WeTried Translations
Translator/Editor: Mordor
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◈ Unbound Magic Swordsman ◈
Chapter 4: Level Up
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“Here they come.”
The words were cool and brief.
The guard clutching the reins at the front of the carriage turned around, his face drained of color.
One guard with a broken arm gripped a dagger in trembling fingers. Another, wounded so badly that his entrails showed through his side, lay sprawled on the carriage floor, waiting only for death.
Only one guard could still wield a spear.
And Lucian.
Hector poked his pale face out from inside the carriage.
“How many do you think there are?”
“Counting them is meaningless. The stench of beasts is coming from every direction. We’re already completely surrounded.”
A deep furrow formed between Hector’s brows.
Whether the beastfolk who had survived the daytime battle had brought their main force, or whether another pack had followed the scent of blood, Lucian did not know.
Either way, the situation had gone beyond terrible. It was pure despair.
“How far to Kaldia’s gates?”
When Lucian asked, Hector answered urgently.
“If we drive the horses until they’re about to collapse... we can make it in an hour.”
An hour.
The intervals between the howls closing in from every direction were shrinking by the second.
Lasting an hour with their backs exposed on a moving carriage was madness.
“Stop the carriages.”
Hector’s eyes widened at Lucian’s low, firm command.
“Are you serious? A pack of magical beasts is coming, and you want us to stop?”
“If we could outrun them, they’d have tucked their tails and run long ago. If we’re attacked from every side on a moving carriage, we’ll be defenseless targets. Better to cover our backs and fight than die like dogs.”
A short, heavy silence followed.
Then Hector nodded toward the guard holding the reins.
The carriages came to a stop.
Lucian’s gaze rapidly swept over the terrain.
A steep slope lay to the right. Rough ground studded with massive boulders lay to the left. Flat land stretched behind them, while the road ahead narrowed into a choke point.
“Drive the three carriages into the gaps between those rocks. Press them together in a U shape, so the rocks block at least one flank and our rear.”
It was a crude, hastily assembled defense.
Still, it was a hundred times better than being torn apart in the open.
Shing.
Lucian drew the new longsword at his waist.
The smoothly honed silver blade caught the reddish-copper moonlight and radiated a chilling killing intent.
The leather hilt fit snugly against his palm. The blade’s balance aligned perfectly with his gaze.
The cold mass of steel felt like an extension of his arm.
At that instant, fine roots from the seed of mana curled beneath his heart pulsed through his veins to his wrist.
It felt as though an invisible thread connected his body and sword.
“Here they come.”
Lucian murmured it again.
This time, no one needed to listen closely.
The creatures poured out of the darkness.
Dozens of shadows burst through the edge of the forest, kicking up mud as they emerged.
Ash-gray fur. Glowing yellow eyes. Blood-soaked scimitars.
Their numbers were on an entirely different scale from the pack they had faced during the day. Thirty, at least. More, if he counted those still concealed in the darkness.
“...Damn it.”
A despairing groan escaped the guard holding the reins.
Lucian, on the other hand, remained as expressionless as a corpse.
His heart pounded wildly in his chest, as though it would burst, but his mind had settled into an extreme, icy calm.
More than thirty magical beasts. Two fighters on their side.
Objectively and subjectively, it was a hopeless situation.
But since the moment he had opened his eyes in this damned world, had there ever been even one second that was not hopeless?
Lucian clenched the sword hilt until it nearly broke.
He would survive.
He would kill.
He would kill, devour experience, and grow stronger.
There was no other way.
The beastfolk pack closed its encirclement.
Unlike the monsters from the day, they maintained formation as they advanced.
That meant they had a leader.
Sure enough.
At the very rear of the pack, Lucian spotted a gigantic figure, a full head taller than the others and standing three meters tall.
It was not holding a crude scimitar, but a massive, properly forged greatsword.
The leader.
The instant Lucian’s gaze found it, its gaze pierced him in return.
Its eyes were not yellow.
Blood-red eyes glowed in the darkness like fluorescent lamps.
A sickening chill raced down Lucian’s spine.
