The Defense Of The Village (1)

Damn it, damn it!

Something beyond all common sense was unfolding right before Zachary’s eyes. He knew he ought to run, but his legs had gone out from under him, and he couldn’t even get to his feet.

How did it come to this…

With Leonard nowhere to be found inside the village, widening the search into the forest had been the natural next step. Of course, had he known a situation like this was waiting for him, he would never have set foot outside his house.

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

Monsters were bursting out of a hole torn open in the sky, and Leonard stood against them, a sight so unreal that Zachary doubted his own eyes.

“Kyaaagh!”

One of the monsters spotted Zachary just then and came charging at him. Its huge jaws were an instant from tearing a whole mouthful out of his soft flesh when Leonard cut in front of him, a step quicker.

— Thwack!

The fist sent the monster flying, and its body slammed into a boulder lying off to one side. Leonard glared for a moment at the thing, a corpse in the blink of an eye, then turned his gaze on the violently trembling Zachary and ground his foot hard into the earth.

“You absolute idiot!”

“Eek!”

Zachary shrank into himself as far as he could go. Whatever business he’d had with Leonard had vanished from his head; the only thing surfacing there was the fact that Leonard Felix could beat a monster to death with his bare hands.

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

It was only the traps reacting to monsters alone that saved him. Otherwise Zachary would have been torn to shreds and killed before anyone ever found him.

— Whoosh!

“…Urk?!”

Leonard hauled Zachary up in one motion and slung him over his shoulder. Given the difference in their builds, it made for a slightly ridiculous sight, 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 and crushed it flat, skull and all. A light flick of that foot punted the corpse away, and the great horde rose to the provocation, coming after him like a herd of enraged bulls.

H-haaagh!

The speed was so tremendous that it wrapped Zachary in the illusion of having 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 running at the very head of the pack caught on one of Leonard’s traps.

— Boom! Ba-ba-boom!

Stone shards packed with mana burst up through the mound of soil and shot out in every direction. The sharp ones punched through flesh; the blunt ones shattered bone. The rest of the pack set off the traps one after another and were swept away without mercy.

Once he had put enough distance between them and the blasts, Leonard finally set Zachary down on the ground. The boy must have got a little strength back in the meantime, because he just barely managed to stand on his own feet.

“Get lost! Don’t even look back!”

A kick to 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 sharp as razors. On top of that, a sleek, lithe body and a head like a lizard’s.

Maulers?

Maulers are known as “Mage Killers.” They rely on explosive mobility, punching through an enemy’s defensive line and breaking its formation apart. Their long forelegs, sharp as a mantis’s, can rip armor open with ease, and their hide is formidably resistant to magic.

In more ways than one they made a bad matchup for a mage, but that didn’t hold for Leonard.

“Hmph!”

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

“Kyaaagh!”

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

— Squelch!

Leonard’s right hand punched through the Mauler’s hide and burrowed in between its ribs, and the hot blood gushing out in surges 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 on the horde.

— Krrzzt!

Red sparks shot from his fingertips and laced through the horde in a single sweep. Every last monster went into convulsions and tumbled across the ground at the very speed it had been running.

Arcane magic: “Neuro Shock.”

The technique threw the nervous system into disorder and sealed an opponent’s movement, exactly the right spell for putting down monsters that attacked in swarms.

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

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

Get a grip, Felix.

Not a single monster 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 its escort of knights came bursting into the village, and every head turned.

“Clear the road!”

“Wh-who are they?!”

No one had given an order, but each knight knew exactly what he had to do.

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

“Monsters? Out of nowhere?”

“There’s no time to explain it piece by piece! Hurry!”

While the evacuation order held everyone’s attention, the other knights rode straight on across the village, driving their horses toward the dimensional rift. Fortunately, it didn’t take them long to reach their destination. The trees grew so thick, though, that there was no going any deeper into the forest on horseback or by carriage.

— Clank.

While Ethan and Sophia climbed down from the carriage, the Knight Commander issued 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! Protection of the mages and of 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 moved carefully into the forest. Sealing a dimensional rift takes two skilled mages pouring in a vast quantity of mana, so with only two mages on hand, they couldn’t afford to squander a drop, however urgent things were.

“Hold on — what’s this sound?”

What broke through the tense air was an ear-splitting scream.

“Aaaaagh!”

“What was that?!”

The startled knights leveled their swords just as 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 pulled their weapons back just in time; he had come within a hair of being run through where he stood. The boy panted as though he might collapse at any second. Then the sight of 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. Bad people or not, the simple fact that there were adults here he could ask for help sent relief flooding through him.

“Wh-whaaaah!”

Sophia pushed her way out through the gap between the hesitating knights and went down on one knee, meeting the boy at eye level to calm him.

“U-up there…! I mean, it’s…”

“Shh. Quietly, now.”

Sophia patted the boy’s shoulder lightly. She had no idea what he had been doing in a dangerous forest like this at such an hour, but there was no time now to argue over anything 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 Sophia’s words 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! Nine years old, his name’s Leonard—!”

He was rambling so badly that he was hard to follow, but Sophia just managed to catch one familiar name in among it all.

Leonard?

Why that name, here?

Sophia’s face went blank before she knew it. The onset of the dimensional rift phenomenon, the appearance of monsters, and now, on top of all that, the name Leonard, heard at exactly this moment. Far too much was happening to take in at once.

“We’ve understood you, so hurry on back to the village.”

Ethan was the first to speak, having decided, it seemed, that standing around 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 others onward.

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

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

Ethan shook his head at the knights’ question.

“We haven’t the spare strength for that. If this is as urgent as we think it is, we’ll be short-handed as it is. That little one… there’s nothing behind us anyway, so as long as he keeps to the path he’ll find his own way home well enough.”

Sophia heard Ethan out, then put a question to him.

“…Professor, doesn’t the whole situation strike you as strange?”

“It does. Of course it does.”

Ethan, too, found it hard to put into words, but something did feel off.

Even so, Ethan’s expression barely changed. 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 dropped into their stances and pushed out their shields, ready to cover themselves at any moment. A faint breath of mana spread over the shields and lent them a glow, and the air drew taut.

— Kaboom!

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

But what actually came into their view was no monster’s claws or jaws. It was the figure of a small child.