The Hunter of Hawk and Wolf

Right next to the Great Road, inside the Labyrinth Forest.

Sevha watched with cold eyes as the men finished off the wounded around the carriage.

Three of them. Dressed in furs. Armed with a butcher’s knife, a man-catcher, and a flail.

Shabby clothes. Crude weapons. They were clearly bandits.

Three men like that couldn’t have attacked a carriage with armed guards.

Sevha was certain they had more companions. He decided not to make a move until he had a firm grasp of their positions.

“Aargh!”

The bandits, seemingly unaccustomed to killing, butchered the wounded with a clumsy brutality that only prolonged the victims’ suffering.

But Sevha merely watched the gruesome scene, listening to their desperate screams. To rush in and help would be to put himself in danger.

A moment later, after the last of the wounded were dead, the bandit with the butcher’s knife walked toward Sevha’s position.

Clomp... Clomp...

As the footsteps drew closer, Sevha pressed himself flat against the ground. Soon, the bandit’s mocking voice drifted from beyond the bushes.

“So this is the Labyrinth Forest, huh? Hey! If its reputation is true, does that mean the boss and the boys who followed that girl won’t be coming out alive?”

The boss and their companions had followed a girl into the forest?

Knowing they weren’t nearby, Sevha decided it was time to begin the hunt. He crawled silently toward the bushes ahead.

Just then, the frightened voice of another bandit rang out from a distance.

“Don’t joke like that, it’s creepy! The forest’s reputation is real! They say you only have to go in a little way before you lose all sense of direction. Then you just wander until you starve or get eaten by monsters!”

Reaching the edge of the thicket, Sevha peered through the leaves.

The butcher-knife bandit was standing just beyond the bushes. The others were out of sight, somewhere behind the overturned carriage.

Having located his first target, Sevha reached for his quiver and shifted into a crouch, ready to spring up at a moment’s notice.

“Get eaten? You coward! There are forests like this back in my hometown!”

The moment the bandit jeered and turned his back to the bushes, Sevha rose like the wind and loosed his bow.

The arrow pierced the man’s neck. He collapsed without a scream.

Just then, the flail-wielding bandit walked out from behind the carriage, his face a mask of anger.

“Who are you calling coward, you son of a—huh?”

The flail bandit saw his companion’s body and froze.

Sevha dropped his bow, drew a knife, and used the dead man’s back as a springboard, launching himself forward to tackle the flail bandit to the ground.

Without hesitation, he plunged the knife into the man’s throat.

Immediately, Sevha glanced to his side. The bandit with the man-catcher was standing there, aghast.

“You, what the—!”

Realizing he couldn’t win, the bandit hastily turned to flee. Sevha drew a handaxe and sent it spinning into the man’s back—a light, deliberate throw.

The axe bit shallowly, and the bandit screamed as he fell.

“Sp-spare me! I was just doing what the boss told me to!” he spewed, trying to crawl away.

Sevha ignored him, walking over to the overturned carriage and pulling open its door. The cabin was empty. No sign of anyone, no spilled blood.

The girl the bandits were chasing...

Sevha pieced the situation together and walked over to the crawling bandit.

“The blonde noblewoman from the carriage fled into the forest, didn’t she?”

When the bandit didn’t answer and just kept crawling, Sevha mercilessly pulled the handaxe from his back.

The man shrieked in pain. Sevha slammed the axe into the ground in front of his face to silence him.

“Did she flee, or not?”

“Y-y...es! She ran that way with her party, and the boss and the boys went after them!” The bandit, weeping as much from terror as from pain, pointed toward a section of the forest.

“Where are your companions now?”

“I don’t know!”

“How do you contact them?”

“We can’t!”

Sevha had no more questions. He brought the handaxe down on the bandit’s head, then looked toward the part of the forest the man had indicated.

Tracking them alone will take too long. I’ll need help from the Hunters on patrol to find them quickly.

He drew an arrow from his quiver.

Its head was as thick as an ocarina and pierced with holes. It was a Hawk’s Whistling Arrow, used to signal a major incident in Anse.

Sevha fired the arrow into the air, and a sound like a hawk’s cry echoed through the trees. A few seconds later, the same sound answered from somewhere in the forest.

They’re not far.

Sevha waited, expecting the Hunters who had answered to arrive shortly.

But they didn’t come. The longer he waited, the more his irritation grew. The thought that he was getting further from the person he needed to find filled him with a cold rage.

Just as his anger became unbearable, the Hunters of Anse emerged from the forest.

“Who’s the patrol leader?” Sevha demanded.

A young woman about his age approached. She had an energetic air, her long brown hair tied back tightly.

Her name was Marina.

“Lord Sevha?”

Marina looked momentarily flustered, then broke into a radiant smile, as if she’d just met the man of her dreams.

Then her eyes fell on the surrounding corpses, and her expression shifted to one of concern.

“What happened? Are you hurt—?”

Sevha cut her off. He barked, “What took you so long?”

“We heard the Hawk’s Whistling Arrow, so we proceeded with maximum caution. That’s why we were delayed.”

“A pack of cowards…!”

Despite the reasonable explanation, Sevha’s rage didn’t subside.

