Chapter 196: Oath of the Sword

Chapter 196: Oath of the Sword

Krogh remembered the scams he and the old man had run—stealing tattered Daoist robes with Old Bald to pose as wandering geomancers, spinning wild fortunes for credulous villagers.

He’d tried his hand at rogue’s chess, a game not yet popular in Vermithys, only to lose what little coin he had to alleyway hustlers. He’d hawked calligraphy, scribbled letters for illiterate farmers, and—when hunger gnawed too fiercely—resorted to snatching eggs from hen coops, praying they wouldn’t be chased out with pitchforks.

And through it all, Old Balder had been there—grinning, patient, endlessly amused by the young noble’s fumbling attempts at survival.

"Krogh-sama, this is the cucumber stolen from the vegetable garden at the edge of the village. It can be eaten raw."

The memory was so clear it might as well have been yesterday. A grimy-faced, grey-headed young Krogh perched on a dirt mound, glaring at the stolen cucumber in his hand. He took a tentative bite—then immediately spat it out with a sound of disgust.

"Prr—prr! Damn! This thing can be eaten?!"

With a weak flick of his wrist, he hurled the cucumber into the bushes, then slumped forward, exhaustion weighing him down like a sack of stones.

A few moments later...

"Ay, Old Bald," young Krogh groaned, waving a limp hand. "Go pick that up for me. I don’t even have the strength to stand."

Obligingly, the old man shuffled over, retrieved the discarded vegetable, and took a hearty bite himself, chewing with relish. "Krogh-sama, these are corn cobs. Roasted ones are better than raw cucumbers."

"Stop talking nonsense," young Krogh grumbled. "Just... eat."

Another memory surfaced—this time of Old Balder digging in the dirt like a foraging animal, emerging triumphantly with a mud-caked tuber.

——

"Old Bald, what is this thing you’ve dug up?"

"Sweet potato," the old man replied, wiping it clean on his sleeve before offering it.

"Can it be eaten raw?"

"Hai, Krogh-sama."

Young Krogh took a cautious bite, then blinked in surprise. "Huh. Actually... damn, it’s crunchy. And kinda sweet."

Old Balder hesitated, then cleared his throat—his dialect thickening the way it always did when he was about to say something he knew would annoy his young master.

"Mi lord... can An’ say somethin’?" Old Bald got a strong accent

"Spit it!"

"Well... if ya roast it, it gets even more fragrant."

A beat of silence. Then—

"Oh, damn it all! Why didn’t you say so earlier?!"

And just like that, the memory dissolved into laughter—Old Balder’s wheezing, toothless cackle mingling with young Krogh’s indignant shouts.

Krogh sighed, running his fingers over the journal’s worn pages. Those were the days...

——

The stolen chicken sizzled over the crackling fire, its golden skin glistening with rendered fat as the aroma of roasted fowl filled the night air. Young Krogh tore into the meat with the ravenous abandon of a starved wolf, juices running down his chin as he devoured the illicit feast beneath the cold glitter of starlight.

"Though we nearly got our heads split open by that farmer’s pitchfork," Krogh mumbled through a mouthful of tender flesh, "this might be the finest meal I’ve ever tasted! Not even the slow-roasted lamb at my father’s banquet table compares!"

Beside him, Old Balder worked methodically through a drumstick, his gnarled fingers moving with surprising dexterity as he matched his young master bite for bite. "Hai, mi lord," he agreed, his words slightly muffled by food, the firelight dancing in his gap-toothed smile. "Fragrant indeed - though mayhaps a pinch of salt would’ve made it proper." His eyes twinkled with mischief as he snatched the last wing just before Krogh’s reaching fingers could claim it.

The memory glowed warm in Krogh’s mind - that simple joy of survival, of stolen meals under open skies. How strange that what had seemed like hardship then now felt like precious freedom.

——

The midday sun beat down mercilessly as young Krogh sprawled across a flat river stone, using his bundled robe as a makeshift pillow. He watched through half-lidded eyes as Old Balder pretended—poorly—not to glance toward the village women washing clothes downstream.

"Old Bald," Krogh drawled, plucking a blade of grass to chew, "when we entered the village, your eyes nearly fell out of your head staring at that plump auntie by the well. And don’t think I forgot about you gawping at that nursing mother last market day." He propped himself up on one elbow, grinning. "Tell me truthfully—how can you just look at a woman and know if she’s untouched?"

The old man nearly choked on his water gourd, his leathery skin darkening with a flush. "Huh... I did not dare to touch," he stammered, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. "Only dare to look. These old eyes still work proper-like."

"My ass!" Krogh crowed with laughter, tossing a pebble at the flustered old man. "You’re worse than a spring-starved tomcat! At least cats have the decency to be subtle about it."

Old Balder’s answering chuckle was equal parts embarrassed and unrepentant, his missing teeth making his smile lopsided and boyish despite his years. That familiar, ridiculous grin surfaced in Krogh’s memory now, bringing with it an ache that had nothing to do with physical pain.

