Those Who Wear Skins (3)
Aside from the occasional hesitation in training caused by Fiona’s presence, Leona’s talent was so overwhelming that calling her a genius would have been no exaggeration.
The only problem was that the backs she looked up to belonged to people far too strong. Her potential was in no way inferior to either of them.
I don’t have bottomless divine power like the Exorcist Priest.
Dante, who slaughtered enemies by weaving divine power into every form of attack, and Yuri, who fused peerless swordsmanship with that same holy force to cut foes down in a single stroke.
Sadly, divine power and mana were simply different beasts in scale and volume.
Then I’ll open my senses instead.
She had vaguely noticed how Dante would spread divine power like a detection spell, mapping out enemy positions and any wrongness in the air. For a knight limited to reinforcing weapons and body with mana, that sort of technique was pure pie in the sky.
So Leona dragged every scrap of her own senses up to the surface—a lunatic act of constant, mana-fueled sensory enhancement.
Rustle.
“Ugh!”
“Miss Lichte?”
“I’m fine. Let’s just finish this and rest!”
Even the sound of someone stepping on a leaf felt like it would rupture her eardrums. The scrape of her undershirt and sweat-wicking layers against bare skin made her flinch without meaning to. If the forest hadn’t swallowed the sun so early, everyone would have noticed how deathly pale she had gone.
Both of them must have gone through this.
It was only a guess, yet it turned out to be right. In Yuri’s case the flood of mana had forced the change naturally; in Dante’s case a completely unhinged master had shoved the experience down his throat.
Dial it back. Dial it back.
Cold sweat ran down her spine while she calmly pitched the tent, and all the while she hunted for a way to tune the razor-edged senses. Not the hunger to know every leaf and insect in the world—only the laser focus on anything that carried malice or killing intent toward her.
The sensations that had been trying to devour her body gradually receded. Her mind settled into the stillness of a quiet lake.
“Hoo.”
An absurd stunt, and the talent to pull it off without dying. If Dante had been standing in front of her he would have started clapping before he realized what he was doing.
“Shall we eat?”
“Uh…? Yes!”
Jena found it a little strange that Leona’s condition had flipped from bad to fine so suddenly, yet she let it slide without real suspicion. Sparring maniac, eccentric, and diligently serious—the image Leona had carefully built of herself was simply that solid.
Even when it was embarrassing, Leona’s team followed her rule to the letter: any time they had to leave the tent, they moved in pairs of two. She had no idea what the other teams or the professors would do, but at least her own group made it through the night unscathed.
The next day the team that discovered the owl-bear tracks received bonus points, and every group immediately began combing the forest with those tracks as the center. Dragging things out only raised the odds that other monsters would show up and someone would die; there was no real choice.
Who was it?
For a brief window every team, both professors, and the teaching assistants had been gathered in one place. In that short span she had felt a spike of pure malice. The problem was that it hadn’t been aimed at her, and her control was still too clumsy to lock onto the source.
“Are we hunting the owl bear?”
“No. We’re going to start from the spot where they said they found the tracks yesterday and look for something else.”
A stretch of forest empty of other people. The rest of the teams were already fanning out wide around the trail, and the professors would be trailing carefully behind them. Only Leona’s group had come to the original discovery site.
“The tracks look genuine though?”
Paw pads like a bear’s, four of them, claws shaped like a raptor’s. Oddly, the claw sheaths had peeled free the way a cat’s would, leaving clear marks. Just as Jonah said, the prints were perfect.
They were so perfect that Leona felt a wrongness instead.
“What are the odds that every single claw sheath leaves a print in the same set of tracks?”
“Huh? That is…”
Jonah finally felt the same unease. Jena and Cled picked up on the anomaly a second later.
“I don’t know how they did it, but an owl bear didn’t make these.”
Except for the four sheaths, the depth, height, and overall shape matched an owl bear exactly. The problem was that someone had tried too hard to make them look perfect, and that over-perfection itself created the dissonance.
They tore the surrounding area apart until the recall time, yet found nothing beyond those tracks. Even a single pile of owl-bear dung would have been welcome; there wasn’t so much as a scat mark.
“Hey…”
“……?”
While the three of them quietly prepared the meal and Leona sorted her thoughts, a girl she didn’t recognize walked up. Not a familiar face, and she hadn’t even used a surname—just a blunt “hey.” Leona’s brow furrowed.
“Let’s try a little manners, shall we?”
“Fuck. Fuck. I almost died because of you, so why the hell should I be polite?”
A tiny flinch.
The drug itself was bad enough, but the version that had spread through the academy was the kind that could kill you if you stopped taking it. Leona had burned the whole stock without knowing the full details, so it would have been a lie to claim she felt no guilt.
“I’m sorry about that, but at least I stopped it from spreading any farther. That’s enough for me.”
“Whatever. You… you weren’t with your team, right?”
“And where did you leave yours to come wandering alone?”
“That’s exactly the problem.”
“Excuse me?”
What was this girl even talking about?
“This Tyruel got labeled a drug addict, so the professors won’t believe a word I say!”
“Uh… didn’t you almost die from the addiction?”
“That’s because you torched every last pill before I could finish the detox and purification prep! I’m a perfectly nice person who just likes to enjoy her medicine!”
Leona had no idea, but the look on her face right then was identical to the one Dante wore whenever he listened to the insane women around him—Leona included—spout complete nonsense.
