The Potential Assessment Ends
The potential assessment was over.
Of the nearly a hundred barbarians gathered ahead of the coming-of-age rite, only five had been rated high potential. The largest share had landed in the low tier, and the next largest in the middle. In potential, Yujun stood utterly alone, and the barbarians' attention had nowhere to go but him.
"Shin Yujun. I'm seeing you in a new light."
"My dad says I should get close to you."
"Marry me. I want your child."
They were frank to a startling degree, almost embarrassingly direct. A barbarian of exceptional potential was an object of envy to everyone, and suitors—men and women alike—threw themselves at such a person without a second thought.
"Shin Yujun. I have a lovely younger sister. She's still young, but settling a betrothal in advance wouldn't be the worst idea..."
"I've got high potential too! Shin Yujun! Come to the barracks with me, right now—"
"Who is the greatest beauty of our tribe? My mother, Lasires. What do you say? Won't you come home with me?"
Yujun recoiled, waving them off in horror. His mother? What the hell. This bastard—no. This barbarian with the heavy, striking features was an actual lunatic.
"A refusal, then. A shame. If you'd accepted, we could surely have made a warm and happy family..."
Yeah. Definitely a lunatic.
And so, on the strength of a high potential rating alone, Yujun became the most popular man among the barbarians. It was a popularity he wanted nothing to do with. The weather was hot, everyone was half-naked, and they had apparently exercised before the assessment; the sour reek of sweat stabbed at his nose. He made no effort to hide how uncomfortable he was.
This was no time to be getting friendly with young barbarians. Leaving wasn't an option either, though. He knew nothing about this world, and ignorance was its own kind of danger. He was nowhere near his true strength. The old him would have walked out at once and gone hunting for the clear conditions, but die once and you could never set foot in an event dungeon again. He had to be careful.
Yujun walked over to Baren, the one who had been buddying up to him earlier, and asked.
"What comes next?"
"What do you mean, what? The assessment's over, so we go hunt."
"Hunt? Hunt what?"
"...You're still keeping that up? The amnesia act?"
"I'm asking because I really don't know."
"You feel like a different person."
"So? What are we hunting?"
"We're going after a Tyragos. Just us. No help from the adults."
"A Tyragos?"
"You really don't remember a thing?"
"That's right."
"A Tyragos is a massive reptilian monster they call the predator of the plains. Its hide is so tough most blades can't even pierce it."
"How big?"
"Figure about ten times your size."
"And we're supposed to take that down ourselves?"
"Yeah. We fight with our lives on the line. That's how you break your limits and grow."
"..."
Level 10 barbarians banding together to kill a monster like that was hard to picture. Still, they wouldn't assign barbarians who hadn't even had their coming-of-age rite something outright impossible.
"Does everyone go?"
"Of course. Sit this out because you're scared, and that barbarian never gets a coming-of-age rite. You're culled. They won't even call someone like that a barbarian."
To these people, barbarian seemed to be a name worn with considerable pride.
"Must be nice for you."
"Why?"
"If this Tyragos hunt goes well, your standing's going to change, isn't it? You'll get noticeably stronger."
Baren wasn't wrong. Rated beyond even the highest tier of potential, Yujun could hardly be said to stand on the same line as the other barbarians. It wasn't a matter of being a few steps ahead. He might as well have been the only one with wings.
"That's why I'm saying you need to watch yourself from here on. You never know when someone jealous of you will come at your back."
"Thanks for the advice. But... you're not going to?"
"Me? Why would I? I get to be friends with the guy who's going to be the Barbarian King."
"Friends?"
"We're not?"
"We are. Friends."
"Right! Friends. Friends. I mean, we've known each other for months."
Baren said it with a showy little flourish.
They decided the Tyragos hunt would begin after sunset. The reason was simple enough: a Tyragos appeared only at night. While the sun was up, it never showed itself.
A raid with limited visibility...
Yujun couldn't gauge the barbarians' level with any precision. His senses were nothing like before; their strength no longer registered in his body the way it once had. But if he assumed the gap between them and his current self wasn't enormous, he could already tell the hunt would not be easy. He looked down at his own hands—pale and fine beside the other barbarians'—and clenched them hard, then opened them, over and over.
My strength has dropped by an absurd amount.
His appearance hadn't changed, yet the power had drained clean out of him. The mana he could hold had shrunk drastically as well, leaving nothing but emptiness. Even so, Yujun trusted his potential. More precisely, he trusted the system. The system generally paid out rewards equal to the price, or the sacrifice.
Day sank into evening. The barbarians, who had been loosening up with light warm-ups, set out as if they had been waiting for it. Yujun walked somewhere in the middle of the column, and the whole way their eyes never left him. Baren, beside him, seemed to enjoy the attention. Yujun only found it tiresome. Staring alone he could have lived with. The problem was that they kept talking to him.
