The Five-Bell Alarm
Dorian burst straight out of the barracks and raced up the central tower—the highest point in all of Habun Castle.
"Huh? Dorian?"
"What are you doing up here?"
The sentries standing watch at the summit went round-eyed.
"Th-there's no time!"
Dorian shook his head, sprinted forward, and slammed the alarm bell with everything he had.
Clang! Clang! Clang! Clang! Clang!
Five peals rang out in a heartbeat, and the highest state of alert—the same level reserved for a Wave—swept through the fortress.
Five-Bell Alarm — Wave-Class Threat
All personnel to battle stations.
"A-are you insane?"
"Oh, damn it!"
The sentries grabbed for Dorian's arms, but it was already too late. Soldiers who had been resting or sleeping came pouring toward the central tower in a roaring tide.
"Wh-what the hell!"
"An alarm, out of nowhere? What's going on!"
"Five rings—that's a Wave and nothing else!"
"That's Dorian! Why is he up there!"
The soldiers stared, eyes bulging, at the green-haired swordsman still hammering the bell.
"Monsters! Monsters are pouring in from the west!"
Dorian kept ringing as he shouted the words Raon had given him, exactly as he'd heard them.
"Monsters? What kind of nonsense is that!"
"Why would monsters come from the west!"
"You idiot! Every monster in the area already submitted to the Lord!"
"Did you have a nightmare or something? Get down from there!"
The Snow Strike Squad swordsmen and the rank-and-file hurled curses up at him, waving him down off the tower.
"Dorian!"
"That's enough already!"
"Raon said—!"
The sentries were closing in to drag him off the bell when his mouth opened again.
"Raon said so! He said monsters are coming from the west! Not as many as a Wave, but a filthy lot of them!"
"Hhk— Raon?"
"I-if it's him, that's… that's worth believing."
"Worth believing? We have to believe it!"
"Move, now!"
"Get the defenses ready!"
"Ring it again!"
The moment they heard Raon's name, the soldiers and the Snow Strike Squad swordsmen swallowed hard and started moving. Even the sentries who had been trying to stop Dorian joined him at the bell.
"Monsters? What kind of monsters are we talking about!"
Terian came charging out late, his voice booming over the chaos.
"Right—what exactly is coming? The countermeasures change depending on the type!"
"He said it's mixed, like a Wave—trolls, orcs, sea monsters. And…"
Dorian drew a breath and finished it.
"He said two of Eden's Ghosts are in the mix!"
"E-Eden? The Eden of the Five Demons?"
"Those lunatics are coming here?"
"Does that even make sense? Why would they be here!"
"What kind of garbage is that!"
Mouths fell open all along the tower. Monsters they could believe. Eden, they could not. Heads shook in disbelief.
"Ah, for crying out loud! Not me—Raon said it! Eden too!"
"Then it's real. Prepare for battle! Open the armory!"
The instant Raon's name left Dorian's mouth, Terian issued combat orders without a second's hesitation.
"If Raon said it, it's true! Move faster!"
"Eden is coming! Get the defenses up, now!"
"Spears and swords—on the walls!"
"Boil the oil, ready the rocks and the logs! Lay arrows along the battlements!"
Because it was Raon's word, the soldiers wiped the doubt from their faces and moved with startling speed.
"……"
Dorian watched them scatter in every direction and wrinkled his nose.
Maybe I should just quit.
Not one of them had believed a word out of his own mouth. The second it became Raon's word, they moved as one. It rankled.
Nothing I can do about it.
Swallowing the sting, he climbed onto the wall. Raon was already there, staring west, a presence flowing off him as smooth and inevitable as running water.
"Mm…"
Dorian swallowed. The moment he saw Raon standing over the gate, the same unease that used to vanish whenever Milland held this post began to drain out of him.
Is he actually a monster?
Even Dorian's meager senses could feel it. Raon had grown another full step. A startled breath slipped out of him before he knew it.
Thanks to Raon's swift orders, Habun Castle's battle line was in place before the enemy arrived. As in the Wave, infantry and spearmen took the wall, with archers and the Snow Strike Squad swordsmen bracing them from behind.
"Hm."
Dorian glanced back and clicked his tongue.
That's strange.
Terian was off organizing the defense, so Dorian had fully expected Edquil, leader of the Snow Strike Squad, to have some snide remark for Raon. Instead the man was quieter than the soldiers. He simply stared west, as if he trusted every word Raon had spoken.
