Chapter 44

Chapter 44

“Get out of my way, I will deal with him!”

Margrave Orquell charged toward Urich as he controlled his frightened horse.

“Woahhhh!”

Urich let out his beastly roar at the margrave charging on his horse.

The horse flinched again, and the margrave scratched the horse’s flank hard with his boot. The hesitating horse was reminded of its owner’s order and resumed its charge.

Clang!

The blade of the margrave had the momentum of the galloping horse. Urich received the blow with both his feet planted in the ground.

“Oh!”

The margrave felt his upper body thrusting backward. Even with the momentum of the horse, he felt that he was being overpowered by the barbarian.

‘My arm is going to break if I don’t move my sword out of the way.’

The margrave released the tension in his legs to absorb the impact of the clash. He tumbled off the horse, falling to the ground in an acrobatic maneuver.

“My lord!” The soldiers shouted.

“Surround him! Attack him from all directions!” The margrave exclaimed at his soldiers. There was no place for a commander who couldn’t take care of himself on the battlefield. He jumped back to his feet and gripped the hilt of his sword tightly.

“Hmph!”

Urich threw his second axe. The axe was buried halfway into the soldier’s knee, making the raggedy joint collapse backward. The soldier fell to the ground with a terrible screech.

Urich had used up both of his axes. He rolled on the ground to pick up the shield that one of the soldiers dropped. It was an inverted triangle shield that tapered downward.

‘A shield.’

Urich was never fond of using a shield. Even back in his tribe, he had only used it occasionally to block the arrows.

‘Is this how they used it?’

Urich mimicked the shield-wielding that he had seen here and there.

The civilized men were adept at using a shield. They knew how to attack and defend with a shield. The inverted triangle shape allowed its wielder to use the shield as a weapon with its pointy tip.

Clang!

Urich parried the soldiers’ attacks by swinging the shield and pushing them back.

Thwip!

His body flinched. An arrow fired from a crossbow plunged into his back, but Urich didn’t seem to be bothered as he kept advancing toward his enemies.

“D-does it not work on him?”

The arrow wasn’t able to dig deep into Urich due to the fur coat that was covering his entire upper body along with his armor-like back muscles.

“Go for his head, his head!” Orquell shouted. The soldiers with crossbows simultaneously aimed at Urich’s head.

Thwip!

Urich raised his shield to protect his head and upper body. As the arrows hit the shield, Urich darted forward in a swift motion.

‘That strange weapon takes a while to reload.’

Urich had seen the crossbow enough times to know how long it took for them to be reloaded.

“Dammit!”

Urich shoved the soldiers with his shield and crushed the heads of the tripped-over soldiers with his knees. As his immense weight came down on their faces, their heads crumpled as the facial bones collapsed. Urich’s hands continued to move rapidly to slit the throats of the soldiers.

“What are you doing, you can’t get scared!” The adjutant tried to encourage his soldiers, but they were all falling one by one, intimidated by Urich’s ferocity.

‘We can kill him with a single attack if we coordinate our attacks properly.’

There was no reason for them to lose. After all, their enemy was a single barbarian who stood up to them without a single piece of armor.

“Argh!”

But the soldiers were the dying ones. The adjutant then realized that something was wrong.

‘The fear that attacking first will result in certain death. We’ve been overwhelmed by him.’

That was the thing that kept the soldiers from coordinating a pincer attack. Whoever dove in first was certainly going to die. What would be the point of killing the barbarian if you also lost your life in the process? No soldier was passionate and loyal enough to jump in despite certain death. The soldiers all hesitated to be the first to attack, and that resulted in the worst outcome of all of them getting killed one by one. If the soldiers were without the fear of death, like the northern warriors, Urich would have been stabbed to death long ago.

‘So, this is the power of the barbarian that the lord was talking about.’

The madness of rushing into one’s own death, the willingness to fight with one’s heart bared open if necessary. The young adjutant realized the crucial importance of soldier morale on the battlefield.

‘Now I get why the civilization military struggled against the barbarians.’

After learning the reality, the adjutant knew that his time was up. Urich’s sword cleanly slashed his neck.

Many knights and warriors ended up dying before they could accumulate their experiences. might knights and warriors were created on a pile of death, and this young adjutant was merely a part of the pile.

