66. Don't Run, Fight Back!

They dressed their ranks.

To the sound of heavy steel armor grinding against itself, they advanced ever so slowly, as if they had become a single enormous organism.

The essence of the shield-bearer is not attack.

Their role was the iron wall’s, to absorb every desperate thrashing of the enemy with sheer weight and render it harmless. A shield-bearer worthy of the name could allow no opening, not one. One gap let through by one man could mean the annihilation of the whole unit.

Don’t rush.

And so they did not hurry. Even with a single enemy before them, they closed the distance with caution. The boy looked utterly ordinary, and the sword in his hands was just as ordinary.

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

They had watched this human pull off the impossible with their own eyes, and the tension only grew thicker.

This is no ordinary one.

Every shield-bearer, spearman, cavalryman, 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, and of that they were certain twice over.

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

Brom, the oldest veteran shield-bearer there, raised his voice. In the arena, only one-on-one duels were permitted, no joining another man’s fight, no calling for aid. Few of them had any experience ganging up on a single opponent like this.

It’s been a while.

But Brom had become a slave of the arena after a life as a mercenary.

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

He knew how to devour the boy in front of him, slow and unhurried. And so, at Brom’s command, the shield-bearers tightened the noose, pressing in by inches.

“You yellow-bellied old geezers! At this rate, when are we ever gonna kill him?! There’s just one of him!”

Heedless of Brom’s shout, several shadows broke from the line and bolted out ahead.

“Stop! Don’t break ranks!”

They were new recruits, not long in the arena. One look marked them as small-timers who thought numbers alone guaranteed a win.

“Damn it! Those idiots!”

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

In this arena, the underlings were nothing more than slaves. Which of them became the day’s sacrifice on the stage, sent out to face the challenger, rested entirely on the master’s whim. They were expendable parts, spent according to a set script.

And here was the amusing part: in this arena, the one who earned the name of veteran was not the one who survived. Those who lost and gave up their lives simply opened their eyes again a month later, in this very same space. A veteran was just a soul that had run that cycle of death and rebirth more times than the rest.

Perhaps that was why.

Brom had had his throat sawed open and his heart run through dozens of times, so he knew this was the most dangerous moment of all. And yet.

I’ll just come back to life again.

Even if he died, he figured the same life would simply go on, revived and forced to raise his shield once more.

“Kill him!”

The new recruits were different. Those not yet chosen, or lucky enough never to have lost even once, always carried a desperate edge. Beat the challenger, and a reward worth the risk would come down to them.

Perhaps that was why.

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

“Heh heh heh.”

The boy swung his sword with an ugly laugh. Some instinct warned Brom that a storm was about to break. He had no doubt the new recruits’ screams and groans were about to erupt and turn the arena into hell.

And yet.

What?

What met Brom’s eyes were the new recruits, still running wild, every limb intact.

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

The new recruits, flush with momentum, were pushing the boy back, shields thrust forward.

On the off chance he was wrong, Brom watched a while longer from a distance. And in the end, there was no killing intent in the boy’s sword. He could feel none of that overwhelming, savage violence. Apart from being too quick to land a hit on, the boy looked like nothing more than a loach no one could get a grip on.

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

Frenzied taunts kept spilling from the recruits, one after another. Faced with it, the boy seemed too busy fleeing to cut any of them down.

And something began to seethe in the deepest part of Brom. Lately, every last one of them had been killed by a single man. After being revived, the answer they gave to who had done it was always the same. That even when the man simply stood there, the shape of an enormous lion loomed behind him.

At first, Brom hadn’t believed it. What nonsense, he’d thought, that a human being could give off the aura of a lion.

But the moment he came face to face with that lion, he understood. That overwhelming savagery had paralyzed his mind the instant their eyes met. Brom had died without landing a single counterattack. No, without even forming the thought of resistance. It had been instant slaughter, over before he could tell how he’d died, whether his throat had gone first or his heart had been run through.

That was how Brom had lived in the arena. The life of prey, trampled by absurdly powerful warriors, dying again and again without ever knowing why.

And yet.

And now, standing before Brom, was a boy he could toy with. To Brom, who had met a wretched death day after day, here was a small creature he might, just this once, get to ravage. That bitter sense of kinship and cowardly superiority paralyzed his reason.

“…Heh, heh heh heh!”

Frenzy was contagious.

