30 Years Have Passed Since the Prologue Chapter 44

Chapter 44: On an Academy Field Practicum, an Attack Always Occurs (8)

Dwarves have darksight. Being a breed that fundamentally burrows underground to live, it was no strange thing.

Though it doesn’t mean they can see across darkness as at midday, in any case they could perceive objects comparatively clearly even in the dark.

Accordingly, Astuk could see the man approaching.

……A large Dwarf?

Astuk fell into confusion!

***

“Isabelle.” “M-Mister?!! How did you get here……?!” “Are you hurt anywhere.”

Ivan came tromping over and stood beside Isabelle. He clicked his tongue with a brief tsk and laid a hand on Isabelle’s shoulder.

“Yes! Yes, I’m. I’m fine!” “Fortunate. Then stay in this spot without moving.”

VIP protection was included in the Annihilation Corps’ basic training course, but that didn’t mean perfect safety could be guaranteed in darkness.

Before a fierce engagement, always keeping the protection subject’s position grasped is important.

Of course Ivan, being an exceedingly efficient man, gave no consideration to how those words might sound.

I’ve seen this before…… the kind that shows up all the time in romance novels!

Isabelle’s eyes spun. The tension snapped loose and she let out a sigh.

Her legs trembled. Fear had arrived belatedly. It might be the suspension bridge effect, but one can hardly help relying on a man who appears before a crisis of death.

On top of that, those words. Stay in that spot.

Like a knight in a tale telling her to wait until he returns from slaying an ancient dragon.

This is a confession. Ha, honestly. How troublesome……. Nothing for it, I suppose. Accepting outright would be a bit much, so, yes. First I’ll just ask whether he’s free this weekend. As a reward.

Isabelle fell into confusion!

***

Revolver in the left hand, longsword in the right. Five daggers hooked at his waist and one axe slung across his back.

Having swiftly checked his armament state, Ivan walked slowly forward.

Frightened. Ivan drew a low breath.

There are several signs that manifest commonly in living things. Hormonal mechanisms are one.

Bodily strengthening through magic power and the extreme rise in efficiency of the nerve-transmission system bring about various chain effects. Among them is the amplification of each sense organ.

Smell, for instance. One becomes able to capture even the very smallest scents drifting in the air.

Accordingly one can detect even the volatile body scent arising as secreted sweat evaporates. In the superhuman domain this belongs among exceedingly important indices.

Because one can read an opponent’s emotions.

This backward pre-modern society doesn’t yet have the word hormone, but a person’s structure is the same, so body scent changes subtly according to emotion—

—and this becomes an index physically revealing emotions like “killing intent,” “fear,” or “affection.”

Cortisol, secreted when a living thing feels fear. This distinctive scent was seeping thickly out from among the Dwarves.

“Are you afraid.” “Talking rubbish!”

Astuk ground his teeth. The fellow is alone.

Since war is ultimately a contest of morale, once pushed back in momentum a fight can scarcely be constituted.

He was instinctively classifying the fight with Ivan as a “war.” Forcing himself to ignore that fact, he raised his weapon.

“Annihilation Corps. You cursed things…… I shall kill you and honor the souls of the comrades who departed before me!” “They all say that.”

Astuk needed time to understand those words.

They all say that?

For an instant a chill crawled over him.

That is a calm confession that he has heard such words many times over, and killed every one of them.

Astuk raised his axe with grave eyes. Matching his movement, everyone in the square formation raised their weapons in unison.

Click, click.

The weighty noise of metal grinding resounds through the tunnel.

Ah, how nostalgic.

Memories of past battlefields where he faced Dwarf square formations in tunnels.

It was during the Mine War.

Ivan thought as he raised his sword. Narrow interiors with restricted sight, Dwarves filling an entire passage. A horrific square formation on which axes and rounds don’t work.

In those days he wasn’t alone. Back then other corps members to support him were always at his side.

Now they are gone. Ivan regripped his sword amid a thick sense of loss.

But those before him now are not the army of those days. At most around 30. Generously counted, a small infantry unit of no more than 50.

And he is not the Captain Ivan Petrovich of those days.

Ten years have passed since the Mine War.

Ivan has accumulated 10 years’ worth of experience.

***

Bang—!!

The opening is a shot. Its purpose is threat and simultaneous vision-securing.

Amid the slow sense of time in which space segments and tilts, Ivan sprinted.

A halted Dwarf square formation is like a turtle. Hard, dull, and unhurried. So one must place the tactical stratum on speed.

“He’s coming!!”

A frightened voice rings through the tunnel. A familiar thing.

Dwarves usually belonged to rear-infiltration teams in the demonfolk army, and that sort of operation was the environment most suited to the Annihilation Corps.

So the individual unit that killed the most Dwarves during the war period has always been reckoned to be the Annihilation Corps.

Clang!

The welcome greeting is a sword strike. This single stroke driven straight down is a feint. Before the fellow at the very front could even react, it lightly struck his pauldron.

The fellow’s weapon thrusts in immediately. Hearing only the air-splitting sound cleaving the void, he twisted his body and evaded.

Eyes closed, counting seconds. Ivan is precisely counting his own steps.

86 cm per stride. Isabelle is 5 steps behind.

Seven steps to reach the formation’s commander. The formation’s lateral width is thirteen steps.

The range in which he can operate is seventeen steps.

Clang!!

Evading the assorted weapons pouring over his body in an instant and boring in, once.

Clang, kragak! The noise heard as he drives the longsword in beneath the elbow of the fellow standing foremost.

Click, click. The friction sounds heard as the movements of the heavily armored fellows mesh.

