The Defense of Jemili Village (2)
A single monster raced across the snowfield.
It had no name. There was no one left to give it one, and no one left to call it by.
But a name was unnecessary. The monster was overwhelmingly strong—strong enough, alone, to wipe out any group that might have tried to name it, brand it, or call out to it.
This time was no different.
Only moments before, the monster had slaughtered an entire goblin settlement and swallowed it whole.
"Grrrrr…"
Even so, it was not enough. While it had dozed after devouring maybe ten of them, the rest of the goblins had fled, and hunger had come clawing back.
The monster set out after the runaways. At the end of that trail, it caught a thick, delicious smell on the wind.
"Grrrrr!"
Found it!
Soon the monster discovered a great nest—and grinned.
A nest. Was that not the proof of the weak?
"Keheheheh!"
The monster needed no nest. Weak things slept easy only inside their dens; the monster could put its back to the ground and sleep anywhere. A nest, then, was where the weak gathered—and where prey piled up waiting to be eaten.
It charged the nest in a single rush.
Thud-thud-thud-thud!
This nest, it had to admit, was sizable. Trees of a girth you only saw in the deep forest had been stacked so high that two arms and two legs together would not have been enough to measure them. It looked reasonably solid—and that only made the monster grin wider. A nest that big meant that much more to eat.
KRAAAASH!!
A savage fist slammed home.
CRACK-splinter!
Just as expected. The nest shattered in a single blow. Now all that remained was to eat the delicious prey inside—
"Grrrrr?"
…Huh?
What was this?
The monster cocked its head. When it broke the nest open, there was another nest inside it. And this one was built of some material it had never seen before.
"Grrrrr!"
No matter. A nest was still a nest. This one, too, would fail to withstand its fists—
"GRAAAAAAAAH!!"
The monster's fists whipped through the air in a frenzy, and—
"GRAAAAAAAAH!!"
The mutant ogre howled.
Not because it was ridiculously strong—but because the insane bastard was bare-knuckling a concrete wall and thrashing in pain of its own making.
Crazy son of a bitch. Punching a concrete rampart with his bare hands.
Still—
"Either way, that settles it! Concrete walls hold even against a mutant ogre's fists!!"
I clenched my own fist and roared it out.
This was the moment. We had tanked their attack—our turn was open. The hardy northerners did not miss it.
"Loose!"
Every northerner was a hunter in their own right. The villagers who had been crouched behind the wall rose as one and loosed their hunting bows.
Thwick-thwick-thwick-thwip!!
A rain of arrows poured down. Shafts punched into the mutant ogre's thick hide—and did almost nothing. The leather was so dense that even arrows driven in until their heads vanished completely failed to draw so much as an itch.
"UWOOOOARGH!!"
If anything, it only made the thing angrier. The mutant ogre started slamming its fists into the wall again.
"This monster of a—!"
"The ground…!"
BOOM! KRAAASH! BOOM!
The wall held. The shaking underfoot was another matter. Even seasoned northern hunters were struggling to keep their footing when one man broke into a hard sprint along the rampart instead.
That man was—
The village chief?!
The same chief who had been fawning at my feet moments ago was now closing on the ogre faster than anyone else on the wall.
Old man, you're going to get yourself killed!
I was about to shout when—
"Tsu—!"
A strange whistle of wind cut the air as the chief loosed the greatbow in his hands. The arrow that left the string was more thunderbolt than shaft; it split the wind and buried itself in the mutant ogre's right eye!
"GRAAAAAAAGH!!!"
No hide, however tough, can armor an eyeball. For the first time the mutant ogre staggered back in real pain—and watching it, I understood something simple.
To have survived this long was, itself, proof of strength.
Having landed the blow, the chief fell back at once. The arrow he had fired was something special—closer to a short spear than a proper shaft—and he clearly would not be loosing another in a hurry.
"GROOOOARGH!!"
In that gap the ogre went berserk. Half its world had vanished between one blink and the next; pain, terror, and rage knotted together as it windmilled its fists through the air. The killing gale of that thrashing was so fierce that northerners who had been nocking fresh arrows flinched and froze.
Then—
Tap-tap—
Someone threw themselves the other way, straight into that murderous wind.
"Max?!"
After the chief, the man who startled me next was none other than old Max.
I asked him for help, not to go die out there!!
I was about to shout his name when Max's body lifted off the wall like a bird taking wing.
Whoosh, whoosh—
Into the space between the mutant ogre's arms—still spinning like a mill of murder—Max dove. And then the miracle happened.
Tap—!
One of the ogre's fists came screaming in under Max's leather sole. By rights he should have been smashed into a smear of meat and sent flying; instead Max kicked off that very fist and vaulted higher still.
