I spun in midair and slashed deep between the ogre’s two heads.

My wrist screamed in agony.

“—Ghh!”

The hide and bone of a six-meter ogre were monstrously tough.

With any of my old blades, it would have snapped in a single stroke.

Crk—!

But the pale blade patterned like thornwood bit through that shield-like skin and wire-tight muscle, forcing its way in to the end.

The Thunderclap Sword scraped hard along the creature’s spine and burst out the back.

Thud.

I kicked off the ogre’s back, turned once in the air, and landed.
Sliding a few paces, I let the shock of the fall bleed out of my legs.

“Haa.”

“Graaagh!”

The mutated ogre screamed—not the same roar that had shattered half the Seventh Centuria, but the cry of a wounded beast.

It turned its massive body toward me.
Every tremor of the ground, every ounce of pressure radiating from its bulk, every grotesque feature of its twin heads—
all of it reminded me what a monster it truly was.

It lifted one foot, as if to crush me.

But that lumbering motion brought relief instead.

Far too slow to catch a Blue Knight.

So long as it doesn’t roar again, it’s just another big ogre.

I drove a foot into the ground.

Boom—!

Sliding under its legs, I swung the Thunderclap Sword toward the Achilles tendon.

Slash—!

A satisfying recoil—and a spray of blood.

“Graaaah!”

The beast shrieked again and toppled.

Whssh—!

At the same time, a hand larger than my body swept across the ground.

An ambush—
but I’d already activated the bio-radar.

I’d seen the movement before the fall had even begun.

Boom!

I stamped a Thunderstep backward, slipping out of range.

The enormous palm struck only dirt.

“Hhhuuuu—”

Even that was a feint.

The mutated ogre sucked in air with a violent hiss; a rasping wheeze escaped the hole in its pierced lung, but it didn’t seem to care.

The precursor to that accursed roar.

A crooked grin twisted across the parasite-ridden face.

Damn it.

It was clever.

Since I’d backed off on my own, it meant I’d given it room to wipe everything out with an area blast.

I triggered high-speed cognition.

Through bio-radar, I glanced at the soldiers behind me.

“Uaaagh!”
“Keh-keh-keh!”
“Die—die!”

Still babbling idiots.

“Ugh—urgh!”

Jo, Gaven, and a few veterans were clutching their heads, starting to recover—but the unit was useless as an army.

And worse—so was I.

Even I lost my mind for a few seconds when I heard that roar.
A few seconds would be enough for the ogre to turn me into a smear.

I couldn’t let it scream again.

How?

Normally, when you needed to silence an enemy, you targeted the diaphragm, lungs, or throat.
But a monster like that—
a single punctured lung wasn’t nearly enough.

I thought back to the last time I’d fought an ogre.

“Haa.”

I shut off high-speed cognition and switched to electro-art radiation.

No need to gather power—just fire quickly.

White sparks flared along my left arm and shot forward.

They struck the javelin still lodged in the ogre’s flank.

Crackle-crack-crackle!

The current rode the metal point straight into its neuromuscular network.

“Khrrgh!”

The ogre coughed mid-inhalation.

“Khrrgh—khh—!”

All the air it had gathered burst back out.

Normally I’d need to refine the charge to punch through that hide and muscle,
but with a metal spearhead already buried in its flesh, there was no need.

Lesson learned from the greenskin hunts.

Shuddering, the ogre clawed at its side, trying to wrench the spear free.

A few seconds.

I triggered high-speed cognition again.

One—
Electric shock works the same. If there’s metal near bone or nerves, I can fry its brain.

Two—
My mana’s grown a bit. It’ll have to be enough.

Even if no soldier could help, it was win or die.

Running away with a decimated unit might spare the “Blue Knight” in name,
but Trisan would seize on it to destroy the would-be heir—and then the Thundering Star would strike my soul.

Enough thought.

Boom!

I kicked off the ground, Thunderclap Sword forward.

Dozens of meters vanished in an eye-blink.

The ogre, palm-sized a moment ago, filled my vision.

Even with accelerated nerves, the speed was dizzying.

The creature reacted fast, jerking upright mid-cough and thrusting out a hand to block me.

If I hit that palm head-on, I’d be pulp.

So I leapt again—barely clearing its fingers, landing on the back of its hand.

Even for a six-meter brute, the distance from hand to neck was only two meters or so.

Boom!

“Thunder roars—so let this body become lightning itself!”

At that range I unleashed Thunderstep.

Adding my full arm strength, I drove the Thunderclap Sword into its neck.

Thunk!

Like a nail struck by a hammer, the blade buried itself to the hilt.

The recoil nearly tore the weapon from my grasp, but I clung on, dangling from the embedded hilt as I channeled power.

Crackle—crack-crackle!

I poured every volt through my body, shifting the current from left to right, as when invoking Heaven’s Lightning.

My nerves from heart to fingertips screamed.

My entire body blazed white—
and by the Authority of Imbuement, so did the blade.

Vrrrrrm—!

Any normal sword would have shattered, but the family-forged greatsword heated from the thornwood pattern outward, channeling every spark into the ogre’s throat.

Crackle-crackle-crack!

Its gullet lit up like a broken magic lamp, belching black smoke.

“Wrooooaaargh!”

Its eyes rolled wide.

