The day of the mass subjugation mission.
A considerable crowd had gathered in front of Tolson’s gate.
The lord’s soldiers first: something like two hundred of them drawn up in ranks, short spears and light armor, every man kitted out to the same pattern. Ordinary men, of course, not ‘Awakened.’
In command was the woman knight with the silver hair and the crimson armor, ‘Crimson Anatoria.’
Then some fifty adventurers registered to Tolson, D-rank and E-rank in roughly equal share. Keim’s ‘Silver Wheel’ among them, naturally.
Another fifty or so had come in from other towns, including a C-rank party whose gear and bearing were on a visibly different level. The gap was startling. Most adventurers apparently finish out their careers at D-rank, and C and above is where the elite begin.
I stood in among the adventurers and watched ‘Crimson Anatoria’ start to speak.
“Adventurers, you have my thanks for assembling. Soldiers, my thanks for your service. I am Anatoria, head knight of the Viscount Barius house. For the next several days you will be engaged in clearing out the goblins nesting in the forest outside Tolson. As you know, goblins left to breed become a threat in their own right. You will destroy them root and branch without delay, and every one of you will give all you have to seeing this mission completed.”
A clear, carrying voice, and a handsome one, a match for the rest of her. Listening to it, though, she sounded young enough to still be called a girl, and once the thought had arrived I could see a trace of childhood left in that stern face. Not that appearances signify. What is inside her is A-rank, and judging her by the outside would be a fool’s move.
“Oof. She’s a serious beauty.”
Keim delivered that verdict under his breath and was promptly writhing under one of Meribel’s pinches.
By the time I’d finished watching the young people at play, the speech had ended and the order to move out had come.
We spent a night near the village I’d stopped at on that earlier goblin subjugation, and went into the forest the next day.
The D-ranks led, reading the sign the goblins had left. The rest of the adventurers followed, and behind them came the viscount’s soldiers with Anatoria at their head.
We found the settlement on our second day in the forest, and it was a large one.
A scout came back to Anatoria with the tension showing on his face. She heard him out without moving, nodded when he had finished, and gave her orders quietly.
“There is a large goblin settlement ahead. Reconnaissance confirms five ‘would-be Kings,’ which puts the population at two and a half thousand at the least. We must assume a King as well. We will strike the settlement and annihilate it. The King will be handled by myself or by ‘Fortuner,’ the C-rank party. None of you is to engage it. We open with a massed volley. Mages, prepare earth-attribute pebble-type magic.”
Every adventurer there began checking their gear. The faint sound of metal moved through the trees, and the sense of what was coming climbed with it.
I went over my weapons, my armor and my pack, and waited for the next order.
“Good. Move out.”
At Anatoria’s command the adventurers started forward, the soldiers falling in behind.
Ten minutes on, light showed up ahead. A clearing, where nothing grew.
As we closed, the clearing resolved to about the size of a baseball ground. More than a hundred tents of tree branches stood in rows across it. Settlement was the wrong word for it. This was a town. Goblins moved among the tents in numbers past counting, a thousand at a glance and easily more. It put a genuine chill through me.
We spread out along the settlement’s edge and halted.
“Magic ready.”
At the word, the mages raised their staves and began gathering themselves. A party member putting a hand up was the signal that they were set. When a hand went up from the C-rank party, Anatoria said, “Loose.”
Parties run to one mage apiece, more or less. Four to a party, a hundred adventurers, and that gives you twenty-five mages. Something like twenty-five of them using ‘pebble-type magic’ at once—magic that throws stones—made for a fairly spectacular thing to stand next to.
An E-rank like Meribel sends several fist-sized stones out at speed. A D-rank throws something nearer to a spear made of rock.
The C-rank mage, firing last, brought down some thirty of those stone spears one after another from high overhead.
The effect was enormous. Four to five hundred goblins were blown apart bloody in an instant, and seven tents in ten came down with them. One of the big ones had gone over too, by the look of it. A ‘would-be King.’
“Charge!”
The adventurers poured into the clearing at Anatoria’s command. Even now they moved party by party, which is adventurers all over.
The viscount’s soldiers came in behind and took the goblins the adventurers had missed.
To an adventurer a goblin is trash you clear in batches single-handed. To a man who has never ‘Awakened,’ it is threat enough.
Anatoria had left the soldiers and gone in ahead of them.
One sweep of her longsword sent something like a blade of light out from the point and cut a whole rank of goblins in two. A skill, without question.
