The Cradle of Heroes (5)
We burst out of the village chief’s house at the urgent shout that skeletons had appeared and sprinted straight to the village entrance. By the time we arrived, people who had already heard the news were gathered with spears gripped tightly in their hands, braced for the approaching threat. Most of the young men had already been injured or killed in the previous battle, so the crowd was mostly older men and women. The sight told me everything about the village’s current state and left a bitter taste in my mouth.
“Where did the boneheads show up?”
“Over there, Hero Candidate, sir!”
I followed the direction the gatekeeper Max was pointing and squinted into the distance. Under the moonlight, I could see skull heads glinting as they reflected the pale glow.
“Whoa, they’re actually moving skeletons.”
“What’s so impressive about that? You’ve seen orcs already.”
“I guess the first one was wonder at something new, but this is wonder born from familiarity?”
“Stop the chatter and focus.”
I shut up the kids who were chatting and turned my attention back to the skeleton horde.
‘They’re definitely… a lot different from what I heard.’
Wild skeletons were supposed to be mindless. The moment they sensed human presence, they would go berserk and rampage. Yet these ones were marching in neat, orderly ranks like they were actual soldiers.
“Senior, these don’t look like regular skeletons, do they?”
Kim Yunhwan must have sensed something off too. He asked me carefully.
“It’s not confirmed yet, so let’s just watch for now.”
That’s what I said, but I was almost certain. Every piece of circumstantial evidence was screaming that there was a dark mage here. There had to be one.
The reason I was hesitating was simple.
‘Do I really have to take this request?’
From a moral standpoint, I should. But did morality even exist in this world?
Back at the Cradle, they told us that anything beyond the original request would require additional payment on site, or we should just refuse. It was an incredibly worldly thing to hear from a religious organization, but that was the reality here. Even the goddess Aeteria must know this. The fact that she didn’t strip them of their divine power proved that God essentially permitted it.
Free volunteer work in a world like this? I could do it, but I really didn’t want to.
“Chief, a moment please.”
Since the skeletons were still far away, I called the chief aside to talk first.
“…What is it?”
Hans, the village chief, looked tense when I suddenly pulled him away. I skipped the pointless preamble and went straight to the point.
“It doesn’t look like there are only skeletons.”
“What? You mean…”
“There’s probably a dark mage nearby.”
“……”
At the word “dark mage,” the chief’s face visibly darkened.
“…Is it very dangerous?”
“It probably won’t be that dangerous, but…”
I trailed off and deliberately looked away. The chief pressed his lips tightly together.
“So you’re saying you can’t take the request.”
The sharp accusation made me nod casually.
“The request details have changed. Isn’t that obvious?”
“Ha, so the rumors were true. Hero Candidates and mercenaries are no different.”
“Then why didn’t you just call for mercenaries?”
Well, in the end they were pretty much the same. After leaving the Cradle, the thing Hero Candidates did most was mercenary work. Still, people distinguished between the two groups. Part of it was because the goddess had summoned them, but the bigger reason was the massive difference in average character between the two.
Why would every Hero Candidate be a good person? Of course there were plenty of trash among them. But compared to the atrocities I’d heard about mercenaries in this world, Hero Candidates were practically saints. Mercenaries would commit assault at the slightest provocation and even raid villages like bandits. I’d heard that things had improved lately because Hero Candidate-led mercenary groups were accepting regular mercenaries and civilizing them somewhat, but the public perception still seemed terrible.
That was why this village chief had put in a request with the Church of the Goddess instead. It was unavoidable. Even if it cost a little more money, wanting to minimize unnecessary risks was only natural.
“…So how much more do I need to pay?”
The chief had finally folded. I thought about it for a moment.
‘How much…’
Running away right now was an option, but this felt more appealing. No matter how much support money they gave when we left, it was better to take whatever I could get. Normally, even additional pay had to be handed over to the Cradle, but I had no intention of doing that.
‘If I just eat it and keep my mouth shut, what can they do?’
They weren’t even paying us a single coin for the original request. There was no reason to honestly turn this money over to the Cradle. We received zero request fees under the pretext that it covered our room and board. The rooms and food weren’t bad, so I didn’t have any major complaints… but taking extra pay was a different story. This was a new contract made between the chief and me here. The middleman was gone, so there was no need to pay a middleman’s fee. Of course, I’d have to spend some to keep the juniors quiet, but that was manageable.
“Double it.”
“D-Double?!”
You always start high. The original request was probably five silver, so double would be ten. No matter how bad the village’s situation was, if they couldn’t even pay that much it wouldn’t make sense.
“…But you must handle it properly.”
“Of course.”
For a week, I attended classes in the morning and combat-related training in the afternoon. Through that, I had accurately gauged my current level.
According to the instructors who helped with combat training and the paladins at the Cradle, my level was roughly equivalent to a knight who had just received their formal appointment. In other words, a Novice Knight.
