Would it be like an evil spirit?
"Evil spirit" is the catch-all for things that steel can't touch—entities that rummage through the human interior or try to possess a body rather than take physical blows.
'As long as we watch out for the fire breath…'
Half the platoon was thinking the same thing. These were people who fought nothing but monsters in the mountains all day.
For them, this was daily life. It wasn't enough time for their accumulated experience to become a proper manual, but they'd grown the eye to know, instinctively.
Creatures like that usually shared the same attack patterns.
"Hey, clamp your molars. If you so much as wobble once, it's three rounds of Captain Rem's mental-armament drill."
One of the troopers muttered it, and that one line snapped everyone to attention.
Jaw muscles tightened, molar marks stood out, and thick veins rose, thumping, across the backs of their hands.
Rem's mental-armament drill is getting beaten to just short of blacking out.
A real fighter, they say, is the one who can fight when cornered to the extreme.
"Just short of blacking out," they call it—but anyone who's done it even once would roll their tongue in disbelief.
A bastard with skill overwhelmingly superior to yours—whose eye for weakness is second to none—won't even let you pass out at will.
If you tried to go down, he'd draw a red line across your nape with his axe and say, clear as day:
"Want me to just kill you? You fall there, you die."
Everyone here knew Captain Rem was the kind to do exactly that—kill and to spare. How do they know?
When someone drags you upright by pushing your throat with an axe-edge, it's hard not to believe. Sit still and your neck's about to come off.
"I'll help you up—what a kind courtesy, huh?"
That's him.
So of course their focus locked in.
There isn't a single soldier among them who hasn't taken that mental-armament drill. It's the bare minimum to be admitted into Rem's guard.
While they were biting down and pumping themselves up, the fire-made monster swatted a tree with its forepaw.
Bang!
Fresh timber burst and shards flew. With a crackle, splinters pinned into the ground, and a trunk so big a grown man couldn't wrap his arms around it shuddered.
"…That's a bit dirty."
That from the officer. If steel passes through its body, be consistent—how does one forepaw swipe make a thick log cant to the side?
A little more accurate and it would have snapped the tree. Pure force-wise, they were looking at a monster not inferior to a giant.
Did that mean they'd just take it?
Rem was a harsh captain, but if you held out here, you got something for it. And not just combat power—tangible rewards.
Like a magic weapon, for instance.
Dwarves are smith-mages, and they know how to make the base forms of magic arms.
One such deft dwarf had dedicated himself to the Border Guard.
On top of that, there was a witch in this unit—and a magic detachment trained by that witch.
They were fully capable of inscribing spells into dwarf-refined iron.
That's why all twenty of them carried so-called spell weapons—magic arms.
Strictly speaking you'd need an enchanter by trade to craft them, but Esther is a genius.
When it comes to magic, she can do it all, no matter the field.
It's just, they weren't the sort you simply swing to raise gusts or call down a rain of fire. The weapons they swung were simple: they could cut and strike amorphous evil spirits.
They all drew axes holding a wash of blue light. The haft lengths varied, but the glow spilling off the edges was alike.
"That'll do, won't it?"
Rem said it, seeing them. It would, obviously.
The flame monster only spat fire about as long as a forearm. Its forepaw swipes hit hard, sure, but—
'Better than a bear.'
A vicious wild bear—or a bear beastman—would actually be worse.
If you had nothing that could cut that body, it was the worst kind of opponent; the reverse made it easy.
Two drew its gaze, three swung behind. The rest flowed out to encircle in a loose ring.
They went straight into a monster hunt. When one of the charging creature's hands got hammered with an axe, there was a poof and flames licked up.
The trooper who swung leapt back the instant he hit, slipping the flare.
"Hey, if your hair goes up in one whoosh, that ugly mug of yours is going to look twice as scary."
"And you're the one to talk?"
They joked, too. These weren't the sort to crumple up tight with nerves when a fight started.
The one who nearly doubled his scary face had grown his hair out pretty, but his skin was pitted like a pockmark map; the second guy had a scalp clean and clear as spring—no hair at all—and when he jutted his own head out, a few nearby snickered.