His instincts screamed.
That one was different. It was on another level.
But there was no time to heed the warning.
“GRAAAAH!”
The red-eyed leader let out a tremendous roar toward the sky.
The signal to hunt.
The ground shook as if an earthquake had struck.
Dozens of wolfmen kicked up mud and charged madly toward the carriage barricade.
Lucian stood firm in the narrow gap between a carriage and the rocks.
It was a bottleneck just wide enough for two grown men to stand side by side. Their only path to survival, where the enemy’s numerical advantage could be crushed.
The first wolfman rushed into the gap with its jaws open.
A silver flash split the air.
The new sword was certainly different.
A blow that would have been stopped by muscle with chipped scrap metal sliced smoothly through the creature’s forearm as if cutting butter.
The beast’s wrist, still gripping its scimitar, dangled by the tendons.
Without losing the sword’s momentum, Lucian twisted his wrist and cut across its throat.
Thuck!
Blood arced from its severed carotid artery as it crashed into the mud.
His first consumption.
The density of his senses rose slightly.
The second beast leaped over its companion’s corpse.
Lucian took half a step back and shifted into a thrust.
Thud!
The sword point struck the magical beast’s shoulder blade, but not deeply enough.
Ignoring the pain, it swung its scimitar like an animal. Lucian pulled free his sword and pressed himself against the carriage’s wooden frame to evade.
The narrow passage tangled the creature’s swing. Exploiting the opening, Lucian drove a third thrust into its abdomen.
Squish.
The sensation of rupturing entrails and scraping against spine traveled through the hilt.
The creature collapsed.
His second and third consumptions.
At that moment, Lucian felt something strange.
Until now, whenever he killed a magical beast, there had been an odd delay before the experience settled in him, as if memories only solidified after sleep.
But this was different.
The experience he consumed was being forcibly etched into his muscle fibers and nervous system in real time through the seed in his dantian.
With every thrust, his movements became more precise. With every evasion, his reflexes evolved into something monstrous.
The relentless slaughter at the limit was pushing the speed of his physical evolution to its breaking point.
Of course, he had no time to think deeply about it. A fourth beast was lunging for his face with sharpened claws instead of a weapon.
Lucian twisted aside, letting the claws pass, then drove his blade up through the creature beneath its armpit.
Four.
The fifth creature had its thigh pierced by the guard thrusting a spear from the side, throwing off its balance. Lucian drove his longsword straight down into the fallen creature’s skull and finished it.
Five.
But then.
Three wolfmen forced their bodies through a gap between the carriages on the right, where the wounded guard had been holding the line, and broke through the defense.
Thuck!
“Urgh...!”
The guard whose chest was pierced by a scimitar sprayed blood like a fountain and toppled onto the carriage.
The defensive line had been breached.
The advantage of the narrow passage vanished, and close combat began amid the carriages.
The instant Lucian turned around, the first creature’s scimitar came crashing down toward the crown of his head.
Lucian threw himself into the mud.
Crash!
The scimitar split the thick carriage floorboards like an axe.
Using the momentum of his roll, Lucian rose and slashed through the creature’s calf tendon.
At that instant, the second creature attacked from his blind spot.
Its claws savagely raked across Lucian’s back.
Riiip!
His clothes tore away, and three or four deep gashes were carved along his spine.
Horrific pain, like being seared by fire, struck his spinal cord, but Lucian ground his teeth and swallowed even his groan.
Using the momentum of the pain, he spun and plunged his sword into the flank of the creature behind him.
It screamed and fell backward.
A chaotic melee soaked in blood.
The third creature charged through the opening. There was no room to evade and no time to create distance.
Clang!
Scimitar and longsword collided head-on, throwing sparks.
The difference in brute strength was overwhelming.
The wolfman’s tremendous power made Lucian’s arm bones feel as though they would shatter.
The creature shoved its sword forward with savage force and reached for Lucian’s throat with its remaining claws.
Lucian abandoned the contest of strength and twisted his blade, diverting the scimitar’s force into empty air.
As the off-balance creature pitched forward, he slashed deeply upward beneath its jaw.