Pahell looked around as he bit his lips. There were signs of a fierce battle. A feeling of shame that he had never felt before rose from the corner of his heart.

“I don’t know. Perhaps I was scared hiding by myself,” Pahell answered as he stretched his hand toward Urich on the ground to help him sit up.

“Scared of hiding, too? You really are the biggest coward.”

Urich belched out a rough laugh.

“I’m saying that I was scared of being a coward who only hides... I am supposed to be the king after all,” Pahell answered, but the words that he was about to become the king didn’t leave his mouth as easily as before. He took the sword of the margrave and clipped it to his belt. The weight of the sword felt unfamiliar.

* * *

Pahell was exhausted. He had tended to Urich’s wounds all night.

“God dammit, how is a person alive after all that? Spit.”

Pahell vomited over and over again. Looking at the flesh beneath one’s skin was not a pleasant thing to do.

“Heat that thing up and hand it over. I need to burn the wounds,” Urich said as he was seated on the ground. Sweat was beading down his face, his eyes bloodshot, and his lips were parched to the point of seeming blue.

“Got it.”

Pahell wiped his mouth and took out the red-hot blade from the fire.

‘How many scars does he have? And he’s my age?’

Urich’s body was covered in scars from head to toe. The slashes and stab wounds were littered all over, and the burns left the ugliest scars.

“At this rate, I’m going to die taking care of you.”

Pahell said as he put the tweezer and dagger down. He had to peer into Urich’s flesh to find the buried arrowheads. It wasn’t something that he ever wanted to do again.

“Stop whining, I’m the one dying over here. Huff, huff,” Urich took a few deep breaths before bringing the blade to his wounds. It was a desperate remedy he had to use because there was no other way to sterilize the wounds.

Tssssss!

“Fuuuuuuuck! It hurts like hell every time I do it, fucking hell.” Urich burned one wound after another as he complained.

“Ugh.”

Pahell plugged his nose to stop the reeking smell of Urich’s burning flesh.

‘I’m really going to die at this rate. I’ve never had to go through this much ever since I came over to this side of the mountains.’

He hadn’t fought this hard since the Thirty-Men Slaughter, which was the time he killed thirty warriors of an enemy tribe over the course of three days. It was an achievement that spread his name throughout the surrounding tribes.

“Pahell, no, what was your name, Var...” Urich said with a pale face.

“Varca Aneu Porcana, that’s my legal name.”

“Yeah, that, Pahell Varca. If for some reason I don’t wake up, cremate my body but please cut my hair and bring it to the foot of the Sky Mountains.”

“What do you mean by...”

Pahell couldn’t finish his sentence, as Urich shut his eyes and fell unconscious.

‘He’s breathing, he’s not dead.’

Pahell breathed a sigh of relief after he made sure that Urich was still breathing.

“If you think about it, what he did just doesn’t make sense.”

Urich had killed over twenty men in the span of a few days. He had to fight and fight as soon as he recovered from the back injury that he got from carrying Kylios.

“This is something that a warrior could boast about for the rest of his life.”

The world was full of renowned knights and warriors, and the Sword Demon Ferzen, who fought off a hundred men on a bridge was one of them.

“You too will be famous one day, Urich.”

Pahell stared at the sleeping Urich. Urich was a mercenary and a warrior. From his ability to his actions, there wasn’t a single thing to be ashamed of. He was that great of a man.

‘Have I become the man worthy of becoming king like I’ve been telling myself?’

Pahell kept asking himself.

‘If I were a horse keeper or a farmer, it would’ve been alright for me to live as a coward. But I am the man to take the throne.’

The world was not an easy thing to navigate, and Pahell laughed bitterly.

“I’m not special.”

It was a truth that he never wanted to admit. Pahell made a rug out of his cloak and fur and tied it to Kylios.

“After all that bleeding, he’s still as heavy as hell.”

Pahell grabbed Urich by the upper body and dragged him onto the rug.

“You got this, Kylios.”

Kylios neighed softly as he dragged the rug that Urich was resting on.

Pahell wandered for another day until he came upon a busy road. Fortunately, he met and joined a caravan that was headed to the city of Valgma. They entered the city gates within less than half a day, and it was after spending two more days in an inn in Valgma that Urich finally came to.

The next day, they were joined by Urich’s Brotherhood in the city.