From the Beginning (2)
For all my talk of turning back, wiping out the human trafficking ring—Bipurit’s lot, almost certainly—turned out to be absurdly easy.
It might have been because I dropped one with the first blow, sheared the upper halves of six more with a Chamgyeok, vaulted over the carriage, and finished the rest before they could even react.
“You handled them all?!”
“Demon Knight!”
“Whoa, look at that bloodbath.”
They must have changed course mid-return and cut a straight line toward me. The three of them came pounding up from a diagonal.
I shook the gore from my armor and hauled up the one lucky bastard still breathing.
Thud.
“Guhk!”
His body slammed down right in front of the Inquisitor as she skidded to a halt.
“This one is…”
“He’s already got one foot on the road to the underworld. Hmm. Hey, can you keep him alive a little longer?”
“It is possible. But is there any need to heal this?”
“No real reason to keep him breathing, sure—but if we’re going to kill him, we should at least get some information first, don’t you think?”
“That… is a fair point. Wait.”
“As long as he can still talk, that’s enough for me.”
Ah, perfect, perfect. I love these dumplings who jump to it without being told.
I left the sticky-rice dumplings to their work and turned my gaze. Now the faces staring back at me were the ones wondering whether I was their savior or simply a butcher.
“You’re safe now.”
The one who needed to step forward first was Baramson. Brown skin, dangling earrings, braided hair, and that unmistakable sailor’s scent—people’s eyes softened a fraction at the sight of him.
“You’re safe now.”
“…You are…”
“…Support from Zakrati. So quit worrying. Just think about making it home alive.”
He quickly scanned their faces and conditions. Everyone looked half-starved; cheeks hollow, eyes dead.
The children inside the carriages were no better.
“First we need to get the shackles off, so the keys—”
“The children first! Please, save the children first!”
“Free the kids first! I’m begging you!”
“…Don’t worry. We were going to free them too. Still need the keys either way—”
“Stand aside.”
“…?”
Who says we need to find the damn keys? If there’s no path, you make one.
I wrapped mana around my hands and legs and gripped the iron bars. With a grinding screech the grate peeled open like curtains being drawn.
It was a trick I’d picked up testing just how far mana reinforcement could push my damage.
“Woooooah…”
The children who’d been cracking one eye open at the surrounding noise let out soft gasps of awe.
“Wh-what the hell?!”
“My lord, have you truly transcended human limits…?”
“Hah! So that’s an option! I’ll help as well.”
While I pried open a gap wide enough for the children, the Inquisitor—having firmly reattached the last thread of the captive’s life—seized the chains binding the carriages.
Those chains ran from the rear of each wagon to every shackled adult.
“You’re not seriously going to do that by hand, are you?”
“Even I cannot manage bare hands yet!”
“Yet?”
She gripped a length of chain taut in one hand and raised her mace with the other.
“Wait, what do you mean by ‘yet’—”
Clang!
The instant the mace slammed into the chain, the links did not merely stretch—they snapped clean. The force of her grip and the blow had simply been that overwhelming.
And she hadn’t even poured Holy Power into it the way she usually did.
“…Crazy.”
“…Yeah, I am never mouthing off to her again.”
That one even surprised me.
Kimchi Dumpling, next time you fight me, leave out the Holy Power and the mace. Hell, leave out the whole ‘using strength’ thing… One hit from that and I don’t think they’d find my bones.
“But even if you smash those, we still have to unlock the shackles themselves, right?”
Separately, the whole display hadn’t actually accomplished much. It gave them room to move, but unlocking the shackles would have done that anyway. In other words: wasted effort.
“Hah.”
Damn it. Not a complete idiot—just this airheaded dumpling. That clueless look of hers is as cute as always…
“Come out.”
“Eek!”
Anyway, time to extract the children.
I stopped mid-pry, ripped one of the bars clean off. A chunk of the surrounding planking tore free with it, but the hole grew that much wider.
Wide enough for anyone to slip through without trouble.
I quickly smoothed the jagged edges with my blade, then stepped two paces back from the opening. The children hesitated, then the larger ones began climbing out one after another.
They were good kids too—once free, the first ones helped the smaller ones down.
“Maya!”
“Dad!”
Someone called out to a child who had just dropped from the wagon. It was the man whose shackles Dev was still picking with a length of wire.
