***
Mutig,
Being a hunter in Waldheim Village meant more than just bringing game home, it meant being the village's first and last line of defense.
That's what my pa used to tell me when I was just a wee lad.
When I was Schnell's age, just like him, I didn't get that. Not that I blame the lad, or my younger, more handsome self, for that matter.
The world looks so small from inside the village, and the forests around feel safe. Like home. Easy to forget that just twelve miles south-east, there is the mountain of Kleinhorn, infested with monsters that hellhole is, and if the inhabitants hunt all the game, they start migrating.
When they do, children and adults go missing, and the forest paths you used to know like the wrinkles on the face of your wife suddenly aren't as familiar, sunny, and peaceful anymore.
Thirty years ago, I had a wake-up call, almost lost an eye to a monster who decided to dive on a stupid human hunter who walked the forest like he owned it. Half of my face is still marked by it. At least Stille likes it, says she married my grumbling ass for it, so I can't complain too much.
I just prayed to the Goddess that Schnell wouldn't need a surprise like that to set him straight, unlike his idiot pa.
Being a hunter meant being able to hunt more than just beasts, it meant being able to hunt monsters. Now, obviously, I like to brag over a pint or two, who doesn't, but even I can easily admit that the stuff I can handle is small fry. There are monsters out there that come and leave like the storm, and behind them, there is only death and devastation. A weaker monster or two, usually starved and pushed out of their usual territory, I can handle. Handled for years now.
Schnell can too, as long as the lad keeps sharp.
But that house-sized monstrosity that was making itself at home in our corner of the forest for the last few months is not a beast I would have us hunt lightly.
Knowing one's own limits is also important for a hunter. Sure, if the beast were to decide to attack the village, we would fight. But until then, the best bet was to pass a message with the next merchant, to the lord, asking to send some proper men for the job.
Meanwhile, tracking the beast and preparing for it is about the best we can do.
The road back home was quiet. The boy was daydreaming again, and after the last two tense hours, when we were crouching with nary a sound, trying to make sense of the tracks to triangulate where the beast had its lair, I couldn't blame 'em.
The forest was nice this time of the year. Birds screaming their little throats out, bees buzzing by, real easy to tell if something is outa of place. Unlike in winter or autumn, right now, if little beasties get agitated, you can tell.
We picked some herbs old Weise asked us to look out for, and some nice berries and mushrooms, in our usual spots. Couldn't afford to hunt any game on this outing; the smell of blood could agitate the monster, those creatures tended to have a keen sense for it.
It was near the entrance of the village that we were greeted by a stranger.
An odd fellow if I ever saw one. Wore that oversized worn cloak, but otherwise was dressed decently, in linen clothing. Very stiff though, and his hands looked as if he didn't have an honest day's worth of work in his life.
He was pretty tall, about as tall as I, and I am not a small man.
"Mutig and Schnell, I presume," The stranger said, his voice was… about right, honestly. I've heard bards who sang more off-tune than he spoke. The stuck-up manner of speech also added up, as did his pale, delicate skin.
I just had no idea what the hell a noble was doing in our parts.
"You'd presume right," I spoke up, chewing on the blade of grass, "Who is asking?"
Couldn't see the man's eyes under the clock, but could swear he briefly looked us both over.
"My name is Albert. The herbalist, Weise, asked me to kill a monster. Said you knew where to find it."
Now, that did take me aback. Still, I looked over the man more carefully. He did have a sword, a decent one too, and he did carry himself confidently…
…no, not confidently, he carried himself without a hint of wariness or tension. Like he was completely relaxed.
"Alright," I said slowly.
Then, at a moment's notice, I moved.
I didn't wind up my punch, just struck, hard as I could, next to his face…
I blinked, staring at my hand, which he caught. I didn't even notice him move properly. Just his cloak suddenly moving in the non-existent wind, and something blurring in the air.
"I can only assume that was some sort of test," He said, undisturbed, just as relaxed and uncaring, letting go of my wrist.
