Chapter 5: First Mission, Big Hit

There was not a shred of hesitation or unnecessary bravado in the girl’s movements.

“Kuhahaha! What’s that tiny little wench think she’s doing! Rushing forward without fear, you must have several lives to spare!”

The giant man clutched his stomach and laughed, as if this absurd sight was quite amusing.

His laughter, beyond hearty and bordering on mad, echoed throughout the entire forest, causing some mercenaries to collapse right where they stood.

A cruel amusement flickered in his eyes.

That laughter would surely be followed by merciless violence.

“Alright then, shall we have a little fun, little lady!”

Bull Jack, who had been roaring with laughter, swung one of the massive twin axes in his hands down at the girl’s head without mercy, right as he shouted.

The sound of the axe cutting through the air was enough to make the surrounding atmosphere feel like it was being torn apart.

The power contained in that heavy chunk of iron had enough force to split even a large boulder in two in a single blow.

---

The priest quietly pushed aside the book he was reading.

He thought about what had happened a few days ago.

The girl with silver hair who had no arms.

After the healing, he had said that the girl’s stage seemed to have risen to the Expert level.

But something didn’t feel right.
A nagging feeling.

‘I too, in my younger days… was an adventurer.’

The priest smiled faintly.

Before he wore the robes of a priest, he had seen his fair share of harsh things as a cleric in an adventuring party and had crossed the line between life and death countless times.

Thanks to that, he could gauge the ‘stage’ of most warriors at a glance.
The number of times he had healed Expert-level powerhouses was too many to count on his fingers.

His long experience was whispering to him.

That girl, she already had the framework of an Expert even before the healing.

However, the sensation of a clear ‘ascension’ was also vivid.

When he poured divine power into the girl’s body, he had clearly felt her innate energy burst forth explosively, as if a dam had broken.

That was why he had concluded that she had ‘reached’ a new stage.

These two contradictory sensations.

What if, just what if… someone who was already an Expert had leaped one step further from there?

What in the world would that be….

“Master?”

The word escaped his lips unknowingly.

That name, Master, swirled hotly in his throat like a ball of fire.

An existence like that, being dragged around as a s*ave with both arms cut off?

A scoff escaped him automatically.

“…This is ridiculous nonsense.”

He shook his head vigorously from side to side.
They say you only get more delusional as you get older, and that was exactly what was happening.

---

“Watch out!”

A desperate shout.

Clang!

But what followed was not the gruesome sound of tearing flesh and breaking bones.

Instead, a clear, pure metallic sound, as if from a well-tuned instrument, echoed across the battlefield.

It was an unbelievable sight.

With that slender arm, she had met the blade of an axe that looked much larger than her own body head-on!

No, it wasn’t just a simple block.

She stood without even a tremor, in a posture so relaxed it was as if she were catching a light tree branch.

It was in that very moment.

A wave of intense and pure mana, incomparable to anything before, exploded from her small body.

It was on a different dimension from any flow of mana I had ever experienced.

The very air around her seemed to vibrate heavily and distort, and the fallen leaves and small pebbles on the ground began to swirl around her.

Only then did I realize.
The power I had vaguely guessed at after she received healing at the temple, was handed a weapon, and we had a simple spar…

Was merely the tip of a giant iceberg.

In our spar, she had clearly, and by a great deal, been holding back and going easy on me.

Immediately after lightly parrying Jack’s axe, the girl launched a counterattack without the slightest delay.

Her movements were as elegant as a painting, and at the same time, as fast as a flash of light.

The first slash.

As her sword cut through the air, a blue afterimage of mana drew a long trajectory.

And in the next moment, Bull Jack’s massive left forearm, as if it were a ripe fruit, popped off from his torso and flew into the air.

It was an impeccably clean and precise cut.

“Kuaaaaaack!”

At the unimaginable counterattack, a desperate scream mixed with pain and astonishment erupted from Bull Jack’s mouth.

Hot blood gushed like a fountain from the cross-section of his severed arm, staining the surroundings red, but there was no change of emotion to be found on the face of the girl who had launched the attack.

It was an indifferent face, as if she were just doing what needed to be done, like a skilled craftsman carving wood.

The second slash.

This time, she aimed for Bull Jack’s right arm as he staggered and screamed.

Just like the first, it was a perfect sword strike without the slightest error.

Jack’s remaining arm also fell limply to the ground, and now the giant man, having lost both arms, couldn’t even maintain his balance, stumbling and writhing in pain.

A large pool of blood had already formed at his feet.

It all happened in the blink of an eye.

An Expert-level powerhouse with a bounty equivalent to the annual income of a decent territory.

The infamous Bull Jack had been completely neutralized with just two sword slashes.

