Forest Keeper
Forest Keeper
"Engaging."
The grinding of gears and metal. A harsh clatter woven into a charging advance, overlaid with a synthetic feminine voice. A massive body bore down on them.
Aslan watched the mechanical giant hurtling toward him, angled his blazing longsword, and drew it down in a diagonal line. The blade scattered a brilliant white radiance as it pointed toward the earth.
Angie considered reaching for the axe slung on her back, then raised her fists instead. Ereta drew her two short blades and spun them once in her hands.
Aslan held his twin swords low and spoke quietly.
"Fay."
"On it!"
Fay ignored the onrushing hulk. She bounced lightly off the ground and sprang into the trees.
From tree to tree, kicking off ancient trunks, she vanished. In an instant the forest swallowed her. Even the thing's gaze lost her.
Aslan raised his longsword, white fire still licking along the steel, and deflected the superheated blade driving straight for his forehead.
Clang!
Sparks erupted. The edge where Aslan's sword had touched glowed a dull red, as if the metal itself were beginning to burn.
Aslan recalled the signs they had found in the slash-and-burn farmers' village. Structures damaged as if by heat-radiating weapons. But none of the corpses draped over the ancient trees had shown the same marks.
There was no way the Artifice's soldiers had never returned. They would have come back to verify whether the farmers had moved on. And they hadn't.
Aslan understood what had happened now.
The Artifice's soldiers had been annihilated. And turned into raw material.
He could not guess how many lives this Forest Keeper—its reason stripped away—had stolen.
What needed to be done remained unchanged. Aslan gripped the chattering hilt of his longsword, tilting the flames that fed on his own fighting spirit.
Screech!
The shriek of metal grinding against metal. A red-hot blade glanced aside. Aslan slipped past the Forest Keeper's attack as it carved through the air inches from the white flames, then reset his stance immediately.
The moment its blade missed, the Forest Keeper swung its arm. Fire jetted from a nozzle at the elbow, accelerating the limb beyond what Aslan's eyes could track.
But Aslan did not stop. Two swords simply followed the trajectories his eyes had already mapped.
Invisible threats could be dealt with. His heightened Luck marshaled every sense he possessed and fed him the attack's path before it landed.
What his eyes traced was a trajectory that would let him deflect without blocking.
Clank. Clang!
Two sharp metallic rings. Aslan let the sounds hang in the air and pivoted hard. His crimson longsword glanced the superheated blade aside, and Seobsaeng rapped the arm itself, knocking the swing completely off-line.
The attack missed wide, gouging a deep wound into the dirt instead.
Aslan watched the overturned earth belch dust. He studied the scar in the ground and his eyes flicked rapidly across the scene.
The advancing hulk. The swelling arm. The flame jetting from the rear of the nozzle. The blade glowing with contained heat.
Calculation complete. Aslan halted his backward movement, reversed his grip on Seobsaeng, and held firm.
Boom!
He drove the reversed blade upward, feet leaving the ground. A tingling sensation warmed his marrow, and without hesitation he wreathed his head in Purity and stacked Seobsaeng behind it.
A violent shock galloped across both swords.
Klang!
Wire, severed against the edge of the turned blade. Through the shower of sparks, the wire declared its presence in that dull industrial gray unique to metal.
The Forest Keeper lunged at Aslan in the same instant. It raised its blade high and fired its nozzle, accelerating.
It meant to bisect him. Aslan read the arc through Luck and experience, withdrew his crossed blades, and stepped aside.
The superheated blade came down with a sound more chilling than any guillotine. It carved deep into the ground and pulled free.
No need to shake it clean. When the blade emerged from its wrist again, not a speck of dirt clung to it. Aslan saw the other blade extending toward him, dropped his stance low, and swept his crossed swords out as if throwing the attack off.
Claaang!
Even mana-reinforced muscle buckled under the force. Direct contact would melt flesh and metal alike. Aslan pushed with Purity, refusing to let the superheated blade touch him at all.
Swordsmanship honed to its limit. The ability to disrupt an opponent's center of balance even while blades were locked—skill taken to its very peak. The Forest Keeper's body lurched.
A gap. Barely a heartbeat. Enough.
Angie launched herself forward as if she had been waiting for nothing else.
