EP.18 – Man-Eater versus Man-Eater? (7)
Lee Han had not dumped the gnolls on his disciples because he was lazy, or because he could not be bothered to care.
They're worth trusting.
It was not only that he had taught them with his own hands. His students were genuinely strong. Taken one by one they might still fall short, but once they formed a group they could draw out the finest synergy there was. He had trained them to fight that way, and they were, in their fashion, a work he had shaped with real care. Above all, among them was a regressor who had already lived through war. A boy who knew how to handle people. Someone the field could be trusted to.
Which meant the thing Lee Han had to focus on now was the monster falling out of the sky.
It was coming down toward the ground, slowly.
Whoooom!
The sight of several hundred gnolls raining down a moment ago had been spectacle enough. Now this vast mass was falling, and it was like watching a meteor. The thing dropped fast, and the monster's outline grew clearer as it closed. Enormous. So enormous that it felt as if a castle wall were coming down on top of him.
And so Lee Han spoke.
"How many times a day am I supposed to pull this stunt? For crying out loud."
"Gyaaaaaah!"
"Hold it steady."
"You vicious bastard...!"
"Quit the act."
Blood ran. Veins bulging until they could bulge no further, his nose bursting, blood-tears spilling from his eyes, Odewal somehow hauled the log-spear up once more. This time, though, it was nothing like the ballista he had fired before. Telekinesis of another order wound together with the rotational force of mana. It could be nothing but a blow meant to send the thing, without fail, to its grave.
Lee Han was privately satisfied. What came out of him, in place of any warm praise, was the whip, swung harder still.
"See? It was an act. You should have done it like this from the start."
"You son of a—!"
For a spell-slinger, the carrot was nothing but a luxury.
If I live through this and he gets a turn hitting me later, I can just take one less blow. Whatever.
...If he survived.
With that resolution, Lee Han rolled his weight onto his left foot and struck with everything he had. His right leg was already useless, so this was a full-power driving thrust in its place.
Kwaaaaa!
The second Piercing-One Spear shot toward the falling giant.
Of course.
Grrrrr...!
Kwang!
Unlike the first shot, he did not get much out of it.
"Deflected it."
The thing had knocked the Piercing-One Spear aside, as if to say it would not be caught the same way twice.
Even so.
"Good. Fall over there."
Unable to cancel the impact completely, the monster began to drop toward the ground directly opposite the Colosseum.
None other than—
Shaaaaak!
—the great lake.
On one side raged an inhuman fight, impossible techniques flying without restraint. On the other, a comparatively normal tension—no, a desperate, suffocating cloud of war—hung over the Academy Colosseum, where humanity and monsters stood face to face.
Krrr!!
The gnoll pack had flinched for a moment beneath knightly spirit, but they recovered at once and threw their heads back in a rising howl. That was a monster's nature. Even before an enemy they had no hope of beating, if that enemy was human they did not reach for fear. They took up humiliation, rage, and hate, and they tried to kill. This was why, now and then, some animal-lover insisted it was possible to commune with monsters, tried to spare them and protect them, and got an entire village slaughtered for the trouble. A monster was not to be set inside the line of human common sense. Monsters were a blood-sworn enemy, unable to live with humankind beneath the same sky. There was no old grievance between them. Coexistence itself was impossible. Monsters moved to eat humans, and humans had to stop them.
The struggle for survival. Yes. For humanity, a fight against monsters was a fight to stay alive.
"Form the phalanx!!"
"Form up!"
"Spears and shields!"
"Hoo! Hoo-oo! Hoo...!"
The instant her master's order came down, Levi Fault took up the cadence and the command together.
The phalanx. Soldiers with spear and shield locked shoulder to shoulder in a single line, packed tight as a hedgehog. A traditional tactic humanity had used since the days it carried stone axes rather than iron, and a formation any soldier of the kingdom would know. If this one tasted of Shaolin rather than the common phalanx, that was no mistake. The instructor who had taught them their tactics had drawn his inspiration from a combined-strike formation that might have walked out of a martial arts novel, and passed it on to his disciples.
