Looking at Roy picking up yet another branch, Skia almost couldn't help but break one of the most important rules of being an assassin: never reveal anything about yourself, especially not your emotional state.
He spoke, his voice cracking with frustration.
"You fucking bastard! Are you going to beat me to death with sticks?"
Contrary to his outburst, only silence replied. Roy continued his methodical action of selecting another suitable branch, testing its weight, then without any hesitation, hurled it toward Skia's position.
Skia hurriedly dodged, rolling to the side as the improvised projectile smashed into the ground where he'd been standing.
Roy didn't want to just throw branches like a coward. He almost felt like that backstabber, the archer he despised with all his heart for his underhanded tactics. Every fiber of his being wanted to charge forward and cut this assassin into a thousand pieces, to make him pay for what he'd done to Prince Elric.
But more important than his pride, more important than his anger, was the prince's safety and the kingdom's security. He had to capture this man alive so they could discover who sent him and whether there were other conspirators involved. Dead men told no tales, and this assassination attempt reeked of a larger plot.
So he swallowed his rage and continued the humiliating but effective strategy of keeping the assassin off-balance from a distance.
Skia quickly steadied his mind, forcing down his frustration. This knight was clearly not someone who could be taken lightly. The man had enough combat experience to react to straightforward attacks with seemingly effortlessly.
Let's try something different then, Skia thought, his mind overriding his wounded pride.
He studied Roy's stance carefully—feet planted, weight slightly forward, sword held in a middle guard that could transition to offense or defense in an instant. The man was a textbook example of proper form.
Skia adjusted his own posture, bending his knees slightly and centering his weight. He set his blessing's direction forward but angled slightly to the knight's right side, away from the sword. But this time, he let the power remain as low as it could go while still providing useful acceleration.
Shoosh!
The moment Skia launched forward, Roy immediately stopped his branch-throwing motion and gripped his sword tightly with both hands, preparing to counter the incoming attack.
This assassin seemed competent enough that Roy didn't think he'd attempt the same blind-speed rush twice hoping for a different result. So his eyes regained their intense focus, pupils dilating to catch every detail of movement.
And the moment Skia launched, Roy noticed the difference immediately.
His movement was now slow enough to follow with the naked eye—barely, but still trackable. And his direction was different than before, angled slightly to Roy's right rather than straight at his center mass.
Roy quickly channeled mana into his legs, anchoring himself to the ground with enhanced stability. His eyes narrowed to pinpoints of concentration, tracking the assassin's approach.
Skia watched the knight standing ten meters away. He blinked, and in what felt like the next instant, he was already close enough to see the individual muscles tightening in Roy's neck and shoulders. But his eyes never left the sword, following its every micro-movement, reading the knight's intentions through the blade's positioning.
His body followed the preset trajectory, approaching his designated interception point.
One... two... three...
The sword moved. First it pulled back, chambering for a powerful strike, then came forward in a horizontal slash aimed directly at his neck. The knight had already calculated Skia's movement speed perfectly. If he maintained the same velocity, the sword would be waiting at exactly the right position to separate his head from his shoulders.
When his neck was perhaps one centimeter from the blade's edge—close enough to feel the displaced air against his skin—Skia's body suddenly stopped as if someone had frozen time itself. Even the wind that had been following his movement seemed to halt.
He'd already prepared for this maneuver, overloading his body with mana reinforcement to withstand the forces involved. At the critical moment, he activated his blessing in three directions simultaneously: right, left, and backward. The combined attractions canceled his forward momentum almost instantly.
But it wasn't quite enough. He felt like his internal organs were trying to escape through his mouth, the deceleration forces threatening to tear him apart from the inside. Still, looking at Roy's sword passing harmlessly through the space where his neck would have been, carrying its momentum forward, Skia knew his gambit had worked.
Without wasting a microsecond, his right hand shot straight toward Roy's exposed neck while the knight's sword was out of position.
But Skia's eyes never left the blade, still tracking it as it completed its arc and struck the ground, raising a small cloud of dust.
Wait, a thought intruded. Why was the impact so minimal?
WHAM!
At some point, Roy had raised his right leg, knee driving upward like a piston. The target was Skia's chin.
Distraction. The sword was a distraction.
Only this thought remained before Skia's mind went blank for a second.
Fortunately, he'd instinctively activated his blessing at the last possible moment before getting hit. Even after losing concentration, his blessing—trained into his very muscles over twenty-six years—continued functioning on autopilot.
Combined with the impact force from Roy's devastating knee strike, it was enough to propel Skia backward through the air, creating distance between them.
While flying backward, consciousness returned in fragments. He stopped his momentum by planting his feet and skidding across the ground, but the next moment his legs nearly gave out entirely. He collapsed to his knees, barely maintaining even that much stability.
His head spun from the impact, vision swimming with spots of color. Blood dripped from his nose—possibly broken—and his jaw felt like it had been hit with a sledgehammer.
But looking at Roy through blurred vision, Skia noticed the knight still had no intention of following up with an aggressive attack. He simply stood there, sword lowered, watching with an expression that seemed almost... satisfied?
Before Skia could wonder about the reason for this strange behavior, he suddenly felt a sharp, piercing pain in his back.
His mind, which had been struggling to stabilize after the knee strike, suddenly felt even more disoriented. Darkness crept in from the edges of his vision like ink spreading through water.
As consciousness fled, he finally heard the knight speak.
"Did you enjoy the show, Thor?"
Roy's voice carried a note of dry amusement, completely at odds with the violence of the past few minutes.
A reply came from deep within the forest, the voice belonging to someone Skia had never detected.
"For an archer, finding the suitable moment is everything," Thor called back, a hint of satisfaction in his tone. "Though I'll admit, you certainly took your time setting up that opening. I was starting to think you'd forgotten I was here."
Footsteps approached— unhurried. Thor emerged from the shadows between the trees, a longbow held loosely in one hand. He was a lean man with sharp features and calculating eyes that never seemed to stop moving.
"The backstabber reveals himself," Roy muttered, though there was no real heat in his words. For all his proclaimed disdain for Thor's methods, he couldn't argue with results.
Thor approached the collapsed assassin, nudging him with his boot to ensure he was truly unconscious. The arrow protruding from Skia's back had been precisely placed—angled to avoid vital organs but guarantee incapacitation. A paralytic poison coated the arrowhead, already spreading through the assassin's body.
"He won't die," Thor said, answering Roy's unspoken question. "The poison will keep him unconscious for at least six hours, and weak for days after. Plenty of time for interrogation."