The Arrow That Halted the Chase
"Were human walls always this weak?"
"These humans have spent so long fighting their own stupid, barbaric kin that they never fortified the way the ones we used to face did."
"Even so, this is far too fragile."
Naturally, the heteromorphic orcs—unaware they had crossed into another world—found themselves puzzled by the utterly ordinary walls before them.
"Chieftain. We've spotted a band of armed humans fleeing."
"Lucky bastards."
The young orc, his entire body a mass of compressed muscle, followed the direction the shaman indicated. He quickly confirmed that the Wolf Mercenary Band raising a cloud of dust in their frantic escape numbered only about a hundred.
"Tantabrum."
"Yes, Chieftain."
"Take the riders and plunder every village around the human city. Especially the breeding stock—secure as many as you can."
"Understood."
"And send twenty riders after those humans. If they abandon their wagons and run, you need not pursue."
"Yes. We move at once."
The orc called Tantabrum divided the waiting boar riders and ordered them to follow the roads, looting every village they came across.
"Olat! You and twenty riders attack those humans! If they abandon the wagons and flee, you need not chase them!"
"Understood! Move out!!"
He relayed the chieftain's orders to the lieutenant-class orc named Olat. Twenty boar riders immediately set off in pursuit, intent on seizing the Wolf Mercenary Band's supplies.
Of course the mercenaries, already glancing back in constant anxiety as they fled, spotted them at once.
"Captain! Greenskins riding something are coming straight for us!"
"They're splitting off toward other places too!"
"Just keep running! We have to put as much distance between us and them as we can!"
If the orcs pinned them here, another pursuit force might latch on. Yet at this rate the boar riders would overtake them before long.
"Archers, get up on the wagons! Once they're close enough, shoot and keep them from closing!"
Lillian sent the archers up onto the wagon roofs to open fire. They had stockpiled plenty of arrows; if it bought them time, a little waste was still a gain.
The Wolf Mercenary Band hauled five warehouse wagons in total. Because the archers also needed a stable shooting stance, two per wagon was the limit.
"I-I'll go up!"
"You're fine! We'll handle this!"
Kaisent tried to climb up as well, but the other bowmen pulled him back. Putting the young-looking Kaisent into something so clearly dangerous simply felt wrong.
"Send Kaisent up!"
"What?"
"He's gifted with a bow! Trust me and put him up there!"
Lillian's shout carried the full authority of Wolf. The archers, who had never once suffered for listening to Wolf, had no choice but to hoist Kaisent onto a roof. The remaining men stayed near the wagons, ready to climb at a moment's notice.
Clatter—clatter—
Kaisent settled onto the violently jolting wagon roof as the vehicle was driven hard.
"Hey, you gonna be all right?"
"Huuu… I'm fine."
"Whatever Wolf saw in you, it's Wolf who said it, so we have to trust it. If you want down, just say the word."
"You don't need to worry."
"Hah. The little brat's already learned how to talk big."
The archer beside Kaisent cracked a wry smile and settled into the most comfortable shooting posture the bouncing roof would allow.
I have to protect everyone. Lillian too!
Gratitude for the Wolf Mercenary Band that had taken him in was part of it, but the greater force crushing down his fear was the need to keep Lillian safe.
This time I'll protect her for sure!
Just as Lillian had said, if the greenskins pinned them here a larger pursuit force would swarm in and crush them with sheer numbers. The key was to make the enemy abandon the chase before they could even attack.
Snipe the ones who look strong.
If he successfully dropped a strong enemy, the rest would weigh the gains of continuing the pursuit against the losses. If he could ride that momentum and drop a few more, they would give up. Of course the calculation assumed these were heteromorphic orcs—but the ones charging on boars radiated both savagery and disciplined military order.
"What the hell is that? Are those boars?"
"Orc cavalry riding boars?"
"They really were heteromorphic orcs!"
The only cavalry greenskins normally fielded were goblins on wolves. Hopgoblins sometimes rode captured warhorses, but orcs had never served as cavalry. Their weight alone made it impractical, and they were simply too ferocious to fight from a mount.
A strong-looking orc. One with high presence. There!
Kaisent sharpened his eyesight and picked out an orc bulkier than the rest, dual-wielding single-edged axes.
"They're in range! Loose!"
"Hit the boars!"
The moment the riders entered range the archers opened a wild volley meant to break their will to pursue. Kaisent nocked an arrow on the newly issued bow and loosed at the powerful-looking orc.
"Hmph!"
Olat swatted the arrow aside with an axe.
That arrow carried quite a bit of force. He looks like a human child, but maybe some small-statured race like a gnome?
He locked killing intent on Kaisent's young face and slight frame.
