THUD!
The ground shook hard.
For an instant it felt as though an earthquake had come.
The apprentice knights' bodies swayed, and only Ethan and Hugo threw their eyes into the air.
"It's coming down."
Gato turned his gaze the way Ethan and Hugo were looking.
It was too dark to see properly.
But thanks to the moonlight coming between the trees, he could see something like a great shadow falling.
Gato's eyes widened and widened.
The shadow came closer.
'Surely that is not......'
WHAM!
He did not want to believe it, and the hope collapsed without mercy.
Even at a rough look in the dark it was a monster of tremendous size, easily several meters and more.
"This is...... the Black Ogre......"
His mouth would not close.
He had heard of them in old tales and in boasts of arms.
The tag that followed them, that they were monsters no human could handle, had always been attached, and honestly he had been half in doubt.
That monsters are large and savage is natural.
And the individuals of unusually great size among them were Ogres.
They were certainly dangerous beasts, and he had thought the exaggeration far too heavy.
But the legends looked, if anything, insufficient.
The Black Ogre faced in the flesh was a monster that weakened your knees the instant you looked at it.
'Fight this?'
He wanted to run on the spot. And Gato did not let go of the sword in his hand.
Seeing that leap a moment ago had made it all the clearer.
Running was a choice he had to erase from his head.
If one leap carried that far, then the moment the thing set its mind to chasing them they would plainly be caught in an instant.
Only with a sword raised was there even a thread of hope.
Shiiing—
At the sound of Gato drawing, Ethan glanced behind him.
Every other man had sat down hard in fright, and Gato alone had taken a fighting stance.
— Young still, as expected.
At Pheon's mutter, Ethan lifted his head and looked at the Black Ogre.
This was the young one...... It really did not look it.
Ethan snorted a laugh.
That was the detonator.
The Black Ogre raised a hand and brought it straight down on the ground.
Without anyone saying a word, all three of them threw themselves clear.
Hugo, now at a distance, had fangs showing at his mouth.
Grrrr—
"Stay as you are."
Ethan said it, looking at Hugo making a beast's cry.
Hugo's feral shift put a great load on his body. And having just come back to human form in the fight before, there was already a heavy load on the flesh.
He could not let him shift here again.
'And there are too many eyes.'
He had no intention of revealing what Hugo was yet.
The moment Hugo heard it, the pupils that had drawn narrow as an animal's came back.
"No one's thinking of fighting?"
Ethan looked behind him.
Every party member was shaking.
"So the will to become a knight came to about that much."
He had expected it and the disappointment was still large. Ethan looked at Gato.
"You, at least, are all right."
"......Is this a time to be taking it easy?"
Gato looked at Ethan with a dumbfounded expression.
Where the Black Ogre had struck, a great crater had opened in the ground.
It had not even made a separate large wind-up; it had simply brought a hand down.
And the destructive force was that.
Take one of those square on and genuinely not a chip of bone would be left.
"Go on and attack first."
Ethan said it as though doing him a favor.
A surge of indignation jumped out of Gato for an instant, and there was no margin to spell it out now.
'I have to attack anyway.'
Gato gripped the sword and bent forward.
Muscle contracted, and then Gato charged the Black Ogre.
'The legs first!'
The great height meant there did not look to be many places worth going for a mortal wound. So Gato aimed first for the Black Ogre's Achilles tendon.
The hide looked thinnest there of anywhere, and an injury there could put heavy restriction on its movement.
But......
CLANG!
'Insane!'
Gato's eyes went wide as lantern bowls.
Though the sword had cut the hide, he felt a tremendous rebound off it.
The sensation was like swinging a hammer at a huge lump of iron; his hand went numb and his head swam.
"Grk?"
The Black Ogre's brow twitched.
As though dealing with an insect, the Black Ogre raised a leg.
'Too late!'
Slow to react, Gato set his teeth.
He twisted his body as best he could, and he was already a beat behind. He could see the Ogre's foot going up.
Dark as it was around him, he felt the huge shadow falling over his head. It was like death coming.
'Is this the end?'
An empty ending.
Everyone dreams of his own last hour. He had not wished for a peaceful death as a knight.
But everyone wanted an honorable death, and wanted his valor and his achievements acknowledged.
That is the breed called knights.
And a death like this......
He did not regret joining Ethan's subjugation party. Given an opportunity, a man who does not take it is a halfwit.
But to be no match for the thing at all.
In that moment, wrapped in despair, Gato's collar was yanked hard.
"Good work."
Ethan had taken hold of Gato's collar and thrown him with everything he had.
The direction he flew was where Hugo stood.
Gato floated through the air with no time even to be startled.
Ethan, meanwhile, loaded mana into his legs. He slipped the Black Ogre's kick and opened the distance again.
"I've roughly got the feel of it."
He felt as though he roughly understood how to operate mana efficiently.
'If I do it like this......'
Ethan put force into the tips of his feet and the ground beneath them burst outward.
In Ethan's hand was the sword Gato had been holding.
— Tsk. With me here, and still you insist on gripping a weapon.
Ethan ignored Pheon's grumbling.
Right now Ethan had no confidence he could wound that monster without a weapon.
As Ethan closed, the Black Ogre swung a fist at him.
For the size of it, it was remarkably nimble movement.
But to Ethan's eye the attack was only broad in area, and nothing but slow.
Ethan ran fast and changed direction.
