The Defense Of The Village (1)

Damn it, damn it!

Something that defied all common sense was happening right in front of Zachary’s eyes. He knew he ought to run, but his legs had given out under him, and he couldn’t even get to his feet.

How did it come to this…

When Leonard was nowhere to be found in the village, the obvious next step had been to widen the search into the forest. Of course, if he’d known what was waiting out here, he’d never have set foot outside the house.

I should have just stayed home and gone quietly to sleep.

Monsters were pouring out of a hole ripped open in the sky, and Leonard was standing against them. It was so unreal that Zachary doubted his own eyes.

“Kyaaagh!”

Just then one of the monsters spotted Zachary and charged. Its huge jaws were a breath away from tearing a mouthful out of his soft flesh when Leonard cut in front of him, one step faster.

— Thwack!

The fist sent the monster flying into a boulder off to one side.

Leonard glared for a moment at the thing, which had become a corpse in the blink of an eye. Then he turned his gaze on Zachary, who was shaking all over, and ground his foot hard into the dirt.

“You absolute idiot!”

“Eek!”

Zachary shrank down as small as he could go. Whatever business he’d had with Leonard was gone from his head. Only one fact was left in it: Leonard Felix could beat a monster to death with his bare hands.

“I told you not to follow me… you god-damned little brat!”

The traps only reacted to monsters, and that alone had saved him. Otherwise Zachary would have been torn to shreds and been dead long before anyone found him.

— Whoosh!

“…Urk?!”

Leonard hauled Zachary up in one motion and slung him over his shoulder. Given the difference in their builds, it looked a little ridiculous, but this was no time to worry about that.

“Shut your mouth or you’ll bite your tongue off!”

“Kyagh!”

— Crunch!

A monster lunged at him from behind, and Leonard stamped down on its long snout so hard it caved into its own skull. He punted the corpse away with a light flick of his foot, and the whole horde rose to the bait and came after him like a herd of enraged bulls.

H-haaagh!

The speed was so tremendous that Zachary felt as if he’d become the wind itself. He could only gape as the monsters behind them shrank fast into dots.

“Kwaaagh!”

The monsters tore through leaves and branches after Leonard, and the one at the very front caught on a trap he’d set.

— Boom! Ba-ba-boom!

Stone shards packed with mana burst up through a mound of soil and flew in every direction. The sharp ones punched through flesh, and the blunt ones shattered bone. The rest of the monsters set off trap after trap and were swept away without mercy.

Only once he’d put enough distance between them and the blasts did Leonard finally set Zachary down. The boy must have got a little strength back by then, because he just barely managed to stand on his own.

“Get lost! Don’t even look back!”

A kick in the backside sent Zachary scrambling down the hill.

With the urgent problem settled for now, Leonard turned his head and ran a quick eye over the monsters he had to deal with. Thick, springy hind legs. Two forelegs as sharp as razors. And on top of that, a sleek, lithe body and a head that called a lizard to mind.

Maulers?

The Mauler’s byname: “Mage Killer”.

Their favorite tactic was to use their explosive mobility as a weapon, punching through an enemy’s defensive line and breaking its formation apart. Their long forelegs, sharp as a mantis’s, could rip armor open with ease, and their hide was formidably resistant to magic. In more ways than one, they were a bad matchup for a mage. But that didn’t apply to Leonard.

“Hmph!”

Leonard ran in a dead-straight line through the detonating traps, seized the head of the first one to come at him, and drove it straight down into the ground.

“Kyaaagh!”

No sooner had he put one down than another Mauler’s sharp foreleg went for his throat. Yet instead of tearing out his windpipe, it raked across the surface of the barrier he’d thrown up and struck sparks.

— Squelch!

Leonard’s right hand punched through the Mauler’s hide and burrowed in between its ribs. Hot blood came gushing out in surges and soaked his hair through.

“Hrrrngh!”

He wrenched his upper body around, and his hand tore out through the monster’s body, scattering organs and blood everywhere. The corpse dropped to the ground in two halves, upper and lower, and Leonard turned that red-stained hand straight at the horde.

— Krrzzt!

Red sparks shot from his fingertips and tangled once through the horde. Every last monster went into convulsions and rolled across the ground at the very speed it had been running.

Arcane magic: “Neuro Shock”.

It threw the nervous system into disorder and sealed an opponent’s movement, so it was exactly the right spell for putting down monsters that attacked in a swarm.

The academy’s people should be getting here about now…

Having bought himself a moment’s breathing room, Leonard fell straight back. For now he was holding out by borrowing the strength of the traps and the herbs, but that didn’t mean he could keep fighting forever. He had to pace himself properly.

Get a grip, Felix.

Not one of them would make it down to the village. Leonard set his teeth.

“What’s that noise?”

“Did something happen in the forest?”