Usually, one can get a measure of a man with a handshake. This was about just as effective. The stranger's grip felt like steel.
"Pa, what in the hells?!" The boy asked, probably staring stupidly at my back.
I grunted.
"If that monster gets agitated, it can attack the village. Letting some hothead with a sword have a go at it will get it all sorts of excited," I explained, both to Albert and the boy. "So sorry 'bout that, but not sorry. Picking out your remains out of his tusks is one thing, but I ain't gonna let everyone in Waldheim suffer 'cuz a new adventurer with lips still white from his momma's milk got a big head."
The man nodded simply, as if expecting it. Maybe he did.
He is damn unsettling. Like nothing that happened surprised or moved him in the slightest. Gives me the creeps.
"I understand." He said simply, and by his tone, it was impossible to say if he did. "I can assure you, you don't have to worry about trying to peel my remains off of anything."
I chuckled despite myself, the joke was shit, but the delivery was good.
"Alright, well, can't check for much else, but you are damn strong and fast. We still have about six hours of daylight, the lair is about two hours away. If you want mine and Schnell's help, you'll have to wait until tomorrow, when we rest up a bit."
I knew the boy would complain, so I turned around as I finished the sentence and glared at him all meaningful like.
"I can still help," He said stubbornly, not willing to look me in the eyes, as he glanced down.
We both knew he was full of shit.
"That won't be necessary," The Albert fellow said simply, breaking up the argument before it could begin. Which I appreciated, not the first time the boy was shite at judging his limits. "I just need you to show me where it is. I don't need any support. I actually would appreciate not having an audience for the fight, a lot of my abilities are a secret I would like to keep. I would also like not having other people I would have to worry about around."
Strange thing to say, but nobles are always weird. Like mages. Like they live in a different world.
Still, as far as I am concerned…
"Sounds good to me." I grunted simply, passing the man by and clapping his shoulder for a moment, "Now wait here, I will be back in a few, gotta take a shit."
Been holding it back for the last three hours, no way am I doing it in the forest when we are practically in the village.
***
A few hours later,
"Now, the beast should be up ahead, stay sharp," I whispered to the swordsmen, who were crouching by my side.
At first, when we entered the forest, he walked like a boar, so loudly it would wake the dead. But he was surprisingly quick at picking things up. By now, he had almost moved like a proper hunter. Learned how to move branches out of the way, learned how to walk properly, and I saw him study me and the boy and emulate it. He was good.
"The boy and I will be here. If things go very wrong, scream."
Albert hesitated, but nodded after a few moments. He looked tenser, coiled like a spring. Surprisingly, that made me feel more at ease.
Meant something could get under his skin, too.
"Thank you for your concern, but it's unnecessary. I will be back shortly."
He sounded confident, too. Not made of stone, after all.
"Who said anything about concern? If you scream, it's our cue to run away."
A bit of gallows humor was just what the lad needed to distress a bit. That's what I thought.
Yet, he didn't react to the joke, just nodded all serious like, and immediately started to move through the forest in the direction of the beast's lair.
When he was gone, Schnell spoke up quietly.
"Pa, you think he'll be alright?"
"Shush," I whispered back, glaring at the boy. We still didn't know exactly how good the monster's senses were. No reason to tempt fate.
With a few sharp gestures, I told the boy to get up a tree; it was a decent one to shoot from, while I picked another one.
Monsters who weren't flying by nature rarely could jump good, and a tree in its way is another second for you to jump somewhere else while it rams it or tries to climb it.
Maybe some pansy town hunters couldn't jump across trees or climb them well, but hunters in villages like ours were trained properly. Warrior's techniques, my pa used to call 'em, though they all boiled down to basic physical conditioning.
If you trained properly from when you were young, you could jump like a squirrel and be strong enough to punch through a wooden wall. That's actually a bare minimum the boy, I, and my pa before me had to do, before being allowed on proper hunts.
Against monsters being unable to do even that much will get you killed.
The instant we took our spots, the forest shook.
