WeTried Translations

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

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Chapter 774: I Got Him

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"I call upon the power of Red Foot."

The witch muttered the same words five times over, eyes darting back and forth without stop.

Both swordsmen were too dangerous. Was she going to die here? Like her younger sister, already dead? That could not happen. She would not let it come to that.

A flash of the days when they had been called the Twin Witches passed through her mind. She swept the thought away and focused, pouring herself into the incantation.

The forbidden art was called Hungering Stomach.

"All of you, drop dead."

This forbidden art required part of her own organs to be consumed in the casting. She had reshaped her body for exactly this purpose, but that did not make the pain or agony disappear.

Black blood ran from the corner of the witch's mouth.

It hurts.

The sensation of her entrails tearing made her lips tremble. Pain was better than dying. The witch knew that much.

* * *

The moment Enkrid stepped forward, he felt something shift beneath his feet.

This spell was not as fast as the fire-lightning, but it was wide. The earth beneath him writhed and split open into holes, each packed with razor-sharp teeth. Anything caught in those would not just lose flesh. Their bones would snap clean through.

The ground rippled outward from him at its center, and the mouths tearing open all strained to swallow him whole.

He sensed the danger, kicked off the ground, and lunged sideways. Strangely, the misshapen jaws that had burst from the earth followed his movement, new ones forming right where he landed.

Clang, clang!

The teeth snapping shut rang out like iron blocks grinding together.

Can I cut them?

Enkrid looked down, thinking. There were dozens of mouths at once. Unlike the fire-lightning, one cut would not end this.

The source was not here, so there was no striking at the root. If he got caught or ground up in those teeth, he would simply be sucked away to whatever demon was sitting somewhere with its mouth hanging open, hungering for something to eat.

He did not know every detail, but instinct gave him enough of the shape.

Forbidden arts.

Not one thing called by that name was easy to deal with. The Walking Fire, the fire-lightning, and now this.

Every time he lifted his foot to move, the mouths followed without fail, opening across a fixed radius centered on him, wide enough for dozens of grown men to stand loosely.

He stabbed Duskforge into one that burst up right at his feet and split it open. It vanished, but a new mouth appeared right beside it even faster than the old one had gone.

Cutting one does nothing, and moving just makes them follow.

Stubborn. Relentless. That was the feeling.

He had watched it manifest and seen its shape. He had a rough sense of how it worked.

A sustained spell, if that was the right name for it.

He was the target. Whatever the witch had sacrificed to trigger this, the mouths would not stop until they had chewed through something and swallowed it.

Cut one, and another grows back.

So how long would they keep appearing?

The question became action.

He placed his feet where the gaps were and moved his arm, Duskforge in hand. He cut, and cut again.

If new ones kept coming, he would just keep cutting.

It was, in a sense, a contest of quantities, the total magical power the blue-eyed witch carried against the total Will Enkrid held.

What was certain was that the witch had chosen the wrong spell.

She had burned half her prepared Sacrifices and sacrificed part of her own organs, and the forbidden art she had chosen was one that wore the target down through sheer persistence. A force that gnawed at stamina until the target was gasping, then swallowed them whole once they finally gave out.

Still, she had reason to feel aggrieved. The man who had come through the Cursed Ground had been fighting every step of the way, cutting walls and cutting spells. His Will should have been running low. His body should have been depleted.

In the end, though, in any contest of who gave out first, there was no world where Enkrid lost.

His detached manner and the steady, tireless rhythm of his sword work made him look like a laborer absorbed in repetitive work. Seeing it, the witch was taken aback.

How can he hold out like that?

When the occasional irregular attack came, a tendril snaking out from inside the hungering demon's stomach, the swordsman simply rotated half a turn and swept his sword out, calm as anything.

The blade, carrying the momentum of the spin, sheared through the tendril and swept long across the ground as though stretching beyond itself. The blade appeared to lengthen. The illusion soon became real, splitting one more mouth down the middle.

"Aaah!"

The witch screamed. Was it her superior spiritual sense? Or the result of simple insight?

She could see her own end.

She already knew that even in a transformed body, being split into dozens of pieces meant death. She had seen it through her younger twin sister. Maybe that was why.

Or maybe it was just terror, plain and simple, and the scream came from that.

"Allow me to add to it."

