#11. The Tyrant of the Mountain
#11. The Tyrant of the Mountain
We traded blow after blow—dozens of exchanges. When its jaws gaped open, I retreated. When it swung a blood-slicked forepaw, I kept my distance. My capabilities were nowhere near enough to fight this thing up close. Skills were the only reason I could paper over the gap at all. The thing had what should have been a crippling wound—a spike driven clean through it—and even then I could barely manage a stalemate. The difference between us was that vast.
The fundamental problem: my attacks wouldn't land. If it held still, I could break through, but it was never going to hold still. While it was thrashing around like that, there was no opening to concentrate my strength. A single misstep and it would tear my throat out in one bite.
So I had to target what the hide didn't cover: the eyes, the inside of the mouth.
"......!"
And the same applied to the wounds it had already taken. The moment I shifted from hounding its weak spots to going straight for the existing injuries, its eyes blazed with fury. A partial success. I'd landed a hit, but I'd also put it on alert. With the Black Wolf, once I'd burrowed into a wound it had been over. But here, Devouring felt strangely thin.
...Why? I didn't know. It seemed this one wouldn't go as smoothly as last time.
Was backup even coming?
I checked with Detection while I had a moment of distance. Nothing. No human presence anywhere nearby. Except for Lee Eun-ha, the stillness was unnatural. Had backup not been sent? Was seven minutes not the reinforcement ETA? Even as I thought it, the thing's wounds were slowly knitting shut. I'd seen it before. It had to have a Regeneration skill.
'Is this how that eel felt when it fought me?'
I had to seize the initiative. I lunged. Intuition screamed that it was about to counter, and I twisted away.
Four skills—Swift Foot, Superior Elasticity, Intuition, and Perception—worked together to keep me in the fight. Put another way: add one more skill, and the balance tips in my favor. And I had one left. I charged straight in, and the thing let out a low, grating howl.
'Charge.'
A skill that activates when rushing an enemy. The sudden burst of speed threw its timing off.
"———!"
I exploited the opening, bit down, and activated Devouring immediately—but the sensation was still faint. Why wasn't Devouring working on it properly? There had been clues in its behavior. And now they clicked.
The reason it had been mindlessly consuming animal after animal. If it had Predation—or rather, Devouring—that explained everything.
Devouring was a skill that let you consume on contact. Which meant that when I touched it and activated Devouring, it had activated Devouring at the same time. We'd both tried to devour each other, and the fact that I came away having consumed anything at all meant my Devouring was at least a little higher level.
The effect was thin, but I could definitely consume. If nothing else, that was a mercy. At least its Devouring wasn't going to work on me.
"——!"
I charged. It howled, a full-throated roar, and I slipped past its follow-up attacks one after another, pressed in close—and for the first time, it backed away.
But that didn't mean much. I hadn't reopened a wound. I'd barely scratched it. My attacks still weren't getting through.
Every clash shrank my body mass a little more. The thing lowered its stance and coiled to leap, and I couldn't retreat. If I backed off now, its next target would be Lee Eun-ha.
The exchange went on. I didn't give a single step. I couldn't. I kept lunging. Through dozens of clashes, then hundreds—and even if I held the advantage in every single one, one mistake would cost me more damage than all those advantages combined.
It felt like a brutally unfair shooting game.
'.......'
Me, barely clinging to life. The thing, steadily healing with Regeneration. The contrast was stark. Where had it all gone wrong? My teeth ground together.
"Aawoooooo!"
Certain of victory, it lifted its head and howled. If I hadn't made that mistake. If I'd just kept my jaws clamped and dragged it out, Lee Eun-ha and I could have brought it down together.
"——♪"
A melody drifted in from somewhere. Out of place. Alien to everything happening around us. Lee Eun-ha? But she was unconscious. The unknown humming pulled me out of my spiraling thoughts. The Monster Wolf was drooling, savoring the anticipation. Its eyes had moved past me. They were on Lee Eun-ha.
"......?"
It stumbled, as if its legs had given out for a heartbeat, then kept walking as though nothing had happened. It was so brief I thought I'd imagined it—but the tracks it left in the dirt were unmistakable. I listened, dazed, to the faint, distant humming. It was laden with something I couldn't name. I steadied my breathing.
A thought surfaced, unbidden: had I been fighting well all this time?
I thought I'd done reasonably well.
The eel, the Black Wolf—none of them had been easy opponents. Every time, what let me win was a shift in perspective. And the will to push forward. Against the eel, Transformation. Against the Black Wolf, Intuition and Perception.
So was I fighting well right now?
...I didn't know. I was trying as hard as I could, but whether I was wielding what I had well—I couldn't say.
What did I actually have?
A pile of skills to make up for my lacking stats. And a human mind to direct them.
I asked myself again: was I using them right?
The answer came back the same. I didn't know. If I did, I'd have fixed it already.
I asked if there was anything else. And this time, the answer surfaced on its own.
...Right. Mana. A power I had never once used, a force I didn't even know how to draw out.
How had it used mana? It had lifted boulders. Crude and simple, but I couldn't even manage that.
How had Lee Eun-ha used it?
