The Hunter of Hawk and Wolf-Chapter 19 : Chapter 19

Sevha groaned, his eyes fluttering open to the snow-covered ground where he lay.
His mind was hazy, but the pain that shot through him as he rose to his feet jolted him awake.
Bones are fine. My right arm… a strained tendon. I won’t be able to draw my bow with much force for a while.
Sevha assessed his condition and surveyed his surroundings.
He was standing at the bottom of the Maw of the Mountains.
The handaxe he had buried in the chasm wall during his fall lay shattered on the ground.
Teresse and Legra were unconscious before him.
They’re... breathing.
Slightly relieved, Sevha looked up.
Snowflakes immediately struck his face. Far above, he could see the snow falling from the night sky through the Maw’s opening.
The moment Sevha sighed, gauging the distance, Teresse let out a heavier groan than his own and squinted her eyes open.
“Hunter. Is this... the Hall of Just Judgment?”
“It is. Judging by the length of the line, we’ll have to wait about three hundred years for our verdict.”
Teresse chuckled weakly at Sevha’s joke and got to her feet.
“Legra?” she asked.
“He’s fine. And you?”
“I’m fine.”
As if to prove it, Teresse bent her arm to flex a bicep that wasn’t there. Pain shot through her shoulder.
She grimaced briefly before smoothing her expression.
Sevha was inwardly impressed at how quickly and deliberately she concealed her pain.
She's no weak girl, that’s for sure.
Oblivious to Sevha’s silent praise, Teresse looked up at the chasm’s opening.
“Climbing out looks difficult,” she observed.
“Finding another way is the priority. If there is none, we’ll have to crawl up, difficult or not.”
Having decided on a course of action, Sevha lifted Legra onto his back. Then, he and Teresse walked deeper into the chasm.
The snow falling from the narrow strip of night sky looked like a thousand hanging curtains.
The curtain of snow brushed against their skin, chilling it red.
But the two of them walked on, pushing through the snow.
After some thirty minutes, the entrance to a cave appeared before them.
“I have no weapon, and my right arm is injured. If we run into danger, I may not be able to help you... so be careful, Teresse.”
As Sevha called her by name, Teresse replied seriously, “You too, Sevha.”
Sevha nodded and entered the cave.
The moment they stepped inside, the narrow sky vanished, and a jet-black darkness swallowed them.
They followed the sound of a desolate wind cutting through the darkness, avoiding the chill of the stone walls that brushed against them.
A short while later, a light appeared. It was a dim glare, a luminous darkness.
Only after stepping into the light did they understand its source.
“This is... incredible.”
Before them lay a vast, cubical space.
A large crystal sphere embedded in the center of the ceiling emitted a dim light, illuminating hundreds of stone houses below. Countless doorways and staircases were carved into every wall.
It was an underground village steeped in the mystery of centuries, perhaps millennia.
Sevha murmured, “I’ve never heard of such a place. Not from my father, not from anyone.”
If the Anse Tribe did not know of it, then no one in the world did.
Pleased by the prospect of a historic discovery, a smile bloomed on Teresse’s face.
As her joy reached its peak, she let it out in a voice filled with the excitement of a child receiving a surprise gift.
“It’s magnificent!”
“What is?”
“It’s not hard to guess what this place is!”
“Hard or not, I didn’t ask...”
“You said the Anse Tribe used to live in the Frost Mountains, yes? They didn’t live
on
the mountains. They built an underground village
inside
the mountains and lived
here
!”
Unable to contain her excitement, Teresse clattered down the stairs before them.
“Teresse!” Sevha chased after her.
But she didn’t stop running or talking.
“The people of the continent had this level of technology before the founding of the Holy Empire! How did they create such a space inside a mountain range? And what is that glowing stone?”
Spilling out words as she ran, Teresse’s excitement tangled her legs, and she fell flat on the ground.
But her glee outweighed the pain. She looked up with a laugh at a stone house about three times larger than the others, which stood beyond a courtyard full of stone monuments.
