༺ 𓆩 Chapter 35 — To Follow the Demon's Command 𓆪 ༻
「Translator — Creator」
᠃ ⚘᠂ ⚘ ˚ ⚘ ᠂ ⚘ ᠃
“La, Tu, Balaka!”
Crying out his yearning for the afterlife, the muscular giant charged toward the King of Wolves. From a distance of more than ten paces, Bessemer struck the ground and used the rebound to hurl himself high into the air. Holding the axe in both hands, he came down toward the King of Wolves’s head.
Bang—!!!
The King of Wolves lightly evaded.
“Planning to run again this time?”
Bessemer wrenched his axe from the blameless earth and settled the haft upon his shoulder. Clumps of dirt rained down to the ground.
Grrr…
The King of Wolves prowled in a wide circle around Bessemer, maintaining his distance. Bessemer, in kind, turned with him, the two of them wheeling round and round.
"Do you remember the old days? We used to circle like this, the brothers and I, fighting bare-fisted. Pitifully, I lost to my elder brothers every time, though I was hardly smaller than them in stature. And now…"
Crunch—!!!
Before he could continue, a Hell wolf lunged from behind and sank its fangs into his shoulder. A bite wound opened, though nothing grievous.
Crack—!!!
Rip—!!!
Before the beast could bring its jaw strength to bear, Bessemer jammed the axe blade into its mouth and tore its jaw apart.
“Why act this way, Father? I wanted a warm talk between parent and child.”
Grrrr.
Whether by the King of Wolves’ command or by the wolves’ instinct to protect their leader, the Hell wolves’ attention shifted from the soldiers to Bessemer.
Bessemer felt a heavy tightness settle in his chest.
"Aye, this was the sensation I remembered."
The air soaked in killing intent gave no ease however much he breathed it, like swallowing seawater. Strength filled his whole body. His heartbeat pounded against his ears like drums. His blood seemed to boil. Itching ran through him, and again and again came the urge to leap forward and swing the axe.
At the camp gate, it had been routine to stand guard and butcher the Hell wolves that charged in. Then he had been the hunter setting traps. There had been walls behind him, and comrades at his back.
Now there were only beasts in every direction, waiting to tear him apart.
Crunch—!!!
Yelp!!!
Crack!!!
Two of the creatures had already perished by his hand. One lay with its neck half-severed by his axe, whining like a whipped pup as it died. The other had tried to slip past his blade and hurl itself into his grasp, and he had seized it and broken its neck.
“Huff… huff. Can you see it? Even without borrowing the strength of some petty sorcery, your son is this strong. Then why… why did you do it?”
When he killed those two, three more rushed him. They bit at his legs and shook his balance. As he staggered, another sprang. Falling backward, Bessemer swung the axe. One was critically wounded and thrown aside, but the blood-slick haft slipped from his hand.
Then it became a savage grapple.
To avoid their bite force, Bessemer rolled across the ground and locked one wolf’s neck beneath his arm. He gouged out one of its eyes with his fingers, clenched his fist, and hammered the bridge of its nose again and again.
Whine—!!! Whine—!!! whiiine—!!!
The beast struggled desperately to break free, but the giant did not release it. The remaining two tried to leap at him, but he shoved himself beneath the captured Hell Wolf and used it as a shield. More than that, the pained cries of their fellow made them hesitate.
Bessemer moved first.
With nothing but the strength of his bare hands, he reduced them to pulp. One he gripped by the jaw and tore the upper and lower halves apart. The other he beat with his fists until its skull shattered.
“Hah… hah….”
He shoved aside the limp wolf corpse and rose again.
Only then did the pain come in a flood.
The flesh of his left thigh had been torn away enough to show bone. His walk toward the fallen axe was poor and uneven. Drops of blood fell without cease with every step.
“Ungh.”
As he finally picked up the axe, Bessemer realized the ring finger and little finger of his right hand had been torn off.
He paid it no mind and gripped the haft with the three fingers that remained and hefted it.
His shoulder and flank had been perforated by the fangs of the Hell wolves.
These, too, he paid no mind.
And then, without warning, he laughed.
“Khahahahaha—!”
A great, booming laugh, with no thread of madness woven through it. His whole body was drenched in blood, yet his face, amid all that red, wore an expression of strange release, as though some long-borne weight had at last fallen from him.
