Chapter 189
Mutant (2)
There were several reasons why Ludwig chose to test Grylls’s abilities despite not having fully recovered.
First, although his body was not in perfect condition, he was still capable of a simple spar.
Perhaps the honey he had continuously eaten yesterday had worked, or perhaps it was thanks to the fish porridge, but he felt far better now.
Until recently, his entire body had felt weak, as though he were suffering from a severe cold. Now, only a slight sense of fatigue remained.
Second, he needed to adapt to his new leg.
He had lived his entire life with all four limbs intact, only to suddenly acquire a mithril prosthetic.
If he intended to survive in the Forest of Four Seasons from now on, he needed to grow accustomed to his new foot.
The third and final reason was that he wanted to know how powerful someone who had survived in the Forest of Four Seasons truly was.
What kind of place was the Forest of Four Seasons?
It was regarded as the most dreadful demonic realm in existence, a region people hesitated even to approach.
Had Ludwig himself not personally experienced why it was called a demonic realm?
Grylls had survived in such a place for nearly an entire month.
Ludwig had quickly realized that after seeing the marks Grylls had carved into the wall.
‘Simply being able to use mana wouldn’t be enough.’
If Ludwig had been able to use mana, could he have survived in the Forest of Four Seasons?
Honestly, he could not say for certain.
All manner of bizarre animals had appeared before him.
Had Grylls survived by using the abilities he displayed yesterday at exactly the right moments?
Had he simply overwhelmed everything with his raw physical power?
Or was there some other reason?
Driven by pure curiosity, Ludwig decided to spar with Grylls.
Claaang!
Ludwig’s mythrilcon sword collided with the shield.
Although he had not used any mana, the piercing shriek of metal rang through the area.
Grylls was about to counterattack when he suddenly hesitated.
The sword currently in his hand was the Heavenly Demon’s sword.
One mistake could result in a catastrophe.
Whoosh!
With that realization, Grylls tossed the sword aside, signaling for Ludwig to wait a moment.
Ludwig understood his intention and retreated a short distance.
Unlike the instantaneous speed with which he had approached, he withdrew with a pronounced limp.
‘He really can’t use mana, can he?’
Grylls watched Ludwig cautiously as he picked up the Heavenly Demon’s sword to put it somewhere safe.
That single attack had given him a rough idea of just how powerful Ludwig was.
Hadn’t he been told that a veteran martial artist’s body naturally became infused with mana, making them far stronger than ordinary people even in everyday circumstances?
The administrator had claimed Ludwig could defeat Grylls without mana.
Perhaps that had not been a complete lie. It might actually have been partly true.
‘It’s not like I’ll be using mana either.’
This would be a contest of pure skill.
Even if I did use mana, I would limit it to reinforcing my body.
After placing the Heavenly Demon’s sword somewhere safe, Grylls brought over the mythrilcon sword.
Its blade was also sharp, but it was still far safer than the Heavenly Demon’s sword.
‘I should make some wooden training swords later.’
His preparations were complete.
Grylls moved the miscellaneous tools aside, creating an empty clearing for them.
Perhaps the animals had sensed the unusual atmosphere between them.
“Come over here.”
“Kyuuu.”
His animal companions moved a safe distance away and began watching.
The giraffe tried to stride majestically into the middle of the clearing, but Kkobong led it away.
And so, Grylls and Ludwig stood facing each other.
With his face tense, Grylls waited for Ludwig to attack.
‘Is he planning to block my attack and then counter?’
Ludwig reached that conclusion when he saw Grylls holding his shield out in front of him.
It was one of the simplest combat methods employed by sword-and-shield warriors.
They trusted in their shield’s defensive power and looked for an opportunity to counterattack.
It was an extremely useful strategy. Even when an opponent knew exactly what was coming, they could still be forced to suffer through it.
‘Though its weakness is that the counterattack tends to be unstable.’
An axe might be different, but the sword’s distinctive center of gravity would make the counterattack unstable.
Keeping that in mind, Ludwig limped slowly toward Grylls.
He had already calculated that Grylls would not attack even if he approached at such a leisurely pace.
Eventually, Ludwig arrived directly in front of him.
Swiing!
Ludwig swung the gray mythrilcon sword with tremendous force.
The moment Grylls saw the movement, he raised his shield to defend himself.
Contrary to his expectations, however, the sword did not strike the shield.
There was no impact.
No metallic clang.
Grylls was briefly confused, but then he saw Ludwig disappear beyond the edge of his shield and realized what had happened.
‘A feint!’
That was another weakness of sword-and-shield warriors.
They were highly vulnerable to mind games.
