The Rookie Slayer
The long battle with Wolfgar finally came to an end.
"Gah!"
Superior stamina had carried me to victory. Wolfgar lay sprawled across the dirt, and I stood over him, dragging air back into my lungs. This was the first time I had ever won a purely physical fight. A thrill boiled up through me at the victory I had claimed with my own two hands — and with it came a hard lesson in just how punishing barehanded combat really was.
Against a monster, I could simply use Instant Death Magic. Against a person, I couldn't go around firing it off whenever I pleased. I needed gear I could wear without giving up the advantage of fighting empty-handed.
"Hmph. You won on stamina, more or less."
"The training paid off."
"It ain't my help. Your growth rate's just absurd, that's all."
"You're the one who built the training to match that growth, Dreygan."
Every time I absorbed a monster and grew, Dreygan tore up the old regimen and wrote a new one. Without him, my body still wouldn't have caught up to itself.
"The instructors'll look after that one. Come with me. Still got some stamina left?"
"Yes."
Wolfgar's eyes were spinning in his skull. The fight had been so savage his brain was starved of oxygen; he couldn't even track us as we left. Neither of us had taken a wound bad enough to keep us down. Leave him be and he'd recover on his own.
"W-wait."
Then Wolfgar, clinging to consciousness by his fingernails, crawled across the floor and forced the words out.
"Again. Let's go again next time."
The fighting spirit in his eyes wasn't dead yet. I had no idea where he found that kind of will, but I nodded.
"Next time, then."
Sparring with Wolfgar helped me too. Right now I was leaning on Instant Death Magic. But someday I wanted to go further — to become strong myself, not just my magic. A strong man who could see his own justice through. That was the kind of person I wanted to be.
"Hurry up!"
At Dreygan's shout from up ahead, I turned, promising myself a rematch, and followed. Today, like every day: training, and more training.
Dreygan's training. Sparring with Wolfgar. Monster hunting. I kept to those three routines without fail, and my body answered with the most explosive growth I had ever known.
Somewhere along the way, Wolfgar had become another of Dreygan's trainees. He was a young man with a wide-open future — raise him right and he'd make a fine monster hunter. His growth was every bit as violent as mine. All those years of grinding alone had finally met a teacher, and his talent burst into bloom. Before long even the instructors were struggling to keep up with him.
That, I supposed, was what raw talent looked like. I didn't envy him. I had spent a lifetime floundering without any talent of my own. I was too busy growing to waste time coveting someone else's gifts.
"You stubborn bastard. A bamboo shoot's racing up right next to you and you won't even glance at it."
"The only thing I look at is the sun. Why would I look down?"
"Pretty words. Wipe that fighting gleam out of your eyes before you start talking."
Dreygan clicked his tongue, but he liked me a great deal. Arrogance had no room to take root in me. The only method I knew was to keep putting one foot in front of the other. Showing off and coming up with brilliant ideas — that was for the talented. People like me just had to keep rolling, like a stone.
And so my body kept growing. Anyone could see it: more muscle, a broader frame. I had reached the point where the local thugs looked the other way when I passed them in the street. I never thought a day like this would come for me. The feeling was almost too much to hold.
And all of it...
Was thanks to Instant Death Magic, no doubt. I glanced at the Third Eye carved into my wrist and let out a breath. I had been given a death sentence for Mana Stone Sclerosis, and yet hunting monsters had let me outlive it. The Monster Hunter Guild didn't give me any trouble, either. After setting aside the bare minimum to live on, I put every coin I earned toward my debt. As far as they were concerned, the money kept coming in, so they had nothing to complain about. On my end, as long as I kept hunting monsters at a steady clip, there wouldn't be a problem.
The one worry was that mid-sized monsters had grown scarce in the surrounding area lately. That was my doing — I had hunted down everything I could find. The city's outskirts were safer for it. A woman I had never even seen before would sometimes bring me bread, thanking me for cleaning up the outer districts. She offered to bake for me every day; I turned her down, saying it was too much of a burden.
A safer city was a good thing. For me, it was a problem. With the local supply of monsters running dry, I had to range farther and farther out.
At least it trains my stamina and my legs. That part isn't so bad.
Still, the travel time cut into everything else, and my growth had started to slow.
So I can't stay in Laoren forever, is that it?
It was time to start widening my hunting grounds.
More than that — today marked the long-awaited third month. I had trained toward this day without rest.
I pushed open the door to the training hall. No instructors. No trainees. Instead, exactly one person stood waiting inside.
A young woman, a sword larger than she was strapped across her back.
After three months of waiting, she had come today to slaughter another rookie.
"O-oh. You came."
The timid little gesture didn't match the epithet at all. But the greatsword on her back radiated something savage. Was the thing that swung a blade like that even human? It looked more like a monster. The sword was that enormous.
"Ah, i-it's a practice sword. A little lighter than the one I usually use, though."
She swung something heavier than that.
"Come to think of it, you don't actually work as a monster hunter, do you, Maria?"
"Ah, yes. Grandfather is against me becoming one."
She looked embarrassed.
"Th-there are so many better jobs in the world, he says. So I shouldn't become a monster hunter..."
"Strange thing to hear from a man who runs a monster hunter training center."
"Right?"
Even Maria thought Dreygan's argument was nonsense. That said, I understood where he was coming from. He had climbed to the very peak of the profession. He knew its limits better than anyone — that no matter how high you flew, a monster hunter was still just someone who handed mana stones up to the mages. The disillusionment and the quiet sigh on his face came from having felt the ceiling of a life. He simply didn't want Maria to feel it too.
