Red Eye Mercenary Corps (3)
“Looks like you took a liking to him.”
“Huh? Oh—yeah. I did.”
Vice-captain Barger’s voice pulled Roselyn out of her thoughts. She nodded, absently rubbing the wrist the young man had seized moments earlier, a smile tugging at her mouth.
“He’s no ordinary bastard. That snake bitch really does have a good eye. Where the hell does she keep digging up guys like him…”
She turned the earlier encounter over in her mind.
How special could he really be?
That was the lighthearted assumption she’d carried when she approached him. She’d been forced to revise it on the spot. Even under a pressure that made green-grade adventurers bow their heads, the young man had lifted his chin.
And he didn’t stop there…
She had meant to crush him flat. Instead of lowering his head, he had snapped his eyes wide and snatched her wrist. That meant he had shattered a Sword Seeker’s aura head-on.
“No idea how he pulled that off.”
Roselyn stroked her chin, intrigued. The amount of mana stored in the young man’s body had clearly been meager—not even Sword Expert level, barely past the threshold of first contact with mana. With a scrap like that, shaking off her pressure should have been impossible.
It should have been. But she had seen it.
In the instant he threw off the pressure, the mana she had scattered was sucked straight into his body. For that fleeting moment, the presence he radiated had not fallen short of her own.
A mana cultivation method she had never seen in her life.
Roselyn had met no shortage of powerful fighters, yet not one of them handled mana that way.
“Some abandoned noble brat, maybe? Never seen a method like that. What do you think, Barger?”
“How would I know, Captain. He looked like he had guts, at least.”
“Yeah. Tch—thinking about it just makes me like him more.”
Roselyn smacked her lips. Barger shot her a sidelong glance and let out a sigh. Just as the Gold-Swallowing Snake never spat out what she once swallowed, his captain never failed to claim anything she marked—by any means necessary.
The Gold-Swallowing Snake, Dieta Arvenia.
And the Red Eye who was now licking her chops over the adventurer Dieta had already claimed: Roselyn Ascalo.
This is going to be a headache.
There would be no avoiding friction with the Dieta Merchant Group, Barger thought.
“Hey. You.”
Just as Najin was about to step into the forest, someone called out behind him. He glanced back. The woman wore a green-painted nameplate.
“Yeah, you. Blackie.”
She crooked a finger at him. Adventurers still packing their gear turned their attention back toward Najin, muttering as they pointed at the woman facing him down.
“What’s Marcen’s problem?”
“Doesn’t like him, obviously.”
“Fair enough. She’s the one who was supposed to be the center of attention here…”
Marcen, green-grade adventurer. A veteran of ten years in Cambria, the most decorated participant in this Dochenberg Forest purge. Word among the adventurers was that Marcen would take first place—meaning the one who should have drawn every eye was her, not some black-grade youth.
“You think this business is a game?”
Marcen had been carefully stacking achievements for years with the sole aim of joining the Red Eye Mercenary Corps. In her eyes, Najin was nothing but a thorn.
“Talking back to a white-grade adventurer—to Lady Roselyn herself—with that attitude—”
“You talk too damn much.”
“…What?”
Najin’s face twisted in open irritation. He brushed aside the finger she was jabbing at him with the back of his hand, as if she were a nuisance.
“Is that all you wanted to say? If you’re finished, I’d like to get going.”
“What did you just say to me?”
“Why are you grabbing a busy person’s ankle? Spend the time killing one more monster. Don’t you care about the rankings?”
To Najin the words meant nothing special. He didn’t know the adventurer’s name, nor that she was the leading candidate for first place. From the perspective of someone aiming for first himself, being snagged by a conversation with zero nutritional value was simply annoying.
To Marcen, the reputed frontrunner, it was a blatant provocation. Her expression crumpled.
“Ha. Unbelievable little shit.”
She barked a hollow laugh and pointed at him again.
“You just wait. We’ll settle this when it’s over. Rank lower than me and you’d better be ready.”
Najin let the threat slide in one ear and out the other, already deciding the conversation was finished. He turned and walked toward the forest. The surrounding adventurers kept whispering among themselves. Marcen listened to every murmur; Najin paid them no mind at all.
The only thing that held his interest was the scoreboard guarded by a mercenary on the platform—the board that would record points in real time every time someone brought in a monster’s head.
Put my name at the very top.
He repeated the goal to himself as he strode into the trees.
Najin had almost no experience hunting monsters. He had carried out a few simple subjugation requests through the guild, but he had never tracked a monster by its traces. Everything he had hunted before—goblin villages, caves—had been fixed locations.
So this is a first.
Chasing a monster’s trail and hunting it down was new. It didn’t seem like a real problem. He steadied his breathing and narrowed his eyes.
In the end, tracking a monster wasn’t all that different from tracking a human.
He had never hunted monsters this way, but he had more than enough experience following human traces and finishing the job—years as Ivan’s hunting dog, and endless pursuits against the Church’s shadow agents.
Clink.
He brushed the throwing blades bound at his wrist.
You’re really fond of those, huh? You use them a lot.