"BREEEEAAARRRGH!"
An ungodly sound, both a boar's screech, all pig-like, and a roar of challenge and pain. The birds immediately went wild and started to fly away, screaming their throats out.
Even from here, it was loud enough for the boy to clutch at his ears. At least he didn't lose his bow.
Still, despite myself, I couldn't help but worry for the lad who went ahead to fight that. I saw the beast from afar, went alone when I did, and covered myself with enough compost and urine for it to be unable to smell me, wore a last year's bear pelt too. The monster looked big and dangerous, ugly like Treue's momma, goddess rest her soul, but this sound alone meant more than just size and a mean face; it felt like one of those nasty magics I heard some stronger monsters had, which meant that thing was even more dangerous than I thought.
But for a while, aside from much quieter screeches, it was mostly silent.
I can't tell when I realized that the tree I was sitting on was shaking.
The first thing we saw wasn't the bore, but rather, a line of falling trees that was approaching alarmingly fast. So fast that the shock didn't have the time to wear off, when the demonic beast in the shape of a boar tore through the hill, throwing up dirt, wooden chips, and other debris.
My hands moved before my mind registered that it did, letting out two arrows, enhanced with my mana, before I could even process what was going on properly.
Both bounced off the beast's hide uselessly, not even penetrating.
My eyes widened in horror as my mind caught up with reality, the boar isn't going to pass by. It was on a direct collision course with the Schnell's tree!
"BOY, MOVE, NOW!" I shouted, realizing I would not be able to jump towards him in time, I just couldn't. Not when I had to shift in place first from a stable shooting position to even be able to jump, much less towards him!
The boy himself didn't even seem to hear me, just… stared at the approaching death, like a rabbit trapped by a snake.
I would never forget the expression on his face in that instant. In that moment, I knew my son would die.
He appeared like a blur. His figure easily lost next to the boar, but he was probably on its tail, maybe even literally, from the very beginning.
I could see a blur in the dark cloak, jumping across trees, and breaking them with his feet, like a stone skipping across water, his feet never even made solid contact with a horizontal surface, with each jump he merely pushed himself into each new tree with such force, that it held him for long enough to jump again. To achieve this, he twisted and rolled in the air like a serpent, too!
My eyes barely caught him moving; in hindsight, the coordination and reaction time necessary to pull a trick like that would've been insane.
He reached Schnell a moment before the boar rammed into the tree trunk, practically evaporating the century-old pine. My boy was grabbed by the scruff of the neck like a naughty pup, and with a single motion, somehow careful enough not to snap the boy's neck, thrown towards me.
The boy screamed.
"Fuck!" I cursed.
Albert, the absolutely insane fucker, didn't say a single world, as he fell to his death, right towards the warpath of the fucking demonic boar.
The sheer adrenaline-filled cocktail of emotions that ran through me in the previous few instances didn't even register properly. I didn't have time to process them, but the adventurer was already pulling another fucking miracle.
I only saw it with my peripheral vision, busy as I was catching my son, and helping him on the branch.
But somehow Albert twisted around in the air in the spare moment he had after saving Schnell, despite the impact from the debris he collide with in the air, like a fucking cat, and landed on his feet. Normally, that would just leave him trampled standing, rather than lying down.
But the boar, disoriented from the collision, didn't manage to immediately skewer him. It clearly saw him and tried to gore him with its head, shaking it from side to side, its colossal three sets of tusks flashing like steel in the air.
Albert, somehow not even phased, managed to weave in tune with the head movements of the beast. The moment he landed, he used the inertia to move left, avoiding the first swing, then like a pendulum, he swung right, avoiding the boar's next swing of it's colossal head, finally the madman ran up the beast's head, avoiding it's jaws with which the monster tried to bite him in half, stepped on his fucking teeth, and jumped from them hard enough to leave the beast reeling, as his body slammed into the Duncan Cedar, a colossal beast of a tree just ten or so meters away from where the bore was… and kicked it.