She sprang, rose into the air, and poured every ounce of that momentum into her fist. The flight was swift and brutally powerful.
Crack!
Her fist traced a simple line and slammed into the Forest Keeper's head. The massive body—easily several times her weight—rocked violently, joints screeching.
The attack had come too suddenly and struck too hard to absorb cleanly.
The head rotated with a grinding sound, tracking toward her. Threat priority recalibrated. A girl whose bare hands produced force on par with a giant's. Small frame, significant power. Immediate elimination required.
The priest raised its arm automatically and spat flame from its nozzle to skewer her.
Death surged forward. Heat that would pierce even Angie's hardened flesh. A woman materialized beside her and deflected it.
Scrape. Clang!
Ereta appeared from the flank, swinging axe and mace together. Blocking outright would have strained her, but deflection cost her far less. She struck the priest's weapon and knocked it aside.
"Ngh—my wrist."
Ereta's wrist bloomed red, burned, and the priest's blade veered off to bury itself in the ground. Angie seized the opening. She drew her fist back, loaded it deep, and drove it upward.
Boom!
The metal head snapped back. A blow that would have made even a Warrior Monk shudder—an attack most priests would struggle to withstand.
"Threat level reassessed. Immediate countermeasures required."
But the Forest Keeper endured.
Angie's strikes were devastating and Aslan's cuts were lethally sharp. The Predator's priest was simply tougher.
That was what made the Predator's priests so troublesome. They possessed respectable offensive power and an array of tools—and layered high defense on top of it all.
Even Aslan's and Angie's attacks only scuffed it. The highest defense rating among all priest types.
Conventional weapons and techniques could not so much as scratch them.
Angie's face showed chagrin. Ereta knitted her delicate brow and clutched her weapons with a smarting wrist.
'Good enough.'
Only Aslan advanced without hesitation.
He had more than a few methods for killing an opponent with extreme defense.
'Heart Piercing.'
That was one of them.
His longsword, now sheathed in white fire, flashed a pale blue. Aslan drove it upward in a rising diagonal.
Rrrrip!
The moment the blade met the Forest Keeper's arm, the same cut that had done nothing before tore the limb away.
Metal screamed as it was wrenched apart.
The severed arm spun through the air. Aslan's body was already in motion.
Heart Piercing was exactly that kind of technique.
A method that amplified penetrative force so much that even bare hands could pierce the hearts of monsters and great beasts.
The effect was simple, and the results were certain. In the hands of a weapon already guaranteed to penetrate, there was nothing it could not cut.
'Too shallow.'
But it was enough. The Predator's priest would not regenerate its left arm unless it secured more resources.
Aslan reversed his grip on Seobsaeng and shouted.
"Fay!"
The attack came the next instant. The right arm drove forward, blade heated to a glow, aimed to tear through Aslan's throat. Almost simultaneously, Fay erupted from the forest clutching both of her swords.
Clang!
Aslan caught the sideways strike and deflected it. The heat surged through Seobsaeng's grip and forced him to drop it.
Reflexively drawing his flail, Aslan saw Fay slice her blades across the backs of the Forest Keeper's knees. Two metallic snaps rang out nearly at once, and the massive body lurched.
Fay gathered herself to spring away. The Forest Keeper extended its right arm toward her while thrusting the stump of its left at Aslan, whose hand was still on his flail. Wire gathered and condensed at the severed cross-section—a snare meant to strangle him.
Simultaneous attacks. As Aslan and Fay both dropped low, Angie and Ereta surged in from either side.
Clang!
Ereta's thrown mace struck the severed face of the left arm dead-on. Wire tangled around the mace head and the whole mess tumbled across the ground. Angie closed in.
Crash!
Her compact frame belied the monstrous force with which she plowed into the torso. The Predator's priest staggered, balance shattered, and halted. Fay, already clear, launched herself again.
Crunch!
This time Fay struck with a thrust. Elf-trained leg strength drove the twin blades deep. She planted them into the joint and twisted.
Sparks sprayed. The Forest Keeper collapsed, one arm reaching backward—but Aslan was already moving.
Rattle-clink!
He cast his flail toward the reaching hand, and the chain wrapped the wrist. The arm, thick as a tree trunk, halted for an instant in the chain's grip.
