Promotion Test (4) ─ The Snout of the Dead
The Ansuz rune activated. It was a spell that allowed conversation with the dead, letting me commune with the recently departed soul of an orc. I flicked the blood and dirt from my fingers and spoke.
—Y-you human! Who the hell are you?!
“No need for you to know.”
Using my Vector—Solemn Speech skill, I grabbed the toughest-looking orc in the group with my Iron Claw.
“Snort!!”
The orc warrior whose face I’d seized instinctively swung a punch. But a soul couldn’t affect the physical world! The muscular orc’s fist passed straight through my face.
—W-what?!
“What, cat got your tongue?”
With a wicked sneer, I tightened my grip on the orc warrior’s face. As expected, strength began draining from his body.
—T-this is…!!
“Let’s play a game of soul ascension! You’re first!!”
I clamped my hand over the orc’s mouth. The vicious bastard went limp like a man crawling into a heated blanket on a minus-fifteen-degree night. Shwaaaah—! The orc warrior’s soul dissipated in a cloud of dry-ice smoke. Thanks to my merciful touch, the bastard had been sent to the afterlife just like the souls trapped in that golem.
—Snort-snort! This can’t be!! Chek’gor, gone just like that?!
—This isn’t real!! We’re all just dreaming between life and death!!
They say the stupider they are, the more they act according to their looks. Suppressing the strongest one first had been extremely effective. He really must have been the strongest orc in this tribe. The others had witnessed his power in life, so the shock hit them hard.
The orc souls trembled in terror as they stared at me. Perfect. Exactly the reaction I wanted. I’ll even give bonus points for the authentic snort-snort crying. Out of a hundred, that’s a solid soul-ascension score.
“Heh heh heh. Sending worthless pigs like you to an eternity of hunger and unrest in hell is nothing to me.”
I spoke while imitating that Ada unicorn dark mage. The only thing we had in common was gender. I wasn’t a unicorn, an Ada, or a dark mage. Still, I had been an Ada until a month ago, and my party members—by pure coincidence—were all virgins, and I could use magic too. If you thought about it, we were about half-similar, right?
—Sniiiiiiiiii… This is a nightmare…
Maybe that’s why. The orcs seemed completely fooled by my acting. A masked otherworldly being who could slurp up one of their greatest warriors in just three seconds! Fuck, even a human would piss themselves if they swapped places.
I kept up the evil sorcerer vibe and cackled.
—Snort!! We are a proud orc clan!! Even in death, we do not fear threats!!
The moment I brought up the main topic, one of them pushed back. This one had six-pack abs too—definitely a warrior. Calling these guys pigs suddenly felt wrong.
I swung my hand at him as if I’d been waiting for exactly that.
—Snoooort!! Impossible…
—Sniiiiiiiiiiiaaaaack!!
The orc evaporated like a drop of water on a scorching frying pan. At that pathetic end, a young orc screamed.
‘Wait, what the fuck is wrong with these bastards?’
I twisted my face into a vicious scowl. Anyone watching would think I was the villain here. I didn’t know the exact mechanics, but whenever a soul touched my body, the ghosts of this world ascended. I was guessing it had something to do with the psychic-nullifying power of a 21st-century Earthling. Just like how the invention of smartphones wiped out ghost photos and UFO sightings, it made sense that someone from the scientific age would have resistance to this world’s shab-shab, bun-shin-sa-ba nonsense.
…Well, whatever the real principle was, ascending definitely didn’t feel painful. The souls trapped in the golem had been the same, and the orcs I’d sent off earlier had all closed their eyes with peaceful expressions. That’s why I’d deliberately covered their mouths.
If the souls I erased opened their mouths wide and floated away looking happy, how was I supposed to look intimidating?! The most effective way to overcome cultural differences was fear. Trying to persuade monsters was completely fucking useless. If I wanted to scare these bastards into giving me answers, I had to keep up the act. There was a reason I was doing it this way.
—Crunch!
I made a grasping motion with my hand and asked again.
—……Grrrrrnt. Snort…
“I’ll give you ten seconds.”
Wait, fuck. Did these guys even understand the concept of time?
—Grab!
I snatched the smallest orc soul out of the bunch. There aren’t many mammals that are cruel to their young. My veterinary knowledge was shining through.
—It was an ogre!!
One of the orcs screamed before I could finish. An ogre?
—A horrible four-armed ogre attacked us!! It breathed fire and hurled lightning, slaughtering every warrior! It even killed the young ones before disappearing, satisfied!!
—Ogres eat orcs!! It came here to devour us!!
—Snort!! My family was taken by that thing too!!
The answers poured out like a broken dam. I should’ve started with the kid from the beginning. I kept holding the young orc and pressed on.
“A multi-armed ogre, huh? And it used magic too?”
—I don’t know what magic is! It spat fire and lightning!
—Its strength was insane! It snapped Chek’gor’s neck like a twig!
Information that was useless whether I understood it or not. My masked face kept twisting in frustration.
Ogres were the pinnacle of powerful man-eating monsters. Unlike orcs that simply killed, ogres took the lead in hunting and eating humans. Goblins and kobolds ate people too, but ogres had an overwhelming preference for human flesh above all other meat.
