Chapter 97
Chapter 97
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Translator: penny
Chapter: 97
Chapter Title: The Kneeling Ogre
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The Sparrow Unit members were all veterans.
The elf warriors went without saying, and those from the Jansrick Mercenary Corps had also weathered countless battles in the northeast region.
Even the Black Eagle Regiment members, who had the least real combat experience compared to the above two, had been drafted into the twice-yearly hunting tournaments and gained hands-on experience hunting beasts and mid-to-small monsters.
Yet all these unit members froze in place for a moment.
‘Could it be… that everything we’ve seen and experienced so far was actually a well-scripted play?’
‘If what we’re seeing now is the real truth of this world…?’
Faced with a dark truth no one knew—and no one was supposed to know—their ordinary minds could only come to a halt.
“Am I goin’ crazy, or is the world goin’ crazy?”
“……!”
Misska’s words snapped the unit members back to reality.
‘Monsters holdin’ a fight like some swordsmanship tournament or jousting match?’
‘And an ogre refreein’ it?’
Reality still felt like a lie.
But there’s always a bottom beneath the bottom.
The madness wasn’t over yet.
Kieeeek…?!
One of the monsters, forced to spectate the brawl under the ogre’s pressure, turned its head this way.
It was a manticore.
Though hidden by the underbrush, the mid-sized monster—on par with or superior to beasts in scent and presence detection—had picked up on the Gau herd numbering dozens and the people riding them.
Kieeek! Kiek!
The manticore let out a screech toward the referee ogre, like it was tattling (absurd as it was, the unit members couldn’t see it otherwise).
Kuohk?!
Reacting to the manticore’s report, the ogre snorted and whipped its face toward them.
Crimson eyes shot toward the Sparrow Unit.
And as if grabbing its axe and springing up—
Kuwaaaaaaargh!!!
Killing intent? Sonic wave? Aura?
Call it what you will.
An invisible force rippled across the swamp’s surface, crashing over the Sparrow Unit in an instant.
“Urk!”
“Guh!”
Nearly all the unit members groaned and stiffened in place, save a rare few.
Even the Gau, rigorously trained for military use, were no exception.
The Gau pissed and shat themselves, collapsing to their knees on the spot.
Kwoooargh!
With another roar, the ogre charged.
Fast.
Unbelievably so for a monstrous bulk over four meters tall, the ogre closed in at terrifying speed.
Boom boom boom boom boom…!
The two hundred meters vanished in a flash.
“Sh… shit….”
But the fearless veteran unit members, struck directly by the elite ogre’s presence, couldn’t budge—like butterflies trapped in a spiderweb.
The elite ogre finally locked eyes fully on the unit members, now reduced to mere prey along with their mounts. Baring its massive fangs in a horrific grin, it leaped into the air.
“……!?”
In that instant, Big Fang—the elite ogre—saw it.
While everyone else cowered under the presence, one figure stood unchanged.
A pitch-black horse and a single human atop it.
And the moment it saw the human’s lip curl in a smirk, hand touching something long and dark—
Big Fang’s elite survival instincts fired on pure reflex. Neurons in its hippocampus linked via synapses.
The reconstructed memory fragments issued an instantaneous command to its body at light speed.
Kwarararak!
Having swung its brutally massive axe high while airborne, Big Fang’s huge frame twisted into three midair flips.
Boom!
Curling up in the air, it landed on its knees in the squelching mud and slid.
Shwarararak!
Kicking up black mud and murky water, the elite ogre’s body slid a full ten meters before screeching to a halt right before the black horse. (The upside-down axe had served as a perfect brake.)
Sion parted his lips as he watched Big Fang slide to a stop, knees demurely tucked beneath it.
“You’ve picked up some weird new tricks while we were apart?”
“Grrrroo…”
“……???”
The Sparrow Unit members, barely freed from the ogre’s presence, couldn’t trust their eyes.
‘Did that ogre just do aerial flips?’
‘Landed on its knees and slid over?’
They couldn’t make out the words clearly, but the monstrous ogre trembled and shrank its neck at Sion’s voice.
‘Does this make any sense?’
Every unit member thought the same.
And so did the monsters who had watched him from the rock, from start to finish.
* * *
Monsters are strong and cruel.
Not as intelligent as humans, but they possess some reasoning ability and can use both hands to craft simple tools.
In simple terms, they’re smarter than Earth’s orangutans or chimpanzees.
