Deboning
I sprinted toward the monster that had smashed through the rampart, and a thought drifted up as I ran.
Weird-looking thing.
This was the boss of an emergent event that had finally arrived after a full five days of waiting. Beyond the choking dust, its outline was growing sharper by the moment.
The strangest part was the face. Teeth showed in a tight, crocodile grin, but where the eyes ought to have been, a massive horn had sprouted and thrust straight forward.
No eyes? Or are they stuck on somewhere else?
The monster's blackened hide was riddled with holes, packed so densely from crown to toe that I could hardly find an unbroken patch.
Those holes have to be good for something.
I never broke stride. I picked the creature apart detail by detail as I closed in — a shallow read, nothing but what my eyes could catch. Even so, it had to be done. Back in Einherjar, the ones who wrote PVE off as boring and skipped the analysis tended to die in a hurry. PVE monsters always came with a surprise tucked away somewhere. Plenty of rankers had swung without thinking, run into a self-destruct type, and been reduced to a smear of meat without so much as a corpse left behind.
Front legs solid. Hind legs weak. Nothing that looks like a wing, so it can't fly. Top-heavy overall. Hard as rock.
I had gotten that far when the wind sliding over my skin changed all at once. A chill coiled at the nape of my neck. The sense I had bought by dying some ten million times in Einherjar had answered, and my body moved before the thought could.
I kicked off and leapt. In the air I hauled my knees to my chest and balled myself as small as I could, then swung the claw sword.
Something struck the blade and sprang away. The jolt sang through my palm, and a beat later the roar and the shockwave crashed in together.
"Oh!"
The blast shoved my curled body wholesale through the air. I didn't fight it. I turned one clean rotation overhead and came down light.
The ground around the monster had been utterly wrecked. Earth lay torn up like a plowed field, and the rubble of the collapsed rampart was shot full of holes — the monster at the center, and not a single direction spared. It looked as if someone had touched off claymores on every side at once. What was the proper name again? Directional mines?
What had just kicked off my sword was a shard of bone, polished smooth as a steel ball. More of the same were driven deep into the ground around my feet. Judging by the gap between the blast and the shockwave, those shards had outrun the sound by a wide margin.
I stood and took in the miserable scene, savoring a small, nostalgic ache.
Season 19. The U.S. Army Raid.
Of course that had come back. An event from the very earliest days of Einherjar, one I had never properly gotten to enjoy: the absurd premise that the U.S. military had stormed the Einherjar coliseum, and a thrilling brawl against soldiers armed with every kind of firearm. It was so early in the game's life that guns had actually been a serious threat. Back then, even dodging by watching the muzzle was more than most people could manage, and that only made it better. You died looking like a honeycomb, came back, and charged in again. The underwater matches, where they simply flooded the arena, could not begin to compare. Filthy, perfect fun — and it survived only as a legend, because the event had ended a single day after it opened.
A real shame. Was fighting an army inside a precise simulation really such a problem? My perfectly normal brain could not begin to understand it.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
Bone shards started blasting out of the monster's hide without a pause, so the trip down memory lane ended there. This time it was not one great volley. It was precise fire, shot by shot, aimed at me.
Ah. Those holes. Gun barrels.
I had figured they were good for something.
I kicked off again. As a test I cut left, then right, and pushed my speed as high as it would go. The bone shards still flew dead into wherever I happened to be. No eyes at all, and its aim was disgusting.
So the eyes really are somewhere else.
Well. I could check that once I got close.
Every time a shard came in, I spun the claw sword and knocked it aside. I felt each path they cut through the air against my skin — where they came from, and where I ought to let them go. All I had to do was turn my hand and deflect. And all the while, the distance to the monster shrank, steady and sure.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
Maybe it was the endless crack of those gunshot bursts, but it truly felt like fighting an army. As if I were finally getting to finish the event that had died after a single day.
In that moment I decided the monster's name. I slapped aside a bone shard that had flown in under my nose, charged, and shouted the name I had just given it with everything I had.
The Bald Elder screamed.
"Since when is that a Black Armored Dragon!"
A Black Armored Dragon was a Danger Level 3 monster, sightless, with a body that was simply very tough. It was not a beast that could plow up the ground before the rampart in a single stroke of lightning. An undiscovered subspecies of the Black Armored Dragon — there was no other way to explain it.
At last the dust thinned, and what it revealed was wretched. With the Black Armored Dragon at the center, the earth had been gouged open in every direction, and nothing that had stood nearby remained intact.
"A subspecies of the Black Armored Dragon," the Bandaged Elder said. "Its Danger Level looks to be four, at the very least."
And that was the minimum. Beyond that, he could not say. Even in his active years the Bandaged Elder had been Danger Level 3, and that was as far as his measure reached.
