WebNovels

The Flirtatious Blade

DaoistdssrLn
42
chs / week
The average realized release rate over the past 30 days is 42 chs / week.
--
NOT RATINGS
257
Views
Synopsis
The reacarnation of sword master fuck u
VIEW MORE

Chapter 1 - the sword

They told me once that a man is measured by the way he holds what he wants.

I have always held things very well.

The sword sings when I pick it up. Metal has a habit of telling the truth if you let it—how old it is, how many promises it has kept, what it remembers of bone. Keen hummed like a throat cleared after a long silence. The blade fit my hand the way a joke fits a grin: precise, practiced, inevitable.

"Good morning," I said to it, because a conversation is better begun with manners.

The men who carried the banners called me Lord Aras and did that clumsy thing people call respect when they'd rather be somewhere else. The girls in the garrison called me trouble and came anyway. Soldiers called me a strategist or a butcher depending on which side of the trench you asked. I preferred "trouble" because it made for better stories at the end of the night.

Manners keep you, charm gets you what you want, and a blade, when properly used, makes people keep their promises.

We stood on the castle wall as the river below became a mirror for a thousand helmets. Paladins of Solace glinted in formation like teeth. At their front rode a woman who liked to look like sunlight and cruelty at once—General Serane. She had the sort of jaw that could cut and still make a man apologize for breathing when she looked at them. People said she was the Light's favorite; I suspected she was just very good at choosing the right lines of prayer.

She saw me and squared her shoulders, and for a second the whole plain looked like two lines of a play waiting for a punchline.

"Aras!" she called. Her voice ricocheted off the stones. "Return what you stole."

I tipped an imaginary hat. "Always happy to give gifts back," I shouted, because I have never been a man to deny a public moment. "But I'm very attached to the wardrobe."

The paladins behind her tsked in that sanctimonious percussion only holy men can keep steady. My captain coughed and tried to look stern. The girls in the courtyard—who had been watching, the way girls watch storms—smiled like they knew the punchline.

Serane's hand tightened on her sword. I made the face that means, this is getting fun, and then I moved.

Combat is a conversation I had been rehearsing long before this body chose to enjoy it. My feet remembered angles like old lovers remember names. The sword was a partner; Keen did not passively take orders. It told me stories, whispered the memory of another life into the grain of its steel. That made fighting intimate: not the bloody thing you see in tavern songs, but a negotiation of precision where each breath bought you the next.

When my blade touched hers, the world shrank to the space between an inhale and an exhale. Sparks and rain and curse-words blurred into a single melody. She was fast—too proper, like a prayer with embroidery. I laughed against her shoulder, the kind of laugh that has gotten men pardons, dinners, and the worst sort of trouble.

"You hear it, don't you?" she said—almost a secret. "The cry. The world… pleads."

"That's probably just the river being dramatic," I said. "Rivers always fancied themselves poets."

She pushed. I gave ground and took some back, and the audience—both armies and the girls—leaned forward. Battle is part theatre; the rest is math. This was both.

Two paladins tried to flank me. I moved so they found my elbow instead of my ribs and the sword made a singing sound that pleased me. A girl in the barracks behind us laughed out loud and a dozen men turned to see what had amused her. By the time I looked back at Serane, she had me caught in a way that should have killed me on most days. Her blade slid along mine and she pressed, and in that pressure I felt something else—an ache in the world like a string being pulled too tight.

"Return them, Aras," she said again. Not a challenge. An order. The sort a woman asks a man because she knows he has the habit of being stubborn for interesting reasons.

I let my smile falter for a flicker. "If I return them, who will carry on the cruelty of good men arguing about how worn their consciences are?" I asked.

She almost rolled her eyes. I loved that about her—she had a way of showing weakness so briefly the world barely noticed.

"You think yourself a hero of irony," she said. "But some debts aren't ledgers to be balanced by jokes."

"Some debts are," I agreed, and when the time came I chose the words that would keep people breathing for another hour. "But tell me this, Serane—if the gods have accounts, and the priests keep their books, what happens when the clerks are thieves?"

She didn't answer. She couldn't. Not because she didn't think, but because she had been taught the elegant answer that places hope on thrones and trophies. I knew the look. It's in the faces of people who grew up believing stories were true because it's kinder that way. I grew up learning that the truth is painful but useful.

Our swords separated and we were both laughing a little, as if the fight were an extended flirtation. There's nothing like the intimacy of shared effort to make a woman's jaw look delicate—for the duration of a strike. When I caught her wrist with the flat of my blade and she looked at me, there was a second where neither of us wanted to look away.

"Aras," she said, softer, like a knock on a door you have no intention of opening but can't seem to ignore. "There are children on the other side of your ledger."

"Children," I said, and the word tasted like a warning. "I don't like it when bureaucrats play with dolls, either."