A frenzy he could no longer hold back leaked from the corners of Brom’s mouth, and a sensation he’d long since forgotten surged hot through his veins. Brom flung his heavy shield aside and drew the dagger at his waist. His comrades already wore 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 whole performance a roaring success. I’d carved it perfectly into their heads, the idea that I was a harmless, pitiable little scrap of prey.

The brutish, oversized shield-bearers came after me with nothing but dull, sluggish movements.

This is what I wanted.

The moment the shield-bearers dressed their ranks and tightened the ring, the long spears of the spearmen and cavalry jabbed viciously at the gaps and blind spots. From the rear, the archers and mages poured out an endless stream of fire, each at their station.

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

— Sssshk—!

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

Just like that earlier time, when a hundred push-ups had bumped my Strength up by 0.1. Call it free evasion-farming, turning the whole barrage aimed at me into my own gains.

“Tch, over already?”

A dungeon that handed out neither loot nor experience had no reason to exist. 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!”

As I dashed and wove across the arena, dozens of shield-bearers gave steady chase at my back. Cutting dozens of those big lugs down one by one, by my own hand, would be far too inefficient a war of attrition. And just as everyone would rather someone else handle the tedious, thankless work for them…

“Gwaaah!”
“Kueoooh, eoh, urk.”

The hundreds of arrows loosed from the rear buried themselves squarely in the backs of the shield-bearers closest behind me. The lightning bombs the mages threw dropped into the thickest knot of them, touching off a chain of electrocution.

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

With their own allies taking the hits meant for me, the archers and mages in the rear panicked and broke off their attacks. Then Gamma’s hysterical, lion-like roar rang out.

“You imbeciles! Who told you to stop attacking?! Those things come back to life a month after they die anyway! Don’t fret over a little friendly fire — keep shooting until that bastard is dead!”

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

— Kwaang! Pubeobeok!

“Kuheok…!”

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

“…Damn it all.”

That was when it finally dawned on them. That throwing down their shields and charging had been the losing move.

Indignation, or maybe some hollow emptiness, was just beginning to color their eyes.

“Nice and cool back there, isn’t it?”

I said it to the one who’d been chasing me the hardest.

“But who is there to resent? You’re the ones who made this happen.”
“You son of a bitch!”
“You know what? Because you were the first to throw off your shield, all the rest followed suit.”
“…”
“You killed all of them.”
“Shut uuup!!”
“You need to get your head straight.”

I lightly drew an X with my sword.

— Sseogeok—!

“A soldier who throws away his gun and walks onto the battlefield is no good.”

I resettled my grip on the blood-slick blade and fixed my eyes on the spearmen and cavalry milling about in disarray, their ranks broken. What broke the terror-stiffened silence was my own voice, laced with laughter.

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

At my taunt, the spearmen and cavalry flinched and traded glances. The sight of the vanguard shield-bearers, riddled into honeycombs by their own allies’ arrows and spells, held them rooted by the ankles.

But from the rear, where he’d been watching it all unfold, Gamma’s hysterical roar tore through the arena once more.

“You cowardly bastards! You’re floundering because you can’t take down one man?! 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 far easier to deal with. But these were slaves, and they had minds of their own.

Theirs was something close to the immortality Qin Shi Huang had chased so desperately¹, a life where even after dying once, they would revive a month later.

But it came with a fatal trap. Reviving after death did not make the harrowing agony of dying any easier to bear. The blade biting into flesh, bone grinding apart, every sensation right up until the breath was severed, none of it ever became something they adapted to, no matter how many times they went through it.

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

“…”

I found the sight of it ridiculous and let a low chuckle slip, then went on.

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

For some time now, the routine cleansing of this Abyss had fallen to Kairon, the head of the house. It surely hadn’t been by his own choosing, but there would have been a mercy for the weak in his blade.

“You know the man who came to you recently, don’t you?”

At my vague question, the minions traded puzzled looks.

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

At my words, several of the spearmen trembled 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 he’d have stolen your lives before you ever had time to feel pain.”

Barring some other Kairon I didn’t know about, one with a sadistic taste for inflicting pain, he would have given them a clean death.

But that was Kairon.

“I’m not like that. I’m going to kill every last one of you like I’m dissecting you alive, make you taste hell for a long, long time. From your eyeballs all the way down to the tips of your toes… I’ll sear the pain so deep into your brains that even after you revive, you’ll never live a normal life again.”

I made a show of running my tongue along the bloodstained blade, then charged headlong into the thick of them.

“Hiiiiieee!”
“D-don’t come!”

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

“Don’t run! Fight back!”