The Underground Auction House and Human Hunters (2)
In Exeria, a quest was a fragmentary yet absolute kind of truth.
Setting aside the strange intent one always felt whenever a quest was carried out, the sentences and words listed in a quest message invariably spoke only of what was real.
So Raul narrowed his eyes.
A quest message had suddenly appeared before him, and its contents were so absurd that he could only stare.
"Emergency scenario - The youngest daughter of the Sererial family."
Sererial. If that was what he was thinking of, then it was the name of one of the founding families that had helped shape the present Great Forest of the West, a line that now occupied a place among the elders of the Senate.
They were here?
Raul’s gaze sharpened.
And as he read on, quickly, he found several words in the quest text that he could not possibly ignore.
...Alicia Sererial...
...She is fated to die....
Alicia.
The moment he saw the name, a memory surfaced.
Those deep green eyes that had glanced back at him as she headed toward the slave prison behind the stage under the elven leader’s orders.
So the rabbit mask beside him had been Sererial.
Since the quest’s contents admitted no doubt, that must be the truth.
The problem was...
...The claw of the Frost-Steel Orc centurion...
That single line.
Not just a Frost-Steel Orc, but a centurion.
A centurion was an infamous creature whose mere appearance was called a minor disaster.
Why such a thing had emerged in the middle of Valentia’s bustling streets was another matter entirely.
“Hmph.”
One thing was certain: the dozen-odd Elven Ranger squadmates in front of him were nowhere near enough to handle it.
Then, between the two so-called human hunters who had been trading provocations, a furious shout rang out.
“You filthy orc! He’s alone anyway! Shoot!”
The one who moved first was an elf who had never quite managed to suppress his hot temper.
The elf’s cry was the spark, and the hostage the Frost-Steel Orc had hoisted by the head was the fuse.
“Wait, Roras!”
But that had to be exactly what the orc centurion wanted.
The elf leader knew it and tried to restrain his men, but the arrow had already left his hand.
Whiiish!
Six aura arrows cut through the heavy air and flew out in an instant.
Yet the orc centurion only bared a vile smile, making the elf leader’s fear come true.
Thuk, thuk-thuk!
“Graaah!”
The near-dead elf took all six arrows through his body and let out a groan.
The orc had used a living elf like a shield to block the shot.
“E-Elunto!”
The elves panicked, falling for such a one-dimensional provocation.
“You stupid bastard! Lower your bow!”
As expected, the ranger squad leader twisted his face in rage and spat the words out.
They stayed buried in the forest for so long that they ended up walking straight into such a childish trap.
Elves were born with abilities far superior even to humans and those orcs, but in war they had always been the weaker side.
The reason was plain.
Experience.
By contrast, the orc whose entire life had been a battlefield was different.
Whoosh!
The gray-white-skinned orc hurled the hostage forward the very instant the elves’ taut tension broke.
The elves, who cherished their kin with a near-violent intensity, turned their attention for that fleeting moment to the body of the comrade flying toward them.
Idiots.
At that moment, the battle was as good as over.
“Hahahahahaha!”
The orc centurion threw his head back and laughed thunderously, his mouth curled with contempt.
He reappeared behind the elf named Roras, the one who had just fired the arrow.
“Roras!”
The elf leader, the first to recover, threw himself forward, but the elf called Roras could not even manage a single dying breath of “Huh?”
A red line had already bloomed across his throat.
Fwoosh-!
Blood sprayed out like a fountain.
Immediately after, the rangers who had forced themselves up from their mistake drew their swords with crackling sparks of lightning.
But the Frost-Steel Orc seized the collapsing corpse and swung it, blocking all the incoming blades with it.
Once again, the elves hesitated because he was whipping around the body of their own kin.
He knew exactly how to exploit the elves’ sickening devotion to their own.
Clang!
The elf leader’s blade crossed with the orc’s massive sword, throwing off a spray of sparks.
“Too slow, too weak! That’s why you end up as prey, you fool of an elf!”
“Shut up!”
“I’ll cut off all your heads and hang them at the edge of the Great Forest! Then your blood relatives will still crawl out even knowing it’s a trap, won’t they? Forest insects with no learning ability whatsoever!”
“I said shut up!”
In the end, even the elf leader fell for that obvious bait and let out a savage cry.
The struggle between the forest’s human hunters and the frozen land’s human hunters already looked as if its outcome had been decided.
Raul kept his mind cool while watching the one-sided slaughter from close range.
As things stood, the premise that he could beat that centurion head-on simply did not hold.
With an unsealed Halo, the story would be different, but in this city, where eyes were already searching for Raul with murderous intensity, he could not afford that kind of risk.
What he needed was a single opening.
He had to wait for the instant neither the centurion nor the elves could have predicted.
And, by fortunate coincidence, Raul had an artifact in his hand that could magnify that opportunity to its fullest.