‘Goddamn it. A four-armed ogre shaman? Even the name sounds retarded.’
Calling it a shaman was still an assumption. I was a rune mage myself, but my bread-and-butter was still punching and spearing. If this was a brain-dead ogre with nothing but ridiculous strength, it might’ve been swinging four clubs and using some kind of Four-Club Style while controlling fighting spirit.
“How strong was it? What abilities did you see on that ogre?”
I fired off every question that came to mind. The orc souls, bound to their corpses, couldn’t run away and answered everything. On the plus side, since they were souls, they weren’t speaking orcish. Without my translation ability, I probably couldn’t have interrogated them this smoothly.
—It was holding two clubs…
—Its hide was so thick my weapons couldn’t pierce it.
—When it let out that weird roar, flames and lightning rained down.
—It tore off one of our kin’s arms right in front of us and ate it, then attacked with the remaining three.
The more I listened, the clearer the picture became. I clicked my tongue.
‘It’s rune sorcery.’
Rune sorcery. The same kind of rune magic that some monsters, like that hobgoblin, used. The short chants were probably vocalizations of rune words. The annoying part was that it could spew fire and lightning without even using its hands. If it could activate effects without a medium, it might be a fairly powerful being that had grasped the ‘true meaning’ of runes.
Ogres were stupid creatures, but if this one could use magic too, it wouldn’t be some brainless natural-born savage. It would be more like ‘A natural-born who graduated from MIT!’
That was basically the same as a brilliant engineer buying an abandoned power transmission tower and turning it into his base! In other words, a crazy bastard. I definitely shouldn’t get involved with him.
Why would someone who graduated from such a good school be playing wild man in the middle of nowhere? Whether on Earth or in this world, a guy who earned a degree and then became an adventurer had to be out of his mind. As a normal person, I couldn’t even begin to imagine what a lunatic like that was thinking.
But they say the criminal always returns to the scene of the crime. Suddenly, staying in this orc settlement felt like complete insanity. There was no telling when that blue-screen-brained, highly-educated wild ogre might come back.
‘Time to dodge out.’
Fortunately, there was no more information to extract. I crushed the trembling young orc like I was wringing it out and sent it to ascension.
—Heuk.
Maybe because it was a child, its soul was weak. The orc that only reached my waist vanished without even leaving a last word.
—Sniiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiick!!
—Ppaaaagooooooor—!!
—It was a lie after all!! You cowardly human!!
The moment the young orc found peace, the rest of the orcs went berserk, hurling curses and punches at me.
Hey, calm down. This is all good for you. Huh? You don’t trust me, bro?
I maintained the concept to the very end as I walked through the rampaging orc souls.
—Sniiiiiiiick…!!
—You devil!! Why are you laughing?! Are you enjoying this?! Snort!!
Like a veteran player turning on reflect damage while strolling through a low-level dungeon, every orc soul that touched my body ascended instantly. The moment they died, every single one of them left this world with peaceful expressions, but the others were so furious they didn’t seem to notice.
—You vile human… snort… I curse you…
The last one remaining was an orc with the face of an elderly chieftain. He had his hair braided like some primitive shaman, and the combination of that ruthless orc mug with the cute red-haired Anne hairstyle was ridiculously unbalanced. Honestly, it was hard to even look at.
—Snort!! Be cursed for your wickedness!! I will wait for you in hell!!
“A good person like me isn’t going to hell.”
Why the hell were these motherfuckers cursing me when I was kindly sending them off to ascension? It was seriously pissing me off. I sliced the orc chieftain’s neck with my spear.
—Slice!
Shwaaaaaah—!!
Maybe because he’d lived a long life, the chieftain’s soul rose into the sky in a pillar of light. It was a majestic ascension that made one reflect on the dignity of life.
I crossed myself and recited solemnly.
Where did the souls of monsters go after death? It was one of those philosophical questions, like the true nature of dark matter that filled the universe—something you could ponder forever without ever knowing the answer.
“Ah, but that’s that and this is this.”
Time to start cutting off these orc bastards’ noses. Just thinking that I wouldn’t have to deal with those troll fuckers anymore made my shoulders dance with joy that refused to stop.
I looted fifteen noses and returned to the village. Besides the quest item noses, there was literally nothing worth taking. The only things in the settlement were crude stone weapons—trash only slightly better than the hand axes of primitive ancients.
Orcs were a species called Jassugaru, so they were foolish enough to only use weapons made by their own people as some kind of patriotic marketing. It was something the digital generation’s sensibilities could never understand.
I’d hoped there might be blades taken from adventurers’ corpses, but there was nothing of value. In the end, it felt like I’d given them a free funeral. Still, I wasn’t some rude funeral insurance salesman who’d lost his parents. It didn’t sit right with my conscience to start calculating how much I could make right after the family had just held the funeral.
Oh well. Nothing I could do. Time to give up.
Oh, right. I’d found traces of burning in the settlement. The ogre bastard’s flame magic seemed to have firepower comparable to my own flame hand blade. How did I know? I tested my own technique right next to it.
Anyway, I returned to the inn before it got too late and explained everything that had happened to Tirsi.
“You’re saying a four-armed ogre wiped out the entire orc tribe and left?”