Slave Merchant: Derick Walker-4
Escape was meaningless. Even if some cosmic miracle of pity aligned every heart here and we all scattered in every direction at once, the Vice Vine would hunt us down and make a mouthful of snacks out of every last one of us. To that grotesque beast, a human being was nothing more than a slice of cake sitting pretty on a plate. Eating us would be just as simple as eating dessert.
Jean seemed to know it too. He'd already prepared for a fight. A longsword had found its way into his hand — pulled from a dead soldier's belt. Nerve like that suited the protagonist of this world.
"Grrrrrk!"
The Vice Vine had already picked its priority target among the remaining slaves. That, needless to say, was Jean. With a roar savage enough to turn a man's soul inside out, it launched itself straight at him.
A body the size of a van, and yet it soared like a helium balloon and dropped like a hummingbird.
A heavy boom. The Vice Vine's bulk came down like a meteor, and a mushroom cloud of dirt erupted. Jean slipped aside with nimble footwork, but four slaves who weren't so lucky were crushed beneath it and died on the spot. Their wretched corpses burst apart like crackers, spraying in every direction.
It didn't stop there. Its tail whipped around and smashed two slaves behind it, then it crunched down on the skull of the one in front. The ones hit by the tail had their necks snapped a full hundred and eighty degrees. Nobody even possessed by a demon, and their heads were on backwards. Hard to live through that.
In the span of a breath, seven slaves had become guests who would never return. Slave lives were cheap as flies, sure — but dying this pointlessly still wasn't something you saw every day.
"Aaaaaagh! We're all dead...! We're all dead! Aaargh!"
Even after watching that atrocity unfold right in front of them, the remaining slaves couldn't run. Their legs had given out entirely. The Vice Vine's overwhelming violence had shattered the will to flee into dust. They covered their faces with both arms, snot and tears streaming — ostrich logic, the kind that says if you bury your head in the dirt, the predator disappears.
"It's strong."
Jean didn't run either. But he was nothing like the others, who were so terrified they'd pissed themselves. He seemed to know that the moment he showed his back, he was dead. Instead, he closed in on the Vice Vine. The slaves left standing had only one choice anyway: go forward and fight, or run backward and die. Jean's movement was far too sharp for a slave who'd been surviving on a crust of bread and a cup of water a day for a week.
Steel rang. Jean's sword crashed against the scales covering the Vice Vine's face. The beast didn't seem to feel a thing. Jean, on the other hand, looked like the shock had gone numb all the way up his wrist. One exchange, and the fight already had a winner.
The Vice Vine's eyes bulged as it lunged, jaws wide, at Jean. The motion was blindingly fast. Any other slave, any soldier, would have died right there. But Jean was this world's protagonist. By the laws of protagonists, a cheap shot like that wasn't going to land. The Vice Vine's fangs carved nothing but empty air.
"Thick armor over the face and body... but it's not without gaps."
In a split second, Jean had analyzed the enemy's weakness. The Vice Vine wrapped itself in steel scales from head to tail, a perfect physical defense. In game numbers, its physical defense sat at 100 — which meant killing it with physical attacks was, at this stage of the story, impossible.
Which is why anyone playing the game for the first time, without a strategy guide, starts cursing on instinct. I sure did.
Obviously, that didn't mean it couldn't be killed. Quite the opposite. If you couldn't kill the Vice Vine, Solari World would end before you even cleared the prologue. No developer would design a game like that.
Like every monster in the game, final bosses included, the Vice Vine had a weak point. Steel scales covered every inch of it — except one. Its Achilles' heel was a hairline gap at the nape of the neck. The one place the armor's blessing didn't reach was, paradoxically, where the Vice Vine's carotid artery ran. Pierce that spot cleanly, and you could kill it. Jean had figured that out from a single clash. Protagonist, through and through.
I was going to tell him if he didn't figure it out. Guess I don't need to.
I watched Jean's fight from behind. Fortunately, he'd drawn the Vice Vine a little ways off, mindful of the rest of us. Buying time to run — except nobody actually moved. I looked around. Half the survivors had fainted. The other half weren't in their right minds. I, maybe thanks to the Mental Resistance skill, was still thinking clearly.
"Why would a monster like that... why would it show up here?! Damn it!"
An unpleasant voice drifted from behind me. "A voice with fat in it" had never been a more fitting description. The greasy, butter-smeared drawl belonged to the caravan's master: Derick Walker.
So the bastard was still alive. Tough to kill, I'll give him that. Then again, Derick Walker's physical stats were clearly the weakest in the party, so it made sense the Vice Vine hadn't bothered with him. He looked like he had way more meat on him than anyone else, but apparently the Vice Vine preferred protein over fat. Gym rat, was it?
I walked over, unhurried, to the man slumped on the ground.
"Huh...? You there, slave! You pig bastard! You! Help me up! We have to get out of here first... Damn it! I never should have hired this garbage, this filth — cheap really is cheap! Hah... the losses are staggering, but I still have a vast fortune! I can start over with that! Rebuild the company and— ghk!"
I picked up a discarded iron sword and drove it into his heart. That greasy rambling had gotten on my nerves. Derick Walker stared up at me, eyes not yet understanding what had just happened. Thick blood gushed from his mouth.
"Y-you slave bastard...!"
"Still not dead. The subcutaneous fat must've caught the blade."
I shoved the blade in deeper. The sensation of sharp iron punching through a heart traveled into my palm. All that plush fat wasn't enough to stop the blood pouring from a punctured heart. Derick Walker's enormous body collapsed.
