Chapter 19
Helplessness is a wretched emotion.
Seria had understood that fact keenly ever since childhood. It began when, at around six years old, her mother was driven from the lord’s castle for being lowborn.
The House of Yurdina placed great importance on noble blood. There was no way a child of barely six could do anything. And besides, wasn’t she lowborn herself?
Her mother howling, her father standing there with a cold expression, and even her half-sister watching the scene without concern.
All her memories always began from that point. It was a nightmare driven into her life like a curse. After that day, Seria resolved never to be helpless again.
Because she believed that was the only way she could overcome the memory of that day’s misery.
Her father’s eyes, cold as frost at dawn, and the gaze of her half-sister looking down at her as though she were pathetic still followed her like a painting.
Whenever she recalled that time, Seria felt as though she were suffocating. Every time she had a nightmare, she awoke as though she had been strangled.
That was why she swung her sword like a madwoman. Even so, she could not defeat her half-sister. Her life had been a history of defeats.
The Sun of Yurdina, her sister, had to win by any means necessary, and the person she was always compared against was the lowborn Seria.
Now there were no opportunities left. Once her half-sister entered the world, Seria would never again be able to stand on equal footing with her. The difference between legitimate and lowborn children was that extreme in the world outside.
That was why she had grown impatient. To avoid feeling helpless and keep from reliving the misery of that day, she had trained herself past her limits.
But was this the result?
Seria panted. She was barely managing to take one step after another, but her ankle throbbed so badly that she could not move properly. The heat of the sprain had long since devoured her sense of pain like a ball of fire.
Cold sweat ran down her body. Even so, Seria gritted her teeth and kept walking. At times, her sword served as a cane.
That sword—the path of swordsmanship to which she had devoted her entire life—had been rendered powerless.
A man would be fighting in her place. Judging by the presences she could sense, there might have been several magical beasts, or even more than ten.
Even facing ten low-ranking magical beasts alone was a grueling task. And what if they were not low-ranking magical beasts?
Just imagining that possibility made Seria’s heart swell as though it would burst from guilt.
As she staggered onward, she tripped over a tree root and fell. Dirt and grass clung to her body.
She felt like crying. Yet she had sworn never to cry even once since that day.
No one had ever been beside her. Not from the day she was born, and not until now.
Her mother, the only person who had been on her side, had already been taken from her. As though it intended to erase even the traces of her mother from Seria’s life, the family had not even told her where she was.
She had grown up surrounded by contempt. Even after her talent with the sword was recognized, she did not keep anyone by her side.
Because she could not trust them. Everyone in the family enjoyed watching her, tormenting her, or subtly slandering her. And yet those same people had begun bowing their heads and treating her like their master one day.
She was sick of it. That was why she had never managed to build relationships with anyone.
At least, that had been true until recently. Now, for the first time, she had someone she could call a ‘friend.’
‘Friends don’t say things like that to each other.’
Senior Ian, who had said those words, had sounded sincere.
How could he do that?
Seria knew. Ian had displayed frightening skill during their first spar, but he had not been like that afterward.
He had a sharpness that seemed excessive for someone in the middle or lower ranks, yet his fundamentals and mana reserves were still too lacking for him to be considered among the upper ranks.
That was certainly what the person called ‘Ian Percus’ had seemed like during the days Seria spent with him. He was not the sort of person to overestimate his abilities and act recklessly, either.
And yet he had stepped into a path where he might die in her place. Seria could not understand it at all.
Wasn’t it her responsibility? Then she was the one who had to take responsibility. Even if someone had to die, it should be her. He had to live.
But Ian had shattered those clear propositions in an instant. That was why Seria could not understand him, though she had a vague sense of what it meant.
‘Perhaps this is what a friendship is,’ Seria thought as she forced herself up from the ground, almost crawling.
There was a Seria who did not want Senior Ian to die.
The Seria standing here thought that even if her ankle had to be broken, she had to somehow inform Professor Derek so that Ian would survive.
That was why she scraped at the ground, crawled, and staggered as she forced herself back up.
