18 7

Normal dagger in his right hand, flame dagger in his left, Haruhiro took a quiet but deep breath in, then let it out. His eyes weren’t focused on any one point, but were watching a broad area with their full field of vision. He rallied his hearing and other senses as well.
In a second or so, Haruhiro had detected eleven lizardmen. It went without saying, but this wasn’t all of them. There were still many more. These were just the ones rushing in toward him.
Ranta looked ready to pounce on their enemies at any moment. “Do we fight here?!”
“No, we pull back for now!” Haruhiro had already turned to go by the time the words left his mouth. Ranta followed after him, nimble as some sort of jumping bug.
The arrows came in scattershot, but didn’t hit. Lizardmen were chasing after Haruhiro and Ranta with stone-tipped spears now, and several even had wooden shields. They wore no clothes, but some had accessories made of bone, fang, or polished stone.
“Ha ha!” Ranta laughed as he ran. “Looks like we’re gonna have some fun!”
As the idiot said idiot things because he was an idiot, Haruhiro tried to eyeball the distance between himself and the lizardmen at the front of the pack. These creatures weren’t slow by any means. If he ran full-tilt, he could probably shake them, but this wasn’t a race, so he needed to avoid that sort of simplistic thinking. He and Ranta were badly outnumbered, and couldn’t afford to underestimate what the lizardman race was capable of. They surely had to be natural hunters. And in that case, they might try to surround or corner their quarry.
The two of them were caught between their enemies and a steep hill up ahead. Before they could retreat that way, they needed to hit the lizardmen and intimidate them first.
“Ranta, we’ll do it there!”
“Hah! About time!”
Ranta accelerated. He was aiming to find favorable ground for fighting the lizardmen. Haruhiro looked back. Arrows were flying, but not with the right speed or trajectories to hit him. He ignored them and kept running. Ranta was racing up the hill.
They say smoke and idiots like high places, so that explains that, Haruhiro thought as he steeled himself for what was to come.
He’d kill quickly and efficiently, then pull out.
Time to get to work.



10. LOVE
The lizardmen didn’t chase the delegation onto the flatlands of the Quickwind Plains. In about half a day, the threat they’d posed was completely gone. Traded in, so to speak, for the return of the gangly giants to the west and southwest. They were also stalked by packs of beasts called jackyles that were somewhere between cats and dogs.
The jackyles looked way smaller than Poochie the wolf-dog, but they actually weren’t. They had short legs and long bodies. Although they were low to the ground, they grew to lengths of up to a meter and a half, tail not included. Their fur was brown with black spots all over their bodies. Their heads were close to pitch black, which made it hard to make out their faces. Creepy.
They were definitely carnivorous, according to Itsukushima, though he didn’t know much about them. They traveled in packs of anywhere between ten and thirty, and were pursuit predators, as evidenced by the way they were pursuing the Frontier Army delegation now.
“Unfortunately, I’ve never seen them hunting before. But...”
Itsukushima explained that he had seen them join in opportunistically when another predator attacked a herd of herbivores.
The story freaked Kuzaku out a bit. Ranta started going on about how it was cowardly, and they were such trash, but the jackyles would probably have argued with that interpretation. To them, hunting wasn’t a battle for pride. It was something they did so they could survive and leave descendants. They needed to minimize their losses while also maximizing their chances for success. To that end, they were skillfully taking advantage of others in order to acquire food. If anything, it was impressively cunning. That said, now that they had set their sights on the delegation, it wasn’t the time to be admiring them.
It was risky to assume the delegation would be safe until another fiercer beast showed up. There was no guarantee the jackyle pack wouldn’t move in for the kill on their own. Even once the sun went down and it was dark out, they were nearby. Haruhiro could sense them moving occasionally, and he heard their distinctive bark, bogyah, so he wasn’t just imagining it.
The delegation stayed at their highest level of alertness, sleeping in shifts. It was hard to rest properly, given the situation, but even just being able to lie down for a while made a big difference.
When dawn broke, Haruhiro was shocked. There were jackyles sitting around and relaxing a mere twenty meters from the delegation.
“Maybe we should just kill the mutts?” Ranta suggested. Haruhiro couldn’t deny it was tempting.
