Slice—

I swung my knife at the monster charging at me.

Ordinarily, it was a red-eyed vampire whose wounds would have healed almost instantly, but—

{Kahaaaak!?}

that wound did not recover.

The monster, its body split clean in two, rolled across the ground, and soon stopped breathing.

{Brothers, be on your guard!}

The faint light lingering in my blade.

That brilliantly golden liquid old man Yun had coated my knife with.

{That being wields the power of our enemy!}

That light still remained on my blade, and it was preventing those bastards from healing.

{Die!}

And that wasn’t all.

A giant beast in the shape of a bull slammed its horns into me.

Crack.

The monster already looked powerful as hell, and now it had even reinforced its raw strength with that supernatural ability.

I could hear every bone in my body shatter in an instant.

But—

Crack...

those shattered bones began moving toward the other broken fragments of their own accord, as if they had wills of their own.

A trait that enhanced the user’s abilities by making the blood inside the body circulate violently.

[Berserk]

The vampire blood inside me raced through every vessel in my body even faster, so for the brief moment I used that trait, my regenerative ability rose to a level similar to that of other vampires.

...Unfortunately, though.

'This hurts like hell...!'

The wounds piling up from the enemies rushing me were beyond even that regeneration.

By the time one wound was trying to close, a new one was already being carved into my body.

'...In that case.'

Slice—

{Grrk...!}

I swung my knife and cut into the weak point of the monster that had shattered my bones.

Following the recipe [Chef’s Eye] showed me, its body was dressed down.

Right.

My combat style was based, at its core, on “cooking.”

And the enemy dying was only a side effect of the ingredient being “prepared.”

[The dish has been completed!]

[Very Fresh Minordon Raw Sashimi]

Every time I cut an enemy down, one dish was completed in my hand.

Snap!

I reached out, grabbed a chunk of flesh from the monster I had just sliced apart, and—

Crunch.

tore into it with my teeth.

{My flesh...!}

Those were its last words before it died.

The cooking effects were already stacked three deep.

Maybe if my body were still whole, it’d be different.

But for me, with my vital energy gone, stacking any more dishes than this was physically impossible.

[Skill - “Healthy Meal” activates.]

Which was why I hadn’t eaten this dish for some other effect.

[This dish has been prepared as a healthy meal.]

[Because health was prioritized over flavor, its taste is quite poor, causing the existing cooking effects to disappear.]

[In place of the existing cooking effects, the consumer’s health is restored in proportion to the quality of the dish.]

The moment I swallowed the dish, the wounds that had been slowly accumulating all over my body—

Srrrk...

in an instant, healed completely.

{...I thought you were merely a strange-smelling being.}

{But you have regenerative ability greater even than our brothers?}

The enemy commanders who saw that.

The nobles stared at me in shock.

'I’ve got mana.'

There had been plenty of times when I’d been scrambling because I lacked mana.

But that had only been because I’d been doing wildly reckless shit at the time.

The amount of mana produced by my stats was overwhelming.

Unless I was trying to feed high-quality dishes to hundreds of thousands of people at once, or put a sun over my own head, something like continuously producing healthy meals just to restore myself wasn’t difficult.

{There was no report of a being like that from the brothers who cleared this region. Has an enemy arisen naturally over time?}

{It may be a being that was trapped somewhere, like us, and was only released late.}

{It has the form of a native species... but there is no way a native species with that kind of power could exist. Even that mongrel who surrendered to us was not to that degree.}

{A being that imitates the form of other life, perhaps.}

Voices came from the left, right, front, and back.

But—

{Still, this may not be a bad thing.}

{...Indeed.}

{If it is a being that strong, then its blood must be special as well.}

in their voices, there was shock, yes—

but no fear.

{It would make prey worthy of being offered to the Marquis.}

What was being cut down by my hand, in the end, was nothing more than expendable troops they could afford to lose.

{If the Marquis takes that one’s blood—}

{...it may reach the level the Grand Duke ordered all at once.}

The commanders of those forces stayed hidden far behind, watching me and licking their lips.

'It’s not that I’m weak.'

This wasn’t like back when I was floundering among the vampires Jinlei commanded, unable to find any way to escape.

The faint light gathered on the blades in both my hands.

That power sliced through even the toughest hides with ease and interfered with their greatest strength: healing.

On top of that, the divine power spilling from my body strengthened my power against [Evil].

And once I managed to identify an enemy’s weak point, digging into that weakness relentlessly was my specialty.

Right now, I held a ridiculous compatibility advantage against vampires.

But—

{Krrrooooooough!!!}

{For the glory of the bloodline!}

{Shyaaaaaak!}

even compatibility like that only mattered when the difference in level was within a certain range.

Sometimes, no matter what you did, there was a gap in raw power that simply couldn’t be overturned.

'Too many.'

Each enemy was strong, forged from the Grand Duke’s blood.

And there were far too many of them.

'And on top of that, they’re careful.'

The ones commanding the troops had fallen far back, thoroughly blocking every possible route of movement so that not even a one-in-ten-thousand chance could occur.

'This is...'

And then, realizing something, I gave a dry laugh.

'This is how you hunt a monster.'

