Never Die Villain

What was the North?

Why had the Belozerskys been entrusted with ruling it in the first place, and what exactly existed there that warranted placing the Empire’s greatest family of swordsmen under its jurisdiction?

The answer was simple enough, because the North had never been merely another territory for the Belozerskys to govern.

It was said that humanity occupied only ten percent of the North.

That alone should have demonstrated just how enormous the territory truly was, and even ten percent was nothing more than an estimate, because nobody actually knew where the North ended.

Beyond the settlements, fortresses, and military outposts controlled by House Belozersky lay an endless expanse of frozen wilderness, and farther still was a perpetual blizzard that no expedition had ever successfully crossed and returned from.

Nobody knew what existed beyond that blizzard.

What they did know was what occasionally emerged from it.

Grotesque monsters wandered south from the whiteout, creatures of such varying shapes and sizes that generations of scholars had failed to properly catalogue them all.

Some could be brought down by ordinary knights working together, while others were powerful enough to erase entire settlements if they managed to slip past the defensive lines. It was precisely because those creatures threatened every territory farther south that the North had become the Empire’s foremost wall against them.

And the Belozerskys were the people standing on that wall.

In short, they were powerful. Absurdly so.

The family had spent generations fighting whatever came crawling out of the northern wilderness, and that history had produced a culture where strength was expected rather than admired.

The branch families might squabble over influence, succession, territory, and prestige whenever they gathered under the same roof, but nearly every important member among them had experienced actual combat, while those holding positions of authority had earned them with considerably more than bloodline alone.

Even the heads of the branch families were no exception.

They did not cower behind their knights when danger appeared, nor did they remain outside and issue commands while others risked their lives in their place.

The moment Valentin gave the order, the same elders and nobles who had spent the evening drinking, flattering one another, and arguing over family politics drew their weapons and stormed back into the Northern Palace alongside their knights.

After all, a Distortion was inside their home.

For most families, that would have been reason to run.

For the Belozerskys, it was a reason to draw their swords.

* * *

"Huu..."

Anastasiya was running out of breath.

The nature of Aleksei’s attacks irritated her more with every passing second, especially since, despite being a swordsman himself, the bastard refused to come anywhere near her.

He remained at a distance while his chains attacked from every direction, constantly forcing Anastasiya to accelerate from one position to another without ever giving her the opportunity to close in.

"Fight like a swordsman, goddammit..."

Another chain came sweeping toward her.

Anastasiya accelerated.

———!

She reappeared several meters away, avoiding the chain completely, but the instant her feet touched the floor, an uncomfortable tightness seized her chest.

Her vision darkened for the briefest moment before returning, and Anastasiya pressed a hand against her chest as she forced herself to breathe normally.

"Haa... haa..."

She was running out of stamina.

It was the one glaring weakness Anastasiya had managed to keep hidden from practically everyone around her.

For a Belozersky, whose body was supposed to have been trained to endure hours upon hours of continuous battle, Anastasiya’s stamina was considerably worse than anyone would have expected from someone of her standing.

But what could she do?

Acceleration had a condition that no one knew about.

Whenever Anastasiya accelerated, her heart stopped beating.

It wasn’t merely the physical exertion of moving at tremendous speeds that exhausted her, because Acceleration did not actually make Anastasiya faster in the conventional sense.

The technique erased the distance between herself and her destination, allowing her to cross space without physically traversing every point in between, but her body paid for every bit of distance she erased.

Her heart stopped in proportion to that distance.

A single short acceleration amounted to almost nothing, barely enough for Anastasiya herself to notice, which was why she could use the technique so freely during ordinary battles.

However, longer distances meant longer interruptions, and chaining multiple accelerations together forced her heart to repeatedly stop and restart within an increasingly short period of time.

That was why Anastasiya preferred ending fights quickly.

Against most opponents, it hardly mattered.

She accelerated once to enter their reach, perhaps a second time to bypass their guard, and by the time her heart resumed its normal rhythm, the fight was already over.

Even powerful swordsmen rarely survived long enough to realize that there was a reason Anastasiya never wasted her movements.

Aleksei was different.

Clink——!

Anastasiya’s eyes moved.

Three chains were already approaching.