I could have ended it. Many of the men I'd known—charismatic, handsome, good with girls—would have ended it. They would have drunk her light like wine and asked no questions, because victory tastes better with a halo. I don't do that sort of thing well. I like my victories complicated. I like my consquences interesting. Besides, I had promises to keep and promises make poor ornaments.

I stepped back and she stumbled. The audience exhaled as one. My captain called in a voice that tried hard to be iron and instead sounded like a man rehearsing. The girls giggled properly now, the way girls do when the man they like nearly dies and doesn't. I bowed—not sincere, theatrical—the kind of bow you give to a woman you suspect would be a terrible lover and an excellent ally.

"Let her live," I told my men. "Let the Light nurse its indignation."

The gate banged shut. Drums rolled. The paladins withdrew. Serane watched me go like someone who had just been offered poison in a velvet cup and could not decide whether to accept it or not.

Later, down in the secret parts of the castle where stone remembers names, I set the blade down on an anvil like one sets a story back on its spine. I like silence after noise. It makes the air taste differently.

Keen leaned into me with a voice that was not my own but belonged in my ribs. You are too pretty to be honest, it said.

"What kind of compliment is that?" I asked it, running a thumb along the guard.

You think the prettiness will distract them from what you take, Keen replied. It does. It also makes them hungry.

"Hungry for what?" I teased. "For a promise? For you? For me? Or for the scandal of being seen laughing while chapel men count heads?"

The blade hummed. "All of it."

I grinned. Being pretty is useful. It opens doors, makes enemies pause, makes women smile through their anger. It gives you a grace period before the world remembers to be cruel again. I used it like a coin.

"Who did I steal from today?" I asked. "A ledger? A taste for safety? The gods' patience?"

Keen was a blunt thing to ask. It answered anyway. Eleven thousand, it whispered. A number like a gravestone for conscience. You take them because the wheel is idle and you are tired of keeping the world polite while it kills itself slowly.

That sentence could have killed lesser men. For me it was a map. I was tired of polite deaths. I had been tired of them for a long time—long before the scar on my jaw became a good story at taverns. I had been tired in a way that makes a man sharpen himself to do things unlikely men avoid: stealing from altars, bargaining with priests, making enemies out of the sort of people who light stars and call them lessons.

A woman—Lira, a singer with a laugh like glass—slipped into the chamber because she liked men who returned her letters and broke their promises in ways that made good epilogues. She kissed my cheek and called me a dangerous man, which was the sort of compliment I kept framed. Her popularity with the other girls didn't hurt. They told their friends about my hands and my smile, and rumors are the currency of charm.

But charm is a shallow currency when futures are mortgaged. The thing you steal in the dark does not vanish simply because the moon looks beautiful. I know this. That's why I keep my jokes sharp and my promises sharper.

"You know the Light will come," Keen said. The blade's voice had the patience of an immortal used to waiting for men to figure out the obvious.

"I know," I said. "And I know Serane will be the one to give me the bill."

Keen hummed like laughter. "And the girl in the crystal?"

The cough that came out of me was part amusement, part confession. "She is the last thing I saw before the old life closed on me," I said, because some confessions should be given in fragments, like a man giving away his secrets as if they were coins. "That is the reason I began to be dangerous enough to do this."

"What now?" Keen asked. Its edge glinted despite the dim.

I picked it up again and balanced it, feeling its weight as if it were a promise. "Now we become intentional," I said. "We wake them. We make them choose."

"And the Light?"

I smiled because the answer was a blade I'd been polishing for years. "We make the Light pick a better face to love."

Keen sang in a way like thunder settling. The girls who hear thunder like men who move the weather. Lira came back with a tray of wine and placed it before me. "To what we call ourselves," she said, and winked.

"To what we steal," I corrected, and touched my cup to hers.

Down below, the horn of the temple blew—single, low, a note that smelled like judgment. It was an old sound. It meant the priests had noticed a mistake. It meant the counting had started.

I set down the cup. Charm is a useful thing, but not for every job. There are debts that require a different payment.

"We start tonight," I said.

"Handsome and perfidious," Lira said, smiling like a woman with enough sense to worry and not enough fear to stop herself. She liked being close to danger. Plenty of girls did. Being liked by them was both a weapon and a distraction. I used both.

Keen nestled into my palm. "Are you a god, Aras?" it asked, half taunt, half wonder.

"Not yet," I said. "Only a man with too many promises and a city that doesn't know how to keep them."

Down the stone steps the dark waited, and with it the eleven thousand names that stole the dreams of a world. Above them, Serane prepared to be the one to collect the bill. Around us, the girls told each other which stories they thought I'd leave them, and I gave them the smile that made promises easier to forgive.

I have always held things well. Tonight I meant to hold the thing that mattered most: a choice.

Keen caught the light one last time and sang. I answered with an easy grin and a step into the dark.

"Make it quick," Lira whispered, because style matters even in revolutions. "I want to hear the stories afterwards."

"You always do," I said, and began to walk.

We moved like a rumor—fast, impossible to stop, and probably the most polite sort of disaster the kingdom had ever seen.