“Thank you, Lord Sea Dragon… thank you, O sea…”
“Daddy…”
The moment the cuffs fell, the man rushed over and crushed the child to his chest. The little one—maybe three or four—flung short arms around his father’s face and clung tight. Even at an age that should still have baby fat, the hollow cheeks stood out painfully.
I want to cry.
“M-Mom…”
“Mister…”
“Chinta.”
“Nadine, come here.”
With that child as the starting point, the others began finding their own people.
Exactly half of them. The remaining children simply stood there, tears dripping, with no parents or familiar adults left to claim them.
“Goddamn it…”
Baramson scrubbed a dry hand over his face. Dev kept silently working on shackles, but his expression had gone just as hard.
“Um… I know who has the keys…”
Right then a child sidled up to me and whispered. Brave and sharp little thing—both for daring to speak to me and for pinpointing exactly what we needed.
“Who.”
“A Middle woman with a red kerchief on her head… hooked nose, wart on her face.”
Had there been someone like that?
I cast my mind back to the storm of violence earlier. The people on the receiving end might remember faces; from the side doing the carving, the details were a blur.
Hmm. Or maybe she was the very first one I killed?
Filter by race and sex, and the process of elimination left only that one.
“…Right.”
Good. We’ll confirm that in a moment.
I looked down at the child. Painfully small. Part of me wanted to praise her to the skies and stuff her full of food.
“….”
But of course I couldn’t. My right arm twitched once before I forced myself to turn away.
Suddenly the blood-soaked ground all around registered in my vision. They might not have watched the killing itself, but they had certainly seen the corpses.
My mouth tasted bitter.
Clink.
Still, the guess proved right. I found the key ring on the first one I’d cut down. The pace of freeing people accelerated.
“What now?”
The real problem came after. We had no capacity to take care of these people.
“We can’t just leave them here the way we have been. There aren’t even palisades.”
Obviously, we had already rescued a great many on the way here. With ten bandit dens smashed, the number of lives pulled free might already have climbed into three digits.
But we simply lacked the strength to protect them all.
We had trusted the ones following behind and left the earlier groups at the dens. Not exactly safe, but better than wandering outside—that had been the judgment.
These people, though? Leaving them because we “didn’t have the spare capacity” was too cruel.
No geographic advantage, no roof against the dew, not enough food.
Most critically, no defenses. Nothing to keep out the beasts prowling the woods and plains.
“If we leave them, the odds of death are high.”
Even the Inquisitor said it. She was right. Ordinary beasts were already dangerous; the ones roaming this land had been demonized. Any civilians who ran into them would be slaughtered for certain.
“But the distance back to the previous dens is far too great, isn’t it?”
“—!”
Then a sound reached my ears.
It overlapped with Dev’s voice, so I couldn’t pin it cleanly… yet it grated strangely.
“We still can’t just send them off alone. Above all, there are too many kids here.”
“I know that, but…”
I snapped my hand up. The three who had been arguing fell silent at once; they read the “shut up” signal with perfect clarity and said nothing more.
“—!”
There it was again. Muffled by distance, but unmistakable. A human voice.
My body kicked off the ground immediately.
“My lord?!”
“Can’t you ever give us a heads-up first…?”
“I-I should go too—no, the people. But.”
“I’ll check it out first. You lot stay and protect these people!”
“K-khh… I-I leave it to you! If you cause that person trouble, I’ll slit your throat on the spot!”
“…You guys really know how to match that guy’s pace, huh.”
Baramson seemed to be talking plenty of trash behind my back, but my dumplings were handling things fine.
I raced across the earth without a care. Every heavy footprint punched me forward, body slicing cleanly through the air.
“Run! Don’t stop!”
And at last the source of the voices came into view: a group of maybe fifteen people, and the pack of foxes hunting them.
Affected by the demonization of the land, their eyes burned scarlet and their bodies had swollen to the size of wolves—terrifying enough on their own. The fact that they were still sprinting with several arrows sticking out of their hides only made it worse.
“…! A person…?”
The one in the lead locked eyes with me mid-sprint. I ignored it. My legs drove hard into the ground and launched me into the air.
“What—!”
Yip!
I cleared the human group in a perfect arc, and now the fox pack filled my vision.