Beneath closed eyes, the shapes of the fellows imprinted on his retina at the moment of firing distort.

Diagramming and analyzing the surrounding noise one by one, he corrects their positions and postures in real time.

“This monster!!”

Such a cry came the instant he “skinned” one fellow’s shell and sawed through his forearm.

A monster. Laughable. Ivan knew the fights of true “monsters.”

Krak!

Ignoring the horrific scream of the fellow whose arm had been sawed, he spun his body two and a half steps sideways.

Into the gap at the nape of the fellow who had just raised his arms to bring an axe down, driving a dagger in beneath it, and then one and a half steps to the right again.

Krak!

The next fellow was thrusting with a war hammer. Letting the weighty air-splitting sound flow past beside his head, he lowered his stance and drove the longsword in.

Krak. The longsword, its edge precariously nicked, snapped.

An anticipated thing. Because from the moment of fighting he had been feeling through his fingertips the sword’s edge being shaved away.

So he doesn’t panic. Ivan was accustomed to this level of durability.

“He’s lost his weapon!!”

No, he released it.

Ivan lowered his head and moved 2 steps sideways. Precisely at his feet an axe had fallen. The weapon dropped by the fellow whose arm he’d first severed.

The instant he picked it up he turned at the waist to evade the next attack and raised his left hand.

Aim, breath aligned, discharge.

Bang—!!

“Gyaaaagh!!”

The broken longsword was lodged in the armor gap of the fellow with the molars. A precise pinpoint shot. As though hammering a chisel, the fellow’s chest bursts open.

He threw the revolver into the air just so and ran forward. Snatching the war hammer the fellow had dropped with his left hand, he twisted his body.

One hand upward, the other hand sideways.

And bringing them down crossing wholesale.

Krraash!!

The instant the dropped axe lodged in one fellow’s helm, the hammer swung without error struck that fellow’s head.

The moment strength drained from the fellow’s body and he toppled, he threw the hammer and snatched the revolver from the air.

Without aiming, straight ahead, toward the commander 5 steps away.

Discharge.

Bang—!!

This time he opened his eyes. The battle situation entered his view at a glance again. As the revolver’s flame subsided he closed his eyes again and drew the transformed formation’s situation into his mind.

The battlefield’s noise, the fellows’ body scents, their positions carved beneath his retina. The sensation of wind grazing both cheeks.

Between breath and breath, the superhumans’ battlefield.

Ah, how nostalgic.

Ivan ran, savoring it anew.

Because a person’s body is frail. Because being stabbed by a dagger not even 3 inches long neutralizes one.

Close-quarters unarmed combat is always a crossroads of life and death staked on one’s life.

Amid that, in a plainly disadvantageous situation, in the middle of enemy lines.

He had lived forgetting this sensation of sprinting toward the enemy’s heart. For 4 years since his last battle, there hadn’t been a situation worth calling combat at all.

So on this familiar battlefield Ivan was feeling even a kind of nostalgia.

Ivan being an exceedingly objective man, he thought that he was broken.

And that was a sensation that stood out all the more in daily life. Among people ordinarily laughing and chatting, he felt even alienation.

So, here. In this moment where life flickers, at least. He could be a person who was needed.

He was still living inside the war. While loathing the battlefield, while longing for daily life. While wishing for home.

Feeling the body scents of his missed comrades-in-arms, Ivan counted his steps.

Now one step.

86 cm ahead are the fellows’ “heads.”

***

What is one supposed to feel from a lunatic “butchering” comrades with a faint smile.

With each breath, one comrade falls.

Block, kill, no! Don’t! My arm! Aagh!

Amid it, the screams couldn’t exceed the syllable level. Upon that battlefield where only death cries rang.

The Annihilation Corps’ lunatic continued his “work” silently, without a word.

Shattered armor springs up overhead. Torn limbs and blood droplets scatter through the air.

A storm. It bears the form of a disaster no individual can resist.

Literally swirling, taking up weapons, gripping them, sprinting.

At last. Even when he had drawn abruptly before his eyes.

The fellow’s breathing was no different from the start.

“I am…… I am of the 3rd Battalion under direct command of the 5th Dragon General, ‘Web Maker’ Engineer Corps…… Senior Captain Astuk. What is your name……!” “Ivan Petrovich.” “……Ha……”

Astuk nodded.

I heard you were dead.

Yes. So that’s it. You were alive. If that’s the case, the reason he was able to burst in on this forest of all places, at the most precise moment, was something he could accept.

“That beard. Did you copy us?” “……?”

Ivan’s face contorted for the first time.

Ivan was an exceedingly cool-headed man, but he never sits by for an insult to the late king.

Instead of an answer, he swung the axe a nameless soldier had been holding.

***

“You may move now.” “I think my legs have gone.”

Isabelle laughed as she listened to Ivan’s footsteps approaching tromp tromp.

It had been a battle whose fierceness she could feel plainly from the sound alone. Merely standing still just behind it, the heat of the engagement seemed to reach even her.

Honestly, overwhelming.

She stretched out both arms and said:

“Carry me on your back.”

Since her legs have gone, carrying her is better than waiting for her to walk.

Ivan, being an efficient man, offered his back without a word.

Soon warm hands wrapped around his nape.

“Are you hurt?” “No.” “You’ve worked hard.” “Yes.” “Today’s a bit much, but might I treat you to dinner tomorrow evening?”

Ivan was currently an undercover agent belonging to the Counterintelligence Command.

He being a man of poverty, he does not improperly accept money or goods from a protection subject.

“No.” “Eh.”