Chapter 151

Chapter 151

I neutralized the adventurer seated next to me, then picked up Austin who was seated opposite me in a flash and threw him out of the carriage before making my own escape.

The inside of the carriage was too cramped to fight in.

Ellen shattered the nose of one of them then escaped from the carriage as well.

The carriage had come to a complete stop.

Even the coachman was in on it.

“You brats are quite perceptive, aren’t you?”

Three adventurers who were still unharmed crawled out of the carriage, wearing wary expressions.

Two of them had already been taken down before anyone from their party could make a move.

“How did you guys know?” one of them asked as he drew his sword.

Ellen drew her sword in response. “I’ve heard that most adventurers are no different from thieves.”

Adventurers...

They lived in places where the law didn’t reach.

Ellen must have heard a lot about the reality of such adventurers from Ragan Artorius.

It wasn’t that there were brigands among the adventurers.

It was that, at any time, an adventurer could become a brigand.

“Rather than taking risks, there are many adventurers who prefer to rob well-equipped novice adventurers.”

Ellen and I were armed with equipment that looked brand new and expensive at a glance. On top of that, we appeared young.

They could have always been brigands, or perhaps they hadn’t been when they’d first met us.

But, having seen us, they had no choice but to become brigands.

Ellen seemed to have known they would act this way. This wasn’t a fairy-tale space filled with the romance and mystery of adventures.

It was a land teeming with adventurers who adventured not for the thrill of it, but for money—a land of profiteers.

Being an adventurer was a profession where one risked their life for money.

If there was a way to make money that was less dangerous and almost guaranteed, there was no reason not to choose it.

They knew that stripping Ellen and I of our equipment and selling it would make them much more money than hunting demons or mapping out some terrain to earn a reward.

That was why they had been glancing at Ellen and I while engaging in casual conversation.

It wasn’t their first time doing something like this.

“Y-You can’t mean... to do that kind of thing...”

Austin staggered to his feet and drew his own sword. How much help he could be was uncertain. Austin seemed to be siding with us, making it three against three.

“... Alright, fine.”

The one who appeared to be the leader nodded his head.

“Don’t regret this, brats!”

They charged at us, each of them approaching Ellen, me, and Austin.

In this unexpected situation, I was engaged in a real battle against humans instead of demons. It was nerve-wracking, but there was hardly any time to feel that tension.

The guy in front of me started to bring his sword down from above.

As I watched the sword coming down from above, I felt a bit flustered.

‘You’re seriously coming at me like this?’

This was my first taste of real combat, but I had dealt with this kind of attack hundreds of times.

And I had countered such attacks hundreds of times too.

There was only one difference between this attack and the ones I’d faced so many times before.

It was too slow.

I grabbed the handle of my sword with my right hand and the blade with my left.

It was a half-swording technique that Ellen occasionally demonstrated.

Holding the sword horizontally, I caught the descending blow.

Clang!

Flowing through the move and letting the tip of my sword rotate around, I pushed it toward the neck of the man rushing at me.

As I parried, I stabbed. Defense transitioned into offense in one fluid motion.

His sword was deflected down and to the right, and the tip of my sword was aimed at his neck.

Pushing any further would pierce his carotid artery.

Clang!

His sword dropped to the ground.

“P-Please, spare me.”

As soon as my sword touched his neck after just one exchange, he immediately dropped his sword. His face turned pale.

Thunk!

“Ugh!”

Ellen didn’t even use her sword.

She’d neutralized the man charging at her with a single low kick. Just one kick left him sprawling on the ground, gasping for air.

The difference in body weight had been rendered completely irrelevant.

Just how strong was she?

“...”

Clang!

The man who had squared off against Austin immediately dropped his sword once he saw his two companions so quickly subdued.

“I... I surrender.”

Austin might not have realized it, but Ellen and I had quickly assessed that they were not in our league.

The fight ended as quickly as it began.

We had won.

We had triumphed in a life-threatening situation.

‘... What is this?’

Somehow, though, the victory felt incredibly hollow.

Why had it been so easy? Just like when I trained with Ellen, the actual fight had ended in just a single exchange.

Anyway, that was beside the point.

“You scumbags. Empty your pockets now.”

It was time to rob the robbers.

Austin seemed to be growing increasingly terrified of me in real time.

Naturally, the robbers who’d overheard this bit of conversation were so terrified that they began to convulse involuntarily.

They seemed to deeply regret provoking such a lunatic.

Ellen, in the end, seemed not to want to unnecessarily bloody her hands.

“Let’s just let them go,” she said. “But in exchange...”

Ellen pointed to the leather armor and other gear and clothes that the brigands had taken off.

The items looked terribly worn, and probably wouldn’t be worth much if sold. And trying to sell such stuff might just make people suspect us to be the thieving adventurers.

“Burn them all.”

For attempting to rob us, these robbers were sentenced to the punishment of returning to Egxian in nothing but their undergarments.

***

In the end we did not sell the brigands’ equipment, but chose instead to burn it all.

Ellen personally destroyed any equipment that didn’t burn.

Even with shin guards on, the sight of her shattering a sword like snapping a baseball bat with her shin made me break out in a cold sweat.