And by the hands of a young girl.
It was truly an overwhelming and brutally one-sided victory.

The battlefield was once again engulfed in silence.

His minions, who were standing beside him, just stared blankly at the sight of Bull Jack being swatted away like a piece of paper.

On their faces was only a pure void, created by the gap between the overwhelming might their boss had shown just moments before, and the unbelievable reality of that same boss being brutally crushed by a young girl.

“Uh…?”

One of them made a stupid sound, like someone who had just woken from sleep.
His gaze was fixed on the two thick forearms rolling on the ground and his former boss, who was screaming while spraying blood like a fountain.

Another one dropped the rusty sword she was holding with a ‘clang’, but she didn’t seem to have any intention of picking it up.

She was probably seriously contemplating whether she had eaten a poisonous mushroom and was hallucinating.

“……The, the boss…?”

Yet another one barely managed to open his mouth, his voice trembling.

His eyes were shaking unsteadily, as if they were about to roll out of his head at any moment.

In the direction he was looking, their boss, who just a moment ago seemed to fear nothing under the sky, was now a lump of meat without arms, wailing desperately.

No matter how you looked at it, that sight was a far, far cry from an ‘Expert-level powerhouse’.

“The boooooossssss haaaas beeeeeen defeaaaaaateeeeed!”

That shout was like a signal flare.
With that one phrase, it seemed the brain circuits of all the remaining minions were directly wired to the single keyword of ‘survival’.

Their eyes momentarily glinted with a strange sense of camaraderie.

‘Yes, we are one!’

‘When it comes to running away, that is!’

“R-ruuuun!”

“Mooooommy!”

After Bull Jack’s minions scattered into the forest in a panic, a heavy silence lingered over the battlefield for a while.

The piercing smell of blood, the bodies of bandits strewn about, and the small girl standing nonchalantly in the center of it all was, in itself, an surreal picture.

The desperate screams and the clash of weapons that had echoed just moments before were gone, and now only the sound of the wind and the rough breathing of the mercenaries could be heard intermittently.

All eyes turned to one place.
To the girl.

“Did, did that young lady really… Bull Jack…?”

“No way… to take down an Expert-level powerhouse so easily… am I dreaming?”

The mercenaries just exchanged glances, whispering in voices mixed with astonishment and disbelief.

Victor’s face was deathly pale.
The reality that the ‘armless wench’ he had despised was in fact an absolute powerhouse was crushing his pride.

In contrast, the girl at the center of all this commotion was far too calm.

She simply wiped her sword, which had just cut off the arms of a monster-like man, with a clean cloth.

It was a mundane and calm gesture, as if she had just swept the yard or was preparing for dinner.

No excitement.

No arrogance.

Not even a hint of fatigue could be felt from her, which made her an even more incomprehensible and awe-inspiring existence.

The gaze of everyone on her should have been burdensome, but she paid it no mind.

Perhaps…

To her, dealing with Bull Jack was as trivial as kicking a stone on the side of the road.

I watched the girl silently, then my gaze shifted to Victor.

He was still standing like a man who had lost his mind, muttering something small that could have been a soliloquy or a groan.

Even without straining to listen, his complex feelings could be read from his expression alone, but his muttering faintly drifted to my ears on a gentle breeze.

“I-if I had bought her then… Keuk… Damn it! Damn it! Damn it! Why only that bastard Leon!”

In any case, the mission was complete.

We finished off the remaining bandits, collected the spoils, and returned to the guild in a somewhat awkward and tense atmosphere.

While settling the reward at the guild reception, one of the guild staff’s eyes went wide as he confirmed Bull Jack’s corpse (to be precise, his twin axes and head that we brought back).

As if she couldn’t believe it, she went through the confirmation process several times, then finally shouted in a trembling voice.

“W-wait a minute! If, if this man is really the infamous Bull Jack… the bounty! There’s a huge bounty on him!”

“I know there’s a huge bounty, but how much is it?”

The annual operating budget of a decent territory.

I had heard this, but honestly, I thought it was an exaggeration.

“The bounty on Bull Jack is… a whopping 550 gold coins!”

There was no exaggeration.

550 gold coins.

It was a huge sum of money that an ordinary mercenary would find difficult to even touch even if they worked non-stop their entire life.

The guild staff calmed his excitement and continued his explanation.

“To, to receive a bounty of this magnitude, you must go to the government office in person and go through an identity verification process. Along with proof of subjugating Bull Jack, you will need documents or a seal to prove your identity. It could be a rather cumbersome process, but…”

His words continued, but another thought was already circling in my head.

A cumbersome process?

Something like that is no problem at all in the face of 550 gold coins