118. One-Man Army
118. One-Man Army
Right after she finished registering the scores of all the magical beasts she had hunted, Lucia sensed something amiss.
She felt a group of presences slowly, stealthily approaching, circling around her.
'Eight of them...? Not magical beasts... no.'
They walked on two legs, and their frames weren't particularly large.
They were human-sized.
In the Black Forest, there were magical beasts both smaller and larger than humans, but none that were human-sized and bipedal.
They weren't magical beasts. They were people.
Were they aiming to eliminate her?
Lucia could discern all this information just by standing still.
She felt the faint vibrations of the ground transmitted through the soft soil of the Black Forest.
Even while wearing shoes, she could feel such subtle vibrations—thanks to the special training method she had honed.
The 'Rock' must become one with the earth.
While fighting in human form, she couldn't physically slam her feet into the ground, but becoming one with the earth was possible.
All she needed was for her body and the ground to be connected through some kind of means.
Just as Lemnos absorbed atmospheric mana through a special cultivation method and radiated it as intense heat,
Russell had trained by absorbing and releasing the ley lines flowing through the earth through the part of her body touching the ground... her feet.
As a result, when Russell breathed through the earth, her breath spread out in all directions, allowing her to detect surrounding vibrations like radar.
The vibrations grew closer.
The image of the Horn Wolves—wolves several times larger than an average adult human, now dead—suddenly flashed through Lucia's mind.
Lucia hadn't actively chased down and hunted those Horn Wolves.
They had targeted her first, coming as a pack to find her while she wandered alone in this forest.
'...I must have looked pretty easy to underestimate too. Maybe it's because I was alone.'
A blue aura blazed like a flame on the two-handed sword gripped in her hand.
The sound of footsteps quickened.
Perhaps realizing they had been detected, the figures that had been slowly circling closer now charged in a straight line.
"...!!!"
From a distance, she felt the flow of mana and an incantation.
They seemed to have used an attack spell.
It was a textbook method: pinning her down with a long-range attack while the rest surrounded and attacked.
Lucia didn't hold her sword in one hand as she usually did.
This time, true to its name, she gripped the two-handed sword with both hands and raised it above her head into a high stance.
It was a stance like a beast bringing its front paw down: the Tiger Stance.
A blazing fireball, the attack spell flying towards her, entered her field of vision.
And beyond it, she clearly took in the sight of six students charging after it, each gripping their weapons tightly.
Among them, one held a net, and another held a chain.
They threw the chain first, and then the net spread out wide.
It was a pincer attack unfolding from the opposite direction of the incoming fireball.
Beyond the net, she saw people wielding various cold weapons like spears and swords.
A coordinated assault that left not a single blind spot for escape,
yet even in this desperate crisis, Lucia remained composed.
Normally, the girl who would tremble in fear at the thought of talking to someone didn't flinch at all, even with eight suspicious figures before her eyes.
Once she became one with the earth, once she held her sword, Lucia was a single rock.
A rock knows no fear.
"... Falling Rock."
The beast brought its front paw down.
Lucia brought her sword down, not on the students charging toward her, but on the ground.
-Tukwang!!!
Soil soared high into the sky.
The earth was overturned.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
"......Is this enough?"
The area around Lucia had been devastated.
As if a mortar shell had landed, the black soil was completely upturned, and the remnants of plants lay strewn about in all directions.
The Rock Sword technique, Falling Rock: a technique that slammed down with physical energy as powerful as a boulder falling from a cliff.
"Ugh... uuugh...."
"That's way too harsh, seriously...."
And before her lay eight people, collapsed like corpses.
A few magical beasts caught in the aftermath also lay fallen, but the number of humans was greater.
"You're the ones... who attacked me first."
Two teams had targeted Lucia and ended up getting taken down in return.
It was true that she looked like an easy target, being alone, so they attacked.
Two teams from the Five Pillars were participating. One was a fairly well-formed team, so they must have thought they could take down someone like Lucia wandering by herself.
But if there was one thing they hadn't considered, it was the fact that they had never once seen Lucia fight properly until now.
Aside from the skill assessment they had witnessed once when entering the academy, almost no one had seen her truly swing a sword, so everyone had forgotten.
Why Russell was called the Sword of the Five Pillars.
"Then... I'll be taking this."
Lucia approached the students sprawled out like sacks of flour and removed the rings from their fingers one by one.
Each time she took a ring off someone, the light of a magic circle flashed, and they vanished from the forest.
In the Hunting Festival, the rule was that if a ring was lost or broken, the wearer was automatically teleported outside the forest, so she was preemptively removing them.
"Ah... no... I absolutely have to, in this tournament..."
"..Then you should have won."
As they disappeared one by one, the last remaining student somehow twisted his body and shoved his arm underneath himself.
He seemed to be desperately trying to protect his ring, but it was a futile resistance.
Lucia grabbed his arm and forcibly twisted it.
"Ow ow ow ow ow ow!!!"
"...Resisting is... pointless."