"We have to seal the passages, no matter what!"
Levi Fault, though, went one step past the formation she had been taught and handled her troops as a living thing. In an instant she split the force into three and stopped up all three approaches. Thinning the numbers created its own danger, but fortunately the strength on the field was not the eighteen Arhats alone.
"We go to close combat! Draw your swords, all of you!"
At Roen's command the young noble sons drew. Swordsmen versed in the Fighting Art plugged, without a gap left over, the openings the Arhats could not spare the attention to cover, and set their edges toward the gnolls.
Kiaa....
The gnolls hesitated. They were being surrounded in a breath, and every one of those meals was putting out a considerable presence.
The Fighting Art. A method ancient humans had created in order to hunt beasts and monsters. If monsters were the living things that had slaughtered the most humans in the history of the race, then by the same measure the warriors who learned the Fighting Art were the living things that had slaughtered the most monsters.
In a tension that could break at a spark, the first to move were the swordsmen.
"Charge."
Kung!!
The instant Roen's order fell, blades tore in toward the gnolls, and the gnolls attacked in turn.
Kwang! Whud!
A fierce collision, and rings of force spreading outward from the point of impact. Swordsmen of the Fighting Art crashed into the aberrant monsters standing on two legs, and a savage melee broke open. The sort of close fight in which a single mistake decided who died.
Even if someone did make that mistake, he was there to watch their backs.
"Focus! Don't let your strength out halfway!"
"Th-thank you, young master."
"Save the thanks. Right now, annihilate the enemy...!"
"Ch-charge!!!"
Roen's rebuke and command came thick with spirit. Hearing them, Cain shouted a salute before he knew he was doing it. The one standing before his eyes did not look like a youth of their own age. He looked like a general who had survived battlefield after battlefield. A seasoned one.
"Cut and thrust! The art you've learned is not weak! The techniques you've drilled, and the teachings your master gave you, are still in your bodies! You do not lose!"
"Uwaaaa!!"
They roared it back, half battle cry and half raw nerve. Roen's presence braced their backs, and they went forward and fought as ordered.
Little by little the swordsmen grew used to meeting gnolls, and the ones trying to spill out of the Colosseum began to balk.
Krrrr...!
The gnolls were rattled to find the resistance this fierce, and at once they searched for another passage. They found the spearmen, who looked weaker than the swordsmen. They were aiming for the ones without that grating presence the swordsmen gave off—the ones from whom no fighting-energy could be felt. The weak ones.
It was a blunder.
"Drive them through!!"
Puuuk! Puk! Puuk!
!?
They would have to learn with their own bodies that taking the spearmen lightly had been a mistake.
"Aaaah!!"
On Levi's order the Arhats thrust, and each time a body was pierced.
Kung!
Ki—! Kiaa!?
Hide thick enough to turn aside an ordinary sword was punched through. And by youths who had not even learned the Fighting Art. It was only to be expected. They had not learned the Fighting Art, but what had been passed down to them was anything but trivial. They had inherited, rather, the extraordinary secret art of a man who had spent his whole life fighting mages and doing battle with monsters.
Muscle Arts.
Gyeong.
It did not reach the Fighting Art. It was, even so, unmistakably the power to hunt a monster.
"Burst!"
A thunderous shout, and force detonating outward.
Through spearheads already buried in hide, Gyeong burst free, and the gnolls—
Puhwak!
Ki—!
...thud.
Unable to endure the pain, they fell. The students could not have matched them one against one. Humans gathered into a group, though, were strong by nature. They had used the advantage of the phalanx properly.
...Even so.
"W-we won!"
"We got the gnolls—"
"Don't let your guard down!!"
"!?"
Hwuk!
A gnoll they had thought down surged back to its feet, and Levi Fault drew on the fallen creature and loosed an arrow that cut its breath. Even then, plenty of them were still moving.
K...i...!