“Tere—! Magus! Will you calm down?”
As Sevha helped her up, Teresse suddenly grabbed his hand.
“What are you—!”
“Come with me!” She pulled Sevha by the hand and into the large stone house.
Inside was a corridor with rooms on either side, which opened into a circular hall.
A stone statue stood in the center.
Teresse stopped before the statue and examined it closely.
“A... hawk-man?”
A mass of tentacles in human form was attacking a man with the head of a hawk. The man was drawing a bow strung with three arrows, practically at point-blank range.
The moment Sevha saw the statue, he knew what the man was doing.
He’s using Hawk’s Talon. But why so close, practically in its embrace? What fool would shoot a bow at that range?
As Sevha pondered this, Teresse examined the statue’s pedestal. The moment she read the strange characters carved there, her expression turned ecstatic.
“So that’s what it was...”
“What is?”
“What do you think!”
Teresse spun around to face Sevha. Only then did her eyes fall upon their clasped hands.
She hesitated, her face flushing, and let go. Then she cleared her throat to brush off the embarrassment and spoke with a childlike smile.
“Se... Hunter. Look at the pedestal. See the characters carved there?”
“Those are characters? Not a child’s scribbles?”
“These are characters used by humans before the founding of the Holy Empire.”
“From the Mythical Age?”
“Exactly,” Teresse said. “There are almost no records from before the Holy Empire—only myths about the gods. That’s why people call it the Mythical Age.”
“You can read the script?”
“I can read a bit more of it than is commonly known. Anyway! Guess what it says here.”
Sevha, of course, remained silent, so Teresse read the characters.
“Rebirth. One. Hawk. Death. King. Sleep. Again. Death. Leave. Briefly.”
“Uh... you. Talk. Strange. Dummy?”
“I can only decipher the individual words. But with these, I can infer the sentence.”
Teresse pieced the meaning together.
“‘The reborn First Hawk put the Wraith King to sleep, and death departed for a time.’”
“Hmm?”
“The reborn First Hawk must be the chieftain of the Anse Tribe. So what would the Wraith King be?”
“Maybe... an undead?”
“If it were just any undead, they wouldn’t have bothered with the title ‘King.’”
Teresse’s childlike smile vanished, replaced by a witch’s grin.
“The undead—or to be precise, the grudge worms—have a hierarchy. Long ago, the chieftain of the Anse Tribe must have destroyed the highest-ranking grudge worm, driving the undead from the Frost Mountains for a time.”
Only then did Sevha understand the inscription’s importance. “So the undead in the Frost Mountains now can be eliminated the same way?”
“That’s right. Though I don’t know how long ‘for a time’ is.”
Sevha’s face brightened, but only for a moment.
“But how are we supposed to find the leader of the grudge worms now?”
“We can’t.”
They knew the method but had no way to carry it out.
Like a true Hunter of Anse, Sevha instantly buried the useless information in the back of his mind and changed the subject.
“The king of grudge worms is not important right now. Let’s rest here for a bit. When Legra wakes up, we’ll find an exit to the surface.”
“Leave so soon? If we study this place, we could learn so much about the Mythical—!”
“How about we start by studying the fact that people only get one life, both in the Mythical Age and now?”
Teresse bristled at his sarcasm. “What’s so dangerous here?”
She grabbed Sevha’s hand again, went outside the large stone house, and began yelling, gesturing at the courtyard full of stone monuments.
“Look! There’s nothing here but ston—!”
Teresse stopped shouting. Her curiosity instantly cooled, and her expression turned cold.
“The monuments...”
Her eyes scanned the courtyard.
“They aren’t just monuments. They’re gravestones. Hunter? The Anse Tribe’s funeral custom is cremation, isn’t it?”
“It is.”
“Then why are there graves here, where the Anse Tribe used to live?”
“They must have had a reason to change,” Sevha replied casually.
