The Town Bully
On a dark night lit only by the great full moon, a man and a woman rode hard through the darkness on horseback. The woman looked unnerved, biting her lower lip as though she sensed something ominous ahead.
"Count Senimilt. You’re still this uneasy, even though we’re barely a day into the journey?"
The man tossed out the remark lightly, trying to soothe the anxious woman.
They were relatively close to the Holy City of Senium, in a region considered safe enough that monsters, demons, and bandits were rare. He couldn’t understand why she was so tense.
Yet the woman ignored him and stared into the darkness, where she could see no farther than a foot in front of her.
And then she saw it: even from that great distance, a bright blaze blooming somewhere in the mountains.
"Sir Rohad! I’ll go on ahead, so follow me!"
The woman dismounted and shot forward as if she were flying. Golden fragments flared in her wake and slowly sank into the ground where she had passed.
"Wait, how am I supposed to bring the horse if you just— Hah, you’re already all the way out there."
The man sighed, thinking of the woman who had left him here with both horse and rider. But then he remembered that she was said to be a woman of divine insight, and decided that was simply how she was. The Church had even ordered them to welcome her properly. They had been exceedingly devoted to the woman who had left eleven years ago.
When she had been a child, too, there had been times when she had suddenly acted like this and narrowly escaped disaster. Perhaps it was the same now.
The Church called her ability intuition. Or perhaps...
'They said it was revelation.'
He silently prayed that there was nothing wrong at the reason the woman who had gone to meet them, Count Senimilt, had hurried off with her navy-blue hair streaming behind her, using divine arts and all.
— — —
"I-I’ll do whatever you want... Please, don’t hurt the villagers...."
Hilde knelt and pressed her hands together as if in prayer. A devout believer does not make selfish prayers to the god she believes in. In that sense, Hilde could be called a complete atheist. So she prayed inwardly instead.
Lady Senimilod! If you really exist, please get us out of this situation. And if you can’t, then please save the innocent villagers. I’m begging you!
Hilde was terrified. She could more or less guess what would happen if they dragged her away.
Being kept as a low-class plaything would have been the least of it. In fact, her mind was already screaming at her to run without looking back.
Hilde was the person who had created this game-world’s foundation, but after reincarnating into it, she had received no special powers, no bonuses, nothing at all. She was just an ordinary woman with a pretty face.
In the midst of the burning village, Hilde looked around at the bandits and villagers staring at her. Victor, Smith, Garrett, Victor’s parents, and the others.
If she gave up only her own body, everyone else could return to their normal lives.
Even if she had made this world, until two days ago she had been just another ordinary person living in it, getting along with them like anyone else.
She couldn’t clearly remember who she had been in her previous life, but Hilde in this life found the situation almost welcome.
It was only right to give back the love she had received all this time.
The bandit leader, Rodhan, was uncharacteristically swept along by the mood. Faced with the girl’s sanctity, he found himself unable to do anything more than he already had. If anything, he wanted to erase the thought he’d had of selling her at a slave auction. But he had his own circumstances, and so he couldn’t afford to yield. Rodhan gathered himself.
"Fine. If you stay obedient, we’ll leave the plunder behind too. What’s your name?"
Relieved by the bandit’s acceptance, Hilde felt the burden on her chest grow lighter, even though she could already see the thorny road stretching ahead of her.
"I’m Hilde."
"All right, load this one named Hilde onto the wagon and let’s move."
Rodhan’s men set down the treasures they had brought from the houses, but none of them complained.
Even they had looked at Hilde and, however shamefully, felt a brief twinge of guilt.
Step by step, Hilde walked toward the wagon the bandits had prepared. She didn’t look back, not even once, hoping only that the villagers wouldn’t feel guilty on her account. She was almost at the wagon when—
Whoosh!
At the sound of an arrow slicing through the air, the shaft Victor had loosed buried itself in Rodhan’s left arm. Rodhan grimaced and turned, glaring back at Victor.
"You little bastard! I showed mercy, and you still dare— Do you want to die?"