The hunt didn't last long. The flame beast went down fast.
Six axe-blows split its body to pieces, and it scattered.
"First time seeing one of these, right?"
"Yeah. Even if the Pen-Hanil Range is a treasure-house of monsters and beastmen, this is a bit much."
The Pen-Hanil Mountains are where monsters and beastmen pour out without end; its nickname is the Monsters' Treasury.
They set off at once to make their report.
And there were others in the mountains besides them. To be precise, the Border Guard's standing troops were there on a contract that came in through Kraiss's lover, Nurat.
The soldier-mercenary system was still a good way to earn krona, and Kraiss encouraged it.
They ran into a similar opponent. This time it was a fireball-made creature with a long neck.
"Anyone carrying magic weapons?"
If Venzance was the captain of the militia, the one who led the scouts who roamed and reconnoitered the range was Finn.
Once he'd run scout missions with Enkrid, and with unbroken training since then, he was now a full-fledged Ranger captain.
At his question, four soldiers with handspan-long arrows mounted at the wrist stepped forward. On this side, single-use spells were sealed in the arrowheads.
That was Anne's handiwork. Arrowheads steeped in reagents—specialized for banishing evil-spirit-type monsters.
"Loose."
Puh-buh-bung.
The fire-forged body burst, flinging cinders in all directions.
'That's something.'
Finn couldn't call to mind any monster quite like it. He simply kept distance and suppressed the creature with ranged fire alone.
The last one standing took five thrown daggers in the skull, sagged, and vanished, leaving nothing but scorched streaks on the turf and dirt.
"Forest fire. Put it out."
At Finn's word, several troopers stamped out embers and splashed water. In parallel, they cleared tinder before the flames could spread.
They were mountain rangers because they were used to work like this. The response was deft. After the situation wrapped, Finn said:
"We can't go any farther."
"I can't in good conscience ask you to, either."
The escort target—the client—shook his head as well. Looking rattled, he asked:
"Didn't they say the monsters in the range had thinned lately?"
"They had."
"They had?"
"Seems not anymore."
As for the why, Finn couldn't say.
The escort had broad learning. He recognized these were not the usual, merely troublesome sort of monsters.
His name was Garett Gyro, a former battalion commander of the Greenperl Reserves who once dreamed of becoming a bard.
Lately, feeling the limits of his own creative talent, he'd decided to risk this much to catch some inspiration.
"To write a few songs, you walk into a monster-choked mountain range?"
A stranger might put it that way, but who knows the artist's anguish.
If it meant writing a good song, a man might peel off a bit of his soul and sell it.
Of course, Garett was counting on the Border Guard standing troops here. He hadn't staked his life.
He only meant to gain a measured inspiration at a measured risk.
Anyway, Garett had a wanderer's trade and was a man enamored of story.
"A monster that breathes fire."
Garett murmured, sinking into thought. There had once been such a creature that burned the continent.
A calamity summoned by the Demon Sanctuary Church—the worst heaven-disaster mankind had ever called down upon itself.
Garett muttered to himself again:
"Salamander?"
The name of a lizard-shaped fire monster. More than ten times a man's size, and the usual magic weapons don't work on it.
So all you could do was endure until it tired and guttered out. All Garett had were stories he'd heard. Well, and things read in books—but either way, it all came from oral tradition or the histories.
The Demon Sanctuary Church bastards had been a headache even then.
A bard is also the one who carries tales, so digging into this and that was both Garett's hobby and his craft.
And now, he judged he'd seen the trace of it in the monster that had just died.
No way… or could it be… nah, that's impossible.
Is this the kind of thought one can brush aside?
Complacency is no virtue in a soldier. And though Garett was a bard, he had been a good soldier.
He knew how to choose hassle over complacency, even how to choose a bit of scorn over laziness—that much wisdom he had.
"…Can we go deeper in?"
Garett asked. Finn wondered if she ought to break the shinbones of this former battalion commander turned mad artist.
It'd probably take pain to make him think, Ah, I was wrong.
