The Defense Of The Village (2)

A boy.

A young boy, plastered head to foot in blood, was hurling himself at the pack of Maulers with a battle cry as loud as any grown man’s.

“Oh, hell!”

Ethan moved first. Mana gathered into his hand, and it had barely taken on a green glow before it spat out a viscous acid that struck the Maulers blocking Leonard’s path. With no attention to spare for anything else, the Maulers were reduced to pulp in the blink of an eye.

Not too late, then.

At the sight of the knight order, Leonard let out a sigh of relief. What if the letter had failed to arrive in time and the academy’s escort had come late? What if he himself hadn’t held out against the monsters? If even one thing had gone wrong, all his effort would have been for nothing.

“Good heavens!”

Sophia went white as a sheet at the horror of the boy’s state and ran to him. Yet when she looked him over to treat his wounds, she couldn’t find so much as a scratch, only the blood he was filthy with.

This is… wait, what?

If none of it was his own, then all of it was monster blood. Surely that didn’t mean he had fought the monsters himself? While Sophia studied him in bewilderment, Leonard, who had recognized her, met her gaze, his face tangled with emotion.

Of all people, it had to be my teacher.

Sophia Flavius.

She had been Leonard Felix’s first teacher and the mentor of his whole life, the one who had shown him a new direction in life when he was drowning in grief over losing his parents. To meet her again like this, of all ways. The same feeling he’d had on seeing his dead parents again welled up in him.

Ethan was holding off the horde of Maulers crowding in again with an ice wall he had just summoned.

“Sorry, but I’m a bit busy right now. If you’ve got something to say, say it on the move!”

Realizing the situation was anything but easy, Sophia finally grabbed Leonard’s hand and pulled him out of the fray.

“Knight order, forward!”

Having blunted the monsters’ momentum with a volley of icicles, Ethan gave the order in a booming voice.

— Ka-clack!

The knights extended the iron rods fitted to the inside of their shields to full length, then drove them deep into the ground to lock themselves in place. They braced both legs and leaned their weight forward, and a splendid shield wall stretched across the field.

— Crash!

The charging Maulers slammed into the shield wall, but the knights didn’t budge an inch.

“Kyaaagh!”

While the front rank pinned the Maulers in place with their shields, the knights in the rear rank thrust their swords through the gaps and shook them off.

— Shunk!

Maulers went down pouring blood. The knights pulled the anchoring rods from their shields, advanced one step, and held off the second wave that followed.

The academy’s own knight order, all right. Fine technique, and they move as one.

Leonard was impressed all over again. These men had opened a Circle but lacked the potential to go further, so they had been made knights, and in exchange their movements, body and mana blended as one, were outstanding. A subtle thread of mana ran through every simple motion, and that was what let them hold the monsters back so effectively.

Block, thrust, advance. Repeating that clean, almost mechanical sequence, the knights began to push steadily forward. They were nowhere near the monsters in numbers, but skill and experience let them make up the difference.

Ethan turned to Leonard.

“Your name’s Leonard Felix, right?”

“Yes. And you are…?”

“I’m Ethan Prospero. I came along to help Flavius with her assignment.”

Leonard’s brow furrowed.

Prospero… that’s a name I’ve heard before.

Ethan Prospero was reputed to be the finest professor on Kestral Academy’s staff, yet almost nothing was known about his past. By the time Leonard attended the academy, the man had long since given up teaching and research and vanished from public view.

Is a guy like that really going to be any help right now?

Leonard was glaring at him with reflexive distrust when the man put a question to him.

“You — did you come all the way out here yourself to stop the monsters?”

The sudden question made Leonard hesitate, just for an instant. To seal the rift pouring out monsters, he too would have to throw his full strength into the fight, and that would lay bare a combat ability badly out of place for his age. Ethan and Sophia would already know he had reached the third Circle, but experience was another matter entirely. A child not yet ten, drenched in blood, butchering enemies with practiced skill?

…Damn it.

If he failed to save the village here, none of it would mean anything. Lying at this point would get him nowhere anyway, so in the end he chose honesty.

“Yes.”

“You that desperate to get yourself killed?”

Ethan fired the question back in sheer disbelief. At this point, wasn’t it less bravery than plain ignorance? Sophia must have had a little of the same thought, because she was blinking blankly. It was hard to believe that a child who had only just awakened as a mage had fought monsters in a bloody fight to the death, but she had seen it with her own eyes, and there was no denying it.

But… honestly, it was incredible.

A bloody melee at close quarters. She had never seen a mage fight like that, not even among the adults. Then again, anyone with less talent who stepped out there would have been eaten long ago.

Sophia spoke up.

“Anyway, you should head back to the village. It’s a miracle you survived somewhere this dangerous until we got here. The grown-ups will handle the rest, so go wait and don’t worry.”

At that, Leonard let out a very small sigh and took his time before he finally spoke.

“…All right. Please be careful.”

