Even in Vertus, whose world I had faced through pixel art on the other side of a monitor, orcs were never pushovers that beginners could casually cut down in the early game.
With sloppy gear and stats, charging one recklessly often meant having flesh separated from bone and a meaningless "Death" message popping up. To beginners, they were a wall of despair and a calamity in monster form. And if merely looking at that horrific monster through a screen was terrifying, facing it right in front of him with the texture of reality layered over it unleashed an overwhelming pressure no ordinary human could withstand.
A massive frame standing two meters tall and weighing nearly three hundred kilograms. To an ordinary person incapable of wielding mana, an orc was no different from a flying natural disaster. Even a Sword Runner-ranked mercenary had to risk his life against one alone, and a frontal duel was suicide for anyone who wasn't a Sword User or above. Worse, despite normally possessing the intelligence of a young elementary school student—enough to handle crude weapons and arrange a formation of sorts—the orcs before him were profoundly alien.
Dark red veins protruded grotesquely across gray-green skin that looked not merely pale but rotten, while their eyes had completely lost focus, gleaming only with bestial madness. Their muscles had swollen to abnormal proportions, and every time they moved, grotesque friction between twisting bone and muscle reverberated through the forest. They had clearly been subjected to horrific drug injections or human experimentation.
Stripped down to nothing but hunger and the instinct to slaughter, they had become meat grinders that tore apart every human in sight. The Iron Man's mechanical mind immediately and coldly calculated their current fighting power. He had only just absorbed another person's life force, and vitality had barely begun to flow through the body that had been reduced to bones, but facing that enormous mass of muscle head-on was still suicide. Even a graze would burst his organs and grind his bones to powder.
'Orcs are excluded. The targets are the armed mercenaries.'
Kyle's coldly settled gaze turned toward the armed mercenaries whose attention was completely consumed by the orcs. The forest where the battle raged was covered by dense, towering trees, leaving only scraps of sunlight filtering through gaps in the leaves despite the middle of the day. Faint shafts of light cast a grotesque glow over rising dust and drops of blood, while the surroundings were drowned in deep shadow and darkness.
Greed's hunger, ravenous for life force, clawed at his insides like a stomach being torn apart, but Kyle kept his reason under perfect control and melted completely into that blood-soaked darkness. The dim terrain was the perfect environment for hunting human mercenaries with limited vision.
The beast's hunt began. The first to catch his eye was a mercenary who had barely dodged a rough swing from an orc's club before tripping over a root hidden in the dusky shade and tumbling to the ground. Unable to regain his balance in time because of his heavy armor, the man flailed helplessly. Kyle approached his blind spot like a shadow, without making a sound. It was perfect stealth movement, so complete that even his breathing had vanished.
Slice—!
"Ghk……!"
Before the startled mercenary could even turn his head, Kyle's battered dagger cleanly pierced the vulnerable throat between his helmet and breastplate, where there was no protection at all. It was a perfect strike that gave him not even a moment to resist. When he pulled out the blade, blood spurted forth. At the same time, a bizarre blood-red haze rose from the wound and was sucked madly into Kyle's heart.
Kyle looked down at the corpse cooling to ice, then shifted his gaze to the heavy steel sword hanging from the man's waist. The dagger was too short to be efficient for the hunt that followed. Kyle sheathed the bloodstained dagger at his own waist and picked up the mercenary's sword from the ground.
Shing—. A fifteen-year-old orphan's body that had never held a sword even once in its life. Yet the moment the cold hilt touched his hand, the Heavenly Martial Physique and the Martial Arts Genius began producing a grotesque synergy.
He had not awakened to everything like a fully realized Sword Demon. But some vague instinct for handling the sword's center of gravity and the angle of its edge began to form in his mind. Kyle took hold of the unfamiliar sensation as it gradually settled into his body and advanced toward his next prey. Each time he cut through an enemy's flesh and blood, that sensation would be honed even sharper. The next to enter Kyle's field of vision were two mercenaries running around to the side in an attempt to draw the orc's attention.
