WeTried Translations

Translator: Hydrogen B

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◈ Omniscient First-Person's Viewpoint

Chapter 527

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Speak of the Tiger and It Appears

The tiger descended.

One roar tore the sky open. One step shook the earth. One breath sent every living thing trembling. The Mountain Lord came down the mountain, the undeniable Beast King, so absolute in his dominion that a single strand of his fur was enough to make every creature in creation flinch, press its face into the ground, and weep. His tail swayed lazily as the valley rang with his weight.

Even kings who hold court in grand palaces give the command before climbing a mountain: do not address me by my title. One careless slip and a tiger might think himself called and come ambling down.

So what of the Mountain Lord, king among tigers?

Humanity ought to be grateful that he occupies only a single mountain. Had he not, humans could never have dared to call themselves the dominant species of the world.

He is the one beast against whom humanity, which calls itself the ruling kind, cannot guarantee victory. Even kings who fly into a rage the moment another king appears will freely use the title Mountain Lord without a second thought.

So why was he here?

Not a trace of presence came from the king of tigers. A force that great stood before us, yet the stillness around him was uncanny. A real tiger already moves with a silence that defies its size, and the Mountain Lord wearing a human form had gone a step further, he had killed off every hint of his presence entirely.

But I knew. My mind reading reads humans precisely. Put another way, a human who does not read properly is not quite a human at all.

And then there was that dangerous sensation bleeding through into my mind, like glimpsing those desperate cave paintings daubed in blood by humans who had not yet learned to write, in some age long past. I had no name for what I was feeling, but the reverence soaked through the terror and told me everything I needed to know.

By comparison, the others had not yet caught up to my level of alarm. Marquis Lapaeno in particular, already stung by the regressor's provocation and then by Sapien calling out the ethics of his position, had his head running hot beneath the surface, even if it did not show.

On top of that, the Mountain Lord's appearance was that of a feline beastkin. Beastkin generally stood with Ende, which made them the Marquis's enemies, part of the beast-eared rabble he looked down on. Marquis Lapaeno made the worst possible mistake.

"What's this now. You want to join the dead wolves?"

Could you even call it a mistake?

No. It was simply absurdity. Calling a human foolish for standing against absurdity gives humans far too much credit. No matter how sound your reasoning, no matter how finely you have been honed at the peak of civilization, if you are not the kind of being who can overturn the world, the world's absurdity will simply crush you.

"Answer what I ask, with what you know."

"If you want to join them so badly, I'll oblige."

Without a moment's hesitation, Marquis Lapaeno drove his rapier at the girl before him.

The kill order had already been given. If the sight of a mere girl made him stay his hand, he would have to hesitate every single time after this. And killing a few beast-eared bystanders as an example was of no real consequence to him. From the Marquis's perspective, it was a rational decision.

The only merciful part was his intent to finish it in a single stroke, but even that he could not have known would turn out to be the worst possible choice.

One whisker on the Mountain Lord's face twitched. What the Mountain Lord did in the face of a Master's strike was this:

He waved his hand.

Like dragging a brush across empty air. As if he had dipped his paw in ink and swept it sideways. That single fluid stroke cut across the trajectory of the principle.

And a black mark swallowed everything. Like smearing a finger across a painting and wiping it clean. That absurd force ground the slash down and kept moving.

Marquis Lapaeno felt a strange sense of loss. He had clearly thrust his rapier forward, yet not only the energy he had put into it, the rapier itself had vanished without a trace. No impact in his hand at all.

"What, a Master? A mage?"

Something had happened that seemed to fall outside all reason, whatever it was. Marquis Lapaeno stepped back sharply, on guard.

Against the regressor and Gruel, he had recognized the type of power in an instant. But this girl standing before him, he could not even begin to gauge what she had used. That alone was enough to put him on edge.

He had no idea that a sharpening hostility was already beginning to grate on the Mountain Lord's nerves.