So he waited.
“Aaaagh!”
“My, my arm!”
“E-Edwin, please dodge!”
Even amid the blood-soaked slaughter, he stood quietly, his black eyes flashing like polished obsidian.
Then it happened.
“A rat trying to smuggle something away in front of a great warrior, of all things!”
The orc centurion, who had been mocking and insulting the elves as if he were enjoying a game, suddenly scowled.
Rat?
The moment that thought reached Raul, the Frost-Steel Orc vanished with a thunderous boom.
No, not vanished.
He had launched himself all the way up to the ceiling of the vast underground auction house, stirred by a fearsome burst of wind pressure.
The orc hung upside down from the ceiling for a moment, and his gaze settled on the auction stage.
There, supporting a limp slave elf, stood the elf in the rabbit mask.
It was Alicia Sererial.
“What—”
At the exact instant Alicia widened her eyes at the sight of her bleeding comrade collapsing before her,
Crash!
The massive body of the Frost-Steel Orc was flung through the air as if rebounding from a taut spring.
Through the glow of the Halo, Raul’s eyes saw the world in slow motion.
The ceiling cracking open.
The orc surging in.
Alicia Sererial crouching instinctively to shield the slave elf she had been supporting, while the elf leader shouted a warning toward her.
“Dange—!”
Alicia squeezed her eyes shut, and the sound of the wind stretched unnaturally thin like a length of tape as it stabbed at Raul’s ears.
Whiiiish!
The orc’s saw-edged sword flew in with a piercing shriek.
Just as the head of the elf with hair like a silver river was about to be crushed beneath it,
Raul leapt into the center of it all and shouted, “Al Largildo!”
The moment he spoke the trigger word, space warped around him.
The air split open into a circular distortion.
At last, the centurion, like a killing machine in motion, slammed into that transparent barrier, but
Kwaaaajiik!
Even with an ear-rattling detonation, it could not cross the artifact’s veil.
It had been stopped.
That terrifying charge, which seemed as though nothing in the world could halt it.
For an instant, a blood-red light flashed in the Frost-Steel Orc’s eyes.
He glared at Raul as if he meant to kill him on the spot.
His mouth opened with a spray of frothing spittle, but the artifact’s power was not finished yet.
“What are you—”
Space bent in front of the creature’s face as it tried to speak, and from within that distortion poured an invisible shock wave.
More precisely, it was the very kinetic energy the orc centurion had just fed into the Mirror Shield himself.
The shock wave hurled him straight into the far wall in a single instant.
“Y-you are...?”
Only then did the startled voice of the elf woman reach Raul from behind him.
Apparently she had recognized him.
But there was no room for conversation now.
Without a word, Raul charged the orc, who was already rising with a growl.
“Grrr...”
Blinding white light gathered in Raul’s hand.
“I’ll borrow this for a moment.”
What he seized and lifted was the saw-edged sword that had gone flying along with the Frost-Steel Orc.
Raul raised it, holy radiance flashing over his entire body as he swung the greatsword, taller than he was, with terrifying speed.
“Hup!”
“Graaaagh!”
A shout and a scream.
The heavy blade and the orc’s gauntlet crossed, scattering sparks.
The monster still seemed unable to grasp what was happening, its bulging eyes rolling everywhere at once, but
“That just means you’re admitting you’ve lost your composure.”
Raul only closed the distance faster and increased the speed of his strikes.
He could not allow the beast a chance to collect itself.
The moment it understood the nature of the power Raul was using, the situation would once again plunge toward the worst possible outcome.
Bang!
Raul brought the saw-edged sword down with all his strength from above, and the centurion blocked it by crossing both arms.
Rrrrk? Drdrdrdrk!
But Raul followed by pinning the blade down with his other arm, pressing the monster with strength that had entered the realm of the superhuman.
“Grrrk! Graaagh!”
The thing spat froth, then a scream, and when it was driven into a corner, it abruptly sacrificed one arm and lunged straight at Raul.
It would have been an idiotic decision bordering on suicide if not for the full-body armor forged from solid Frost-Steel.
But the armor was there, and Raul seemed as if he would have no answer to the power of that mysterious mineral.
“Careful...”
The clear voice of an elf he had heard before brushed his ear, but the problem was already solved.
Ziiip-!
He was already tearing open a scroll he had drawn from his breast pocket with his teeth.
Tick. T-tick.
Contained within it was a spell of the fourth circle.
After several sizzling snaps like a gas stove igniting, a red magic circle appeared around the ground where Raul stood.
Then a pillar of crimson flame erupted upward.
Frost-Steel, in any age, had always been vulnerable to intense heat.
Shhhhhhhhh!
The sudden collision of heat and cold unleashed a deafening roar and exploded into pale steam that made the spine go cold.
Even then, Raul remained calm and searched quickly with his eyes.