It seemed as though she could break the blade itself, and not just the handle, with her kicks.

The brigands realized they had messed with an unbelievable monster, and their faces went pale.

Despite losing everything they had, they thanked us for sparing their lives, bowing repeatedly as we left.

In the end, our loot totaled eight gold coins and a carriage drawn by three horses.

Austin, who had experience driving carriages and had been to Saints Point a few times, took the reins. Given his earlier behavior, he didn’t seem like the type capable of harboring any ill will.

Ellen and I did not sit inside the passenger compartment but took the seats beside the coachman’s seat.

“Aren’t horses expensive, though?”

Even though this was a medieval fantasy, this world didn’t exactly correspond to the real medieval era.

Weren’t horses incredibly expensive in the medieval period?

Horses are expensive even in the modern day...

Stealing three horses felt like we had stumbled upon a fortune.

I mentioned this more to myself, but Austin replied anyway.

“Ah... Uh... You’re thinking about destriers, the type that knights ride. Of course, these horses aren’t dirt cheap either...”

I nodded at Austin’s explanation. The horses pulling the carriage were clearly bigger than ponies, but didn’t seem like they were fit for riding. They also seemed to be rather old.

The horses that were used for riding lessons at the Temple clearly differed in breed and size from these. Austin, squeezed between Ellen and I as he drove the carriage, was sweating bullets. He seemed to be feeling a lot of pressure.

“You... You guys are incredibly strong.”

“Indeed. I was surprised as well.”

“Surprised?”

Yes.

Even though I had pulled it off, I was surprised.

“I thought they were experienced brigands specializing in robbery, but I didn’t expect to finish them off in one move.”

It was more than likely that they were violent criminals with experience in killing and ample real combat experience. Yet, the fight had ended with just a simple downward slash of a sword.

Had I not stopped, plunging my blade straight into the carotid artery would have meant sending them to their grave in an instant.

“Not many are professionally trained in martial arts,” Ellen murmured with her arms crossed as she quietly observed the passing scenery.

“To be precise, anyone can sign up to be an adventurer. And among those people, few are properly trained in how to wield a weapon.”

“Is that so...”

Although Ellen was talking to me, Austin muttered as if he was struck by her words.

Becoming an adventurer was essentially a career for all sorts of people looking to strike it lucky. All kinds of people were drawn to it. They carried weapons and even swung them around, but in the end, they were not professionally trained.

Life as an adventurer could make one proficient with a sword. But that proficiency tended more towards swordsmanship that was geared for survival, rather than systematic fencing.

It was basically learning how to keep yourself alive with your sword.

In a way, it was like comparing a street brawler to a mixed martial arts fighter. Of course, one could overpower a fighter with sheer size, but when it came to weapons, technique often played a bigger role than physical strength.

That was why it had been so easy for me to overpower my opponent.

“Most martial arts assume that the opponent will be armed. For an adventurer who only has to deal with the situations that arise from day to day, it’s almost unnecessary to know such techniques, unless it’s a situation like just now.”

Ellen’s words made sense.

The enemies of adventurers were usually demons or monsters, which typically did not wield weapons. Of course, there were exceptions, but those were rare.

However, what Ellen and I had been taught involved overpowering and killing armed opponents.

In short, techniques predicated on facing armed humans.

Adventurers had little need to know such things. Therefore, if one was only going adventuring, there was no reason to delve so deeply into swordsmanship.

Of course, knowing more was always better than knowing less, but it wasn’t a necessity.

Anyway, Ellen and I had continually honed our skills in overpowering armed humans. No matter how much more real-world experience they had, they could not stand against us, who had undergone systematic training.

At best, the sword swings they used to bully weak monsters or inexperienced newcomers were merely suited to street brawls.

That level of swordsmanship could never work against us.

Anyone who faced off against Ellen couldn’t possibly stand a chance, and neither could those facing me—who, despite being in training for a shorter time, learned persistently from Ellen every day.

In the end, the swordsmanship skill possessed by most adventurers could not surpass the level of the pseudo-swordsmanship techniques I had acquired before.

This was another revelation...

“Did you guys... train specifically in swordsmanship?” Austin asked.

“... You could say that.”

Although I learned some of what I knew from lectures, most of my training was with Ellen, which essentially made her my swordsmanship instructor.

“I’m envious...”

The vague sentiment in Austin’s words did not resonate easily with me.

I always believed I was significantly weaker compared to Ellen, and that was a fact.

Within the Royal Class, with all the training I’d done, I could have been considered around average in terms of combat prowess.

But it seemed Austin never even had the chance to learn swordsmanship, whether because of financial issues or something else.

At the Temple, not only did students in the Royal Class undergo weapons training, but many of the students in the general classes also chose combat majors and underwent training as well.

Those students would be considered highly skilled in places like this.

Yet I was a student from the Royal Class at the Temple, a select group of individuals, and even among them, I practiced daily with the most outstanding among us.

‘... It would have actually been more strange if it hadn’t been easy.’

Not being able to easily overpower those guys would have been the real surprise.

Unbeknownst to me, a tremendous gap in combat ability had already developed between myself and the average person, to the extent that even life-threatening battles felt overly easy.