"Hilde isn’t someone trash like you gets to take away! You bastard with no mother!"
Victor looked toward the villagers. Would they live each day as if they didn’t know Hilde, sacrificing herself for them? Or would they fight back?
Bridget, her short red hair bouncing, grabbed the torch hanging nearby and shouted,
"Hilde is my one and only best friend! Get that bastard out of here and save her, everyone!"
Tears clung to Bridget’s eyes, ready to spill at any moment, and she was so terrified she looked like she might collapse any second. Still, her will was filled with one thought: they had to save Hilde. She couldn’t just let her sweet, beautiful little sister, younger by a year, be sent to hell.
The villagers each grabbed whatever weapons were close at hand and started to rise. They knew they had no real chance of winning, but in the end they were still the tight-knit mountain folk who shared the animals they hunted with one another.
"No! If you all fight, you’ll die!"
Hilde felt her heart being squeezed in a vise. The thought of losing everyone she had lived beside for eleven years sent grief crashing deep through her chest.
'In the end, everyone will die, and I’ll be the only one left to be dragged away.'
Rodhan, still mounted, charged at Victor, who had fired the arrow. He lowered himself into position, intending to use the speed of his horse to cut Victor in half with his body.
One second before Victor was split in two, Hilde felt murderous intent for the first time. She wanted Rodhan erased from this world altogether, hurled into the hottest pit of hell in some other dimension. Something about the way she saw the world had changed.
Crash!
With the sound of shattering glass, the world fell into silence.
The crackling of the village burning. Victor’s parents shouting as they ran toward him. Bridget squeezing her eyes shut. Everything in the world stopped. The timing was so perfect it was as though God Himself had intervened.
'The world stopped...?'
But there was a problem. No matter how hard Hilde tried, she couldn’t move. If this was all there was, she was no different from the others frozen in place.
[____, at long last! I’ve been waiting for o___. I will _____.]
An unfamiliar language echoed in her mind. And yet, strangely, she could understand parts of it. The gaps she couldn’t understand felt less like her own ignorance and more like a break in the transmission. But the voice in her head wasn’t important right now.
Rodhan’s blade remained suspended just before Victor’s throat. She had no idea what kind of skill or combination could have caused time to stop like this in the game, but whatever it was, the moment time resumed Victor would be beheaded on the spot. Then blood would fountain from his neck, enough to become a signal flare of despair.
[I’ll help you a little, ____.]
With that voice, her body began to move, little by little. But there was a problem.
Taking one step felt like sprinting a hundred meters at full speed, and strength began to drain from her body.
Still, Hilde was glad.
No matter how hard it was, if she alone could move, she could protect the villagers.
One step. Then another. She advanced until she stood before Rodhan. She was so exhausted that her vision had gone intensely red, and she couldn’t tell whether the moisture in her eyes was blood or tears. Still, Hilde pushed beyond her limit and forced her body onward by sheer will.
Her whole body felt as though it were breaking apart, and she even heard hallucinated voices screaming at her brain to stop right now. But she had to do it. She had to bring this man down.
Taking the sword from Rodhan’s grasp was easy. One finger at a time, his hand began to crumble to dust as Hilde crushed it. Even after seeing Rodhan’s hand without its fingers, she felt no guilt. This man had intended to inflict wounds that the villagers could never wash away.
Suddenly, Hilde’s sky-blue eyes flashed brilliantly.
Slowly, she drove the sword into Rodhan’s chest. He wore plate armor despite being a bandit, but the blade met no resistance on its way in.
As if stabbing through soft tofu, the sword pierced Rodhan clean through. With such intense murderous intent, moral scruples never even came into play.
She had disposed of the bandit leader so easily that she thought, perhaps, the villagers really could win.
Hilde had no strength left to move and collapsed where she stood.
Once again, with a crackling crash, the world began moving.
The villagers crying out Victor’s name.
The bandits, who had been watching as if their leader were about to kill the insolent brat, had their expressions change in less than a second.
With a dry, brittle sound, Rodhan’s torso crumbled into powder and vanished.
