Episode 18 — Man-Eater versus Man-Eater? (6)
The Academy Colosseum had become a living hell.
Everyone thrashed to get out. They shoved, they tripped, they trampled whoever stood between them and the exits—a race run for nothing but survival. Some threw their own bodies down in a desperate nobility, trying to save a child, a parent, a lover. Others collapsed under the Fear pouring off the monsters, or simply lost their minds and stood drooling where they were.
Wretched. This was what it meant when a monster beyond human comprehension appeared—something no person could dare stand against. Panic without a break in it. Merely holding on to one's sanity was a labor past enduring.
And in the middle of that wretched crisis:
"This one's a failure."
"Things ought not to be this 'peaceful.' Honestly..."
Two men looked upon the ruin and called it peaceful.
In all that chaos they alone remained in their seats, talking with perfect ease, and the sight of them was alien. Stranger still, both wore the robes of temple priests—one of them the vestments of a high priest—and yet not a single soul begged them for help. As if no one had noticed they existed at all.
The high priest, who had been taking the storm of screams for music, opened his mouth.
"It is not going as I expected."
To anyone else the scene was plainly wretched, but the horror he had planned was nothing so lukewarm. There had to be death. There had to be Sacrifice. It had to be gruesome, the ground swimming in blood, packed full of young lambs wearing faces of endless despair.
And now?
"...There are no proper sacrificial lambs."
The place itself might be a cauldron of confusion, but it was a lukewarm space, empty of despair and empty of death. Chaos of this sort could be put back in order whenever one pleased. The high priest shook his head, disappointed.
"We seem to have drifted far from the plan."
"Mm. I'm sorry, Captain. I was careful—I was careful—and still a snag like this..."
The young junior priest laid his remorse bare. Even he, playful as he usually was, could not hide the apology now.
The high priest shook his head.
"How could that be your fault? The blame belongs to me, for arrogantly believing everything would turn as I planned."
"......"
"So you need not reproach yourself overmuch."
"...Thank you, Captain."
"The courtesy is done. More to the point, contrary to the plan, the offerings are all slipping away. It cannot be helped."
"What do you...?"
"Open the second summoning circle."
"Ah—won't the cost be far too steep...?"
Summoning a monster of that size had already taken no small toll. Roughly half a year's budget for the kingdom? Perhaps more. And now, on top of that, further expenditure? The trimmings might well end up costing more than the feast.
He only said:
"Do it. Now."
"......"
A flat command, and nothing more, as if the whole of the responsibility would rest on him alone.
"Hah... I don't know a thing about this anymore."
The junior priest obeyed his superior in silence and drew a staff from his robes.
Vmmm.
Mana stirred, thick and filthy as ditchwater, and only then did the high priest give a nod. He spared the working no more than a glance. His eyes turned once more to the center of the Colosseum.
"—Does some loathsome knight dare obstruct the great work?"
Loathsome. Hateful. If he followed his heart, he would step out and tear the man into a thousand pieces, into ten thousand. But he must not. This stage was not for them.
Even so, though he could not step forward—
Even if the bleeding reached astronomical sums, that knight, at least, he would kill. He swore it to his god.
In a space of pitch black, the thing howled.
Its size could not even be guessed. How vast did a body have to be for the voice alone to toll, ominous, through the whole of the Academy?
Worse than the bulk was this.
Fwoosh!
Squirm... squirm...!
It was still burning, hot as ever, and yet it was regenerating. A tremendous power of recovery.
Monster. And that blow—what kind of blow was that...!
Odewal, the arrogant mage. He despised knights, but he was no fool incapable of even reading a knight's skill, and so he knew. The ballista that ignorant knight had hurled was a strike even an archmage would be hard-pressed to reproduce in person. An ordinary large monster ought to have died on the spot.
That the thing was not only intact, but crawling back together without so much as having taken the damage, was anything but normal. The knowledge came as terror.
Who in the world summoned a monster like that?!
A century, at the minimum. Humanoid monsters grew larger the longer they lived, and their savagery and strength grew with them. That thing had lived a hundred years if it had lived a day. And merely having survived past a hundred years was itself the proof of a monster's strength. To live long was to have endured in an ecosystem of eating and being eaten.
A hundred years? A specimen like that still remains on the continent?
He did not want to believe it. Creatures of that caliber, he had thought, were wiped out in the late king's reign.
"Hey. Slave. Let me ask you one thing. That looks like magic to me. Why can't you erase it?"
"...You say things so stupid they sicken me with rage. Summoning magic is triggered by an absolute promise. Therefore, that is..."
"Enough. If you can't, say you can't. Why's your tongue so damn long. ...Useless bastard."
"!?"
It was unfair. It was not that he couldn't do it. Bring any mage you liked and none of them could ever break that magic, so why was he the only one being chewed apart?
"I am telling you, it is not a matter of skill!"
Just as the words he flung like a scream declared, it was not a matter of skill. That summoning magic had surely been driven by an enormous offering, and summoning worked through an offering was absolute—a promise that must descend upon this world, irreversible by any means. The monster would come. For the moment its body was simply too huge to crawl out of the hole. It would appear all the same.
"W-we have to run! Or beg the kingdom for reinforcements this instant! I am telling you, you cannot take that monster alone!"
"......"
"Stop acting the idiot! What, do you want to be a hero, is that it?!"
Odewal was wearing himself raw trying to persuade the knight, snarling like a man spitting curses. He wanted to live. He wanted to run this very moment. But that damned oath left him unable to refuse the man's orders, and so he was reduced to begging. Please. Let us flee.
...However.
"Looks like the spectators have mostly cleared out. We could probably bolt, too."