The skill was frightening enough on its own, but I couldn’t follow the sword at all, and every so often she covered ground in a step so fast it read as teleportation. There is no describing that as fighting inside human limits.
I had been taking the chance to study how an A-rank works, though I was also out on the end of the adventurers’ line putting goblins down one after another. Bursting them, more accurately. A group this size had come up in the world, stone axes and stone spears instead of wooden clubs, and honestly none of it mattered much.
The spears landed on me here and there, but ‘Steel Body’ meant no stone point was getting through my skin. Picking that skill up when I did was luck.
Twenty or thirty of them flattened, I’d guess, when a tent that was still standing came up in front of me. There might be a few more inside. I moved in to take it apart with the mace, and that was when it happened.
Gugigii!
The cry came out heavy, and the tent burst open from the inside.
What came out of it stood two meters and was built like a slab of muscle, a thick club in one hand, planted wide and shaking with rage. Plainly a higher order of goblin than the ‘would-be King’ I’d seen before.
Which meant—was this the ‘King’!?
“Whoa!”
The club came down without warning and I got clear of it with nothing to spare.
The sound it made against the ground was appalling. Take that clean and ‘Steel Body’ or no ‘Steel Body,’ I was going to be badly hurt.
“That’s the King! Get back, old man!”
Keim’s voice, somewhere off in the distance.
Right. The King was Anatoria’s or the C-rank party’s, that had been the order. Except this King had settled on me and nothing else. Turn my back at this range and I’d take that club across the back of the skull. Which left holding on until help came.
The King swung. Wild swinging by any reading, and yet its balance never went; the trunk on the thing had to be tremendous.
I gave ground and watched for the gap where the attack stopped. Take it on the buckler and I’d lose the buckler and the arm behind it. With the mace, then… ah. A counter.
The King brought the club up at an angle, meaning to bring it down diagonally across me.
As it came down I brought the mace up off the dirt to meet it.
The club itself was the target. Not a thing you could ordinarily plan on, but I have been training ‘Kinetic Vision’ and ‘Reflexes.’ Club coming down met mace coming up, and the difference in materials shattered the club.
A tremendous shock came back up my arms. I held on to it and reset. The King, its weapon gone, backed off two or three steps looking honestly confused.
Good. Time to run. The thought was barely finished when the King came at me flat out. I was late. Its right hook caught me in the body.
More impact than ‘Steel Body’ could absorb went straight through to my insides. My stomach felt like it was coming up my throat. Damn it, you bastard. The red washing across everything, is that blood? No. That skill.
‘Stability’ was in there too, and I kept my feet. The left came straight in after it.
I slipped it by a hair and drove my forehead into the King’s beak of a nose with everything I had. Fool. The headbutt is the strongest technique in close combat.
The King reared back with its nose streaming. It still came on, both arms reaching to get hold of me.
It had me, and I swung the mace up anyway. What the swing found was the King’s groin.
Gugyaa!
Yes, I know. That hurts. I’ll put you out of your misery in a moment.
I set the mace in both hands and brought it down on the head of the doubled-over King.
“I see. The King appeared directly in front of you, and you had no choice but to fight.”
The rest of the goblins were cleared out soon after, and the work of pulling magic stones from better than two thousand corpses had begun. The viscount’s soldiers, it turned out, were largely here for that.
And in the middle of it, one man was being interrogated by a woman knight in crimson armor. Me.
“Yes, that’s how it went. I did consider running, but at that distance I judged turning my back to be the greater risk.”
“Hm. Those who watched it tell it the same way, so the matter stands.”
Anatoria set a hand to her chin and looked up at me, weighing.
Standing this close, I could see she was a full head shorter than I was.
Close up she was undeniably beautiful. A beautiful girl, more like. The points on her ears meant she wasn’t of human stock—an elf, most likely—and it lent her an air that belonged in a story.
That she can fight like a demon out of legend at that size and with that face is what makes a former A-rank frightening.
“Now. I am told you reached E-rank only recently, yet shattering a King’s skull in a single blow is considerable skill. Forgive me, but at your age I would expect a long career behind you.”
“No, I ‘Awakened’ very recently in fact. Strength is the one thing I have any confidence in. And I was fortunate today. The blow happened to land on a vital spot.”
“Fortunate. By any ordinary reckoning a King is not a monster an E-rank defeats one to one. If you have truly only just begun, then yes, you were fortunate.”
“Yes. Neglecting my ‘Presence Sense’ was my error. I’ll be more careful.”
“You would do well to. Very well. The engagement was unavoidable, and I will let the matter rest. Do not forget that disobeying orders on a mass subjugation mission carries a penalty to match.”