The deep shadows created by the thick branches blocking out the light became perfect cover for Kyle. From within that darkness, he sprang like a beast and rushed in behind them. Then he thrust the newly acquired sword into the air.
The trajectory was much smoother than before. This was not a killing stroke forced through brute strength, but a swordsman's killing path that minimized air resistance and precisely targeted the junctures between bone and muscle.
Slice! Thud—!
"Aaaagh!" "Guhk!"
The first mercenary's neck was half severed, spraying a fountain of blood, and Kyle immediately applied the recoil of the returning blade to pierce the second mercenary's heart perfectly from behind. Along with the impact transmitted to his fingertips, the knack for handling the sword was etched even more clearly into his mind.
The two bodies crumpled to the ground without even managing proper screams. The massive life force released from both men wrapped around Kyle's entire body, forcibly rejoining muscle and bone.
"You insane little brat!"
The fourth target was a huge mercenary who had witnessed the slaughter moments ago in its entirety. Radiating a far stronger spirit than the men before him, he gripped a massive broadsword in both hands and charged furiously at Kyle, murderous intent pouring from him. Kyle could have met him head-on and cut him down in a single stroke, but his cold reason suddenly thought of an experiment.
It was the perfect opportunity to test the limits of this newly acquired body and his reflexes in response to another person's attack. Kyle deliberately stumbled clumsily and retreated behind the dark shade. He even pretended that the hand gripping his sword was trembling, exposing a wide-open gap.
The weak, frightened figure of a fifteen-year-old boy. Deceived by the flawless act, the mercenary gave a nasty smile and brought the broadsword down with his full body weight behind it.
"Die, you rat bastard!"
A terrifying roar split the air. But just before the massive blade reached the crown of Kyle's head, the eyes that had seemed frightened sank into a reptilian chill. With the smallest possible movement, Kyle twisted his upper body and lightly knocked aside the descending broadsword's trajectory with the flat of his own blade.
Clang—! No great strength was necessary. With the slightest adjustment to the direction of force, the mercenary's enormous sword cut through empty air and buried itself in the ground. His upper body collapsed helplessly when his full-powered strike missed, and reflected in his startled eyes was the boy's emotionless face, already closing in beneath his chin. Kyle's sword, whose struggle had been nothing but an act, shot ruthlessly upward from below.
Thrust—! The sword blade, driven up through the mercenary's jaw, flashed as it caught the thin shafts of sunlight leaking in from here and there. The fourth target's huge body fell, eyes rolled back, dead instantly.
"M-Monster……!"
The fifth mercenary watched all the deception and overwhelming slaughter, then completely lost his reason. A crazed orc rampaged ahead of him, while a mad little boy slaughtered mercenaries like toys behind him in the darkness. He threw away his weapon with trembling hands and began fleeing madly into the deep shadows between the densely packed trees.
But Kyle did not bother to chase him. He lowered the sword in his hand to the ground and drew the dagger tucked into his waistband. The Martial Arts Genius instantly calculated the fleeing target's speed, the direction of the wind, and the degree of muscle contraction.
When a faint beam of light barely shining through the leaves illuminated the back of the fleeing mercenary's head for an instant, Kyle pulled back the arm holding the dagger, then hurled it explosively forward like releasing a bowstring.
Whoosh—! The dagger cut through the air in a precise parabola and buried itself deep in the back of the fleeing mercenary's head, piercing through bone.
"Aah……!"
The mercenary collapsed on the spot, clawing at the ground until he died.
The life force of all five men. Vast energy poured into Kyle's entire body like a waterfall. If this had still been a game on the other side of a monitor, system messages would have appeared one after another in the corner of his vision. But in this hell that had become reality, there were no such conveniently helpful text notifications.
There was only the vivid growing pain that seemed to tear his entire body apart, along with the horrifying sensation of a body reduced to bare bones by severe abuse and malnutrition finally being restored to the "original stats it should have possessed." Practical, tightly packed muscle without an ounce of excess filled his limbs, which had been dried out with no flesh on them, restoring them to the sturdy frame of a normal boy. At the same time, the blood-red life force coursing through his body gathered near his heart and condensed into a tiny mass.