"General! The Black Tiger Seal is ready!"

"Perfect timing!"

Marquis Lapaeno welcomed the news.

The Black Tiger Corps was the vassal state's elite force, a unit of energy practitioners led by a Master as its core strength. Against an enemy with no Master of their own, they were close to invincible, but if that were all they were, they would be no different from a standard infantry unit with a bit more bite. An invincible unit used for nothing else is a wasted one.

Elite units like the Black Tiger Corps carried something more, a different kind of wonder. A powerful artifact and a unique innate arcane that made them something no enemy could afford to ignore.

This situation had not seemed critical enough to deploy their mage, but the Black Tiger Seal remained on hand. And the adjutant, already wary of Kito's innate arcane, had drawn the artifact out.

The Marquis gave the order.

"Stamp it down!"

"Yes, sir!"

The adjutant drove the Black Tiger Seal down with full force. An invisible weight dropped and pressed down onto the Mountain Lord. The crushed air swept outward, thick with dust. Crunch, crunch. Stone ground to pieces, and it was as though an invisible seal had pressed the earth like paper. The negative impression of a tiger burned itself into the ground.

An artifact is the trace a unique innate arcane leaves behind in the world. When a mage dies, there are cases where the innate arcane they had manifested does not disappear but lingers. When that happens, the innate arcane remains as an artifact-a shell of power with no will behind it at all.

And when only the power remains with no will to guide it, it sometimes grows a little stronger than the original innate arcane ever was. The Black Tiger Seal was one such case.

What had once been nothing more than the ability to stamp in multiple places at once now applied enormous pressure across a full thirty meters. The invisible force pressing down on that space locked the very flow of the wind inside it. Through a field where gravity seemed multiplied several hundred times over, Marquis Lapaeno moved lightly.

The Black Tiger Seal was a seal. Know the engraved pattern, and you could follow its lines. Marquis Lapaeno could navigate the maze the Black Tiger Seal laid out with his eyes closed.

'I didn't want to bring out the Black Tiger Seal, but that thing is dangerous. If it sides with Ende, we might actually lose. Full force from the start, cut it down!'

In place of the vanished rapier, he drove forward a main gauche with a blade black as night. The main gauche looked short, but it was a hidden blade, a rare sword concealing an unseen edge. It was a calculated strike targeting the gap in an opponent's guard left by their familiarity with a rapier's reach. The Marquis held nothing back as he unleashed his principle and aimed the main gauche at the beastkin girl's throat.

'Linked Blade, secret technique, Fortissimo!'

The secret technique Marquis Lapaeno had honed over years was unleashed. Past slashes and the present slash overlapped. Two slashes cannot occupy the same space, but principle does not abide common sense, it is raw force where reason does not apply. An unstoppable strike, infinitely renewed, came for the Mountain Lord.

But against absurdity, a human's artifact means nothing. A human's energy means nothing.

The Mountain Lord growled, low and quiet.

"Grrrn."

No one saw it. Which meant I did not see it either. The process was gone and only the result remained.

The Marquis briefly disappeared. Only when I turned my head could I make out the blurred shape of him sailing through the air, folded in half. Shards of his broken sword kept him company on the way.

Then, a beat later, thousands of slashes shattered like glass.

Every slash Marquis Lapaeno's Linked Blade had left hanging in empty air broke apart all at once. The remnants of the energy glittered like shards of glass catching sunlight. Through that cascade of falling light, the Mountain Lord shook himself off with an air of mild annoyance. One shake of his head and the broken slashes scattered in every direction like throwing stars.

The Linked Blade leaves slashes behind. But even a slash is just force, energy poured into a sharp blade and swung. Hit it with enough greater force and, in theory, even those slashes can break.

Easy enough to say, of course. This was force that could tear through steel without effort. And the last technique, unleashed at the final moment, was a single strike that bridged past and present. Even the Beast King should not have been able to withstand it.

