30 years after the death of Himmel the Hero. Northern Land.
CLANK!!!
In the midst of the blinding snowstorm, two shadowy figures collided fiercely before tearing apart. One was a four-horned demon, a hulking mass of muscle easily twice the height of his opponent.
The other was just a human girl.
"—Where does a rootless thing run to, little dust? Even the sand has forgotten you," the Demon rumbled, his laughter like rolling thunder.
With a flick of his wrist, he unleashed a blade of black magic. It shot past the girl, silently splitting the massive boulder behind her.
High-temperature smoke hissed from the sheared stone, carrying enough residual heat to vaporize a human instantly.
"Heh. Our demon magic is at a peak you humans will never reach, even if you spend your pathetic fleeting lives trying. How long are you going to keep running with those skinny legs, huh?"
Despite his taunts, the Demon's crimson eyes rationally analyzed his prey. Words were merely a tool to deceive humans and create blind spots.
But the girl did not react.
Through the heavy snowfall, the Demon watched the wind whip her short, reddish-brown hair, exposing bold flashes of pink.
She wore a haik, a beige cloak woven with intricate geometric star patterns and gold-threaded edges. As it fluttered around her mid-thigh, the Demon caught faint glimpses of scarred scales beneath the fabric, the undeniable mark of a veteran who had survived countless slaughters.
Yet, what caught the Demon's attention most were her eyes. Above the scarf tightly covering her mouth, her greenish-brown gaze held absolutely nothing.
She silently shifted the sword into her left hand.
"...Ho ho." The Demon's eyes narrowed.
A perfect left-handed stance.
She pulled her right foot back slightly, pushing the left side of her body forward. Her center of gravity dropped low, completely controlling the heavy blade with only her left arm muscles.
The Demon's mind raced through the calculations.
Left-handed swordsman, huh. So her reach extends to the front-left, and her defense key must be on the right side of her body, but... her starting point for attacks is always on the left.
Foot speed, sword trajectory, blind spots... everything optimized for the left.
The corner of his mouth lifted. Once a human's trump card was understood, all that remained was slipping a spell into the gaps.
Countless black magic circles erupted around the Demon. An area-of-effect spell. No room to dodge.
[Dark Spears]
A rain of black magical lances plummeted toward the girl's head. At that very moment, her figure blurred.
A split second before the spears cratered the earth, her boots explosively kicked the snow.
BOOM!!!
Leaving a white wake behind her, she instantly closed the gap to the Demon's chest.
"Pretty fast," the Demon sneered. "But your trajectory has been read."
He didn't panic. Shifting toward the angle where a left-handed swordsman would naturally strike, he cast a heavily reinforced [Barrier] spell.
CLANG!
Sparks erupted, and a shockwave blew the surrounding snow into a perfect circle. The Demon felt a flicker of genuine surprise.
A strike from that small body, wielding the sword with only one arm, actually possessed enough kinetic force to spiderweb his barrier. The way she concentrated her weight, her pure technique—it was far beyond standard human limits.
Her mastery was so absolute that the word perfect felt inadequate.
But the Demon remained certain.
Humans have limits. This is the maximum output her left hand can muster. It's not enough to break me.
The girl kicked off the cracked barrier, somersaulting backward. She landed in a fluid motion as her stance re-establishing without a single flaw.
"...There!" the Demon barked, seizing the initiative.
To control the space on her left side—the sword side—he fired massive chunks of spear in rapid succession. The girl reacted instantly.
The Demon watched her muscles contract as she swung her sword, accurately slashing the center of gravity of the approaching ice to deflect its trajectory.
Shards exploded outward, grazing her cheek. A line of red blood flowed, but her empty expression never wavered.
The Demon's cruel smile deepened.
I knew it. Her awareness is anchored to the left.
And that was exactly what he wanted.
While she focused her intent on defending her left, the Demon subtly channeled his mana into the frozen earth beneath her unprotected right side; her ultimate blind spot.
Left-handed swordsman, your right side is completely exposed. This is the end.
In the Demon's arrogant mind, victory was already an absolute fact. The stone spikes would erupt, pierce her right side, and inflict a fatal wound. It was an unshakable truth.
But as the Demon grinned, the girl's movements completely shattered his logic.
She didn't dodge, nor did she brace. Instead, she swung her left arm—her sole line of defense—far backward, completely opening her guard.
What...? A last gamble? Even from that distance, my magic hits first!
But…
…She didn't swing the sword.
With terrifying speed and a violent twist of her hips, she let it go.
"What—!?"
For the first time, a sound of raw panic tore from the Demon's throat. Her sword became a deadly silver blur, spiraling in a straight line directly for the vital point between his eyes.
Damn...!
Survival instinct overrode his offensive strike. He violently aborted the stone spikes beneath her feet, ripping the mana back to throw up a desperate barrier over his face.
CLANK!!
With a deafening roar, the thrown sword struck the shield and shattered into shrapnel.
A shockwave rattled the Demon's skull, but he survived.
I blocked it! A human without a weapon is dead meat!
Gasping, the Demon snapped his gaze forward to finish her. But the snowfield was empty.
"...Huh?"
Nothing but a white expanse and the howling wind.
The Demon's mind stalled.
Not in front. Not on the left. Where?
He had fallen into his own logical trap. By focusing all his nerves on the lethal threat from the left, he had lost her. And using the explosive shockwave of her throw as cover, she had dropped into a slide, gliding across the snowfield and vanishing into the one area the Demon's arrogant mind had deemed perfectly safe: His right side. The blind spot behind him.