Audin joined in. Enkrid was shattering the witch's expectations one cut after another, and while she split her attention trying to deal with Jaxon's attacks, the man with the bear-like frame drove a holy fist at her that she had to stop with nothing but her own body.

Her remodeled flesh could produce something close to a knight's strength, in its way.

Crack, thud, bang!

It was useless.

The man imbued with divine power read the joint of the mass of flesh she had thrown out as an arm, wrenched it the wrong way, broke it, and kept coming until his iron fist drove into the witch's skull.

Clang!

It hit like a fist literally forged from metal.

One blow caved the witch's skull in. Black blood streamed freely. Before new flesh could grow to fill the depression, a fist full of white light struck her again and again.

Boom, crack, boom, crack!

The rhythm of each punch used the witch's skull as a drum.

"St...op."

In the pause between blows, the fallen witch stopped screaming and stopped casting. She begged.

"Yes, I will send you to the Lord. Poor soul."

Audin showed no mercy. He drove the final punch through and crushed her. Bang! He hammered her into the ground. The body, reduced to meat, was pressed flat against the floor, and that was the end. The witch could not say another word.

Two witches who had stretched their lives past a hundred and fifty years, clinging miserably to existence, were dead.

And throughout all of it, the Apostle had been driven back by Ragna's blade.

"This is impossible!"

The Apostle denied what was in front of him. Enkrid, now with room to breathe as the forbidden art ended, nodded in agreement.

With sturdy walls, forces specialized for the Cursed Ground, countless Demon Creatures, and even the personal strength of those within, it was a group that two or three ordinary knights could never handle. Calling it impossible was understandable enough.

"Why are you nodding along?"

The number of Demon Creatures here had actually been lower than outside, so Fell had drawn closer with the thought that this side was easier to clean up. That was what prompted the question.

The logic was simple. More Demon Creatures meant more swings and more time and stamina spent. Elite Demon Creatures or ordinary ones, cut them, slice them, burn them, and they died the same.

"I am the Apostle of Red Foot!"

Far off, the Apostle attempted one last desperate surge.

Red musculature spread across his entire body like a second skin, and his frame began to swell.

The blue veins bulging through that outer layer of muscle were as thick as ordinary rope. His body had grown that much. Even Audin required a look upward when standing close, but the Apostle was larger than a Giant now.

His height shot up to that of three or four grown men. The transformation itself was startling. It looked as though his muscles were growing on their own, expanding at incredible speed in a short time.

"Ver-min!"

The Apostle roared. The swordsman standing before him simply raised his blade in silence.

The sword's name was Ilchul. The man holding it was Ragna.

The sword in Ragna's grip shed red light, pushing the darkness away from it. A small source of light came into being on the ground.

Born in the east and ruling half the world, a god that devours darkness was here.

"Hey."

The man holding a sword imbued with that god's power called out to the Apostle. The Apostle's eyes were red and enormous, the black blood vessels threading through them grown thick.

Rather than answering, the Apostle brought his fist down. The heavy mass swinging like a hammer was itself like a boulder.

Crack!

Air split open, and the space along the swing's path warped. Tremendous strength tore through sound and space.

Ragna, standing in its path, looked like he was about to be reduced to pulp. That was not what happened.

He spread his legs, set his stance, and raised Ilchul. The Will spreading from his core through his whole body caught the force and held it.

Boom!

A shockwave rang out and expanded in concentric rings.

Enkrid felt the power packed into that single blow and judged the Apostle's strength to exceed the Minotaur that had been rampaging with two swords.

No technique, though.

That was how it looked. Those with deep experience give meaning to every attack, every movement, with no wasted gesture. But the Apostle's punches had no thought for what came after the one swing.

In plain terms, he had little experience as a fighter. The raw power in each blow was no joke, but the fighting itself was clumsy.

Could he have broken the walls? Yes. Killed every Demon Creature here? Yes. Swept through the cursed thorn-wood tribe? Also yes. If he stepped out onto the continent, could he seize an ordinary city and choose the humans within to eat? That too was within reach.

The Apostle had that level of strength. He simply could not kill the one man with a sword standing in front of him.

The fist that had come down on Ilchul could do nothing to the human gripping it.

Trickle, sizzle.

