WeTried Translations

Translator/Editor: Mordor

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◈ Unbound Magic Swordsman ◈

Chapter 1: Lucian

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Rain was falling. Cold and clammy.

He could not even tell whether it was rainwater or crimson mist condensing into drops.

Ash-gray clouds, like ink spilled across the sky, swallowed the heavens and pressed down upon the earth.

Dark crimson hellfire burned on the horizon.

A man knelt in the mud.

A sword was clenched in his trembling hand.

A crude longsword, half its edge chipped away and rusted, which he could not remember where he had picked up. The leather grip was slick with cold sweat and animal blood.

The dark red residue on the blade washed away in the rain.

“Hah... Hah...”

His breath came in ragged gasps.

His lungs screamed, and his heart pounded as though it would smash through his ribs and burst free.

His exhausted muscles trembled.

Stab wounds still bled across the skin exposed through his shredded clothes. Blood flowed from his left forearm, down his wrist, and onto the sword hilt.

Before him lay a massive corpse.

No, it was too horribly mangled to call a corpse.

A humanoid monster clad in crude iron armor. It appeared to be an orc. Black blood poured from its body, but it did not move.

Three sword wounds scored its thick back. The last strike, which had crushed its spine, was fatal.

The man had driven those wounds in from behind.

A fair fight? It had never been possible in the first place.

It stood two meters tall. Its iron armor and muscles could deflect blunt blows. It possessed enough strength to crush a human skull in one hand. If they had crossed blades face-to-face, the man would have been folded in half and thrown into the mud in a single exchange.

The man had understood the difference in their strength exactly.

So he had become thoroughly cowardly.

He had silenced his movements, sunk his feet into the mud, hidden his presence beneath the noise of the rain, and slipped into the creature's blind spot.

His first slash had dug into the gap in its armor at the nape of its neck.

The creature had let out a bestial scream and tried to turn.

With his second strike, the man used its turning momentum against it and stabbed beneath its now-exposed armpit.

The instant it staggered and lost its balance, he drove his final blow, carrying all his weight and will to survive, into its spine and twisted.

It had not been clean. Any knightly honor or elegance of swordsmanship had long since washed away in the rain.

There was only the ugliest and most efficient struggle for survival.

“Phew...”

The man planted his foot on the corpse and roughly pulled out his sword.

Squelch.

With a dull thud, the huge body twitched once before finally falling still.

Then, at that moment.

Something rose from the dead orc's body.

Neither mist nor light, an indescribable primal force lingered in the air for a moment before flooding into the man's body.

It did not enter through his skin or breath.

It forced its way through a layer of his being, seeping between soul and flesh.

Like muddy water filling an empty vessel. Like parched earth drinking blood. It was an inescapable naturalness.

For an instant, the world as the man perceived it became a shade clearer.

A subtle change, like wiping a fogged window once with his fingertip.

But the man, whose senses had become keenly attuned to survival, did not miss that upheaval.

He could clearly see the paths of the raindrops.

The bloody stench and rotten odor rising from the corpse stabbed more sharply at his nose.

More than anything, the old longsword that had felt heavy enough to tear off his arm seemed slightly lighter.

‘Experience Absorption.’

The words flashed through his mind like lightning.

No translucent system window appeared, nor did he hear a level-up chime.

There was no quantified data in this hell.

But the sensation carved deep into his bones proved it.

He had just devoured the essence of that enormous living creature, and he had become slightly, yet undeniably, stronger than he had been a minute ago.

In truth, this was only his second devouring.

The first had been three days ago, on the second night after he had awakened in this world.

Exhausted by hunger and cold, he had lost consciousness amid ruins. Then pain tore through his calf as something bit into it, and he woke screaming.

It had the build of a wild dog. But three rows of saw-like teeth filled its jaws, and four eyes gleamed from its face. It was a magic beast.

Unable even to scream properly, the man had grabbed a rock lying beside him and smashed it down on the creature's head.

Once, twice, three times. Even after its skull caved in and the beast went limp, he struck it dozens more times with the blood-spattered rock.

It was madness born of fear.

That was when he first felt it.

The sensation of an intangible remnant rising from the crushed corpse and seeping into him. The world becoming half a shade clearer. The strange sense of stability that came as the tremors in his hand magically subsided.

That contradictory pleasure.

‘This isn't a game.’

The man clenched his blood-caked hand and repeated the words as though grinding them between his teeth.

The blood running between his legs, the rainwater's chill burrowing into his bones, the stench of the organs of the creature he had just butchered. All of it was vividly real.

And yet, the brutal game logic of experience points had been laid over this land of slaughter.

Whether that had always been this world's law, or whether the game he knew had imitated this hell, did not matter.

Only one proposition ruled his mind.

Kill, or be killed.

Survive by any means necessary.

The man roughly searched the orc's waist.

Inside a rough leather pouch, he found several pieces of dried meat that reeked of rot and a rusted dagger with a chipped edge.

The disgusting smell twisted his stomach, but he shoved a piece of meat into his mouth without hesitation.

