The Knight and the Demon
The only clue left by the creature that had carried out the massacre was a set of enormous hoofprints stamped into the dirt....
There was nothing more to see here. I cleaned up the corpses, scattered the bone ash into the river, and set off once more.
Days flipped past one after another, and as the weather shifted, the land finally leveled out into open plains!!
And when I found an actual road — the emotion that hit me was beyond anything words could capture....
Follow the road, and I'd reach civilization. People. A real settlement!
Still — looking at how far it stretched, I really should've run more of the way. Instant regret....
A clean, flat path stretching endlessly ahead!
Anyone could tell it was a road people used, so I wasn't sure how they'd react to Hati — a giant wolf — and kept him a little ways off as we traveled.
I don't know how much time passed.
As we moved along the road, I started finding those same massive hoofprints in place after place.
That shape... it belonged to the thing that had committed the massacre. It had come this far down?
And this was a road people actually used. That made me uneasy....
"Beep!"
Hugin cried out from above my head and shot higher into the sky.
A signal. Something was out there.
It was probably that thing. Leaving it alone would only mean catastrophic damage, so tracking it down and finishing it off didn't seem like a bad idea.
"Hati!"
Hati burst from the undergrowth in a flash and came to my side.
"Follow Hugin! Blanc, hang on tight!"
"Woof woof!!"
"Pong~"
I raced after Hati as he surged ahead, and before long the sounds of battle carried from some distance away.
Boom!!!
"Damn it!!!"
The young knight Delner Erta scrambled across the ground in a desperate roll.
A moment slower, and either a horn would have skewered him or a hoof would have crushed him flat.
The situation was very... very bad.
The monster hunters who had swaggered in so confidently had died without accomplishing a thing. The mercenaries were either dead or fleeing. Even the priests who had come along to help take down the demon were either dead or frozen in panic, useless.
Still, Delner burned with fighting spirit against an enemy that radiated sheer, overwhelming presence.
The demon Beast.
Its body was the size of a house, and from its head a massive set of stag's antlers jutted skyward in jagged spikes. Chunks of dead mercenaries' flesh still clung to those horns, blood dripping steadily from them.
Unlike ordinary animals, the front of its body was grotesquely oversized, giving its entire form a profoundly unnatural look....
With the crushed, flattened pupils that marked a demon, it searched for its target.
A bone-chilling cry shattered the silence.
"Uuuuuuuuuu!!!"
Beast fixed its eyes quietly on the knight.
"Hup!!"
In a fraction of a second —
The demon's horn closed the distance without a sound. A ferocious charge with no tell, no wind-up at all.
If I block with the sword, I die!!!
Trusting his instincts, the knight threw himself onto his back, gripped his sword in both hands, and spun.
His instincts were right.
The horn scraped past between his legs by a hair's breadth. He swung as it went by, but aside from a shallow gash, he couldn't land any real damage.
Delner scrambled up and reset his stance.
Damn it! The hide is too tough!
Even a sword swung by a body reinforced with the Mind-Body Method left only a wound like that....
The demon charged again.
This time he dodged sideways and carved upward at its neck.
On the next charge he slipped past the horn and stabbed for an eye.
The charge after that.
And the one after that.
A deadly bullfight that decided life and death with every exchange.
How much time passed?
The surroundings had been reduced to chaos by the demon's charges, but the knight still stood.
"Hah... hah...."
His body was a wreck, but the fire in his eyes had not gone out.
Silence — broken only by the sound of his ragged breathing.
The demon's form blurred.
A high-speed charge faster than anything before.
His eyes couldn't track it — but after surviving so many charges, something deeper took over. Blindly, he rolled right and slashed down at a hind leg.
"Uuuuuuu!!! Uuuuuuk!!!"
The demon looked thoroughly enraged.
Through the relentless exchange, Beast's body had become a bloodied mess.
The knight kept dodging every charge and carving out wounds — but the situation could not go on forever.
His body was simply too exhausted. His spirit still burned, but flesh no longer answered it.
He avoided the horn on this charge, but a foreleg still caught him and sent him tumbling across the dirt.
"Ghk!!!"
At last savoring the joy of being able to kill this pest, Beast began to circle the crawling Delner, pacing around him.
The knight Delner felt the end approaching.