To change even a bastard like that… Raon's presence was even more overwhelming than Dorian had imagined.
A low, rolling rumble built in the west. The aura that had been gliding from Raon like a quiet stream surged up into a crashing tidal wave.
"They're here."
At that low voice, every eye turned west. The thin forest collapsed inward, and monsters came pouring through it like a landslide.
At the heart of that blue-green tide stood two grotesque figures, ghost-qi bleeding off a mask and a helmet. Eden's vessels. The Azure Pearl Ghost and the Ice Fang Ghost.
"I-it was real."
"That's actually Eden."
"Th-the Azure Pearl Ghost…"
"That's the Ice Fang Ghost!"
"Kh…"
The sight of Eden's Ghosts—and of monsters whose presence was more vicious than anything in a Wave—sent a shudder through the ranks. Discipline on the wall rippled like a flag in a hard wind.
"W-wait! That's the Lord behind them! The Ice Troll Lord!"
"The Lord's here too?"
"I-it was a trap! How are we supposed to…"
"Fire the flares."
Raon's voice was calm, and the trembling stopped as if a hand had closed over it. A soldier behind him loosed two signal flares into the sky.
They burst. Darkness peeled back, and the monsters' warped auras and savage faces stood naked in the light.
"No time to draw up a plan, so we do it the way we always have."
Raon moved toward the right-hand wall, where the repairs still weren't finished.
"Sir?"
"What do you mean?"
"I'll hold them from below. Support me from above."
"R-Raon!"
Dorian stretched out a hand to stop him, but Raon was already dropping from the wall.
"Hhk!"
"H-he's doing it again?"
"That—again?"
"Raon…"
"Raon!"
Awe and terror mixed in the eyes of the Snow Strike Squad and the soldiers. Some of them were shaking as if a current had run through their bones.
A deep, grinding roar rolled off the earth. With Raon standing before the wall like a colossus, the morale that fear had crushed surged all the way to the sky.
"Raon."
Dorian stared at the overwhelming presence pouring off him and clenched his fists until the knuckles went white. Beside him, Edquil bit down on his lip and locked his gaze on Raon's back.
Raon watched Eden's Ghosts and the monsters charging toward him and evened his breath.
About eighty percent.
He still hadn't fully recovered. He could only bring about eighty percent of his true strength to bear. Even so, the growth he'd carved out since the Wave made him certain he was stronger now than he had been then.
Holding them alone might still be a stretch.
The Azure Pearl Ghost, the Ice Fang Ghost, and the Ice Troll Lord. Forget the horde behind them—those three alone would be more than enough.
But I have to do it anyway.
A martial artist grew by walking into hard fights and coming out the other side of crisis. Feeling his heart hammer against his ribs, he drew up the Cultivation of Ten Thousand Flames.
"You were here! What luck!"
The Ice Fang Ghost kicked off the ground. In the blink of an eye he tore through the space between them and brought the blades along his forearms crashing down, Battle Qi and killing intent fused into a single blow.
Raon stamped a true step into the earth. Surging energy poured into the forms of the Mad Fang Sword, and a sword-strike shot out like a bolt of light, batting the Ice Fang Ghost's blade aside.
A shriek of metal, as if a lump of iron had been crushed out of shape, and the Ice Fang Ghost staggered, flung backward.
"Y-you little—!"
Shock rattled the eyes inside the helmet.
A howl cut the air. Razor shards of ice came down from the sky like hail—the Azure Pearl Ghost's ice sorcery. The temperature plunged, and the shards scythed in at unnatural angles.
Raon settled his breathing and bloomed a crimson flower along his blade.
Cultivation of Ten Thousand Flames
Crimson petals flared and scattered, filling the air, melting the ice that choked the sky and severing the lines of the Azure Pearl Ghost's sorcery. A wave of power born from the resonating Ring of Fire.
"What is this—!"
The ruined spell sent a shock through the Azure Pearl Ghost; the mask trembled. For an instant the creature couldn't move. Raon was about to drive for its throat when a terrifying surge of Battle Qi flared on his right.
"KRAAAAH!"
The Ice Troll Lord came on like a charging bull. An axe heavy with colossal Battle Qi dropped toward Raon's skull.
Raon stepped the Supreme Harmony Footwork. He blurred like a shadow at night and reappeared a pace behind the blow, sword rising to meet it.
"Krrrk!"
