Man-Eater versus Man-Eater? (8)
At a glance, it was a monster that resembled a troll.
From the look of it to the build of its body, it even seemed kin to the rock trolls the students had fought today, so it would not have been wrong to call the creature's kind a troll.
…And yet. That thing.
Could a troll that enormous even exist?
About five times an ordinary troll. No — perhaps larger still. And its skin was a blackish red. A troll's hide was supposed to be rough as stone, but this one's skin called to mind the scales of a snake: a bulk several times a normal troll's, and dark-red hide like a serpent's. And then—
A chill.
…The whole of its eyes had gone red, as if blood had pooled inside them.
"Hhh…!"
The mage barely held out against the Fear pouring off the thing, and still his legs shook. He was too afraid. And then he remembered.
R-right. I… I know what that is.
Something he had read as a child, in an old text, inside his master's room of ancient books. Amid a heap of nonsense gathered up as legend, the nightmare that old volume had recorded of a certain ancient species.
"The G-Ghost King…."
A troll. No — the moment he spoke the epithet of a thing one could not dare simply define as a troll—
A roar of water.
The thing was hauling itself up out of the lake. The water was deep enough, yet it was submerged only to the waist, and every time it rose and flailed its arms the lake overflowed as if in flood and heaved like a wave. It moved as though the resistance of water did not exist, and once the mage had a clear look at its shape he began, little by little, to back away.
"Ghost King?"
The knight turned the question back on the mage, who was shaking like a quaking aspen. Did he know something about that troll? A king, was it?
"Grand title, for a troll."
"D-don't say something stupid! The Ghost King isn't an ordinary troll!"
Ghost King — an arrogant name to hang on a mere monster, or so it seemed. But considering what that troll had done, the mage's terror was only reasonable.
"W-we have to run! Th-that thing isn't a simple monster! It's the Ghost King, the Ghost King! A troll that has lived a thousand years!"
"…?"
"Champion of the trolls! A monster that eats ogres! A creature said to hold the power of immortality! A slayer of kingdoms!"
About a thousand years ago, a kingdom more prosperous even than Pendragon had been destroyed overnight. Because the event lived only in texts, no one had known whether it was true — until the relics of the fallen kingdom were found, and the record gradually hardened into something close to accepted history. And the thing that had destroyed a kingdom in a single morning was none other than this.
"They say it was a calamity wrought by a single troll…."
A disaster caused by one monster, and that monster, astonishingly, was said to have been a troll. But it had not been a simple troll. A troll that had lived a thousand years. Just as a tree, a lake, a wind, or a volcano that harbors Mystery gains a spirit by enduring through long ages, even a monster, if it lasts a thousand years, becomes a catastrophic existence that can no longer be defined as a mere monster. Ancient humanity had been forced to learn that through the disaster called annihilation.
"A-a creature that achieved evolution through a thousand years of Mystery. King of every troll, and the apex of monsters — that is what that thing is…."
A black hide steeped in dark-red scales. A body more than twenty times an ordinary troll. Regeneration no different from immortality, so that blade and fire, magic and any weapon, failed to kill it even when they wounded it. The Ghost King. It could just as well have been called a Demon King, but because its form resembled a ghost, that was the name it had been given — a living natural disaster that the likes of humans must never touch.
And so.
"W-we have to flee! Right now, even now…!"
The fear the mage felt was nothing more than the survival instinct any living thing ought to have. And the knight who had heard the whole of it—
"Twenty times? However I look at it, it doesn't seem like more than five."
—wore only a bored face.
It was not that he had ignored the mage's explanation, or let it in one ear and out the other. Nor that he was slighting the monster. It was simply that, if one meant to be afraid—
It doesn't look like that much.
For all the grand telling, he could not see the power to destroy a kingdom. Instead of trembling while he listened, the knight narrowed his eyes and took the measure of his enemy.
"It's bigger than a normal troll, sure, but it looks smaller than what I just heard. What do you make of that?"
"Ah, p-perhaps it's short on nutrients. The Ghost King is said to take a sleep of several centuries at the very edge of the continent, where no human foot can reach. Keeping a body that huge at all times wouldn't be efficient, so I expect it sleeps for a very long time. And right now summoning magic has forced it out of that long sleep and dragged it here against its will. Which is to say…."
