Chapter 16

Mad Swordsman of the Shadow World (16)

The forest at night wore a different face from the day.

Beneath the shade of trees where even moonlight could not seep through.

Theron was gliding silently through the darkness.

‘Section 3’s first search party... moves along the eastern stream.’

Isaac’s voice was still vivid in his ears.

—We’ll sweep them all away starting from the first day. Three search parties. The eastern stream, the southern ridge, and the rocky area.

How considerate of the prey to reveal their own route.

The corners of Theron’s lips rose faintly.

‘Then... I should take them one by one.’

Before long, Theron, who had been moving forward, suddenly stopped.

The stream before him.

It was subtly different from the waterway in his memories.

‘...The stream has shifted to the right.’

His previous life.

He had run across the terrain of this exam site so much that even the soles of his feet remembered it.

Back then, the stream had definitely flowed along the rocky area on the left.

‘Well... it was two or three years later.’

A single flood could easily change the course of a stream.

Use memory as a reference, but trust what his own eyes saw.

Theron revised the map in his head and slipped back into the darkness.

And not long afterward.

Step. Step.

Footsteps came from beyond the darkness.

‘...Four in total?’

From nothing but the weight and spacing of their footsteps, he could picture their number and builds.

‘The one in front puts more weight on his right foot... and the one at the back is scared.’

His footsteps kept drawing closer to the person in front of him.

Because he was instinctively frightened.

Theron climbed silently into a tree and looked down at the path they would take.

Section 3’s search party.

Wooden swords in hand, their gazes sweeping around.

‘For a search party... they’re clumsy.’

But that was only natural.

The trainees here had never learned how to ‘search’ before.

Theron, on the other hand, had led the Shadow Knight Order in his previous life and repeated methods of searching and hunting hundreds of times.

Before long, the moment the search party passed beneath the tree.

Tap.

Theron’s figure dropped silently.

Thwack!

The edge of his hand struck the back of the frightened boy’s neck.

He caught the collapsing body with one hand and laid him down silently.

Pabat!

Before the next person could even sense something was wrong and turn around, Theron was already inside his guard.

Thud! Thwack!

Solar plexus. Chin.

With exactly two strikes, two of them collapsed to their knees without even managing to scream.

“Wh-What the...!”

Only the one in front remained.

He hurriedly raised his wooden sword.

From the tension packed into his shoulders and the angle at which he raised it, the path his sword would take was obvious.

‘He has a habit of bringing it down from overhead with brute force...’

Most trainees of this age swung their swords like this.

Theron watched his attack and moved half a step to the side.

Whoosh!

He had moved only half a step, yet the wooden sword cut through empty air without even grazing his shoulder.

And...

Thwack!

Theron’s elbow struck precisely upward into the boy’s chin.

Thud.

Four.

Four of them had fallen in the blink of an eye.

Theron searched the fallen trainees and collected their tokens.

‘Four for now.’

Then he dragged them deeper into the bushes and scattered fallen leaves over the traces of where he had passed.

They were not dead.

They simply would not return.

Theron knew very well what began to bloom in a commander’s mind when a search party ‘went missing.’

‘Anxiety... makes people even more impatient.’

_______________

The path toward the southern ridge.

Theron’s pace had become faster than before.

From the moment the first search party failed to return on time, time was no longer on Theron’s side.

‘The second... can’t be handled the same way.’

The terrain of the ridge was different from the streamside.

There were few trees and the view was open, so ambushing them from above would not work.

But that did not matter to Theron.

If the terrain changed, he simply had to change his hunting method.

Upon reaching the entrance to the ridge, Theron casually dropped something in the middle of the path.

One of the tokens he had just taken from a Section 3 trainee.

Then he lay down in a hollowed shadow beside the ridge and held his breath.

How much time had passed?

“...Huh? Hey, that.”

“That’s a token, isn’t it? Why is something like that lying in the middle of the road...”

Three members of the southern search party stopped walking.

A fallen token.

There were two possible explanations.

Someone had dropped it, or it was a trap.

“Isn’t it a trap?”

“Where would anyone hide around here? It’s completely open.”

Their gazes swept around.

An open ridge with neither trees nor rocks.

There seemed to be nowhere for a person to hide.

But they did not know.

Hiding did not mean concealing yourself behind something.

It meant exploiting the habits of another person’s gaze.

People’s eyes sweep around at eye level. They do not suspect the shadows beneath their feet.

Before long, the moment one of them bent down toward the token.

Pabat!

The shadow beneath their feet abruptly rose.

Thwack! Thud!

There was not even a scream.

The one bending down was struck in the back of the neck.

The one who turned around in surprise was hit in the solar plexus.

Theron saw the last remaining boy put a whistle to his mouth.

‘That would be troublesome.’

Swoosh!

A stone thrown by Theron precisely knocked the whistle away, and before the boy’s open mouth could even close, the edge of Theron’s hand fell against his neck.

Thud.

‘That makes seven.’

Theron retrieved even the token he had used as bait and quietly steadied his breathing.

The first had been an ambush, and the second had been bait.

He eliminated them while changing his methods so they would not even realize they had fallen to the same hunter.

That was how ‘something unknown’ began growing inside the opponent’s mind.

_______________

At the same time.

Section 3’s main camp.

Isaac, who had been sitting on high ground in the rocky area, suddenly opened his closed eyes.

