It Burns Beautifully
The ghouls came flooding in. No matter how many we cut down, the horde showed no sign of breaking. To any ordinary hunter, the acrid stench of oncoming death would already have been thick in the air. And yet—even as the ghouls, having finally grasped the situation, pressed their advance, neither Seoa nor I hesitated for so much as a heartbeat.
They crept closer, detouring around every patch of ground where a trap lay buried. But detouring meant wasting time, and against a horde of mere C+ rank ghouls, that kind of slack translated directly into their deaths.
Not that we actually needed to kill them. A rain of arrows stitched across the sky and sank its teeth into the ghouls' legs once more. Ever since learning of the invulnerability granted by One-Hit Faith, Seoa had changed her tactics. If they could only die to a first strike, then there was no point straining to kill them at all. Cripple the legs. Pin the feet. Shatter the knees and drop them on their calves. Right now, immobilizing the ghouls was enough.
A few more volleys like that, and the ghouls advancing around the traps lay sprawled across the ground. At the same time, their fallen bodies became a breakwater damming the rest of the horde's advance. It went without saying that the first requirement of holding any position was a barricade. Seoa, who hadn't even had a chance to breathe under the suddenness of the assault, certainly hadn't had time to prepare one. Now she had plenty.
She stacked the barricade from ghoul corpses as if nursing a grudge with every layer. Even so, their numbers were overwhelming. Some ghouls climbed over their kin's bodies or skirted around them, and those too fell to Seoa's interception. And still—slowly, inch by inch, but surely—the horde closed the distance. For Seoa, already worn down by the poison, that was more than she could hold against to the very end. Which was why—
Shrrring—!!
The next instant, the heads of the ghouls lunging at the front door went flying into the sky.
Even by my own judgment, it was a clean stroke. Every time that crescent-curved blade swept across the ghouls' necks, a hole tore open in their formation.
The boarding house had two entrances—front door and back. With every other approach plastered over in traps, covering two measly doorways was hardly a challenge.
Vwoooom—!!
My greatsword tore through the air with a splitting roar and caught the ghouls' necks once again. Heads soared skyward with a resounding clang—a sight that was, frankly, rather splendid. With those two cuts, the front line that had surged up to the door broke and fell back in a big way.
It was only natural. Strip away the tricks, and the ghouls' raw combat power was nothing special—nowhere near enough to break through the front door while I held it. So they had no choice but to pull back for the moment.
Of course, I had no intention of letting them go now. Steel balls flicked out from between my fingers and promptly shattered their legs. Nor did it stop there—the swarm of steel balls maneuvered on the heels of my mana manipulation. In moments, a barricade of ghouls stood complete before the front door.
And then—
'Material: steel balls. Mana paid as the reagent.'
KRAKA-BOOM—!!
The flying steel balls burst apart in an instant. The metal that made up their surfaces became a storm of wedges and blew the ghouls' limbs clean off. A miniature claymore. With destruction that could only be described that way, holes opened in the retreating horde as well.
KYAAAAAK—!!
Shock. Agony. Pain. Terror. The ghouls' fury echoed across the field. Well, whichever it was, it was no longer any concern of mine.
I hurled another steel ball at the backs of the ghouls fleeing with their tails between their legs. And once again, Instant Alchemy. The material was steel balls again, and the cost, again, mana. But the result was different.
The steel ball streaking toward their skulls stretched out long and thin, left and right. An unreal sight. A comical one. But what unfolded before my eyes the next moment was not funny at all.
The metal composing the steel ball spread thin and stretched. In the blink of an eye, the iron wire that had been a steel ball bit into the ghouls' necks once more.
Crack!
With a chilling sound, a whole heap of ghouls collapsed. Handy, that. An honest impression.
I had a rough grasp of it now. The techniques I'd just used proved as much—neither shattering the steel balls nor flattening them thin had consumed any enormous amount of mana. Thanks to that, my auxiliary armaments, previously good for nothing but simple harassment, could put out real firepower.
If there was one drawback, it was that the whole thing wasted materials. In any case, weapons that could hold their own against monsters were invariably made from high-grade materials—like the bow Seoa was using right now. Hunters generally used the carcasses of the monsters they'd slain as their materials, or, like me, minerals that had been transmuted by soaking in mana. Which meant burning through auxiliary armaments like this wasn't exactly economical.
