The Grown Muscle of Advanced Development (1)
“Sir, the wind is cold. Please come inside.”
Sir Lergal was seated on the wooden steps of the lodging the mountain village had prepared for them.
The one who spoke to him was a fellow adventurer who had traveled with him all the way from Zern.
He said again to the knight, who was still staring blankly at the summit of Tetra Mountain, “The Holy Warrior won’t be back until the day after tomorrow at the earliest. The summit of Tetra Mountain is the kind of place where, even if you set out fully prepared, it still takes another two days. I know how you feel, but let’s stay calm and wait.”
The middle-aged adventurer’s face said he understood the impatience of a young, talented knight perfectly.
“The day after tomorrow...”
The shadows on the knight’s face deepened.
“Kevin... Benjamin and Al... they might still be going through some kind of torture right now...”
“But there’s nothing we can do except wait. Haven’t we already confirmed that this is beyond what the four of us can handle?”
“...”
The knight had nothing to say back to the veteran adventurer. There was nothing wrong with what he had said.
Haste and impatience had made six people who should have been here vanish.
Exeria was not a kind world, one where the dreams of a promising young knight would be realized without trouble.
“If the Holy Warrior returns the day after tomorrow... do you think anything can change?”
The knight asked it with a half-defeated look.
He wanted reassurance.
The middle-aged adventurer had been chosen for this expedition not because he was impressive in a fight, but because of the experience and judgment he had gained over years of adventuring.
And the middle-aged adventurer would, of course, reassure him.
He had always played the role of lifting other people’s spirits, even when he had to lie to do it.
Yet contrary to the knight’s expectations, the middle-aged adventurer shook his head and spoke.
“No.”
“...Pardon?”
The knight’s eyes widened at the abrupt denial.
But the middle-aged adventurer, all trace of a smile gone from his face, looked straight at Lergal and said, “This world isn’t romantic enough to be turned upside down by one knight or one Holy Warrior.”
There was anger burning quietly in his eyes.
It was clear that fury was directed at the knight who had driven his old companions into a dead end.
“Ruso... I...”
“Still, I’m going. If there’s even the smallest chance... if there’s even one of my companions left breathing... I have a duty to save him.”
The adventurer, who had always been a liar, was speaking the truth.
The young knight could not say a word.
Only an uncomfortable silence remained, and wind swept over the mountainside of Tetra Mountain.
A dry, cold wind that naturally brought the season of winter to mind.
What should he say?
What could he say?
While the knight was caught in a kind of worry he had never had to face in his life, a sudden voice came from behind him.
“Why are you outside?”
The knight whipped around.
Then there, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, stood a man with jet-black hair like the night sky.
“H-Holy Warrior?”
“I’m back.”
“No, no, how? The summit of Tetra Mountain is two days away at the earliest from here... and only one day has passed...”
“There were a few things going on, so I hurried a bit.”
Was that something one could just hurry through?
The knight, who had been swamped with worries only a moment earlier, went blank as if someone had struck him on the head with a stone.
Huh?
He even stared wide-eyed as Raul strode toward him.
And there was a reason for that.
The Holy Warrior Raul’s body had changed so dramatically he looked like a completely different man, starting with his frame.
He had grown larger.
The same Raul whose build the merchants had once sneered at and called pretty-boy-like had...
His shoulders had broadened, massive muscles had packed themselves onto his upper and lower body, and the clothes that had plainly seemed a little loose on Raul now looked tight across his frame.
At this rate, he could have stood shoulder to shoulder with Sir Lergal, a knight who had trained his body his whole life.
And again, all that had happened in a single day.
Was something like this really possible?
No, was it?
Was it impossible if one had the grace and protection of a god?
The knight could only stare at Raul in a daze, speechless.
Raul, perhaps amused by Lergal’s expression, let out a small snort and said, “Everyone’s stamina recovered all right?”
“Huh...?”
“We’re pressed for time, aren’t we?”
Clank.
Without a hint of hesitation, Raul picked up the halberd that had been leaning beside the knight.
He did it with pure strength alone, without any divine strengthening of his muscles and without the reduced weight of a blessed weapon.