"...It's alive," the Tall Elder murmured, as if the words hurt.
At the center of the torn earth, a bundle of black hair stood without a single scratch. A moment later, Black Sheep's attack began.
Another claw slid out of that voluminous hair. One in each hand. Gripping two small claws, Black Sheep charged the Black Armored Dragon.
"We have to stop her! A Danger Level 2 claw couldn't so much as scratch a Black Armored Dragon's scales—"
A howl of agony tore through the village.
The Bandaged Elder, already starting forward, had no choice but to stop. Flesh was being carved from the Black Armored Dragon's foreleg, the way one pares an apple. Round and round. Each time Black Sheep coiled about that leg, a long ribbon of meat still wearing its black scales unspooled, and where she passed, not a scrap of flesh remained. Only cleanly deboned bone slumped to the ground, strengthless.
It was the Deboning Sword in truth: a living thing taken apart while it still drew breath. Even to the elders, the sight looked viciously painful — painful enough that hunters who had spent their lives killing monsters found themselves, against their will, sympathizing with the monster's cry.
Black Sheep did not stop while the Black Armored Dragon screamed. She rode the same momentum that had pared the foreleg and climbed the body itself. The dragon thrashed to throw her off. It twisted, slammed itself into the ruined rampart, and set off that lightning blast once more. None of it mattered. There was nothing the Black Armored Dragon could do. Before anyone quite saw how, part of its torso was nothing but bone.
The sight had long since passed understanding. The dreadful swordsmanship — spinning as she cut, then stepping on the cut to climb — they could set that aside. How did one cut the harder thing with the softer? That was the greater riddle.
By then the Black Armored Dragon had lost even the will to strike back. Its deboned foreleg had dropped it onto one side, and all that escaped it was a thin, drawn-out scream. Black Sheep regarded it for a quiet moment. Then she sprang from its body, down onto the foreleg she had left as bone, and tore free the claw still fixed at its end. She raised that claw as if gathering it into an embrace, and drove it into the Black Armored Dragon's skull.
The subspecies died in a single stroke. The scream that had gone on and on cut off as if it had been a lie. To the elders, that final blow looked almost like mercy.
The Bandaged Elder's murmur spread low across the village clearing.
Deep in the Flowing Forest, where the leaves had gone white, a band of men who looked like hunters had made camp. Camping in the middle of the forest during the Season of White Leaves was something no hunter in his right mind would dream of. The men seated around the clearing, however, could not have been more at ease. Meat cooked over the campfire, and a bottle of liquor made the rounds.
Maknae, the youngest of the crew, was the one who spoke.
"Boss. Shouldn't we be heading for Sleeping Lake Village soon?"
The man they called Boss set the bottle down. The look on his face asked what kind of nonsense this was.
"Huh? The leaves are still white everywhere. What the hell are you on about?"
Maknae pressed on, perfectly serious.
"Last time we drove the monsters in and cleaned out Sleeping Lake Village's hunters, didn't we? Shouldn't we harvest before it's too late? And these past few days we haven't seen so much as a monster's nose. Even with the white leaves."
Someone tore at a piece of meat and backed him up.
"That's true."
For the first few days after the white leaves came, monsters had rushed them day and night, and there had been no chance to so much as shut their eyes. Then, from one day to the next, the attacks had stopped as if the whole thing had been a lie.
"We got lucky," the Boss said, brushing it off. He rubbed his chin, thought a moment, and spoke again. "No. The white leaves are dragging on. Go too late, and the village itself might be gone."
Not a single hunter remained there. There was a limit to how long a place like that could hold, however scarce the monsters had become.
Maknae hesitated, then asked, "But, Boss. There are three old men there who were something in their day. Will we be all right?"
A brief silence. Then the men around the fire burst out laughing all at once.
"Now that you mention it," the Boss said, smug as could be, "Maknae, you've never fought a hunter, have you? It's no problem. Hunting monsters and hunting people are completely different."
He drew a longsword that looked light at the hip and spun it on his fingertips.
"Monsters are big and tough, but they're honest. That's why hunter bastards fight like idiots, lugging weapons as tall as they are."
The long blade caught the campfire and flashed.
"But that sort of thing isn't much use when you're killing people."
The men snickered.
"Those old men might take monsters better than we do. That doesn't mean they fight better than we do."
"If it's that easy," Maknae said, "then didn't we suffer for nothing, digging all those traps?"
The Boss answered him.
"That was to leave a reason no one would find strange if a whole village vanished. That's how you keep Central from paying attention."
He threw back what was left of the liquor and stood.
"All right. Time we got moving. Off to claim prosperous little Sleeping Lake Village."
One by one the men rose, confidence written across their faces. As far as they were concerned, when the work was hunting people, no one in the area could match them.