Master of the Bow
Master of the Bow
Crunch.
Juice streamed from the bitten apple, slicking Angie's fingers. She wrinkled her nose at the sticky feel but didn't wipe it on her clothes.
At least it meant she wouldn't drop it.
While Angie worked through the apple, Fay sat on a nearby rock, legs swinging idly.
They were lounging near the mountain city's entrance, and plenty of people had already passed them by.
Warriors loitering with weapons in hand, merchants clearly from out of town, mercenaries who'd armed themselves hoping to make a score in foreign lands.
Scores of people moved with purpose. Only these two seemed to savor the quiet. Something about sitting there while the sun dried them felt strange and pleasant.
A stray thought crossed Angie's mind—shouldn't they be here by now?—and only after she'd popped the last edible bit of apple into her mouth and chewed did the stillness finally break.
Like clouds slowly drifting until a wind scatters them, noise rushed in to fill the empty space.
It wasn't a sound the people of Geladrion, with their medieval-level technology, could understand.
If Aslan had heard it, he'd have called it the whine of a turbine. If Angie had heard it, she'd have said it reminded her of things from Aslan's illusions.
But the people of Geladrion, the warriors of the Mountain Kingdom among them, thought it sounded like some roaring beast.
—!
A grinding, bellowing roar. The moment that thunderous noise echoed, heads snapped toward its source.
"...Huh?"
The first warrior to spot it let out a dumbfounded noise. Something that shouldn't exist hung in the air.
At first glance, it looked like a colossal bull.
Four legs extended from an angular body, each spewing gouts of flame and turbulent storm-winds.
If you looked past those massive legs and angular frame to the front, you'd see a head shaped like a bull's.
Horns, a blocky, prominent skull. Eyes blazing with hellish light.
It looked exactly like a bull forged from steel.
Mimicking an animal was the simplest way to boost destructive power, and the Predator's priest knew that well enough to remodel its body into a bull's likeness.
The differences were that this one could fly and was made of metal.
A colossal bull that rode turbine-scream and flame into the sky. It tilted its body forward, a steep dive, its massive bulk hurtling toward the ground.
The hurtling mass accelerated, its roar ballooning. That ballooning roar merged with the noise of something immense plummeting and the turbine shriek, until the whole thing felt like some gargantuan monster screaming as it charged.
People finally understood what it was.
A priest.
A priest of the Predator.
"Priest! It's a priest!"
A scream spread fast, following the first warrior who'd shouted. Terror rippled through the fleeing crowd.
Mothers clutching children, travelers running with lungs heaving, mercenaries melting into the chaos—all of them became one tide streaming toward the mountain's interior.
Even the warriors had no leisure. They stared at the priest's charging bulk and thought:
We can't stop this.
But if they didn't stop it, the mountain would crumble. By instinct they knew the attack couldn't be blocked. They also knew they had to block it anyway.
"St-stop them! Stop them!"
With someone's shrill scream, warriors white-knuckled their weapons and rushed toward the impact point.
Inside that churning chaos, Angie let out a long breath.
"Huh. They actually came. Just like he said they'd look... how does Aslan even know this stuff?"
The words came out easy. No tension in them. She's getting used to this, Angie thought to herself.
Fay took up the thread.
"Aslan just knows everything! There's nothing he doesn't know!"
From the voice alone, you'd picture a little kid bragging My dad's the best!—but the two short swords already in her hands killed that impression instantly.
Her vivid crimson hair scattering, Fay rose and bounced lightly on the spot. The priest's bulk was closing in.
Crack!
Watching the enormous body now less than twenty meters above the ground, Angie crushed what remained of the apple in her fist. Sticky juice ran between her fingers and the scattering pulp.
"I'm going."
She smeared the stickiness generously across her palms and surged forward.
Boom, boom, BO-BO-BOOM!
Angie ran. Her agility was low, but her strength and health meant the sprint only built momentum, piling on force with every stride. The power she carried was anything but negligible.
Each time her foot punched into the earth, cracks spiderwebbed outward and launched her forward. Knees ought to have ached, but Angie's towering health score wouldn't allow it.
Accelerating, Angie blew past the warriors—some of them let out startled sounds—and at the peak of her speed, she collided with the priest as it came down like a meteor.
KWA-BOOOOOOM!
The detonation rolled outward. Angie's momentum-laden body was driven back. Her legs, planted deep, scraped a long, grinding furrow through the ground, kicking up a deep trench and spraying rocks in every direction.
Arms spread wide, she held back the priest's bulk and hissed through her teeth.
"Grrrrrrrgh...!"
The shoving force slowly came to a halt. As the ground shredded her leather boots, Angie wrapped her arms around a body several times larger and heavier than her own—and lifted.
The moment her golden eyes blazed, the priest's body was hurled back down to earth.
"RRRAAAAAAAGH!"
KWA-BOOOOOOM!
She slammed it into the ground. A thunderous rumble shook the whole mountain. The priest bounced off the dirt, rolled, and finally came to a rest.
Dust bloomed from the crater as Angie stood there, bleeding through torn clothes, shaking out her hands.
"Ah, shit. My wrists hurt."
The priest staggered upright, eye-lights blazing.
"...Primary predation target confirmed. Engaging."
Angie cracked her neck left and right and sneered.