Because their tactics were often built upon the premise of blocking first, a momentary mistake could leave the rest of their body completely exposed.
Grylls had faced opponents like the boss gorilla, who simply smashed through his shield, but this was his first time fighting someone who used feints.
It left him thoroughly flustered.
‘Right!’
Claaang!
Despite his surprise, his response was remarkably effective.
He immediately turned his shield toward the spot where Ludwig had vanished and blocked the attack.
His regular visual-tracking exercises with the fast sloth allowed him to react in time.
‘Not bad.’
His dynamic vision and reaction speed earned passing marks.
Ludwig had attacked with genuine intent. Although Grylls had been caught off guard, he had still defended himself immediately.
However, there was another reason sword-and-shield warriors became increasingly underrated at higher levels.
‘If they fail to block, they lose.’
The defensive power of the shield gradually became meaningless.
When the world was filled with experts capable of slicing through iron as easily as tofu, trying to block them with a shield was practically the same as advertising:
Please cut me down.
Of course, a handful of people used shields with extraordinary skill, but they were exceptional cases.
Ludwig wondered whether Grylls could become one of those exceptions.
‘In my current condition, I cannot break through that shield’s defenses. In that case....’
Ludwig decided to exploit the shield’s weaknesses through a different method.
More precisely, he would target the rigidity of Grylls’s combat style.
“Huaaah!”
Before he could do so, Grylls launched his own attack.
He apparently believed that since he had blocked once, it was now his turn.
Swoosh! Swish!
Grylls swung his sword with all his strength.
To reiterate, he merely swung it.
Ludwig had noticed it before, but Grylls put so much strength into his body that his posture resembled someone swinging a club.
The absurd part was that he was fast.
In fact, his speed was comparable to that of a competent knight.
He achieved it entirely through his raw physical attributes, which made Ludwig want to laugh in disbelief.
Clang!
However, something else surprised him even more.
When Ludwig seized an opening and counterattacked, Grylls appeared to have predicted it and knocked the sword aside with his shield.
It was what people commonly called a parry—a technique that could only be performed by anticipating the opponent’s attack.
‘What the hell is with this strength...?’
Parrying with a shield rather than a sword was not particularly difficult. What caught Ludwig’s attention, however, was the sheer strength Grylls had displayed while doing it.
Ludwig had put considerable force behind his attack, yet not only had his arm been knocked backward, it now tingled as though it had nearly been dislocated.
Grylls possessed brute strength in the truest sense of the term.
Ludwig had noticed it earlier as well, but their fundamental physical attributes were absurdly different.
“Hup!”
Regardless, the spar was not over.
After successfully parrying the attack, Grylls swung his sword diagonally.
Ludwig’s upper body had been left wide open by the parry. At this rate, the sword would cut him.
Slide—
Yet Ludwig showed no alarm. He effortlessly evaded the attack by retreating a couple of steps.
Perfect distance control.
It was something every martial artist needed to learn, but applying it in actual combat was extremely difficult.
Ludwig, however, withdrew with complete ease—a testament to his wealth of experience.
Swiing!
With Grylls’s attack having missed, the initiative returned to Ludwig.
After regaining his balance, Ludwig brought both arms, which had been knocked upward, crashing down.
Claaang!
Gritting his teeth, Grylls blocked the descending strike.
He was forced to bend his upper body slightly, which normally would have destroyed his balance.
But Grylls had been aiming for precisely that.
Ludwig’s leg entered his field of vision.
One of Grylls’s preferred tactics was to reduce his opponent’s mobility.
Ludwig’s mobility was already impaired, but that did not matter.
‘Someone like him will definitely have a counter.’
The instant that thought occurred to him, Grylls swung his sword horizontally.
The blade traveled directly toward Ludwig’s ankle.
At this rate, Ludwig would soon need another prosthetic.
However—
Stomp!
As though he had anticipated the attack, Ludwig effortlessly stepped on the blade.
Grylls’s carefully aimed strike had failed.
Worse still, his sword was now pinned beneath Ludwig’s foot.
“Not bad.”
“Most people would never consider targeting the leg.”
Ludwig’s voice came from above Grylls’s head.
At the same time, Grylls felt something cold against his neck.
Ludwig’s mythrilcon sword was resting beside his throat.
“...I lost.”
They could not understand each other’s language, but Ludwig easily inferred what Grylls had said.
He withdrew his sword and stepped back.
Grylls straightened his bent torso and composed himself as well.
‘He saw through every one of my moves.’
As expected of a human rather than a beast—and a veteran knight at that.