At the explosions that reached them now and again, every villager was turning an anxious eye toward the western forest. Just then a carriage and a party of knights came bursting into the village, and every head turned.

“Clear the road!”

“Wh-who are they?!”

Nobody had given an order, but each of the knights knew exactly what to do.

“Monsters are coming! Everyone has to get out of the village!”

“Monsters? Out of nowhere?”

“There’s no time to explain everything! Hurry!”

While the evacuation order held everyone’s attention, the rest of the party rode straight across the village, driving their horses toward the dimensional rift.

Fortunately it didn’t take long to reach their destination. But the trees grew so thickly that they couldn’t go any deeper into the forest on horseback or by carriage.

— Clank.

As Ethan and Sophia climbed down from the carriage, the Knight Commander gave a short set of orders.

“I’ll keep this brief! Hold the formation we settled on and advance to the point where the rift opened! Protecting the mages and the village comes before anything else!”

“Sir!”

The knights traded their cavalry lances for swords, maces and the like, then formed a ring around the two mages and walked carefully into the forest.

Sealing a dimensional rift took two skilled mages pouring in a vast quantity of mana. So however urgent things were, with only two mages on hand, they couldn’t afford to squander mana carelessly.

“Hold on, what’s that sound?”

An ear-splitting scream broke through the tense air.

“Aaaaagh!”

“What was that?!”

The startled knights leveled their swords, and a human shape burst out of the undergrowth. Its distinctive hair, bright as flame, stood out clearly even in the dark.

“It’s just a kid?”

They’d pulled their weapons back fast, and that alone had saved him. He’d come within a hair of being run through on the spot. The boy was panting as though he might collapse any second, but the sight of the heavily armored knights seemed to bring him to his senses, and he sucked in a sharp breath and shrank in on himself.

“Wait, wait! We’re not here to hurt you.”

“What were you doing out here?”

— Thump!

The tension drained out of the boy, and he finally dropped to his knees. Whether they were bad people or not, just knowing there were adults here he could ask for help sent relief flooding through him.

“Wh-whaaaah!”

Sophia pushed out through a gap between the hesitating knights and went down on one knee to meet the boy at eye level, so as to calm him.

“U-up there…! I mean, it’s…”

“Shh. Quiet, now.”

Sophia patted his shoulder lightly. She had no idea what he’d been doing in a dangerous forest like this at such an hour, but there was no time now to argue over something so trivial.

“That’s enough crying. Hush, now! What’s your name?”

“…Zachary… Zachary Grayson, ma’am.”

“Can you get back to the village on your own, Zachary? I’d like to take you myself, but we’re rather busy just now.”

“Y-yes. Yes.”

Zachary understood what “busy” meant here, and he seemed to accept it well enough. Then, as though something had come back to him, he shot to his feet.

“…B-big trouble.”

“What?”

“I mean, there’s another kid up here besides me! He’s nine, his name’s Leonard—!”

He was rambling so badly it was hard to follow, but Sophia just managed to catch one familiar name in the middle of it.

Leonard?

Why that name, here?

Sophia’s face went blank before she could stop it. First the dimensional rift had opened and monsters had appeared, and now, at exactly this moment, she’d heard the name Leonard. Far too much was happening to take in all at once.

“We get it, so hurry on back to the village.”

Ethan spoke up first, having apparently decided that leaving things as they were would get them nowhere. Zachary nodded weakly and went on down the mountain along the path the knights had come up, and Ethan urged the rest of them onward.

“…Let’s move for now. Thinking comes later.”

“What about the child? Shall we send a man with him?”

Ethan shook his head at the knights’ question.

“We can’t spare anyone for that right now. If this is as bad as we think, we’ll be short-handed as it is. That little one… there’s nothing behind us anyway, so as long as he doesn’t lose the path, he’ll make it home on his own just fine.”

Sophia heard Ethan out, then asked him, “…Professor, doesn’t this whole situation strike you as strange?”

“It does. Of course it does.”

It was hard to put a finger on it and name it, but the feeling that something was off was there.

Yet for all he said, Ethan’s expression hardly changed. Left with no other choice, Sophia signaled the knights, and the party resumed its advance.

— Rrrumble.

With every step they took, the unidentified blasts grew louder. Sensing they were nearing the source of the explosions, the knights watched their surroundings more closely still and tightened their grip on their weapons.

“Brace for an ambush!”

The knights lowered their stances and pushed out their shields, ready to take cover at any moment. A faint breath of mana spread over the shields and lent them a glow, and a taut tension filled the air.

— Kaboom!

Then a blast went off right beside them, who knew how many that made by now, and in the same instant Ethan and Sophia threw up a magic barrier on something close to pure instinct.

But what actually came into view wasn’t a monster’s claws or jaws. It was the figure of a small child.