An instant was enough. While the hand was blocked, Fay leaped backward to safety. The chain snapped.
The moment it broke, Aslan seized his Blood Sword in both hands and sprang.
His feet moved with quick, precise steps, kicking the frozen hand aside before he jumped again. Flipping his body through the air, he landed standing on the Predator's shoulders.
He gripped the longsword in both hands, drew it back, blade poised behind his own neck, and spoke in a low murmur.
"Heart Piercing."
The blade flared pale blue.
Screech!
Sparks erupted as the edge bit in. The head came away with a ragged cross-section.
Boom!
Dust boiled up. The heavy head and heavy body both crumpled to the ground at the same moment.
Aslan stood atop the kneeling steel corpse.
The white-fire sword still in his hand.
Breathing hard, heat still radiating from his frame, Aslan stepped slowly down from the priest's body.
"Why..."
Where he descended lay the head. The severed head of the Forest Keeper.
"Why did it... turn out like this? What... did I do wrong? How... should I have..."
The voice that repeated the words had no strength left. Even through the machine, the emotion that bled out was despair.
"Louis... Denise... Ela..."
The head on the ground recited names. Aslan could guess whose they were. Family, almost certainly.
Oil smeared across the severed head during its tumble. It looked like tears.
"I'm sorry..."
The man who had become a priest, the Forest Keeper, died like that. The silence that settled and the head that moved no more were proof enough.
Aslan stood on the earth and closed his eyes.
What lay before him was a heap of machinery and scrap. It did not look like a corpse at all. Yet somehow looking at it stirred the same visceral unease as staring at a dead body.
But he could not look away from reality. He had killed a priest who had said he did not want to die. He had killed a man who had only asked to be left alone. He had killed this Forest Keeper because he could not permit the slaughter the man would have carried out as the Predator's priest.
Now the man's soul would have arrived at the Predator's warship as a handful of data, consigned to eternal torment.
Aslan let out a long-held breath and spoke emptily.
"I'm sorry."
He retrieved Seobsaeng from where he had dropped it and returned it to his belt. Bitterness coated the inside of his mouth.
That was when it happened.
"Priority ■■ entity—elimination failed. Operation compromised."
A voice.
Reedy, almost feminine, yet utterly inorganic.
The voice was emanating from the Forest Keeper's body.
Aslan's eyes snapped toward the torso. The voice that bled from it announced with perfect dispassion:
"Empathy-based approach ineffective against priority ■■ entity. Strategy requires revision."
Aslan's expression hardened.
The words meant one thing.
The Predator had deliberately left the Forest Keeper's personality intact to hunt Aslan.
It had tried to use his pity to lower his guard, then strike.
Aslan ground his teeth together and raised the longsword he had been about to sheathe.
Crunch!
He drove the blade deep into the severed cross-section. The voice cut off. The mechanical body grew colder still.
Neither the scattered mechanical wreckage nor the horror of the scene, nor the emotions that clawed at him afterward, changed his mind.
If anything, the conviction hardened: the priests had to die.
There was no other way to keep a tragedy this vile from spreading wider and further.
The evil gods all had to die. Aslan believed that.
And yet, he could not be certain the choice had been the right one.
Had this truly been the best he could do? Could Purity have resolved it somehow instead? Belated regret trembled through his hands.
This was a common tragedy.
Nothing rare about it.
Geladrion saw things like this happen countless times, and would see them again.
He had witnessed it often enough to know.
He would keep witnessing it.
And still, no matter how common, he could not chew it up as just another tragedy and swallow.
Because he believed nothing would remain of a man who let himself be broken that way.
The moment he forgot the compassion and sensibility of the modern world, Lee Hyun-woo would truly die, and only Aslan would remain.
Yet even knowing that, the bitterness and fury would not leave him.
The hand gripping the longsword's hilt trembled faintly. At last Aslan raised his head and roared.
The shout—grief, rage, and resentment poured out together—shook the forest. Every beast that had stayed through the battle fled at once.
At the corner of Aslan's vision, at the edge of his sight, a message flickered.
[Sub-quest Completed]
[ ! Defeat the Priest of the Predator]
He did not know when it had appeared. The system message, cold as ever, had already filed this tragedy away as nothing more than a common sub-quest.