"I'm telling you, my mother is Lasires..."
"And what do you want me to do about it?"
The especially persistent ones only peeled off once he glared hard enough, or answered with an edge. Baren, for reasons Yujun couldn't fathom, kept grinning. Yujun simply waited for the Tyragos to appear.
How much time had passed? In the middle of the wide-open plain, the adult barbarian assigned only as a guide raised a hand.
"The Tyragos will show itself soon. If you don't want to be wiped out, you'd better get ready properly. Your mind, or whatever else."
At his words, tension settled over their faces. Baren stood among them wearing the same expression.
"Shin Yujun. I'm counting on you."
"Don't. Right now you're stronger than I am."
"...Come on. That's a joke."
"It's not."
Yujun said it quietly, without a trace of a smile. Baren's face went ashen.
"Weren't barbarians supposed to be fearless?"
"Where'd you get that? The ones without fear are the ones who become barbarians."
"Then you won't make it."
"Hey, you can't just decide that. No fear at all, and you're no different from a moth flying into a flame."
That was when it happened.
Grrn. Grr-grrn.
A rough vibration rose from the sparsely wooded ground. Not one barbarian failed to understand what it meant. Yujun gripped the crude iron sword he had been given after the assessment, and the moment the hilt settled in his hand, confidence welled up in him. A puzzle that hadn't fit anywhere seemed to snap into place the instant he held a sword. Whatever it was, the effect was a good one.
He had no intention of charging the Tyragos outright, though. He needed time to study an unknown creature. He had heard about it from Baren, but scraps of secondhand information were nothing next to seeing the thing himself. In the dark, its shape flickered in and out of view. Before he had entered the event dungeon, he would have seen it clear as day. In his current state, not a chance. Yujun narrowed his eyes and fought not to lose track of it.
The Tyragos was quicker than he had expected.
KWAANG!
"Aaaagh!"
"Guhk!"
A heavy crash, as if something had collided, and several barbarians screamed.
"Weapons up!"
"It's the thing!"
They had supposedly been taught how to fight a Tyragos beforehand. Yujun, to his considerable grievance, had missed that lesson. Not that it mattered. Against a Tyragos of overwhelming strength, they could barely scratch it no matter how they swung.
"The weak point! They said it has a weak point!"
Even now, Yujun couldn't make out its shape with any clarity. All he knew was that it was an enormous reptile walking on two legs. The weak point lay on its back, and that spot was no bigger than a grain of millet. Hitting it when he could barely see was extraordinarily difficult, and a hit meant nothing unless the accuracy came with force. It had to be the exact place, and it had to be a heavy impact. Failing that, you would have to carve through the hide itself.
Of course, not a single barbarian had ever managed that. Every kill had come from striking the weak point, and no wonder. The Tyragos's hide was too hard for their weapons to pierce. Strength was part of it, but the real limit was the weapons they carried, and they were hardly masters of mana either. For barbarians whose entire way of fighting was inborn strength, a Tyragos was a natural enemy in the purest sense. In practice, the hundreds of them couldn't so much as stir.
"H-how are we supposed to stop that?"
"Spread out! Is there a brave barbarian who'll draw its eyes?"
The word brave rinsed the fear clean off them.
"I'll do it!"
"I can handle being bait!"
They tried, in their own way, to match their timing against it, but the Tyragos's strength was beyond anything they had imagined. Not one of them could withstand a single blow. It wasn't that the creature had superb technique, or any great intelligence. It was simply huge, hard, and strong. That was all.
Yujun stood well back and only watched them fight. He moved only after a full twenty more barbarians had been sacrificed—not because he had been waiting for them to die, but because he had been waiting to grasp what abilities the Tyragos possessed. And for all that waiting, the creature had none.
Figures. These barbarians don't even have skills. If it started breathing fire on top of that, the balance would be completely broken.
He hadn't forgotten that his level was 10, which meant the difficulty couldn't be absurdly high. He advanced slowly, hidden in the gaps between the barbarians. Even he couldn't think of a way to kill a Tyragos in one strike without hitting the weak point. If he had at least been allowed to use the consumables in his inventory, it might have been possible. He wasn't.
When the opening comes, I take it.
To swing at the optimal moment, he first had to be close. That was what the approach was for.
There is a way to kill it without lifting a finger, actually.
Summon Paranet. But he meant to keep that as a hidden card. He had no intention of taking the easy road. More than anything, he wanted to see how potential pushed to its extreme would act. Kill the Tyragos, and he would know at once.
The creature was locked in a frantic fight. Every sweep of its tail sent barbarians flying or snapped their bodies—one or the other. Toward that thing, Yujun closed in quietly, stealthily. And at last, standing before the enormous Tyragos, his eyes went wide.
Why can I see the grain?