Chapter 40
Translator: RaidenTL
Chapter 40
It was a place so pathetic it hardly deserved to be called a village. It was a tiny, remote settlement, the kind that probably didn't even appear on the local lord's tax ledgers.
A single log temple and three or four sparsely scattered houses were all it had.
Although the temple dedicated to their god was not built with high-quality materials, the devotion of those who built it was palpable. It looked neat and sturdy.
However, someone had smashed the doors and windows.
Light streamed through the shattered openings like the gaze of a god. Following that light inside revealed a sea of blood, with corpses strewn everywhere.
Steam rose from the fresh slaughter, mingling with the cold air.
"W-when the Day of Promise c-comes, the God of Condemnation will p-punish you all."
Bleeding from his entire body, a priest collapsed on the floor, gasping as he dragged himself away. He was trying to put distance between himself and someone.
Escape was clearly impossible, so the man who had reduced him to this state simply stood there, looking down at him.
The man's sword was still sheathed at his waist, but he held a sickle-like weapon in his hand. Thick blood dripped from its blade.
People often resemble certain animals. The man with the sickle had a protruding jaw that gave him the unmistakable look of a dog—a fierce fighting dog. Yet, his eyes were surprisingly calm.
His face was covered in numerous small scars, with a particularly large one slashing across his right eye.
The man spoke.
"When?"
"What?"
"When exactly is he going to punish me?"
"W-what do you mean?"
"You're slow on the uptake. When I was a kid, I prayed every single day for divine punishment to strike. I begged him to kill my piece-of-shit parents. Or at least kill me. But no matter how much I prayed, he just ignored me. So, I killed them with my own hands. And then I realized."
"..."
"There is no god. Nothing even close to one."
The man's blasphemy was so casual, so effortless. The priest's eyes widened, seemingly more shocked by those words than by his own horrific plight. A demon…
"Even if I kill you, no divine punishment is going to strike me down. But if there is such a thing as God's mercy, it's that you ran into me. If you'd run into the others, you'd be begging them to kill you by now, not praying to God."
The man walked toward the priest. His footsteps squelched in the blood pooling on the floor.
As the man drew near, the priest closed his eyes and prayed.
"O Lord, save this pitiful soul..."
"There is no divine punishment, and there is no salvation. But of the two, 'salvation' is the bigger load of shit."
Swish! Thud!
The man's sickle drove straight into the crown of the priest's head. The priest thrashed like a landed fish. Just then, a cheerful female voice called out from outside the temple.
"Shuti! Shuti! What's taking you so long?!"
The man called Shuti was none other than Mad Dog Steiner. The quintet must have been quite close, given their use of nicknames.
Steiner looked down at the priest he had just killed. He was reasonably satisfied with the sight of the corpse, a sickle embedded in its skull.
But that fleeting amusement quickly passed, and he turned to leave the temple. Outside, three others were waiting, having already finished their work.
Among them, the woman who had called out to Steiner was fluttering about in a dance, looking incredibly excited. She was draped in several crudely stitched-together hides.
They were human skins, the patched-together sections differing subtly in color and texture.
The woman's actual skin, however, was dark and bumpy, resembling a toad. It was the result of practicing an extreme, aberrant Mana Drive. This woman was Erze the Skin Collector.
"Shuti, what took you so long? Ohoho. Look at this."
She approached Steiner, raising her arm and stroking it as if showing off.
"Isn't it so soft? My skin is getting prettier and prettier. Ohoho."
"Sure... But where's Tony?"
Tony was the nickname for Leto, the necromancer and experimenter of the Ehrenberg Quintet.
"That gloomy bastard said he got everything he needed and left first," said a man dressed in pitch-black from head to toe. He was the one known as Ghost, the Ghost Sword. To any observer, however, he seemed the gloomiest of them all.
"I told you guys to head to the rendezvous point once the job was done. Didn't you pass it on?"
"I thought you did," Ghost said, looking at Erze.
"Why would I talk to him? I thought Hati had."
The man called Hati was inhumanly tall and massive, like a giant out of legend. Beside him stood a rectangular shield as large as an ordinary person. He was Hanet, known as the Iron Bulwark.
Standing with his arms crossed and leaning against the wall, the top of his head nearly touched the roof.
"Why are you dragging me into this all of a sudden? And I did tell him."
The three of them, excluding Steiner, shifted the blame to one another. For a group with such a fearsome reputation, they were surprisingly disorganized. It was a strange sort of camaraderie, proof of how close they were.
They had all graduated from the same academy, and though they bickered constantly, they were like brothers and sisters. Perhaps their bond was even tighter than that of a real family.
The only serious problem was that they had failed to grow up properly, maturing instead into horribly twisted individuals.
"Hati says he told him."
"Sigh..."