How much time had passed like that? She sensed a presence ahead of her. Her mind was hazy from sprinting and tumbling with all her strength.
Perhaps because of that, the other party detected her presence first. She heard murmuring, and soon three people appeared before her.
Professor Derek, with his stocky body, and the black-haired girl who had been chatting playfully beside him. Come to think of it, she seemed to be Senior Ian’s friend.
Seria could not remember her name. There was also another second-year student who seemed to have formed a group with her.
As Professor Derek approached her in surprise, Seria swatted away his hand and said,
“Magical beasts……”
Professor Derek looked at her in bewilderment. The other two did the same.
However, it did not take long for all three of them to freeze in place.
“The magical beasts… attacked… Senior Ian is in danger…….”
Even while panting, Seria looked at Professor Derek with desperate hope. Without saying a word, Professor Derek turned his gaze toward the direction from which Seria had run.
And he left them with a single word.
“……Well done.”
At the same time, Professor Derek launched himself from the spot without leaving so much as an afterimage. The black-haired girl chased after him. The girl left behind stamped her feet for a moment, then turned around and ran somewhere.
Soon, the murmuring voices of the students could be heard from the direction in which she had run. They began grabbing their weapons and rushing off somewhere, seemingly intent on joining the fight.
Please let him be alive.
Seria prayed that as she gasped for breath.
Her head was dizzy from the lack of oxygen reaching her brain. That was why she did not know.
That this was the first prayer she had ever offered for someone else in her life.
The lonely girl had, before she knew it, begun allowing someone to stand at her side.
**
The two wolves charged in zigzags. It seemed to be the result of coordinating their movements, since their strides never tangled with each other.
My vision was dizzy, but the moment they would finally come rushing at me was still predictable.
At the very last instant, when the wolves briefly faltered so their charge could gain momentum like a cannonball.
I held my breath and lowered my gaze.
I had to find a ‘tell.’ They were merely magical beasts. They should have been less skilled than humans at concealing their muscles and intentions. And now, every sense in my body had grown sharper than ever.
Come. At that moment, imaginary trajectories appeared before my eyes.
It was a matter of instinct. I immediately twisted my body and slipped through the tiny gap between those trajectories. In the instant when time seemed to stop, my sword spun with a swish. My hand gripped the sword in reverse.
With a sharp sound that tore through the air, two gray cannonballs skimmed past me by a hair. Those massive bodies, launched at high speed, possessed terrifying physical force. If I had not evaded them, I would have suffered severe injuries.
I brought down the sword I had prepared beforehand. Unable to overcome its own momentum, one of the wolves was still flying forward when the sword struck vertically into its back.
The mana-infused sword tore through its muscles and rang with a low hum. My aura should not have been this dense, but as time passed, the mana coating my sword continued to grow more saturated.
With a long rip, the blade embedded diagonally in its back, clear of the spine, tore the wolf’s body open.
It was a fatal blow. The wolf screamed as blood poured from it, still in the posture it had taken while leaping through the air.
That was when the other wolf, which had evaded my blade, charged at me again.
I immediately pulled out my sword and swept it horizontally. With a crunch, my sword lodged in the wolf’s open jaws. The angle was just right to avoid the fang jutting precariously out and cleave all the way to its throat.
But perhaps because the fatigue accumulated in my muscles was too severe, the strength left my grip, and the sword could go no farther.
With a crunch, the wolf forcibly bit down on the sword in an attempt to survive. Its bite force was terrifying. I could not pull the sword free at once.
That was when the wolf with its back torn open made its final struggle. Squeezing out every last bit of strength, it opened its enormous jaws and tried to bite me.
The sword would not come free, and it was too late to evade.
In that desperate instant, my mind burned completely white as it searched for an escape route.
My hand naturally groped around my waist. There, it caught an unfamiliar sensation.
It was a hand axe, a secondary weapon that had somehow come to hang from my belt.
My arm drew the hand axe of its own accord. Since it was much shorter than a sword, its speed was incomparably faster.