It raised both massive hands to clap—
enough force to crush me like an insect.

I saw the palms coming and didn’t move.

“UAAAAAAH!”

Instead I turned the rest of my mana into lightning and wrapped it around the blade.

It was every blessing the Thundering Star had ever granted me.

I moved colossal current with Celestial Conductor control,
drew on the mana of both the Thundercloud and White Lightning elixirs,
and, as I’d learned during the admission trials, drove it all through the metal catalyst.

The thick palm struck my shoulder armor.

A shudder.

Then limpness.

“Ghhrrr…”

The mutated ogre lurched forward.

I kicked off its chest and released the hilt.

As I landed, its chin hit the ground.

Boom!

The sword’s tip burst out through its neck.

I’d survived.

The ogre was dead.

But relief was premature.

We were deep in the border jungle—
the kind of place where a drake, or the lizardmen and kobold packs that had ambushed us before,
or even another mutated ogre could appear at any moment.

I had to gather the soldiers and retreat.

A single roar that could wipe out a hundred men—
unbelievable.

I was half-tempted to slap that half-wit merchant who’d dragged us into this.

True, we’d come for the bounty,
but I hadn’t expected this level of danger.

Grinding my teeth, I vowed to wring every last coin of that gold out of him and turned back toward the troops.

“The world—spins!”

“Heeheehee!”

“Mother—Mother!”

They were calmer than before; fewer screams, more fainted men covered in scratches.

Several had stripped out of their armor and clothes entirely to claw at their itching skin.

“Vice-Centurion Jo!”

Jo was among them.

“Jo?”

Sweat soaked her hair. She’d thrown off the quilted armor she never removed and was raking her hands under her silk shirt.

The bandages around her torso unraveled with her motion.

I saw her neck and chest.

When Yulia came at night, she’d seemed flustered then, too.

There was none of the curve a man should have at the throat—
and there were curves where a man shouldn’t have any, at the chest and waist.

I’d half-suspected before.
Her tone was rough, but her voice high.
Her manner coarse, yet she’d never met with the women who visited camp after dark.

“Kyrie, sir?”

She looked up.

“You’re unharmed?”

“I am.”

She glanced at my face,
then at the fallen ogre in the distance,
then at her discarded armor and the bandages strewn about.

At last she spoke, bright as ever:

“I’m relieved you’re safe, sir. But it seems I’ve managed to screw my own situation rather spectacularly.”

“…”

Yet she didn’t seem shameless.

“Will you handle my execution yourself? I won’t bring disgrace on you.”

Her expression said she meant it.

What should I even say…

I thought faster than I had in the fight with the ogre.

“Put your armor back on first. This place still isn’t safe.”

“Sir?”

“Do you expect me to rouse and reorganize a hundred men alone? I may command, but I was trained more as a warrior than a commander. I need my adjutant.”

“Kyrie…”

“Truth is, my optic nerve strained in that fight. My vision’s still off. I can barely tell what you’re trying to say. We’ll talk once we’re back in the village.”

Simple enough conclusion—
Keep her busy.

Work clears the mind better than any sermon.

Jo proved herself again.

“Up, you slugs! Sir Kyrie slew the ogre himself!”

“You, you, you—flip that carcass and recover the Sir’s sword!”

“Third Decurion, salvage the cannon wrecks! Fifth Decurion, tally the casualties! Seventh, secure the perimeter!”

She roused the men with kicks and shouts, recovered my blade, and restored the lines.

In under an hour, the broken unit was ready to march again.

“Kyrie, sir. You should see this.”

She’d even spotted abnormalities.

“There are two main reports—one about the wounded, one about the ogre.”

“Start with the wounded.”

“As you surely experienced, sir, the soldiers saw strange visions after the ogre’s roar, followed by convulsions, vomiting, and delirium. Several developed rashes like this.”

She lifted the tunics of a few who’d scratched themselves raw.

“Age spots? No… tumors?”

Their sides and forearms were blotched with red welts—
resembling the veins that had marbled the ogre’s flesh.

“Noted. We’ll summon a traveling priest once we return.”

“And this, sir, concerns the ogre.”

She led me back to the corpse.

A dozen soldiers parted to reveal it.

From the ogre’s nostrils leaked a clear, glistening fluid.

“Strange.”

“Yes.”

It wasn’t mucus—it was like melted crystal, beautiful and translucent.
Within it floated threads of dark-red fluid like blood vessels.

It looked as if a man’s flesh had been made transparent so you could watch his veins flow inside.

“If we have a glass vessel, collect some. We’ll send it to the main house.”

I gave the order.

“Return to the village! Hold on a little longer!”

Thanks to Jo’s efforts, we managed to withdraw before sunset.

“Blue Knight.”

“Gaven.”

That night—

“I trust you don’t intend to overlook your adjutant’s crimes.”

Gaven pushed up his spectacles with a smirk.

“One: violation of the Church’s doctrine forbidding cross-dress and deception of cosmic harmony.”

A faint smile spread.

“Two: deceiving His Highness the Great Peleus’s army by falsifying identity—treason by imposture.”

It wasn’t an evaluator’s smile. It was a spy’s.

“Three: a common woman’s enlistment and commission—each offense punishable by death, as you know.”

That was when I decided exactly how this would end.

“Of course I know.”

It was time to remove Gaven.

Chapter 26

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