The Three Survivors
From a distance, I hadn't noticed — but up close, the soldiers' condition was far worse than I'd expected.
In my memory, a royal expedition party consisted of one 10-captain and ten soldiers.
Yet the only people in sight right now were three.
"Hah… hah……."
The soldiers exhaled in shallow, flickering gasps, barely clinging to consciousness.
Where had the other eight gone?
I assumed the worst. For all I knew, these three were the only survivors out of eleven.
Whether they were short on Thermal Powder or something else, their lips had turned blue, and they showed no sign of coming around.
This damned environment was a headache. What claimed people's lives out here wasn't monsters or anything of the sort — it was the beautiful, merciless natural world itself.
First, I pulled out some Thermal Powder and carefully dusted it over the soldiers' bodies. I was careful not to dump it on all at once. Their body temperatures had already dropped so low that a sudden shock of heat might do more harm than good.
Even after applying the powder, the effect didn't show right away. If anything, they made soft sounds of pain, as though the warmth itself burned.
Death on this land wasn't something I was experiencing for the first time. I'd even killed people with my own hands before.
Whenever that happened, my nerves always wound themselves tight. Someone's death was that kind of dizzying, sharp-edged thing.
Then Neveterde suddenly pushed her way in.
— — —♪?
"Ah — hey, Neveterde?"
Whether she'd taken an interest in the three newly appeared humans or not, Neveterde had followed us and was now sniffing at the soldiers.
Pina flailed her hands helplessly beside her.
"You can't eat people!"
But Neveterde didn't bare her teeth at the fallen soldiers.
— — —♬♪….
Instead, after taking in their scent, she let out a soft, whimpering sound.
Then she pulled her nose away from them, lifted her head, and looked around.
Pina watched her and turned to me.
"What's wrong with her?"
"I don't know either."
I didn't know everything, thank you very much.
I kept a close eye on Neveterde's behavior. She'd never acted like this before.
A look of alarm quickly crossed Pina's face as she hovered nearby.
"M-Miss Alice."
"What is it."
"This one — his nose is bleeding."
Bright red blood was running from the soldier Pina pointed to.
I checked his condition carefully. The nostrils the blood was flowing from were dry, his complexion was deathly pale, and his breathing was uneven. He looked genuinely dangerous.
"Altitude sickness."
This was serious.
Had they failed to pace themselves and just kept running?
"…We need to get back to Lacrima right now."
I had no way of helping them out here.
Moving this late was risky — but leaving them like this for that long was a problem too. Getting down the mountain quickly and resting in Lacrima, where the elevation was at least lower, would be the better call.
The real issue was that I'd have to shake Neveterde off again on the way back.
"What about Neveterde?"
— — —♬…♬….
Neveterde was still whimpering, glancing around uneasily.
Then she sniffed the soldiers one more time, caught the scent on the ground, and began to lumber along after it.
"Uh…"
Pina moved to grab her.
But before Pina could do anything, Neveterde rose from the ground, raised both arms to form her ice wings, and took flight.
And she flew exactly along the path the soldiers had come from.
Pina looked disappointed.
"She just left all of a sudden…"
I watched her go in silence.
"……."
A thought crossed my mind — but this wasn't the time to go somewhere else.
There was a more urgent problem right in front of us.
"…Let's just do what we need to do."
I calmly stripped the armor off the soldiers.
I left all of it on the ground so it wouldn't get in the way, spread out a waterproof sleeping-bag tarp, and rolled the three of them up in it.
Then I bound the three of them with rope and gave it a firm tug.
It held taut. No problems there.
"Are we heading back right now?"
I answered Pina's question without a second's hesitation.
"Yeah. Can you carry my greatsword for me?"
"…Yes, of course."
I unbuckled it and strapped the greatsword to Pina's back. Then I looped the rope binding the soldiers once over my shoulder and started moving, slowly.
I should have woken them and gotten the full story — but I didn't need to hear it to know what had happened.
These soldiers had been running from Neveumano.
I was sure of it.
Evan chewed on a berry plucked from a shrub and stretched.
The tundra night was cold and raw. The only thing worth looking at was the night sky overhead. Evan prodded the burning campfire with a shrub branch.