A net like spider silk. Spatial distortion. Countless spikes. A colossal awl. The same mana, but what the Warg did with it and what she did with it were worlds apart.
No. Those weren't the right questions.
Not what the Monster Wolf did, not what Lee Eun-ha did. The question was what I had done. That was the real question.
Something stirred inside me.
Small, like water beginning to boil in an electric kettle. But it was definitely boiling. I closed my eyes and felt it.
It had no form. No color. No texture. No sound. And yet it held everything at once. A power that whispered like a demon, promising it could grant any wish. Mana.
[Change: Alters the characteristics or properties of an object.]
Unlike Transformation, which only altered appearance, Change could alter nature and properties themselves. And the price of that power was mana.
The kettle boiled over. The water vaporized. Vertigo hit me.
My first experience of mental exhaustion.
I'd never even known how to pull the trigger on my own mana, and now I did. I dragged Change forward, bit by bit. Image it. Give it form. Make it real.
I needed an image that could beat this thing.
Not as another Wolf. It was a Superior Species. I was just a half-baked copy wearing a Warg's shape. I couldn't dominate it in a contest between living things. I had to approach this differently—not as a Wolf, not as a slime.
I had to make that image concrete.
***
The singing stopped. As if the need had passed, the Girl ceased humming and gazed into the temple grounds. Her back was turned; her expression was hidden.
"You may be glad. The child you were looking for is alive."
To Woo-taek, her voice sounded oddly buoyant. Buoyant? Was there something here that could actually please a being of her caliber? He ground his teeth and forced every ounce of mana he could muster into resistance. The best he managed was pushing his upper body off the ground. The Girl glanced back, surprised.
"You're saying... she's alive?"
Even a single sentence was a battle. Just those few words left him gasping.
"Yes."
The pressure vanished as though it had been washed away. The Team Leader, barely holding on, staggered but still managed to speak.
"Why are... why are you even here?!"
"......."
"Answer me! Has the Disease been eliminated? Has the Plague been defeated?!"
"No."
Utterly definitive. The Team Leader had expected as much, but still clenched his jaw.
"Then—!"
"I only came to confirm something."
"And that—that matters more to you than stopping them?!"
The Girl's eyes met his. The Team Leader's legs buckled.
Ten seconds. How arrogant he had been. No one—himself included—could guarantee anything when faced with her. The gap between them felt flayed open, bone-deep. Even knowing it was impossible, the Team Leader thought he might die here. The Girl's gaze was fixed on him, but her eyes seemed to be looking somewhere far away.
"...To me, yes."
A distant, melancholy voice. Beneath it lay a sorrow—or perhaps regret—so deep anyone could feel it.
"Go. It's already... over."
What had she left unspoken? The Girl's form vanished in an instant. Woo-taek and the Team Leader stood dazed for a moment, then exchanged a nod. They rushed into the temple grounds and found Lee Eun-ha collapsed in the center, drenched in blood and unconscious. The Team Leader pulled out a potion and administered it immediately.
"Ah..."
Minutes passed. Several team members belatedly caught up. Eun-ha let out a faint groan.
"Coming to?"
"...Senior? Team Leader?"
"You—are you out of your mind? What were you thinking, coming here? If you wanted to die, you should've just—!"
"Woo-taek."
"...I'm sorry."
Eun-ha's subdued reply was the only thing that let Woo-taek choke his anger down.
"...Let's head back down first."
"Yeah."
The temple grounds were a ruin. Dark, oxidized blood soaked the ground. Everywhere, devastation. Clear traces of a battle. The phenomena manifested through mana had faded, but their echoes lingered. The Team Leader frowned. There was no sign of the Warg's corpse. That meant the Warg was still alive—and yet somehow, so was Eun-ha.
'Why?'
He didn't understand. The behavior of monsters was incomprehensible at the best of times, but a Warg that had let her go twice was beyond anything.
'What in the world was she...'
Had she come to see Lee Eun-ha? The girl had talent and instincts—refined, but untrained. If she were properly honed, the glimpses of what she could become were unmistakable—but right now, she was still raw ore. It didn't seem plausible that a Square Master would have come all the way to this mountain just to assess a bit of potential.
Then what...?
"——Aawooooooooo!"
A howl. The moment he heard it, the Team Leader felt every hair on his body stand on end. He raised his guard and summoned his mana, but nothing registered. The howl hadn't come from anywhere nearby. It had echoed from far, far beyond the reach of his Detection.
"T-Team Leader."
The team members were trembling. Like prey before a predator. Raw, instinctive terror.
"Ah... Ah!"
Lee Eun-ha especially—she looked like someone who had lost something precious, and the terror that gripped her reflected that. The only ones who still seemed halfway composed were Woo-taek, himself, and a handful of B-class or higher hunters. Even then, they were only hiding it. Every one of them was feeling the same fear a prey animal feels.
'From a mere Warg?'
A mere Warg. A mere oversized Wolf. A special variant, maybe, but the challenge had only ever been finding it, not killing it. Then the thought reached Predation, and the Team Leader shut his eyes tight.
What he had feared had come to pass. A being that had transcended its species. A new Tyrant had been born on this mountain. He could draw no other conclusion.