“Now… I understand a little. Why I could never beat my brothers then.”
Bessemer settled the haft of the axe upon his shoulder once more. Painted in blood, laughing, he looked like nothing so much as a madman.
“I wanted to live too much. But now I see… it is you who are like that, Father. Did you want to live so badly? Enough to become a beast?”
Grrr…
“Surely thirteen years of living as a beast has not made you forget the tongue of men."
Grrr…
“Ah, Birpi must have ordered you about like a kennel dog. Then I suppose you haven’t forgotten.”
The silver wolf, which had been observing from afar like a king among wolves, lowered its center of gravity.
“So? Did you live well? Eat well? Fight well?”
Bessemer kept talking without pause, his eyes fixed on the King of Wolves’ movements. In all the years he had hunted it, he had never provoked it like this.
The day Isaac called him into the tent and proposed luring the King of Wolves, he had taught him a different method.
‘However great a warrior you may be, how shall a man run down a wolf? And a demonic beast besides?’
‘Then what would you have me do?’
‘You must make the wolf come to you.’
‘How?’
‘You must make him wish to tear you to pieces.’
‘You believe I can best the King of Wolves?’
‘No. A monster whose body would shame any beast, upon the head of a chieftain who once led a tribe? By what means?’
‘Then what would you have me do?’
‘Only make him a common, savage beast.’
‘...?’
‘When we dueled, did I not show you? You were not a man in that moment.’
‘...….’
The reason Bessemer had lost to Isaac was not only because Isaac had trained techniques to counter him.
A weak twelve-year-old brat. The eldest son born in Goethe, whom Bessemer despised. A cursed half-man openly challenging him for Vinfelt.
It had been laughable.
Isaac had treated him like a game piece and provoked him, even invoking Baitur tradition.
By then Bessemer’s reason had already snapped.
He had no room to judge how to use his body, what battle favored him, or how strong his opponent truly was.
Isaac’s victory had begun there.
In the ten years he had hunted the King of Wolves, Bessemer would never have considered such underhanded means. It would shame the tribe.
But both he and his father had gone too far now to speak of honor.
Bound to a pole, Bessemer had watched clearly as unwilling people were turned into Hell Wolves.
“So then, with that big body of yours, the filth you leave behind must be enormous. Though you already dumped enough filth over the history of our tribe.”
Grrrr…
The silver wolf lowered itself until its body was level with the ground. Its forelegs bent. Its tail stretched straight. Its ears stood sharp. The muscles in its hind legs tightened and swelled.
Bessemer did not miss the movement.
“Look around you. Is this the Baitur tribe? Is this the land of the Vinfelt clans? To my eyes it looks like nothing but a wolf den—”
In an instant, a dark silhouette crashed over him.
The shadow of moonlight cleared the cordon of Hell wolves in a single bound and bared its cold, glittering fangs.
Bessemer had been forced to accept bites while fighting many Hell Wolves, but the King of Wolves’s fangs were another matter. If those bit him, at minimum it would be mortal injury. If they found a vital point, death was certain.
He gripped the lower end of the axe haft in his left hand and tightened his hold.
La
Tu
Balaka
Sanctum
From far away, a voice he had loved long ago rang in the hollows of his mind. It was the voice of the monster that now bore his death between its teeth, and yet it was not. It was something like the breathing of his father, who had stood like a wraith before the burning corpses of their tribesfolk and stared emptily at them.
May you be at peace in Balaka.
That was what it meant in the common tongue.
But to the child Bessemer then, it had sounded like words his father never spoke aloud, words swallowed inside.
I will not make you wait long.
I shall follow soon.
The breadth of his father's back.
His breath. The smell of blood and ash. The sound of palm against hair as he wiped blood from a broken head. The wind through the black forest that sounded like weeping. The cry of insects in the grass.
The Bessemer standing in that memory now placed the weight of the past and the weight of regret that could never be undone into the heel of his foot.
Impossibly supple for a body so vast, unnaturally so, his waist twisted to one side. At the end of that arc was the axe, gripped tight in both hands.
Now all that impossible weight of the past,
through the body that Bessemer had forged across the long years,
through every sinew and muscle,
with all his strength,
endlessly,
forward,
was swung.