A vicious life force. Their recovery was enough to make the head spin; they endured even a blow that had burst from the inside. A stab to the belly or the chest would not do. It had to be the neck, or the heart, without fail. They had gone down from that unfinished work and risen again to charge, and in the instant the students flinched—
Chunk!
"Bear cubs. Letting your guard down is a bad habit."
A man who brought a black panther to mind. Kunta's kopesh, curved like a sickle, bisected a gnoll in a single stroke.
Krak!
"When you kill, go for the heart or the head. Like this."
Garand, halberd in hand after he had popped the lid off a gnoll's skull, did not stint on the advice.
Shhk!
"Better to go for the arms and the ankles first. Take their mobility, and the rest will be easier."
Arno, who had cut two gnolls to pieces with paired swords, shook the blood from his blades.
"W-we're alive...."
Those who had barely kept their lives thanks to the three offered relief and thanks. The three only shook their heads.
"I would not call you alive yet."
"Those things are smart."
"Kunta hates those."
Unease set into their faces, and they hardened.
Why had gnolls taken their place among the most dreadful of monsters? Because they always moved in packs, and because—monsters though they were—they used tactics. Cunning monsters. They did not merely follow instinct. They knew how to cooperate, and that was what made a gnoll terrible. There was a reason one of the continent's finest insults was you gnoll. Nothing of the sort became an insult without cause.
"We're surrounded."
Kieee!! Krrr! KA—!
Like hunters driving prey, the gnolls were gradually closing around the humans. They, too, had stopped taking this quarry lightly. They came on at full strength to hunt.
However high each student's ability sat for their age, overcoming a pack of that size was still too much. Just as every student's face darkened under the sense of crisis—
"Charge!!"
"Save the children!"
Old knights, and aged veterans. Reinforcements as solid as anyone could ask joined the fight. They had come as spectators, and the moment the evacuation was finished they had taken up weapons and returned to the Colosseum. Solely to help.
And not only them.
"We are not about to lose to our juniors!"
"I am Rachel of Dern!"
Their seniors. Everyone had thought them fled, but they came back with armor and horses and charged the gnolls. Pride and courage that would not run, even with monsters in front of them. This was the mettle of Pendragon, a nation founded by the brave and noble knights a dragon had held in regard.
"...You came!"
Levi felt the relief wash through her. Before the fighting began she had asked the young ladies to raise as many reinforcements as they could, and that plea had borne fruit.
"Ho ho. You should have heard how those girls begged."
"My face was burning. I couldn't just sit there."
They could hardly refuse the girls and slink off like cowards. More than that—
"If we don't put those loathsome things down, there's no telling how much damage they'll do."
A single gnoll reaching a homestead could annihilate a village. If hundreds were loosed on the Royal Capital at once, the scale of the harm was beyond guessing. Now, while the Colosseum and these fighters could still serve as the bars of the cage, the pack had to be wiped out to the last.
With that resolve, an old knight settled into a couched-lance stance and lifted his spear toward the gnolls—
Kwaaaaa!!
Rat-a-tat-tat—!
"...Ahem."
—and instead of bringing it to bear, he simply went blank.
The lake lay right beside the Colosseum. That lake burst. A column of water shot sky-high and came back down as rain. For a moment unable to believe what he was seeing, the old knight asked.
"A poor question for a time like this, but I'll ask just the one."
"What would that be, sir?"
"...That knight. Is he truly human?"
"Ah, well, that's...."
Levi looked cornered, and a hollow little laugh escaped her. Even so, she understood exactly what he meant. With good reason.
"We wonder the same thing all the time, but yes. He's human."
Only—
"Now and then he does things that make him hard to see as the same species."
"...Ho ho."
Puhwaaaak!
Almost before the girl had finished, another column of water climbed.
The cause was simple. None other than this.
"More harpoons."
"Gueeeerk!"
"Faster! Bring them faster!"
Great harpoons. A knight—their master—was hurling harpoons too large for any person to throw, straight into the monster.
Mm...
So which one of them is the monster?
It was not a sight that left the question of species alone.