mana.
There was no remnant mana where the maid had previously stood, no proof that a spell had been used at all. These were all things she would have expected in the case of any high-level magic.
There was absolutely no sign that magic had been used.
Instead, one moment the maid had been standing in the middle of a small army of knights. And then the next moment, she was gone.
She wasn’t gone for long, however. Later on, when Mary had the opportunity to review the recordings that her second minds were currently taking, the princess would realise that her personal maid was missing from her perception for a micro-instant; the moment she disappeared, she had reappeared. For years to come, Mary would lack the means to keep up.
Try as she might, the best she could guess even with recordings was that mere nanoseconds passed between her disappearance and her abrupt reappearance before the unfortunate knights.
In that single instant, within the few nanoseconds available, Sylvia compressed an eternity of action.
Mary saw the result occur before she heard it, and upon reflection, this would serve as another hint that the otherworlder had vastly underestimated the physical capabilities that mana could provide.
And even so, even with a recording that she could obsessively watch, finding the true sequence of events remained out of her reach.
From her perspective, everything she observed occurred nearly simultaneously; the maid's speed made it genuinely impossible to analyse any single moment of the fight.
From Mary's perspective, she saw a knight—the man that Sylvia had been facing before she moved, the knight that she had chosen to taunt.
One moment, he was hesitantly standing at the ready; the next, he was involuntarily flying backwards, smashing into the man directly behind him, and the pair of them flew back even further in what quickly became a cascade of flying bodies.
Mary looked on in quietly growing horror as she watched his presumably heavy armour crumble as if it were made from tissue paper instead of whatever was used for heavy plate armour in a magical world.
What followed him and those that he was thrown into, and what scattered the knights even further, was what Mary would later conclude was a pressure wave that was generated by the physical might of the maid.
A wall of sheer force expanded outward, casting those caught in it several metres away from the impact zone, which had previously been occupied by one of the knights.
The wave, much like Sylvias means of travel, was another non-magical phenomenon, at least as far as Mary could guess. This wave was produced by the overwhelming physical strength that the maid was apparently hiding behind her slight frame.
The bevy of knights that had been thrown away, however, were not the only victims of Sylvia's first assault; along with them, she physically struck two more knights, those directly to the right of the man who Sylvia had originally swung for. They too were batted away like so much trash and found themselves smashing into other knights behind them.
Once again, a pressure wave followed them, attacking nearly a dozen more knights who were too close for comfort.
Later on, Mary would wonder why these knights, who presumably had some experience with fighting Sylvia, would surround her and make things so much easier for her.
The truth would be something she would learn from the maid herself later on.
Nonetheless, in the centre of where all those men used to be standing, Mary saw the still dignified, still physically perfect maid who had attacked them, one of her shockingly muscular arms stretched out firmly holding what to Mary was still a much too large axe.
But seeing her use it, Mary had already begun to understand why it was so absurdly massive.
The princess stared intently at the maid and felt her blood chill further as she saw what could only be called a chillingly deranged smile on what would have otherwise been a beautiful and charming face.
Just as she registered what had physically occurred, the princess heard the sound; the thunderous noise of a pressure wave slammed into her, and had she not already been braced against a firm wall or had the currently hidden princess been even slightly closer to the racket, she suspected that she would have been bodily thrown away, much like the knights had been.
Immediately following the wave was the ear-piercing screech of metal tearing, as it completely failed to stop the overwhelming force of the slam.
The final sound, one that she should have expected but caught her by surprise anyway, was the apparently delayed and quickly distant scream of pain, torn from the throats of an entire slew of men getting thrown further away as they were tossed aside by brute force.
Sylvia did not stop to pose; instead, she shifted her leg across the ground in a nearly unseeable blur, her wide hips twisting.
In the instant before she vanished again, Mary locked eyes on the axe head and noted that the maid had very kindly chosen to attack with the broad-flat side of the axe instead of its edge.