“Are we gonna go for it?” Kuzaku asked, sounding pretty enthusiastic. “We can take ’em if we give it everything we’ve got, right? I don’t see us losing. Once we kill a few, I bet the rest will probably run off.”
“Not a chance,” Yume said, vigorously shaking her head with a frown. “No way. No how. These little guys’ve got serious stamina. We’ll end up wearin’ ourselves down. Then what? They’ll just run away if we attack, right? And if we try chasin’ them, they’ll run even more.”
“We could go after the younger ones...” Itsukushima said, looking at the pack of jackyles with a low grunt. “But outside of the freshly weaned pups, killing them will be a major struggle. We should only fight them if there’s no other way.”
Whatever the group chose to do, once they got out of the Quickwind Plains and into the Gray Marsh, the jackyles would probably give up. That was Itsukushima and Yume’s read on the situation. But getting there would take them another two days, or maybe a day and a half if they hurried.
“Then let’s hurry,” Bikki Sans decided, and that was that.
Things looked bright afterward, both figuratively and literally, as there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. Until afternoon came, that is. Then the sky started becoming cloudy, and the wind picked up.
“This isn’t one of those heavy thunderstorms, is it?” Haruhiro asked Yume.
“Nurrrmm...” Up on her horse, Yume screwed up her face in a way that told him she wasn’t sure.
“Probably not,” Itsukushima said, coming to a stop. Beside him, Poochie was staring at the jackyles.
Something’s weird. But what? Haruhiro couldn’t tell. He just felt uneasy.
“What’s wrong?” Bikki Sans asked from up on horseback. That’s when it happened.
The jackyle pack let out a long howl: bufwooooon! Or to be more precise, one of them started, and then the others joined in.
“What?!” Neal the scout pulled back on his reins and turned his horse. No, that wasn’t quite it. His horse whinnied, then began jumping about wildly. Bikki Sans, Yume, and Setora’s horses were doing the same.
“Mwuh?! Whoa, Hendrix III! It’s okay! It’s okay!” Bikki Sans was smiling and trying to calm his mount. Apparently, when a horse was agitated or excited, it helped to smile. But once a horse started bucking, the rider was bound to be disturbed, so it wasn’t easy to fake a smile like that.
“Damn! You! You! Worthless! Jackass!” Neal was yelling at his horse, only making it panic more, and Yume and Setora were struggling to control their mounts too.
Incidentally, Hendrix III was the name Bikki Sans had given his horse at some point. It was a bit too long and awkward to say. But even if he thought that, it wasn’t Haruhiro’s place to object.
“Wh-What? What?! What’s happening?!” Kuzaku was panicking and looking all around. Ranta gave him a kick in the butt.
“Hi-yah!”
“Ow! Oh, come on!”
“Haru!” Merry called, pointing north-northwest. Itsukushima was looking in that direction too, which Haruhiro hadn’t noticed before Merry had gotten his attention. He turned to face that way. The horizon. Grassy fields. Scattered trees. That was all he saw. Nothing out of the ordinary— No, wait.
Haruhiro turned his gaze upward.
Was it the sky?
There was something in the cloudy sky.
What could it be?
This is stating the obvious, but it was flying. Was it a bird? If so, it was an awfully large one. Could it be a wyvern? But wyverns were supposed to live far away from here, in the Kuaron Mountains.
“Bad luck,” Itsukushima said, sighing. “We’ve got a mangoraf incoming.”
Ranta gripped the hilt of his katana. “Huh?! A mandragon?! What’s that?!”
“Mangoraf,” Merry corrected him. Her expression was tense. Haruhiro couldn’t say what made him think so, but just for a moment he sensed it. Or maybe it was his imagination.
“Get off your horses!” Itsukushima yelled. “Pull all your luggage off them! Right now!”
“What is this about?!” Bikki Sans shouted back at him.
“The thing about mangorafs is...!” Yume responded as she detached the packs from her saddle. “They love eatin’ horses!” “What...did you say...?!” Bikki Sans was speechless.
“Th-This is ridiculous!” Neal the scout jumped down from his horse. Or more like he fell out of the saddle.
Setora was having trouble getting down from her mount. “Urgh...!”
