36. The One I Kept Hidden

Tracing the strokes left behind by the past heads of the house, and by Kairon: easy to say, less easy to do.

Without Eve as my partner I’d never have had the nerve to try the method at all, and repeating one motion hundreds of times until my body remembered it on its own turned out to be harder than I’d expected.

“My arms are… going numb.”

It slipped out between my lips as something close to a groan.

I only leaned on Eve’s help when I was driving my muscles to their limit in raw training. Once actual sword practice began, she withdrew strictly to the role of observer. So I ground my teeth through a soreness that felt like it was slicing me up from head to toe, and I swung. Only when my joints were screaming and not one knuckle of my fingers would obey me did I finally get a short rest.

Stretched flat on the cold floor, staring up at the ceiling, I’d sometimes feel a vicious wave of doubt wash in. I used to live an ordinary life. How on earth had I ended up rolling around in the dirt like this? Why was I the one who had to swallow this kind of pain?

…No. I decided I was going to see this through to the end, didn’t I.

So I gathered up my fraying mind and made myself remember, once more, why I’d resolved to clear this world and what was waiting at the end of this damned trial. If I stopped here, everything would have been for nothing. I couldn’t disappear without so much as treading on the shadows of the past heads of the house.

And what you got when a state-of-the-art partner met blockheaded effort was this.

Clang!

The Aerondight in my grip met Kairon’s real blade.

Feels like I’m being acknowledged.

The first thing that made me happy was that Kairon was holding a real sword and not a wooden one.

Even if it’s my own delusion, fine by me.

I chose to take it that, on some level, he was acknowledging me.

Clang! Clang! Clang!

The second thing that made me happy was that the match was running on even footing. Neither of us said a word, yet each knew where the other meant to strike and how he meant to defend. Sparring against the illusion had raised my level another notch, I realized.

But the gap is still abysmally far.

The longer the bout went on, the more I felt the gulf between his level and mine, a gap that no amount of effort alone in the underground training ground could close.

Which is exactly why this is fun.

I’d somehow managed to make a congenitally disadvantaged body into something serviceable. As for the risk that the curse barred me from ever learning to use mana, that was nothing but an excuse.

I know Kairon is matching me on purpose.

Clang!

Don’t try to win. Just enjoy this.

I forgot he’d once been a boss in the game. What I was doing right now wasn’t a clear-attempt. It was simply what swordsmen do, a sparring match.

Schick.

The hem of Kairon’s robe parted, fluttered loose and settled to the floor, and we both lowered our swords at the same moment.

“Four months already, is it? Since I took over this training ground.”
“Yes.”
“How was it? Did I meet your expectations?”

Kairon glanced at the severed hem and let a small huff of laughter escape him.

“…Not bad.”

How that would sound to anyone else, I don’t know, but to me it was no different from the highest possible praise.

Only when she said so did I realize I was smiling.

Who knew I’d be this thrilled by praise from a mere NPC.

But Kairon didn’t let me enjoy that strange feeling for long.

“Prepare to leave.”
“Sorry?”
“Go and bring your sister back.”
“Did something happen while my sister was away in the Empire?”
“It is not Seraphina’s matter.”

His expression had gone grim, and seeing how serious it was, I could think of only one thing.

Has the Emperor awakened, after all?

The day the Crown Prince’s sword plunged into the Emperor’s heart, the Lord of Lamentation, the entity that would lay the Empire to waste, would be born.

I don’t yet have the power to stop him.

Up to now I’d guaranteed myself a hundred-percent clear against any opponent whose patterns and strategy I knew, but this time was different.

The matchup with me, who can’t use mana because of the curse, is too rough.

The Lord of Lamentation couldn’t be damaged by anything that wasn’t magical. I could have a sword enchanted, sure, but even that was no more than a stopgap.

Which magicians among the NPCs who lived near the Arne domain were there, again?

I wrung my brain like a wet towel. Then, out of nowhere, Kairon, who’d been watching me do it, spoke.

“Lillian.”

Before I could ask him who that was —

“Seraphina is not your only sister.”

Rattle, rattle.

The carriage had left the Arne domain behind and was speeding north along a forest road. Watching the domain shrink in the window, I thought back to the last words Kairon had given me before I set out.

— Why do you think the succession contest is a fight among siblings?

“Well… because I didn’t know. How was I supposed to know when nobody told me?”

Until now I’d taken it for granted that Kairon had only four children: Seraphina the eldest, Valerian the second, Lucius the third, and the youngest, Arden, the one I’d possessed. But by Kairon’s account there was one more child, between Lucius and me.

— Her name is Lillian. She is two years older than you.

Like Arden, she was an NPC who didn’t appear in the game.

Why were only these two scrubbed?

House Arne carried a fair amount of weight in the game, so Kairon and every one of his children had been turned into named bosses. I thought it through, and this was the conclusion I arrived at.

Adding Lillian AND Arden would have been too much.

The dev team had to consider, at every turn, the parts users would enjoy most, and by that logic, five mid-bosses besides Kairon really would have been overkill.

A reunion between brother and sister, both cast aside.

So here I was. The moment I’d left the training ground, I’d been forced into the carriage Kairon had prepared, and the mission he’d given me, in his own words —

— Bring Lillian back.

The luggage was already packed: spare provisions, a sleeping bag for resting, a well-honed sword, a bow and arrows, everything. Aerondight, worth noting, Kairon had taken back.

— A sword that doesn’t suit a swordsman’s skill only rusts him.

I wasn’t particularly offended. I knew I was the frog at the bottom of the well.

Come to think of it, going by the few scraps of information Kairon had passed me, she was a magician.

Magicians were rare among the NPCs.

To be precise, what I remembered was that there weren’t any good magicians.