Sylvia would later inform the princess that if she had attacked with the edge, she would have cleaved through the knights, armour and all, as if they were made of wet paper, for her great axe was made to kill beasts much more heavily armoured than mere royal knights.
What followed could not reasonably be called a fight, nor could it be called a battle. If Mary were to be totally honest, what she would spend the next handful of seconds witnessing could not even charitably be called a spar, as every knight in the field felt the maid’s battle lust.
But as those seconds became minutes, it became equally obvious that after the first instances where Sylvia had demonstrated her total superiority against what must have been a majority of the palaces' knights, she began to give them time to fight back.
Time to learn that alone they were nothing to her.
Although, as Mary watched, she noted that even together, these knights had very little chance of success.
The fight continued on, and as the knights truly started to gather the will to resist, Sylvia began to cheerfully laugh, as she smashed them away in groups, the occasional pressure wave launching from her swings disrupting any attempts at true resistance.
The knights' armour did not protect them; based on Mary’s observations, it appeared to crumple inwards under the force exerted by Sylvia. Later on, the princess would correctly assume, as she would eventually be told, that the armour was rated for much weaker opponents than the former B-ranked adventurer.
And that there was actually armour that could, at least in theory, defend against the force that Sylvia could bring to bear.
Although such things were much too expensive for the relatively poor kingdom of Midgard.
Mary watched as the very few attacks that the collected knights attempted would entirely fail to land; she listened to the desperate shouts and exclamations of the knights as the few of them that could gather the courage to try to physically counterattack quickly turned into pained screams as they were blasted away by pressure waves.
At the back of what had quickly become hasty frontline formations, knights gathered and attempted various forms of magical combat.
Mary watched these with interest.
She watched as one group began to cast what the princess immediately recognised as a magical bombardment; spell circles appeared in the air, with what Mary assumed was a variant of the already familiar [Fire] runes in the centre. Surrounding those semi-familiar runes was what to her eyes looked like: incredibly messy or perhaps rushed magical logic.
Internally, Mary noted that such rushed and faulty mana logic would negatively affect the power and efficiency of the spells, something she would not have expected from what should have been the Midgard Kingdom's premier military force.
Later on, Mary would charitably admit, even if only to herself, that she likely would not have been able to cast her best spells while being so thoroughly dominated, just as the knights were at that moment.
Another group of knights began to cast spells that Mary did not recognise, but the effects of the unknown runes were obvious enough once they had finished casting.
The princess watched as knights desperately rushing at the momentarily slowed maid found their speed increased, a firm glow of magic surrounding them, and Mary assumed that there were other less obvious benefits to the presumed augmentation magic that she could not see.
This magical boost was completely useless to the attacking knights.
After minutes of thrashing the over one hundred knights who had been present, Sylvia seemingly got bored of variably swinging her axe around.
And instead stopped for one moment in what Mary first took to be a dramatic pose.
The shouts of abject terror from the knights convinced the princess that this assumption might be incorrect, and so, having learned her lesson from the pressure waves, she braced herself.
It didn’t help.
“Haaaa!” Sylvia exclaimed.
The next thing Mary knew, she was face down on the ground, a massive force of magic pressing her down.
Later on, the maid, when asked, would admit that both the exclamation and the pose were wholly unnecessary.
This information would not reassure Mary at all.
As her vision narrowed and she began to faint, suddenly, Mary felt the crushing force vanish.
For a moment, the princess lay on the cold ground and then frowned as she realised that she was feeling the cold.
The worry of what that could mean instantly brought Mary back to full consciousness, and she moved to quickly check and confirm her most immediate fear: that her stealth suite was now missing; the mana that had been maintaining it had been dispersed by the force that Sylvia had expelled.
Immediately, she renewed the magic, hoping nobody would notice. But she knew that one person present definitely would.
And then Mary slowly, with great reluctance, stood up, looking upon the wreckage of the Midgard Royal Knights.
Unlike Mary, who was just pushed to the ground, they were all clearly unconscious.
And Sylvia was looking right at her, smirking smugly.