From beneath the haik, the true fangs she had hidden the entire battle were finally bared. That is, her dominant hand, which had never once touched the hilt of a sword during the fight.
Her right hand.
In her palm rested a sharp trench knife. It was a lightning-fast execution, invisible to the naked eye. When the Demon finally sensed the shift in the air and tried to turn, it was already over.
There was no sound. All there is the cold sensation of metal sliding through flesh, bone, and demonic mana, as smooth as cutting butter on flatbread.
"...... Ah,"
The Demon's head slowly slipped off its neck. Dark red blood erupted, painting the pristine snow like a geyser.
With a heavy thud, his massive body collapsed.
It had been a perfect deception. A flawlessly executed tactic that weaponized the Demon's own arrogant rationality against him. As his body began to disintegrate into black ash, blending with the howling wind, his fading consciousness locked onto the girl.
She calmly wiped the black blood from her short sword.
Her deep, greenish-brown eyes still held no emotion. In that moment, her gaze looked exactly like the way Demons looked at humans.
And scenes deep within the demon's memories were abruptly pulled to the surface.
A group of humans who had once plunged the Demon King's Army into unfathomable terror.
A blue-haired man wielding a sword at their center.
At that moment the Demon finally understood. There was only one entity in this world capable of teaching such a distorted, perfect, and suicidal fighting style.
His mouth moved one last time.
"Huh... So you're the child raised by that Hero..."
The hoarse voice of the demon, abandoned at death's door, echoed faintly deep within Samsa's ears, mingling with the cold wind. Yet, not a single ripple of emotion stirred in her heart. She merely accepted those words as fact, as if cross-referencing records of the past.
Samsa sheathed the dagger with her right hand.
A hero, huh.
Faking one's dominant hand, luring the enemy's awareness and defense entirely toward the left, and then, from an intentionally crafted absolute blind spot, delivering a fatal strike with the right — her true dominant hand.
The tactic that had just slaughtered the demon with such ease was not one Samsa had devised herself.
It was an actual combat technique instilled directly into her by her mentor, the Hero Himmel, the man who had once saved this world.
"You know, demons won't fight fairly for the sake of aesthetics or pride like us humans. Because of that, in order for us to survive, sometimes we have to be tougher and more ruthless than anyone else, Samsa."
In a distant memory, Himmel had said those words with a smile that looked slightly troubled, yet incredibly gentle.
In stark contrast to his glorious title as the Hero admired by all, the combat techniques he taught Samsa were brutally practical, unrefined, and entirely focused on increasing her chances of survival, even if only by a fraction.
Deceive the enemy, create an opening, launch a surprise attack, and finish them off with absolute certainty.
Perhaps he knew better than anyone that a life could not be sustained by beautiful ideals alone.
Those teachings were now ingrained in Samsa's very flesh and blood, allowing her to survive to this day in this cruel world.
Beneath her wind-blown cloak, her hand unconsciously touched the hilt of her sword.
Whenever she recalled Himmel's teachings, her memories were invariably dragged even deeper, further into the past. Before she had ever met Himmel. To a time before her heart had been consumed by emptiness, back when she still possessed tangible warmth and vibrant colors.
Clang... clang... the heavy strike of iron against iron.
Samsa's eyes slipped shut, and when she opened them again, the freezing wilderness was gone.
Now she stood in a dimly lit room wrapped in suffocating heat. Sweat began to trickle down her forehead.
She was back in the blacksmith's workshop in Geyrnata, the village of her childhood.
"How many times have I told you not to stand near the fire? Don't you understand yet?"
A deep voice, tinged with warm annoyance, echoed from above. She looked up to see a sturdy man, his face smeared with soot, his stern eyes filled with gentleness.
He was a former military commander who now forged iron for his village. Her father.
In her mind's eye, she was no longer a hardened killer in a blood-stained cloak, but a little girl in a white dress, her light red hair long and flowing down her back.
"Moo~ I just wanted to help~" her childhood voice echoed in her memory.
Her father let out a heavy sigh and rested his blacksmith's hammer on the anvil. "You're still too young. This place is dangerous. Go play outside."
"I don't want to. I want to stay here. I want to be near you, dad!"
Stubborn and spoiled, little Samsa hugged her father's massive arm tightly. Her father looked down at her, momentarily confused, before a soft, defeated laugh rumbled in his chest.
"...You stubborn child. But watch out for the sparks, okay?"
He stroked her head, the rough, calloused skin of his palm radiating a warmth that felt achingly real. He reached into his workbench drawer and pulled out a leather cord, draping it over Samsa's neck.
"This is for you. A real sword is still too dangerous. But, someday, when you're grown up..."
The cold metal rested against her chest. A round iron pendant, meticulously engraved with a sword.
Cling… Clang… The forging hammer echoed again.
But the rhythm twisted. The steady clanging warped into the apocalyptic roar of hellfire consuming the village. The screams of burning neighbors. And finally, the terrifying, triumphant laughter of a devil—
Samsa gasped, her eyes snapping open.
The barren, northern snowfield rushed back in to greet her. The blistering heat of the forge shattered like glass, replaced by the biting teeth of the blizzard. The warmth of her father was gone.
Without realizing it, her right hand was clutching the leather cord around her neck, her thumb tracing the round, iron pendant that had never left her chest.
"...I must go home."
Her hoarse whisper was instantly swallowed by the storm. It was her only objective. To return to Geyrnata, far away at the edge of the Southern Land. Even if that warm place was now nothing more than a graveyard of ash.
Samsa released the pendant. Pulling her haik tighter against the violent wind, she turned her back on the black stain in the snow and began the long, heavy walk north to find shelter.