The knight’s jaw dropped at that astonishing transformation, and Raul spoke on with the faintest smile still on his face.
“Let’s move now. To that magnificent stronghold of theirs.”
***
Half a day later, under the gray-black dawn mist and the heavy, damp dew peculiar to the mountains, a gigantic fortress finally rose before the party.
“They say it was a castle used by an ancient dynasty called Ordeo.”
The middle-aged adventurer, whose eyes were also wide and whose mouth had fallen open beside Sir Lergal, added the explanation.
Raul nodded.
He understood why the words “ancient” had been attached to it.
The outer walls of the fortress had already half-collapsed under the weight of time, leaving the interior visible from the outside.
There were many people guarding the perimeter, but perhaps because they had begun as bandits, all of them looked utterly lacking in alertness.
Raul reached out a hand.
The knight then handed over the map of Ordeo Fortress he had painstakingly drawn by hand over the past half-day.
The room where the “teacher” stayed.
The fortress where the bandits lived.
The underground prison where the “materials” were kept.
Even the location of the reception room for various “guests.”
Perhaps because they had already been trapped in this fortress once, they knew everything there was to know.
Their bitter failure had not been entirely worthless after all, now that they had met Raul.
As Raul listened to the full explanation and studied the rough map, he worked quickly through the problem in his head.
The Saint’s composure and Raul’s own knowledge of the game instantly produced multiple simulations in his mind, and his eyes, weighing countless possibilities, came to rest on one point.
“Then the very first place we should target is... here.”
When Raul stabbed a finger at the center of the crude map, the knight widened his eyes exactly as expected.
“S-Sir Holy Warrior. But that place is...”
“Yes. As Lergal said, it’s the most heavily guarded and the place with the most enemies... the ‘teacher’s’ room.”
“A frontal assault... As a knight, I can only be moved by the Holy Warrior’s honorable choice. But, sir, we have an obligation to rescue the hostages and arrest the nobles who have joined hands with those bastards.”
Sir Lergal looked at Raul with eyes blazing with resolute will.
It meant they could not simply be satisfied with winning the battle.
“I know.”
But Raul had already folded even that objective into his simulations.
“Would you like to hear something interesting?”
A faint smile touched Raul’s lips.
It was the expression of someone talking about a game he knew far too well.
***
When he explained the finer details of the plan, the fear in the eyes of the knight and the adventurers was replaced by worry and concern.
And naturally so.
No matter how the process or the result played out, the person standing in the most dangerous position for this operation was none other than Raul himself.
Rustle.
Hidden in the deep shadow of dawn, Raul extended both hands in a flash.
“Mmph?!”
What his hands found was the head of a bandit heavy with sleep.
He seized the crown of the skull and the jaw with both hands and twisted. The neck bone slipped past the point of no return, snapping to a grotesque angle as the bandit’s body went limp.
Light. Lighter than I expected.
Without delay, Raul hid the corpse and slipped into the fortress.
Broken and crumbling in countless places, the fortress was, as expected, overflowing with places to hide a body.
Crunch.
Who had said it, that high technology was not so different from magic?
Raul was putting that joke into practice in the real world.
Only, instead of technology, he was using pure brute force.
Snap.
Leaping up from behind, Raul hooked an arm around a burly man’s neck and twisted, and that massive body also went slack in an instant.
The body was huge, and its weight was tremendous, but it was no real problem for Raul now.
He lifted the giant as it toppled backward with one arm, then set him down softly in the black shadow of dawn without a sound.
Nothing changed from one enemy to the next.
Raul’s grip strength had already gone beyond the limits of human beings, and there were probably not many bandits anywhere in Exeria who could resist the force with which he dragged them in.
So he grabbed them, then broke their necks before they had a chance to scream.
What made all of this possible was his insanely increased strength.
No matter how shameless I am, I never imagined a three-rank jump in a stat would actually happen...
It seemed there really was no impossibility in a realized Exeria.
Strength: A
Raul’s strength, once D Rank, had leaped to A Rank by sacrificing a legendary soul stone.
If he had told the gamers who had once been writing a strategy guide for Exeria Devil Hunter with him, none of them would have believed it.
