The Defense Of The Village (2)

A boy.

A small boy, soaked in blood from head to toe, was throwing himself at the pack of Maulers with a war cry big enough for a grown man.

“Oh, hell!”

Ethan moved first.

Mana gathered in his hand, and it had barely begun to glow green when it spat out a stream of thick acid that struck the Maulers blocking Leonard’s way. The Maulers had no attention to spare for anything else, so they were turned to mush in the blink of an eye.

Not too late, then.

Leonard saw the knight order and let out a sigh of relief.

What if the letter had arrived too late and the academy’s escort had come late with it? 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 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 a single scratch. He was only filthy with blood.

This is… wait, what?

If none of it was his, then all of it was monster blood. Surely that didn’t mean he’d fought the monsters himself? While Sophia looked him over in bewilderment, Leonard recognized her, and he met her eyes with a look full of complicated feeling.

Of all people, it had to be my teacher.

Sophia Flavius.

She was Leonard Felix’s first teacher and the mentor of his whole life, the one who had shown him a direction to live in again when he was in agony over losing his parents.

And now he was meeting her again like this, of all ways. The same feeling he’d had on seeing his dead parents again came creeping up on him.

“Sorry,” Ethan said, holding back the horde of Maulers crowding in again with an ice wall he’d just summoned, “but I’m a little busy right now, okay? If you’ve got something to talk about, let’s do it on the move!”

Sophia realized the situation was anything but easy, so she finally took Leonard by the hand and got them both out of there.

“Knight order, forward!”

Ethan broke the monsters’ momentum with a volley of icicles and gave the order in a booming voice.

— Ka-clack!

The knights extended the iron rods fitted inside their shields to full length and drove them deep into the ground to anchor themselves. They braced on both legs and leaned their weight forward, and a fine shield wall stood complete, strung out in a line.

— 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 in the wall and shook the Maulers off.

— Shunk!

Maulers went down pouring blood. The knights pulled their anchoring rods free, advanced a single step, and held off the second wave that came after.

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

Leonard was impressed all over again.

They had opened a Circle, yet they’d been conscripted as knights because they fell short on potential. In exchange, the way they moved, body and mana together, was outstanding. A subtle thread of mana ran through every simple motion, and that was what made them so good at holding the monsters back.

Block, thrust, advance. The knights repeated the clean, almost mechanical sequence and began to push steadily forward. They were nowhere near the monsters in numbers, but their skill and experience let them handle the enemy deftly.

“Your name’s Leonard Felix, right?” Ethan asked him.

“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 reckoned the finest professor on Kestral Academy’s staff, yet almost nothing was known about his past.

In fact, back when Leonard was at the academy, the man had long since put down his teaching and research and stopped appearing in public at all.

So is a guy like that going to be any help here and now?

Leonard was glaring at Ethan with an instinctive distrust when the man put a question to him.

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

The question came out of nowhere, and for just an instant Leonard hesitated.

To seal the rift spewing out monsters, he’d have to throw his full strength into the fight as well. But if he did, his combat ability, so wrong for his age, would be laid bare.

They’d already know he was at the third Circle, but experience was another matter entirely. A child not even ten years old, drenched in blood and 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 to be honest.

“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 seemed to be thinking a little of the same thing, because she was blinking blankly.

A child who had only just awakened as a mage, fighting a bloody battle to the death against monsters? It was hard to believe, but she’d seen it with her own eyes, so there was no denying it.

But… honestly, it was incredible.

He’d fought a bloody melee at close quarters. She had never seen a mage fight that way, not even among the adults. Then again, anyone without that much talent who stepped out there would have been eaten by the monsters long ago.

“Anyway, you’d better head down to the village,” Sophia said.

“It’s a miracle in itself that you survived somewhere this dangerous until we got here. The grown-ups will take care of the rest, so don’t you worry. Just go on back and wait.”

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

“…All right. Please be careful.”

He left them with those words wishing them safe and turned his back, and they watched him go before hurrying on.

“We’re almost there! Keep advancing!”

