First Blood
Judging by the size and number of the encampments, roughly sixty to seventy.
Having concealed the mercenaries in the forest and confirmed the scale of the greenskin camp, Wolf decided it was well within their means to handle. He jerked his chin at Frederick.
They had long since reached the point where words were unnecessary. Frederick took command of the shield-bearing mercenaries, crouching low as they crept slowly toward the tents.
"On my signal, volley fire on a high arc. After that, free shooting."
Wolf issued the order to the archers, then readied the remaining mercenaries—armed with a mismatched assortment of close-combat weapons—to charge at a moment's notice.
"Hah… hah…"
Kaisent felt the air of war settle over him. He wasn't tired, yet his breathing had gone ragged and his hands trembled violently.
"Colton."
"Aye, boss."
"If Kaisent stays like that, take his bow after the first volley if you have to. Don't let him shoot."
"Understood."
Wolf ordered the mercenary named Colton to seize Kaisent's bow if the boy slipped into full panic. He had rolled through enough battlefields to know, bone-deep, what a panicked ally was capable of.
Clang-clang-clang-clang-clang-clang-clang-clang!
While Wolf was still giving instructions, a goblin in a watchtower cobbled together from stacked furniture spotted Frederick's shield wall and began hammering on a battered hunk of scrap metal.
"Smoothskins! The smoothskins are coming!"
Kaisent watched as greenskins poured out from deeper inside the camp, answering the alarm of a goblin barely smaller than himself.
"Kuaaaah!"
"Uwaaargh!"
Three kinds of greenskin emerged from the encampment.
Orcs—thick slabs of iron hanging from heavily muscled frames. Hobgoblins—built somewhere between a goblin and an orc. And goblins themselves, clad in leather scraps and carrying crude bows and spears.
The orcs had linked iron plates to cover their chests and backs, and they carried massive two-handed weapons. The hobgoblins wore human armor and wielded human arms. The goblins made do with poor leather and rough-hewn bows and spears.
"Ready!"
Seeing the greenskins surge toward the shield wall, Wolf gave the command. Every archer nocked an arrow and settled into the posture for a high-arcing volley.
"Uh—ah—aah—"
Crushed beneath the savage air of a battlefield where cold steel decided life and death—no guns, no mechs—Kaisent fumbled for an arrow and dropped it, his fingers slipping in a humiliating fumble.
Only days ago he had sworn to master ranged combat because close quarters terrified him. Now his mind had gone blank; he no longer even knew what he was thinking.
"Hey, kid. From here on, this isn't a world you can walk into with ordinary resolve."
Colton, drawing his own bow at Kaisent's side on Wolf's orders, offered the advice in an easy, unhurried voice.
Resolve…
The word Colton had spoken drove itself into Kaisent's mind, and he finally understood why he was fighting.
To take revenge on that man. To get Seol-yeong back. If I run from this, finding her will be impossible even in my dreams.
To find Dang Seol-yeong—who had vanished somewhere—he would have to pay fortunes to information networks, or search for her himself. And even if he somehow found her, should they ever cross paths again with the man who had attacked them, both of them would die. That man had been half-dead from some earlier battle, and he had still overwhelmed her completely.
If I run now, I won't find her—and I won't get my revenge!
The grief and hatred of watching everything precious to him crushed and destroyed by the will of someone stronger rose up inside him. The paralysis in his head cleared.
Creak—
The dazed, terror-stricken eyes were gone. Kaisent now wore the eyes of a warrior. He ignored the arrow lying in the dirt, drew a fresh one, and pulled the string taut.
He pulled himself out of a panic? Does he carry a sense of mission stronger than the terror of war itself?
Colton was startled—both by the sight of Kaisent conquering his fear, and by the fact that a boy so young and so frightened possessed a purpose fierce enough to make him fight through it.
In any case, the greenskins were charging the shield wall headlong, their flanks wide open. Colton gave the order to fire.
"Loose!"
Thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip!
The simultaneous release of bowstrings rang out, and arrows climbed on a diagonal before raining down among the greenskins.
"Kieeek!"
"Kuwaaargh!"
Struck from the side, a portion of the greenskin force peeled away and charged the archers.
Except for a lord-class commander capable of binding them into a single force, every greenskin's entire strategy amounted to massing up and rushing forward. Against their raw physical power, meeting them head-on was dangerous—but a textbook ambush or surprise attack could thin their ranks this easily.
"Chaaarge!"
"Uwaaaaah!"
"Kill them!"
Wolf ordered the unshielded mercenaries forward and led the way himself, swinging a massive two-handed sword.
"Kraraaak!"
Among the greenskins racing toward them, an orc carrying a huge axe roughly jammed into a thick wooden haft singled out Wolf and attacked.
In that instant, a white aura flared along Wolf's blade. When steel met the axe, the weapon split as cleanly as tofu—and the cut continued straight through the orc's neck.
"Uwaaaaah!"
"Wawawawa!"
The mercenaries' morale soared at the overwhelming martial display of their leader at the front, and they crashed into the greenskins.
Wolf focused on the orcs and the better-armed hobgoblins, and the greenskin numbers dropped rapidly. That did not mean the mercenaries escaped unscathed.
Thuk!
"Gah!"
"Kikekek!"
