Civil War
Civil War
The Faiza Jungle. Once a region dotted with palisades, fortresses, and a garrison of mages, it had since succumbed to dense trees and the scattered lairs of wild creatures.
A force of soldiers and warrior monks threaded through its deep growth. Their footsteps rose with plumes of dry dust and faded into the jungle silence.
The officer leading the soldiers approached and spoke. A warrior monk carrying twin spears answered.
The exchange was simple: how they would move, when they would strike, how much farther to advance, and the plan to charge from a single direction for ease of coordination.
A monk resting a hammer on his shoulder eavesdropped and let out a low, "Hmm." He was not the only one—other warrior monks emerged from the shadows and gathered around the spear-wielder.
"We will force the gate open first," the monk said, scratching under his jaw. "Enter once it is breached."
The commander nodded and glanced across the gathered monks.
A monk carrying two bows in four hands.
A monk with twin spears.
A monk cloaked in robes who seemed to favor his fists.
A monk who wielded a hammer.
Every variant was a specialist of the battlefield.
Dueling, mass combat, siege warfare—they were a force so overwhelming in numbers and composition that defeat should have been unthinkable.
Yet something flickered in the commander's gaze as he looked at them. A trace of unease. Before the monks could notice, he turned away and led his soldiers forward, the warrior monks folding into their ranks.
The tread of their marching filled the dim jungle, and their body heat bled into the night breeze.
"Gahahahaha!"
A laugh. A roaring laugh that boomed beyond any human lung capacity.
From between the trees stepped the source of that booming mirth.
A fully naked dragon-kin.
Scarlet scales stark under the moonlight, black horns crowning his head, he carried a massive bow fitted to his enormous frame.
The oncoming soldiers froze. How could they not? They had marched to ambush an enemy in the night and found instead a giant standing bare before them.
"What the—"
The commander's confusion met the dragon-kin's eyes just as he opened them and laughed again.
That booming laugh still echoed through the air when the four-armed monk blinked his compound eyes, raised his bows, and declared,
"If you don't know what it is, shoot it. So—"
He drew. Fast. Four arms, two bows, arrows set to the strings with blurring speed. The brace of arrows was about to fly.
Had the air not ruptured first.
The monk reflexively looked up and a shaft the length of a short spear impaled him.
Crunch!
It crushed through, skewered him, and pinned him to the ground.
Craaack-splat!
Driven nearly inside out—from skull to groin—the monk's arms went slack, and something that was neither blood nor fluid hissed from his body.
"Can only shoot what you see, is that it? You stink of inexperience."
The still-chuckling dragon-kin reined his mirth into a smirk and nocked a fresh arrow. Another short-spear-length shaft, the sort meant for a siege engine.
"Remember this: a first-rate show-off finds his marks even in the dark!"
Twang!
A steel bowstring snapped and the steel arrow accelerated. Fast enough that even the warrior monks nearly lost track of it. It struck before anyone could brace.
It tore open the commander's belly, scattered his entrails, punched through the soldier behind him, and kept going. Scraps of chain mail, gore, ripped flesh. The iron-slick projectile only stopped after it sheared off the spear-wielding monk's arm.
Kwaaaang!
"Ghk—!"
The steel arrow halted buried in a shattered great-tree. Panic and terror swept through the soldiers, and the dragon-kin reached for another shaft.
The commander was dead. One monk already dead. The most senior warrior monk forced himself to think, then shouted—insight honed from a career once spent as a general.
"Scatter, scatter! Protect the soldiers, brothers!"
Gripping his spears, the monk charged the dragon-kin. The soldiers scattered in blind terror, and the remaining monks fanned out after scanning their surroundings. If the ambush had been detected, retreat was doctrine.
The hammer-wielding monk had read that much and fell back with the soldiers. The chaotic soldiers burned with the raw will to live, and the monk could read that desperation. He moved to shepherd them to safety.
"Kyaaak!"
"S-save me!"
"Agh!"