But it was still nothing more than a speck of mana, far too insignificant to manifest anything. With his current body, Kyle could not even dream of channeling mana into his sword to perform Sword User techniques, or drawing it outside his body to attack. He had not even reached the threshold of a Sword Runner—the very bottom of the bottom. Only the pure physical strength and reflexes of his normalized body were his sole weapons.
Meanwhile, on the opposite side of the battlefield, the hulking leader of the mercenary band, clad in heavy iron armor, was engaged in a desperate struggle for life and death.
"Huff, huff……"
The captain panted harshly, his face covered in blood. At his feet lay the three elite subordinates who had fought alongside him, already reduced to hideous corpses by the orc's club, without a bone left intact. But a sliver of hope still remained in the captain's eyes.
He had calculated that if the five subordinates who had gone to draw the other orc's aggro from the opposite side joined them, they could take down the wounded orc before him.
'Just hold out a little longer!'
Barely deflecting the orc's rough attacks, the captain screamed toward the rear until his throat felt ready to burst.
"Hey, you bastards! Get over here right now! Form up! If you five hit it from the side, we can take this monster down!!"
After giving the order, the captain waited for the reassuring response of his subordinates and the urgent sound of their approaching footsteps. But.
Only a chillingly unnatural silence answered him. The dense branches blocked the surroundings in every direction, creating a cold silence no different from an eerie night despite the daylight. Sensing that something had gone terribly wrong, the captain hurriedly turned his head, bloodshot eyes wide.
In the darkness. The five subordinates he had called for so desperately lay scattered around him as cold corpses, forming pools of blood. And in their midst stood a boy, drenched from head to toe in someone else's blood, staring straight at him with pitch-black eyes beneath a single shaft of sunlight breaking through the leaves.
An overwhelming, horrifying murderous aura rose from the boy's body, as though tens of thousands of beasts were lying in wait within him.
"W-What the hell is that……"
That instant of shock. The half-second gap in which his brain stalled as it registered that his subordinates had been massacred by a boy, not an orc. That brief opening, born while the forest's deep shadows blurred his vision, was no different from a horrific death sentence in a struggle where life and death hung in the balance.
Boom—! The orc's enormous club struck the captain's unguarded side without mercy. His iron armor crumpled like paper, followed by a cracking sound as his spine was pulverized. The captain's body was hurled through the air and slammed miserably into the wreckage of the wagon.
With all his organs ruptured, he died instantly without even managing a final cry. From the darkness, Kyle watched the scene, his eyes narrowing coldly.
'A shame.'
The captain had likely possessed the highest-quality life force here. It was regrettable that Kyle had been unable to personally finish him and absorb his strength, allowing him to be sent flying so pointlessly by the orc's club. There were no surviving mercenaries left. Even though their commander had been killed horribly, every subordinate who might have screamed and mourned him had already been slaughtered by Kyle's hand. Only a horrifying silence steeped in blood remained over the forest.
"Raaaaargh!"
Having struck down the last human tormenting it, the orc unleashed a victorious roar that shook the forest.
That was when it happened. A massive shadow emerged from the deep shade cast by the towering trees, each heavy step pounding the ground. There had not been only one orc. A second orc, covered in blood after tearing the coachman and escort mercenaries apart at the front, had joined them. It was the instant when the two orcs, drunk on the euphoria of victory, relaxed their beastly muscles for a moment.
Bang—! Kyle's form launched off the ground and shot upward, tearing through the darkness. The spring in the leg muscles that had finally recovered their normal strength after escaping malnutrition was fast and precise enough to carry him straight to the first orc's broad shoulders. Now, while the creature was off guard and howling, was the perfect hunting moment calculated by the Iron Man's reason.
Kyle landed on its shoulder in the dusky shade, gripped the steel sword in reverse, and brought it down with his weight behind it toward the thickest carotid artery.
Kang—! But at the moment when bone should have split and blood should have erupted, a dull resistance like striking a massive iron boulder slammed into Kyle's wrist.
'The muscle density is abnormal.'
