The cave was grim.
It was true that the weather was turning cold, but for some reason it felt colder still in here.
The air settled heavily. Only the sound of water dropping from above disturbed the stillness.
Hugo was thoroughly hunched, keeping watch on his surroundings with a tense expression.
Ethan, by contrast, pressed forward with an indifferent look on his face.
'Nothing out of the ordinary that I can tell.'
To look at, it seemed an ordinary cave.
It was giving off a bleak air, but that was all it was.
'Do we need to go deeper?'
FLAP-FLAP!
KREEEK!
"Eep!"
A bat burst out of the darkness. Hugo curled up and shrieked.
"Get up."
"Y-young master, but just now."
"They aren't the problem, so get up."
"Yes......?"
Hugo looked up at Ethan with a bewildered expression.
In eyes that had adapted to the dark, Ethan's face was faintly visible.
'H-he's smiling?'
It was the expression of a man saying, there it is at last.
Hugo could not understand the state of Ethan's mind.
Taking it that easy in an extremity like this made no sense to Hugo's common sense.
'Bats.'
But Ethan had his reason.
The fact that bats had appeared.
It was proof he was finding the right road.
"Found you."
A savage gleam of eyes flashed in the dark.
He could tell without looking.
Every hair on him stood up and warned him.
Looking at Hugo, he could see the air about him had changed.
His pupils had drawn narrow and his breathing had quickened.
'The vampire's natural enemy.'
The blood of a werewolf ran in Hugo's body.
'Overwhelming physical ability.'
Spring hard to credit in a human being.
A beast's recovery that put him right in a day however brutally the training abused his body.
All of it came of Hugo's bloodline.
But Hugo did not know it.
Living among humans, the instinct called the feral nature had clouded over and faded.
The most efficient way to wake the feral nature of a beast that has lost it is to put it in front of fresh prey.
'The current has changed.'
Hugo's artless face had turned savage.
But Hugo, who had lived his whole life with a tender character, could not hide his confusion; the killing intent and the feral nature surging up in him were hard to accept.
"Filthy blood is mixed in you."
Someone began to walk out of the darkness.
The face of what looked like a young man was pallid, and the air he gave off was grim.
He spoke in a cold, low voice, looking between Ethan and Hugo.
"And what exactly is the reason you crawled in this far?"
"Came to beat up kids like you, obviously. Isn't that right?"
Ethan grinned at Hugo.
This part he left to Hugo.
It looked hard going for now, but before long the werewolf's true face would show itself.
'This is what I didn't teach him the sword for.'
There is no need to teach a beast to hunt.
Simply moving on instinct is their finest way of fighting.
A cat catches mice and eats snakes without being taught a thing.
In Hugo's blood ran the blood of the wolf.
'And noble blood among them, it said.'
Truly, however he looked at it, this was a trainwreck story for certain.
But Ethan was in the position of having to survive inside that trainwreck setting.
"Right, I'll go on ahead."
The vampire's gaze, fixed on Hugo, shifted to Ethan.
"......Do you dare to mock me?"
"No, I mean, your natural enemy is right there, so why mind me? Sort it out between yourselves."
Ethan's words seem to have broken the vampire's patience; killing intent settled into his eyes.
"An insolent thing like you is repulsive even to make a thrall of. Just die."
FWISH!
The vampire's hand shot at Ethan's face.
But Ethan avoided the attack with nothing more than a simple turn of his head.
'His hands are fast, that's certain.'
He had been braced from the first sign of the attack, and even so he had nearly had a hole put through his face.
"......A mere human, and you dodge?"
"Can't you fix the way you talk? It really does sound like shit."
The vampire's face twisted at the scathing criticism.
"If dying in agony is your wish, then I shall grant......"
GRAAAAAGH!
Just before the vampire could act, a bestial cry came from behind him.
Ethan took the opening in the vampire's attention and broke into an all-out run.
The vampire realized it and turned to give chase, and behind him the beast was already coming down on him.
Tap-tap!
Hugo's body had changed. His frame had grown huge, and silver fur and a long muzzle had come out on him.
Transformed, Hugo threw himself at the vampire.
Hugo had boasted superior spring and agility already.
But the physical ability of Hugo turned werewolf soared far above that level.
Far enough that the vampire could not react in time.
"Graagh!"
The vampire let out a scream full of pain. Because the sharp claws grown out on Hugo's hand had torn a fistful out of his shoulder.
Red blood began to run from the vampire's shoulder.
The vampire's pupils drew narrow.
He swung his long nails like swords.
Hugo, who had been watching the vampire's fingertips, lifted his head and avoided the attack easily.
Hugo snarled, as though his reason had been eaten whole.
Realizing this was no time to be careless, the vampire's expression hardened.
In the wild, a mistake means death.
For a vampire who had reigned as overlord of the region, the arrival of a threatening natural enemy was no light matter.
Even as he ran, Ethan glanced behind him.
'Stronger than expected.'
In the original he remembered Hugo fighting the vampire on even terms.
But Hugo as a werewolf was overwhelming him completely.
