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The blinding brilliance of the Grand Summon slowly faded, leaving only residual afterimages in the returning darkness of the barren canyon. And together with the light, Yuliana's hopes faded, the newly lit blaze of courage within her completely snuffed out.

Where the summoning circle had been moments prior now stood—a person.

Though the summoned hero was said to come from another world and could have looked like anything, the stranger resembled a regular human.

An adult woman, to be precise.

Not a gallant valkyrie in a sparkling plate armor, lance in hand, blonde hair beautifully swaying in the light breeze.

Not a sorceress veiled in gorgeous black satin, imbued with mysterious powers.

Not even a cute, glowing little fairy, a tall elven princess, or a young muse.

Not a muscular amazoness leaning on a humongous greataxe.

Instead, the person looked only like a regular maid.

A woman dressed in a simple, brown dress shirt with the sleeves crudely rolled up to the elbows, a gray, knee-length skirt, as well as a murky blue apron covering the front. On her feet were light indoor slippers, dirty white. No matter how you looked at it, it was an attire ill-suited for combat.

Brown, thick and wavy hair reached past the woman's curvy hips and looked like it would get in the way of—any kind of work, really. Her figure showed no marks of a violent life; rather, her chest and hips had quite a bit of excess fat to them, proof of an idle lifestyle.

Was the stranger a magician then?

The woman didn't have a staff, not even a small wand, no cloak, not one ancient tome in hand, no magical gems, no rings on her fingers, actually no jewelry or accessories of any sort. She did have a sort of beautiful face, but there was an abundance of pretty—and prettier—girls in virtually every town. There was no way for her to contest any Zurian maiden, let alone the Divines, in that regard.

The woman was from another world, that much was clear from her foreign attire, the material of which looked oddly cheap and unrefined compared to the Oberian silk worn at the court, or the hand-woven cotton attires common everywhere in Langoria. It was clear that whoever had made those clothes took no particular pride in her handiwork.

Setting aside the woman's garments, if this person was not a warrior or a magician, not a mystical being or even armed in any way—then what good was she to Yuliana in her dire situation?

The woman had been brought here by the Grand Summon, to save the people of Ortho, like the ages-old prophecy predicted.

“A champion, the strongest among his or her kind”—such were the criteria by which the great miracle was said to select its agents. Yuliana had believed it to mean someone of peerless mental and physical capability. The old songs were quite clear on that point.

A sobering thought occurred to Yuliana.

Perhaps prophecies were not quite what they were made out to be.

Or, it couldn't be that the people of the other world were really WEAK?

“Hm, hm,” the strange woman looked blankly around for a moment and didn't appear too shocked over being suddenly torn from her home and dropped in a place she couldn't recognize. Was she too dense to even realize her reality had changed? Were the other world's inhabitants perhaps mentally only on the level of a newborn baby, coddled by magic or unimaginable technology?

Then, the foreigner's attention was caught—not by Yuliana lying helplessly on the ground, but by something up ahead on the slope.

Battered by the rain, pinned between the rocks, was a large sword.

Yuliana's sword. It was what she had been carrying with her.

It was not just any old greatsword. Yuliana's life, her future, depended on it. Her pursuers were willing to kill for it. Simply touching that particular instrument of battle was enough grounds for the capital punishment to anyone outside the royal family. Not even the king could simply carry it off to battle with him if he so pleased. Before a weapon, it was a treasure, the cornerstone of Langorian culture.

“Ooh!” With an exclamation of excitement, the woman went and picked up the sword. Like picking up a flower, she lifted it nimbly in the air and examined it from both sides. “Fifty-six and a half inches in length, the handle fifteen, about six at widest. Maybe six pounds point...seven, eight? What a marvel of craftsmanship! It fits my grip so well too! This isn't steel, is it? Some kind of unknown fantasy metal!? Wow, they do give out freebies after all!? This isn't a day one DLC, is it? I'd really hate to see someone else running around with another just like it...”

What in the world is she talking about? Yuliana wasn't amused.

Offended on the behalf of her house, she was about to stand up and order the stranger to return the weapon, but someone else beat her to it.

——“Hand over the sword!”

A crude voice came from uphill.

Both the woman and Yuliana turned to look up, and through the rain, down the slope, emerged a group of men.

Knights, five—seven of them.

Most were clad in uniform chain mail that reached the knees, with a long, deep blue surcoat over it, their coat of arms embroidered on the chest in silver. On their heads were cylinder-like helmets, save for one, the commander, whose head was left bare. To show his rank, he also wore a blue little cape over his left shoulder. He was the one who had issued the command.