With that, he turned his back on them and left, and Ethan, Sophia and the knights watched him go before quickening their pace.

“We’re almost there! Keep advancing!”

Thirty minutes had passed since Leonard went back to the village. The fight was dragging on longer than expected, but fortunately no one had fallen.

That was thanks to Ethan and Sophia supporting the knights with magic at every chance, and to the knights pacing themselves to save stamina. Above all, the monsters had obligingly come crowding in from a single direction, which let them pour everything into the fight.

“Charge! The objective is right in front of us!”

Before they knew it, the knights had cleared away nearly all of that vast horde, and they pressed forward harder still. Even the knights, who weren’t mages, could sense that the rift was near.

“Over there…!”

Almost at their goal, the knights summoned yet more strength and climbed the hill. Just then, a light reaching through the undergrowth fell across them.

Some six or seven meters above the ground, a ring of mana wavered and gave off a blue light, as beautiful as an aurora, and as ominous.

But the real problem started here.

Once the work of sealing a dimensional rift begins, it cannot be broken off partway; one slip, and the mages’ own mana risks widening the rift instead. In other words, every monster that came out from now on had to be handled by the knights alone, without help from the mages.

“Encirclement formation!”

— Thud!

Ethan struck the ground with his staff as he shouted. Both mages and all forty knights moved in perfect order, and soon they had formed a huge ring with the rift at its center.

“Flavius!”

At Ethan’s signal, Sophia, standing far off on the opposite side, let out a deep breath and nodded. Golden light leaked between the fingers of her clenched fist and, in an instant, formed a great stake.

“Dimensional Anchor!”

— Ka-chunk!

Like anchors dropped into the sea, the stakes of light Ethan and Sophia had thrown lodged at either end of the rift.

“Pull!”

“Rrrgh!”

Sophia bore down until her knuckles went white. The two anchors hauled the rift’s ends in opposite directions, and it began to shrink.

“Kyaaaagh!”

A cry broke the quiet, and Maulers came bursting out of the rift with it. The smaller the rift grew, the more of them crossed over. To hold back the swelling tide of monsters, the knights closed in on the rift and tightened the ring.

How much time passed that way?

“Haah… haah…”

By now the knights’ breath was rasping in their throats, and Mauler corpses had piled into a mountain around them.

The flow of monsters had just begun to drop off sharply when the rift’s mana abruptly flipped to a red light.

“Uwoooaargh!”

A monstrous howl loud enough to carry all the way back to Keld Village rang out from beyond the rift. Then two huge, thick legs slid out of the mouth of the hole. Knees and thighs followed, then the torso, and finally the head.

— Thooom!

Something shaped like a man landed on the ground and at last showed itself.

A hulking, muscled body. An axe-shaped weapon of clotted bone. A face twisted into something not quite right.

“Woodsman.”

Someone murmured the thing’s name under their breath.

Species name: “Woodsman”. A High Class monster that appeared only rarely, with strength in a different league from Normal Class mongrels like the Maulers.

“Kyaaaagh!”

That thing alone could be the death of them, and now Maulers were joining it, a few at a time.

— Gulp.

Several of the knights swallowed dryly.

This is the worst.

They had made it all the way here without a single casualty, but that luck had run out. Here, now, in this place, someone was certain to lose their life.

“…Block it! Don’t let it get near the mages!”

“Uwaaah!”

The instant the knights charged, the Woodsman, which had been standing as still as a stone statue, moved too. Its target was none other than Sophia.

As it raised its axe and came striding on, the knights cut down Maulers and threw themselves at its back.

— Shhrk!

One knight’s sword grazed the Woodsman’s Achilles tendon, and blade after blade followed, sweeping across its shins and ankles and leaving a scatter of long gashes. The monster gave an irritable growl, then tightened its grip on the axe handle.

“No—!”

“Flavius!”

Sophia started forward without thinking, but Ethan’s voice cut across her like a blade.

— Shhrk!

“Gaaaagh!”

Armor and shields were no defense against the Woodsman’s axe.

The grisly sound of a slab of meat being sliced away, then the screams that burst out after it. Knights rolled across the ground, scattering blood, and Sophia was about to look away from the ghastly sight when she met Ethan’s eyes. He glared straight at her and bellowed.

“Don’t move — you concentrate on your own job! Stopping that thing is the knights’ role!”

Turning their own bodies into meat shields and holding out until the mages could do their part was precisely what knights were for.

At the very least…

Sophia grieved inwardly. If only there had been even one more mage in this place.

“Ngh, nngh!”

When the fallen knight lifted his head, he saw the blood-drenched axe raised high against the sky. The red light mingled with the cold sheen of the steel, and its edge gleamed with a chilling sharpness, like a guillotine’s.

The knight squeezed his eyes shut, and in the instant the axe came plunging down…

“Hraaaaah!”

— Thwack!

Leonard’s fist came flying in on the back of that shout and cracked across the Woodsman’s face.