The method used when a small number of weak ones faced a single strong one.

Of course it felt familiar.

It was the same way we awakened fought overwhelmingly powerful enemies.

After a long mess of twists and turns, I had grown pretty strong.

But from the beginning, I had never cared all that much about my own individual strength.

And that was because—

'This is how a powerful individual ends up.'

No matter how much you honed a single person’s strength, it became meaningless in front of an army with strategy.

...I just never imagined I’d be the one on the “individual” side.

I kept cutting enemies down, but in the end, that was all it was.

That sun had only been allowed to imitate divine authority one time.

At this rate, who would win was obvious as hell.

And.

Apparently I wasn’t the only one who knew it.

-...I’m sorry.

From the very back of that army, a voice pierced into my mind.

-But I simply cannot give up.

Slice—

I cut down another monster.

Both hands still weren’t enough to handle the enemies rushing me, so I lashed out with my foot and crushed one’s skull.

Then I tore into the flesh of the enemy I’d cut down and chewed it roughly.

-You do not know what kind of life I have lived.

And as I did, I thought to myself.

'That I don’t know what kind of life you’ve lived.'

Well, sure.

It’s hard to know facts you were never told.

But even so—

'Roughly...'

I felt like I could guess.

That kind of thought crossed my mind.

***

-I told my retainers that I was a great noble from the moment I was born.

At that,

I remembered the story Karhin had told me not long ago.

There were many human nations on the continent.

But if you asked which of those nations was the greatest, no matter how strong a person’s patriotism might be, everyone would speak a single name.

The Empire.

Not only did it possess overwhelming military power unmatched by any foreign nation, it was also the main seat of the Church of the Sun God, the most widespread faith among humanity.

Because it bore the largest share of the front against those vampires,

it even collected taxes from nearby countries under the pretense of protection fees.

Because of that, for the citizens of small nations far from the Empire, the Empire was sometimes imagined as a heavenly land personally watched over by God.

A place where angels walked the earth, and everything was abundance.

-Perhaps... if it were you.

But of course, that Empire was still a land where people lived.

There were naturally people who starved to death because they had nothing to eat,

and dark regions filled with nothing but miserable lives.

Frontier settlements were like that.

Natural disasters on a catastrophic level, such as severe drought.

Homelands laid waste by wars born of internal struggles over power within the Empire.

Outbreaks of plague, or people driven out by those vampires.

Those who had lost the places they could call home for all sorts of reasons.

Among them, the ones who despaired slipped into wealthy cities and became beggars.

And the ones who still wanted to keep living were guided by the Empire to frontier settlements.

-You may already have guessed that all of that was absurd bragging.

Literal undeveloped land, with no safety secured.

There was no foundation whatsoever for making a living there, and no one knew what dangers might exist where.

That was where the Empire sent those with nowhere left to go.

With the promise that taxes on whatever crops came from that land would be greatly reduced for generations, or not collected at all.

For all the talk,

if they managed to succeed in settling the land, they would be able to begin a new life.

For those who had not yet given up on life, it was effectively their only option.

...Even when bad rumors about those places were constantly circulating.

-My father was a criminal.

And then.

To one of those frontier settlements, a man arrived.

A huge man with a vicious face.

Through the tears in his old clothes, rough scars could be seen all over him.

The sort of wounds a person would never get from farm work.

When the residents of the frontier settlement saw him, they frowned.

The Empire sent to these frontier settlements anyone who had been cast aside with nowhere else to go, without discriminating over what «N.o.v.e.l.i.g.h.t» sort of person they were.

Among them were prisoners who had committed serious crimes, been captured, and later released.

And there were also plenty who committed crimes and fled to frontier settlements before they could be caught.

The place already had more than enough work to do.

If someone violent got mixed in and dragged down efficiency, there was hardly anything worse.

But—

-The place where I lived was so impoverished that it had to accept even criminals like him.

Even so,

the frontier settlement was desperately short on hands.

That was all the more true because just recently, several people had died from overwork and starvation.

And so the man and his daughter joined the settlement.

The very first thing they did was clear out the remains of death inside the hut they had been assigned to live in.

***

Contrary to everyone’s worries, the man thankfully worked sincerely alongside the villagers.

The unfortunate part was this: life in a frontier settlement was overwhelmingly busy.

The more diligently the man worked, the less room he had to care for his child.

“...”

The daughter looked around.

In the center of the village, women had gathered while doing small bits of work.

And hanging at each of their waists

was a child who seemed to be their own.

Faces caked with dust from their harsh lives.

Even while men and women, old and young alike, had to work constantly, they still somehow managed to care for their children.

-I never even saw my mother’s face.

The man’s daughter could not.

Only a few softhearted women would occasionally come by to check on how she was doing.

It was a time when everyone was struggling.

People too busy taking care of their own families had no room to look after someone else’s child.

“Father.”

And so, one day, when her father came home late at night—

“Where did my mother go?”

the daughter asked him that question.

Inside the dark room, where not even a single candle had been lit, the father heard the voice and, for whatever reason—

“She left.”

after a moment’s thought, he finally answered.

“She abandoned us. Went off on her own.”

Abandoned.

-That was the only story I was ever told about my mother.