"Now that is welcome to hear! At last you are not saying something stupid!"
"Thing is, though. I don't think that bastard means to let us go."
"What nonsense—!"
"Not nonsense. Look."
"You—what are you— mm!?"
Fate, it seemed, would not even permit flight.
The knight's brutal hand cranked Odewal's neck toward the sky until it felt ready to snap. He meant to shout about the rudeness, and the words died in his mouth.
In the sky...
"This is madness—!"
Pat-pat-pat!
Those who saw it first might have taken it for hail. Black hail, or green—hail that stirred a revulsion with no name. And the more of it fell...
"M-monsters are falling from the sky...!"
The hail's true shape grew easy to know. Living things, bodies curled into balls, dropping through the air. Humanity's natural enemy. Born man-eaters, with whom coexistence was impossible.
The thundercloud was not vomiting up the giant alone. It was vomiting the small ones as well.
Thud—!
Monsters poured like rain, so many their number could not be guessed. Several hundred at the least, and without effort. The sight drained the color from every face.
Thud!
Thuuud—!
Hundreds of bodies plummeted from dozens of meters up, and a vast cloud of dust rose off the ground. Better if the fall had killed them. Summoning magic was not that kind. It rarely called the weak, and what it did call was powerful even among monsters.
Which was to say—
"Kiaaa!!"
"Krr—!"
—not one of them had a life frail enough to die of being dropped from dozens of meters in the air.
"G-gnolls!"
Gnolls. Aberrant monsters, as if someone had stirred dog and hyena together. Filth-poison soaked them from end to end, and they wandered about spreading disease. Poison was not the whole of it. Their hides were thick; an arrow often failed to kill them. And the food they loved best...
"The children—hide the children and the women! Quickly—!!"
Infants, and young women. The monster humans hated most, found most revolting, and could not help but fear.
And now those gnolls—
"KiAAA!!"
Several hundred and more had gathered, and they howled as one.
"Kieee...!"
Stolen armor. Stolen axes. Drool strung from their mouths, and their eyes, bloodshot past enduring, had gone red. At the sudden smell of their favorite prey they could not keep hold of their wits. From a gnoll's point of view, they had blinked and found a banquet laid wherever the eye could reach. Whatever they chose would be delicious, and they made no effort to hide the excitement.
......Ridiculous of them.
—Thwack!!
Thump....
"......?"
For an instant the gnoll could not accept what had happened. The head of the comrade beside it was falling. In that scene, slow as slow motion, one gnoll gradually turned its head, and the last thing it ever saw was—!
"Don't bark. You stink."
Shhk!
The arc of an axe in the hands of a certain terrifying human male.
Thump!
Another head added to the count. Another gnoll's corpse, split from itself. An axe-fighter who cut down mid-to-upper-rank gnolls as easily as scarecrows—no.
"Blackie."
"Roen Dmitri de Lionel. Here, Instructor."
"It's a battlefield. Call me Sir."
"Awaiting your command, Sir Lee Han."
The knight, Lee Han. He stood there with a fury on his face unlike any he had worn before, and Roen, who had already put down a gnoll of his own and come up to his side, waited for the order.
"You know whose work this is?"
"...I do not."
"No lie in that, I take it."
"I will stake everything I have."
His face was as cold as ever, but he could not hide the tremor in his eyes. He did not know this situation either. An incident unknown even to a regressor.
What mattered to Lee Han now was not that even a regressor didn't know it. Only this.
"Then I'll trust you."
"......"
He needed one excellent swordsman. Nothing more.
"I'm giving you an order. I name you my proxy, and Levi Fault your second. Take command. Round up the ones still standing and wipe out every one of these disgusting bastards, however you have to."
"......"
Before Roen could readily answer, ten gnolls smothered their presence and fell on Lee Han.
"KiAA!!"
Each of them was easily twice the bulk of a grown man. The moment was threatening beyond words.
Splurt!!
"I asked if you understood."
"...It seems to me, Sir, that you could simply kill them all yourself."
Lee Han's axe swept sideways, and nine gnolls became lumps of blood in an instant.
"Ki...—."
The last of them thrashed in his one hand.
Crunch. Crack.
His five fingers drove into its skull. The gnoll writhed in agony and died where it was. Lee Han shook it off as lightly as dusting dirt from his hands, then shook his head.
"I've got someone else I have to deal with."
A finger flicked toward the sky. Roen's face darkened.
"...Will you be all right alone?"
"I may not win. I still have to hold."
"......"
"So. Your answer?"
"...I will follow your order."
There was a man who trusted him and set his own back in his keeping. If he did not answer that, how could he call himself a warrior of the North? Roen struck his heart with the grip of his sword. A northern salute: he would see the mission done even if it cost him that heart.
"Good."
Lee Han wore a satisfied smile, and drew in a breath with all the strength he had.
Huuup!
"Hear me, One Hundred and Eight Arhats!!"
"...!?!"
Lion's Roar. For an instant Lee Han's Lion's Roar shook the whole of the Colosseum and struck helpless the gnoll pack that had been about to run wild. The martial pressure in it, heavy with killing intent aimed at the gnolls, was enough to paralyze every one of them for a breath. And inside that ringing roar, the knight's disciples heard his voice. Their eyes went round as rabbits, and they fixed on him.
—......
"...Yes!!!"
The One Hundred and Eight Arhats—no. Every first-year of the sword faculty, regardless of station, answered as one. They saluted, and they drew.
Of the eighty first-years, not one ran.
"...Are you certain you cannot do this alone?"
Watching a man overwhelm several hundred gnolls with nothing but his voice, Roen found himself asking again whether there was any point in his stepping forward at all.
The melee had begun.