“Setora-san...!” Kuzaku rushed to her side, wrapping his arms tight around the hindquarters of the horse she was riding. “Whoa, he’s so freaking strong! Horses’re crazy! H-Hurry and get down!”
Yume jumped off her horse, slapping it on the butt to get it running. “Meow! Run away!”
The mangoraf, or whatever it was, had gotten pretty close. How close? Haruhiro wasn’t sure. Two, three hundred meters away? It didn’t seem that fast. The way it flew was kinda ungainly—forced, you could say. It had wings. But it also had four limbs. It looked like someone had stuck a pair of wings on the back of a beast.
Setora unloaded her horse with Kuzaku’s help, then got down.
“We’re good, now let go!”
“Will do!”
Bikki Sans was still mounted. He was doing everything in his power to try and calm the terrified Hendrix III. “It’s okay! I’m with you, Hendrix III! It’s going to be okay! I won’t leave you alone! It’s okay! It’s okay...!”
The horses Neal, Yume, and Setora had been riding each ran off in a different direction.
“Hey, Bikki!” Neal got up and shouted. “You’re in danger! Lose the damn horse!”
The mangoraf dove at one of the horses. The one Neal had been riding.
Thud, the air shook as it landed.
A moment later, the horse was tumbling through the air.
What in the world just happened? The mangoraf struck, biting through the horse’s neck, and then threw it into the air in a single moment. That was probably it. It was only the body flying high. Everything from the neck up was gone.
“Gyahhhhh!” Bikki Sans screamed as if he were the one the mangoraf had bitten. “Arsenus! Arsenuuuus!”
Incidentally, Arsenus was the name Bikki Sans had given that horse. Even Neal just called it “you,” or “horse,” but Bikki Sans had given every one of the horses a proper name. He even had a policy of never using the same name twice. That was probably why they were all weirdly long, and there were a bunch of them that were “the second,” or “the third.” Not that it mattered.
The mangoraf that had bitten off Arsenus’s head raced like a coursing river toward the next horse and sprang. This time it was Setora’s former mount. The mangoraf knocked the horse over and held it down with its front paws, then tore its head and neck clean off with one bite.
Horses from the mainland weren’t that big. Still, they had a shoulder height of about 1.3 to 1.4 meters. Horses were never small animals.
That said, the difference between them and the mangoraf was like the difference between an adult and a child. No, if the mangoraf was an adult, these horses were babies.
“Ohhh, not Teristarchus too!” Bikki Sans let out a cry of pure anguish. Teristarchus. Oh, right, that was the name of the horse Setora had been riding.
Haruhiro glanced over to see the pack of jackyles swarming around the fallen Arsenus. It was opportunistic, but he had to respect their boldness.
The mangoraf was marvelously fast for its size. With Teristarchus down, it went for Yume’s horse next. The massive winged beast ran. No, it leaped. It flapped its wings just once, not taking it very high, and then glided.
Yume’s horse ran for its life, but the mangoraf plowed it into the ground. Then, coming to a sudden stop dozens of meters away, the mangoraf turned again and, this time, finally looked toward Haruhiro. Its blood-drenched face—was human.
Human, yes, but what kind? Male? Female? Young? Old? He couldn’t say. However, the mangoraf’s features were definitely humanlike, and not only vaguely so. A smirking person, covered in the blood of their victims. That was what it looked like.
“Bikki Sans, forget the horse!” Itsukushima yelled at him sharply.
“Hendrix III!” Bikki Sans, however, made no attempt to dismount. He clenched down on the rampaging Hendrix III’s sides with both legs and twisted his body around. It was clear Bikki Sans was trying to make his horse run. If he got down from it now, what would the outcome be? Obviously, Itsukushima must have been aware of that when he made his plea. The hunter was probably no more eager than Bikki Sans to sacrifice the animal. But now there was no other option, because like it or not, it was hard to imagine how the horse could get out of this unscathed.
Even so, Bikki Sans was ordering Hendrix III to run. No, not ordering.
This is what Bikki Sans was shouting to his horse: “I’m with you,” and, “It’s okay, I won’t leave you alone,” and, “Let’s run away together.” Bikki Sans was entreating the horse with all of his soul.
Did Hendrix III respond to him? Haruhiro didn’t understand horses.
