Hell Mode: Volume 2, page 19
part #2 of Hell Mode Series
He totally got an eyeful of my Summons.
There was no doubt in Allen’s mind that the knight captain had gotten a clear look at his Summons fighting. He wondered if he was going to be interrogated about them later.
“Gumoh?” The orc king sized up its new opponent warily.
“I see, an orc king. I’ll take care of it. In the meantime, you take care of the chaff, Vice-Captain Leibrand.”
“Sir, yes, sir!”
Huh?! Vice-Captain Leibrand is here too?!
Just as Zenof did, Leibrand also walked past Allen, weapon—in his case, a spear—in hand.
Seemingly infuriated by Zenof’s undaunted attitude, the orc king swung its halberd with all its strength, roaring, “GUMOOOOHHHHHH!”
This was a four-meter-tall monster brandishing a five-meter-long weapon in its rage. Even so, the knight captain managed to beat it back with his sword, even making it look easy. The impact from the blow was so great it blasted the giant monster off its feet for a brief moment. The orc king returned an attack so fierce Allen flinched instinctively, kicking off the start of a furious exchange between the knight captain and the monster.
At the same time, the vice-captain advanced on the normal orcs with his spear over his shoulder, not a hint of trepidation on his face. The magic-using orcs reacted first, shooting three fireballs into the air.
“I see, magic,” Leibrand murmured before his figure suddenly turned blurry and became enveloped in a shimmering haze. The next instant, he thrust his spear at the monsters faster than the eye could see. The shockwave generated from the point bored a huge hole in the abdomen of five or six orcs in a row. Blood exploded after a beat and the victims crumpled to the ground, dead. One of them was a magic-user. Apparently Leibrand was prioritizing them.
One of the fireballs lost momentum and dissipated, but the other two continued flying toward the vice-captain from different directions.
“Hmph!”
Leibrand sliced the two fireballs apart with a single swing, causing them to break apart and similarly dissolve harmlessly. During this whole exchange, he was still walking toward the orcs, his face as cool as a cucumber.
The orcs drew back in fear for a brief moment at the sight of the vice-captain dealing with the magic attacks so easily, but the next instant, they all surged forward. In response, the knight also picked up his pace, quickly shifting into a full-speed charge himself. When the two sides clashed, he sliced and diced the monsters every which way, making short work of them.
At the same time, the fight between the captain and orc king was also coming to an end. The former slashed down with his sword, bisecting both the halberd held up in defense and his opponent, armor and all. The orc king was clearly no match for the captain. After mere minutes, the two knights had finished off every last orc within the village walls.
They’re freaking strong! I guess that’s the “fiefdom’s most powerful man” for you. And turns out the vice-captain can really hold his own too.
Allen recalled hearing from Raven about how everyone familiar with the knight captain’s fighting style called him “War Demon Zenof.” Similarly, it was hard to imagine the vice-captain being the same man who had been thoroughly beaten up by Krena in her youth. Mihai had previously told Allen that Leibrand was strong, and now he saw the truth in that statement for himself.
The haze thing that Leibrand used, was it an Extra Skill? So other classes have Extra Skills too, not just Sword Lord. Speaking of which, Zenof didn’t use his at all.
As Allen started analyzing what he had seen, Zenof approached. “My men will arrive slightly after sunset today. Let’s finish taking care of all of this then.”
Surprisingly, he was not questioning why Allen was here. Zenof, Leibrand, and Allen worked together to gather all the orc corpses into the middle of the village. There was no need to purposely show off his Summons, so Allen pulled his weight using only his own strength. Just as he had done for the goblin villages, they were going to cremate the remains.
“Captain, I want half the magic stones,” Allen said.
“Hm? Well, that’s fair. Very well.”
Allen had already killed around half of the orcs by the time Zenof and Leibrand arrived, so he made sure to properly request what he deserved. The truth was that he wanted the Rank B magic stone too, but he let it go, as it was the captain who had killed it. The three quickly dug out the magic stones from the mountain of corpses. During the process, Allen caught Zenof looking over as if he wanted to ask about the Summons, but he never did.
According to Zenof, they would have to fully burn this place to the ground afterward to prevent other orcs from moving in and using it as a settlement again. The human remains were fine being gathered in one place; the chivalric order would bring them back in case any surviving kin wanted them.
While the three of them were in the middle of moving the human remains, the rest of the knights arrived on the scene. They had pushed their schedule forward in order to catch up with their captain.
It’s about time for me to head back, or I won’t make curfew.
Allen looked up to confirm the position of the sun. Considering the distance between this location and Granvelle City, he would not be able to arrive back at the mansion within the day if he did not head off soon. When he announced that he would be returning, however, Zenof said, “Camp out with us tonight. I’ll explain things to His Lordship afterward.” Naturally, Allen had no choice in the matter.
Because the orc village stank terribly, the knights moved off a certain distance away to make camp. From what Allen could see with a Bird E, there were about a hundred knights on this expedition. This was probably a reasonable number for taking on orc villages. Honestly speaking, he thought the knight captain could probably take on an entire village all by himself, but the others probably all had their own roles to play. There were some things that required numbers rather than individual strength.