But he would not die quietly.
He rose in silence, took up his sword, and settled into a stance.
Ox Guard.
In that hopeless moment, the knight's presence and his blade were as sharp as a bull's horns.
Demon's horn against knight's horn.
The knight charged — and just as the fight was about to reach its conclusion —
Something snatched his body up at tremendous speed.
Delner realized he was floating in the air. He looked up.
"?!"
A black hawk the size of his own head was holding him, looking down at the demon from above.
Imagine you've spent a long time tracking and cornering your prey.
Your body is wrecked, you're filthy and exhausted, but at last the moment of the kill has arrived!
And then someone pops in with a "ta-da" and snatches that prey to safety.
How would a hunter feel?
Furious enough to want to murder the bastard who saved it — that furious.
And for the demon Beast, whose mind was mostly pure savagery and violence? Even more so.
"I almost had him!!! Get down here!!! Get the hell down!!!"
Beast launched into a full-blown tantrum.
A super-tantrum that put any child thrashing on a supermarket floor over a toy to shame.
It started smashing every tree around it and tearing up the ground.
It tried hurling trees and rocks with its horns — nothing even came close. It tried jumping up to reach — and the black thing in the sky dodged with almost insulting ease.
Then that black bastard looked down from the sky, laughing at it, and spoke.
"Kekekeke. What can a primitive dirt-crawler like you even do?"
Beast froze.
What can you even do.... even do.... do....
A taunt like a dagger driving into its skull.
In all its life in this world, Beast had never been provoked like this.
Its rage blew past the redline and went berserk.
And that fury, astonishingly, evolved its body.
Fur that had been pure black turned a deep, blood-dark red. Black haze began pouring off its entire body, and bloody tears welled from its eyes.
Evolving out of sheer anger — had that ever happened before?
Beast's power roughly doubled on the spot.
But.... so what?
No matter how hideously it evolved, at its core it was still a demon that crawled on the ground.
Evolved or not, it was still a dirt-dog.
Jumping still didn't reach. Throwing things still did no damage.
As if to make it even angrier, the black thing's taunting continued.
"Nope~ You can't do anything~ Dumbass dog~"
"Kaaaargh!!! I'll kill you!!! I'll fucking kill you!!!"
In an instant the black thing swooped down above Beast and spoke again.
"Your face is seriously fucking ugly. Who're your parents? Wait — nah, looking at you, they took one look and dumped your ass."
Beast flinched. Seeing that reaction, the black thing piled on the abuse with a sneer.
"If you'd been born looking halfway decent, somebody around here would've taken you in and raised you.... Man, what a pathetic fucking bastard...."
Snap....
The sound of something breaking....
Abuse laced with orphan digs proved extremely effective at severing what little reason remained.
Things started shooting skyward. A massive body began jumping, jumping, jumping for all it was worth!
And so began a lively little dance party for two!
Caught in the aerobatics of that situation, Delner felt waves of nausea crash over him.
"U... ugh...."
Motion sickness always hits twice as hard when your body's already exhausted — but it still beat dying, right?
After some amount of time had passed —
Beast was panting, worn down to the bone.
But its rage had not cooled. On the brink of dying from a blood-pressure spike, something new entered its vision.
A grotesque figure stitched together from mismatched animal hides, its face a wooden mask.
Beast had found something to take its anger out on.
"Kraaaaaagh!!!"
Hearing the evolved demon's furious roar, Delner felt a chill crawl over his entire body.
Still — what was that black hawk that had saved him, and why had it done so...?
Curiosity stirred — and then a certain figure caught his eye.
A bizarre man holding a staff, dressed in rawhide clothes and a fur robe, his face covered by a wooden mask.
If not for the current situation, anyone would have mistaken him for someone who commanded that demon — that was the kind of look he had.
The strange man set down the pack he'd been carrying and began walking slowly toward the rampaging demon. Delner shouted in horror.
"No!! Run!!"
In his mind he already saw the demon charge, saw the stranger reduced to a blood-spraying lump of meat — and in that same instant, a star settled upon the stranger's staff.
Back on the ground, Delner still couldn't make sense of what had just happened.
In the instant Beast charged, a star had settled on the strange man's — no, his savior's — staff, and the demon's head had gone flying into the sky in the blink of an eye. After that, it did not move again.