But the opponent was the Mountain Lord. The king of tigers.

Having torn through everything with tooth and claw, the Mountain Lord looked for his next prey.

"General! Ugh, the Black Tiger Seal!"

The moment the adjutant lifted the Black Tiger Seal again, a massive paw closed the gap in an instant and covered the adjutant's face. That was the last thing the adjutant ever saw. The neck bones snapped and the skin stretched with a horrible sound as the adjutant's head was shoved free of the body. Crack. The Mountain Lord ground the head directly into pulp and shook his hand off.

The escort adjutant was dead, and the soldiers reeled.

"The adjutant!"

Was it because the death had been so fast, so unreal? Or because the Black Tiger Corps were veterans too hardened to be stopped by death? Even after seeing the adjutant's gruesome end, they looked at the artifact lying among the remains and charged forward.

"Recover the artifact! We cannot let it fall into enemy hands!"

The Black Tiger Seal was an artifact-a national weapon more valuable than any single mage. Driven by the conviction that the artifact had to be recovered no matter how many of them fell, the Black Tiger Corps pressed against the Mountain Lord. It would have been better if they had simply run.

The Mountain Lord turned his head. Faced with several hundred humans advancing on him with blades drawn, he opened his mouth with an expression of clear displeasure. A slow exhale. A tiger draws in one last breath before the hunt. A tiger's inhale is the last gasp of all those whose breath is about to stop. A faint mist gathered at his lips.

The Mountain Lord opened his jaws wide and roared.

｢｣

It was lightning rising from beneath the sky, and an earthquake born from the earth. The killing curse and the death cry of a beast that counts all things as prey.

Aimed at the Black Tiger Corps, the shockwave alone rattled me to the bone. Fear felt like it was trying to tear me in half and run off with the pieces. A ringing cut through my ears. Even I nearly lost my mind, and it was only because I had anchored my sense of self to the regressor that I barely held on.

Several of the beastkin nearby fainted from the sound alone. Those still standing with their wits intact were far fewer. Scattered souls in the most literal sense. The Mountain Lord's Roar held the power to scatter a person's spirit right out of their body.

And even..."Hah!"

Beastkin standing behind the Mountain Lord lost consciousness and crumpled too. Yet the Black Tiger Corps, who had taken the roar head-on...

"...Oh."

Every one of them had their souls knocked out of them.

Dead? Alive? I could not tell. I reached for them with mind reading and heard nothing at all. The Mountain Lord's Roar had twisted the flow of breath and blood, shaken every sense, and emptied every mind. No different from a state of suspended animation. Against absurdity, the only way to stay alive is a miracle. The few Black Tiger Corps soldiers who had miraculously avoided a direct hit dropped to their knees in fear.

"The wild beast has come to me. I take pity on the wolves that wished to fill my place."

But even that miracle was only possible because the Mountain Lord chose to stop.

'That's not innate arcane... no! It's power! Overwhelming power beyond human reach! This, could it be... the king of beasts...?!'

Marquis Lapaeno, who had miraculously survived thanks to his energy and protective equipment, staggered upright. But even before his knees had fully straightened, he swallowed a sound at the sight of the Mountain Lord appearing before him like a ghost. Those ferocious eyes bored straight through Marquis Lapaeno.

How could anyone facing death hold themselves together? Marquis Lapaeno trembled, gripped by overwhelming terror.

'No. Not me. I can't die like this, so pathetically, not me, the Black Tiger General of the Lilac Duchy, the Master of the Linked Blade...!'

Before he could even open his mouth to beg for his life, a single blow from the Mountain Lord caved in the Marquis's shoulder. The force was so violent that the right arm hanging below it snapped and flew off sideways on its own. His spine buckled. His pelvis collapsed. The Marquis's limbs tore apart and scattered in every direction.

Marquis Lapaeno, who had himself been someone else's absurdity in the form of the Linked Blade, met an absurd death.

"I have come to keep my promise."

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