With practiced movements, the knights soon had the camp all set up.
“Allen. Come eat over here.” Zenof called out to Allen, who had been watching from a corner so as to not get in anyone’s way.
“Yes, Sir,” Allen replied, obediently approaching the fire. He was handed the drumstick of a wild bird and urged to dig in.
“So, all the destroyed goblin villages that we found were your doing.”
“Yes, Sir.”
“You understand my need for up-to-date intel as the knight captain, yes? So I have to ask: how many goblin villages are left up ahead?”
“None, I believe. I destroyed fifty-two of them in total.”
There may be ones that’ve just sprung up, but I can at least say for certain that there aren’t any left in the foothills of the White Dragon Mountains.
Allen had scoured the area meticulously for goblin villages using Bird E and thoroughly razed every last one to the ground.
Zenof’s brows drew together in a thoughtful frown. “You’re just as—no, beyond what I’d heard.”
“I’m sorry, Sir? What did you hear?”
The knight captain began recounting all of Allen’s feats to date, prompting the boy to set his drumstick down and listen closely. At six years of age, he had brought down his first albaheron, then went on to hunt more than fifty of them over the next two years; this matched perfectly with the years Krena Village had exported a large number of albaheron feathers to Granvelle City. Then, at age seven, he had started advising the village’s hunting party. As a result, the number of great boars they were able to take down per year doubled from ten to twenty.
How does he know all that? I mean, he probably asked around in Krena Village. But still, that’s a lot of detail.
As figurative question marks appeared over Allen’s head, Zenof continued.
Right after Allen started working at the Granvelle mansion, strange occurrences began cropping up in the area between Granvelle City and the White Dragon Mountains. Goblin corpses bearing slashes like claw marks turned up in large numbers, every last one with its magic stone carved out. The numbers kept climbing and climbing, with the final total, according to reports, exceeding even one thousand.
One year later, reports came in of the same thing happening, this time to orcs. Starting last year, armored ants were added to the list of monsters suffering the same fate. Crucially, the days such discoveries were reported overlapped perfectly with Allen’s days off and the days he went out as a huntsman. Most recently, almost every goblin village that the chivalric order had advanced on had already been wiped out and burned to the ground.
Damn, he’s basically got a perfect account of everything I’ve been up to. It makes sense when I think about it, though. I did leave all those monsters’ corpses just lying around after I took their magic stones. It’s not like I went to the trouble of burying them either. Of course Zenof would hear of this, being the knight captain and all.
In light of everything that he had learned, the knight captain had come to doubt the reading from Allen’s Appraisal Ceremony. There was no way he had low stats and no Talent. His three matches with Mihai—which Zenof had witnessed in person—had been more than enough to indicate that something was amiss.
So Zenof summoned the clergymen who had handled Allen’s Appraisal Ceremony to gain a more detailed account of what had happened at the time. All of them firmly insisted that Allen had no Talent. But this raised another question.
This group of clergymen traveled throughout the kingdom every year, starting from the royal capital and stopping at various fiefdoms and villages on a specific route. The number of children that they had Appraised throughout the years was beyond counting, and yet, they somehow still remembered this one boy from so many years ago.
When the knight captain had queried the clergymen, they thought it strange as well and started to reexamine their memories more thoroughly. This process ended up helping them recall the occasion in greater detail. The crystal used in the ceremony was supposed to glow in different ways depending on the child’s Talent, but it had glowed so brightly for Allen that everyone present had to shut their eyes. Add in Allen’s rare black hair and eyes, and little wonder the incident had remained vivid in their minds. The clergymen had nodded at each other’s contributions to the conversation as if comparing answers while reconstructing the situation piece by piece.
Thanks to this, the memory of the head clergyman who had headed the ceremony was jogged and he was able to recall the reading on the pitch-black metallic plate. He retracted what he had said earlier about Allen not having a Talent, explaining that there had indeed been characters on the display, but that they had been illegible. This, combined with the low stat values, was what had led him to conclude it must have been some sort of error and to declare the boy Talentless.
“And it is thanks to that Talent that you’ve been able to kill so many monsters, yes?”
“Uh...yes, Sir.”
“Mm.”
The knight captain was now sure that Allen knew that he had a Talent despite having been declared Talentless and had kept quiet about it all this time.
He’s caught on. Is he going to ask me about my class? Not that I intend on telling him anything.
Allen had every intention of glossing things over if pressed for details, but the knight captain never did ask him in the end. The two continued eating their meal while staring into the fire.
After a long silence, just as Allen looked up to peer at Zenof’s face, the man said abruptly, “His Lordship already knows everything.”
It was nearing the three-year mark of Allen’s time at the Granvelle mansion, but as it turned out, the baron had already known about him for quite a long time. In other words, he had allowed Allen free rein with full awareness of the boy’s doings. Making him a huntsman so soon after he entered service had, aside from the demands from other servants and whatnot, been a conscious decision to go along with what Allen wanted.