'The effect of the training?'
In the original, Hugo had not been able to bear his own power once he turned werewolf.
An unfinished body had gone into overload, and a body that could not keep up with the instinct had put shackles on him.
But Ethan had built Hugo the finest body he could.
Strength, quickness, endurance, cardiopulmonary capacity.
To produce the best result in a short span he had cut combat training out entirely and poured everything into conditioning.
And as a result Hugo's body was holding up under the werewolf's form now.
'The result doesn't change.'
Ethan had a good eye.
The vampire had been careless. Reigning after his fashion as overlord of a district, perhaps that was only to be expected.
His senses had dulled, and he had allowed himself to take it easy. And that ease had led to a serious wound.
Too deep a wound to ignore.
A fight generally goes against the side that bleeds first.
Nor was the gap in ability overwhelming.
It was the vampire who was used to combat.
But a lion knows how to fight from the moment it is born.
Hugo too could move naturally without being taught anything like a method of hunting.
'Time to collect the reward.'
Ethan started running without a backward glance.
***
He had got past the vampire, but obstacles went on standing in Ethan's way after that.
They were at a level embarrassing to set beside the vampire, though.
Scrawny bloodsuckers, kobolds, lower-tier monsters of that order.
The interior of the cave was cramped compared with how it looked from outside, which accounted for some of it, but the opposition was pitifully thin.
Ethan went on, dispatching each monster that blocked his path with the dagger in his hand.
'Because I'm still not used to anything with bulk.'
However fast Ethan's swordsmanship was growing, what Ethan handled best and had most confidence in was his own body.
With his life riding on this operation, it was right to use what was familiar over what was not.
'Doesn't bother me as much as I thought.'
Ryu Tae-sin the modern man, no, Ethan, had never taken a life until now.
What he was killing here was hard to call human, but they were 'things that had been human' and 'living creatures of roughly human size'.
And killing beings like that, Ethan felt nothing in particular.
'Because of this character's nature?'
That could be it.
The Ethan who appeared in the original novel had been an arrogant, utterly unrestrained psychopath.
Having transferred into a wastrel of a character who enjoyed torture and killed without a thought, a change of this order was within what he could accept.
'And even if not, this is inside a novel.'
Inside a novel.
Whether he could go back to Earth he did not know, but in the end this place was only a story.
SQUELCH—
Ethan took a goblin from behind and drove the dagger into the back of its neck.
'And I'm getting used to the work too.'
At first there had been incidents of blood splashing onto his clothes by mistake, but after a few repetitions the old mistakes were growing fewer.
'Hm, it's further than I thought.'
Ethan shook the blood off the dagger.
Looking into the cave without one point of light in it, Ethan presently moved his feet and stepped into its deep layer.
"Is this it?"
Ethan muttered as he looked at the small wooden stick driven into the ground deep in the cave.
A shabbier shape than he had expected.
'The Dead Tree.'
For all the chill the name carried, it had taken the form of an ordinary wooden stick.
Ethan stood looking at the stick in the ground for a while, and then began to take one step at a time.
'Strange.'
Ethan's senses were keen. His keen instinct was warning him.
It seemed to be whispering not to set his foot down any further.
But Ethan pressed his instinct down and kept moving.
The journey had been made to obtain this.
'This is the fastest road.'
He had no intention of going the orthodox way. To chase the fellow who was the novel's protagonist, he had no choice but to use a shortcut.
Ethan put out a hand and closed it on the stick.
"Hngh."
The moment he gripped it, a numbing sensation came with pain climbing up through his hand.
Not pain felt in the hand alone; it felt like something coming over his whole body along skin and vein.
The sensation was skin-crawling enough that he nearly let go on the spot, but Ethan set his teeth and pulled the stick free.
The dried-out stick, its life long gone, hummed as though it were weeping.
'My stomach's turning.'
It was not pain at a level he could not bear, but a revolting feeling came with it, as though he might be sick.
The energy of it gradually lessened, however, and a short while later, restored to his usual state, Ethan looked at the Dead Tree without a word.
The Dead Tree no longer gave off the chill it had before.
'Hm...... is that it?'
Ethan clenched a fist and opened it.
Nothing yet struck him as greatly different by feel.
But there was no mistaking it.
He had absorbed the Dead Tree.
'Shall I head back?'
Hugo's fight with the vampire ought to be about finished.
— Where do you think you are going.
Then a voice came from behind him.
Ethan stopped and turned his head slowly to look back.
There was nobody there. Not even the sense of a presence.
"It's not as though I misheard......"
Ethan muttered, and the voice came again.
— I feel the blood of Blante in you.
This time it was an utterance too certain to be denied.
An unforeseen situation.
Ethan deliberated a moment, then spoke.
"Um...... who might you be?"
— ......
The voice was silent a moment at the question, then went on.
— ......I too am one who inherited the blood of Blante. You could call me your ancestor.
......What?
Ethan stood looking blankly at empty air for a moment.
An ancestor?
A setting like that gets unpacked here, out of nowhere?
No, why, exactly?