In the moment a mercenary parried a hobgoblin's sword, a goblin used its small stature to drive a spear up between his legs. The man staggered, his knee ruined.
"Uwoooargh!"
Seizing the opening, the hobgoblin swung a longsword—clearly looted from a human—at the mercenary's head. The man raised his weapon in a power-drained stance to block, but a single clash shattered his posture and sent him sprawling.
His comrades were too busy fighting their own greenskins to help. Sensing death close, the mercenary squeezed his eyes shut—and the hobgoblin, about to strike again, suddenly faltered, then toppled forward limply on top of him.
"Wha—!? Ah— wait…?"
The mercenary, still screaming at the sudden turn, saw the arrow buried in the hobgoblin's skull and finally allowed himself to breathe.
Right between the eyes? Who the hell…?
Using the hobgoblin's corpse—tongue lolling, eyes rolled back, an arrow driven clean through the brow—as a shield, the mercenary crawled backward and withdrew to safety.
He's dead.
Having witnessed a fellow mercenary in mortal danger and, without thinking, loosed a perfect shot, Kaisent wore a blank expression.
I killed that person…
To Kaisent, who had seen countless races across the cosmos, greenskins and humans were the same—people, living beings. They spoke. Even in their savagery they seemed to have a culture of sorts—bone-ornament necklaces and the like. The humans of this world who called greenskins "monsters" would have found the thought absurd, but for Kaisent, raised in a society that recognized the diversity of species, it was unavoidable.
This is the path I chose. I won't start whining about it now!
He forced the shock of killing down beneath his thirst for revenge and his longing for Dang Seol-yeong, and nocked another arrow.
Noona. Noona! Noona…!
Every time one of his arrows punched into a greenskin's head and the creature bit its tongue and rolled its eyes, it felt as if someone were driving a hammer into his chest. The urge to fling the bow away right then and there rose again and again; he held it back by clinging to the thought of her. Tears ran down his face against his will, and still he did not stop shooting.
The battle ended, as expected, in a mercenary victory.
But this particular win had more than a few strange points about it.
"Not a single man dead?"
The shield-bearers had formed ranks, absorbing enemy attacks steadily and countering; a handful of wounded was all they had to show. The regular mercenaries, though, who mixed it up in the melee, should have taken fatalities. Yet this fight had produced wounded—and not one corpse.
"Whoa. How did someone put it right there?"
"No kidding. Whoever it was got damn lucky."
"If this bastard had still been alive, a few of us would be dead."
While hacking off greenskin heads and scavenging the field for loot, the mercenaries took a particular interest in one orc corpse—a massive specimen whose face had been hidden behind a full helm. Larger than the other orcs and better armed, it had been killed instantly by a single arrow driven clean through the eye-slit of its helmet.
Had that orc—one Wolf never got the chance to face—been allowed to run wild, the death toll for this fight would have climbed into the double digits.
"Ugh… I almost died. Someone put an arrow into the thing that was about to finish me, and that's the only reason I'm still here."
"I always figured the archers just sat back lobbing shots and collecting easy pay."
"We'll have to buy those bow-boys a round later."
There were other mercenaries, too, who had scraped past death only because of someone's arrow. Most of them chalked the whole fight up to good luck and moved on. But Wolf and Frederick, who knew their company's capabilities intimately, sensed at once that this had left the realm of luck behind.
The archers were ordinary—no better, no worse. And yet today they had suddenly sniped dangerous enemies and pulled allies out of mortal danger with the precision of dedicated marksmen. Neither man could believe the entire archer corps had spontaneously awakened and leveled up overnight.
"Kaisent."
"That boy?"
The newcomer to the archer unit came to mind at once. After confirming there were no survivors among the plundered villagers and recovering what valuables remained, the two of them went looking for Colton.
"Colton. Where's Kaisent?"
"Went off to throw up the second the fighting stopped."
Only after the greenskins had been wiped out did Kaisent's reason return from the heat of battle. Every emotion crashed in at once, and he had vomited his guts out.
"Did you check any of the arrows Kaisent shot?"
"I made sure the first one hit a greenskin skull instead of an ally's back, then stopped watching. Did someone get hit?"
"No. First fights, people make mistakes. I was just asking."
Even a veteran like Colton could not pour every scrap of attention onto Kaisent when a single one of his own arrows might decide a comrade's life or death. The moment he saw that first shot fly true into a greenskin, he had turned back to his own work.
After sending Colton away, the two men continued their conversation not as Lillian and Frederick, but as the co-founders of the company—the captain and vice-captain.
"Luck?"
"Too many times for luck."
"But Kaisent's skill was never at that level…"
Kaisent had only started learning the bow two weeks ago. If two weeks of practice were enough to pick out only enemies in the middle of a chaotic melee, every army in the world would train nothing but archers. Massed volley fire—laying down a curtain of arrows—could be taught relatively quickly. Precision sniping, on the other hand, took years.
"Did he deceive us? A spy?"
Frederick considered the worst case. Wolf shook his head.
"No. If he were a spy, it would be easier to stay out of sight doing menial work."
"But he was definitely hiding his skill."
Whatever Kaisent's purpose, they could agree that he had concealed his ability. Nothing else explained the archers' performance today. So why hide it? What did he stand to gain?
They found no answer to that question, and decided simply to watch the boy more carefully from now on.