66. Don't Run, Fight Back!

They dressed their ranks.

Heavy steel armor clashed against itself as they advanced, ever so slowly, like one enormous organism.

The essence of the shield-bearer is not attack.

Theirs was the role of the iron wall. Every desperate thrashing of the enemy they absorbed with sheer weight and rendered harmless. Under the name of “shield,” not one opening could ever be allowed, because a tiny gap left by one man could mean the annihilation of the whole unit.

Don’t rush.

So they didn’t hurry. There was only a single enemy in front of them, and still they closed the distance with care.

He was a boy who looked utterly ordinary, holding nothing but an equally ordinary sword.

He dodged a magic bolt with just a flick of his head?

But they’d seen the absurd thing this human had done with their own eyes, and the tension only grew thicker.

This is no ordinary one.

Every shield-bearer, spearman, lancer-cavalry, archer, and mage in the arena had been ordered to kill this boy who didn’t even look old enough to have come of age. He was anything but ordinary. Of that they were certain, and certain again.

“Don’t let your guard down! Hold the formation!”

The shout came from Brom, the oldest veteran among the shield-bearers here.

The arena permitted only one-on-one duels, with no joining another man’s fight and no asking for aid, so few of them had any experience ganging up on a single opponent like this.

It’s been a while.

But Brom had been a mercenary before he became a slave of the arena.

“Stay calm! There’s only one of them!”

He knew how to devour the boy in front of him slowly, without any hurry. And so, at his command, the shield-bearers slowly began to close the pressure in.

“You yellow-bellied old geezers! We’re never gonna kill him like this! It’s just one guy!”

Shadows bolted out ahead, ignoring Brom’s shout.

“Stop! Don’t break ranks!”

They were new recruits who hadn’t been in the arena long, and one look told you they were small-timers who thought having the numbers meant having the win.

“Damn it! Those idiots!”

A curse spilled out of him, but the arrow had already left the string.

The minions in this arena were all nothing more than slaves. Who became today’s sacrifice on the stage and faced the challenger rested entirely on the master’s whim, for they were merely expendable parts, used up according to a set scenario.

And here was an amusing fact: in this arena, surviving wasn’t what made you a veteran. Those who lost and forfeited their lives simply opened their eyes again a month later, in this very same space. A veteran was only a soul that had gone through that cycle of death and rebirth more times than the others.

Perhaps that was why.

Brom had had his neck sawed through and his heart pierced dozens of times, so he knew this was the most dangerous moment. But.

I’ll just come back to life again.

Even if he died, he reckoned, the life of being revived and forced to raise his shield again would simply go on.

“Kill him!”

The new recruits were another matter. Those who hadn’t been chosen yet, or who were lucky enough never to have lost even once, always carried a desperate edge, because defeating the challenger would bring down a reward worthy of it.

Perhaps that was why.

Brom had often seen them bite their lips in disappointment each time the master’s finger passed them by.

“Heh heh heh.”

The boy swung his sword with an unpleasant laugh.

An instinctive premonition flashed through Brom’s mind: a storm was about to sweep through. He had no doubt that the new recruits’ screams and groans were about to erupt and turn the battlefield into hell.

And yet.

What?

What he saw instead were new recruits running wild with all their limbs intact.

“Hey! Look at this little rat! Don’t run!”
“Drive him into a corner! He’s nothing! He’s just fast, that’s all!”

Flush with momentum, they were pushing the boy back with their shields thrust forward.

In case he was wrong, Brom watched from afar a good while longer, and in the end there was no killing intent in the boy’s sword. He could feel none of that overwhelming, savage violence. The boy was too quick to land a hit on, but aside from that one fact, he looked like nothing more than a loach you couldn’t catch hold of.

“Gah, I almost had him!”
“Once I grab you, I’ll tear you limb from limb!”

Frenzied remarks kept spilling from the new recruits’ mouths, one after another, and the boy was too busy fleeing to cut that frenzy down.

In that moment, something began to seethe in the deepest part of Brom.

Lately, all of them had been killed by a single man. After they revived, the answer to the question of who had killed them was always the same: even when the man just stood still, you could see the figure of an enormous lion.

At first, Brom hadn’t believed it. What kind of nonsense was that, he’d thought, feeling a lion’s aura coming off a human being? But once he came face to face with that lion, he understood.

The overwhelming savagery had paralyzed his brain the instant their eyes met. Brom had died without managing a single counterattack. No, he’d died without so much as conceiving the thought of resisting. It had been an instantaneous slaughter, and he hadn’t even registered how he died, whether his neck had gone first or his heart had been run through.

That was how Brom had lived in the arena. It was a prey’s life, trampled by absurdly powerful warriors and dying without ever knowing why.

And yet.

Now there was a boy standing before him that he could toy with. To Brom, who’d met a wretched death day after day, here was a small creature he might, just this once, be able to ravage.

That bitter sense of kinship and cowardly superiority paralyzed his reason.

“…Heh, heh heh heh!”

Frenzy was contagious.

It leaked from the corners of Brom’s mouth, and he couldn’t hold it back. A sensation he’d long since forgotten surged hot through his veins. He flung aside his heavy shield and drew the dagger at his waist, and his comrades already had the same look in their eyes.

“Don’t kill him! Not yet — don’t kill him yet!”

For the first time in a very long while, Brom surrendered his body to the frenzy.

“Slowly… I’ll tear you apart ever so slowly!”

A nameless shield-bearer threw off his shield and lunged at me.