That said, the steel balls I'd been using until just now were hardly premium goods. They were scraps—a few leftover mineral fragments melted down and given a rough shape after being used here and there. Frankly, I'd made them because I hated to let the leftovers go to waste. But with things as they were, I couldn't help worrying a little about my remaining ammo. No, it wouldn't be a problem for a while yet.
'It's not like the mana cost is nothing, either…'
As a proving ground for testing magic, the battlefield hadn't been bad—but this was still the weapon that suited me. Clack. The steel in my hand let out a sharp, aching cry.
And then—
Gyaak…?
When the steel-ball bombardment from behind stopped, one of the ghouls, suddenly sensing something off, glanced back. At the same moment, their eyes went wide with astonishment. The figure of me, planted stubbornly in front of the front door until seconds ago, had vanished at some point.
A moment of conflict. The torment of whether to charge once more and take the boarding house brushed across their minds. And for me, that much was plenty.
SHWAAAAAK—!!
A one-stroke painting with ghoul blood for paint. There was no other way to describe it. Once a hole had been punched in their formation, the next step was to rampage—I had plunged into the very heart of the horde with my presence smothered and swung my greatsword in a circle. Once again, their heads flew into the sky without a single hitch, and the punched-through hole widened even further.
KYAAAAAK—!!
They, too, had no choice but to throw themselves at me resolved to die. Of course, they'd charged because they saw a sliver of a chance. They must have judged that this situation beat facing me with the building at my back, if nothing else. Now that I'd leapt into their midst of my own accord, surely a desperate, all-out lunge could at least sink a claw or two into me. That was what they thought. And naturally, it was because I had lured them into thinking exactly that.
Soon, death came whirling down.
KAGAGAK—!!
I swung the greatsword once more. The spinning blade deflected the claws of ghouls lunging from every direction, and riding the momentum of that fully-loaded swing, I leapt as well. At the same time—a whirling vertical cut. I split the skull of one of the onrushing ghouls straight down from crown to chin.
The greatsword bit helplessly into the ground. The ghouls rushed at me—me, standing on my hands with my grip locked on the hilt—but only for a moment. I bent my elbows and straightened them, flinging my body higher, and my frame soared to a height the ghouls could no longer reach. They faltered, thrown into confusion.
At one of them, I released the chain coiled around the hilt and threw it—no careful aim, no calculation. THWACK!! The weight at the chain's end struck home, and its right arm exploded. But that was all. The defense granted by One-Hit Faith remained fully intact; I couldn't touch that one with the chain again.
However—in a situation like this, One-Hit Faith's defense actually worked in my favor. I flicked my wrist upward and worked the chain, and a chain with power to spare for crushing its skull cinched tight around its neck.
Naturally, it didn't try to dodge or block my attack. Obvious, really. According to the lore, ghouls mortally wounded by a first strike yet somehow still alive beg the warriors for mercy instead—kill me, they plead. And if the warrior is fooled and swings the blade a second time, the ghoul recovers even the wounds from the first attack and bares its fangs at the merciful warrior who spared it.
Same principle. That ghouls wield near-invincible defense after the first strike is an ironclad fact. But the wounds from the first strike are not healed. That's why they beg for a second attack—to convert that second blow into fuel and regenerate the damage. Because if they linger in that half-dead state, even without dying instantly to the first strike, they'll simply waste away.
The same went for my and Seoa's attacks. Blowing off their legs wouldn't kill the ghouls outright—if anything, they'd gain resistance to subsequent shots. So what? What of it?
Most living things die when their legs are severed and left untended. Poison in the knee kills them too—or at the very least, incapacitates them. Higher-species ghouls might be another matter, but a lesser ghoul could be neutralized easily enough by taking off a single leg. That held just as true now.
The color drained from the ghoul's face as the chain squeezed its throat. Of course, that was mere camouflage—in truth, its forearm was visibly regrowing in time with the chain around its neck, hard to miss even if I'd wanted to. But what I needed right now was a nice, hefty weight, and if it was dumb enough to hang on tight of its own accord, so much the better.
HUP—!!
Using the muscles of my upper body, I twisted myself in midair. In sync, the ghoul in my grasp whooshed upward, higher than me. Then, the fall. The ghoul, swinging in a wide arc around me, slammed into the ground like a hammer.
KWA-AAANG!!
The impact that hammered the horde sent the ghouls staggering hard. And right beside it lay the traps I'd prepared for the boarding house's defense, packed dense as sardines—wires to sever their legs, steel balls primed to detonate like landmines. Beyond the further-warped horde, the moment I landed, I scattered oil canisters drawn from beyond space.