Blood erupted.
In the single beat while the beast staggered, Lucian mercilessly drove the sword point into its eye.
Six.
The first creature, limping with its severed calf tendon, rushed in for one last desperate attack.
Lucian ducked beneath its swing and slashed horizontally through its throat.
Seven.
The second creature, the one Lucian had stabbed in the side, rose again while bleeding heavily. But Lucian’s kick shattered its knee, and his blade pierced its heart.
Eight.
The instant he consumed the eighth experience, the world stopped.
If his previous experiences had been raindrops soaking into his body, this was a colossal tidal wave.
The formless energy flowing into his dantian broke through a critical point and exploded like a bomb with physical mass.
His heart stopped completely for one beat.
It was not a figure of speech.
The pulsing motion in his blood-filled veins ceased. Then his heart began beating again.
Thump!
That single beat resounded as though it would shatter his entire body.
A horrifying wave pierced his spine from his toes to the top of his head.
The seed of mana curled beneath his heart finally split fully in two.
This was not mere germination.
Its hard shell shattered, and the raw, suppressed pure mana within burst forth explosively.
Roots of mana, thinner than hairs, split into hundreds, thousands of strands, forcibly tearing through his veins and nervous system as they spread throughout his body.
From his heart to his chest. From his shoulders to his wrists. Down his spine to the tips of his legs.
A vicious heat spread through every blood vessel the roots entered.
It was not burning pain, but a destructive ecstasy that shattered the body’s fundamental limits.
The upheaval immediately manifested in his body.
The torrent of blood pouring from the deep claw wounds across his back stopped short.
As though an invisible giant hand had forcibly closed off his veins, torn flesh pulled together and tightened at a grotesque speed.
It was not magical healing that grew new flesh.
It was an evolution of the body, extremely focused on survival, that forcibly halted the worsening wounds and stitched them closed.
The cuts on his chest and bruises on his shoulders all hardened as their pain faded.
Lucian looked down at his blood-soaked palm.
There was no visible change.
But beneath his skin, in a layer of the abyss deeper than his blood vessels, an entirely new power flowed.
It was neither aura refined from mana nor ether woven from a magic circle.
Pure mana, the very origin of the world, had begun circulating through his veins like a stream.
A single current of energy that had burst free when a faucet valve finally broke.
This explosive transformation transferred directly into the longsword in his hand.
The sword seemed to lose its weight.
Until now, it had been nothing more than a metal tool he held and swung.
But now, roots of pure mana passed beyond his wrist, wrapped around the hilt, and connected to the very tip of the blade.
The sword was an extension of his body. Wherever its tip pointed was Lucian’s will.
But he did not have even one second to savor it.
Outside the carriages, the remaining magical beasts were trying to smash apart the defensive line completely at their leader’s roar.
Even the last guard fell, his throat torn open by two wolfmen attacking together, blood spraying from the wound.
Lucian was now the only human capable of fighting.
Five beasts had pushed their way inside the barricade.
A desperate moment.
Fwoooosh!
A blinding red flash burst from within the carriage.
It was Hector.
The white-haired old man tumbled out of the carriage and stretched out his bony hand.
A fireball that burst from his palm slammed into the nearest wolfman’s face.
“GRAAAARGH!”
Covered in magical flames of ether, the beast rolled across the ground, filling the air with the stench of burning flesh.
Hector gritted his teeth and fired a second flame, but it was less than half the size of the first.
The third flame only singed the beast’s fur before fading away.
So he had not been a merchant after all.
He was a mage.
But an old mage whose mana furnace had completely broken down, leaving only an empty shell.
“Pant... pant... Th-this is my limit.”
Hector staggered, looking as though he might cough up blood.
Lucian did not answer.
Instead, he adjusted his grip on the silver longsword, now completely fused with him, and stepped into the heart of the battlefield.
His body was different.
The world looked different.
He could hardly believe that the person he had been ten seconds ago was the same being as he was now.
In the darkness, Lucian’s eyes, filled with pure mana, shone with a killing intent fiercer than any beast’s.
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