Promise (2)
I swept my eyes across the battlefield in a single, sharp glance.
One large-class monster was already down, slain and cooling in the snow. Far off on the opposite side of the field, the Commander cut through the chaos with black hair flying, drawing the monsters' attention and holding their focus.
Confirming he was unharmed, I let out a breath of relief.
So he managed to hold on without me.
I had wondered how they were surviving this many large-class monsters at once. The soldiers, following the Commander's orders, were repeating a cycle of fire and retreat, herding the creatures into a single pocket and wrapping them in a circular formation that held the line.
Facing this many large-class monsters at once had to be a first even for him, yet his response was calmer than I could have imagined. There was blood on his uniform, but nothing in the way he moved suggested it was his own.
He still hadn't noticed me. Every scrap of his attention was locked on directing his men.
They're holding better than I expected, but…
A cordon like that was nothing more than a stall for time. Even if they were lucky enough to keep the formation, the bullets would run out sooner or later—and the moment they did, the line would collapse in an instant.
If I hadn't made it here when I did, the Commander and every soldier on this field would have been finished.
Then one edge of the encirclement buckled.
"Ugh—!"
A soldier stumbled backward and went down, taking several others with him, and the monsters seized the opening at once. One of them lunged at the men sprawled across the snow, jaws yawning wide, razor teeth flashing as it charged.
"A-aaah!"
I watched the panicked soldiers claw and crawl desperately across the snow, then pulled a white round from inside my coat and fired it straight into the monster's eye.
A white round wouldn't deal serious damage to a large-class monster—but the color was invisible to them, so they never dodged a shot aimed at the eyes. Perfect for drawing aggro.
"Kyaaak!"
True to form, the monster took the white round dead-center in the eye, shrieked, and wheeled toward the direction the powder had come from. Every gaze among the soldiers—and the Commander's—snapped to me.
I watched the blood drain from the Commander's face as he found me standing armed on the snowfield, shock spreading over his features by degrees.
"Haydam! What are you doing here?!"
Fair enough. Finding your own son planted in the middle of a monster swarm would rattle anyone.
But I couldn't afford to lose my "father" here either.
My illegitimate-son route only worked if the Commander covered for me until I was secured as his successor. Even if he died this very moment, Daphne, Meursault, and the Academy graduates would still back me—taking the zone wouldn't necessarily become impossible.
The problem was how young I still was.
If the Commander fell now, the man most likely to become the next Commander wouldn't be me. It would be Meursault. Hayden had only become Commander of the Cola Area by marrying Daphne, the previous Commander's daughter—and the man Daphne held in her heart was Meursault.
Both of them were well-disposed toward me for now. What that goodwill would become once they stood at the peak of power was anyone's guess.
And besides… I promised Luna Moon I would protect Hayden.
Remembering the vow I had made when I took the ring from Luna Moon's grave brought her portrait to mind unbidden—the face that looked so much like my mother's. I shoved the thought of her away with deliberate force.
No room for distractions. Player or not, facing this many large-class monsters alone meant staying sharp.
I loaded the rifle from my back and ran straight at the monster charging me.
"Wh—?!"
"You lunatic! Haydam!"
Shouts rose from every side as they realized I wasn't retreating—I was sprinting headlong into the monster's charge. I ignored them all, slid across the snow like a skater, and slipped clean under the creature's jaw.
The reason I went under the chin was simple: after taking the white round, the monster hadn't thrown its head back. It had pulled its jaw tight against its body on pure instinct, as if shielding something.
There it is.
I drove a bullet up into the soft flesh beneath the jaw. The monster twisted, sensing the threat, and tried to turn away. The reaction told me I'd found the core's location—but the rifle in my hands was built for a child's recoil tolerance, and its stopping power was nothing special.
Which was exactly why I'd given Meursault his orders.
Shoot after I shoot.
—Bang! Bang!
Two shots cracked in quick succession from not far off. Meursault hadn't been bluffing when he said he could hit whatever I marked. His first round blew half the monster's jaw apart; the second slammed home in the exact spot where mine had gone in.
Something shattered with a wet crunch. The monster's body listed. I rolled free from under its chin and shouted at the soldiers around me.
"Fall back!"
The men, already torn between watching over me and bracing for the next charging monster, scrambled clear at my cry. Two of the creatures they had been pinning went down under the falling bulk of the one we'd just killed, crushed beneath its massive carcass.
The remaining monsters glanced my way, but the numbers on this side of the field were too thin to hold their interest. They turned instead toward the soldiers who had bunched together while dodging the collapsing body.
"Hah—hah—Lord Haydam, please, no more reckless—"
Meursault had come at a dead run and was still gasping for air. Without taking my eyes off the monsters bearing down on the soldiers, I held out my hand.
