The Defense Of The Village (3)

“Krrrk…”

The impact had forced the Woodsman’s mouth open, and a faint groan leaked out of it. It stood frozen a moment with its axe still raised, swayed, staggered back a few steps, and then went down flat.

— Thoom!

“Huh?”

One knight had curled in on himself, sure his life was about to be taken, but the crash out of nowhere made his eyes snap open. And there, right in front of him, someone landed as lightly as a feather.

It was Leonard Felix.

A fist? Did he just throw a punch at a monster?

Ethan’s face went blank.

If he’d guessed right, Leonard was almost certainly using body-hardening magic, the kind that strengthens the muscles. Body-hardening was easy enough to cast, but holding the effect in place took a good deal of mental fortitude. Standing still, maybe. But while throwing himself around like that?

But how…? Don’t tell me he’s using it on instinct?

Body-hardening had started out as a kind of defensive magic. Over time, though, the magic barrier was developed, the knights appeared, and mages switched to fighting entirely at range, so the technique was all but on its way to extinction. And of all the techniques he could have reached for the moment he became a mage, it had to be that one.

“You didn’t go back?!”

Someone spoke up just then. Leonard turned his head and found Sophia staring at him, bewildered.

No.

It wasn’t only her. Every last one of them had their eyes fixed on Leonard, because they’d just watched something that made no sense at all: a child not yet ten knocking a hulking Woodsman flat. It was plain, raw reality, with no room for a trick of the eye or a misunderstanding.

“…”

Sophia barely dragged herself out of her shock and spoke again.

“Why… why did you come back!”

Leonard didn’t answer. Instead he looked over the knights sprawled around him in a terrible state, and tore at his hair.

Damn it. Of all the ways for this to turn out.

His head was swimming. It was mana deficiency, from spending mana too fast. He’d pulled back for just a little while to get the dizziness and the headache under control, and in that window, of all things, a High Class monster had shown up.

The two mages are pinned down by the rift.

If it had only been Maulers, the knights could have handled it themselves. But once a High Class monster like the Woodsman appeared, there was no avoiding casualties.

— Stomp!

Leonard stamped one foot down hard, as if to spur himself on, and dropped into a low stance.

“Pull everyone back.”

“Don’t!”

Only then did a few of the knights come to their senses and shout at him.

There was no question Leonard was strong. They’d seen it with their own eyes, so they had no reason to doubt it. But the Woodsman was a High Class monster, and it could soak up far more punishment than any ordinary monster. The risk was too great to stand around weighing the odds.

But Leonard didn’t back down. He’d never meant to in the first place.

“Kwaaaagh!”

The Woodsman hauled itself up with its axe as a staff and looked around for Leonard, and the instant it spotted him, it let out a monstrous shriek and charged. It moved more nimbly than its bulk had any right to, but Leonard was a little faster.

— Whoosh!

He rolled aside to dodge the kick, balled his right hand into a fist, kicked off the Woodsman’s knee to launch himself upward, and drove an uppercut straight into it.

“—!”

The searing blow bored up under its jaw, and the Woodsman dropped onto its backside like a puppet with its strings cut. The knights watching were thrown into confusion.

“Huh…?”

The Woodsman sat at the weaker end of the High Class monsters, yet it was still rated a nuisance, and the reason was its transcendent durability: skin as tough as rubber, and hard bones. And Leonard was driving a thing like that into a corner, not by burning it or freezing it, but with nothing but his fists?

“Uwaaaah!”

They had no way of knowing. Leonard, once called a dullard for coming into his mana so late in life, had poured nearly forty years into body-hardening magic, the one and only technique he was good at.

It was not at a level the likes of a Woodsman could stand up to.

— Tap!

As the Woodsman struggled to get up, Leonard closed in, got around behind it, and thrust his right fist forward.

Its weak point is—!

Its upper body was far too big for its flimsy lower half, and only the base of its spine kept that lopsided frame upright.

The lumbar vertebrae!

— Crunch!

Leonard’s fist struck the lumbar vertebrae dead on, and the sound that crawled out of it was horrible enough to make every watching knight recoil.

“Kraaagh!”

The Woodsman pitched forward, in more agony than ever. Leonard didn’t stop there. He hammered relentlessly at every weak point he could see and ground it down, going for the ones any monster built like a human shares: the eyeballs and the collarbone.

“Agaaaagh!”

— Thwack! Crack!

The Woodsman had lain on its face and taken every one of Leonard’s blows without fighting back once, but now it suddenly swung the axe it had never let go of. The blade came flying in, splitting the air. Leonard, though, dropped almost flat to the ground, dodged it by a hair, and struck up into the prone Woodsman’s jaw once more.

— Thwaack!

The shock packed into that small fist passed whole into the jaw, and the Woodsman’s huge body lifted slightly off the ground before dropping back down.

“What the hell?”

“Is that… is that even possible?”

The knights stared in a daze, each of them blurting something out, as if they couldn’t believe what was happening in front of them. Leonard was beating the Woodsman down with such precision and power, without a hair out of place, that it called to mind a surgeon at work. The blows came one after another with a ferocious momentum that left not the briefest gap to break in.

Still… I’m getting a little worn out.

Yet Leonard himself, the one actually doing it, chewed his lip as if none of it satisfied him at all.