Unfinished growth or not, a Lord was a Lord. In that same instant the troll twisted the axe into a perfect guard.
Power crashed into power. The shockwave split the darkened earth.
"Hhk!"
Raon clenched his teeth and unfolded the Mad Fang Sword. A vicious blade that had caught the scent of an opening smashed the Ice Troll Lord's axe aside.
Balance broken, the Lord was driven back and crashed through the orc pack behind it. Six orcs vanished under that bulk, reduced to a smear of blood.
White dust bloomed. Above it, Raon lowered his sword.
Three times.
He had swung his sword all of three times, and Eden's two Ghosts and a hundred-odd monsters had been brought to a halt. The overwhelming force of it left the people on the wall and the monsters below blinking like they'd had their souls knocked loose.
"If this is all you've got, I'm disappointed."
Raon smiled thinly and raised his blade. A savage current bled from the silver edge and began to eat the space around him.
Putting on a show while you're already overreaching.
Wrath snorted.
True enough.
Raon huffed a quiet laugh.
I only have to hold the front.
He lifted his left hand and closed it into a fist. Arrows and crossbow bolts split the calm moonlight and stitched the sky.
They punched into monsters caught flat-footed. Bodies went down in heaps; others dropped to their knees.
"Loose again!"
Terian's hearty shout rolled over the wall. Hundreds of silver thunderbolts fell a second time, and even more monsters sank to the ground than before.
"How's it feel, getting ambushed for a change?"
"How did you know we were coming?"
"I've got a pretty good instinct for these things."
Raon narrowed his eyes at the Azure Pearl Ghost and the Ice Fang Ghost.
"I'll give you this—you dug the trap well. I walked right into it. But…"
He pointed at the dying flares.
"That's a distress signal. The Commander will be here before morning. All I have to do is hold until then."
"Ice Fang Ghost. This time, you were right."
A gloom so thick it could raise the hair on a man's neck crawled out of the Azure Pearl Ghost's mask.
"That one has to die here and now."
"Kill me? You two aren't enough."
"Ra Tia!"
⟨ Raise the Fallen ⟩
The Azure Pearl Ghost slammed its staff down and spat the incantation.
"Krrrrr!"
"KYAAAAAH!"
Monsters that had been dying on the arrows lurched up like corpses, red light burning in their eyes. Their presence turned more vicious than before, yellow teeth bared, scraps of flesh still caught between them.
"Change of plan. Priority one is that boy. Kill him!"
"Oh, for the love of—"
Hearing the Azure Pearl Ghost, the Ice Fang Ghost chuckled and came forward.
"Never imagined you'd have grown this much since last time. You really are a monster."
Blue light flared in the creature's eyes as it drew up its Battle Qi. A rough, freezing North Sea tide seemed to coil around its body.
"You heard him! You're first!"
The Ice Fang Ghost detonated the power it had gathered and came on in a rush. The Sharksting helmet swelled in Raon's vision in an instant—speed that made their last encounter look like a stroll.
Raon answered with Glacia. Through the Sea of Senses he read the Ice Fang Ghost's movement and brought his sword down.
Blade-fin and sword met, and a roar went up as if the axis of the earth itself had shuddered. The Ice Fang Ghost drove in on raw strength. It felt like taking a tidal wave of the open ocean on bare skin.
Raon wrenched the Cultivation of Ten Thousand Flames to its peak and smashed the Mad Fang Sword across. The Ice Fang Ghost's blade bounced away—and the creature twisted like a shark, driving a spike at Raon's throat.
"Die!"
"You first."
A hair before the spike kissed his throat, Raon's left hand moved like lightning. He tore the Requiem Sword from the small of his back and cut in the same motion.
A blade steeped in ominous qi sheared through the Ice Fang Ghost's armor and tasted hot, red blood.
"A wound like this—!"
The Ice Fang Ghost didn't give ground. True to the savage nature of Sharksting it had taken into itself, it bared needle teeth and came in again.
"Then I'll just cut you down where you stand."
A chilling light entered Raon's eyes as he drew the sword back, ready to carve a single killing line—and his vision filled with white fur. The Ice Troll Lord, wounds already closed, had recovered completely.
From the right, snowballs the size of a man's torso came down in a blinding storm—the Azure Pearl Ghost's blizzard. Unlike an Ice Troll Shaman's sorcery, a single hit from one of those looked like it would snap bone.