The sequence of events was completely ridiculous, something you would hear people make up about one hero or another.
But I saw with my own eyes as the colossal cedar, at least forty meters tall, and wide enough for three men to hug, broke in the middle, and started to fall… on the boar.
Albert, of course, wasn't anywhere near the crush side; the colossal tree fell upon the roaring and snaring beast, that sounded downright… afraid. The monster attempted to flee, but its relatively short, stubby legs couldn't move it away in time. The only thing it achieved was that instead of landing on its head, the colossus of a tree landed on its back.
With a loud snap.
Albert was by the side of the boar before it even recovered, landing next to its head. Slowly, much too slowly, even by my standards, the young man raised the sword high above his head, both hands gripping the hilt, the blade angled downward - tip first - ready to drive it down in a finishing blow.
The blade in his hand glowed blue, crackling from the sheer amount of mana he was pouring into it.
Then, quicker than lightning, he struck the blow.
It crushed like a hammer of god. I swear I could've felt the earth shake.
But the beast, oh the fucking beast, it snarled and trashed, squealing louder, not dead. The blade stuck in its enormous skull. Probably didn't even penetrate properly, but now firmly lodged in it. Stuck.
But Albert didn't seem bothered or surprised; he just jumped on top of the monster's head, raising his fist…
*Bam.*
He punched the hilt, the sound loud enough to echo across the forest. The beast screamed louder, trashed harder, trying to throw the man off.
But Albert was relentless. The expression on his face never changed. His shoulder never tensed beyond what was needed to deliver the blow. The man looked like a genuine fucking icon of serenity.
*Bam.*
The second strike drove the hilt deeper, definitely penetrating the brain. But the funny thing about monsters is that something like that isn't a mortal wound for them.
It seems Albert knew it too, as he raised his bloody fist up, one more time.
*Crack.*
This time, something gave in, the beast's skull visibly deforming, blood shooting from the wound like a small fountain, covering Albert's clothes.
That didn't even slow him down. The only part of his face I could see, his lips, didn't even twitch.
The demonic boar let out its loudest, most desperate scream yet and…
*Crack.*
*Squelch!*
The skull of the beast cracked open, like a giant tomato, spewing disgusting brain matter everywhere, with fragments of bone, and likely the sword that was used to do the deed.
By that point, I had already jumped down and was approaching the man carefully. The finishing blow merely made me step aside to let a large part of the brain fly past, and fall on the ground with a wet squelching sound.
He stood indifferent, his face as if carved out of stone, any tension gone from his body, despite being covered in blood and brain matter from head to toe.
"Squeal your last, piggy," I snarled, spitting on the monster's body just when it started to break down into mana.
The blood and gore on Albert's body and clothing also started to shine blue and disappear into the motes of light.
"Those beasts are beautiful when dead." The man commented, as if talking about the weather, as he studied his hand, as the monster's blood evaporated from it into motes of light.
For a moment, his words didn't register.
Then I started to laugh.
At that moment, I genuinely thought it was the funniest fucking thing I've heard in my life. My son seemed to agree.
So here we were, two idiots laughing, while the adventurer stood there, cool as a cucumber, not phased in the slightest.
It took us a while to recover enough to stand straight.
***
"At least I can see what you wanted to hide so badly," I said, tightening the bandages on Albert's arm. While it looked like he dodged the boar perfectly, apparently, the beast still managed to cut his arm up a bit. The man acted as if he didn't feel any pain, but I could feel him tensing when I had to stitch it close.
Young men and trying to act stoic. Not like there were any ladies around here to impress.
"It's a shame about the sword," He commented, trying to change the subject. I didn't mind. I don't care what type of secret warrior tribe he was a part of; after today, as far as I was concerned, he could be a filthy money-grabbing fucking Southerner for all I cared. "I just started to get used to it."
The aforementioned sword, or more precisely, its bent hilt, was resting in Albert's hand. He seemed to find tracing fingers over it meditative.
I chuckled.
