2. Winter Expedition - 04
2. Winter Expedition - 04
"Gwaaaargh!"
Boom!
The ogre's club caught me square and sent me flying.
The bastard's strength was so monstrous that even though I blocked with my sword, I still shot backward like a loosed arrow.
"Pfft. Kain, you really are pathetically weak. Can't even handle one ogre with a broken arm."
While I was sailing through the air, Bianca's grating voice somehow reached my ears with perfect clarity anyway.
'Bitch.'
I hated the ogre that had just swatted me across the hall, but my hatred for Bianca—standing there running her mouth like an insufferable sister-in-law—burned far hotter.
And that hatred for Bianca gave me strength.
Screeeech—
Mid-flight, I twisted, forced power into my legs, and landed squarely on the ground.
Using the centrifugal force, I launched myself right back at the ogre.
"Gwaaaargh!"
The ogre swung its massive club, completely unfazed by its broken arm.
It brought the club straight down at my head, aiming to shatter my skull.
Whooosh!
But a second before that club could cave my head in, I read exactly where it would land.
'One step to the right.'
A single sideways step was all it took to slip out of that clumsy club's reach.
Crash!
The ogre's club missed my skull by a hair and slammed into the floor.
The wind from the blow sent my hair whipping around, but my expression didn't shift in the slightest.
I had seen and endured far too much over the last six months to tremble at something like this.
I took another step forward, walking myself right into the range where my sword could reach the bastard.
Its foul breath hit me. Our eyes met. Staring into those killing-intent-filled eyes, my legs went cold. But I shook off the fear and drove my sword straight into the ogre's throat.
Shunk—!
Just in case, with the blade still buried in its neck, I gave it a full clockwise twist.
"Grrrgle! Gwaa, aaaarr..."
Thud!
No matter how high-and-mighty an ogre thinks it is, it can't endure a blade spinning inside its own throat, and the thing finally collapsed to the ground.
Instant death.
"Huff... huff... huff..."
I almost died. This time, I really almost died. If I'd misjudged the ogre's club range by even a little, my skull would be smashed to pieces right now, and I'd be sprawled dead on the ground.
Clap, clap, clap.
Slow, deliberate applause sounded from beside me.
I turned my head and found the Imperial Princess standing there with a genuinely gratified look on her face.
"Sir Kain. Impressive. To think you could fell an ogre after only six months of training."
"...Its arm was broken, Your Highness."
The title "the man who beat a crippled ogre" isn't exactly dashing, and it's the sort of thing I'd be too embarrassed to tell anyone about.
"Even considering that, it's impressive. Six months ago, you couldn't even handle an orc with broken limbs. It seems this training method suits you."
At the Imperial Princess's remark—half compliment, half something else entirely—my face twisted into a bizarre grimace.
Six months ago, the Imperial Princess had captured a limb-broken orc and brought it back expressly to beat me like a dog.
The Imperial Princess, under some absurd pretext about how "a lion pushes its cubs off a cliff," had simply stood there and watched me get pummeled. And Bianca, who apparently found the sight of me getting thrashed hilarious, would come running the moment she heard the Imperial Princess was training me and devoted herself to thoroughly spectating every punch I took.
After about a week of getting beaten by that orc, I had an awakening.
The realization that at this rate, I might actually get beaten to death by an orc. And that the human survival instinct is, in truth, a magnificent thing.
A solid week of getting pummeled, and my body automatically began learning where the orc's fist was aimed, how much force it carried, and how to take a hit so it hurt a little less.
Another week after that, I succeeded in driving my sword into the throat of the orc that had beaten me senseless countless times.
"Hmm. Two weeks. That's slower than I expected. I'll have to raise the intensity of the training."
The Imperial Princess watched me skewer the orc's neck and murmured those chilling words. The next day, she brought an orc with all four limbs intact. The day after that, a troll. Then, all manner of bizarre magical beasts whose names I didn't even know, all captured alive, and she demanded I take each one down.
How she managed to keep catching these monsters, in a brutal winter where snow-flowers swirled through the sky and life itself seemed impossible to sustain, I could only feel a growing resentment toward her for it.
Again and again, I was beaten. My life was threatened. And I, too, fought desperately to survive.
Six months passed that way, and I finally succeeded in reaching a level where I could, at least, take down a handicapped ogre.
'...And so what.'
I wasn't the slightest bit happy about it. When I think about how many times I got beaten by those bastards over six months, I feel so shitty I could bolt upright out of a dead sleep. If someone says to me, "But you got stronger for all that hardship, so it's fine, right?" I'm confident I could beat that son of a bitch every single day for six months.
Wake at dawn for physical conditioning and swordsmanship drills. Then march north through the snowfields, shivering in the extreme cold. In the evening, life-or-death bouts against monsters trying to rip me apart. And then, to season it all, Bianca's bitchy behavior, grinding me down every chance she gets. It honestly makes me want to kill myself.
If the Emperor and the other pieces of trash saddled me with the guide role just to make me suffer, then I'd say that scheme has succeeded one hundred percent. Because right now, I have an overwhelming urge to put a sword in my mouth and end it all.
"Watching you grow like this, even I, as your mentor, feel proud. So, with that in mind, how about we try a death match against five orcs tomorrow?"
"....."
The witch, and everything else—I'm so fucking over it all. I just wish someone would hurry up and kill me. Bianca excluded, of course.
