The Beggar King of Ghouls
Mother of God.
It was the kind of remark that would've made my mother back in the countryside weep into her apron, and with it, I dropped to one knee.
To be more precise, my legs simply gave out on their own.
There was nothing I could do about it.
I'm not in a position to complain after all my grumbling, but fatigue and sleep deprivation are, at their root, purely mental suffering.
The damage I'd accumulated across this running battle wasn't even at a serious level.
And yet.
This injury was different.
An entirely physical wound.
Granted, even objectively speaking, it wasn't a deep one.
The endless fighting. The exhausted mind.
Then, out of nowhere, Ye-eun appearing right before my eyes.
On top of all that, a strike through the gap I hadn't noticed.
Every condition had lined up perfectly against me, and even so, I'd managed to respond by the skin of my teeth.
In the end, all I'd lost was a few layers of skin on my neck and a few drops of blood.
Even so.
The very next moment, the world spun with a sharp ping.
...Right.
The problem, if there was one, was the venom carried in the ghoul's claws.
Not lethal.
Just enough, and no more.
These flesh-eating fiends paralyze their prey with the toxin in their nails before devouring them—for ghouls, that poison is nothing more than a seasoning for their meals.
It's not the kind of thing that threatens a life.
Well, obviously.
On the contrary, it's more than sufficient to paralyze a body from head to toe.
In other words, the toxin carries no immediate threat to survival.
No—more precisely, it doesn't need to be lethal.
You just kill the paralyzed prey.
Son of a bitch.
I cursed under my breath.
It throbbed. It hurt like hell.
A maddening, rampaging pain gnawed at the edges of my mind.
But if not for that, I suspect I would have found it rather difficult to process what was in front of me.
Ye-eun, lying quietly atop the magic circle.
And at the same time, a single ghoul that had been prowling near the circle until moments ago.
The very creature that had opened a wound on the back of my neck.
Judging by the mana I could feel from it, it was easily A-Rank or higher.
A being of legend, said to have retained some fragment of its power as a fallen spirit.
The King of Ghouls, then.
The way it dribbled its laughter—kelkel kel—was so utterly vulgar that it felt less like a king and more like the ringleader of a pack of beggars.
That said, it was no pushover, king or not.
For one thing, there was my current situation.
Recovery was out of the question.
I had no opening to pull out an antidote, and the concentration wasn't low enough for my mana manipulation to neutralize it myself.
Above all, we were both well inside each other's range right now.
For my paralyzed body to operate my ability and draw out the poison would take far longer than it would take the thing to pin me down with its claws.
In other words, unless some opening presented itself, I had to fight like this.
Not great.
Honestly, it was a pretty miserable spot to be in.
My opponent was an A+ Rank monster.
On top of the damage I'd already piled up, I was currently poisoned with a paralytic toxin.
I had some mana left, but factoring in what I'd need to restore my suit, I was functionally at the bottom of the barrel.
My overworked senses felt as though they could bid farewell to my sanity at any moment.
The one mercy was that the thing hadn't taken Ye-eun hostage... perhaps it had decided securing a chance to ambush me was more important, or maybe there was some other reason entirely.
Either way, it was a stroke of luck as far as I was concerned.
So then—let me count up my advantages.
One was simple raw capability.
The ambush had somehow been dodged.
I'd taken the poison, sure, but there was no hole left in my neck.
And my objective combat ability sat at roughly the level of an A+ Rank hunter.
On pure combat power alone, I could stand against the King of Ghouls in front of me.
Add in the augmentation from my senses, and I could overwhelm it without breaking a sweat.
The only other point in my favor was that I had some time before its ghoul subordinates closed in.
That was it.
I steadied my breathing.
The conditions were, even as a joke, nowhere near fair.
Nine times out of ten, the leader in front of me was also aiming for a long game.
The reason it was playing it casual right in front of me was the same.
From its perspective, there was no reason to take a loss.
Their goal from the very beginning was the completion of the ritual.
Not a victory report over my corpse.
And at this rate, all it had to do was stall—the paralytic toxin would do the work for it.
I could understand why it was taking its time, then.
Which meant.
Conversely, what I needed to aim for was a short, decisive battle.
Before reinforcements—whether from the New World Order or through the gate—gave the ghouls breathing room and more of them came pouring down, I had to kill this thing and settle it.
I rose slowly.
It felt like a mountain's weight was pressing down on my shoulders.
Bastard.
If it had come to me first, things would've been a little easier.
I let out a dry chuckle and quietly squared my stance.
Swinging the greatsword with my whole body like before was out of the question.
That approach burned stamina in every possible way.