The fleeing soldiers stopped, split apart, and toppled. Men clutching severed throats collapsed. Corpses with pierced hearts tumbled across the jungle floor.
In seconds, the dead outnumbered the living.
The hammer monk's eyes widened and he sprinted toward them.
"Hold on! I'm coming! Just hold out a little longer!"
He lowered his hammer from his shoulder, gripped it two-handed, and charged. The ground shook with his heavy footfalls. The moment a priest closed in on the soldiers, something burst from the darkness at terrible speed.
It came without a whisper of presence, accelerating into a rapid spin. Red light streamed from the rotation, tinted with violet-blue. Indifference that shone stark even through the night's shadow swung a blade wrapped in that spin.
The hammer monk twisted mid-charge.
He sensed the flashing arc aimed at his neck and jammed his arm into its path.
Block with his carapace, then counter. His response to an ambush was textbook.
Or it should have been.
Sskkt!
"Gh—!"
The force behind that slash surpassed any normal man's strength. A full rotational cut bit through the monk's arm and pulled free.
Whooosh!
The monk swung his hammer one-handed, but it stirred nothing but empty air.
The attacker had sliced his arm and slipped straight back into the forest darkness. From a different angle, another gleam burst forth.
Clang—a spray of sparks. The monk saw the elf spring from the shadows and brought up his weapon in time to block.
The steel haft of the hammer caught the sword stroke and pushed it aside. Thwarted, the elf back-flipped without hesitation and melted back into the dark.
Only then did the monk realize.
The soldiers around him had not been butchered at random—they were bait meant to draw him.
The spear monk's shout to protect the soldiers had been overheard, and a trap laid.
The monk took in the brutal carnage of every soldier in sight and twisted his few facial muscles into a grimace.
He raised his hammer to shoulder height and lowered his stance. Wary of another ambush, he set himself. As if mocking his rigid preparation, the elf flung a blade.
"Gck—!"
A shortsword. It spun through the air and pierced the throat of a still-living soldier. The dying man choked blood, and the monk turned toward him before he could stop himself.
Compassion.
That was what undid him.
The instant the monk looked away, Fay exploded from the darkness.
She lunged in a billow of crimson hair and brought her blade down. A leaping spinning cut raked across his arm and out.
Thud!
The arm holding the hammer was severed and dropped. As the monk twisted back to respond, the shortsword moved again—flashing low to slice through his hamstrings.
"Ngh—!"
He had lost his leg, lost his weapon. Stripped of the means to fight, the monk's stance collapsed and he fell to his knees. Fay, who had cut his legs as she passed, pulled the shortsword from the soldier's throat.
"Have you no human heart at all...!"
The ground was slick with the blood of dying soldiers. Fay crossed that gore-soaked battlefield toward the monk.
Though realization came late, the monk recognized the elf before him.
Master of the Sword, Fay.
The elf who fights.
And that fighting elf wore no innocent, carefree expression of her kind. Her face was blank—eerily so.
The expressionless elf drove both shortswords into the monk's neck. They crossed in an X and slowly sawed through.
As though shearing a neck with scissors, the girl answered while she cut.
"None."
The monk bled from his mouth as he stared into that emotionless face.
"Aslan has it. So I don't need any."
Crrrick—splat!
The monk's scream of agony was cut short as his severed head flipped upward and fell. Amid the rising dust, the headless giant collapsed to the earth.
Fay glanced at the corpse and the dying soldiers, then took hold of the fallen hammer by its haft.
Dragging it across the ground, she walked.
"Think Aslan would like it?"
*
"...Mm."
A low sound. The grating of chitin. Amid it, a towering figure close to three meters tall blinked his eyes.
Ocular organs—part compound, part human—swept their dozens of pupils across the surroundings before fixing ahead. There was sky. The warrior monk was on his back.
Did I lose consciousness...
He searched his memory.
He had been falling back with the soldiers when a tree came flying in, forcing him to halt. The soldiers were separated from him in that moment.