Full name: Tyruel Nainir. She had ended up in the Knight Department only because she had zero talent for magic; her real specialties were medicine and shamanic arts. In a world crawling with both magic and curses she was practically a walking specialist in detoxification and purification rites.
“So what’s actually going on?”
“My teammates don’t feel like people.”
“In what way?”
“You’re not calling it bullshit?”
“I can at least tell when someone’s lying. And I’ve learned that thinking the only real things are the ones you’ve seen with your own eyes is just stupid.”
From the ghost train to the cannibal village that worshiped an evil god she still couldn’t name, she had felt in her bones what kinds of monsters lurked on the unseen underside of the world.
“Hoo… okay, so…”
Tyruel scrubbed her face dry, steadied her shaking nerves, and continued. She had stayed alone in the tent, desperate to go home as soon as possible. The moment one of her teammates returned from the search and she saw his face—
“Fuck. That bastard’s face skin was twisted all the way to the right!”
“……”
“I thought I’d finally cooked my brain on the drugs! But then that crazy son of a bitch started fidgeting with his own face skin like it itched—didn’t even notice I was staring!”
Under the mismatched hide she had watched the real eyes, the real nose and lips, all of them sliding around while he tried to line everything up again in real time.
“And one of the others blocked the view with his body so I wouldn’t notice—what the hell was I supposed to do?!”
She had sprinted straight to the professors, but her prior record meant they wrote every word off as junkie hallucinations. What would happen once they all returned was painfully obvious. The guy who had suddenly gone missing would claim she had been spouting nonsense, and since she had wandered off without telling anyone, the professor would simply hand the problem to the team leader.
“And tonight I would have been dead.”
“What do you think it is?”
“What?”
“We need to know what we’re dealing with if we want to prepare. I don’t have that knowledge, and neither do the others.”
Even the glasses perched on her nose made Tyruel look exactly like the type who aced every written exam.
“I don’t know either! I’m not some exorcist priest or one of the Hellsing family’s maniacs—how the hell am I supposed to know?! I’m a shaman and a doctor!”
“Hmm. Got it. At least I’m pretty sure it isn’t a doppelgänger.”
A formless monster that perfectly copied whatever it locked onto the moment it saw it. A doppelgänger would never end up with twisted, ill-fitting skin.
“Yeah, not that. And I said face, but the neck wasn’t lined up right either.”
“So probably not a mage who just wears human skin as a disguise.”
Facial skin could hide identity, but the rest of a body? Far more efficient to turn cursed flesh into parchment for dark spells.
“Then what is it?”
“Hmm. You don’t know?”
Tyruel barely stopped herself from throwing a punch. The pure, wide-eyed way Leona asked didn’t help, and the fact that she herself had no answer left her with nothing to fire back.
“For now, stay with us.”
“Thanks…”
The bristling spines finally settled. They had to stretch the meal to four portions, but it wasn’t a real problem.
“Isn’t one of our members here?”
Just as the sun finished dying and they were setting the night-watch order, an unwelcome guest appeared—the leader of Tyruel’s original team. Friendly face, someone Leona had occasionally seen at the training grounds.
“No.”
Quick-witted Tyruel vanished into the tent in a flash; Jena slipped inside as well to hide any silhouette.
“Hmm. I was told she came this way…”
“She might have changed direction halfway. We’ve been eating here the whole time and no one showed up.”
“That so? Then why are there five spoons?”
“I used two.”
A shameless lie delivered without so much as a flicker of color in her face.
“Then just let me check inside the tent—”
“Stop.”
Tak.
A beautiful silver-plated scabbard—sword still sheathed—blocked the male student’s path toward the tent.
Sizzle.
“……!”
The instant the scabbard’s surface touched him, something burned. Smoke rose and the boy jerked backward. Leona’s eyes went razor-sharp.
“Who are you?”
“What the hell is that?!”
Before leaving the forge, Dante had consecrated a small lump of silver and asked for it to be worked into a scabbard. Not some flashy necklace that screamed “I care because she’s a girl,” but a scabbard that would quietly protect the soul of whoever wore it.
And the moment that scabbard brushed the man’s clothes, smoke poured out as though the fabric had been seared by fire.
Sling.
A single draw from a seated stance. Before the man could even react, the blade tore through his facial skin.
No human muscle or bone waited underneath—only a hideous face matted with beast fur.
“Eek! Why would something like that be here?!”
“I should be asking what you are!”
“Like I’d ever—gah?!”
Thud!
Crack.
The words had been a feint, copied from watching someone else. In the same breath Leona’s sword punched straight into the monster’s chest. The blunted blade drove in like a steel club, more than enough to pin the creature in place.
“Hup!”
The second she ripped the sword free, Cled—already in combat stance—brought his weapon down on the fallen monster’s neck like he was splitting firewood.
Crunch.
The monster’s face twisted in what looked like pure injustice. Even with head and body cleanly separated, the Adam’s apple kept bobbing. Leona shouted first.
“Cover your ears!”
Tyruel, who had been watching from the tent, and the other three didn’t hesitate for a heartbeat.
“KYAAAAAAK!”
A horrific shriek tore through the forest. Answering cries rose from the direction of the other teams and the professors.
Bang!
While the dread was still climbing, a familiar gunshot cracked through the trees.
“He’s here…!”