Roughly a thousand years ago, it had been hailed as a secret treasure of the Empire—a mana weapon. At the same time—
'Material: metal. Oil and mana paid as the reagents.'
The magic I invoked took shape. The mana spent was mere labor—the work of soaking the traps in oil. With a modest outlay of mana, the wires strewn all around drank deep of the oil. And then—
FWOOOSH!!
The weapon of the Eastern Roman Empire, said to burn even a great warship to nothing in moments, took the flame into itself. Fire kindled by a cheap mana stone was more than enough.
The burning ghouls ran mad in every direction. I didn't even need to control the flaming wires. Kin. Kindred. Before joining up with Seoa, I'd confirmed it through a few experiments: the defense granted by One-Hit Faith does not trigger against fire. Or, to put it more precisely, until the fire goes out, it counts as a single attack. Either way—
Well, look at that—it burns beautifully~ Watching the ghoul horde begin annihilating itself of its own accord, that was the admiration I voiced. All that was left was drizzling the same oil over the corpse barricade, maybe. At least for a while, the defense would have some breathing room.
"Wow."
"Wow, my foot. Hey—I told you not to let your guard down, didn't I?"
Perhaps because the ghouls strewn around us had been more or less cleaned up, I aimed that scolding at Seoa as she came up beside me.
To be fair, I'd have to factor in how bad the situation had been. Still, Seoa's showing this time was, honestly, below expectations. Never mind anything else—my own disciple, done in by a ghoul's cheap trick?
"…No, you keep saying that, but honestly, who could even tell them apart in a situation like that?"
Even as I spoke as if something was wrong with her, I had definitely taught her about ghouls too. And yet, until I arrived, she hadn't even managed to guess what was going on with the One-Hit Faith defense. Tsk—the click of my tongue escaped me before I knew it. If she'd simply held the line, fine, no problem. But she'd gone and left her flank wide open, and I couldn't help feeling she'd taken a wound for nothing. No—I knew she'd tried. Still.
"Geez, come on—this wound up going pretty well overall, didn't it?"
Seoa said that, quietly slipping her gaze away as if my nagging sat heavily on her.
Then again, with the suspicion hanging over us—unconfirmed, but there—that this whole mess might have happened because I'd left my post, maybe Seoa had simply been faithful to her role. Above all, there was no question it had been Seoa who held the boarding house while I was gone. For me to come back late and start picking things apart now… that was hard to justify, whatever way I sliced it.
Either way, Hayeon had held up well too. Right now she was holed up in the semi-basement with the madam. According to Seoa, Hayeon had volunteered to step up and fight herself, but… judging there was no way she could face ghouls, Seoa had given her somewhat different orders. So now she was on standby in the rear, guarding the madam, who had fainted. Her assigned role: if anything happened to Seoa, take the madam and run.
Well, correct call. Considering Hayeon's abilities, she could stand against ghouls, but winning would be a stretch—and against multiple ghouls, she'd be neutralized in moments. With the madam's safety in her hands, she couldn't have gone gallivanting off recklessly either. A sound order, I'd say. Of course, Seoa hadn't truly been resigned to death against the ghouls either—but that's exactly why the charge of carelessness was one she couldn't dodge.
"Well, it was dangerous."
In the end, Seoa admitted as much herself. "I knew it in my head, but I couldn't help it. If a few higher-species had been mixed in, it really would have been dangerous."
…Huh?
I was nodding along to Seoa's rueful murmur when a wrongness suddenly snagged on me. Huh? No—what did she just say? If a few higher-species had been mixed in? Wait, hold on. Something's off here.
"Huh? What is?"
The moment I spat out the wrongness that had been hazy until seconds ago, it took on an even sharper shape.
There were no higher-species?
Strictly speaking, that wasn't wrong. Until I'd linked up with Seoa, there hadn't been a single decent higher-species anywhere around here. Seeing that, I'd assumed Seoa had been sniping the higher-species preferentially. But there had barely been any higher-species to begin with?
'Why?'
That was the first question that surfaced. Why? Why were there no higher-species? Because—Hayeon was here. Even if Seoa's orders had done their work and the ghouls had failed to confirm Hayeon's existence, they had this boarding house marked as a priority target. The size of the gate alone said as much. Higher-species or not, they were B+ rank at most, but it was hard to believe a gate that size would be short on them.
…A vicious wrongness. Amid the ghouls' corpses sprawled everywhere, some unnameable unease crawled up the back of my neck.