My Castle received visitors. Several of them, in fact.
They were not reincarnates, however.
Every one of them was a warrior who had made a name for himself and risen to prominence operating in Nation T.
They had two things in common.
One was confidence in their strength and their swordsmanship.
The other was confidence in the performance of the weapons they carried.
It is the latter that deserves attention here.
Sword, spear, axe, hammer—whatever the type, these were national-treasure-grade pieces of the sort a country might possess one of, if that. And a good many of my visitors were carrying them.
The reason was obvious.
A blacksmith capable of making them had appeared in Nation T.
She had used the Goddess's Gift, [The Power to Have Any One Wish Granted], to become [the greatest blacksmith in history].
Her name spread in no time, and renowned warriors came flocking to commission her master craftsmanship.
Whereupon she fed her customers all manner of things under the guise of rumor, and pointed them at me to be struck down.
What became of the warriors who visited My Castle knowing none of this hardly needs stating.
I teleported to Nation T and paid a visit to the smithy run by the blacksmith they call a national treasure.
"Welcome in!"
The one who greeted me was a woman in a navy work coat, black hair tied back in a ponytail.
This was the blacksmith in question.
"Can you repair this sword?"
What I handed the blacksmith was a broken sword made of one hundred percent diamond.
Unlike metal, diamond cannot be put back once it has broken. Not that it is beyond me, obviously.
"Well, now. That is quite a sword......"
She was taken aback, as anyone would be—but she took the hammer hanging at her hip in hand all the same.
Then she laid the broken faces of the diamond sword out so that they met, and brought the hammer down on them.
There was a flash of light, and the diamond that had been two long fragments turned into a single sword.
"There you are, all finished."
She had pulled off a job thought impossible, and she held it out to me with a smug look on her face.
Metallic bonding, covalent bonding—none of it makes any difference to this blacksmith, apparently.
"Mm......"
I took the sword and inspected it from the bottom up.
"Now, as for the fee—"
"Oi. This sword is one centimeter shorter."
I cut off the blacksmith as she went straight for payment, and lodged a complaint.
"That will be because the fragments were missing. I am a blacksmith and nothing more, so producing something that does not exist really is beyond me."
"If you cannot, should you not have said so at the outset? You have gone and done something quite unnecessary."
The nerve—to take on an impossible job like this and get a complaint for her trouble.
That is what the blacksmith is thinking.
My purpose, of course, was never the repair of a sword. It was to harass the blacksmith.
"Be that as it may, there is no blacksmith in this world greater than me. I made the impossible possible for you—shouldn't you settle for that?"
"Oi, you. You are wrong about every part of that. One: you did not make the impossible possible. That it turned out to be possible means it was never impossible—it was possible from the start. And two: if I become a blacksmith, then a blacksmith greater than you does exist."
I stood the diamond sword upright in my right hand and gave it a tap with a finger of my left.
The diamond sword flashed and grew one centimeter.
"Wha—! What are you?!"
"I am [The Omniscient, Omnipotent, Strongest, Invincible, Absolutely Superior One]. The one you are supposed to defeat."
The blacksmith finally grasped the situation and backed away.
She had sold her very finest weapons to any number of customers, aimed every one of them at me, and every one of them had failed.
Naturally she has a very good sense of how strong I am.
"So you have come to eliminate the threat—to stop me supplying your assassins with strong weapons?"
"Do not flatter yourself. That is a spectacular misunderstanding. I came to make you aware that you are a coward."
"A coward? Me?"
She frowned, assuming I meant her having obtained her present standing with the Goddess's Gift. That is not it.
So I explained it to her, in careful and considerate detail.
"A coward who does nothing but steer other people from somewhere safe and never runs the slightest risk herself, and calls that carrying out her mission. A coward who hires a beautiful assistant with her ulterior motives on open display, fully intending that her own life at least will sail along untroubled. A coward who steers people into striking down a dangerous being like me and turns a tidy profit while she is at it."
"And what's wrong with that! I'm a blacksmith!"
"Because you chose to be. With the Goddess's Gift you could have become anything at all."
"And I'm a woman!"
"You were a man before you were reincarnated. You begged the Goddess to make you a woman—what are you talking about. Besides, a blacksmith of your caliber has more than enough skill at handling weapons to go with it. There is no reason you could not come and strike me down in person."
"I am a blacksmith held to be a national treasure. This country needs me!"
"Do not be confused. What this country actually needs is a Hero who can defeat me."
A beat late, the blacksmith realized her mask had been peeled off, and stopped caring how she looked.
"Shut the hell up! Fine. I'll kill you myself, personally!"
The blacksmith took a sword down from the wall and struck the flat of the blade with her hammer.
"Wake up!"
"Right you are, boss!"
That sword was one the blacksmith had made for her own use—the strongest sword by her own reckoning.
A demon sword with a will of its own; a masterpiece that moves under its own power and makes its bearer the strongest swordsman even with no training whatsoever.
I raised the diamond sword.
"You're planning to fight with that ornament?"
It is no wonder she howled it.
Diamond is extraordinarily hard, and brittle for exactly that reason. Trade blows with a metal sword that has toughness and it snaps easily and loses.
But of course none of that has any bearing on a contest between the blacksmith's demon sword and mine.
"Hrrraaah!"
"Hmph."
The diamond sword cut the demon sword clean apart.
The demon sword's will winked out, and the severed tip of its blade buried itself in the blacksmith's head.
Both eyes wide, mouth hanging open, the blacksmith toppled over backward.
I teleported back to My Castle and dropped onto Nation T a monolith—a twenty-kilometer black object cut to the shape of the country.
Incidentally, there were assassins she had dispatched who had not yet reached My Castle. I disposed of the lot of them.