The Colitol Aroma had worn off long ago, and after one fight on the heels of another, his mana was all but scraping the bottom. On top of that, his body was a third-Circle child’s, nowhere near his prime. He was just slightly short of what it would take to finish the Woodsman off for certain.

My body won’t hold up any longer.

His muscles screamed every time he swung his fist, and the mana in his hand was dwindling bit by bit. Even wringing out everything he had, he was getting only a third of the force the technique should have put out. Like it or not, he had to end this as fast as he possibly could.

I’m not even asking to kill it. I just have to hold out until the rift closes, at least…

Leonard had been clambering over the Woodsman’s body like a squirrel as he attacked, and when he finally opened some distance and pulled away, the thing planted one leg and rose to its feet. There were no spectacular wounds to see on the outside, but beneath the skin its organs and bones had burst and shattered in places, and they were already regenerating.

Let’s settle this.

A blue light of mana flowed out from the center of Leonard’s body and covered his right hand. First the hand, then the forearm, and soon the shoulder too, until the mana sheathing his whole arm lit up the dark forest.

— Tap!

Leonard came charging in, drawing a single streak of light, and the Woodsman answered by hurling its axe. A hair before the huge blade could split him in two, Leonard gave the axe head a light push aside with his glowing right hand, and sparks leapt where his fingers met the metal.

“Uwaaaaah!”

With the axe twisted off its path, Leonard ran on without losing any speed and leapt as high as the Woodsman’s head.

— Smack!

His palm swung like a slap to the face and cracked into the Woodsman’s temple, and in that instant every last bit of the mana gathered in his right hand poured into it.

A brief silence. And then,

— Whump!

“!”

The Woodsman tottered, unable to get out so much as a proper sound, and Leonard caught hold of its head with one hand.

Guts Shake.

If Neuro Shock, which stimulates the nervous system directly, was a delicate, keen-edged “knife”, then Guts Shake was a “hammer” that used a wave of mana to strike straight at the organs behind thick hide.

— Thoom!

The shock ran whole along the bone and shook the Woodsman’s brain and the fluid around it. It was a blow on an entirely different level from anything before, and even the knights, laymen where magic was concerned, could feel its force by instinct.

What the—?!

But the ones most astonished were Ethan and Sophia.

A child of only nine, handling mana like that?

Leonard’s movements were nothing but plain punches and a slap, yet the magic behind them was a kind even Ethan had never seen. Then there was the seasoned skill with which he’d put the Woodsman down without so much as blinking. Was that really something a nine-year-old boy could do?

“Haah… haah…”

Leonard, meanwhile, was perched on top of the Woodsman’s head, looking down into its great pupil and dragging in rough breaths.

— Twitch.

Shit. This thing’s going to be back up in no time.

The Woodsman was repairing the damage fast, and it began to move again. Leonard clicked his tongue. Left with no other choice, he bent the fingers of both hands like rakes and dug them into the Woodsman’s head.

“Would you just…”

— Krrzzt.

Red sparks snapped from both hands as Leonard cast Neuro Shock straight into its head.

“Go dowwwn!”

Once, twice, and a third time, blazing red current ran down his fingers and nails and churned through the inside of the Woodsman’s body.

“Ngh… Krraaaagh!”

Pure white steam rose from the Woodsman’s mouth. Fully awake now, it twisted its body even harder and swung a fist at Leonard, who was riding on top of it. There was no room to dodge. He blocked with a magic barrier, but the force was so tremendous that the barrier couldn’t cancel all of it, and Leonard skipped across the ground like a stone over water before coming to a stop in a cloud of dust.

“Th-that—!”

The knights tried to block its way, but the Woodsman paid them no mind and ran straight for Leonard.

Oh, damn it.

Just a little more and he’d have had it.

“Flavius!”

Just then, through his fading consciousness, he heard Ethan’s voice.

A chunk of ice came flying out of nowhere and smashed into the crown of the Woodsman’s head. Its skull split, and blood poured out. The knights looked toward the voice and broke into cheers. Ethan and Sophia had closed the rift completely, and they’d finally moved.

— Whoooo!

Sophia cast another spell, and ice grew up from under the soles of the Woodsman’s feet and sealed both of its legs.

“Good work. You did great.”

Ethan reassured Leonard and began casting at speed. The Woodsman sensed things turning against it and thrashed like mad, but the ice didn’t so much as crack, let alone break.

“Krrrk! Kraak!”

“Know when to quit, you monster.”

— Fwish.

The moment Ethan’s angry voice rang out, a spark shot from the tip of his staff and touched the Woodsman’s skin. It fed on the fat and spread, and in the blink of an eye it had become a blaze big enough to swallow the whole body. It was clean, powerful magic that burned nothing but its target.

Ethan watched the sight quietly, then turned his head toward Leonard, who lay collapsed and utterly spent. That was a devil’s talent, the kind that pulls twice as far ahead of everyone else with no more effort than breathing and leaves anyone who sees it in despair.

As much as me… no. More than me, maybe.

Someone standing on the summit and someone halfway up the slope can never see from the same height. And pursuing knowledge alone comes to nothing in the end if there’s no one to argue it out with and share it with. That was one of the reasons he’d lost interest in raising the next generation of scholars.

Found it.

But in the end, Ethan had found it.

The single most interesting thing in this world.