The drug-soaked mutant orc's neck muscles had expanded abnormally at the moment of crisis, pushing the blade away. He had opened a wound and burst blood vessels, but Kyle's strength had fallen just short of making it a fatal injury that would sever the orc's life in one blow. The mana dwelling inside the protagonist was no more than a speck of dust and could not add any force to the blade. Mana that had not even reached the threshold of a Sword Runner was incapable of cleaving through those grotesque muscles in a single strike.
"Grrrgh!"
The enraged first orc clutched at its neck and reached its enormous hand toward Kyle on its back. To make matters worse, the second orc spotted Kyle as well and raised its vicious club into the air.
Whoosh—! From within the forest's darkness, the second orc's club rushed forward at terrifying speed, intent on crushing Kyle's entire upper body. The first orc's rough hand and the second orc's club.
With the space on its back too limited for escape, every route was perfectly blocked. It was a crisis in which death was certain. Kyle had just finished calculating how to draw his sword and throw himself to the ground to evade their trajectories when—
"Duck, kid!"
A streak of blue mana flashed through the darkness like an instant, then shot fiercely toward the first orc's knee joint, where Kyle was riding.
Thrust—!
"Graaagh!"
With half its tendon severed, the first orc staggered and dropped to one knee. As its massive body suddenly collapsed, Kyle's position atop its shoulder dropped sharply with it.
Whoosh—! The second orc's club swept past above Kyle's head, cutting through empty air. If the first orc had not dropped to its knee, that trajectory would have crushed Kyle beneath the club without a chance to move. It had been perfectly timed intervention.
Using the recoil, Kyle slid down from the orc's back and landed lightly on the ground. A man approached him, gasping roughly as he gripped a battered longsword. It was Antonio, the old mercenary who had tried to save Kyle from the corner of the wagon.
At some point, he had found a key among the corpses and freed himself from his shackles. A faint blue light flickered along the tip of his longsword, then quickly faded. The mana Antonio could wield was extremely weak—the bare minimum for a Sword Runner. He could maintain mana on the blade for barely a second.
His hard-won technique was to explode mana in a flash only at the moment of impact. That instantaneous strike had allowed him to cut through the orc's thick joint just now, but he could squeeze out that technique only five or six more times at most.
Antonio opened his mouth, glaring at Kyle through the faint sunlight barely penetrating the trees, his eyes mixing wariness with stunned disbelief.
"I thought you were dead weight, but you butcher people like rats."
Antonio's gaze shifted to the two orcs ahead, who were snorting angrily as they rose again. Their dark red veins gleamed grotesquely in the deeply shadowed forest.
"But that toy strength of yours won't do squat against those mutants. Their muscles are like steel from all the drugs they've taken."
He glanced rapidly between Kyle and the two orcs before adding,
"I'll draw their attention and hit their joints. You use that movement to get into their blind spots and stab their vital points! If we don't coordinate, we're both dead here."
It was the cold compromise of a veteran mercenary trying to survive, as well as a flawless proposal for cooperation. From his previous strike, Kyle's reason had also realized that, even with his normalized body, he needed a reliable distraction and an opening to pierce the orc's dense muscles in one blow while lacking any mana support. He agreed immediately.
They were a combination that could perfectly cover each other's weaknesses. Kyle opened his mouth to accept the plan. But.
No words came out. More precisely, his jaw had locked up with a foreign sensation that felt as though his vocal cords were being torn apart, and only a hoarse sound circled in his throat. Kyle, the fifteen-year-old orphan who had been the original owner of this body. Whether it was a side effect of severe abuse and malnutrition or a congenital problem, he suffered from a serious speech impediment.
There was no time to explain the situation at length. Kyle adjusted his grip on the steel sword dripping blood and opened his bloodless lips toward Antonio, forcing out a short, rough metallic sound.
"……Yeah."
A short, dry affirmation. Antonio let out a hollow chuckle and tightened his grip on his longsword.
"Damn brat."
Beneath the faint shafts of sunlight falling through the leaves, the mutant orcs howled like beasts as they raised their collapsed knees. An old hound and a beast crazed for slaughter simultaneously kicked off from the floor of the dark forest and sprang forward.