"It's not inspiration or whatever. Just feels ominous."
Garett was serious. Instead of kicking his ankles, Finn gave orders to two troopers.
"Head back to the unit, deliver the situation."
If things got dangerous, securing a retreat route wouldn't be that hard.
Finn had run these mountains like her own house. Of course, if she really treated it like her home and lay down, she'd be reborn as monster dung.
'We can go a little farther.'
Finn knew her limits well. She'd never dreamed of knighthood or such.
So what could she do? She'd found the answer in the mountains. She had memorized terrain, learned everything needed, and honed her specialty.
Seiki, the runaway Saintess, had been a Highlander raised to eat, sleep, and live in the mountains, and Finn had shadowed her, experiencing the life of a mountain-dweller.
That became today's Pen-Hanil Rangers. Her decision to press farther was the judgment of someone who had stacked years of time and experience.
"Your intent?"
Her words got short. Only a fool sets foot where danger is assured. If you go anyway, there'd better be a reason.
Garett judged Finn an experienced ranger, so he answered without hesitation, though her tone was clipped.
"May it be just a hunch, but—do you know where the Salamander last disappeared?"
Before Greenperl was Greenperl, a great blaze had risen on that land and burned everything. Grass grew again on that charred earth, and that became the prairie of Greenperl.
It's in the histories. Before it was called the Green Pearl, the land was the Ash Field, a plain of gray cinders.
"There are many theories on its appearance, but all agree on where it disappeared. Some scholars even speculate the thing merely sleeps, like a bear in hibernation."
The place named by every scholar—the summit of the Pen-Hanil Range. A basin filled with hardened black-and-gray ash-rock.
It was said that only drake-like monsters called "young dragons" lived there.
A brief explanation followed, and Finn nodded.
"Yes, understood."
Doubt gnawed—Could it really? No way.—and that meant it needed confirmation. Finn recognized it and pressed on.
They had entered at dawn, felled the fire-beast in the morning. Barely three hours later, Finn turned back.
She'd found the marks of someone gouging the ground with a blade broad as a plank.
The problem was the depth—so deep her eyes couldn't measure—and the length, as long as a great tree laid flat.
The smell of burning hung heavy. More than that, the air itself sweltered.
"No ordinary monster could leave marks like these."
Garett was deadly serious now.
The number of dead from the Salamander's appearance back then is never estimated. No, it can't be estimated.
Whole cities nearby had burned away.
And—
"Captain."
One of her sharp-eyed, keen-sensed troopers called and pointed.
'More of them.'
Three fire-bodied monsters, raising their heads in the distance, heat shimmering off them. Each was bigger than Audin. Big as bears.
At this distance they hadn't sensed the scouts yet.
"Fall back."
Finn avoided battle, returned to the unit, and reported the situation, which was relayed directly to Enkrid.
And Enkrid's blue eyes glinted.
"Captain Garett?"
"Best to call me just Garett now, Sir Enkrid."
"You're saying something's appeared?"
"Nothing certain. Just… Salamander."
What he'd told Finn was passed along in a briefer form. Enkrid's eyes shone as he said:
"Then tell them, that I leave first."
"…Hm? Tell them what? Me?"
Garett was flustered.
"Every one that comes."
Enkrid wiped sweat from his brow, tugged on his gear, and strode off.
"Where are you going?"
Startled, Garett's old manner slipped out. But really, there was nothing to ask.
"A walk."
A walk? Marching out in full war gear looked more like charging straight for the Salamander.
"Captain, they said fire monsters are cropping up all over."
Finn followed him, speaking of what she'd heard on the way. Rem's assault platoon had run into them, and even the safe-road outposts near the mountains had seen them.
"Go tell Kraiss."
Enkrid paid it little mind. Two reasons.
First, he had that much margin. He was the one who had trained these soldiers. They could handle monsters of that level.
Second, he knew full well what Kraiss, wrapped in unease, had done.
By now, among the Border Guard's standing troops and special cadres, it was rare to find anyone without a magic weapon.
At minimum, they even carried scrolls.
They weren't about to be done in by mere lumps of fire.