Inside the howling snow, Raon slipped the Lord's attacks and knocked the Ice Fang Ghost's blade aside.
Hhk—
The Ice Fang Ghost and the Azure Pearl Ghost both carried the strength of Expert High-Class or better, and now he had to fight the Ice Troll Lord on top of that, with its overwhelming physique. Cold sweat ran down his spine.
That's what you get for charging in like a fool.
Shut up.
He shoved Wrath's mockery aside and sent his sword out.
Cultivation of Ten Thousand Flames
Saw-teeth of flame spun and tore through the Ice Fang Ghost's blade and the Ice Troll Lord's waist.
He tried to press through—and the Azure Pearl Ghost threw up a wall of ice sorcery that cut his path dead.
"Tsk."
It was always like this. Interference like that, and he couldn't finish anything.
The monsters are a problem too.
Even the ordinary beasts were hurling themselves at the wall with madness in their eyes, trying to break through. He couldn't afford a single lapse.
If just one of the three dropped out…
He was clicking his tongue over it when two figures leapt down from the wall. He turned. Dorian, shaking like a leaf, and Edquil, lip bitten white.
"Dorian? And you—"
"W-we'll take the Lord!"
"You handle those two."
Dorian pulled a black stone and a white stone from his Belly Pouch.
"I can't just stand there and watch you fight alone a second time!"
He struck the two stones together like flint and hurled them at the Lord.
They burst. Gray smoke boiled up and swallowed the Ice Troll Lord and the monsters around it.
"Let's go!"
"Understood."
Dorian and Edquil pulled on strange things that looked like eyepatches and plunged into the smoke.
Hah. Never thought I'd live to see that brat actually make himself useful.
That makes two of us.
Raon smiled faintly and turned. The Azure Pearl Ghost and the Ice Fang Ghost were narrowing their eyes at him.
"Sorry, but I need this over with as fast as possible."
He leveled his sword at the two Ghosts.
"I'll grant you the strength. That swordsmanship, those reactions—they don't belong on someone your age. But you're taking us far too lightly."
A smile steeped in ghost-qi crawled across the Azure Pearl Ghost's mask.
"We're not ordinary monsters either."
The Ice Fang Ghost dropped into a crouch, eyes locked on Raon, and planted both arms and both legs on the ground like a wolf, head lifting. Battle Qi flooded every inch of its body as it dragged up every last shred of the North Sea's cold that coiled around its heart.
"Freeze and die where you stand!"
Its jaws yawned wide, like a shark swallowing prey. Icy breath roared out of that black throat—Sharksting's power, the Breath of Frost.
Sharksting's signature art — Battle Qi fused with killing cold.
A wave of pure-white frost that froze the cracked earth in an instant and raised a wall of spiked ice behind its target.
The white cold swallowed Raon whole. The frost-wave was so savage that a wall of spiked ice reared up in the space behind him.
"It's over. Now… huh?"
The Ice Fang Ghost wiped its mouth and started to rise—and froze like a plaster statue. Raon's reflection trembled in its pupils. He looked so untouched it was impossible to believe he had taken the Breath of Frost head-on.
"Wh-what!"
The Ice Fang Ghost shook from head to foot, as if struck with palsy.
"How did you—the Breath of Frost…"
The Breath of Frost was a unique art that wove Battle Qi and cold together. Ordinary cold-warding could never endure it. How he was standing there unharmed made no sense at all.
"Out of the way. I'll do it. Kadiartin!"
The Azure Pearl Ghost slammed its staff down and chanted.
A frost-curse that assaults the mind rather than the flesh. The blizzard raging around Habun Castle collapsed inward on a single point, its color turning a sick, ominous yellow. Even a powerful resistance to cold cannot endure a freeze laid upon the spirit.
"Huh?"
A terrifying storm of curse-snow howled around him—and the human inside it stood unbowed, sword pointed at the sky.
A crimson blade fell like lightning and tore the cursed blizzard in two. He came walking through the shredded snowflowers as if draped in a coat of silver light, the corner of his mouth lifting.
"Th-that's impossible! A curse-laden spell, how did you—"
The Yellow Lotus Snowflakes had been prepared as a mental assault to stop Milland. That it could be broken like this had never once entered the Azure Pearl Ghost's mind.
"Cold? Curses?"
Scarlet flame surged up Raon's sword, melting the dark as it rose.
From someone far more vicious than the likes of you.