I wiped the blood off the sword on my sleeve. No real psychological impact. This bastard was just an NPC anyway, wasn't he? In the original, he was an extra who died right here.
He hit the ground like a slaughtered pig, convulsed a few times, and became a slab of meat. The twitching in his extremities went still. And that was the end of him.
Steel kept ringing. I turned my attention to Jean, still fighting furiously. The situation was not in his favor. He looked like a matador going at a buffalo with nothing but his body — barely slipping the Vice Vine's charging bulk, then slashing at its flank.
No results. He'd found the weak point, but exploiting it was another matter. I knew the Vice Vine's patterns. Jean had no reason to. I found myself wondering whether I should help him.
Huh? Wait. Come to think of it, I have an attack skill.
There was a highly effective method of dealing with the Vice Vine besides going for the nape. Magic. Its physical defense was formidable, but its magic defense was paper-thin. A mage was this thing's natural predator.
Of course, that only counted if you could actually hit the damn thing. What it lacked in magic defense, it made up for in agility. Being able to cast magic and being able to kill a Vice Vine with it were two very different problems.
Killing the Vice Vine with Jean's physical attacks looked hopeless. He was a human with finite stamina, and you could watch him wearing down in real time. I opened my palm. With Elemental Mastery, I could attack with all six elements. Maybe, in this world, that skill counted as magic?
Fire Arrow
Flame bloomed above my hand. Heat-shimmer rose off it as I took aim at the Vice Vine. Its attribute was Metal. Metal was weak to Fire.
The Vice Vine was too busy with Jean to spare me a glance. I lined up the arrow of flame. Aiming well wouldn't be enough — the thing was too fast. You had to predict the movement, then fire.
The fire arrow slammed into the Vice Vine's flank with the fierce, reckless force of a phoenix spreading its wings.
"Kiiiiiing!"
As the rigid steel scales heated in the fire, the Vice Vine thrashed and bucked. That sturdy armor had become a grill, roasting the body inside. The same beast that had shrugged off physical attacks like they were nothing couldn't handle magic at all.
"Magic?"
Jean looked over at me, startled. I grinned and gave him a thumbs-up.
"Now! Go for the vital spot!"
"...Thanks!"
Jean took the sword in a proper grip and steadied his breathing. Thunder Breathing...! No, not that. From the correct stance, a terrifying, well-honed killing intent poured off him. It felt like he was dumping every last scrap of strength he'd been hoarding. His feet left the ground. In that instant, his body was already flying toward the Vice Vine.
Jean's sword carved through the Vice Vine's neck as it writhed in the heat. A crude longsword, but the Vice Vine's unprotected flesh didn't need anything finer. As the blade opened the nape, a massive fountain of blood erupted with a wet hiss. A clean cut. One stroke, two pieces.
"Grrrrrngh... grrngh..."
A gut-twisting roar tore from the Vice Vine's mouth. Its writhing body hit the ground with a heavy thud. A monster that more than ten mercenaries couldn't bring down had fallen to this world's protagonist's sword.
The other slaves stared at Jean in disbelief. Jean kept his eyes on the carcass for a few more seconds before he let the tension go.
"Hah... it's dead."
The sword slipped from Jean's hand and hit the dirt. Then Jean himself crumpled where he stood. The ragged breathing, the ashen face — he'd poured himself out to the last drop.
To beat something stronger than yourself, you pay a price. Jean had left himself no reserve, and in exchange, he'd taken the Vice Vine's head. My magic and Jean's all-or-nothing strike — without either one, that thing wouldn't have gone down. I walked over to him.
"You okay?"
He didn't look okay in the slightest, but I asked out of courtesy. He slowly shook his head. No major wounds that I could see, but his stamina was completely gone.
"Hah... hah... a mage... surprising..."
His surprise was fair. Mages were fairly rare in Solari World. A mage ending up as a slave almost never happened. And my appearance screamed dissolute merchant, not mage. Even Vandal, the mage in the protagonist's party, was a kindly old man — not a pig like me.
"Can you stand?"
I asked him that. Jean slowly shook his head. Even that looked like it took effort. Good. I slowly picked up the sword he'd dropped.
"Good thing you let your guard down so easily."
I drove that sword through Jean's heart. No hesitation. Completely spent, Jean could read the movement and still do nothing about it.
A question bloomed on his rigidly frozen face. He wanted to ask why, but unfortunately his mouth wouldn't open. As a parting gift, I answered it for him.
Jean probably wouldn't grasp what that meant. Not my problem. Watching him fight the Vice Vine had confirmed it. Without my advice — without the strategy guide knowledge — he would never reach this world's ending on his own. Jean wasn't strong enough to bring peace to this continent.
Which meant I had to step in myself. Absorb every opportunity that was supposed to go to Jean, and write the ending with these two hands.
Jean died without so much as a dying scream, which wasn't very protagonist of him. I slowly pulled the sword from his chest. A red flower bloomed, surging, from Jean's heart. His bright arterial blood ran down the blade.
Sword in hand, I looked at my fellow slave friends. They were shaking like aspen leaves.
Too many witnesses never ends well. I danced with the sword in front of friends too terrified to move. "Friends" is a stretch. I'd never thought of these bastards as friends, not even once.
Especially this one next to me. The bastard who'd pulled that "Derick Walker's your daddy" shit. That one I couldn't let live.
Fat body or not, slaughtering slaves frozen in terror wasn't hard. Looks aside, my Strength was around 60. Way stronger than an ordinary person. I didn't stop the sword dance until I'd painted myself in blood.
And then there was nobody. Except me.