But Hendrix III started to run. That much he was certain of. And Bikki Sans was still riding, of course. The man and the horse were one. It was a beautiful start. From the moment he began galloping, Hendrix III’s head was down. Bikki Sans raised his butt from the saddle, but kept his profile low, as low as he could. Their vigor was a sight to behold.
Go, thought Haruhiro.
Please, go. He couldn’t help but pray.
Bikki Sans, Hendrix III. Get out of here.
Let there be a miracle.
“Ahhh...” It wasn’t just Haruhiro. Ranta, Kuzaku, and even Yume all let out a similar groan at the same time.
They all knew. Miracles don’t happen that often. It’s why they’re called miracles.
Still, the mangoraf was merciless. It ran after Hendrix III, caught up, and just for a moment ran alongside them. Then, chomp, it bit the horse’s head off.
“Hen—...!”
Bikki Sans’s beloved mount was decapitated before his very eyes. What must the shock of that have been like? The heartbreak? Not being a horse lover himself, Haruhiro couldn’t imagine it.
Now headless, Hendrix III tumbled to the earth, Bikki Sans and all.
“You idiot...!” Neal’s voice was shrill.
Hendrix III was the last of the four horses that the mangoraf took down. It hadn’t cared about anything below the neck on the previous three, but, perhaps satisfied with its work, it absolutely tore into Hendrix III, devouring him messily. The incredible sound of its bite told them it was chomping through meat and bone all at once.
“Argh...! No! Stop...! Augh...!”
“I-I-It’s eating the old man...!” Ranta shouted, even though there was no need to. Haruhiro could tell that for himself. Honestly, while he thought, He’s still alive? it wasn’t actually that strange that Bikki Sans was still breathing. Hendrix III had died instantly when the mangoraf bit its head off, but the rider had simply fallen with the horse’s body.
“W-We’ve gotta—” Kuzaku looked at Haruhiro.
“Save him...?”
“Way too late for that...” Neal said, sounding like an empty shell of himself. What had happened had taken all the fight out of him.
It was hard to respond with either “Yeah” or “I dunno.” As Haruhiro’s eyes wandered, he noticed the jackyle pack on the move. They had been devouring Arsenus a moment ago, but now they were polishing off Teristarchus. Am I fleeing from reality? Haruhiro wondered to himself. Do the jackyles even matter?
No, wait... Maybe they do?
“Itsukushima-san, Yume...!” Haruhiro called out to the hunters, and incredibly they instantly knew what he wanted from them. It was almost touching how fast they picked up on it. Obviously, this wasn’t the time for him to be getting all emotional, though.
The master and pupil who were like a father and daughter readied their bows and nocked arrows.
They fired.
It looked like they’d both aimed at Teristarchus’s remains. The arrows hit one of the jackyles devouring the horse. Instantly, the beasts scattered like flies. But only for a moment, because the arrows had simply surprised them. The jackyles began circling Teristarchus again. Some were eyeing Itsukushima and Yume, while several others rushed to sink their teeth into the fallen horse once more.
Their movement drew the mangoraf’s attention, and from its perspective, they were stealing its prey.
It let out a throaty roar, “Obahgogahhhhuhgohhh...!” Its voice sounded almost human. Like a ridiculously big old man who was absolutely livid and screaming incoherently.
The jackyles jumped. The moment they flinched, the mangoraf pounced toward Teristarchus’s remains.
“Now...!” Haruhiro shouted, already running himself. Neal and Merry followed him. Kuzaku was about to chase after them, but Setora stopped him.
“You stay here!”
Ranta was with Itsukushima and Yume, gathering up their stuff and preparing to retreat. Seeing the dread knight already doing what Haruhiro needed from him, the thief couldn’t help but think, Aw, damn it. Only a little, though.
Haruhiro hurried toward Hendrix III with Neal and Merry. The horse had been brutally torn apart, and sadly, Bikki Sans was no different. He was still just barely identifiable by his upper torso, but his lower half was such a mess of blood, meat, and bone that you couldn’t tell where he stopped and his former mount began.
Despite this, Merry still raced to Bikki Sans’s side. Unconcerned about getting blood on her, she pressed her fingers to his neck. After just a moment, she looked at Haruhiro and shook her head.