What he was looking for was the gap in the orc centurion’s balance, thrown off by the steam pouring from his full-body armor.
It was the one path that led straight to the creature’s heart.
Raul’s gaze stopped in an instant.
Then he overlapped the great saw-edged sword with the path he had found and thrust it forward with all his strength.
The blade drove out in a clean straight line, twisting the rigid Frost-Steel and piercing the broad chest beyond it.
Thuk!
After that, the only sound left was the wet, horrifying rip of flesh.
The frozen hunter of the northern waste, who had been a living shell, a walking tank, and a merciless engine of slaughter all at once, drooped his head like a robot whose power had been cut off.
Raul had brought down a monster that even the rangers of the West Great Forest could do nothing about.
And he had done it in less than a minute of fighting.
No one in that area who still had his wits about him could fail to be stunned by what he had just seen.
Elf or human alike, all of them stared wide-eyed in disbelief. And they remained that way for a long while.
***
Clatter, clatter.
The wagon rolled onward at a slow rhythm, its wheels carrying it through a forest lined with deciduous trees.
Cold winds had already begun to blow, and yet, strangely enough, the deeper one went into the forest, the more vividly it displayed a lush green vitality in full bloom.
That was proof enough that they had entered the grace of the forest, the realm of the World Tree, which ignored even the changing seasons.
“Shall we camp here for today?”
Raul, pulling the wagon with one arm, stopped and turned back.
The elves following behind him all came to a halt with startled expressions.
“...Pardon?”
“Camp. Don’t elves sleep at night too?”
As Raul asked it so casually, the ranger squad leader had been wearing a blank look, but then he seemed to snap back to himself and answered at once, “No. We do sleep. Yes, let’s set up camp right away.”
There were four rangers left alive.
And all of them, save for Alicia Sererial, who had been away from the battlefield, were severely wounded, missing either an arm or a leg.
“That’ll do. Wait here. I’ll gather firewood quickly.”
Raul moved first on their behalf.
A normal elf, whatever his condition or injury, would have been baring his teeth and flying into a rage, but none of these elves went against Raul’s words.
That was only natural.
Not only had Raul defeated the Frost-Steel Orc...
he had also healed the elves afterward and secured their route of escape.
He had even covertly helped the injured elves slip out of the city, and as they could see, he was now loading the slave elves onto the wagon and pulling it himself.
They had enough intelligence to understand that he was not trying to harm them.
If he had meant them harm, he would have killed them all where they stood, when they were nearly annihilated.
The process had been messy, but in the end, thanks to that orc centurion, Raul seemed to have earned enormous favor from these elves.
Frost-Steel Orcs, huh...
Come to think of it, that shamanic defector from Tetra Mountain had also said that those bastards were connected to the Devil’s Egg.
And now he had gone and run into a centurion-class specimen as well.
It seemed the force trying to spread that vile thing called the Devil’s Egg through Exeria was far larger than Raul had expected.
Still, that was something he could think about after safely entering the West Great Forest.
With that conclusion in mind, Raul shook his head once and picked up kindling.
Fwoosh-
A pale vermilion campfire drove away the cold night air.
The slave elves, still half-dazed even after their shackles had been removed, and the shattered ranger squad all gathered before the fire.
Raul handed them a bowl of flour porridge boiled with plenty of salt and pepper, and to his relief, the elves accepted it without any particular reluctance.
They only gave short answers to whatever he asked and did not speak first on their own.
That was not strange.
They had lost more than a dozen comrades that very day.
The silence was heavy, but Raul made a point of not showing any discomfort.
As the forest and the night deepened, the hour came when brilliant stars asserted their presence in the sky.
“What manner of person are you, to have helped us this much?”
Whether they had sorted out their feelings or lowered their guard a little, at last the ranger squad leader spoke to Raul.
An elf expressing curiosity first.
That was a good sign.
Raul felt inwardly pleased that all the knowledge he had used to help them had not been wasted, and he answered with quiet confidence.
“Raul. I’m a priest of Motala.”
But perhaps because the other man was an elf with a lifespan several times that of a human, the ranger leader shook his head without hesitation.
“No. I know what I saw. The power you used in battle was Motala’s. But the power you used to heal me and my men was Mimir’s.”
One religion’s faithful could not copy or imitate another religion’s divine power.
The elf leader let the statement hang for a moment before speaking again.
“To have accepted the authority of two gods into a single body, and to have helped our forest kin without asking anything in return... what, then, is your true identity?”
Raul considered the question for a moment.
How much did this elf actually know?
And how much could Raul himself afford to reveal?
The answer came quickly enough.
This was the first ally he had met who might truly be one.
An awkward lie could become an obstacle later.
So, at least here, I’ll be honest.
Raul quietly spoke the word he had never once used since awakening in Exeria.
“Raul. I am the Saint of the Beginning.”
The moment he heard it, everyone around him froze as if time itself had stopped.