36. The One I Kept Hidden

My task was to trace the sword strokes the past heads of the house, and Kairon, had left behind.

Easy enough to say. Harder to actually do.

For one thing, without Eve as my partner I’d never have worked up the nerve to attempt the method at all, and repeating a single 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.”

A groan of a murmur slipped out between my lips.

I only leaned on Eve’s help while I was driving my muscles all the way to their limit in the raw conditioning. The moment actual sword practice began, she withdrew strictly to the role of observer. Grinding my teeth through a soreness that felt like it was slicing me apart from head to toe, I swung the sword over and over. Only once my joints were screaming and not a single knuckle would move the way I willed it did a short rest finally get allowed.

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

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

I gathered up my fraying mind. Once again I made myself remember why I’d resolved to clear this world, and what was waiting at the end of this damned trial. If I stopped here, all of it would have been for nothing. I couldn’t let myself vanish without so much as drawing close to the heads who’d come before me.

And the result, where 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, not a wooden one.

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

I chose to take it as a sign that, on some level, he acknowledged me.

Clang! Clang! Clang!

The second thing that made me happy was that the sparring was running on even footing. Without a word between us, each of us knew where the other meant to strike and how he meant to defend. Sparring against the illusion, I realized, had bumped my level up another notch.

But the gap is still abysmally far.

Even so, the longer the bout went on, the more I felt the gulf between Kairon’s level and mine. It was a gap no amount of effort in the underground training ground alone could ever close.

Which is exactly why this is fun.

Somehow I’d taken a body that was disadvantaged from birth and made it serviceable. The risk that the curse would bar me from ever using mana had been nothing but an excuse.

I know Kairon is matching me on purpose.

Clang!

Don’t try to win. Just enjoy this.

I forgot that 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: sparring.

Schick.

The hem of Kairon’s robe parted, fluttered loose, and drifted to the floor. We both lowered our swords at the same time.

“Has it really been four months? Since I took this training ground over.”
“Yes.”
“How was it? Did I meet your expectations?”

At my question, Kairon glanced at the severed hem and let a small huff of laughter slip out.

“…Not bad.”

How it would have sounded to anyone else, I couldn’t say, but to me it was no different from the highest praise there was.

At her words, I realized I was smiling.

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

Kairon didn’t let me savor 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.”

Kairon’s expression had gone grim. Seeing how serious his face was, only one guess took over my mind.

Has the Emperor awakened, after all?

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

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

Up to now I’d been able to guarantee a hundred-percent clear against any opponent whose patterns and strategy I knew. 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 wounded by anything that wasn’t magical. There was the option of enchanting a sword, 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, while he watched me work, Kairon spoke.

“Lillian.”

Before I could even ask who that was, he went on.

“Your sister is not only Seraphina.”

Rattle, rattle.

The carriage had left the Arne domain behind and was racing along a forest road, heading north. Watching the domain shrink in the window, I thought back to the last words Kairon had given me just 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 if no one told me?”

Up 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 according to Kairon’s explanation, there was one more child, between Lucius and me.

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

She, too, like Arden, was an NPC who never appeared 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 made into named bosses. After turning it over, the conclusion I arrived at was this.

Adding Lillian AND Arden would have been too much.

The dev team had to weigh, at every turn, the parts the players would enjoy most. By that logic, five mid-bosses on top of Kairon really would have been overkill.

A reunion between brother and sister, both cast aside.

As it stood, the moment I’d stepped out of the training ground I’d been bundled into the carriage Kairon had prepared.

The mission he’d given me, in his own words:

— Bring Lillian back.

The luggage inside the carriage was already packed: spare provisions, a sleeping bag to rest in, a well-honed sword, a bow and arrows, everything I’d need.

One thing worth noting: Kairon had taken Aerondight back.

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

I wasn’t particularly offended. I had no illusions about how far out of my depth I still was.

Come to think of it, from the few scraps 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 ones.

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.

Eve and I traded small talk back and forth, and once night fell we stopped, built a campfire, and ate dinner.