Though as things stand for me right now, with the wolf at my own door, the simple fact that she’s a magician is something I should be grateful for.

If the coachman caught me muttering to myself out loud, he’d report to Kairon that I’d gone mad, so we kept the conversation in the chat.

I went on trading small talk with Eve, and when night fell we stopped, built a campfire and ate dinner.

Except when nature called, the coachman never moved away from the carriage’s immediate vicinity. I, on the other hand, walked some distance off and lit my campfire there, so that I could talk with Eve in comfort.

“Monsters that come out at night tend to be scared of fire, you see.”

I’d told Eve all kinds of things while we’d been together, yet there were still plenty of stories left to share.

“There’s a monster called a Dark Wolf. Like the name says, they’re wolves that live in the dark. But here’s the weird part: on full-moon nights, they shift into human form.”

By and large, though, most of our conversations were about the worldbuilding of Demonic Frontier.

In my field of view, three wolves were standing on their hind legs, brown-furred, with extremely fluffy-looking coats.

“…Yeah. Just like that.”

I tilted my head up. A perfectly round moon hung in the sky.

“Of all nights, it had to be the night of the full moon.”

“They’re dangerous. The moon’s power sends their madness into overdrive.”

“Awooooooo!”

The three Dark Wolves came lunging at me.

Crack!

The wooden chair I’d been sitting in splintered into three chunks, but I’d seen the attack coming, so I kicked off the ground and dodged it lightly.

“Grrr! Human!”
“Grrr! Kill!”

Saliva dribbled in long strings from the Dark Wolves’ fangs.

“You’re not goblins, so what’s with the grrr-ing?”

Watching wolves who couldn’t manage their own drool, I started to draw the ordinary longsword at my waist, then decided against it. Instead, I stretched out one hand and beckoned with a curl of my fingers.

“Come at me, mutts.”

I rotated diagonally and slipped past the claws of the most excited one, the wolf charging at the front, and in the same motion I chopped him on the temple with the edge of my hand. He keeled forward and crumpled, out cold.

At that, the two in the rear, apparently smarter than the first, lashed their claws at me from both sides.

“Pretty clever for mutts, huh?”
“Grrr! Not mutts!”
“Grrr! We are warriors!”

Humans, in many cases, were far weaker than monsters of any kind. They were supposed to make up the difference with intelligence and technique, like using tools in the real world.

“It… it hurts!”

But that applied only to your ordinary human.

To eliminate Aerondight’s penalty I’d raised my Strength to 50, and at Strength 50 even bare hands were a lethal weapon against Dark Wolves. So I dodged their stabbing claws, caught each wolf’s wrist on either side, and —

Crunch—!

“Kyeeeeeeek!”

I twisted, hard, and shattered the bones.

The screams didn’t last long.

The campfire blazed red.

“They came at me without a moment’s hesitation. That means this wasn’t their first time jumping a traveler like me.”

The Dark Wolves had been far, far too unguarded.

“You’d think they’d at least be wary of something they’d never seen before.”

Animals, unless they were starving to the point of desperation, didn’t attack indiscriminately, because if you picked the wrong opponent and ended up wounded, you couldn’t survive in the wild any longer.

“There were three of them and one of me, so that probably gave them the courage. Plus it’s a full moon, so they must’ve been overflowing with strength too.”

“Could be. But that’s no reason to attack a human.”

Had a few drinks. So, a mistake was made.

The way that kind of nonsensical excuse should never get anyone off the hook —

“Hiiiiieeeen!”

The instant I heard a horse’s distant whinny, I sprinted full-tilt toward the carriage.

To think the distance I’d put between us so I could talk comfortably with Eve would come back to bite me.

Wild animals, especially the pack hunters, invest more in whichever prey has more meat on it, not in whichever is weakest, and I’d overlooked that they would commit a larger force to the plump horse and coachman than to a beanpole like me.

I tore through the darkness under the full moon. If my guess was right, a dozen-plus Dark Wolves would already be swarming the carriage. The coachman might be cowering inside in terror, or he might already be getting torn apart.

I burst through the underbrush into the clearing where the carriage was parked.

“You sons of — get the hell out of—!”

My shout died in my throat the moment I took in the scene.

“…”

A silence had settled. Only the cold moonlight fell across the clearing, and a dozen-odd Dark Wolves lay sprawled motionless on the ground. They weren’t simply knocked out. Every single one had been stabbed or slashed clean through a vital point, its breath cut off.

And right in the middle of that pile of corpses, one especially huge, red-furred wolf lay with his head smashed in. Beside him, calmly wiping a blood-stained dagger on his sleeve, the coachman spoke.

“My apologies for the slight disturbance around the carriage.”
“You did all of this?”

I was pointing at the wolves’ corpses as I asked. The coachman glanced down briefly and tossed off a flat reply.

“The smell of blood makes for poor sleep. We should probably move the campsite.”

He tapped the Dark Wolf leader’s corpse out of his path with the toe of his boot. I say “tapped,” but even at a glance the thing easily had to weigh over 100 kilograms, and it rolled away like a soccer ball.

This is not an ordinary man.

Thinking back on it, this was, after all, someone Kairon himself had assigned to me. I clicked my tongue in awe and slid my sword back into its sheath. With the corpses scattered all around, my worry now felt like a waste.

“The night air is chill. I’ll handle the cleanup, so please go back inside and rest.”

Without waiting for a reply, the coachman began to tidy up the area. I scratched my head and just stood there gazing at him —

“Please rest, sir.”
“…Yes.”

I obediently trod across the strewn wolf corpses, climbed back into the carriage and laid myself down on the plush sleeping bag.

“The coachman owns the carriage, and I’m just a guest riding in it.”

“What I mean is, a guest is supposed to listen to the owner.”

I was not doing this because I was rattled. Got it, Eve?