"…it hasn't slept enough, so it will be furious, and the stress of being woken by force will have left it with a tremendous hunger."
Reasoning drawn from analysis, nothing more. But the analyses this mage spat out were rarely wrong. Reading the world through mana was a mage's specialty. And if the analysis was accurate, then that troll, driven by rage and hunger, needed a vast quantity of nourishment — and the things carrying that nourishment were, most likely, these.
"Grand name or not, at the root it's a troll."
Every monster eats humans. But among them, the ones that eat humans with a particular, special greed are the trolls — the monsters called man-eaters.
"W-we'll be eaten. All of us…."
The mage's head calculated whether he wanted to or not. Set against the old texts, how many humans the Ghost King would have to devour to recover its original body. And the result of the calculation—
Every citizen in the Royal Capital—!
The moment that thing left the lake, not a blade of grass would remain in the capital.
"Heh… it's over. The Ghost King. The Ghost King of legend…."
The mage gave himself up and showed a hollow despair. Quick at calculation, he was just as quick to abandon an opponent he could not beat. He could not even think of raising his mana. He had lost the will to fight.
…However.
"So what you're saying is, that thing's in a badly weakened state."
"……?"
"Yeah. That'll do."
Thump.
Leaving the mage to despair and go blank on his own, the knight walked boldly toward the lake. As he went he threw back five bottles of potion at once and jammed a potion-filled syringe straight into his leg.
Crack.
Ordinarily the daily dose was two. Drink more than that and addiction, hallucinations, and the rest ought to appear, but the knight ignored it. This was no time to worry about pain or side effects. More fortunately still, troll factors were already running through his body, so the side effects would be milder than one might think. If anything—
"Hoo. Now I feel like I might live."
—the trouble was how well they worked.
Pop. Pop.
His body grew lighter by degrees. A forced awakening. The bones of both legs, broken and burst, knit together, and the skin regenerated. His blood seemed replenished to some extent as well, and so the knight spoke.
"A troll's a troll, when you get down to it."
The Ghost King did not know human speech. And so it could not understand what the little wretch had said. One thing, however. For an instant, the Ghost King's nose caught a scent. That scent was none other than this.
"Oh, this potion? Made it by hunting the pups of your own kind. Well? Think I did a decent job? Shame it's watered down thirty percent, but still."
—The smell of its kin, blowing in on the wind.
The Ghost King did not know that the stuff was merely a potion alchemists had made by copying troll blood. That was not what mattered. What mattered was that it was a taunt. Did mere prey dare provoke a king—! The Ghost King raged, and wanted, right then, to seize both arms of the wretch before its eyes and tear them off. To kill it in agony, then grind it between its teeth, for daring to mock its kin—! No. For daring to mock itself. Already burning to the crown of its skull because its sleep had been cut short, the Ghost King was on the verge of lunging—
"You think I gave up a leg to dump you in this lake because I'm an idiot?"
The knight looked to the sky and welcomed the speck closing in fast.
"I-Instructor! I-I brought them!"
"Drop them as they are."
"B-but—"
"I won't get hurt."
"Nnngh!"
With a groan, Irene Windler spilled out the dozens of great harpoons she had ferried on telekinesis. Thirteen great harpoons of the kind used for whaling.
Thud.
"Thanks."
The knight snatched a falling harpoon out of the air, offered Irene Windler a brief thanks for hauling them all this way, and then—
Huuup!
He gathered every ounce of his strength and hurled the harpoon with all he had.
Boom!!
"Back in the age when you were running around, humans probably still couldn't catch whales."
But this was not a thousand years ago.
"I'll show you just how far human cruelty has come."
The harpoon that had split the water struck the Ghost King's shoulder, and the Ghost King felt pain. It had not punched through those hard scales. But—
Crrk.
—a single clash had put a crack in scales that had been as good as armor.
Only then did the Ghost King understand. That this prey was no easy quarry. A thousand-year man-eater, and a remade human forged from human malice, crashed together.
Do you know what happens if you fire a harpoon like a cannon?