“I’ll keep it in mind. I’m grateful for your leniency.”
I bowed and withdrew.
She watched me go with the face of someone looking at a rare animal. Because I hadn’t spoken or carried myself the way an adventurer does, perhaps.
I am from another world originally. A certain amount of that is only to be expected.
After that came the clearing up, and then the road back to Tolson.
More than two thousand goblin corpses could hardly be left where they lay, naturally. They were dragged into one place and burned with magic and oil. That job alone ate more than half a day, and it taught me in my bones what a nuisance goblin breeding really is.
I took the day of our return off, which even I felt entitled to, and from the next day it was back to the usual round of F-class dungeon and training.
Two evenings after the subjugation I looked in at the Guild, and Kisara handed over the mission pay along with the buyback on the Rare Boss horn.
“I’m sorry to have kept you waiting. The answer from headquarters finally came. It does appear to be quite rare, and this is what the buyback comes to.”
What she handed me was one million seven hundred thousand roms. For material off an F-class dungeon monster, that has to be exceptional.
“That’s very welcome. I spent freely getting ready for the subjugation, so this should just about carry me to Euron.”
“So you really are going, Okuno-san. It’s a little lonely.”
“Thank you. I got a good start as an adventurer because of you, Kisara-san. I’ll come back when I make D-rank, and I’ll be in your care again then.”
“Yes, of course. There aren’t many people who can put down a goblin King at E-rank. You’re going to get strong, Okuno-san. Please do your best.”
“I will. I’ll do my best not to die. Excuse me, then.”
I bowed to Kisara and left the Guild.
That night I ate with the four of ‘Silver Wheel,’ under the heading of a farewell party.
“So you’re really going, old man. That’s a bit lonely.”
Keim let it out over his drink, in a quiet register I hadn’t heard from him before.
Meribel made a sound of agreement beside him. Her eyes had gone slightly wet.
“How do I put it, Soshi-san was settled, and easy to be around, so it’s a shame. But you’re strong enough to put down a King, so that’s how it goes, isn’t it.”
“Honestly, that surprised me. A King’s hide ought to be quite hard. To break the head in a single blow is tremendous strength in the arms.”
Ranan said it while working steadily through her food, impressed in her flat way, and Rabert nodded along beside her, delighted.
“Thanks to Soshi-san I understand now that a mace can carry you. I’m going to push my strength skills up and work at it.”
“Sounds right. The heavier the mace you can swing, the more it puts out, so training that’s nothing but swinging heavy things might be the way to go.”
“What sort of training do you do, Soshi-san?”
“I swing Dark Metal rods I bought at the weapon shop.”
“Dark Metal? That garbage metal that’s heavy as hell and good for nothing?”
Keim cut in, interested.
“That’s the one. I bought three, and I swing them around or run carrying them.”
“Whoa. That’s what you’ve been doing, Soshi-san? No wonder you’re getting strong.”
Rabert’s eyes went round, and Ranan put in from the side.
“No. An ordinary adventurer can’t lift three Dark Metal rods at all. Soshi is abnormal from that point alone, I’d say.”
“Is that so?”
“A high rank is another matter, obviously. At E-rank it is flatly impossible.”
“Then why can Soshi-san lift them?”
It was Meribel who answered.
“He probably ‘Awakened’ with an aptitude for strength. Kisara said before that there are adventurers like that.”
“That’s a thing?”
“Apparently there’s a lot of variation even among the ‘Awakened.’ She said two people can fight the same way in the same dungeon and grow at different speeds.”
“That’s true whether you’re ‘Awakened’ or not, mind. Maybe the old man’s a bit special.”
Keim looked at me with something like envy in it. Being handed that look out of nowhere is awkward, though now that it had been said, a difference in talent is probably only natural.
Thinking back to my old life, there were plenty of people I was never going to beat no matter how hard I worked. If I’ve come out on that side of it this time… what am I supposed to do with that?
“…I’d thought myself that something was a little off. If that’s what it is, I’ll train with it in mind and see how far it goes.”
“I really want to see where that ends up. Oh, that’s right, could I try holding your mace, Soshi-san? I’d like to know what I’m training toward.”
“Sure, go ahead.”
Rabert took hold of the mace where it stood propped against the wall. He got both hands on it and swung once, and his body wobbled badly. The weapon shop’s old man had called it a piece for D-ranks who fancy their strength, and that looks about right.
And I’ve already started to find the thing light. Maybe I really am a strength-specialized adventurer.