"Well, you could probably buy a much better one with this," I said, with some theatrical gesture offering him a colossal tusk.
Monsters rarely left anything behind themselves. They needed to have a lot of mana for their parts to stay solid after their deaths.
He looked taken aback for a moment, genuinely, I could see his mouth opening a bit.
"That wasn't part of the contract." He said slowly. "This is yours."
I just shook my head, smiling all the while.
"Just take it, whatever old Weise offered you for killing that thing, it wasn't enough," I told him seriously. "We are a small village, we probably can't pay you properly. But this tusk is a high-quality thing, even I can tell, the city's alchemists will probably pay you enough to buy ten swords like this." I gesture at the hilt in his hand.
For a moment, the young man, and I could tell he was young, not even a single hair growing around his mouth, hesitated.
"Come on, take it. Or I will really take offense." I threatened him jokingly.
For a moment, he stared at me. Then nodded, not a hint of emotion in his body language.
"I understand. Thank you, you are a kind man."
Grunting is an art form I long since mastered, with this grunt I conveyed all my (good-natured) disdain (and amusement).
"I married the last person who said that to me, and not only do I not swing that way, Stille would have my balls even were I to agree."
The man finally accepted the tusk, carefully packing it away into a cloth he extracted from a small pouch on his belt, freeing me up to finish bandaging him up properly.
"Laying with another man is a sin," He said, probably just to say something.
I chuckled.
"A sworsman, an adventurer, and a preacher too? Someone is just full of talents."
He didn't comment, merely shrugged a bit, making me pause for a moment, and glare at the kid.
"Don't move again while I work," I warned him.
Wisely, he kept silent.
A minute or so passed.
"Done," I said, finally leaving him alone, as I stood up by the fire and stretched.
"Once again, thank you." He commented quietly, carefully testing his arm, without moving it too much. The movement looked practiced. "You can go to sleep, I will take the first watch." He offered simply.
I stared him down. He attempted to stare back.
"You are going to sleep," I said simply. "Ain't no way you aren't falling asleep right now, whatever you did there must have left you drained."
The man hesitated, but nodded.
"You are right." This admission was filled with genuine annoyance. Didn't feel like the kiddo was mad at me, though.
Albert has weird issues.
"So go to sleep. You saved my son today, and killed a monster that could've killed a small party of adventurers. You deserve some good rest."
He seemed to consider it. If I learned anything about Albert while traveling with him, it's that the man had the emotional depth of a stone wall, or he was just that good at concealing what he felt. He was also stubborn and straightforward, much like a mountain ram.
Finally, common sense won for the day, and he nodded.
"Wake me up for the second watch." He said. He wasn't asking, but neither was he demanding; it was more like a statement. His weird-ass way to talk.
"Sure thing, kid," I said, lying as easily as I breathed. I had a lot of practice with Schnell.
My own son was already fast asleep by the campfire, so I saw no reason to disturb him. We couldn't make it back to the village by nightfall. Luckily, there were outposts prepared by us all around the forest, precisely for situations like this. Generations of hunters from our villages had hideaways like those.
That meant I knew the area, it was relatively peaceful. There were also some amenities around, like food and fresh water, which was why Schnell was fast asleep, lulled into a dream by fire and a full belly after that shitfet.
For a while, I simply stared into the fire, ignoring Alber's preparations to go to bed, even as he lay with his back to the tree.
After a while, I swear I felt something weird in the air, but it was gone almost immediately. I was on guard for a minute or two, but time passed, and I had to admit to myself that this was just my nerves.
Then, another sound joined Schnell's quite snoring.
A speech, whispered by the sleeping noble, in a language I couldn't recognize. It sounds kind of like he was whispering different names to himself. He was clearly asleep, never even taking that stupid hood off. No idea if he was calling out his girlfriend's name, parents, or someone else.
I decided to forget all about it. Whatever it was, whatever secrets that Albert fellow had, I couldn't care less for them tonight.
As for tomorrow, I will probably care a bit about when we will get wasted. Eh, we'll see.