Simple. A cannon in the shape of a harpoon is launched. Its power was savage and cruel enough to hunt even the blue whale, that enormous whale of the name. Once, when the Age of Sail opened, several kingdoms had invented the weapon for hunting whales. But after Leviathan, guardian god of the sea, enraged by the deaths of its kin, drowned several kingdoms beneath the water, and humans were the first to beg mercy and plead for forgiveness, it became a weapon that was scarcely ever used.
Humans, however, were not a breed to leave an invention they had gone to the trouble of making just lying around. They modified the great harpoons so they could take great monsters — or, failing that, so they could take the sea-beasts that had themselves turned monstrous. Modified, in any case. And so the cannon in the shape of a harpoon still saw plenty of use in the field, and its power and ferocity had grown, if anything, more vicious than in the days of the whale hunt.
Crunch.
The Ghost King was in a frenzy. It wanted out of the river, yet the harpoons kept coming down on it as if to bind it where it stood. Not even the Ghost King could ignore the force of a harpoon flying dead straight. Had its condition been normal, had it taken in even a scrap of nourishment, it might have been otherwise, but unfortunately—
"Where do you think you're opening that mouth!"
The Ghost King had been just about to swallow a fish when Lee Han, as if sighting the exact opening, drove a harpoon into its mouth. Appalling accuracy, speed, and force!
Boom!
The Ghost King's jaw was wrenched clean around.
Skrrrss….
But worthy of a monster handed down in legend, the Ghost King answered the harpoon and pulled off the trick of catching the shell-like shaft in its teeth. Strength no less than Lee Han's — no, a bite force that was simply terrifying.
However.
"You're lacking. That's why you're a troll."
Hwueeeek—!
The moment the liquid coating the harpoon entered its mouth, the Ghost King felt a pain in its tongue and throat that no word could hold. Agony like thousands of needles stabbing at once. Most poisons did not work on a troll, but this poison had no choice but to work. An extreme toxin specially compounded in the kingdom, turned out by its alchemists only in tiny batches. He had gotten it from a certain princess — the one he called his elder sister — who had scowled, loath to part with it, at the end of a tantrum. No. At the end of a dramatic compromise.
"Told you. I'd show you how far human cruelty has come."
Lee Han kept his word. Human greed, honed across long ages and bent on reigning at the top of the ecosystem through the struggle to survive, had produced no end of fruits. Lived a thousand years? Called the king of monsters, and gifted even with deathless regeneration? Not a bit of it was worth a damn.
"We're the ones who hunt things like you."
Humans were the kind of creature that would one day strip even the moon for parts. Lee Han drove the Ghost King on with a thoroughly insolent bearing, and watching that sight, a certain young mage—
What is this? Which one of them is the villain?
…Just so.
What a sorry sight we humans make….
It was Irene Windler, unable anymore to tell who was evil and who was good, gone pale with shock.
—However.
Crunch!
"Huh?"
As if to prove that even the good and evil the girl was trying to weigh were nothing but human arrogance, the ghost men called the apex of monsters — a demon king clothed in savagery — gathered a murderous force, and—
—charged, speaking. Enduring even the harpoons that came flying at it. And so, at last, the thing—
Rumble!
—set its foot on the ground.
"You. I… kill."
"You bastard. You're huge."
Big as three elephants put together. Not merely huge — an overwhelming presence, and a killing intent steeped in malice. A pressure that would leave even a veteran of a hundred battles not merely cold in the guts, but clutching his chest and vomiting blood. That was how it felt to face the thing head-on, and he was a man who could only shake his head, as if this were no creature put out there for anyone to beat. And yet.
Shing.
Somehow, contrary to the look of a man thoroughly sick of all this, Lee Han was drawing his sword.
"…Stinging it from a distance, a little at a time, was starting to feel pretty cheap anyway."
How long was a man who was a knight, more or less, supposed to keep playing at infantry? He flicked the blade through the empty air a few times, a clean smile on his mouth.
Not one move withdrawn.
In go and in battle alike, the moment you stepped back, only defeat remained. Without yielding so much as a step, he simply set his resolve out in a calm voice, and went forward.