“...”

“What’s wrong, Isaac?”

A subordinate beside him asked cautiously.

Isaac did not answer.

Instead, he slowly scanned the forest swallowed by darkness.

Thirty minutes had passed since the eastern search party was supposed to return.

They had either gotten lost, or encountered trainees from another section...

That was what his mind told him.

‘...No.’

But the ominous feeling told him something else.

Getting lost would be so pathetic there would be nothing to say even if they died, and if they had run into someone else...

There should definitely have been some kind of noise.

But the forest... was too quiet.

“What about contact from the southern ridge group?”

“Nothing yet. If they’re on schedule, they should be back soon.”

“No. They won’t come back.”

“...Huh?”

Isaac stood up.

The silence of the forest.

That silence had bothered him for a while.

Rather than natural silence, it felt as though someone was deliberately erasing every sound.

Isaac’s gaze turned cold.

His senses were telling him.

Something... was definitely happening.

‘Of course.’

There was no evidence for it.

It was merely intuition.

Rustle.

Isaac straightened himself and spoke to the trainee beside him.

“Call back the rocky-area group. And from now on, double the guard around the main camp.”

“Huh? Then what about hunting tokens...?”

His fellow trainee asked Isaac.

But Isaac curled his lips and gave a faint laugh at the question.

“Hunting?”

But soon, the smile disappeared from his face.

Then Isaac spoke.

“I think... we’re the ones being hunted right now.”

“...”

His fellow trainee swallowed dryly as he looked at Isaac. Isaac turned his gaze toward the forest dyed in darkness.

Just how close was that unidentified ‘something’ now?

“...Interesting.”

Anyone else might have been flustered by the unexpected situation, but Isaac was confident.

A small variable had appeared, but in the end, he would still win this exam.

Before long...

Rustle.

Isaac slowly began walking somewhere.

_______________

Meanwhile, at Section 5’s western defensive position.

“...Perka.”

Renil, watching the darkness from behind a rock, called quietly.

“The bushes to the northwest. That’s the third time.”

“I saw it.”

Perka answered softly.

The shaking bushes.

The movement was too different to be wind and too cautious to be an animal.

“Section 1.”

Tioren, who had remained silent the entire time, spoke briefly.

“I saw them during the day. Their footprints over there. Same pattern.”

“...Of all sections, it had to be Section 1.”

Renil grimaced.

Section 1.

They were considered a step above Section 5 in both number of trainees and average ability.

No, in truth, every section was rated higher than theirs.

Perka counted the presences in the darkness and recalled what Theron had said before leaving.

—When they come, don’t meet them head-on. The position is bait, and your weapon is the terrain.

“...Let’s do what Theron taught us.”

Everything they had managed to do so far was thanks to what Theron had taught them.

At Perka’s gesture, Renil, Tioren, and the other members silently slipped into their respective positions.

The air of the darkened forest gradually began to change.

________________

Tap!

Theron stood where he had taken down the second search party, looking down over the terrain below the ridge.

The rocky area revealed by the moonlight.

And the collapsed cliff at its edge.

‘...Was it over there?’

Suddenly, a memory rose as though caught on a fishing hook.

His previous life.

Was it several years after this exam ended?

There had been an incident where a trainee accidentally discovered ‘that’ at this exam site, throwing the entirety of Hell Island into an uproar.

‘Exactly where it was... my memory is vague.’

Back then, it had been someone else’s affair to Theron.

But this time was different.

‘Before the exam ends... it’s worth checking.’

Token hunting and treasure hunting.

Theron intended to obtain two things from a single exam.

Originally, there would have been no need to do it now, but since the exam had changed, his plans had to change as well.

Just as Theron organized the fragments of his memory and was about to turn away.

“...!”

The hairs along his spine stood on end.

A gaze.

From beyond the forest, in the direction of the rocky area, there was a texture of perception probing toward him.

The distance was far.

Far enough that he should not have been visible.

And yet, he could feel it against his skin.

‘...Isaac.’

A quiet laugh passed across Theron’s lips.

He had been the same in the previous life.

On the battlefield, that bastard’s senses had always been faster than his eyes.

When Theron had entrusted his back to him, there had been nothing more reassuring.

‘Meeting him as an enemy... I never knew he’d be this troublesome.’

Once he confirmed that two search parties had been cut off, Isaac would not send out more subordinates.

He would eliminate as many variables as possible and come himself to deal with the matter decisively.

That was the kind of person Isaac was.

Theron secured the last token against his chest and looked into the darkness.

It was earlier than expected, but that was not necessarily bad.

He was someone Theron would have to face by the end of this exam anyway.

But at that moment.

Piiiiik! Piiiiik! Piiiiik!

Three sharp whistle blasts split the night sky from afar.

Theron’s head turned reflexively.

The direction was west.

Where Section 5’s defensive position was located.

Three whistle blasts.

It was the signal he had arranged with Perka.

—Under attack. Difficult to hold.

‘...Already?’

It was earlier than expected.

It was not Section 3.

Isaac’s forces were still in the rocky area, so another section was attacking Section 5.

Theron’s eyes narrowed.

Perka’s group was being pressured in the west, while behind him, Isaac was moving to find them.

Go back.

Or continue forward.

In the darkness, Theron slowly steadied his breathing.