Except when nature called, the coachman never strayed far from the carriage. I, on the other hand, walked some distance off and lit my own campfire there, far enough away that I could talk with Eve in comfort.

“Monsters that move around at night tend to be afraid of fire, you see.”

I’d told Eve all sorts of things in our time together, but there were still plenty of stories left to share.

“There’s a monster called a Dark Wolf. As the name says, they’re wolves that live in the dark — but uniquely, on nights when the full moon comes out, they shift into human form.”

By and large, though, most of our conversations came back to the worldbuilding of Demonic Frontier.

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

“…Yeah. Just like that.”

I tilted my head back. 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. I’d anticipated the attack, 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 — why are you grrr-ing?”

Watching the wolves who couldn’t even manage their own drool, I reached for the plain longsword at my waist, then thought better of it. Instead I held out one hand and beckoned with a curl of my fingers.

“Come at me, mutts.”

I spun off on a diagonal and slipped past the claws of the most worked-up wolf, the one charging at the front. In the same motion I chopped the edge of my hand into his temple, and he keeled forward and crumpled, out cold.

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

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

Humans were, in a great many cases, far weaker than monsters of any kind. They were meant to make up the difference with intelligence and technique, the way people used tools back in the real world.

“A… Aaaagh!”

But that only applied to an ordinary human. To cancel out Aerondight’s penalty, I’d raised my Strength to 50. And at Strength 50, even bare hands became a lethal weapon against Dark Wolves.

So I slipped their stabbing claws and caught a wolf’s wrist in each hand.

Crunch—!

“Kyeeeeeeek!”

I wrenched, hard, and the bones gave. The screams didn’t last long.

The campfire blazed red.

“The fact that they jumped me without a moment’s hesitation means I wasn’t the first traveler they’d picked off.”

The Dark Wolves had been far, far too unguarded.

“You’d think they’d at least be wary of an unfamiliar creature.”

Animals didn’t attack indiscriminately unless they were starving to the brink of desperation. One that picked the wrong opponent and came away wounded couldn’t survive in the wild any longer.

“That they were three and I was one — that probably gave them the courage. On top of that, with the full moon, their strength must have been overflowing too.”

“That’s possible. But that’s no reason to attack a human.”

I’d been drinking, so I made a mistake. That kind of nonsensical excuse should never work as a get-out-of-jail-free card…

“Hiiiiieeeen!”

The instant I caught 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, the pack hunters especially, put their effort into whichever prey carried the most meat, not whichever was weakest. I’d overlooked that they’d commit a larger force to the plump horse and coachman than to a beanpole like me.

I tore through the darkness beneath the full moon. If my guess was right, a dozen and more Dark Wolves were already 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 over everything. Only the cold moonlight spilled across the clearing, where a dozen-odd Dark Wolves lay sprawled motionless on the ground.

Not simply knocked out. Every single one had been stabbed or slashed clean through a vital point, the breath cut from them.

And right in the middle of that pile of corpses, one especially huge, red-furred wolf lay with his head caved 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?”

When I pointed at the wolves’ corpses and asked, the coachman glanced down briefly and tossed off a flat reply.

“If there’s a smell of blood, sleep won’t come easy. We should probably move the campsite.”

The coachman tapped the Dark Wolf leader’s corpse out of his way with the toe of his boot. I say “tapped,” but even at a glance the thing easily weighed over a hundred kilograms. The corpse rolled off like a soccer ball.

This is not an ordinary man.

Thinking back on it, this was, after all, a man Kairon himself had assigned to me. I clicked my tongue in admiration and slid my sword back into its sheath.

Looking around at the scattered corpses, I felt embarrassed for having worried at all.

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

Without waiting for a reply, the coachman set about tidying the area.

I just scratched my head and stood there gazing at him.

“Please rest, sir.”
“…Yes.”

I obediently stepped over the strewn wolf corpses and climbed back into the carriage. I lay down on the plush sleeping bag.

“The owner of the carriage is the coachman, and I’m a guest riding in his carriage.”

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

And no, I was not doing this because I was rattled. Got it, Eve?