"Hic…!"
The full weight of Olat's murderous gaze, fixed precisely on the one who had sniped him, made Kaisent's body tremble for an instant.
"Hup!"
Yet the sense of duty to fight for the entire mercenary band—and for Lillian—let Kaisent shake the killing intent off with a sharp shout. From then on, save for one arrow that went wide when the wagon suddenly jolted, nearly every shaft he loosed flew true toward Olat and the boar beneath him.
So he means to target me, the commander. Correct—and yet not correct!
Olat was an upper-tier warrior with solid command skill and personal strength, even if he fell short of true commander-class orcs. Arrows whose origin he could see held no terror no matter how many came.
No good! This power isn't enough!
Any more force and the bowstring would snap. Yet at this level he could not drop a commander-class orc. He could not put more power into the draw. How, then, to deliver a heavier impact with the same force?
Infuse the arrow with mana and shoot.
But that alone was insufficient. An ordinary arrow could hold only so much mana. Protect the string with mana? No—this was a common bow; forcing mana into it would more likely destroy it.
Friction and spin. Spin the entire arrow as I loose it.
Just as a rifled barrel outpowers a smoothbore of the same caliber, spinning the arrow would increase its force. Yet an arrow drawn and released from a string could not be given strong rotation. He knew the answer, but the formula to reach it was still blank.
In that instant a vast assembly of information and knowledge began inside Kaisent's mind. The way Kenneth and Lillian infused weapons with mana, the techniques he already knew for imparting spin to an arrow—his brain fitted the pieces together without a single error, like completing a puzzle, and arrived at the optimal solution.
What? Is he about to try something?
Olat felt an instinctive sense of danger the moment Kaisent's eyes, still locked on him, changed.
Dangerous! I have to kill him!
A warrior's instinct howled. That little one had to die, or he himself would die. He snatched a throwing axe from his belt and hurled it with all his strength at Kaisent.
The axe flew faster than any arrow, aimed straight at Kaisent's torso. On a wagon roof where simply keeping one's footing was hard, dodging meant throwing oneself off the side. Kaisent, however, drew and loosed in a single fluid motion at the oncoming axe.
Krrrrk!
The spinning arrowhead scraped along the axe blade and altered its path; the weapon that had been flying at Kaisent veered aside and sliced empty air. Kaisent nocked another arrow, murmured something under his breath, and released.
The mana-laden shaft punched through the localized storm-like barrier of air and spun toward Olat at tremendous speed.
Sssseeeee—!
An arrow flying at a velocity incomparable to anything before it streaked for his torso. Olat crossed both axes in a desperate block—
Kiiiiiiiiiiing!!!! Crack!
"Guh!"
The furiously spinning arrow punched clean through both of Olat's axes, pierced his armor, and buried itself in his chest. The impact hurled him from the boar; he tumbled hard across the ground.
"Captain!"
"How dare you—!"
"Stop! Hold! Do not pursue!"
The other riders, unable to contain their rage, tried to close in, but the surviving Olat roared and checked their charge.
"Cough! Hhkk!"
Olat yanked the arrow from his body and used mana to stem the bleeding.
"Captain! Why?! At this rate those bastards—!"
"Don't talk nonsense! You still say that after seeing this?!"
"That is…!"
He held up the dual axes the arrow had punched through, and the arrow that had gone on to pierce his armor and wound him. The orc cavalry could only stare in shock that a completely ordinary, featureless arrow had destroyed Olat's cherished weapons.
"An arrow that still had enough force left after destroying my weapons to punch through armor and unhorse me. If an archer of that caliber is being protected and aims at you, do you think you'll walk away whole?"
"……."
"Learning they have someone of this skill is cheap at the price."
"But…"
"And our kin on this side are violent and savage. They forget even simple orders the moment they start fighting. In a situation like this we need beings like us who can follow precise instructions."
A battlefield needed fierce warriors, but it needed elite troops who could execute orders exactly and shatter the enemy's tactics even more. The heteromorphic orc Olat feared failing his chieftain more than he feared being blamed for his own failure, and so he ordered the retreat.
"I take full responsibility. Withdraw as we are."
"Yes."
At Olat's command the orc cavalry collected him and fell back.
"Huh? They're retreating…?"
"What? Why?"
"They just pull back that easily? Orcs?"
"But that last arrow—who shot it?"
The archers had recognized that Olat, better equipped than the rest, was commander-class. Yet even after that commander was wounded, the orcs had not launched a mindless, savagery-blinded charge. Instead they had been intelligent enough to retreat the moment they realized the prey was not easy.
"Huuu…"
"Kaisent, you… just now…"
As Kaisent let out a breath of relief after successfully sniping Olat, the archer beside him stared in open astonishment. The others on different wagons had not seen it, but the man right next to him had watched Kaisent's arrow fly.