"White rounds."
He seemed to heave a monumental sigh at the sight of me extending a hand without so much as a glance his way—but a solid white round was pressed into my palm a moment later. I fired it into the back of a monster's skull as it turned away from me.
Across the field, the Commander had clearly realized I was deliberately pulling aggro. He was staring at me as if he meant to devour me whole. For now, this was still the best option for both of us.
I looked away from him and watched the monster charge me on the white-round aggro. There—on the bridge of its snout, a core glinted in plain sight.
A core sitting that openly, and it's still alive. Must be one of the smarter ones.
It had been dodging bullets by throwing its head up. Anyone with eyes would have aimed for a mark that obvious, yet the bridge of its snout was relatively intact while the underside of its jaw was shredded to ribbons.
A specimen like this was harder than the last one, whose core had been under the chin. Humans, short of taking flight, always end up standing under a monster's jaw. That was why conventional hunts poured overwhelming firepower into a creature until it fell, then searched for the core and destroyed it.
But I'm different.
If my body couldn't hit the mark—
I left it to luck.
Before I did, I flicked a glance past the charging monster toward the Commander behind it.
We're far enough. The title effect can drop for a second.
Confirming the distance, I swapped my title from Luna Moon's Friend to Magic Marksman.
Last time I counted, I still had about three shots left before the seventh. One monster wouldn't burn the stockpile.
I leveled the barrel. The creature threw its head up, showing off—
But cute little tricks like that meant nothing in front of the Magic Marksman.
I fired without hesitation. The bullet punched through the weakened underside of its jaw—the same stretch of flesh already torn open by concentrated fire—and drove straight through the core sitting on the opposite side of its snout.
The monster dropped where it stood, as if someone had simply pulled its fuse. Its own momentum carried the corpse skidding across the snow until it came to rest right under my nose.
Meursault had closed in to follow up my shot. When the monster fell to a single round, he stared at me in pure astonishment.
"You…"
"Wooooaaah!!"
Whatever Meursault had been about to say was swallowed by the roar of cheers. There were still large-class monsters left on the field, but the sudden appearance of a boy who had just dropped two of them in succession seemed to have made everyone forget the danger. They were too busy staring at me in open admiration.
Killing two so quickly had given the other teams room to breathe. The pair that had gone down under the first monster's falling body had already been finished off by soldiers who hadn't wasted the opening.
Four left.
Dropping two in a row had pulled the remaining four monsters' aggro straight onto me. I checked my remaining rounds and shouted at the soldiers.
"Get the wounded and clear out!"
They hesitated for a beat, torn over whether they were allowed to obey—then spotted Meursault coming up behind me, supported their injured, and poured away from me like an outgoing tide.
With the soldiers gone, I could see three figures approaching through the gaps between the monsters charging me. The Commander had handed off command to someone else and was walking forward with his rifle trained on the creatures. Platon followed with a flushed, exhilarated face. And behind them, for reasons I couldn't begin to guess, Shut-in Yeobo was pounding across the snow as hard as those short legs would carry her.
I can't keep Magic Marksman active.
The seventh bullet of Magic Marksman always struck the person most precious to the user. Hitting any one of those three would be a disaster—and meeting the Commander without Luna Moon's Friend equipped risked planting a seed of unease in him.
The instant I swapped Magic Marksman back for Luna Moon's Friend—
Something strange happened.
"…Huh?"
All four monsters lunging at me flinched as one, their massive bodies shuddering. They shuffled backward, then turned and fled—veering clear of me as I walked toward them. Even with the Commander coming up right behind them, they streamed past him and vanished across the snowfield.
I lowered the barrel I had jerked up in case they went for the Commander, feeling faintly ridiculous.
"What was that?"
Hard as it was to believe, they had bolted like prey animals fleeing some apex predator, terror written in every line of their flight.
Why?
I did have titles that could frighten monsters into running—but Luna Moon's Friend was nothing of the kind. Even if it had carried such an effect, no title I knew of in the Safe Zones could send four large-class monsters fleeing in terror. And I had been wearing Luna Moon's Friend from the moment I arrived on this field; I had only swapped it briefly for Magic Marksman before putting it back.
If the title itself had driven them off, the effect should have triggered the second I appeared.
I'll have to look into this…
Whatever had made them run—and whether it had anything to do with the monsters vanishing from the Team Zone earlier—was a question worth answering properly.
But for now, their flight just saved my life.
Even I would have had my hands full taking on four at once.
I was still watching the direction they had fled when soldiers' voices rose from the far side of the field, thick with shock.
"D-did those things just run from Lord Haydam?"
"Two monsters with two bullets wasn't enough for him…"
"He drove off four large-class monsters with sheer presence alone?!"
Ah.
Another piece of nonsense for the legend of my birth.