“Why...would he go so far for me?” Allen asked, taken aback.
“Well...I’m sure you’re curious, but it’s not my place to say. His Lordship might share his thoughts with you directly one day. Lend him an ear then.”
“Lend him an ear”? That’s a weird way of putting it. It almost sounds like he might ask me, a mere manservant, for something.
Zenof requested that Allen report to him on matters like his next targets and current progress whenever the captain visited the mansion in the future, then fell silent again. This, of course, made sense from his position. He and his men had gone to the trouble of making thorough preparations to fight a whole village of goblins only to arrive on-site and find it already razed to the ground and all the goblins dead. Understandably, finding all their effort wasted would negatively affect the troop’s morale, especially when it happened so many times. After having been allowed to do as he pleased for so long, there was no way for Allen to refuse this request. So he agreed, after which Zenof nodded and grew silent once more. In the very end, he never did ask for details about the Summons or the way Allen usually spent his days.
＊ ＊ ＊
After dinner was over, a knight came over to the fire where Zenof and Allen were warming themselves to report that preparations for the bath were complete. By bath, he was referring to a simple process of using a bucket of hot water for wiping off sweat and grime. The knight captain immediately stood up and took off his armor right there.
Remembering that he had yet to thank the man for saving his life, Allen offered to wipe his back. He gasped when he saw the fifty-some-year-old’s bare back—it was marred with countless scars, as befitted a veteran soldier of decades. Although the captain had plenty of scars on his arms and face, Allen had not imagined that it would be the same under his armor as well.
Allen then knelt down to wipe Zenof’s back, wondering just how many life-and-death battles he had lived through. But when he got close enough to take a better look, he gasped once more. Many of the scars had been wounds so deep that large swathes of skin had been removed, revealing the muscle below. From the looks of things, all of them had likely been near-fatal.
“Mm? What’s the matter?”
“Oh, I’m sorry, Sir. I will begin wiping now. Um, by the way...” These old wounds...are painful even to look at.
“Yes?”
“I have recovery items that can probably heal you. Would you like me to use them?”
“I’m good.”
“I have plenty of them, though.”
“No, there’s no need. Leave it.”
“Y-Yes, Sir.”
Allen had been thinking of using a Leaf of Life, but to his surprise, Zenof turned his offer down. The man apparently wanted to keep his scars. Allen fell silent and resumed wiping.
Still, today’s hunt was an utter failure. There’s not much I can do when the orcs group up like they did today. Slowly pushing in is just a war of attrition, the worst strategy possible. And me entering the gate was a huge mistake too.
While diligently wiping the back before his eyes, Allen reflected on how today went.
Suddenly, the knight captain asked, “Do you find hunting fun?” almost as if he had read Allen’s mind.
“Yes, Sir. It’s incredibly fun.”
“I see.”
Silence returned between the two. There was a hint of sadness in Zenof’s face, but Allen could not see it from his angle.
The next day, Allen finally returned to the mansion. After explaining what had happened to Sebas, he was let off without a reprimand. All Sebas said was, “I’m glad you’re back home safe.” This reaction was all that Allen needed to realize he really had been allowed to hunt as much as he wanted. The reason still remained a mystery, though.
＊ ＊ ＊
Two weeks passed, and it was now the end of May.
“GUUMOOOHHHHHHH!!!”
The orc king roared at the top of its lungs, then fell to the ground, bleeding profusely.
Hmm, is this really the best way of doing this? I ended up using 120 Rank D magic stones. But before anything else, hooray for getting my first Rank B magic stone!
After much trial and error, Allen had finally succeeded in clearing an orc village all by himself.
The first attempt had taught him that slowly pushing in from the front gate was a bad idea, as it gave the orcs time to set up formations and drag things into a war of attrition, gradually wearing each side out. Based on this lesson, he had changed up his tactics.
First, he arranged forty Beast Ds into four groups of ten each and made them attack the orc village from all four directions at the same time. If each Beast D could kill two orcs using the element of surprise, that was eighty orcs down before they could even react. Suddenly lowering their numbers so drastically proved an effective way to prevent them from forming up.
Then he used Sharing to remotely control four Beast Ds to target the magic-using orcs. Just in case, he had also instructed the other Summons to prioritize killing the magic-users should the opportunity present itself.
The rest was simple, no matter how many Summons went down and no matter if an orc king came out or not. In short, he just continued calling out as many Summons as needed to overwhelm the enemy through sheer numbers. With Allen himself taking up position somewhere out of harm’s way, victory was simply a matter of time.
Just now, Allen had just proved the efficacy of this new strategy.
I did end up using quite a few magic stones, but now I know I do have the ability and resources to win. I may have failed in my blind playthrough, but now I got this.
In Allen’s previous life, playing a game without any prior knowledge was called “doing a blind playthrough.” Failure was a very common element in these playthroughs. What was most important as a gamer was the ability to learn from past mistakes to pull off a better run next time.
All right, now that I’m able to clear an orc village alone, it’s time to shift focus to improving efficiency.