Yuliana knew the man by name.

Sir Ivanov Bravia Eisley, the Baron of Troms, the vice commander of the Kingsguard. There were only a handful of people even in the capital qualified to bring back the holy sword, and he was definitely one.

The short black beard framing Sir Eisley's sturdy jaw had lost some of its usual refinement in the rain, as had happened to his short dark hair that clung slimily over his forehead. His sharp, deep blue eyes gave Yuliana a quick, tired glare. He nodded at two of his men to go secure her, before turning his attention back to the unknown woman,

“What you have there is something priceless to our kingdom. Hand it over, and for this once I shall overlook the felony of you sullying its divine grace by your commoner's hands. At once.”

Even in her peril, Yuliana felt more concerned over the well-being of the outsider—since it was partly her fault the woman was here in the first place.

Being suddenly confronted by a squad of knights, right after having been abducted into another world without a word of explanation, the woman was understandably shocked and couldn't muster a response. She had to have been.

For a moment, Yuliana wondered how she should argue their collective defense when someone interrupted her thoughts,

—“No, thanks, I'll pass up on that offer.”

“Haa?”

It was the unknown woman.

Yuliana and the knights' side were both momentarily stunned by the unexpected—unexpectedly blunt—response. Under the circumstances, a hare casually defying a pack of wolves never appeared a possibility to them, either.

“I really like this thing, so I'm going to keep it until I find something better,” the stranger followed up with an outrageous explanation. “Sorry, but consider it lost now.”

It took several blinks before the knight commander recovered.

“For the love of Divines...!” he spat, before repeating, “Give the sword to me, wench! Do not make me ask you a third time!”

“No means no,” the woman immediately repeated with a frown. “What are you, a telemarketer? You guys are all armed with swords, which means this world must be pretty dangerous and guns haven't been invented yet. In other words, I'm going to need a good weapon to defend myself with, and the way I see it, this one's the best around. Well, if you're willing to give me one of yours, some other items, money, and a bit of information, then I suppose we could bargain, if you really want it that bad.”

“Josley, take it!” Sir Eisley ordered one of his men standing nearby and cursed. He hadn't been chasing a fugitive all day in the rain just to end up haggling with a daft vagrant. He didn't know what the light earlier had been—clearly a failed spell somehow initiated by Yuliana—but that didn't matter. He would take the sword and the girl, the wench too, if necessary, and be back to the king before the weekend.

The named knight did as ordered and started to descend the rocky slope towards the woman with the sword. Sir Josley expected her to soon turn and run, and checked if the throwing knife pouch hanging by his hip was ready for use. He wasn't about to run another step tonight.

But again, against everyone's expectations, the woman wouldn't run. Instead, she turned to face the knight, kicked her slippers off her feet and raised the sword in front of her.

As though preparing for a fight.

The knight stopped. He hadn't intended to, his feet had done it on their own. There was something unsettling about the woman and the weapon that should have been way too heavy for her to hold so steadily. She was on the lower ground, vulnerable, without armor. But her stance was adamant, as if her soft-looking figure had suddenly turned to stone. The sharp end of the blade lingered right at the level of their connected line of sight, radiating a sense of dread.

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A voice quiet enough for only the knight to hear it reached his ears.

—“If you come too close, I might have to kill you.”

Though the woman had intoned it like a friendly warning, there was a hollow, cold ring to her words. Whether she was lost in madness, or just pretending well enough to even fool herself, she appeared to believe without a modicum of doubt that she could follow through with the threat.

Kill a knight? A commoner?

How delirious could she be, to throw around such absurd lines in a situation like this?

“What are you doing? Hurry up!”

His captain's angry urges in his ears, his comrades' faint, ridiculing chuckles sounding from inside their helmets, embarrassment made Sir Josley's blood boil. He was soaked, feverish, hungry, tired, and confused—and angry because of all that.

“Fine, if that's the way you want it,” he confidently told the woman, unsheathed his longsword and took a step forward.

There was no reason to be afraid.

It was completely unthinkable for the woman to actually be able to wield the holy sword. Even if she could somehow gather enough strength to lift her thin arms, he was certain he could push her down long before the blade would fall. It was an empty bluff, nothing more. Encouraged by his observation, the knight boldly picked up the pace and stepped towards the woman in an almost casual fashion, determined to pull the royal treasure from her unresisting grip and leave.