——

The fever burned through Krogh’s body like wildfire, his skin slick with sweat despite the evening chill. He lay shivering beneath their threadbare travel blanket, his fingers clutching weakly at Old Balder’s sleeve. "Old Bald," he whispered, his voice cracking with dryness, "am I going to die? If I’d known... I never would’ve touched that damned sword box in your pack..."

The old man’s calloused hands were surprisingly gentle as they pressed a damp cloth to Krogh’s forehead. "You won’d!" he said fiercely, his usual dialect thickening with emotion. "Krogh-sama, don’t go thinking dark thoughts. This old brat knows - people scare themselves sicker than any poison." He leaned closer, his breath smelling of the medicinal herbs he’d been chewing. "Think instead of good things, mi lord. That fine aged sake at the Red Lantern Inn. The roasted pheasant we had at Midwinter. Or..." he added with deliberate mischief, "that clever-eyed magistrate’s daughter who kept smiling at you last town."

"The more I think of those things," Krogh groaned, "the more I want to die knowing I’ll never taste them again."

Old Balder clucked his tongue, adjusting the blanket with fussy precision. "No, no, no, Krogh-sama still owes me three jugs of top-shelf rice sake! Remember your promise?" He adopted a theatrically solemn tone. "A man of character speaks words that four oxen, five donkeys and six horses can’t drag back! Where I come from, we say even a loud fart can blast a hole in the ground, but a true man’s word carves stone!"

"Damn you, Old Bald," Krogh wheezed, though a faint smile tugged at his cracked lips. "Your jokes are worse than this fever."

"Shall I tell another then?" the old man asked brightly, settling cross-legged beside his charge.

"Spare me," Krogh muttered, closing his eyes. "Your repertoire consists entirely of stale tavern tales and peasant vulgarities. I could recite them in my sleep—and likely have, given how often you’ve repeated them." He turned his face away with what dignity he could muster. "Now let me rest. This ’righteous hero’ isn’t dying today, if only to spite you."

——

The campfire popped and crackled, sending up spirals of sparks into the velvet night. Young Krogh studied the old man across the flames, noticing how the light deepened every wrinkle on his weathered face.

"Old Bald," he asked suddenly, "why did you never marry?"

The question seemed to catch the old samurai off guard. He poked at the fire with a stick before answering. "Nah," he said at last, his voice softer than usual. "When I was young, all I knew was swinging a hammer at my master’s forge from dawn till dusk. Never saved two coppers to rub together." He shrugged, the motion making the sword box on his back creak. "By time I might’ve scraped something together... well."

Krogh sighed, suddenly ashamed of his own full purse and fine clothes back home.

"Ah, but it’s no matter," Old Balder continued, his usual cheer returning. He patted the sword box affectionately. "Never tasted bird’s nest soup or bear paw stew in all my days, so I don’t miss what I never had. Mostly just..." He winked. "Take a good look when chance allows, let imagination do the rest."

"Damn it all, you old rogue!" Krogh laughed, shaking his head in wonder. "Every now and then you come out with something almost wise."

"Hey now," the old man protested, rubbing his bald pate in mock embarrassment, "even a blind hen sometimes finds corn."

Madam Claret, watching Krogh’s face as he relived these memories, saw the subtle softening around his eyes, the barely-there quirk at the corner of his mouth that betrayed his fondness. She found herself smiling in response, though she knew better than to comment.

With deliberate slowness, Krogh opened the journal’s final page. The words there were stark, unadorned:

With the box on his back, Balder Hanzwart leapt to the top of the wall, coming to rest twenty meters from Ulsar Drows. All five katanas had been released from their wooden prison, and all three of Balder’s self-created sword arts had been unleashed in their entirety. Ulsar Drows faced him bare-handed.

Forty six moves they exchanged, each collision reshaping the ancient stones beneath them, their auras so potent that veteran warriors watching from below trembled like saplings in a storm. When Balder Hanzwart unleashed his ninth and final sword art—a technique born from a lifetime of hardship and simple joys—Ulsar at last raised his right hand in earnest. Their final clash hung in the air like a crimson river pouring down from the heavens, the force of it shredding Ulsar’s sleeve to ribbons.

For three hundred thirty-three moves they fought—Balder with one arm broken, four of his five katanas shattered, yet still pressing forward. Until at last, his meridians broken and his life fading, the old warrior settled cross-legged atop the battered wall.

Krogh closed the journal with infinite care. The translucent Threads of Fate coiled about his body shimmered faintly, their movements mirroring the tremor in his hands that he would never allow to show on his face.

Old Balder had never taken a wife. But he’d raised an orphaned son of a Hanz clan guard as his own. And that young man had a daughter named Yunny.

The faint aura Krogh had sensed on Lordi’s body - the one that had stayed his hand—had been unmistakably hers. Not the vengeful wraith’s fury, but the lingering warmth of the humanity had somehow returned in her.

Without looking up, his voice carefully devoid of anything resembling emotion, Krogh said softly, "Claret. Would you heat some shochu for me."