And the instant he lost them, two figures had appeared. Two he could recognize.
A last remnant of the ancient gods, and the onetime Saintess of Slaughter—Master of Blunt Weapons.
He had felt confident. The monk had flung himself at them with assurance.
His art was unarmed combat, and with a carapace harder than most plate armor and six arms, he had thought it would be enough.
It had not gone that way.
His six fists, thrown from a body twice her size—the girl had caught them all.
Not just caught them. She had struck back.
Every time her fist hammered into his body, his carapace rang and blood welled in his mouth.
And that was not all.
From the moment the white-haired woman had spun like a dancer and brought her axe up into the fight, the monk had been pushed back.
That two-handed axe had split his carapace and cleaved through his arms.
He lost his arms one by one.
The fewer his arms, the more he was driven back, cut, and battered.
He had no space to retreat and catch his breath.
The girl with the scarlet hair blew blood from her nose and spat it from her lips, yet she clung to him with savage tenacity.
She punched without any pretense of defense, driving her fists into him relentlessly.
A mindless brawl. At the end of it, the monk had lost.
Ereta had channeled her whole body into an axe-stroke that split his breastplate open, and Angie had pried apart the cracked carapace and torn it wide.
His recollection over, the monk finally understood. He was dying.
He spat something that was neither blood nor fluid and spoke. The girl and the woman still looked down at him.
"There is... one more. He will finish you. He will offer you up."
"The hell is this bastard on about?"
"His mind's fading in and out."
"That confidence of yours won't last long. He is nothing like me."
It was less a plea than a curse. Angie wiped her bloody nose and sneered. Ereta smiled quietly.
"That one... is a dragon hunter. He bears twin spears that spit lightning and the twin-spear art raised to its highest realm. Though I have been defeated here, he will complete the task. So quietly accept the death that comes for—"
"Yeah. He was a little tough."
The monk's incantations halted. Angie and Ereta, whose expressions had been indifferent, turned their heads. The monk could not help but turn his as well.
A voice that seized attention—smooth and commanding. The low tone made the monk blink his compound eyes, and he saw someone approaching.
A man carrying twin spears across his back and a large head in his other hand.
Cold teal eyes, black hair stark even beneath the falling moonlight.
The Master of Combat, Aslan.
The monk recognized the head in his grip.
That was the dragon hunter.
A head pierced by a gigantic arrow the length of a short spear, neck severed clean through.
"Ah... aah..."
The monk who had believed in him shuddered with horror. Aslan heard the sound, stepped forward, and dropped the head.
As it rolled and met the monk's eyes, the monk's face crumpled with terror, shock, and grief.
Aslan looked down at the monk with cool eyes as he drew one of the spears from his back.
Crackle!
Current raced along the spear shaft. As the electricity scorched the ground, the monk unconsciously rolled his eyes toward Aslan.
"But not as strong as I expected."
The spear, held in reverse grip, plunged down. Before the horror could fully bloom, it skewered through. Thud! Flesh burst and charred black under the lightning.
His skull impaled, the monk died. A death he had not imagined, and with it a contract concluded.
The monk was a monk no longer. He was merely fodder. His anguished scream reached no one—no one except the God of War.
Aslan, who could not hear it, pulled the deeply embedded spear free and returned it to his back.
Behind him, the clatter of arms rose alongside the coming dawn.
The soldiers still fought, their shouts mixed with incomprehensible screams.
A failed night ambush and the fighting that followed. Aslan could picture the outcome even with his eyes closed.
He did not need to help, nor did he intend to. Killing the warrior monks had already fulfilled his role.
"Let's head back."
Angie still gazed down at the monk with residual curiosity, but she nodded. Ereta approached without a word and laced her arm through Aslan's.
As though the war were not theirs, they returned to camp.
One week since Aslan's arrival.
As of today, eleven warrior monks had died at the hands of the Master of Combat.
The warrior monks faced a calamity without precedent.
A calamity named Priest Slayer.