That one fact alone made the performance a roaring success. I’d managed to carve it perfectly into their minds that I was a wholly harmless, pitiable little prey, and now these brutishly oversized shield-bearers were trying to catch me with nothing but dull, sluggish movements.

This is what I wanted.

The moment the shield-bearers dressed their ranks and tightened the encirclement, the long spears of the spearmen and cavalry stabbed viciously through the gaps at my blind spots, while from the rear the archers and mages, each at their station, poured out an endless stream of ranged attacks.

Of course, I could dodge every one of those attacks. No, I wasn’t just dodging them. I was putting them to very good use.

— Sssshk—!

I dodged an arrow that grazed past my cheek, and a system message floated up before my eyes.

It was just like the time before, when I’d done a hundred push-ups to raise my Strength by 0.1. Call it free evasion-farming, with the barrage aimed at me turned to my own advantage.

“Tch, over already?”

A dungeon that yielded neither rewards nor experience had no reason to exist, so it was about time to bring this standoff to an end.

“Kill him! Snap that bastard’s arms and legs off first!”

Just as I’d intended, the shield-bearers broke their own ranks and kept charging at me like rabid dogs.

“Heh heh, come on, come play with the old man!”

I dashed and wove through the arena, and dozens of shield-bearers steadily gave chase. But taking dozens of big lugs and cutting their throats one by one with my own hands was far too inefficient a war of attrition, and everyone wishes someone else would handle the tiresome, tedious work for them.

“Gwaaah!”
“Kueoooh, eoh, urk.”

The hundreds of arrows loosed from the rear lodged squarely in the backs of the shield-bearers chasing close behind me. The mages’ lightning bombs dropped into the heart of the cluster packed nearest to me, too, and set off a chain of electrocution.

“Hey, you crazy bastards! Where the hell are you aiming?!”

With friendlies taking the hits meant for me, the panicked archers and mages in the rear hastily stopped attacking. Then Gamma’s hysterical lion’s roar rang out.

“You morons! Who told you to stop attacking?! Those things come back to life a month after they die anyway! Forget about a little friendly fire and keep shooting till that bastard’s dead!”

Cowed by Gamma’s lashing, the ranged units gritted their teeth and resumed their indiscriminate bombardment.

— Kwaang! Pubeobeok!

“Kuheok…!”

Only when their allies’ magic and arrows had lodged in their backs once more did the shield-bearers’ frenzy subside.

“…Damn it all.”

That was when they finally grasped the situation. Throwing down their shields and charging had been the losing move.

Just as indignation, or maybe a hollow emptiness, was about to color their eyes —

“Nice and cool back there, isn’t it?” I said to the one who’d been chasing me the hardest.

“But who can you blame? You did this to yourselves.”
“You son of a bitch!”
“You know what? You threw off your shield first, so the rest of them all copied you.”

“…”
“You killed all of them.”
“Shut uuup!!”
“You need to get your head straight.”

I lightly drew an X with my sword.

— Sseogeok—!

“What kind of soldier throws away his gun and walks onto the battlefield?”

I resettled my grip on the blade, which was dripping with blood, and fixed my gaze on the spearmen and cavalry milling about in disarray with their ranks broken. What shattered the terror-pressed silence was my own voice, laced with laughter.

“What’s wrong? Aren’t you coming to get me?”

The spearmen and cavalry flinched at the provocation and glanced at one another. The sight of the vanguard shield-bearers, cut down into honeycombs by their allies’ arrows and magic, was holding them back by the ankles.

But Gamma had been watching the situation from the rear, and his hysterical lion’s roar rang through the arena once more.

“You cowardly bastards! Floundering around because you can’t take down one guy?! Attack, now! What are you waiting for?!”

Even under Gamma’s badgering, they couldn’t bring themselves to step forward.

Zombie soldiers with no fear of death would have been so much easier to deal with, but these were slaves who possessed intelligence. They lived a life close to the immortality Qin Shi Huang had chased so desperately¹, where even after dying once they’d revive a month later.

Yet there was a fatal trap in it. Reviving after death didn’t make you immune to the harrowing agony of reaching it. The blade biting into flesh, the bone crushing apart, the sensation felt right up until the breath was severed: you never adapted to any of that, not one single time.

I took one bold step forward, and dozens of spearmen backed away as if by some prearranged signal.

“…”

The sight was so ridiculous that I let a low chuckle slip, and then I went on.

“You all know perfectly well you’ll revive. So whoever’s feeling confident, come at me.”

For a while now, the regular cleaning of this Abyss had been the charge of the head of the house, Kairon. He surely hadn’t meant it that way, but there’d have been a consideration for the weak in his blade.

“You know the man who came to see you lately, right?”

It was a vague question, and the minions exchanged puzzled looks.

“Come on, you know. The man who looks like a lion just by standing still.”

Several of the spearmen trembled slightly and gave the faintest of nods.

“Right, that lion at least had the mercy to take your head in one stroke. He’s so strong, you’d have been dead before you ever had time to feel pain.”

Unless there was some Kairon I didn’t know about, one with a sadistic taste for inflicting pain, he’d have delivered a clean death.

But that was Kairon.

“Me, I’ve got none of that. I’m going to kill each and every one of you like I’m dissecting you alive, and make you taste hell for a long, long time. Starting with your eyeballs, all the way down to the tips of your toes… I’ll sear that pain into your brains so that even after you revive, you can never live a normal life again.”

I made a show of licking the bloodstained blade with my tongue, then charged headlong at where they were gathered.

“Neeeeigh!”
“D-don’t come near me!”

The cavalry hastily wheeled their mounts around and fled, and the spearmen ran screaming.

“Don’t run! Fight back!”