Half out of her mind, Hilde tried to make sense of what had just happened.
In the frozen world, only she had moved with mass. If that was true, then that mass must have carried infinite velocity, and the impact would have been absurd beyond reason.
Rodhan, struck by that mass, had been shattered to dust and died from the force of the blade’s penetration.
No, this entirely unscientific phenomenon could only be explained as a miracle. Perhaps it was one of the powers hidden within the game that even she had never known about.
With the sudden impossibility of it all, the fight between the bandit group, which had lost its leader, and the villagers came to a halt.
The villagers were stunned, yet relieved; the bandits, meanwhile, erupted in fury.
"You fucking bastards! The boss just died out of nowhere! It’s all or nothing now—kill every last one of them!"
So they would retreat if Rodhan died? Clearly not. In the end, the villagers would either be wiped out or spill plenty of blood themselves, and Hilde wept at the thought.
The bandits swarmed toward Hilde and Victor, whom they assumed had killed their leader. Hilde closed her eyes, thinking this life would end here.
Then, from far away, came the sound of wind.
There was the sound of meat being sliced apart. But she felt no pain. When she opened her eyes, a group of about twenty bandits had been cut cleanly in half at once.
Though her vision was too red to see clearly, someone stood in front of Hilde as if guarding her. In the hazy outline of that figure, navy-blue hair streamed in the wind. Mom, Agatha.
"M-mother..."
Even speaking seemed to take all her strength, and Hilde panted for breath. The woman in front of her had finished off the bandits ahead, then dropped to one knee before Hilde and gathered her into her arms. It was the first time she had seen her in this world, yet the feel of the holy knight’s uniform was all too familiar from when she had been developing the game. It felt warm, and unbearably nostalgic. And they had only met again after less than twelve hours.
Agatha was not the sort of woman who cried easily. She had always looked at Hilde with warm eyes and raised her with love. But now the gaze fixed on her was so sorrowful, tears spilling freely down her face.
It was the sad expression of a mother Hilde had never seen before.
"Hilde... don’t speak. I’m so glad you’re alive. You’ve done well, my dear...."
Agatha poured a warm golden light into the child in her arms.
As the tension left her body, Hilde found herself wondering what the voice in her head had been. Had the god answered her prayer after all? If so, then she was profoundly grateful.
As her senses sank into a cozy warmth like being immersed in pleasant hot water, Hilde soon drifted off, breathing softly in her sleep.
After laying Hilde down, Agatha looked around her. There were roughly a hundred bandits who had attacked the village. Once she had cut down sixty of them in three seconds, the rest had fled in every different direction. She wanted to chase them and finish the job, but her first priority was Hilde. If she had been any later, she might have lost Hilde forever.
'Whew. Thank you, Senimilod.'
With gratitude for her own power, and for the god she had once resented, Agatha rose with Hilde held in her left arm.
Fortunately, none of the villagers appeared to have died, though several were badly wounded.
Agatha moved among them and healed the villagers one by one.
The villagers had assumed Agatha was just a young widow and had no idea she was from the Church, so they were amazed and deeply grateful. To them, Agatha was a savior.
"Thank you. Because of Hilde’s mother, my son and the other villagers were saved. I’ll never forget this kindness for the rest of my life."
Hant, Victor’s father, who was among the less injured villagers, bowed his head to Agatha as he spoke. He didn’t care that Agatha’s clothing marked her as a holy knight, or that holy knights belonged at minimum to the nobility. Agatha, too, had felt from a distance how desperately the villagers had fought for Hilde, and she felt grateful in return.
"Ma’am. Hilde is safe, right? She is, yes?"
Bridget approached Agatha and asked. She had seen Hilde collapse with tears of blood in her eyes.
At Agatha’s affirmative answer, Victor and the children all sighed in relief and sat down where they were, their legs giving out beneath them.
"We protected our village from those damned bastards!"
Now that it was all over, the children shouted in innocent delight. As expected of a village of hunters, they had tasted victory in battle.
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