The Defense Of The Village (3)

“Krrrk…”

A faint groan leaked from the Woodsman’s mouth, jarred open by the impact. Still frozen with its axe raised, it swayed for a moment, staggered back a few steps, and finally went down flat.

— Thoom!

“Huh?”

The knight had curled in on himself, certain his life was forfeit. At the crash out of nowhere his eyes snapped wide open, and right in front of him someone came down, light as a feather.

It was Leonard Felix.

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

Ethan’s expression went blank.

If his guess was right, Leonard was almost certainly using body-hardening magic, the kind that strengthens muscular power. Body-hardening magic was easy enough to cast, but holding the effect in place demanded considerable mental fortitude. Standing still, maybe. But keeping magic like that going while throwing himself around the way he was?

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

Body-hardening magic had originally been a kind of defensive magic. Over time, though, the magic barrier was developed, and once the knights came along, mages shifted to one hundred percent ranged combat, which for all practical purposes set the technique on the road to extinction. And of all the techniques to reach 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, not only her. Every last one of them had their eyes fixed on Leonard. They had just watched something that made no sense: a child not yet ten knocking a hulking Woodsman flat.

There was no room to call it a trick of the eye or a misunderstanding. This was raw, unvarnished reality.

“…”

Sophia barely managed to drag herself out of her shock and opened her mouth again.

“Why… why did you come back!”

Leonard didn’t answer. He ran his eyes over the knights sprawled around him in a dreadful state and tore at his own hair.

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

His head swam with mana deficiency; he had spent his mana too fast. He had pulled back for a short while to get the dizziness and the headache under control, and that, of all moments, was when a High Class monster had turned up.

The two mages are pinned down by the rift.

If the enemy had been nothing but Maulers, the knights could have handled it among themselves, but once a High Class monster like the Woodsman appeared, casualties were unavoidable.

— 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. Leonard was strong; there was no question of that. They had 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 punishment far beyond an ordinary monster’s. The risk was too great to waste time weighing the odds either way.

Leonard didn’t back down, though. He’d never had any intention of it in the first place.

“Kwaaaagh!”

The Woodsman hauled itself upright, leaning on its axe like a staff, and looked around for Leonard. 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!

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

“Huh…?”

The Woodsman sat at the weaker end of the High Class monsters and was still rated a nuisance, all because of its sheer toughness, which came from rubber-tough skin and hard bones. And this boy was driving a Woodsman 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, mocked as a dullard for coming into his mana so late in life, had poured very nearly forty years into body-hardening magic, the one and only technique he had ever been good at. The likes of a Woodsman could never stand up to that.

— Tap!

The Woodsman was struggling to get up. Leonard closed in, slipped around behind it, and thrust his right fist forward.

Its weak point is—!

An upper body far too big for its flimsy lower half. And the base of the spine, barely holding that lopsided frame upright.

The lumbar vertebrae!

— Crunch!

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

“Kraaagh!”

The Woodsman pitched forward in more agony than it had ever known.

Leonard didn’t stop there. He hammered relentlessly at every weak point in sight and ground the Woodsman down, going for the spots common to any monster built along human lines: the eyeballs and the collarbone.

“Agaaaagh!”

— Thwack! Crack!

Flat on its face, the Woodsman had taken every one of Leonard’s blows without resisting once. Then, without warning, it swung the axe it had never let go of, and the blade came flying in, splitting the air.

Leonard dropped almost flat to the ground, dodged it by a hair’s breadth, and struck up into the prone Woodsman’s jaw once more.

— Thwaack!

The shock packed into that small fist passed intact into the jaw. The Woodsman’s huge body lifted slightly before dropping back to the ground.

“What the hell?”

“Is that… is that even possible?”

Staring in a daze, the knights each blurted out something of their own, as if they couldn’t believe what was happening in front of them. Leonard beat the Woodsman down with a surgeon’s precision and brute power, every strike exactly where it needed to land. The attacks came one after another, so fiercely that no one could have found an opening.

Still… I’m getting a little worn out.

Yet Leonard himself, the one actually doing it, chewed at his lip as though something about it didn’t satisfy him. The Colitol Aroma had worn off long ago, and after the back-to-back fights he had already been through, his mana was all but scraping the bottom. On top of that, his body was a child’s, sitting at the third Circle and nowhere close to 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.

Every swing of his fist made his muscles scream, and the mana held in his hand was dwindling by degrees. Even wringing out everything he had, he was getting no more than a third of the force the technique should have delivered. 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. When he finally opened the distance and pulled away, the thing planted one leg on the ground and rose to its feet. It showed no dramatic wounds on the outside, but beneath the skin its organs and bones had burst and shattered, and were already regenerating.

Let’s settle this.

Blue mana light flowed out from the center of his body and covered Leonard’s right hand. First the hand, then the forearm, and soon the shoulder as well. The mana sheathing his whole arm lit up the dark forest.

— Tap!

Leonard came charging in, trailing a single streak of light, and the Woodsman answered by hurling the axe it held. 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. Sparks leapt where his fingers met the metal.

“Uwaaaaah!”

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

— Smack!

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

A brief silence. And then,

— Whump!

“!”

The Woodsman tottered, no longer able to get out so much as a proper sound. Leonard caught hold of its head with one hand.

Guts Shake.

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

— Thoom!

The shock traveled undiminished along the bone and rattled the Woodsman’s brain in its fluid. This blow was on another level entirely from anything that had come before. Even the knights, laymen where magic was concerned, could feel its force by instinct.

What the—?!

But no one was more astonished than Ethan and Sophia.

A child of only nine, handling mana like that?

Leonard’s movements amounted to nothing more than plain punches and a slap, but the magic behind them was of a kind even Ethan had never seen before. On top of that came the seasoned skill with which he put the Woodsman down without so much as blinking. Could a nine-year-old boy really bring ability like that to bear?

“Haah… haah…”

Leonard, meanwhile, was perched on top of the Woodsman’s head, gazing down into its great pupil and dragging in ragged 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 hooked the fingers of both hands like rakes and dug them into its head.

“Would you just…”

— Krrzzt.

Red sparks snapped from both hands as Leonard cast Neuro Shock straight into the Woodsman’s head.

“Go dowwwn!”

Once, twice, a third time. Blazing red current ran down his fingers and nails and churned through the Woodsman’s insides.

“Ngh… Krraaaagh!”

Pure white steam rose from the Woodsman’s mouth. Fully awake now, it twisted its body harder still 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. Leonard skipped across the ground like a stone over water and came to a stop in a cloud of dust.

“Th-that—!”

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

Oh, damn it.

Just a little more and he would have had it.

“Flavius!”

Just then, through his fading consciousness, he heard Ethan’s voice calling out to Sophia.

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 from it. The knights looked toward the voice and broke into cheers.

Having closed the rift completely, Ethan and Sophia had finally moved.

— Whoooo!

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

“Good work. You did very well.”

With that word of reassurance to Leonard, Ethan began casting at speed. Sensing the tide turning against it, the Woodsman thrashed like mad, but the ice did not so much as crack, let alone break.

“Krrrk! Kraak!”

“Know when to quit, you monster.”

— Fwish.

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

Ethan had been watching quietly. Now he turned his head toward Leonard, who lay collapsed and utterly spent. Here was a devil’s talent, the kind that leaves everyone else in the dust with no more effort than breathing, and drives anyone watching to despair.

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

The view from the summit and the view from halfway up the slope can never be the same. Knowledge pursued alone comes to nothing in the end without someone to argue it out and share it with. That was one of the reasons he had 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.