Steiner let out a sigh. Then, he spoke to Erze, who was closest to him.
"Eri, you go get him."
"What? Me? Why?"
"That loser actually listens to you, at least."
"Hmph, well, that's true. Being pretty is such a chore."
Erze spun around on the spot as if flaunting her beauty. But she was the polar opposite of beautiful. She was grotesque, horrific, and completely out of her mind.
"Then the three of us will head out first. Eri, I'm counting on you."
"Okay..."
"By the way, Shuti, did you hear?" Ghost asked just as they were about to leave.
"Hear what?"
"They say some heroes showed up in Siegfringer recently. Apparently, they're wiping out thieves' guilds and bandits, saving people. And they do it for free. I heard Haspil is dead too. And Auntie Lily."
Steiner seemed to ponder this for a moment, then spat out a single sentence.
"Must be some real freaks."
Saving others without asking for anything in return? In Steiner's worldview, they were freaks beyond comprehension. Utter, absolute freaks.
*
Even including his previous life, Rickert had never seen terrain like this.
The moss-covered ground looked merely uneven, but each step caused it to slosh and sway, as if a thin crust lay over a pool of water.
At any moment, the ground could give way, sucking a person down to their death in an instant.
To make matters worse, the snow cover made it impossible to tell where it was safe to step. It was a fascinating yet incredibly dangerous swamp.
In this vast, empty wasteland, they had no idea where to even begin looking for Leto's laboratory.
The one saving grace was that it hadn't snowed recently, allowing them to spot footprints. Judging by the size of the prints, they undoubtedly belonged to the Nameless.
"Oh? It's Mister's footprints."
This time, Boribori noticed them before the sharp-eyed Rickert.
The footprints headed north. Rickert and Boribori followed the trail, the ground squishing beneath their feet with every step.
After walking for some time, they came upon an unbelievable sight.
Groaaan...
Corpses with rotting flesh shambled about as if they were still alive. And there wasn't just one or two.
Several of the corpses scattered around were still moving, though by all accounts, they should have been dead long ago.
Their milky-white eyes rolled, and some even crawled slowly despite having their entire lower halves blown away.
"A-a necromancer..." Boribori muttered.
Confronted with such an absurd sight, Rickert's mind went blank for a moment. Was magic truly this horrific?
Forcing himself to snap out of it, he carefully examined the scene. The corpses looked as though they had been mauled by some massive beast. They were crushed, trampled, and hacked by axes.
"It's Mister. He must have fought here," Rickert said.
At his words, Boribori crossed the gruesome scene without looking back, following the footprints. Rickert quickened his pace as well.
At some point, a hazy white fog began to roll in, despite it being midday.
It wasn't thick enough to completely obscure their vision, so they managed to follow the footprints until they stopped at a bleak, ominous-looking cabin. It sat on what was probably the sturdiest patch of ground in the swamp.
Rickert unslung the sword from his shoulder and held it in one hand, ready to draw at a moment's notice as he approached the cabin.
He cautiously pushed open the unlocked door, only to be met with another gruesome, sickening sight.
All kinds of anatomical specimens were preserved in jars of fluid, many of which had shattered and spilled across the floor. A bizarre, pungent odor from the liquid assaulted his nose.
And there, resting squarely on what appeared to be the necromancer's desk, was his severed head. It was Leto the Experimenter. He had already been slain by the Nameless.
He must have looked grotesque in life, but in death, he was even more bizarre. Perhaps because of what they had just seen outside, it felt as though his eyes might snap open at any second.
"He left it for us," Boribori said.
"Huh?"
"Otherwise, there's no reason Mister would have gone out of his way to cut off his head and leave it here."
"I suppose..."
Indeed, the Nameless was not the type to engage in such macabre displays during a fight. That meant there was another intention behind it, and Boribori's theory seemed correct.
But for the two boys, finding the Nameless was far more important than taking the head.
Besides, this wasn't a bounty hunt where they had to prove the kill to authorities; it was an assassination request, meaning they only needed to eliminate the targets. They didn't strictly need to bring back the head. They could just slice off an ear or take a distinctive item.
"Oh my, what do we have here? A couple of cuties?"
A cheerful female voice suddenly rang out from behind them. Rickert and Boribori spun around reflexively.
A toad-like woman came into view. She didn't just resemble a toad; she looked as if a toad had literally taken human form. And she was draped in human skin.
Rickert's intuition flared instantly.
"Erze?"
"Oh? You know my name? Well, I suppose my beauty does precede me."
Erze flaunted her hideous appearance with incongruously elegant gestures.
"Where are the others?"
"Hmm?"
"You guys are a quintet."
"Oh, please. How could we always stick together? They're probably in Lindveil."
Lindveil was the place where the quintet had committed their very first village-wide massacre.