How much more unbelievable, then, was it for Raul, who had experienced it in his own body?
He even had the bizarre sensation that his body was being designed and formed all over again from the ground up.
And the result of that was... this.
“Agh...”
Crunch—!!
Louder than their dying gasp was the sound of neck bones breaking, announcing Raul’s presence.
He was already on his twentieth guard assassin, relying on a kind of power that felt more magical than magic itself.
Since even the witnesses had all been killed off, it was definitely assassination.
Before long, he had reached the fortress’s central area.
Raul himself had not expected to keep up this pace of assassination so smoothly, so he considered it for a moment.
This is the point where I was expecting to be discovered.
No matter how deep the dawn ran, no one seemed to find the corpses he had dumped in corners.
Well, he had not exactly ruled out this possibility either, so Raul hurried on without showing any sign of panic.
Creak...
When Raul opened a rather large door and stepped inside, unlike the candleless corridors of the fortress, he saw a large room blazing with light.
In one corner of that room lay liquor bottles that reeked so strongly they seemed about to twist his nose out of place, while on the opposite side sat a row of strangely out-of-place laboratory tools, beakers and lamps and the like, lined up on a bookshelf.
That bookshelf...
It looked familiar. The tools were similar too, and the books lined up on it were almost identical to those of the dark mage Tod.
Swish.
While Raul was looking around the room, someone on the bed placed oddly in the very center of the room slowly sat up.
A large tattoo ran from the top of the head, fully exposed, all the way down the body...
It was the tattoo symbol of the Aria-tu tribe, the hallmark of a second-tier class shaman.
“I clearly said not to let anyone into my room today, didn’t I?”
Raul looked straight at the shamanic defector, who still had not fully shaken off his sleep, and said, “You’re the teacher.”
At once, shock crept into the man’s eyes.
“...Who are you?”
“If I answer your question, will you answer mine?”
When Raul asked in a leisurely tone, the shamanic defector slowly, carefully sat up and replied, “...Fine.”
Raul smiled faintly.
“You don’t need to ask how I got here and all that?”
“Shit, if you’ve got the ability to come here, then you came. Or maybe that idiot bandit chief got drunk again and punched a hole in the place.”
“Both are true.”
“Ha. Shit, I thought so.”
The shamanic defector casually picked up a rolled cigarette from the bookshelf beside his bed and lit it.
He took one deep drag, blinked a few times, and only then let the smoke out.
Raul had thought it was just a cigarette, but the smell was sharp and biting.
It was definitely a drug.
“Huuuu. Want a puff yourself? It leaves a good aftertaste if you eat the energy of Tetra Mountain.”
“I don’t need it.”
“Ah! Figured you’d say that. So what do you want to ask? What noble house sent you this time, to be slinging around that much murderous intent?”
The shamanic defector seemed to think Raul was some kind of messenger sent by a client.
Raul gave a soft snort.
It didn’t seem like a bad assumption, so he smiled.
“Where did the demon’s eggs come from?”
What Raul wanted to know was the source.
No matter how much of a shamanic defector the man was, having sold himself to the devil to raise his rank, Raul had confirmed with his own eyes that the bastard lacked the ability to travel in and out of the demon realm.
Then the man laughed loudly.
“What. I thought I had a new customer, but you were already one of us? You too, or rather the one behind you? They want a seat at the table too? Where the hell did you come from, to be this greedy?”
“I haven’t heard the answer yet. One question, one answer. Wasn’t that our deal?”
“Shit and double shit! Fine, good. I’ll answer. I raised them myself from seed.”
Raul frowned at the answer.
“You took them in?”
“Hey now! If you’re following your own rules, then it’s my turn, isn’t it? Huuuu. This time you answer. Where the hell did you come from, to send a grown man into another grown man’s room in the middle of the night? Doesn’t your employer have any manners? If you’re going to send someone, send a pretty girl.”
...Hah.
Watching the shamanic defector, who talked far too much, Raul felt the need to revise his plan.
At this rate, if he tried to keep talking with the bastard in a civilized manner, dawn would break.
Raul decided the timing was perfect, drew the halberd slung across his back, and said openly, “Raul. Holy Warrior of Motala.”
“......What?”