This world evaluated knights in four ranks: Novice, Intermediate, Advanced, and Sword Master. A Novice Knight was someone who could freely use aura and knew how to form an Aura Sword. From what I could tell, that assessment seemed accurate.
Of course, being a Novice Knight didn’t mean they were weak. It wasn’t easy for locals to reach knight level in the first place. Even among Hero Candidates, if your talent rolled “Low” or below, the efficiency was absolute garbage. Until you bought a talent upgrade ticket from the shop, becoming a knight was nothing more than a dream. Knights were that difficult to produce and that valuable as military assets.
After hearing all that, I had briefly considered ditching the Cradle and heading straight to somewhere that paid well. But since it was only a month and jumping straight into real combat would make adaptation difficult, I decided to stay for now.
I got sidetracked, but the reason I brought this up was—
Crunch!
“These guys are easy.”
Every time I swung my sword, skeletons shattered and crumbled. I kept swinging without pause. I’d heard that once you reached Intermediate Knight, you could project aura and wipe out ten or twenty of these trash mobs in a single strike. I wasn’t there yet, so I could only smash one or two per swing, but this was more than enough.
The important one was the dark mage bastard.
As I killed the skeletons, I realized something. The durability of these skeletons I was hitting directly was far higher than what I’d been told at the Cradle. If the difference had been minor, I might have dismissed it as a misremembering, but—
“Ugh! Die, you fuckers!”
“Why are these things so damn tough!”
The way the others were struggling made it clear. It wasn’t a mistake.
‘They’ve probably been reinforced with magic…’
To be honest, I didn’t know much about magic. I had only heard a few things in passing as preparation. I couldn’t accurately gauge the opponent’s level. Still, the reason I had stepped forward confidently was that, in pretty much any fantasy world, mages were weak against knights unless they were the protagonist. That applied here too. A Novice Knight could handle up to the 4th Circle, so as long as it wasn’t higher than that, I’d be fine.
Crunch!
“Come out already. You’re my five silver.”
I’ll kill you gently.
Hidden in the forest, the dark mage Mordeca watched Yoon Iseo smashing skeletons like a madman and trembled violently.
“What the hell! Why is a knight in a place like this?!”
Look at that clear Aura Sword glowing on the blade. If that wasn’t a knight, then he wasn’t a mage—he was a street magician.
“Aaaargh, damn it! He never should have gotten caught in the spatial distortion in the first place!”
It had already been a week since he’d been dragged here by the spatial distortion. Mages almost never got caught in them, yet he had stupidly been sleeping without any precautions and got sucked in anyway. That was already infuriating. But then some knight had popped out of nowhere and ruined all his plans. Mordeca felt like he was losing his mind.
He wanted to kill the version of himself who had thought things weren’t so bad when he first fell here.
‘Ugh, I got too excited after meeting humans for the first time in so long.’
Mordeca was a 3rd Circle dark mage—a lowly commoner dark mage barely scraping by on the outskirts of the demon race’s territory. At 3rd Circle, he was worth less than the monsters wandering around the demon lands, so gathering normal dark magic ingredients was already difficult. An opportunity to obtain a large quantity of humans as materials was incredibly rare, so his eyes had rolled back in his head.
How excited had he been? Right after figuring out where he was after getting caught in the spatial distortion, he had danced with joy. Living humans in the demon territory were either dark mages like himself or slaves of the demon race. Both were existences that a pathetic dark mage like Mordeca could never touch. To see humans, he would have had to risk his life crossing into enemy territory. Yet he had secretly landed right next to a village full of people. It was incredible luck.
So he had been wildly excited, thinking he would secure as many materials as possible this time and return. But—
‘If only my circle hadn’t gotten twisted in the spatial distortion!’
Watching the skeletons he had summoned by coughing up blood get smashed to pieces, Mordeca’s eyes welled with tears. If his circle hadn’t been twisted and left him bedridden, he could have killed them all before that knight bastard even showed up. No—he should have killed them all yesterday even if it meant resting a few more days. Because he hated being sick, he had waited until he recovered, and this disaster had happened.
He felt so regretful he wanted to die, but since he didn’t have the ability to become a lich yet, he couldn’t actually die here.
Still, at least his location hadn’t been discov—
Shiver.
“No way?”
Mordeca, who had been staring at the battlefield absentmindedly, suddenly felt a chill run down his spine as if he had made eye contact with the nameless knight. Just to be sure, he watched the knight carefully. The man was focused only on smashing skeletons and showed no other reaction, so Mordeca sighed in relief and tried to run—
Then he saw it.
Yoon Iseo’s face, smiling brightly as he moved his left hand to his waist.
The moment he saw that expression, Mordeca realized he had been caught. He frantically tried to flee, but—
Swish!
Thud!
Startled by the throwing knife that grazed his forearm, he froze on the spot.