As if to show her arms were getting tired, to surrender, the woman indeed lowered the blade.

By the time Sir Josley realized how bad he had misread her, it was already too late.

Lightly, almost playfully, the greatsword swept across the rain.

The knight, perceiving movement, instinctively brought up his sword, to defend, to react, to do something, but by that point, his balance already crumbled. His thigh, a bit above the knee, momentarily exposed through the open front of the chain mail as he walked, had been severed by the exceedingly sharp tip of the lengthy blade.

Because of their unequal footing on the steep slope, he had entered his opponent's range before striking back ever became possible for him. This slight oversight in judgment had costly consequences.

Screaming in pain, gripping his profusely bleeding leg, where muscles and arteries had been torn all the way to the bone, the knight collapsed and fell beside his opponent, at her feet.

Chunk.

Before anyone could even think about running to his aid, the terrible blade cut down again like the guillotine and sank clean in the crack between the helmet and the chain mail's collar. The metal cylinder went rolling downhill, its owner's decapitated head still trapped inside.

Yuliana and the six remaining knights stared at the woman and the bloodied weapon in her hand, their mouths agape, staggered by the unexpectedly vicious turn of events.

“Sorry. But with that wound, he wouldn't have made it,” the knight's killer lightly announced, displaying little remorse. “I did give him a fair warning, I think.”

That woman from another world.

What kind of world was it, Yuliana thought with a shudder, where even housewives could slay grown knights without blinking?

“Fuck!” Sir Eisley swore in a mix of rage, frustration, and helplessness over the loss of his man. This wasn't a combat mission. No monsters, enemy soldiers, or natural hazards were expected on the way. There was no journey without risks, of course, but nobody sincerely believed in there being casualties. They were only to capture a solitary thief and return posthaste. Granted, Yuliana had been fully trained as a knight, but Sir Eisley had known her ever since she was a little girl and knew what to expect of her, more or less.

This—this wasn't supposed to happen!

“Get the sword!” the knight commander shouted at his remaining men. Now, more than before, he felt he had to accomplish the task. He owed it to the deceased.

“If you really want it that bad, why don't you come get it yourself?” the woman asked.

No one bothered to answer. In short order, the two knights who had been on their way to seize Yuliana and had paused to watch the show changed course and drew their weapons.

Their pace was a lot quicker and more aggressive than the first one's, as they jumped from rock to rock. Though there were two, they didn't try to surround their enemy or adopt anything that could be called a battle plan. From their point of view, the woman had simply taken advantage of her enemy's courtesy and put him down with a cheap shot. No, their interpretation was undoubtedly the correct one.

Could anyone fault their will to avenge their fallen comrade?

In response, their target—sighed.

“Why is it that the only time I have young men coming after me is when they're trying to kill me? Don't you think my life is already sad enough as it is?”

Is that what matters to you here!? Yuliana impulsively retorted in her mind, before recalling the seriousness of the situation.

Even if the stranger appeared to have some skill with a sword, she was outnumbered. Yuliana had to do something to help her—but at the same time, she was too intimidated by the bloodthirst hanging thickly in the air to decide where and how to intervene.

Leaping off a sizable rock, the foremost knight lifted his sword up high above his head with both hands, in an apparent attempt to cleave the woman in two with his full weight.

Not that he really was that murderous. Expecting her to put up her guard, he intended to simply knock her down with a superior mass. Considering his advantage in this regard, it could have still turned into a deathblow by accident, but he was not as soft as to only feign an attack.

But the woman didn't attempt to block his diving cut.

Instead, she waited right until the final moment, before quickly stepping sideways. And as she moved, she simultaneously pulled the greatsword with her. That sword, made of material far tougher than steel, ate through the chain mail and tore at the falling knight's exposed flank beneath the ribs. Perhaps her swing alone wouldn't have had enough force to cut through the numerous rings of steel, but being mid-fall, he essentially cut himself with his own momentum.

Sharing the fate of the previous knight, he let out a cry of agony and crash-landed on the rocks, past his target, like a humanoid cannonball.

“Why you—!”

The second—the third—knight quickened his charge after his comrade's fall, approaching the woman from her right. He had every intention to be more cautious than his fallen brothers-in-arms. He didn't let down his guard but kept his training in mind as he readied his weapon for a diagonal swing. With his eyes, he aimed at the woman's shieldless neck, which shone pale as a white flag in the dark. Should a counterattack come, he was fully prepared to break off his assault to receive it.