So I brought the greatsword forward instead.
One hand on the grip, the other on the auxiliary hilt.
In spear terms, something close to a shortened hold.
Given the defensive properties of the One-Hit Faith, it wasn't an efficient tactic.
But right now, this was my best option.
From the moment I'd barely dodged the ambush, to the moment the ghoul's king pulled back its distance.
Roughly ten seconds in total.
Short if short, long if long—and at the end of that gap, the fight began anew.
I was the one to draw first blood.
The desperate one moves first. What else can you do.
At the same time.
Flames crashed over me as I surged forward.
Whether to call it luck or misfortune, fire is a relatively common spirit power among ghouls.
Which meant I could drive in without much hesitation.
I led with the flat of the blade as a shield, deflecting to the side.
The flame, given form, slid along the side of the greatsword and streamed past behind me.
A reaction like a cold weapon's.
But you can't expect physical laws to hold for flames made of mana, not one by one.
Forward again.
At the same time, the King of Ghouls retreated, facing away from my advance.
Its arms embraced the empty air like a lover.
Matching the leader's motion, flickering flames rushed in.
...No.
My feet stopped on their own.
The motion was that of someone gripping a fireball to hurl it—and the fireball had changed trajectory, as if it had read the movement my mind was already chasing.
BOOM!!
My body, which had slammed the brakes at the last possible instant, creaked and screamed.
And now, at long last, the fireball bared its teeth at me.
A heavy impact crashed through the greatsword.
The motion was a simple feint.
Was it actually manipulating the flame through some other method?
I didn't even have time to assess it.
KRA-KOOM!!
The next moment, an explosion detonated behind my back.
The flames from its very first strike—the embers still lingering—had swallowed my rear whole.
A combination that would have killed any number of ordinary hunters.
But.
Sorry.
I answered with a non-reaction.
Whoosh!
I stripped off my suit jacket like a coat and whirled it.
The collar, used as a shield, swallowed the blast.
Scattered flames for suppression, then flame manipulation keyed to the scattered embers.
I'd handled both before—against the thing's overwhelming, strictly superior counterpart.
The firepower was decent, but every single feint was clumsy.
It manipulated fire more slowly than that one, too.
No—maybe it was more that he had been frighteningly fast.
But that's only natural.
Accumulated technique and craft are, after all, the privilege of humans.
To a creature like this, it's nothing but parlor tricks.
For example—enough leeway for me to pull something like this.
Whoong!!
A steel ball flew through the curtain of embers.
The target: the head.
A crude weapon, but a direct hit would kill even the King of Ghouls.
And precisely because of that, the king had no intention of giving up its head.
A slight tilt, a lazy turn—the ghoul's king evaded with a flick of its neck.
I knew it would.
Thud!
The moment my feet, knocked airborne by the fireball's impact, planted back into the ground, I charged again.
And I chanted.
Material: steel ball. Pay mana for the components.
Yes, my mana was nearly gone.
Restoring the suit alone would leave me scraping the bottom.
Anyone looking would think the same.
Which was exactly why.
Here, I abandoned restoring the suit.
I threw my opening move from the start.
CRUNCH!!
The steel ball hammered into the wall transformed, in the blink of an eye, into a spike.
A sneak attack from behind.
Perhaps because it hadn't anticipated it, the leader left its flank open.
At the same time, venting its fury, it moved to shatter the spike skewering its side.
Through that gap, I took another step.
Shukuchi.
The chance I'd been hoarding, hoarding, and hoarding again—spent here, now, in this place.
At the same time.
The leader's face, having barely wrenched the iron spike from its flank, flooded with disbelief.
Of course it was.
It was a single instant.
Even accounting for a hunter's physical abilities—my body's movement included—it was a distance that couldn't have been closed in an instant.
The gap that should have served the King of Ghouls as a safety net, I crossed in one full sprint.
At this point.
The means of attack the leader ghoul could bring to bear numbered exactly one.
Close-quarters combat with its own body.
And of those, primarily the claws it favored.
And.
If you can read it, you can dodge it.
WHAM!!
Twice.
Like a fighter emptying the last of his cherished elixir into a final round, my second Shukuchi erupted.
Dodging the claws and driving in a strike would have been simple enough.
But the opponent was a ghoul.
Factor in the One-Hit Faith's defense, and that kind of attack settles nothing.
Which meant.
What was needed here, now, was overwhelming force.
In other words—
A means for even me, stripped down to the studs, to secure enough offensive power.
In a word: gravity.
Stepping onto the second Shukuchi, my body launched skyward.