****
Thankfully, the two other members of the Winter Expedition didn't torment me as directly as Bianca or the Imperial Princess did.
With Bianca already beating me down mentally and the Imperial Princess pummeling me physically every single day, if anyone else had joined in, I might've actually lost my mind.
But that didn't mean they were friendly or warm toward me, either.
One of them just wore this ambiguous smile that made it impossible to tell what she was thinking. The other made no effort to hide her disapproval of me.
First, let's talk about Saintess Ariel Tiere, the one who serves as the clergy of our Winter Expedition.
Saintess Ariel was a woman I genuinely could not figure out.
She never lost the smile on her lips. No matter what happened during the expedition, she never once showed herself losing her composure.
I'd never seen her expression change even once, so I actually started to wonder if saintesses slept with a smile still plastered on their faces.
Beauty that's called the very incarnation of the Goddess. A kind and gentle heart. A soft, pleasant way of speaking. Divine Power so immense she could casually restore someone from the brink of death back to perfect health. There was nothing lacking in her, not a single flaw. Saintess Ariel was, to put it simply, a perfect woman.
...And yet, I always felt oddly uncomfortable around the Saintess.
She didn't harass me like Bianca. She didn't physically torment me like the Imperial Princess. And still, I felt uneasy. I don't know the reason. It was simply a feeling I had the moment I saw her.
Whenever Bianca bossed me around like a servant, or whenever I was left gasping and exhausted from training with the Imperial Princess, she would wordlessly approach and cast a healing art on me. She was a kind woman. But every time, a vague, unpleasant sensation lingered in the corner of my heart.
Maybe it was because she was too kind to me. Now that I think about it, from the very moment we met, the Saintess treated me with an easy familiarity, like we'd been friends for ten years. And that wasn't all. When I was hauling luggage and desperately trying to keep up with the expedition from behind, the Saintess was the only one who would stop and wait for me to catch up. After meals, she was the only one who helped with cleanup and washing dishes.
But still, I was uncomfortable. If anyone heard me, they'd probably bitch at me for being an ungrateful brat, but I truly found myself uneasy around Saintess Ariel. There was something in the way she sometimes looked at me—an inexplicable, disquieting something that I couldn't understand.
And then there was Kirie El Denaris, the elf who served as the archer of the Winter Expedition and Guardian of the World Tree. She was the same.
Kirie always treated me like I wasn't even there. No—to be precise, she seemed to look down on the entire human race just a little. She used polite speech with us, but underneath it, you could feel a clear resistance.
I don't know the reason. ...Maybe she thinks humans are inferior because they only live a hundred years. Maybe the fact that the "witch" who brought winter to the continent is a human has soured her mood. Or maybe some human slapped her in the face in the past. I really had no way of knowing.
Whatever the reason, Kirie's attitude was more than enough to get under the skin of Bianca, who runs on nothing but pride, and the Imperial Princess, who's utterly consumed by her devotion to the Imperial Household. Thanks to that, I—stuck in the middle like a goblin wedged between ogres—was the one getting ground to dust.
The Saintess, who just stood in the middle smiling "fufu" and watching me try to mediate, was a bonus.
Fortunately, Bianca and the Imperial Princess never got so pissed off that they tried to throw down with Kirie head-on, but the suffocating war of nerves that erupted between these women still felt like it was choking the life out of me.
We were an expedition of only five people, and watching them all act like they were dying to tear each other apart made me sigh without even realizing it. Seeing all four of them torment me, each in her own special way, felt like my damn lifespan was being shaved away.
The expedition was supposed to last only a year, but there wasn't a single day I could rest easy. And in direct proportion, my fury and resentment toward the "witch" piled up, day after day.
Yeah. This is all because of that bitch of a witch. If it weren't for that fucking woman, I never would've been thrown into the underground prison. I never would've been dragged along on this expedition as a meat shield. I never would've been thrown around by those four in turns. The fact that bitch Bianca gave me shit today, the fact that the Imperial Princess dragged in two ogres and got me beaten like a dog, the fact that Kirie's sarcastic remarks nearly made a furious Bianca start a brawl, the fact that the Saintess watched the whole thing with her own two eyes and just kept smiling—it's all without a doubt the witch's fault. That damn woman has clearly ruined my life this thoroughly.
My directionless fury and resentment turned into killing intent, and that killing intent ate away at my heart, turning it black. I'd reached a state where I could laugh it off no matter what crazy shit the women next to me pulled, but that wasn't because I was letting it go. I was just bottling it up tight in a corner of my soul.
And so, a year passed. At the northernmost point, upon reaching the Estel Duchy, we finally came face-to-face with the culprit who had summoned winter to the continent—the Winter Witch.
The witch was a beauty with hair as white as snow. Honestly, judging by appearance alone, I couldn't believe she was the "witch" who had brought winter upon the continent. But the moment I saw her conjure snowflakes from her fingertips, my vision went red. It was the moment that the patience I'd endured, and endured, and endured for the past year finally reached its limit.
"Fufu, so you've finally arrived here. You are the ones who came north from the south to stop m—"
"Hey, you fucking bitch."
"...Huh?"
I shut the witch's mouth before she could start rambling on about whatever she was about to say. The only impulse blazing in my head was the overwhelming need to slice that bitch's neck open as fast as possible and release every last drop of pent-up resentment.
"Shut your mouth and let's fucking fight, you damn bitch."