As if backing up that sneer, a group of people walked out.
Warriors.
Fierce warriors of the Mountain Kingdom, their bodies branded with mana tattoos, pushing the limits of human capability.
The kind of warriors Aslan thought of first when weighing the reasons for an alliance—fighters steeped in combat.
Warriors with at least one tattoo coiling over their entire bodies revealed themselves in unison.
The most striking among them were two women.
A warrior woman with a forward-curved short sword in each hand: Frida.
And a lovely woman in a leather breastplate and shirt, gripping an axe in one hand and a mace in the other: Ereta.
Ereta spun the axe in her palm and spoke to Angie.
"I brought them, just like you said. Looks like you handled the blocking well, Angie."
"Heh. Obviously. I'm Tail's Stone Fist, y'know."
Ereta laughed and muttered something about that having nothing to do with stone fists. Angie grumbled back. Watching the girl and the woman bicker, Frida narrowed her eyes.
Just as they said.
Ereta had come straight to Frida. What she'd said was simple and baffling.
Two priests planned to attack the city. They'd strike in staggered waves.
One would charge the city first. The other would wait outside, biding its time before joining the assault.
The priest waiting outside was stronger than the one that would hit the city, so Aslan had gone to handle it personally.
Frida couldn't easily understand it, nor did she know if she should trust it.
But there was no time to figure that out. She decided it was better to move on a fool's errand than waste time deliberating and lose the chance to prepare.
Her judgment, luckily, was right.
The colossal steel bull—a body easily exceeding five meters—gleamed with red eye-light. Flames jetted from beneath its feet.
"All of you, draw."
How had Aslan predicted the priests' appearance, and if he knew, why hadn't he told them sooner?
The questions were many, but Frida knew she couldn't ask them now.
So instead, she prepared for battle.
The Mountain Kingdom's warriors drew their weapons in a single motion. Axes, spears, swords, shields—pulled from waists, backs, shoulders—filled their hands, and mana tattoos flared blue-green across their bodies.
Muscles bulged. Steam hissed from their mouths. Heated flesh flushed red.
At their center, Frida blazed blue-green alongside the beast at her feet. As the tattoos coiling her entire body lit up, her eyes flickered a brilliant cyan.
Even the beast that had been on all fours rose onto two legs.
The warriors readying for battle radiated something inhuman. Angie and Ereta, too, took their stances facing the priest. Seeing the fighters fully arrayed, the bull-shaped priest bellowed with the scream of turbines.
In the heated air, a moment of heavy silence.
"Go kill it!"
At Frida's ferocious shout, priest and warriors crashed together.
Aslan and Tiyamal walked. They followed a mountain trail until they reached a place thick with trees.
It wasn't aimless wandering.
Aslan remembered the main quest.
What enemy would appear, where it would come from, what kind of plan it would use.
He already knew.
He was certain.
A Predator who used cunning, strategic maneuvers would act exactly as it had in the game.
And Aslan's prediction was correct. The priest was waiting to attack in the exact same spot as in the game.
If anything was unexpected, it was the priest's demeanor.
The priest Aslan and Tiyamal now faced wore a full-body cloak made of feathers.
Unlike the typical Predator priest who abandoned human form, this one remained fully humanoid.
Its designation was Stymphalos.
A priest strong enough to have earned a name, who had lived a very long time.
Having lived so long, its sense of self was sharp.
So its hostility was faint. It only seemed surprised that Aslan and Tiyamal had appeared here.
As Aslan laid a hand on his scabbard, the priest spoke. A male voice, almost free of machine noise.
"How did you know?"
The question was thick with curiosity. It was basically asking how he'd sniffed out the staggered attack.
Aslan answered like it was the most trivial thing in the world.
"You see it, you know it. The Predator you serve is exactly that kind of bastard."
The answer could have stung, but Stymphalos just stroked his chin with an air of acceptance, like a man running fingers through a beard that wasn't there.
"True enough. My master is such a being."
The staggered attack was a strategy straight out of the game.
A vicious ploy that flipped the assumptions: Two priests would never show up in one place, they'd never send two priests just to raid one city.
It was a strategy that waited for the moment the defenders were exhausted from barely taking down the first priest, their options completely spent.
The second attack was meant to strike in that moment of depletion, aiming to eliminate Aslan entirely.
Aslan had known it from the game, and the Predator's vicious shrewdness—unchanged from the game—had confirmed it.
The Predator he knew would absolutely do it.
So Aslan had come with Tiyamal to kill the second priest.
Its armament, its form, its tactical level were probably several times greater than the priest rampaging inside the city, but Aslan was confident.
If Tiyamal's skill matched—or exceeded—what Aslan believed, there would be no problem.
Aslan set his hand on his scabbard. His right hand drew the blood sword Rutile; his left hand pulled the Seobsaeng from behind his hip.
Two longswords hung low. Stymphalos tracked the movement with his eyes.
"Tiyamal."
"...Yeah."
Tiyamal's voice was thick with tension. Aslan spoke quietly.
"I'll create the opening."
As the raised crimson blade kindled white, Aslan spoke through the rippling pale flames.
"So you do what you do best."
This was a test.
A test to see whether Tiyamal's skill could reach even a priest.
As the two longswords gleamed with a chill light, the priest spread his cloak.