Kkobong had been relatively easy to face because of his serious weakness: poor eyesight.
Ludwig had no such weakness.
‘If that’s what he’s like with impaired mobility, how strong was he originally?’
Grylls watched Ludwig scribbling something in a notebook.
Everyone in the gallery had repeatedly emphasized how powerful Ludwig was, and this spar had finally made him understand.
‘It seems that even someone like him struggles to survive without mana because he can’t use his techniques.’
While Grylls was once again realizing the importance of mana—
‘In the wilderness, technique means little. Raw physical attributes are what matter. There’s a reason elephants reign supreme over the grasslands.’
Amusingly, Ludwig had reached a completely different conclusion.
There was one reason Grylls had managed to survive in the Forest of Four Seasons despite the dangers he had faced.
His raw physical attributes.
His technique was an absolute mess, but he possessed tremendous physical abilities and an aura that was stupidly powerful.
Even if they added proper technique to that, would it truly make much of a difference?
Honestly, Ludwig did not think so.
‘Training him as a sword-and-shield warrior is the right choice after all. His physical attributes matter more than technique.’
It was not that Grylls lacked talent.
His combat instincts were exceptional.
Ludwig was not teaching a human techniques that would allow him to defeat a gorilla.
He was teaching human martial arts to a gorilla, thereby making the gorilla even stronger.
Was it not cruel to treat a perfectly ordinary person like a wild animal?
In Ludwig’s eyes, Grylls was hardly any different from that white gorilla over there.
Abandoning his greatest strength—his physical attributes—to invest in technique would be profoundly foolish.
‘He’s also excellent at improvising. His ability to observe his opponent’s movements isn’t bad either. If we were outside the forest, he would have been quite satisfying to train.’
Grylls did not possess a heaven-sent talent like the Hero, Asella.
Instead, the heavens had granted him the kind of talent that made a teacher want to nurture him.
If Asella was taught one thing, she would independently comprehend ten—no, a hundred more.
Grylls was different.
If Ludwig taught him one thing, he would apply that single lesson in numerous different ways.
Most important of all were his physical attributes.
Ludwig could not yet judge his aptitude for martial arts, but there was a high probability that he possessed tremendous talent for physical development.
Some people struggled to exceed sixty kilograms no matter how much they ate, while others surpassed one hundred kilograms after eating only a little.
Ludwig would need to observe Grylls more closely, but he might belong to the latter category.
‘First, I should teach him how to cut properly with a sword. If he lacks talent for the sword, I’ll tell him to use an axe.’
Ludwig almost hoped Grylls had no talent for swordsmanship.
There was hardly a weapon more suitable than an axe for exploiting his monstrous physical power.
Still, it would be a shame to discard everything Grylls had learned until now.
More importantly, it would be a tragic waste of the Heavenly Demon’s sword.
Ludwig knew perfectly well how extraordinary the Heavenly Demon’s sword was.
It was a masterpiece among masterpieces.
“Here.”
“Thank you.”
Ludwig handed Grylls his written assessment.
It was fairly lengthy.
The moment Grylls received it, he uploaded it to the gallery.
He would have preferred to ask the administrator directly, but he could hardly trouble someone who was already busy.
“Hey.”
“Hmm?”
While Grylls was using the gallery, Kkobong, who had been quietly watching, approached Ludwig.
Ludwig looked curiously at the gorilla coming toward him.
“You. Fight. Me.”
“What?”
“Whoosh, whoosh. Fight. Once.”
Kkobong used gestures to issue his challenge to Ludwig.
Apparently, watching Grylls and Ludwig fight had left him itching for a match of his own.
Ludwig stared silently at Kkobong and thought—
‘I can never get used to this creature.’
His white fur was strange enough, but he was even wearing glasses.
Around his neck was a mana suppressor of the kind usually worn by prisoners.
Grylls had given Ludwig a rough explanation, but the sight remained difficult to accept in many ways.
‘Is everyone here a mutant?’
The thought briefly crossed Ludwig’s mind.
“Very well. Let us begin at once.”
“Thank you. Teach me.”
Once Ludwig accepted, Kkobong performed an Eastern martial greeting—a fist-and-palm salute.
It was a gesture of respect toward a fellow martial artist and a remarkably unusual action for Kkobong.
Having witnessed the entire exchange, Grylls was dumbfounded.
“Hey. Why don’t you ever greet me like that?”
“You are beast. Worse than beast.”
“You little bastard.”
“....”
Ludwig watched the two people—or rather, the one person and one animal—who could understand each other.
‘I wonder how long it will take me to adjust to this place.’
This forest truly was a village of three-eyed people.