Where to aim was decided.
Swish!
Swordsmanship was not familiar to him.
And there was no guaranteeing swordsmanship would work against a monster outside all specification like a Black Ogre to begin with.
The Blante clan's swordsmanship had developed purely on the assumption of facing other humans.
In that case there was nothing for it but to use the most intuitive, the most efficient, the most useful technique available.
Ethan bent low and his thighs swelled.
Warmed muscle fiber contracted as though it would burst, and mana settled into it along with the blood.
— You cannot mean......
Ethan had no margin of mana. Assume the use of Pheon's power and there was a little margin, and that was purely insurance.
With a sound like a pop, Ethan shot out.
Gato's eyes went wide.
He could not see Ethan's movement.
'Mana!'
Movement on that order was impossible on physical ability alone, so Gato was certain.
Ethan was operating mana right now.
But how?
Mana cannot be hidden.
It was not because of the image Ethan held inside the clan.
By what Gato had watched, Ethan had trained only his body and had not cultivated mana.
When Gato had asked, he had only said he had a plan and dodged the answer.
That was the part Gato could not understand.
Mana.
Become a full knight and you could learn the Blante clan's secret mana cultivation method.
Ethan was a trueborn of the clan.
He was born with the right to learn a method that had produced a great many Masters.
To hold the opportunity everyone longed for and neglect mana.
He could not understand it, but that did not mean Ethan was slack in his training.
He repeated hard training so absurd, every single day, that it was hard to understand how the rumor of a wastrel had ever gone around.
'How, then?'
Stacking mana and operating it takes physical time, regardless of talent.
And in a span this short, mana operation this precise.
Nade was no less astonished.
He had felt that something about Ethan was different when he came out of the cave.
But he had not thought it was mana.
That in the half-day of going to that cave and back, the man had awakened mana.
'What in the world have you done?'
But a Black Ogre was not an opponent a greenhorn who had only just begun handling mana could beat.
Nade drew his mana up slowly.
Because allow the Black Ogre even one attack and even Ethan would not come through it.
He had to be ready to intervene in that fight at any moment.
Ethan leapt.
Ethan could not yet sheathe a blade in mana.
A Black Ogre's hide was hard to so much as scratch with an edge that carried no mana.
Ethan knew it too.
'The protagonist, well. Seems he killed one well enough.'
Ethan and the original's protagonist differ in situation and in position.
But there was no need to complain about it.
He only had to hunt by a method other than the original protagonist's.
Flying through the air, Ethan landed and went straight for the area of the Black Ogre's groin.
'Let's see whether the hide here is tough too.'
Ethan's point went for the Black Ogre's groin.
SHLUCK—
The sword went in.
— ......What a horrific thing to do.
The dismay came through in Pheon's voice.
Gato's and Nade's and Hugo's faces filled with shock as well.
To attack in a way like that.
And Ethan's brutality did not end there.
KRRRAK!
Ethan turned the blade sideways. The sound of flesh crushing and tearing rang out.
Blood poured over Ethan's head like a fountain. It looked like showering in it, and Ethan did not close his eyes.
GHOOOAAARGH!
The Black Ogre screamed in agony.
The scream alone shook the ground and set the trees trembling.
Birds and winged things fled at the Black Ogre's roar.
"Sorry about that."
It isn't over yet.
A smile hung at Ethan's mouth. He took hold of the wound he had ripped open once and pushed the sword straight in.
The fibers were so dense and the hide so hard that he heard the edge chipping.
Veins rose on Ethan's forearm.
As though hoisting a barbell, Ethan put everything he had into ripping the wound open once more.
GRAAAAAH!
The Black Ogre thrashed and sat down where it was.
SHLUCK—
The sword stayed buried deep in the Ogre's groin, and presently, with a dull sound, it broke.
The sword was a slight waste, and it was already past reuse.
It had been Gato's weapon rather than his own, and reckoned as the price of a life it had come cheap.
"Hoo."
He barely got his breath level.
And there was no margin to take it easy.
How fast a Black Ogre's regeneration was, he did not know.
He did not think everything would heal even with a vital part made into rags, and there was no telling when the thing would go berserk.
Kicking off the ground and climbing again, Ethan's clothes were soaked through with the Black Ogre's blood.
"Sorry about this, huh?"
Mounted on the chest of the fallen Ogre, Ethan bared his teeth and smiled.
Killing intent poured out of the Black Ogre's eyes.
And on the other side of it, the thing seemed steeped in terror.
The Black Ogre had always been in the predator's position.
Pain of this kind was deeply unfamiliar to him.
His tough hide had never once been split, and however ferocious and savage a monster, it had always tucked its tail and run before a Black Ogre.
His days had been spent considering what to eat today; there had been no day for learning pain.
The Black Ogre swung an arm to catch Ethan, and it cut nothing but empty air.
Ethan went up as far as the Black Ogre's face and gathered the mana left in his body into his hand.
This was the last of it.
He could not produce explosive movement the way he had a moment ago.
That an Ogre's hide was tough he had felt in the exchange just now.
But a living creature always has tissue that is not tough.
Ethan took hold of the Ogre's eyelid.
"This'll make you a bit dizzy. It'll be over fast."
A dagger was in Ethan's hand.
SHLUUCK!
Ethan's hand went through the Ogre's eyeball. By how deep it went, it seemed to go in as far as his shoulder.