Crrrack...!
The gravestones in the courtyard shifted and toppled in unison.
“Hunter. The reason they changed from burial to cremation...”
As they stood stunned, rotten hands shot out from the soil.
Sevha stared at the scene and said blankly, “An ancestor who saw this would never want to bury a corpse in the ground again.”
As he spoke, the undead crawled out of the earth.
When they opened their mouths and grudge worms emerged from within, Sevha cried, “Run!”
Sevha held Legra tightly on his back, and Teresse gripped Sevha’s hand as they ran.
The grudge worms in the undead’s mouths snapped toward them. The undead followed, running after them.
Sevha glanced back as he ran.
Dozens of corpses were chasing them, their tattered limbs flailing.
“Those damn... rotten things! Why are they moving all of a sudden!”
“The cold preserves the—!”
“No! I mean, why were they still when we went into the house, but now they’re moving!”
Teresse thought quickly, squeezed her eyes shut for a moment, and then opened them. “Yuska.”
“What?”
“Do you remember what Yuska looked like?”
“A corpse with its throat torn open!”
“So he was a dullahan.”
“A what?” Sevha yelled, not slowing his pace.
“A classification!” Teresse shouted back.
“Scholars group them into tiers based on how damaged the corpse is. More worms mean more damage, and more power! A body with no visible wounds is a ghoul. A torn neck, like Yuska, is a dullahan. If there’s almost no flesh left, it’s a lich!”
She glanced at the undead still chasing them. “And those things are ghouls.”
“So?!”
“I said it before, didn’t I? The grudge worms might have a hierarchy! Higher ranks can influence lower ones.”
“In simple terms!”
“A lich can control a dullahan, and a dullahan can control ghouls.”
“What? Then the reason those things suddenly started moving is...”
Sevha scanned the doorways on all sides as he ran.
Then, his face set in a hunter’s expression, he said, “Yuska must be nearby.”
Just then, Legra, still on Sevha’s back, opened his eyes.
“Lord Sevha. Good morn—”
The moment Legra saw the ghouls chasing them, he corrected himself.
“I see I’m still dreaming.”
“No. Soon you’ll be in the afterlife.”
“Uh... I mean... haha... This is no time for joookes!”
Just after Legra’s desperate cry echoed through the cavern, Sevha and Teresse ducked into one of the doorways.
“Sevha! Do you think we can escape?” Teresse asked.
“At their speed, they won’t catch us.”
They ran without rest through the dark tunnel, but the place they arrived at was not the outside.
It was another underground village.
“There are multiple villages within the mountains, and they’re all connected.”
Just as Teresse was grasping the structure of the place, a rotten hand slapped down on the railing of the stairs where they stood.
As they looked over, a ghoul that had climbed the wall poked its head over the railing. It opened its mouth, and the grudge worms inside squirmed.
Legra screamed. Sevha and Teresse simultaneously kicked the ghoul’s head, shattering it.
The head fell to the floor and rolled toward the village, where it was crushed beneath the feet of dozens of ghouls emerging from the doorways.
Teresse’s expression was tense, yet slightly thrilled.
“We need to find an exit and escape,” she said.
“And lead these things to the surface? Do you want to go down in history as the one who brought death to the continent?”
“Those ghouls only moved when Yuska got close. If we escape to the surface and he follows, once we lure him far enough away, they should stop moving again.”
“And you expect me to trust that hopeful speculation?”
Teresse locked eyes with Sevha and said solemnly, “Trust me.”
Meeting her confident gaze, Sevha felt as if he were under a spell, with only a single thought in his mind.
Trust her.
He looked at the doorways carved on all sides, none of which offered any clue where they led.
Finding the right path while being chased by a horde of ghouls would be a difficult task.
But Sevha felt no discouragement, no despair.
He fixed the ghouls with a hunter’s gaze.
“These ancestors never even made it to the Labyrinth Forest. Guess it’s time I showed them how to find a path.”