"Krrrh…"
"Khh…"
The soft sounds of the soldiers sleeping around him tickled his ears.
Everyone was sleeping soundly.
Evan swallowed the berry.
After tasting a bitter, bone-deep defeat at the hands of the master swordfighter known as Sabre Tiger, Evan had changed.
Above all, his usual impatience had died. He thought about his stamina now, and avoided pushing himself whenever he could.
He'd come to understand that this place was not a knights' battlefield, and he'd started thinking like a hunter.
And so, after taking down the first monster they encountered, then the second, then the third… banding together with his soldiers to bring down enemies that struck first, he'd finally gotten a feel for what he needed to do.
Even the soldiers who hadn't much liked Evan at the start of the expedition — when he'd been nothing but a constant nuisance — had opened up to him after seeing that change.
When the branch he'd been poking the fire with caught flame, Evan simply set it down.
"Haha—"
He laughed out of nowhere.
All of this was something he'd only understood after being defeated by that same hunter a second time. Evan touched the corner of his mouth.
Alice. He'd thought she was just some hunter who'd caught a princess's fancy. Who would have guessed she was skilled enough to rise to the rank of Master? Evan pictured her face.
The first time they'd met, in that tavern, she'd thoroughly beaten him.
One hit and he'd gone down flat, if he remembered right.
At the time, it had been humiliating and absurd, and it had made him furious.
Looking back now, losing had been inevitable.
Once you reached a certain level, it no longer mattered whether your opponent was human or monster. Alice had reached that level — and before her, Evan had been nothing but a two-bit knight.
What if Alice quit being a hunter and became a knight instead?
If he dared to imagine it, he wondered whether she might even threaten the position of knight-commander. Evan looked at the longsword lying beside him.
And with the thought that he couldn't just stay like this, he picked up the longsword and rose to his feet.
Beneath the moonlit night, Evan took up his sword and slowly worked through his forms. Lately, whenever he took the night watch during the expedition, he no longer let the hours pass in a daze — he trained.
Careful not to wake the soldiers, he stepped lightly over the snow and moved his arms with deliberate control.
Ordinarily, when Evan held a sword, he paid little attention to his surroundings. But tonight his mind was unusually clear, and he managed both his vigilance and his swordwork at once.
At the edge of his vision, someone appeared over the horizon.
It wasn't a monster — it was a person. Not a party of eleven like theirs. Just one person, alone.
Evan immediately lowered his sword and turned his gaze that way.
Why was someone moving alone, without a single comrade?
He sheathed the longsword and secured it at his hip. It could be a deserter, so he kept his guard up.
"Hah — hah—"
But the soldier running toward them didn't look well at all.
Driving his feet forward on ragged, steep breaths, the soldier hurried toward Evan's unit. Evan, realizing the man was coming his way, went out to meet him.
"Identify yourself."
"Hah — hah…. I-I'm under Sir Minor's command… hah…"
The soldier was so winded he couldn't even finish saying his own name.
The name Minor was enough for Evan. Judging by the man's appearance, he didn't look like a deserter. A deserter wouldn't have come this way.
Rather than a deserter, he looked like someone fleeing from something.
"…Minor? You're one of Minor's men."
Minor was always slow and deliberate — yet somehow his sword was strangely fast and sharp. Their personalities had never quite meshed, but Evan respected the man's skill, if nothing else.
"Y-yes. R-right now Sir Minor — no, our whole unit is in danger."
Minor, in danger.
Evan recognized the gravity of the situation and nodded.
"What happened?"
"Well…"
The soldier forced the words out one by one.
"A h-huge monster… a huge monster appeared out of the blizzard. I-I got separated from Sir Minor in the storm by myself… I-I don't know what happened to the rest of the soldiers… we have to get back to Lacrima…. Hah…"
The soldier's words grew more and more incoherent, until at last, overcome by dizziness and vertigo, he collapsed.
"H-hey!"
Evan checked on the soldier who'd suddenly gone down. It seemed he'd simply run himself to exhaustion getting here and passed out.
A huge monster…
Evan blinked and turned the words over in his mind. Maybe that was the "big foot" they'd been searching for. That was what he thought.
In that case, they needed to head back at once.
The very thing they'd all been after had finally shown itself.