Even by raw numbers across all species, they don’t lag far behind humans.
So why do monsters sometimes prey on people but ultimately get pushed into remote forests or canyons?
Many reasons, but the decisive one is their short lifespans.
Even assuming they die of old age without ever facing predators, small monsters like goblins or kobolds live around ten years.
Mid-to-large ones like trolls or ogres live longer, but those exceeding twenty years are exceedingly rare.
And those rare cases are elites like ‘Big Fang’—or champions above them.
But Big Fang is the king of monsters in the Brandin Mountains.
Meaning no one in the range has outlived it.
So the monsters gathered in the swamp now had no idea why this thug-like ogre was acting this way.
They didn’t even know who that tiny human was.
Monsters are simple.
Not livestock-level, but… ambiguously smart, you could say?
Even Big Fang—having surpassed elite to approach champion status, enough to grasp human speech somewhat—is a genius in the monster world.
Yet even that genius had been beaten senseless by Sion, imprinting a ‘major premise,’ and now acted accordingly. That’s exactly what it was doing.
The swamp monsters likewise had their own major premises as starting logic.
One of them was identical to the one etched into Big Fang’s instincts from long ago—before it got thrashed by Sion, when both its fangs were intact.
- I don’t obey orders from those weaker than me!
Of course, the swamp monsters had all prostrated at Big Fang’s single roar, recognizing the power gap.
However.
For the apex thug to grovel before a ‘weaker’ one?
The major premises conflicted.
Faced with this complex situation, the monsters felt confusion.
But as said, monsters are simple. Ambiguously smart ones.
So these ambiguously smart creatures reached a profoundly simple, clear conclusion.
- I don’t obey orders from those weaker than me!
- But the ogre is stronger than me.
- But… what if it’s not ‘me,’ but ‘us’?
The mid-to-large monsters—who’d normally be at each other’s throats—exchanged glances.
An invisible will (shinXsak) among creatures bound by the monster category birthed something transcending species (kalX).
And that great something (kalX) was invisible to the monsters themselves.
But visible to this world’s one and only ‘user’ at this moment.
* * *
[Error.]
[Specific conditions triggered: Monster wills temporarily linked.]
“What the hell is this…?”
Sion stared at the dozens of mid-to-large monsters fixating on him, utterly dumbfounded.
Not that the prior message hadn’t been absurd.
[Error.]
[Elite Ogre (LEVEL 49) has fully submitted to User No. 01, Sion Jang.]
[First to subjugate a monster.]
[First to subjugate an elite monster.]
[Elite Ogre (LEVEL 49) individual $$&&****## subju%%$$###]
[Error.]
He got the part about fully subjugating Big Fang.
But the errors and garbled characters… total mess.
Seemed like repeatedly breaking this world’s laws as the sole user—before the ‘main story’ even started—was causing it.
‘But whatever. What the fuck are those guys? ProXss kalX or some shit?’
Sion didn’t play much, but as a Korean, he knew internet memes cold. The monsters matched nothing else.
Not just the floating message—the blue tendrils oozing from their heads, intertwining, screamed it to anyone watching.
“…….”
Sion believed this world was real.
After meeting Derkios, glimpsing fragments of its secrets, seeing levels, unmistakable ‘system messages,’ and the status window.
Everything he’d experienced, the people, the emotions—they were undeniably real.
Thus, he’d come to see it as an alien world merely augmented with a game system.
But this situation forced words from him he’d never imagined uttering.
“What a piece-of-shit trash netgame this is.”
Yet Sion was this trash game’s sole user. (For now.)
Plus, this situation, if you thought about it…
‘Is actually a good thing.’
He’d planned to use Big Fang to clean up mid-to-large monsters upon reunion anyway.
And here they’d gathered a bunch for him?
All high-level too?
Sion glanced back.
The unit members—still massively flustered but sensing the shift in monster presence—were swiftly assuming combat stances.
Those guys are bits of 0s and 1s data?
Bullshit!
Those are my kids.
For the kids he’d cherish and nurture (exploit) long-term, there was only one thing to do.
“Everyone, hold tight. Today, I’ll show you some proper driver skills.”
“Kn-Knight!”
Knight this, driver that—who cares?
Whether you bus ‘em or sweep with lance and sword, killing monsters is what counts.
And so the knight charged at the swamp monsters.
(To be continued)