He had just witnessed something extraordinary.
M-magic? No — it wasn't like the legends that had been passed down.
Hah....
He didn't understand it. But he was still alive, and that was enough....
After the battle he tried to push himself up, but his body refused to cooperate.
"Kh.... cough!"
Even the smallest movement sent violent pain lancing through him — cracked bones, probably — and his muscles trembled violently. On top of that, his internal injuries were severe enough that blood kept streaming from his mouth without end.
To recover, he'd need more than a decade of rest in a monastery....
He would have to abandon the path of the knight.
My body's a wreck, but there are things that must be done.
Enduring the pain, he forced his shaking body upright and walked slowly toward the savior who had rescued him, offering his thanks.
"My name is Delner Erta. Sa... cough!"
Blood sprayed from his mouth, but he forced the words to continue.
"...vior. Thanks to your power in slaying the demon, I survived. You have my deepest gratitude. I will never forget this debt, and I will repay it."
He delivered his thanks with full formality — but his savior said nothing, merely nodded in silence and turned to examine the demon's corpse.
"Beep!!!"
At that moment the hawk settled onto the savior's shoulder, and the man stroked its feathers.
So that black hawk really was his companion.
Delner had thought it an unusually powerful bird, strong enough to haul him through aerobatics by the waist — but if it was this man's partner, that made sense.
"Woof woof!!"
At some point a white wolf the size of a man had also come near, circling the savior and receiving pets of its own.
A taciturn benefactor who travels with a white wolf and a black hawk.
That was how Delner assessed him.
Still — he could not simply let the man who had saved his life walk away empty-handed.
Delner searched near the shattered trees for his dead horse and dug through its packs. Fortunately the luggage was intact. He pulled out a coin pouch.
It held the contract payment for the mercenaries he had hired. Their advance had already been paid, and with the contract broken, he owed them no remaining balance.
What good would this money do him now?
Better to offer it as payment to the man who had saved his life.
"Benefactor!!"
Delner briefly stopped the savior as he packed his things and held out the mercenaries' contract gold.
"A small token of my sincerity. Please accept it!"
The savior looked at the pouch, considered for a moment, then nodded.
"Thank you!!"
Whew.
Seeing his savior accept the gesture, Delner felt a little of the weight lift from his heart.
"Pong~"
"!!"
A tiny presence had appeared beside his face without warning.
A cute little slime that looked soft to the touch.
It floated slowly over, rubbed against him — and something astonishing happened.
The pain in his body began to ease at remarkable speed.
My body... is being healed.
Delner closed his eyes for a moment and turned his awareness inward. Most of his internal injuries had recovered, and the cracked bones had eased to mere hairline fractures.
This is the power of healing...? Was that slime just now a water spirit?
He could only marvel.
"Ah!"
When he came back to himself, the savior and the spirit were already gone.
"Ha.... hahaha!!!"
The knight laughed, light and free.
A truly strange encounter....
Leaving the departed bond behind him, Delner set about clearing the corpses. It was necessary work if he didn't want to be attacked by undead in his sleep.
The demon's carcass still lay alone in what had become a wide-open clearing. It would need to be dealt with eventually, but he wasn't worried.
Reinforcements would arrive soon enough. They would handle it.
By now, word of a powerful demon that had slaughtered most of a subjugation force — carried by the fleeing mercenaries — would have spread through the territory.
Leaving a thing like this free would mean catastrophic damage to the nobles' estates. Anyone could see that. To protect their lands, they would reorganize and come quickly.
The priests who had fled would come even faster if they still feared their god. Three days or so of waiting should do it....
Not long after finishing with the bodies, Delner lay down in a small makeshift shelter.
While he had been cleaning up, the sky had somehow been painted over in orange.
Looking up at that sky after surviving — it was truly beautiful.
Watching the sunset sink below the horizon, Delner made a vow.
He would keep looking at this view. He would keep surviving. He would grow stronger.
The knight Delner smiled and murmured to himself.
"So my fate was not meant to end here...."
A young knight's duel against a mighty demon.
And a strange encounter with a mysterious wanderer.
His journey had only just begun.
As for the savior who had rescued him — realizing they shared no common language, and the despair that followed — that is a story for another time.