The creature's claws cleaved empty air, and I planted my feet against the ceiling, upside down.
And then.
Kicked off. Falling.
Guided by gravity, I tore down the corridor toward it.
The world spun with a ping.
The strain of violent mana manipulation and back-to-back Shukuchi had surfaced as the paralytic's bite.
Didn't matter.
Now that I'd started falling, even I couldn't stop this descent.
Gripping the sword in both hands, arms thrust forward.
All I had to do was swing—the power banked by Shukuchi would carve the thing apart on its own.
SHEEERK!!
And it did.
With a clean, rending sound, the ghoul's body went flying into the air.
But.
Tsk.
The feedback was weak.
It reacted at the last possible second...!!
I clicked my tongue and landed.
Ignoring the legs that groaned under me, I stepped forward.
Only then did I see what had actually gone flying.
The ghoul's arm.
It had apparently leapt backward in time with the strike...!!
Reflexes to be proud of.
Of course, that didn't mean I intended to let it go.
The blade sagging under the greatsword's own force.
I wrenched my grip onto the auxiliary hilt hanging from it.
And.
The moment I drew a deep breath—
In a span of time too brief to call an instant, the final exchange began.
Matching the incoming claws of its remaining hand, I caught them with the flat and deflected.
Through the opening, I raked and pierced its upper body with the great blade.
With its entire skeleton shattered, I tore the ribcage open like a plane shaving wood.
With a crack of splintering bone, the torso laid bare, I set the sawtooth edge against it.
But.
KRRSH!
The paralytic, maybe.
Despite a flurry of attacks delivered in a single breath, the result was pathetic.
The thing had raised its remaining arm and blocked the sawtooth.
Perhaps the rhythm of my combo had dulled at the seam.
I gritted my teeth through the pain and drove forward again.
HRRRAAAAGH!!
With a roar, I wrenched the blade free.
For a moment, ghoul claws and sawtooth scattered sparks—and then, both hands seized the greatsword once more, and I bellowed as if vomiting it out:
There is no god but His wrath!!
Through the shattered guard, in His name, I drove the blade into its chest cavity.
At the same time.
Its teeth sank into my shoulder.
A cross-counter.
In this situation, it was the only way to finish the leader ghoul for certain.
KYAAAAAK!!
There were two problems.
The first was that I had to make physical contact with the monster.
The teeth boring into my shoulder.
Compared to the stench of the ghoul washing over my body at this range, the searing pain of my shoulder burning was nothing.
Even though the thing was ramming every last scrap of its remaining mana into those teeth.
My shoulder blade festered, and the joint began to give.
The flame-mana was quite literally melting the muscles of my arm.
If that had been all, I'd have cleaned up this corpse on the spot.
The second problem was right there.
That is to say—
Glrk... glrk...!!
The King of Ghouls didn't die.
A miscalculation?
No. That wasn't it.
Power sufficient to kill it for certain. Timing sufficient to kill it for certain.
Even by my own assessment, I had worked out a flawless calculation and derived the route that would kill it.
Which meant.
If a variable had crept in, it had to be because of this situation right here.
You absolute lunatic—
Slrrp. Slrrp.
Only then did I realize the thing's maw was making a strange sound.
There was no need to wonder what it was.
Bloodsucking.
An ability that drained the blood of others and converted it into its own mana and vitality.
The moment the thought reached me, something else surfaced.
The fallen king of evil spirits.
Among the leader-class ghouls, there were those called by that name.
A being once celebrated as a fire-wielding spirit, and feared in equal measure as a blood-drinking vampire.
In some legends, it was said to have commanded countless ghouls—the fiend, Markish.
If the thing in front of me was a king of evil spirits who had once been called a vampire...
Then of course it has bloodsucking!!
And it did.
The louder the sound of draining blood grew, the more vitality I could feel flooding back into its body.
By a sliver.
By the exact amount it had recovered through bloodsucking—my strength had fallen short by a sliver.
Crunch. I forced my teeth together.
Then let's see this through to the end.
Its recovery, or my next strike—which reaches the back of the other's neck first?
Yes. Let's settle it, you bastard!!
The moment I snarled the words through my fury—
THWACK!!
With a hideous sound, the head in front of me exploded.
Teacher, are you okay?!
Because.
The explosion. The roars. The screams.
After all that noise, Ye-eun had finally opened her eyes and used her ability—belatedly.
KYAAAAK!!
T-Teacher?!
Well, whatever.
As for me, splattered with chunks of the ghoul that had detonated point-blank in my face, I had no choice but to let out another scream.
But I couldn't help thinking what an absurdly hollow ending it was.