Chapter Thirty-One: Aulang’s Methods

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After a brief standoff, the Great Velocidrome seized the initiative and launched its attack.

It raised its body, opened its bloodied maw, and sprang at the hunter.

The attack was still as plain and unimaginative as ever, almost stiff in its simplicity. Yet the presence of paralyzing fangs meant the hunter had to remain fully alert.

One mistake—being grazed even once by those poison-coated teeth—and he might well lose his life on the hunting grounds.

With his shield held before him, he sidestepped the attack. It was the safest response; even if the Great Velocidrome followed up, he would have ample time to deal with it.

But his caution appeared to have been unnecessary.

After its bite found nothing, the Great Velocidrome made no further move. Instead, it leaped backward several yards, seemingly wary of the hunter’s counterattack.

A trace of disappointment stirred within Oran.

“Go on, attack, will you? As the leader of your pack, have you grown timid now that all your underlings are gone?

“Or is this all the so-called first trial for novice hunters, the Great Velocidrome?”

Oran pressed his lips together and suppressed those restless emotions that would only cloud his judgment. He raised his shield loosely with his right arm, held his hunting knife in his left, and advanced toward his target step by step.

The Great Velocidrome shifted its weight backward. The muscles in its thighs tensed, and it prepared to leap away once more.

Oran suddenly accelerated. In the blink of an eye, the few yards between them vanished. Carrying the force of his charge, the hunting knife in his hand slashed diagonally toward his opponent.

Advancing Slash!

The Great Velocidrome had been preparing to leap backward and was half a beat too slow. The hunter closed the distance first and brought his blade down across its chest.

“Graaagh!”

The Great Velocidrome cried out in pain, and at last its ferocity was roused. It abandoned any thought of retreat, lowered its head, and snapped at the hunter who had come within striking range.

Oran guarded himself with his shield and twisted aside, avoiding the bite. But the Great Velocidrome’s counterattack did not end there. It spun through the air, its slender tail lashing out like a whip.

Oran, who had never once relaxed his vigilance, leaped backward. The tail’s tip struck his shield, and the considerable force made him pause for an instant.

Now that was more like it!

Before the Great Velocidrome could turn back around, the muscles in Oran’s legs and core drew tight as bowstrings. After a brief moment of gathering strength, he surged forward.

The Great Velocidrome had just turned to face him when a sword blow far heavier than his previous Advancing Slash came down upon its head with full force. It split open a bloody gash and shaved away a piece of the imposing crest atop its skull.

The sudden heavy blow made the Great Velociprey reel backward, leaving it in a considerable daze.

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Oran did not rush to press his attack. Instead, he stored the excess momentum from his previous strike and once again entered a charging stance.

One second. Two.

The instant the stored power reached its limit, he lunged forward and swung again. Another heavy horizontal slash struck the Great Velocidrome’s head and knocked it askew.

This “Deadly Combo,” now infused with the Great Sword’s charging technique and a few elements of the Hammer’s momentum conversion, had long since become something entirely different. If an experienced Sword and Shield user who truly understood the Deadly Combo had witnessed it, they would probably have felt deeply uncomfortable.

The true essence of the Deadly Combo lay in its rhythm and in seizing an opponent’s openings—not in charging up attacks.

Oran’s peculiar technique, which relied on overwhelming force to stagger the opponent, then gathered strength for more than a second before delivering another full-powered strike and staggering the monster again, was less a Deadly Combo than a Great Sword charge aimed at the head.

Of course, Great Sword users would never accept that description. They would insist, “Isn’t this simply a Deadly Combo with a slightly slower rhythm and somewhat greater power?”

A charged slash was no such light and frivolous thing!

Oran himself understood that his hastily blended version of the Deadly Combo, incorporating Great Sword charging techniques, was somewhat awkward and caught between disciplines.

It lacked the power of a Great Sword and the agility of a Sword and Shield. Its overall rhythm was closer to that of a Hammer, yet it lacked the Hammer’s greatest advantage: the weight of its attacks.

Against larger and more powerful monsters, the technique might prove embarrassing. If he could not stagger them, his offensive rhythm would be broken.

But against the Great Velocidrome, it was just right.

Before the Great Velocidrome could regain its footing, Oran swung his charged shield strike into its forehead. The impact left it dazed and sent several of its poisonous fangs flying, forcing it to stagger backward with its head thrown back once more.

Naturally, Oran wanted to maintain this rhythm and keep up the pressure. But even the finest Great Sword user could not charge attacks without limit.

And charging a Sword and Shield attack was even more difficult than charging a Great Sword. With his current skill and physical conditioning, he could perform at most three such heavy blows in succession.

If he forcibly continued charging, his muscles might well tear from the sustained tension.

Was he therefore forced to abandon this perfect opportunity, retreat, and give his muscles a few seconds to relax?

Of course not.

The weapons he had mastered were not limited to the three that could borrow techniques from one another: the Great Sword, the Hammer, and the basic Sword and Shield.

There were also the Dual Blades, whose fighting style was completely different.

At first, he had tried to combine Demon Mode with the Great Sword’s charged slash. If he could retain both the speed of Demon Mode and the tremendous power of a charged slash, would that not be overwhelmingly powerful?

Yet after trying it repeatedly himself, he discovered that the two were practically incompatible.

Demon Mode worked by stirring the battle aura and forcing the body into a state of extreme hyperactivity. In that state, the heartbeat accelerated sharply, blood raced through the body, and the muscles became highly unstable. Even flexing a few fingers could make them jerk wildly, as though seized by a cramp.

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Few hunters could adapt to such a state. Only that small minority could activate Demon Mode in actual combat and become true Dual Blades users.

Yet even a highly skilled Dual Blades user could not perfectly control their body while in Demon Mode. They could only rely on countless hours of training to build muscle memory.

The clearest example was the Demon Dance. Once it began, the movements were almost impossible to stop. Only a leap, a roll, or some similar maneuver could forcibly interrupt it.

A Great Sword’s charged slash, on the other hand, demanded absolute control over every muscle in the body.

Take herding sheep as an analogy. Only when every sheep obediently followed orders and gathered into the flock could the herd be driven smoothly in a particular direction.

But in Demon Mode, every “sheep” was mad, racing wildly in every direction. There was practically no way to force them all together.

Thus, every attempt he made to charge an attack while in Demon Mode ended in failure—complete, total, and utterly irredeemable failure. In the end, he had no choice but to give up.

He had once taken this problem to Miss Maridan.

Although she was neither a Great Sword user nor a Dual Blades user, she was the strongest hunter among those he knew, and her breadth of vision far surpassed that of ordinary hunters.

After hearing his question, Maridan found a “solution” for him from an entirely different perspective.

If a flock of sheep was forcibly gathered together for too long, they would grow restless and refuse to assemble again. The same was true of a Great Sword: it could not charge forever.

So why not let the sheep run wild for a while? Once they had exhausted themselves, would they not gather together again?

Oran struck his sword against his shield and activated Demon Mode.

Red light flashed. His battle aura surged violently through his body. The young hunter blurred and appeared before the Great Velocidrome, his sword and shield crossing in a haze of indistinct afterimages.

Demon Dance!

In the span of only a few seconds, Oran carved more than a dozen fresh wounds across the Great Velocidrome’s chest, neck, and head before deactivating Demon Mode.

The muscles that had been drawn taut from his repeated exertion had been thoroughly loosened and worked through.

Before the Great Velocidrome could recover from that storm of blows, Oran once again tightened the muscles of his core and entered a charging stance...

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