"……."
No longer able to hide the secret, Kaisent met Lillian's gaze as she looked up at him from below.
"The son of a great black mage from another world? Kaisent?"
"I knew he looked like some noble brat."
Having successfully shaken the greenskin pursuit, the Wolf Mercenary Band took a brief rest. There Lillian explained the cover story they had prepared in advance for the moment Kaisent's abilities were exposed.
Kaisent had been the son of a black mage in his original world; he had hidden his power because the instant he arrived here he had been attacked simply for being a black mage, and the experience had left him terrified.
"But hearing Kaisent is a black mage somehow isn't scary at all."
"Right? When you say black mage you picture someone gloomy and terrifying."
Black magic dealt with negative energies, so its users usually ended up with twisted appearances and foul temperaments to match. Kaisent, however, was so cute he would have looked like a rabbit if only his eyes had been red, and his behavior was diligent. Learning he was a black mage therefore left everyone stunned by an identity none of them had imagined.
"So, what do you intend to do now?"
"Pardon?"
"Black mage or not, the clear fact is that you are a mage. No matter how bad a black mage's reputation, mages are treated well wherever they go."
Frederick already knew the full story from Lillian, yet he wanted Kaisent to state his future plans in his own words so the others would be convinced.
"Normally I'd like to discuss this at leisure, but given the situation I'll be blunt. We can't afford to hire a mage. If you want, we'll escort you as far as a decent city."
Mages commanded high weekly pay and the privilege of first pick of good loot. For a mid-sized outfit like the Wolf Mercenary Band, hiring one was simply beyond their means.
"I…"
Intimidated by so many eyes on him, Kaisent nevertheless looked at Lillian—still playing the role of Wolf—and opened his mouth with a resolute expression.
"I want to repay the debt I owe Wolf. It's true I have no connections in this world, but I don't want to abandon my benefactor just because circumstances have changed."
The mercenaries nodded as if they had expected nothing else.
"That's our Kaisent."
"Figured he'd say that."
"Can't our world's black mages learn that kind of thing?"
Kaisent's sincere wish to repay kindness drew exactly the reaction they had anticipated. The boy who threw himself into every task and worked so hard to fit in with everyone could never have changed now.
"From this moment Kaisent is our band's mage. I won't complain if you still treat him like the youngest, but no more odd jobs. Understood?"
"Um… Frederick?"
"Hm? What is it?"
"I'd… still like to help in the kitchen… Vex looks like he's struggling alone…"
To be perfectly honest, the real reason Kaisent assisted in the kitchen was that Vex's cooking was hard to swallow.
"The kitchen?"
"Yeah! Kaisent has to stay in the kitchen!"
"If Vex handles it alone the food's garbage!"
"What?! It only got better because Kaisent helped and gave me breathing room!"
"That's just what you think!"
Thanks to everything Kaisent had shown them so far, not a single mercenary felt uneasy about having a black mage among them. Proof enough was that when the black mage himself volunteered for kitchen duty, they all agreed he absolutely should.
"Enough, enough. We've rested long enough. We move again. We don't know when the greenskins might come back, so we need to put even a little more distance between us."
They still had no luxury of ease, so Lillian quieted the uproar and ordered them to resume the march. The mercenaries believed that Kaisent becoming a black mage changed almost nothing about their daily life—yet that belief would not last long.
The fall of Munratel.
The news that Munratel—whose walls, while not on the level of a magically reinforced military fortress, still boasted formidable defenses among ordinary castles—had been taken in a single greenskin assault slammed into the Halrot Kingdom.
Survivors who, like the Wolf Mercenary Band, had left Munratel for various reasons and barely escaped with their lives reported that the greenskins had simply rammed bizarre spheres into the walls and gates, shattering them and seizing the city with ease.
The First Prince and Second Prince factions, who had assumed it was an ordinary greenskin army, reeled at the unexpected variable. Worse, the greenskin force that had taken Munratel did not immediately advance on a new target; instead they began consolidating power with Munratel as their center.
A greenskin army moving in a completely different pattern from anything seen before, and armed with an unforeseen new weapon. Both the First Prince and Second Prince factions desperately wanted to respond, yet neither could turn their backs while still fighting each other, so endless internal debates began over how to handle the crisis.
Then a single figure sent envoys to both camps with a proposal.
The Margrave of Karayden, who once guarded the Halrot Kingdom against the Luciarkenel Kingdom and now against the Saryeong Kingdom—Akina Karayden, who had surpassed Master and reached the Origin realm, a height fewer than a dozen people in the entire world had attained—had begun to move.