Then I brought the raised axe straight down.
With a crunch, the hand axe struck the nose of the wolf with its jaws open. Its jaws snapped shut, and its head slammed into the ground.
The desperate final struggle of a living creature ended just like that.
The wolf holding my sword in place with its jaws shook its head in confusion, trying to break free from me. Its pitch-black eyes, which reflected not even a sliver of light, filled with fear.
That was the last emotion the wolf felt. The hand axe struck its skull like a bolt of lightning.
Bang, bang, bang. As the axe came down again and again, chunks of flesh and bone flew in every direction.
Only after its brain burst out and blood drenched the axe did the hunt end.
The two wolves were gone. Only two corpses remained.
I felt as though I would die from exhaustion. I barely restrained the urge to collapse where I stood. There was still one presence left.
But that presence was exceptionally strange.
It did not move. After approaching to a certain distance, it had simply remained where it was. That made me even more suspicious.
Could it be waiting after laying a trap? Or perhaps it was waiting until I grew tired. A clever hunter would naturally do that.
Wolf and human. By now, I could no longer tell which of us was the hunter and which was the prey. I steadied my ragged breathing and enjoyed a brief rest with my back against a nearby tree.
The last wolf still did not move. Instead, it even circled leisurely around the place where it lingered, as if to say, ‘Come if you dare.’
Even for a damn mutt, that was ridiculous. I let out a hollow laugh.
But I had no need to fight it on its terms. I was exhausted, while it was still fresh. Besides, the fact that it was calling me over to that spot meant it must have had some ulterior motive.
There was no reason to answer such a childish provocation. Once Professor Derek arrived, the wolf would either tuck its tail and flee or become one of the corpses littering this clearing anyway.
But then a faint medicinal scent brushed against the tip of my nose.
I stopped short. It was a smell I had encountered somewhere before. There were few scents so strong and long-lasting.
Even amid this overwhelming stench of blood, it stood out distinctly. I rose as though bewitched.
Then I headed toward the clearing where it was waiting. This scent was unmistakably the smell of a workshop.
Only a student who spent all day in an alchemist’s workshop would carry a scent like this.
My steps halted when I discovered the enormous wolf standing in the middle of the clearing.
The wolves I had fought so far had been enormous in their own right, but this one was even larger. It seemed to stand well over two meters at the shoulder. It was so large that I had to look up just to meet its gaze.
The forest was quiet in the middle of the day. Sunlight filtering through the leaves illuminated its massive body. Before that terrifying monster, I looked like nothing more than a dwarf.
But it was not the size of the wolf that left me speechless.
It was the tiny scrap of cloth hanging from its mouth.
The bloodstained cloth was a piece of the clothes Emma had been wearing that day.
The wolf spat out the scrap with a ptoo, as though mocking me. Then, wearing a sly smile, it looked around as if showing off.
All sorts of animals were lined up there. The strange thing was that every one of them had been disemboweled, their intestines spilling out.
It had not done it because it was hungry. It had done it simply for fun.
Magical beasts are beings like that—creatures seething with endless malice toward living beings outside themselves.
I let out a small chuckle. That tiny laugh soon reverberated throughout the forest.
Pff, hahaha, kekeke.
It was as though I had unleashed every kind of laughter I could produce. It was a long while before the laughter finally subsided.
It felt as though the heat were cooking my brain. My chest pounded, and my brain throbbed in time with my heart. It hurt enough to make my head ache.
Until then, the wolf had waited for me patiently. If anything, its eyes looked expectant.
So I decided to willingly do exactly what it wanted.
With a click, I leveled the tip of my sword at it. A growl scraped its way up my throat.
“Hey.”
The corners of its mouth curved into a grin. It looked as though this was exactly what it had expected.
“You’re dying by my hand today.”
Without fail.
Only then did the wolf begin walking leisurely, scanning me as though observing its prey.
They were the eyes of a hunter stalking its prey. But today, the prey would be the wolf.
A cold, eerie light settled in my eyes.