Thirty minutes after Leonard went back to the village. The fight was dragging on longer than expected, but fortunately there had been no casualties.

That was because Ethan and Sophia had backed the knights with magic as far as they possibly could, and the knights had fought while saving as much stamina as they could. Above all, the monsters had obligingly come crowding in from a single direction, so they could put everything into the fighting.

“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 drove forward on their toes with even more force. They weren’t mages, but even they could tell by instinct that they were nearing their destination.

“Over there…!”

As they came almost within reach of it, the knights summoned still 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, giving off a blue light. It was as beautiful as an aurora, and just as grim.

But this was where the real problem began.

Once the work of sealing a dimensional rift begins, it can’t be broken off partway. One slip, and the mages’ own mana risks widening the rift instead.

So every monster that came out from now on had to be handled by the knights alone, without the mages’ help.

“Encirclement formation!”

— Thud!

Ethan shouted it and struck the ground with his staff. 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 had barely begun to leak between the fingers of her clenched fist when it took the shape of a great stake.

“Dimensional Anchor!” Ethan and Sophia shouted together.

— Ka-chunk!

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

“Pull!”

“Rrrgh!”

Sophia bore down until her knuckles turned 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 Maulers came through.

The monsters were multiplying fast, so to block them efficiently, the knights closed in on the rift and drew their ring tighter.

How much time passed like that?

“Haah… haah…”

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

The number of monsters crossing the dimensional rift had only just begun to fall off sharply when the mana making up the rift flipped to a red light in the blink of an eye.

“Uwoooaargh!”

A monstrous cry rang out from beyond the rift, loud enough to be heard back in Keld Village. Then two huge, thick legs slid out of the mouth of the hole. Knees and thighs followed, and then the torso and the head, one after the other.

— Thooom!

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

A muscled body. A weapon of lumped calcium shaped like an axe. Features twisted strangely out of true.

“Woodsman.”

Someone murmured the thing’s name under their breath.

Species name: “Woodsman”. A High Class monster that appeared only at a vanishingly low probability, with strength beyond any comparison to Normal Class mongrels like the Maulers.

“Kyaaaagh!”

That alone was enough to be the death of them, and to make matters worse, Maulers kept joining it, one and two at a time.

— Gulp.

Several of the knights swallowed dryly.

This is the worst.

They hadn’t lost a single man all the way here, but that luck had run out.

Here, now, in this place, someone was certain to die.

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

“Uwaaah!”

The instant the knights charged, the Woodsman, which had stood motionless as a stone statue, moved too.

Its target was none other than Sophia.

The Woodsman raised its axe and came striding on, so the knights cut down the Maulers in their way and threw themselves at its back.

— Shhrk!

One knight’s sword grazed the Woodsman’s Achilles tendon, and blade after blade followed, sweeping over its shins and ankles and leaving long gashes scattered behind. The Woodsman gave an irritable growl and tightened its grip on the axe handle.

“No—!”

“Flavius!”

Sophia was about to move without thinking when a knife-edged voice stopped her.

— Shhrk!

“Gaaaagh!”

Armor and shields were utterly powerless against the Woodsman’s axe.

There was the grisly sound of a slab of meat being sliced away, and then the screams burst out after it. Knights rolled across the ground scattering blood, and Sophia was about to turn her eyes from the ghastly sight when she met the gaze of Ethan, who was glaring straight at her.

“Don’t move — you focus on your own job! Stopping that thing is up to the knights!” Ethan bellowed.

To make a meat shield of yourself and hold out until the mage could do their part. That was exactly what a knight was for.

At the very least…

Sophia lamented inwardly.

If only there had been even one more mage here.

“Ngh, nngh!”

The fallen knight lifted his head and saw the axe raised high against the sky, drenched in blood. The red light mixed with the cold color of the steel, and it glinted with a skin-crawling edge, like the blade of a guillotine.

The knight squeezed his eyes shut, and in the moment the axe came dropping down—

“Hraaaaah!”

— Thwack!

Leonard’s fist flew out with the shout and cracked across the Woodsman’s face.