They’re handy.
Throwing techniques stolen from the Church’s assassins. Najin closed his fingers around one blade and followed the marks left on the ground. His senses, honed to a razor edge, missed not even the faintest presence.
The soft rustle of undergrowth—
Najin whipped his head around and flung the blade.
At the same instant a goblin’s guttural cry rang out. He closed the distance, severed its neck, dropped the head into his sack, and kept moving without pause.
Then he stopped short.
What? Why’d you stop?
I just thought of something.
Najin lifted his gaze to the dense canopy overhead and murmured inwardly.
There’s no real reason I have to stick to the ground, is there?
You’re going to travel through the trees? That’s elf stuff. Ordinary balance won’t—
Najin was already climbing.
He tested a few branches with the tip of his boot, exhaled slowly, then pushed off. The leap was precise; the landing was soft. This was a young man who had used the narrow gaps in alley walls as footholds. To him, a tree branch was a broad, stable platform.
Huh…
Leaving a speechless Merlin behind, Najin raced through the canopy. His eyes moved even faster than his body.
Found you.
From a distance it might have looked like aimless sprinting, but his gaze locked onto every monster with perfect accuracy. He dropped from the branches and split a skull in a single stroke, stuffed the head into the sack, and vanished again.
With every repetition his movements grew sharper, cleaner. Watching him plummet from the trees and snatch a monster’s neck in one motion, Merlin thought it looked exactly like a bird of prey on the hunt.
How much time had passed since the Dochenberg purge began? As the sun sank toward the horizon, the adventurers drifted back to the forest’s edge. Closing time was near.
One by one they arrived with sacks of monster heads, handed them to the Red Eye overseer waiting on the platform, and had their scores tallied. By the time most of them had returned, every eye went to the board.
First place, as everyone expected, belonged to Marcen. She had arrived only moments earlier with thirty-one points—five clear of second place.
“Marcen’s first, of course.”
“Figured she would be, but thirty-one? That’s ridiculous. Just finding them is half the work…”
Because no one had doubted her victory, the surprise lay in the number she had taken, not the fact of first place itself.
“Hey, though—that black-rank kid’s no joke either. Look at the rankings. Twelfth.”
“Black-grade in twelfth? Holy shit…”
What truly startled them was the black-grade adventurer Ivan’s place on the board.
12th. Ivan — 14 pts
Fourteen points. Even for green-grades that was no easy total. Finding and killing the monsters hidden in these woods demanded every sense a person had. They were just beginning to admit he possessed attention-worthy skill when one of the late returnees spoke up.
“Wait. Something’s off.”
He pointed at Ivan’s name while settling his own score.
“I saw him taking hobgoblin heads. Hobgoblins are three points each. I personally watched him drop more than four—and that was over an hour ago.”
“You sure you didn’t miscount?”
“No. I was setting up on a hobgoblin pack and he just dropped out of a tree, snagged the necks, and was gone.”
Four kills in an instant, then vanished. The cluster of adventurers began to stir.
“Come to think of it…”
“He still isn’t back.”
Closing time was upon them, yet the black-grade youth was nowhere among the gathered adventurers. Had he turned in one sack midway and gone straight back into the forest?
They were still waiting when, right at the final moment, a dragging sound rose from the trees. Out of the sunset-stained forest stepped a youth painted head to toe in blood. The blood matting his body and hair was not his own.
Dark, blue-black monster blood.
The adventurers flinched and gave ground before the eerie aura clinging to him. Najin walked through them, climbed the platform, and handed his sack to the overseer.
A cascade of heads spilled out—seven hobgoblin heads. Eyes went wide. He had hunted only the highest-scoring monsters the forest offered.
Every gaze swung to the scoreboard.
His previous total had been fourteen. Adding twenty-one points from seven hobgoblins…
“Thirty-five…”
Someone whispered the number as Marcen’s name was wiped from the top. In its place appeared another.
1st. Ivan — 35 pts
2nd. Marcen — 31 pts
Every eye turned to Marcen. She stared, wide-eyed, first at the board and then at Najin standing beside it. Against every expectation, a black-grade adventurer had taken first place.
Marcen snatched up her sack and spun toward the forest—only for the overseer to ring the bell. Time was up. She ground her teeth and glared at Najin, but he did not spare her so much as a glance as he stepped down from the platform, as if she had never held the slightest interest for him.
Crunch.
Marcen was just about to close the distance when Najin’s head snapped around. From deeper in the forest came the frantic pound of running feet.
“Haaah!”
Adventurers burst through the brush and collapsed at the treeline, gasping, faces bloodless, bodies shaking with terror.
“Inside—inside the forest!”
Their cry was still unfinished when a heavy footfall rolled through the trees.
Thud. Thuum.
The steps grew closer. Then came a wet crack of splintering wood, and an entire tree, ripped up by the roots, hurtled toward the gathered adventurers.
Screams. Stumbling feet. The rasp of weapons drawn with sweat-slick hands.
Through the noise, out of the sunset-drenched forest, a single monster stepped into view.