The old samurai’s name had long since faded from the collective memory of the demonic world, erased not by any deliberate malice but by the simple, indifferent passage of time that washes away all but the most monumental of legends. Where once his deeds might have been sung in Hanz Stronghold taverns or whispered with reverence in Pond House sword halls, now there remained only silence - his identity dissolved into the vast, uncaring tapestry of history that only remembers those who reshape the world through overwhelming power or terrible destruction.

As the sharp, burning shochu trickled down Krogh’s throat, the alcohol’s heat seemed to conjure visions from the past. In his mind’s eye, he saw Old Balder setting out on that final, fateful journey beneath a sky painted in the violent hues of a dying day—streaks of crimson and gold bleeding across the horizon as if the heavens themselves were wounded by what was to come. The old man’s leather sandals, worn nearly translucent from decades of traversing mountain paths and desert wastes, whispered against the parched earth with each determined step, their faint scuffing sounds the only fanfare for this last march. The sword box strapped to his bent back seemed heavier now, not with the physical weight of the five blades within, but with the accumulated burdens of a lifetime. The wind carried the metallic promise of rain that would never come, as though the elements themselves hesitated to bear witness to what was about to unfold at FrostBane Castle.

Krogh Hanz had never been one of those legendary prodigies whose births were heralded by celestial phenomena—no twin suns appearing at his nativity, no ancestral swords ringing in their scabbards to mark his arrival. Unlike the chosen ones of epic poems, he hadn’t emerged from the womb already grasping the fundamental truths of cultivation or displaying impossible mastery over arcane arts. He had been, in every way that mattered, a typical spoiled scion of the Hanz clan—raised in silken luxury where his every whim was anticipated by an army of attendants, where the concept of hunger was nothing more than the brief discomfort between lavish meals, where struggle was something that happened to other, lesser people in stories meant to caution against indolence. The grand feasts of his youth blurred together in memory, one extravagant display of culinary excess after another, all taken for granted as his birthright.

All of this changed when his father, in a rare moment of wisdom, had arranged for his first real journey beyond the clan’s gilded halls - accompanied not by an entourage of guards and tutors, but solely by that ridiculous old man with his missing teeth and ever-present sword box. It was during those hard months of travel, sleeping in flea-infested inns and sometimes under open skies, that Krogh first came to understand the quiet dignity of ordinary people’s lives - the way farmers measured happiness by full storehouses ahead of winter, how merchants took pride in honest dealings as much as profits, why craftsmen would spend decades perfecting a single technique. These lessons in humanity’s resilience and simple joys had been more valuable than any secret manual or cultivation technique the clan vaults might hold.

And yet—

The memory surfaced with painful clarity: Old Balder’s face creasing into that familiar, gap-toothed grin that could make even the most dire circumstances feel like just another amusing anecdote to be shared over cheap wine. The image was so vivid Krogh could almost smell the old man’s familiar scent—steel polish and sweat and the faint herbal tang of the medicinal alcohol he always carried. That grin had never faltered, not even when facing down certain death, as if mortality itself were just another punchline in the cosmic joke only he understood.

There had been a moment—unremarkable to outside observers but seismic in its impact on Krogh’s soul—when everything changed. It might have been when the old man shared his last crust of bread with a starving child without hesitation, or when he stood unarmed between Krogh and a band of marauders without an ounce of fear in his bearing. The exact instance mattered less than the realization it sparked: true strength wasn’t measured in cultivation stages or rare techniques, but in the unshakable will to stand by one’s convictions regardless of cost.

That revelation had shattered Krogh’s worldview more completely than any master’s blow could have. The path of cultivation wasn’t merely an ascent to power as he’d always believed - it was a crucible that tested the mettle of one’s character far more than one’s martial prowess. Old Balder, with his patched robes and humble demeanor, had possessed a nobility no amount of inherited wealth or status could match.

When the Hanz clan scouts finally delivered their record of the old samurai’s final journey, Krogh had sat motionless through the night, the scroll clenched in whitened knuckles. By dawn, he had made his decision. With methodical precision, the young heir of Hanz Clan stripped himself of every trapping of privilege—leaving behind his signet ring, his silken robes, even his name. The Abyss Pit Sect’s recruitment trials were brutal by design, meant to break all but the most determined aspirants, yet Krogh endured each trial with a focus that bordered on religious fervor. And when the time came, he descended into the Gworm Abyss not with the reckless arrogance of his youth, but with the quiet certainty of one who had finally grasped an essential truth.

The Sword Path wasn’t about strength alone. It was about purpose—the unwavering why that gives meaning to all actions. And as Krogh stepped into the Gworm Abyss, Old Balder’s finest katana in hand, he vowed to walk this path further and with greater ruthlessness than that toothless old man ever had, precisely because he finally understood what the old man had been trying to teach him all along.

PS:

Hey there! This is a 2900+ words Chapter.

So, I decided to play around in the corners of this story’s world a bit and give some side characters a chance to step into the spotlight. This is my first time really digging into a background story like this, and I had an absolute blast writing it.

I hope you enjoy this little glimpse into the past of a certain legendary swordsman. I had so much fun imagining his adventures (and misadventures) long before he crossed paths with our main crew.

Hope it brings a smile to your face!

Happy reading! Wishing you a wonderful weekend filled with great stories. 😊📖