Whether by coincidence, irony, or sheer malice, Lindveil was also where the Nameless used to live.
In any case, Erze had absurdly blabbed their secret rendezvous point without a second thought. In a way, it might have been because she felt absolutely no threat from the two boys before her.
Or perhaps she simply had no intention of letting them leave alive in the first place.
"You boys are a bit on the older side, but your skin is quite nice. Yes, I've decided. I'll add you to my collection. Aren't you grateful?"
Rickert and Boribori had never been called "older" in their lives. Everyone usually thought of them as young, but apparently not to Erze.
The toad-like woman cackled hoarsely and drew a sharp dagger. It wasn't a typical dagger, but rather a tool used for skinning.
But as she stepped toward the boys, her eyes caught what lay beyond them. The head resting on the desk. Erze froze, staring blankly for a moment, before her body began to tremble violently.
"T-Tony?"
They usually ignored and bickered with each other, but that was all just playful teasing. To her, the Ehrenberg Quintet was family.
Unable to accept reality, her eyes flared with murderous rage, and her face contorted hideously. Her already ugly face twisted into something terrifying enough to haunt nightmares.
"What did you do to Tony—!"
Erze shrieked, but she couldn't finish her sentence. Rickert and Boribori had already drawn their swords and lunged.
Clang! Shatter!
Amazingly, however, their swords only scratched the outer layer of human skin she wore, failing to pierce her actual hide beneath.
Rickert's Meteoric Iron Sword was such a fine blade that it didn't break, but Boribori's mana-infused sword snapped in two—even though it was capable of cutting through almost anything.
It felt as though they had struck a solid boulder. Rickert felt the violent vibration of the blade reverberate through his hands and deep into his bones. Grimacing, he quickly backed away.
Meanwhile, Erze lunged at Rickert with murderous intent.
"Ricky!"
Boribori cried out, clutching his aching wrist. But in that moment, Rickert almost thought Erze was joking. Her attack was incredibly clumsy.
Was she unable to control her emotions after losing her companion? Was her martial skill simply abysmal despite her tough skin? Or was it a trap? A myriad of thoughts flashed through his mind in a split second.
But Rickert, having survived countless life-or-death battles, found his answer even in that fleeting moment.
Letting go of his sword, his hands moved in a blur, instantly snapping her arm joint.
Crack!
"Aaaaargh!"
Seizing the opening, Boribori leaped onto Erze's back. Wrapping his legs tightly around her waist like a turtle shell, he shoved his hands into her mouth, grabbing her upper and lower jaws to pry them apart.
As mana surged through his veins and into his muscles, a monstrous strength erupted.
"Hrrgh!"
Crunch.
"Aaaaaaargh!"
Erze's jaw dislocated, her mouth stretching wide like a snake's. She thrashed wildly, but Boribori refused to let go.
When Boribori finally ripped her lower jaw completely off, she lost her balance and threw him.
Crash!
Boribori was sent flying, but he scrambled back to his feet instantly.
"Ghhhrrr..."
Erze could only let out a guttural, undead-like groan, unable to speak. Her tongue, having lost its support, hung limply downward as she stumbled, trying to flee.
"Where do you think you're going?!"
Rickert pursued her barehanded. Terrified, Erze tried to run, but Rickert was far faster.
Catching up to her in an instant, he grabbed her leg, tripped her, and twisted her ankle.
"Aaaaaah!"
Erze writhed in agony on the ground. She reached out to grab Rickert, but he had already leaped back out of reach. Drawing a dagger from his breast, he spoke.
"Are your eyeballs tough too?"
"Ghhhrrr..."
"I certainly hope so."
Without waiting for an answer, he drove the blade deep into her eye. As the blade pierced her eyeball and reached her soft brain, Erze's body convulsed once before going completely limp.
Against ordinary opponents, her blade-resistant skin would have made her nearly invincible, but these two boys were far from ordinary.
"Pant, pant, pant..."
Boribori approached and looked down at Erze's lifeless body.
Rickert asked the panting Boribori, "Are you okay?"
"Yeah. What about you, Ricky?"
"I'm fine."
"Then let's go."
"Yeah."
After gathering proof of Leto and Erze's deaths, the two boys immediately set off for Lindveil.
Although they had completed the request by killing Leto and Erze, Rickert and Boribori's journey was not yet over. Nor did they have any intention of stopping.
However, Rickert harbored one lingering anxiety. It wasn't a worry about the Nameless dying. He was someone who accepted death with stoic resignation.
Rather, it was the thought of what meaning there could possibly be in dying after punishing oneself like that, regardless of whether revenge was achieved or not.
Though the circumstances of Ricky in his previous life and the Nameless were different, there were undeniable parallels. Rickert was anxious because the Nameless seemed to be following in Ricky's exact footsteps. Because at the end of that path, there was no salvation.