I drew the scimitar. The blade rose in a diagonal slash the moment my feet left the earth and cut one fox cleanly in two.
The sword flowed smoothly into a reverse turn, then carved upward from below on the opposite diagonal. The smaller fox that had just lunged at me split apart.
Third strike: a downward cut. The blade cleaved the tiniest of them lengthwise, then thrust straight forward for the final target.
The last one was the male fox bringing up the rear of the pack.
Shunk!
The male that had been about to sink its fangs into me died with nothing but steel in its mouth instead. The blade punched through the roof of its maw and out the back of its skull, then tore free in a spray of blood.
Thud. The massive body sprawled across the dirt.
“The foxes… they’re all dead…”
“How… those things never went down that easy…”
So that’s why they had so many arrows in them. These people had been fighting back.
I confirmed the obvious and recovered my blade. Held level with my line of sight, the scimitar felt faintly warped.
It was a scavenged sword. If it breaks, no one can complain.
“Um… who… who are you?”
Once things quieted, the person who had been in the lead approached slowly and spoke.
Wheat-blond hair so pale it was nearly white, sharp eyes, pointed ears strung with bone ornaments—those details stood out.
Click. My sword spun smoothly back into its sheath.
“None of your business.”
I’m far more curious about all of you.
They might have been fleeing foxes, but their armament was no joke. Every single one of them carried a sword—that alone said plenty.
And some of them smelled a lot like Baramson…
Pirates, maybe?
“My lord!”
A voice arrived without a single footfall. The suddenness made the group whip around in fright, weapons swinging toward the sound as a bonus.
“Haa, why are you always so damn fast?”
But Dev was the type who stayed bold in the strangest places. Whether eyes and blades pointed at him or not, he strolled up talking like nothing was wrong.
“And what’s this now? Demons? You heard that racket from that far away and came hunting?”
Dev managed to convey “you’re a monster” without ever saying the words.
“And, wait—these people…”
Only now did Dev turn his head toward them. Whether he had truly only just noticed them was anyone’s guess. I doubted it.
“Who are you lot?”
Maybe even the act of setting them aside because of me had been part of Dev’s arrangement.
“…Hah. I’m Blue Moon Watia. Professionally a pirate… but for the moment I’m serving as field captain of the resistance force.”
Who knows—maybe the guy who recognized Baramson’s face knows other pirate faces too.
“Resistance force?”
“Yeah. Resistance force. You haven’t heard the news yet? It’s the group formed to fight Bipurit and the pirates under him. More precisely, to protect people from those bastards.”
Blue Moon glanced my way as she spoke.
“We’re looking for people who were taken… If you have any spare capacity, could we ask for help?”
“You don’t even know who we are and you’re asking that? Aren’t you worried we might be Bipurit’s men?”
“The ones who saved me and then killed those demon beasts? Fat chance. If it had been those bastards, they would have left me to die. Then they’d have sprinkled powder and sauntered away from the beasts without a care.”
Whether Blue Moon was simply free with information or Dev was deliberately asking questions that forced answers, the knowledge kept piling up: a militia was operating, pirates and civilians alike were part of it, and Bipurit’s side had some method of avoiding those beasts.
“Is that so.”
“So? What’s your answer? If you need payment—”
“Take them.”
And honestly, once I knew that much, I already understood everything that mattered. Dev might want finer details, but for me the situation was clear.
Besides, the “taken people” Blue Moon mentioned looked an awful lot like the group we were currently babysitting.
If there was an organization willing to take them in, we welcomed it.
“What?”
“I said take them.”
“……??”
I left those words hanging and turned back the way I had come, trusting Dev completely to handle the rest.
“…The people you’re looking for… I think we rescued them a little while ago.”
“What?”
See? I told you Dev would take care of it!
“Shall we go check?”
“Y-yeah…”
A mutually beneficial compromise was dramatically reached—though it somehow left only my character looking like bottom-tier trash.
“Oh, you’re finally back? Where the hell did you— Watia unnie?”
“…Suriya? Is that really you, Suriya?”
“…Good gods, we heard you’d gone scouting to Montata and the trail went cold. You’ve been here the whole time?!”
“Damn it, who are you to talk! You worthless little brother!”
If we walked a little farther we even got a sibling reunion that felt like the gods were messing with us.