A man leaping skyward with his back to the world. As if on cue, the moon hanging above flared bright. Max rose through the moonlit night like a dancer, back turned to the earth—head down, heaven and ground inverted in a single leap.
No. That technique—surely not—
The longsword at Max's hip flashed like lightning.
KRA-KA-KA-KRAK!!
"Guhhhhk—!"
The wet, shattering crack of a neckbone and the cervical spine beneath it rang out across the wall. Watching soldiers clenched their fists and roared.
"That's our captain!!"
"The Slayer of the Seventh Night!!"
What the—holy shit, for real?!
Max's form touched down behind the mutant ogre, and the northern warriors poured after him without missing a beat. The cervical spine is where the nerves run. When a body that can no longer take orders from the brain crumples empty to the ground, the northerners' finishing frenzy closed over the carcass like a wave.
It did not take long for the thing to die.
Farewell, mutant ogre.
A disaster from the days before concrete walls…
Jemili Village had already been in a festival mood for my visit. Driving off an attacker that had come out of nowhere only stoked the fire higher.
"To put down an ogre that easily!"
"And not just any ogre. I've never seen one that big in my life."
The mutant ogre's corpse was so massive it could not be disposed of in one go; it was hacked into pieces and hauled to the center of the village first. Everyone could see it there—a heap of meat the size of a house.
"Aigoo, Young Master!!!"
The village chief who had just pulled off that insane sniper move came scurrying over as if he had never done anything of the kind, fawning all over me again.
"To take a monster like that with no losses at all—it's all thanks to you, Young Master!!"
Mmm. That much was true. Being able to kill the thing at all owed a great deal to the concrete walls I had put up. To bring down a giant of that size you first needed something that could take a giant's punches—and the concrete wall had stood in for that equipment.
Even so, I did not think the credit was mine alone.
"It was because everyone pulled together."
The chief's sniper shot, for one—he was still panting right in front of me—could not be brushed aside. However large the target, putting an arrow clean through an eyeball while the ground shook underfoot like an earthquake was not a feat just anyone could pull off.
Of course, the greatest share of the work belonged to—
Our Max, though.
These days he was simply my butler inside the Grand Castle. Once, though, he had been a centurion whose name carried weight. The soldiers had shouted that in his day he had been called the Slayer of the Seventh Night—and I badly wanted to hear the story from the man himself.
Only—
"Speaking of which, do you know where our butler has gone?"
The star of the show was nowhere to be seen. When I asked the chief, he went, "Ah—" and answered at once.
"If you mean the gentleman who came with you, he should still be on the wall. I told him to come in out of the cold, but he said he had something to check…"
"Is that so?"
After the fighting I had had nothing pressing left to do and gone straight back to the chief's house. Max, it seemed, had not. What was he up to?
Standing around alone felt awkward, so I went back out.
"Young Master!!"
"Damn it, we believed in you!!!"
The villagers who recognized me poured on the welcome; I asked my way through them until I found where Max had gone. Sure enough, he was standing off to one side of the wall, staring out into the dark beyond it.
"Max."
"Young Master? Why have you come all the way out here…"
Whatever he had been so fixed on, his face was still distant even as I came up beside him. I asked,
"I heard you were standing out here alone, so I came looking. The night wind is cold—why are you still here?"
Max let out a broad, easy laugh.
"Heh heh heh. To a northerner, a wind like this is nothing."
"Mm. Is that so? As expected of the Slayer of the Seventh Night…"
"W-where did you hear that moniker?!"
The moment I dredged up the epithet I had half-caught, Max visibly flustered.
Well now. So the old man was human after all—to react that hard to an old nickname.
"Who else would it be? The other soldiers were shouting it after your performance just now."
"Hah… those rascals, honestly."
Max scratched the back of his head, looking sheepish.
"An old title, from another time. You would not know it, Young Master, but in my active years I served with an extermination unit."
An extermination unit?
What—so he wasn't just a former centurion?
I was still reeling from a name that reeked of blood when Max glanced outward again, his expression settling into something grave.
"More importantly, Young Master. I regret to impose, but there is something I must ask of you at once."
"A favor?"
Out of nowhere? Don't tell me he wants to borrow money.
They say you shouldn't even co-sign for family…
Then again, for Max—who had put his life on the line for my word—I could probably close my eyes and skim a little from the official budget for him, couldn't I?
While I was thinking that, Max nodded and spoke.
"I am afraid this old servant must return to the Grand Castle in all haste."
"What? You mean now?"
Back in the middle of the night? The request was so far from anything I had expected that I asked again. Max's voice dropped another register.
"Yes. The monsters' movements… do not seem ordinary."