"Then what do you want to become, Maria?"
She was still young. Young enough to reach for any dream she wanted. And yet she showed up at the training center every day and swung that greatsword. Looking at that alone, she was a monster hunter through and through.
"I suppose so."
Maria drew the greatsword from her back and swept it through the air. It hummed as it cut toward the floor.
"For now... I'm just trying to get stronger."
A vague goal. But her strength was the real thing.
"Do you think you can beat me, Haren?"
She shifted her grip on the greatsword, a little spark of excitement on her face. It was an arrogant question. Then again, she was the Rookie Slayer — she had never been broken by anyone.
"Yes."
I was going to win. I had even brought a trump card I'd been practicing for just this.
The gauntlets on my hands clicked together. At my current level, I couldn't catch a sword with my bare hands. Against a monster you couldn't block anyway, so evasion was the only option, and a weapon had always felt like dead weight. Sparring with Wolfgar had taught me otherwise. So I had spent my latest earnings on these: gauntlets that left the palms open and armored the backs of the hands, forged from monster hide. They could turn aside just about any weapon.
"Well then... I'll begin."
Maria lifted the greatsword in that trailing voice of hers. And then the blade came screaming down toward the floor.
A roar of wind exploded off the tip of her swing, whipping sand and dust into a choking cloud. The training ground vanished behind a wall of grit. It didn't matter. The moment my vision died, the Third Eye on my wrist snapped open — a trump card no one else knew I had. Through the expanded sight, a wavering flame shimmered beyond the sandstorm.
I threw myself backward the instant I saw it.
The greatsword tore through the sand-wind and carved through the space I had just occupied. I had dodged, and the pressure wave still hammered me like a physical blow. I couldn't begin to guess how much raw force was packed into that swing. Gauntlets or not, taking that head-on would shatter my hands.
If I'm fighting Maria, I'd better treat this like fighting a monster.
The greatsword slammed into the earth. Using the shock, Maria flipped through the air — and the blade came with her, chaining into a midair follow-up so fast it barely looked real. This wasn't a human skill. How was she swinging that thing twice off the ground?
I hadn't seen it coming. I had no time to reset my stance. I cocked the gauntleted fist as hard as I could and swung, meaning to smash the flat of the incoming blade—
Maria twisted the greatsword in empty air. The full weight of her strength crashed into the gauntlet.
A crumpling shriek of metal. Shock tore up my arm. Brand-new gauntlets, and they folded like tin.
The impact launched me. My body shot into the sky, a numb, electric sting flooding the length of my arm. It felt like colliding head-on with a monster. Maria was more aggressive than any monster I had ever faced. She inverted the weight of her own swing, stomped the ground, and carved a windmill through the air — a three-hit chain reaching up to meet me where I hung. No storm ever hit this hard.
The gauntlet was already ruined. Another clash here and I was finished. Worse, she was modulating the strength in her arms, subtly angling the edge. One more kiss from that blade and the arm would break.
Then the only thing I can rely on...
Was my body. The extreme dynamic vision I had carved out by absorbing monsters. I tore my eyes wide, and the Third Eye drank in every inch of Maria's movement — the greatsword's direction, its speed, its angle, all of it flooding into my head and locking into place.
The instant before the blade arrived, I tucked forward in midair like a cat going over a wall. My body poured over the greatsword.
Maria's eyes flew open. She clearly hadn't expected a stunt like that off the ground. She didn't let me go. Enormous force loaded into her arms; the swinging greatsword stopped dead in the air. She meant to reverse it and cut me down on the way down.
I had already climbed onto the backs of mid-sized monsters more times than I could count.
The tip of my foot found the flat of the blade. In that single heartbeat I wrung every drop of power from my legs, used her own sword as a springboard, and finally — the opening I had been waiting for — drove my fist at Maria's face.
This would decide it. One way or another.
Something that was not her face met the punch. Her shoulder, jerked up into the path. It would have hurt; her face twisted to prove it. But she had kept the blow off her head, and it wasn't a finishing wound.
I hit the ground on her right, rolled, and came up fast. The shot to her right shoulder bought me a breath — she couldn't swing the greatsword immediately. Instead she took the hilt in her left hand alone.
"I didn't think you'd go for my right..."
"I didn't think you'd stop my best shot, either."
A trick like that wouldn't work twice. It had been my last card, more or less.
"W-we should keep going. As far as we each can."
"No."
I dusted off my hands.
"It's over."
"What?"
Maria started to ask — and her body simply tilted. Her eyes went wide at a situation she had never imagined, but she was already meeting the floor.
She went down with the greatsword still in her grip, and a single tremor ran through her.
Three months of pouring Instant Death Magic into monster after monster had taught me one technique: how to scatter a life flame. Not extinguish it — shake the flame itself, deliver a shock. The trick I had stumbled onto briefly severed the connection between the life flame and the body, and all the strength ran out with it. The fist that had touched Maria had, in that sliver of a gap, made contact with her life flame. That was the result.
"Ah."
She had no idea what I had done, and the confusion showed. She could tell I had done something, though.
"I figured I couldn't afford to be picky about my methods. Not against you."
That was the full extent of what I had. Someday I wanted to beat her without Instant Death Magic at all. For now, this was as far as I went. I would just have to keep working.
Maria's lips moved soundlessly. Every ounce of strength had left her body; her vocal cords wouldn't answer. If she had something to say, it would have to wait a little while.
"Thank you for the match. I hope we can do this again."
So I bowed first, and said it in advance. If I kept fighting Maria, I would get stronger. Without reading the look in her eyes, I turned and left to get on with the day's training.