And yet, he never saw what happened next.

Turning quickly on her heels to face him, the woman brought down her weapon from above, over her shoulder, and bashed the knight on top of his helmet with the flat side of the massive blade. His weight at the front as he charged, his helmet blocking the view from above, he was flattened onto the ground by the impact, knocked out. As he lay there at her feet, defenseless and dazed, the woman quickly straightened her arm to turn the blade upright and brought it down in a cruel stab, below the back rim of the shiny helmet. The squishy sound of metal sinking into soft flesh made Yuliana wince and avert her face. The fallen knight immediately stopped kicking, dead, a red river running down the rocks underneath him.

“What the Hel…?” Sir Eisley staggered, stupefied.

Before he could fully grasp how it had happened, he realized he had already lost three men—half of his escort. He hadn't given any follow-up orders, or rather, he had no idea what he should even do next, when another knight stepped forward of his own initiative.

Everyone probably shared the same sentiments.

They couldn't—refused to—believe the reality in front of them.

Yes, the unknown woman had proved to be unexpectedly skilled, but was there anyone who didn't know how to use a sword, in this dangerous day and age? The knights had been careless. What had really killed them could only be called a mixture of bad luck, oversight, and difficult conditions working against them.

That was all.

They couldn't accept that the poorly equipped commoner before them could be somehow—different.

The fourth knight pulled a knife from a sheath below his left arm, weighed it quickly in his hand, and then cast it at the woman. In his mind, he was probably mocking his fallen companions for their stupidity at the same time, for losing their lives in such a trivial conflict. Their chivalry had been their undoing, but he wouldn't make the same mistake. A knife from a distance was all that was needed to put an end to this tragicomic struggle.

“What—?”

As aptly as it had been dispatched, the thrown knife never reached its target.

Flicking her wrist, the woman deflected the incoming weapon with her sword, like it was a shuttlecock in a casual game of badminton—although the game was not known in this world. And before the repelled knife had landed far behind her back, the woman was already dashing straight at the knight who had thrown it.

The knight in question was momentarily startled by the change of pace.

The stranger had barely moved from her spot this entire time, content with simply receiving and countering the knights' attacks, yet now she suddenly turned to the offensive. The man couldn’t understand that he had caused it himself, by introducing projectiles to the battlefield, thus changing the essential nature of the conflict.

Nimbly like a goat, the woman ran uphill. The distance of roughly four meters that the knight had needed to secure the kill was crossed in barely a second. In disbelief, he couldn't even think about resorting to the weapon still hanging sheathed on his belt, when the holy sword arced through the rain and sank into his right shoulder, at the base of his neck, where the chain mail's protection was at its weakest.

The heavy weapon dived with little effort into his torso for its full width, and an upward gush from the deep red fountain drew a wide arc across the heavens.

Instead of stopping to extract the blade, the woman continued to run past the knight, pulling the handle behind her like a lever. Skewed, torn by a violent, murderous agony, the knight could only turn along and, after the twisting motion stopped, fell back-first down the hill, pulled from impalement by gravity.

The swordswoman's assault didn't end there, but continued straight for the next knight in the line, not allowing the remaining enemies to recover and restore their formation. If they all decided to attack her from range together, they would no doubt quickly emerge victorious—and she would do all that she could to keep them from realizing the fact.

The knight standing closest from there was—the captain, Sir Eisley himself.

“Hi—?” A startled sound stole past his lips as the understanding dawned on him.

Bare moments ago, he had been safely surrounded by his squad and now—the front line of the battle had suddenly been drawn to where he stood.

In the habit of only issuing orders, the knight commander didn't have his sword drawn. He had nothing to throw. Not even a helmet. His attention had been captured by the surreal dance of death unfolding before his eyes, and so he had ended up completely forgetting about himself.

When was the last time he had needed to defend his life? He couldn't remember.

A bare second after his shocked gasp, Sir Eisley's throat was impaled by a thrust of the weapon he had been sent to retrieve. Having sealed his movements through this mortal blow, the woman retracted the blade and turned on her heels like a spinning top. In the next moment, the baron's decapitated head was cast through the darkening night, making dull, horrid noises as it bounced along the rocks like a rotten melon.

The two remaining knights wasted no more time idling, but...

—“AAAAAGGGGH!!”

“A DAEMON, MONSTEEER!!”

...Turned and scrambled up the slope on all fours, as fast as they were able.

“What was so scary?” the woman, Itaka Izumi, looked after them, tilting her head in confusion.