"Tsk."

She accelerated again.

———!

Her heart stopped.

Anastasiya appeared on the opposite side of the corridor, but another chain immediately changed direction and came after her.

She accelerated a second time, then a third, each disappearance placing her farther from Aleksei while simultaneously worsening the pressure inside her chest.

———!

Her heart restarted painfully.

"Ghk...!"

Anastasiya stumbled, catching herself against the wall with one hand, and for several seconds, she could hear nothing except the pounding inside her chest. Her heartbeat had lost its rhythm, hammering erratically inside her chest, and that brief irregularity sent a wave of dizziness through her head.

It was too much. She had used Acceleration too many times in succession.

A chain scraped across the floor ahead of her.

Anastasiya raised her eyes. Aleksei hadn’t moved.

The bastard was still standing at the opposite end of the corridor, content to let the chains exhaust her while he remained completely outside the effective reach of her sword.

Whether he understood the weakness of Acceleration or was simply fighting according to instinct didn’t matter anymore, because either way, his strategy was working.

"You... are really starting to piss me off..."

The chains rose again.

This time, Anastasiya didn’t move.

If Aleksei intended to keep forcing her to waste Acceleration until her own heart gave out, then she would simply have to stop playing by his rules.

Anastasiya tightened both hands around the sword, steadying her breathing as she watched the chains slowly rise around him.

"Fine."

Anastasiya lowered her stance and waited for the chains to come to her. The borrowed sword was poorly suited to her usual style, but perhaps that was exactly what she needed now.

"If you won’t fight like a swordsman... then neither will I."

The first chain came for her.

Anastasiya didn’t accelerate.

Clang——!

She swung with both hands and struck it aside, the impact sending a shock through her arms as the chain veered away from her body.

A second followed immediately from the opposite direction, but rather than escaping its reach, Anastasiya stepped forward and brought her sword down against it, forcing the chain into the floor before continuing toward Aleksei.

One step.

Two steps.

Aleksei raised his arm.

Three more chains answered.

Anastasiya watched them carefully, resisting the instinct to rely on Acceleration as they approached from different directions.

She slipped past the first with a turn of her shoulders, struck the second away with the flat of her blade, and ducked underneath the third, feeling the displaced air brush across her hair as it passed overhead.

"Haa..."

She continued forward.

This was how she had fought before developing Acceleration.

People had become so accustomed to Anastasiya disappearing and reappearing across the battlefield that even her own family occasionally seemed to forget she had learned swordsmanship long before mastering the technique that made her famous.

Her speed had never been the entirety of her strength, and if anything, relying on Acceleration had allowed her to neglect the more ordinary skills she had spent her childhood drilling into her body.

Clang——!

Another chain met her sword.

Anastasiya redirected it rather than trying to overpower it, turning her wrists at the moment of contact and allowing its own momentum to carry it past her.

The opening was small, barely enough for a single step, but she took it immediately and continued closing the distance.

Aleksei finally moved.

——I’ll kill you!

"No you won’t."

The chains converged from every direction, closing around Anastasiya before she could reach him.

She drew in a slow breath and followed each one with her eyes, quickly determining which attacks she could avoid with ordinary movement and which ones would force her to use Acceleration.

She couldn’t evade all of them normally, but she didn’t need to.

———!

Acceleration.

For an instant, Anastasiya’s heart stopped as the space directly in front of her disappeared.

She erased less than a meter, barely enough to slip between two chains as they crossed behind her, and her heart resumed beating almost immediately.

It was a negligible distance compared to what she normally erased.

But it was enough.

That single missing step placed her inside the formation before the chains could close around her, and Anastasiya planted her foot against the floor as Aleksei’s enormous figure finally entered the reach of her sword.

There.

She understood her mistake now.

She had been treating Acceleration as movement when it had never needed to be.

She didn’t have to disappear across entire corridors whenever Aleksei attacked. She didn’t need five meters when half a meter would put a chain behind her, nor did she need to retreat ten meters when a few centimeters could turn a lethal strike into a miss.

If the price was proportional to the distance she erased, then she simply needed to erase less.

Anastasiya smiled.

"Got you."

For the first time since their battle began, Aleksei was within striking distance.

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