“The letter!” Neal shouted, pushing Merry aside and rifling through Bikki Sans’s pockets until he found the rectangular leather envelope that contained the letter. It was covered in blood, but free of tears or holes. “Okay!”
The mangoraf threw Teristarchus’s corpse high into the air to catch in its mouth on the way down. The jackyle pack that had been scattered by the mangoraf were running around in a panic, but it seemed they hadn’t fully given up on the horses’ meat just yet. They weren’t fleeing.
Itsukushima was leading the way northeast with Poochie the wolfdog.
“You damn fool!” Neal spat on the ground before running off. On the ground, not on Bikki Sans’s corpse, obviously. “Go and play with your horses in the afterlife!”
“Let’s move!” Haruhiro said to Merry, who nodded.
“Okay!”



11. Inscrutable Causality
They say fortune and misfortune are intertwined. Disaster and blessings are two sides of a coin. Failure can lead to success, and unexpected good luck can lead to bad luck. Things go well sometimes, and sometimes they don’t. It’s just how things are.
Maybe the delegation had caught the mangoraf’s attention because they were being stalked by jackyles. Perhaps if they hadn’t been attacked, Bikki Sans and the horses would have been all right. But whether they could have gotten through the Gray Marsh with horses in tow was far from certain. Besides, thanks to the jackyle pack, they’d been able to divert the mangoraf’s attention, allowing the survivors to escape. If not for the sacrifice of Bikki Sans and his four horses, someone else might have ended up as mangoraf or jackyle food.
The seeping chill of the Gray Marsh was punishing, and its multitude of leeches couldn’t have been more troublesome. Nonetheless, after all the difficulties they’d faced on the Quickwind Plains, this was perfectly tolerable in comparison. The delegation crossed the Gray Marsh in three days, and finally made it to a sea of trees in the foothills of the Kurogane Mountain Range.
According to Itsukushima, the lizardmen had previously lived here in the forests along the Iroto. It was probably pressure from the Southern Expedition that’d forced them to migrate south. And if they assumed that these woodlands were now Southern Expedition territory, the delegation needed to be even more careful now.
That being the case, the party redoubled their efforts to scout for enemies, practicing an almost excessive degree of caution as they moved through the forest. Though, even if they hadn’t, they couldn’t have rushed ahead. The forest was made up of trees that were unbelievably tall, with twisted, intertwined roots that seemed to be trying to invade the surface, creating an intense battle for survival between plants. The way that the trunks of the trees and the roots crawling across the ground created ridges and troughs everywhere, leaving almost no flat land to be seen, made it difficult to walk.
“This isn’t a place humans belong...” Neal the scout kept muttering to himself.
Incidentally, with the death of Bikki Sans, Neal had taken over the man’s responsibilities as chief delegate in an acting capacity. That made him their leader, at least on paper, but nobody treated him any differently from before. Ranta started calling him the “deputy” out of spite, and everyone else followed suit. Neal didn’t like it, but they didn’t care. Generally, no one responded to Deputy Neal’s grumbling.
Still, in the time between when they entered the forest in the morning and when it got dark, they estimated that they had only progressed ten kilometers. The way things were going, they’d move even slower here than they had in the Gray Marsh.
They set up camp for the night, but couldn’t start a campfire, so they were all basically just hanging around in the same spot. Hardly any moonlight or starlight breached the forest canopy here. It was impossible to see anything, so they had to stay clumped close enough together that they could sense one another in the darkness.
“Whoops, sorry,” Deputy Neal apologized with a laugh.
“Mew?” That was Yume’s voice. Ranta flew into a rage.
“Hey, you bastard. You just touched Yume, didn’t you?!”
“Huh? Not intentionally. I apologized, didn’t I? I can’t see any better than you can.”
“I don’t trust a word out of your mouth.”
“You sure do hate me, huh? What’d I ever do to you?”
“Do you need me to go through the entire list?” Setora asked.
“No, please don’t.”
It was easy to imagine Neal ducking his head. If Setora were to lecture Haruhiro about all the things the thief had done wrong, he’d never recover from it either.
“But y’know...” Kuzaku said, stretching as he did. “The nights here aren’t as cold as in the Gray Marsh, and the air has just the right amount of moisture. It feels pretty good. Makes me kinda sleepy.” “How are you so easygoing?!” Ranta retorted.