The flesh stopped by the blade peeled and bled, and the blood that flowed evaporated against the heat the sword held, rising like steam. An acrid, fishy smell spread through the air.

Ragna held Ilchul and thought.

My oath.

To not stop until the day I die.

The will to keep moving forward until the last breath was the foundation of the oath.

What was effortless for one person was a challenge aimed squarely at oneself for another.

Everyone's standard was different, so everyone's limit was different.

That was the nature of Ragna's limit.

What came naturally to Enkrid did not come naturally to him.

The Apostle used both spells and raw physical force.

Dark blood clumped into tendril-like masses that shot from his limbs, each one tearing through the air as it flew. Mouths opened on his belly and back, and the tongues that lashed out from them were covered in barbs.

The sword shining in the darkness struck, deflected, and blocked all of it.

Enkrid stood to one side and watched. Everyone else held their positions too.

Amid the collapsed walls and the bodies of Demon Creatures, a single swordsman and a single Demon Creature fought to the death.

Enkrid thought Ragna might die. The Apostle's spells might find a way through his defense.

Black vines that grew from the floor burst apart, scattering thin needles in every direction. Ragna's limbs slowed briefly where some of them struck.

Still, this side won.

"Distasteful."

Sinar muttered under her breath.

Spells that used tree vines were an elf's specialty, particularly that of druids. Watching the Apostle bastardize and repurpose that technique, Sinar's mood was understandably sour.

"......Brought down by nothing more than a knight."

The Apostle murmured those words.

The Cursed Ground was full of monsters that devoured knights. Plenty of them.

One of them looked at Ragna, bleeding from a wound on one side of his head, and said that.

Half of the Apostle's head was crushed. His body was warped as though seared by hot iron, blistered, and carved apart in strips. The muscle armor that had stopped everything split easily under Ragna's blade. He was drawing his final breaths.

Leave him alone and he might die on his own, but that was not certain enough to bet on.

Ragna raised his arm, heavier now than before. It had been a poor matchup for a single sword.

As he fought through a spell that snatched away the mind of anyone who looked at the Apostle, one of the tendrils had nearly skewered him through.

Holding his sword, Ragna felt something flying at him from behind and turned his body.

The dodge was half a beat slow, but what was coming had not been aimed at him, so he had room to clear it. If he had stayed still, the projectile would have clipped him. Dodging it was simple enough.

Thwack!

The thrown object drove into what remained of the Apostle's half-destroyed head. Whatever force was behind it, the projectile tore muscle and skin clean from the Apostle's neck as it tumbled to one side.

It looked like someone had split a gourd with brute force, jammed something into the split, and rolled it. The thing buried in that half-destroyed skull was a hatchet.

"I got him."

The lost barbarian's low voice came from one side. Rem continued.

"Whoever lands the last hit gets the kill. You know how it works."

Right arm still extended from the throw, Rem grinned.

Small cuts lined his forehead, and more were visible on his forearms. Getting here had not been easy for Rem either.

This was the Cursed Ground, a place where human hands had never taken hold.

The fight was over. Some Demon Creatures would still be out there somewhere, but the fortress that had stood here was broken, and the beings that had defended it were dead.

It was only one fortress city, not even at the center of the Cursed Ground.

Enkrid took stock with a cool head. Even so, it would have been a lie to say he was not proud.

These others might not know it, but this was a place the Red Cloak Knights had attempted to take again and again. Enkrid's party had come in and swept it clean in a single stroke.

Sinar looked at the body of the corrupted spirit she had killed earlier and wrapped the cut on her forearm with a long leaf, an elf-style bandage. She glanced around and heard the faint wailing screams of vengeful spirits still drifting in from somewhere.

If they left now, another thorn-wood wall would be built here. The obsession carved into those walls was not something that simply faded away. Purification was needed, and nothing suited it better than fire.

"Let's burn it."

Those words came from an elf who had once hated fire. Was it a memory of a past she had overcome, or a resolve to keep moving forward? There was no need to know her inner depths, so Enkrid simply nodded in agreement.

The work was done. Time to send up the signal fire.

Gray clouds covered the sky, and in the darkness that had settled over everything, a red flame shone like a sun.

Dawn was still a long way off, but the fire burned as hot as the sun and continued to burn for a long time.

And in doing so, it fulfilled the wish Enkrid had been carrying.

Footnotes:

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