Lucia twisted the person's arm as casually as if she were bending a mannequin's arm, didn't bat an eye even at the cracking sound from his shoulder, and pulled the ring off.
'I caught more people than magical beasts...'
So far, Lucia had hunted two magical beasts alone, but she had just taken down eight people. At this rate, she looked more like a human hunter.
She didn't have any grand ambition for the Hunting Festival.
It was simply a festival she had to participate in as a matter of course, and she was working hard because achieving a good result was also a matter of course.
"... I miss Atlas."
She hadn't seen Atlas at all today.
In the morning, he had left early to prepare for the Class 5 tea house's second-day opening, and Lucia had to go prepare for the Hunting Festival herself.
Naturally, she had assumed Atlas would participate in the Hunting Festival too, so it was a huge shock when he said he wouldn't.
It felt like common sense had been upended.
"Why did he have to be so stubborn..."
When Atlas not only didn't participate but also didn't suggest teaming up with her, she felt wronged and, in a fit of pique, declared she would do it alone without any teammates.
She really had been pointlessly stubborn.
Being alone brought many annoyances and inconveniences.
She wasn't sure how it looked from a third party's perspective,
but since she participated alone without teammates, all sorts of people saw her as an easy target and challenged her, and she had to handle all of it by herself.
It was truly beyond inconvenient.
"!!!"
Sensing a suspicious presence, Russell swung her sword, and a spherical sword aura shot out, bursting a tree trunk like a cannonball.
The Rock Sword technique 'Stone-Throwing'. Generally, a sword aura manifested as a sharp slash, but peculiarly, the sword aura Russell fired delivered an 'impact' like a stone launched from a catapult.
"That's quite a greeting."
"You..!"
The one who effortlessly dodged the cannon-like sword blast and landed lightly on another tree branch, silver hair flowing, was Casey.
——————————————-
-Tukwang!!!!
A sound like a bomb going off echoed from the distance.
The sound was so loud that the ground tremor felt like a small earthquake.
"They're really going all out..."
"Did some 5th-circle magic or higher clash?"
Unlike the two who were just startled by the trembling in the air, Emy stared fixedly toward the likely epicenter.
"...Let's head that way."
"Towards the explosion?"
"Yes, with an explosion that big, we should be able to run into magical beasts fleeing from there."
"Now that you mention it, yeah?"
Emy, having formed her first team, was properly acting as its leader.
Emy had a clear plan for which direction to move and how, and she gave precise instructions.
They had already hunted five magical beasts under her direction.
At first glance, she might have seemed indecisive, but now there was strong conviction behind Emy's words.
"But a lot of other teams will be moving that way aiming for the same thing, won't they? You okay with that?"
"It's fine. I don't think we'll lose anyway... and if we're aiming for victory, we have to take some risks."
"I'm in favor."
"...Alright. But let's move while keeping a thorough watch on our surroundings."
"Okay."
--------------------------------------------
"That makes it... nine!!"
A blazing flame sword sliced through the chest of a magical beast.
The corpse of the Rat Bear—a bear-shaped magical beast with the face of a rat—had its chest torn open, as if clawed by a lion, without even having a chance to scream.
"Aaaaaaah!!!!"
Edgar naturally approached the Rat Bear's corpse, held his ring up to it, and registered the kill, but Cindy, seeing this, let out a shriek.
"Damn it, I told you not to do it like that!! Who hunts game like this! The hide is completely ruined!!"
"The score is the same no matter how you hunt it!"
"It's disgustingly inconvenient as far as I'm concerned!!"
Cindy Le, being from a prestigious elf family, had learned hunting as an essential part of her education.
To the elves, hunting was receiving the blessings of the forest,
continuing one's own life through the sacrifice of other living beings, and being part of nature's great cycle.
Therefore, beyond how to hunt game well or how to find and track prey, they learned a 'respect' for the game that had to be sacrificed for them to continue living.
Elf hunting preferred methods that damaged the corpse as little as possible, using bows or magic.
This was partly for quality control of what needed to be harvested from the prey, like hides and meat, but also because they believed preserving its appearance as much as possible was the greatest courtesy they could offer when sending it to the afterlife.
However, Lemnos's swordsmanship was too far removed from such principles.
Lemnos's flame sword didn't cut cleanly; it tore apart and burned, leaving the prey in a horrible mess.
And that sight was too painful for Cindy to bear.
"Then you handle it before I do!"
"You finish them off before I can even do anything because you're so fast..!!"
Edgar was also annoyed by Cindy, who kicked up a fuss every time they hunted a magical beast.
He couldn't understand how much time she was wasting when their agreement was to hunt magical beasts quickly and win.
"... Hey, everyone stop."
"Bolte, what's wrong?"
The pupils of Bolte Jin, the tiger beastman who had the sharpest senses among them, suddenly turned razor-sharp.
When a predatory beastman's pupils sharpened, it meant they were in a state of extreme alert.
He stood perfectly still, not even breathing. His round ears twitched, and he slightly turned his head in a specific direction.
"...Grrrrr.... It's a big one."