Haruhiro forced himself to smile. “If you think you can sleep, go for it. We’ll wake you if we need to, but you’re pretty good at getting up by yourself.”
“’Kay. G’night, then...” Kuzaku said with a yawn. He was already lying down. He might have even been asleep already.
“That’s certainly a talent, of a sort...” Setora mumbled to herself.
Haruhiro felt the same. He was thinking about how he couldn’t sleep the way Kuzaku did, while also feeling very conscious of the way Merry’s right arm was touching his left as she sat beside him.
I want to hold her hand, he thought. In this darkness, no one would be able to see. It might have been a weird thought to have, but no matter what he and Merry got up to, as long as they didn’t make any noise, no one would notice. That didn’t mean they could just do whatever they wanted. Or much of anything at all. He didn’t have the guts, you could say. But holding hands? That was fine. Maybe thinking so much about all this made him a creep, but though Merry’s arm moved a little sometimes, she wasn’t pulling away from him. Maybe this was that kind of thing. What kind of thing? You know, that kind of thing.
Maybe Merry was thinking she’d like to hold Haruhiro’s hand too?
Who knew, really? He had no way to find out. He couldn’t very well ask her. Like, “Can I hold your hand?” No way. Not an option.
“Hey, Yume,” Ranta said, clearing his throat. “You, uh...wanna sleep with me?”
“Way too soon,” Itsukushima said, and there was a sound like he’d hit Ranta.
“Ow! The hell, old man?! You just whacked the back of my head like you could see it!”
“I can’t see where it is, exactly, but I have a rough idea. Don’t take us hunters lightly, dread knight.”
“Oh-hoh... So Yume’d be able to tell too, then?” “Kinda sorta,” Yume confirmed.
“Whoa!”
“Your side’s here, right?”
“D-Don’t touch me there! That’s a delicate spot...”
“Your sides’re ticklish, huh? Cootchie-cootchie-coo!”
“S-S-Stop! Stop it! And wait, what’s with the cutesy—!”
“Cootchie-cootchie-wootchie-coo, cootchie-wootchie-coo...”
“Eek! Stop it already! Are you trying to kill me?!”
“I’m not sure they’ll ever be ready...” Itsukushima mumbled to himself.
Tell me about it, Haruhiro thought, secretly feeling triumphant.
While Ranta and Yume were fooling around, he’d been able to take hold of Merry’s hand. Their arms and fingers were firmly intertwined too.
Oh, man. Holding hands like this makes it feel like we’re one. Like it’s not just our hands, not just our bodies that are connected, but our souls. I’m not just imagining it, right?
No? Maybe I am?
Merry rested her cheek on Haruhiro’s left shoulder right when he was starting to hope she would. The top of her head brushed up against the side of his face. He could feel her hair, smell her scent.
This might have been obvious, but the members of the delegation had been unable to bathe all this time. While it wasn’t uncommon for them to get wet in the rain or the swamps and marshes, it was surprisingly hard to actually wash themselves. They’d maybe get a chance to wipe their faces once in a while, at best. Honestly, there were times he thought, Man, I reek. Pretty often, in fact. He was inured to it, but to be honest, they were all kinda filthy.
However, for some strange reason, beyond their combined body odor, there was a sweet, mellow scent he didn’t find all that offensive.
That scent varied from person to person. Considerably. And this might have been Haruhiro’s imagination, but he felt there was a difference between the guys’ and the girls’ too.
Basically, Merry smelled really good to him.
That was incredibly dangerous.
Haruhiro’s urges weren’t very strong, to the point where he questioned whether it was okay for a young male like him to be this way. But they weren’t nonexistent. Zero times anything is always zero, but multiplying even a small number can give you a big one.
You might say Merry’s scent was too big a multiplying factor.
Now he was feeling her hand too, on top of that, which added another multiplier.
Haruhiro had never anticipated feeling this sort of powerful urge. He wasn’t used to it, and he struggled to put it into words, but basically he was lusting after Merry.
Furthermore—though this might have been a misunderstanding on Haruhiro’s part—he suspected Merry might be feeling the same.
It went without saying that, even if she was, they couldn’t, uh, do the deed here.
Obviously.

Chapter end