For his own,
and for his father's
release.
Whooom—!!!
The axe's edge clove the air.
“.......!”
It missed.
The silver wolf twisted in midair and slipped just beyond the line the blade had drawn.
Awooooo—!!!
The silver wolf landed far beyond Bessemer and howled.
Grrrrrr.
The Hell wolves, which had faltered before Bessemer’s force, recovered their savagery; this time the King of Wolves meant to kill him together with them.
There was no longer father and son, chief and great warrior, King of Wolves and heir.
There was only predator and prey.
“Hahaha… fuck.”
Bessemer let out a hollow laugh.
It had been a strike with all his strength. He had already lost too much blood. His body felt dull, as if drowned in drink. He could not even feel pain.
Through his dimming vision, Hell Wolves rushed him. Instinct sent one final warning at the presence behind him. Teeth and claws came from every side.
Le Tu Balaka.
The words wheeled through his head. If one changed la to le, the meaning shifted with it, to oneself.
I go to Balaka.
In that moment he seemed to see the lands of Valaka before him. There, he was a little boy once more. A child of unremarkable stature, no different from the other children of the tribe, with an innocent face.
Just as Birpie had always said, little Bessemer had been a coward. And perhaps the reason he had hated Isaac from the first moment he had laid eyes on him was because, at that age, he himself had never been able to do what Isaac did.
Now, no matter how it ended, it was all one to him.
The coward Bessemer only wanted to rest now.
“Bessemer!”
Then a voice, whetted to a sharp edge, cut through the dark. Like a child's petulant cry, harsh to the ear, and yet somehow that very sound dragged Bessemer back from his visions.
In the vision he had scarcely reclaimed, he saw Hellwolves dropping limp, like puppets whose strings had been cut.
“.................!?”
In the path the King of Wolves had been charging, Carlson now stood. There must already have been some struggle here, for the corpses of Hellwolves were strewn all about him. Some twenty paces away, one of the silver wolf's ears had been shorn clean off. Dark blood clotted upon the silver fur of one corner of his face.
“Die! Die, damn you!”
“Uaaaaah!”
Only now did Bessemer hear the soldiers’ desperate roars.
The numbers of the Hellwolves were still great. Enough, at the least, to blanket the open ground of the encampment and fill his sight.
Yet somehow, no thought of giving up stirred in him now.
A scrawny, pale-skinned child. No, an Ice Demon, stood there at his side, a sword still clutched in its hand.
“Come here to die?”
Bessemer asked Isaac with a faint laugh.
“As if.”
“Is that the only sword stance you know?”
Isaac had once again taken the same upward-strike stance he had used in their duel.
“Were you trying to die?”
“….”
Isaac answered a question with one of his own.
“Carlson killed Birpi.”
“Did he go as a man, or as a wolf?”
“As a wolf.”
“Hah. That dog bastard dying like a dog suits him. Hoo.”
Bessemer could no longer hold his body up, and sank onto one knee. He drove the head of his axe into the ground and leaned upon the haft, gasping for breath. No strength at all remained in him. He wanted only to sleep. He wanted only to rest. He was tired.
“Now it’s your turn.”
“Look at me before you say that. I’m about to leave for Balaka.”
“It is an order, Bessemer of the Baitur.”
Isaac did not listen to a word he said. He only spoke his own words with a firm expression.
Bessemer found it absurd.
He, who would have died a dozen times over were he any other man, who was barely enduring as it was. And this was an order?
Yet strangely, even at death's door, the words of this little lordling seemed to demand his ear. No, they drove themselves into his heart. Why should that be?
It was simple.
This moment was the one Bessemer had longed for through all those years. The moment he had not even dared to hope for. Not to be buried beneath the past of Vinfeldt together with his kin and comrades, but to dream of living in the present. Isaac was the demon who had heard that wish and come for him.
“Kill the King of Wolves.”
“….”
"Give your father his peace."
So said the demon.
“…Haa.”
Bessemer looked up at the night sky.
Thirteen years ago, on that night also, a moon such as this had hung in the heavens.
"I shall do… as you command."
The giant rose slowly to his feet.
To follow the demon's command.
END σϝ CHAPTER