He chewed blood and animal fur, but did not care.

If he wanted the calories to move, he would have had to eat mud if necessary.

He swallowed the tough meat with animal-like bites and scanned his surroundings with bloodshot eyes.

It was a battlefield.

No, a vast graveyard that had been a battlefield until just days ago.

Thousands of corpses lay scattered across the soggy plain. Human, beast, orc, and unidentifiable remains of grotesque creatures stretched endlessly in every direction.

Broken spear shafts, shattered shields, torn battle banners buried in the mud. Decay had only just begun, and flocks of crows drawn by the scent of corpses gathered like storm clouds.

The orc he had just killed had likely been an unfortunate survivor of the defeated army.

It had been separated from its main force and killed in an ambush while fleeing.

It was not an incorrect judgment. If he had faced it head-on, his own skull would have been rolling around in that puddle.

The creature had been unlucky, and the man had been desperate. That difference had divided life from death.

The man began walking across the battlefield, where corpses formed mountains.

He had no destination. No, he could not choose one.

He knew neither this world's geography, nor the balance of power among the factions tearing at each other's throats, nor even the name of the hell he now walked through.

He merely avoided places where smoke rose and detoured around the roars of beasts or the clash of steel.

But peace seemed absent from this damned continent.

Less than two hours after leaving the field of corpses, he came upon another tragedy.

A burned-out village.

The blackened frames of wooden houses still exhaled acrid smoke. On the muddy road lay horribly scattered bodies that appeared to be civilians. Women, children, and the elderly. A raider's blade did not ask what a life was worth.

A typical, nauseating dark-fantasy massacre scene.

The man did not stop.

He had no time to offer prayers for the dead out of sympathy.

He only quickened his pace, avoiding the wreckage where embers still glowed.

Leaving the burned village behind, he entered a dense forest.

It was a primeval woodland where broadleaf and coniferous trees tangled together in grotesque fashion. Huge trees of species he could not even guess at blocked out the sky, and the light filtering through the canopy was an ominous pale violet.

This was not Earth's nature.

It was the bare face of an alien, oppressive world.

The man wedged himself between enormous tree roots and leaned back against them.

Only then did strength leave his legs.

As his taut tension loosened, exhaustion and pain crashed over him all at once.

Blood began to seep from the wounds on his shoulder and forearm again.

He tore a strip from his clothes with his teeth and bound his wounds.

It was a crude measure closer to stopping the bleeding than treatment, but at least it kept him from bleeding to death for the moment.

He steadied his rough breathing and closed his eyes.

Then, once more, he searched through memories sunken in a deep abyss.

It was a futile resistance he had repeated hundreds of times over the past three days, but all he could dredge up were fragments.

His name. It would not come to him.

His age. He did not know.

He could not even be certain of his own face.

The man's face reflected in a puddle days ago had belonged to a cold, sharp-featured young man in his early to mid-twenties. But he could not tell whether it was his real face or the shell of a game avatar.

Only fragmented sensations lingered in his mind.

He had been sitting before a monitor. He had been playing a game.

A commonplace dark-fantasy single-player RPG.

The character he controlled in that game, which he had loaded with cheats and editors, had been named Lucian.

That was the entirety of his identity.

How had he come here?

There had not even been a cheap warning sign, no enveloping light or tearing dimension. The entire process had vanished.

One moment, he had been holding a mouse in his room. The next, he had been thrown into this blood-soaked battlefield beneath pouring rain.

‘Lucian.’

A Magic Swordsman.

A contradictory class that wielded both swordsmanship capable of breaking the body's limits and magic capable of twisting the laws of the world.

In the game, it had been a setting boasting overwhelming martial power. But now that it had become reality, he was thoroughly half-formed. No, less than that.

He could not use magic.

More precisely, he could sense that an alien power existed within his body.

Somewhere deep beneath his heart, in a place that might have been a dantian or a mana furnace, he vaguely sensed something like a heavy seed curled up.

But he had no idea how to awaken it or draw it out.

It was the helplessness of having a massive dam inside his body but not knowing where its floodgate lever was.

In the end, he was no more than Soldier A, an inferior soldier with a frail body only slightly closer to animal instinct than that of an ordinary adult, and an inexplicable sense for slaughter.

Potential.

If he had fused with the game character he had built up with cheats, the limits of his potential would be impossible to measure.

But potential only had value when one survived long enough for it to sprout.

This was a world where even the greatest talent would become nothing more than a rotting lump of meat if a blind arrow pierced the back of their head before they learned how to hold a sword.

“...”

The man, no, Lucian, opened his eyes sharply.

A cold viciousness settled in his black eyes.

Whether his mana awakened or not, whether this world was a game or reality, none of that mattered right now.

He would survive.

Even if he had to crawl through this nauseating mud and sea of blood, even if he had to chew the corpses of his enemies.

Leaning on the tree roots, Lucian slowly rose, using his blood-soaked longsword as a cane.

Silently, he stepped into the deep darkness of the violet forest.

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