Annoyance tightened Marina’s features. She stepped right up to him and asked in a low, fierce voice, too quiet for the other Hunters to hear, “What the hell is wrong with you, Sevha?”

“Eli…se was attacked. How can I not be losing my mind?”

Elise. Understanding the reason for his unreasonable tirade, Marina’s expression turned hurt.

But she quickly schooled her features into a serious mask, deciding that solving the problem came first.

“Your orders,” she said.

Sevha strode past her and shouted, “Elise is being pursued by bandits in the forest! We track and rescue!”

As he marched toward the trees, Marina and the Hunters fell in behind him.

“Marina. Current password?”

“Red-feathered Bird.”

“Make it Blue-tailed Bird.”

Sevha stood before the forest and let out a long, bird-like whistle.

Pheeew—

The moment the sound died, Sevha, Marina, and the Hunters plunged into the trees. 

As soon as he was inside, Sevha spotted footprints under a tree. He immediately ran in the direction they led and whistled again.

Pheeew—

In response, Marina and the other Hunters converged on his position.

A moment later, while running, Marina spotted blood-stained leaves. She veered in the direction the stains led and gave her own whistle.

Pheeew—

Sevha and the others immediately changed course and ran toward her. In this way, they moved through the forest, communicating with whistles.

Pheeew—

The Hunters silently maintained their formation, spreading out and closing in on each other. They would instinctively break off to check for tracks behind trees and rocks before rejoining the group.

Pheeew—

Their perfectly synchronized movements resembled a single hawk beating its wings, its eyes surveying every corner of the ground below.

Pheeew— Pheeew— Pheeew— Pheeew—

Suddenly, the Hunters whistled in unison and stopped. Where they stood, the bodies of soldiers, a lady’s maid, and bandits were scattered across a small clearing.

The young woman Sevha was looking for was not among the dead.

They were cornered and fought here… then fled again.

The tracks scattered in all directions. They would have to split up.

“Spread out and search,” Sevha commanded.

Marina and the Hunters whistled and ran off in different directions.

Sevha tracked their positions by the sound of their calls, then ran in a direction no one else had taken. The further he ran, the more distant their whistles became.

He arrived at a place filled with rabbit holes and waist-high bushes. A shout from nearby drowned out the fading calls.

“Where in the hell did the boss go?!”

Sevha instantly hid behind a tree. Three bandits appeared from behind the trees in succession.

“He went after the woman!”

“So which way did he go, you retard?!”

“That way, wasn’t it?”

Unaware that Sevha was watching, the bandits ran off breathlessly.

He whistled to signal that he had found his prey, then listened intently to their footsteps. To move without alerting the keen senses of beasts and monsters, one must blend with the surroundings. This was the Anse Hunters’ tracking method.

Once Sevha had the rhythm of their footsteps, he began to run, burying the sound of his own steps within theirs.

Thud-thud-thud-thud.

As he closed the distance, he drew his knife and disappeared behind a nearby tree. A moment later, the bandits changed direction.

In the process, the rearmost man fell briefly out of his companions’ line of sight.

Sevha shot out from the bushes to the side.

“Wha—!”

He clamped a hand over the bandit’s mouth and dove into the thicket on the other side.

Shoving the man’s head into a rabbit hole, Sevha stabbed him in the stomach. The bandit’s death rattle echoed only within the earth.

Immediately after, Sevha climbed a nearby tree and vanished.

Thud thud thud thud.

A few minutes later, something fell into the bushes right next to the second bandit. Hearing the sound, he stopped instinctively, and the distance between him and his companion grew.

“Who—!”

Sevha burst from the bushes, grabbed the bandit’s head, and yanked him backward. He slammed the man’s upper body into the brush and drove his knife into his stomach.

The bandit’s limbs went rigid.

Sevha shoved the corpse into the undergrowth and went after the last one.

Thud... thud... thud... th...ud.

The last bandit, still running, finally noticed that the only footsteps he could hear were his own.

He stopped and looked back. His companions were gone. There was nothing but bushes.

“Where did everyone—?”

A sense of foreboding washed over him. He tightened his grip on his weapon and scanned his surroundings.

Rustle...

The instant he heard the sound, the bandit spun toward it. But it was only a rabbit emerging from the brush.

The moment the bandit let out a sigh of relief, Sevha rose silently from the bushes behind him. He approached like a ghost, clapped a hand over the man’s mouth, and slit his throat.

The blood vessels in the bandit’s eyes burst. His bloodshot gaze darted to the side, trying to see his killer, but his eyes lost their light before he ever saw Sevha’s face.

Thump.

Just as Sevha flung the corpse to the ground, a woman’s shout came from nearby.

“Run, my lady!”

Sevha hid in the bushes and moved silently toward the sound.

In a small clearing, a dozen or so bandits were gathered. Their leader had his foot on the back of a fallen lady’s maid.

Before them stood a woman who looked to be about Sevha’s age. Lush blonde hair. A gentle air, despite the tension etched on her face.

Eli!

It was Elise, the one he had been searching for.

Sevha wanted to run to her at once, but there were too many bandits. He decided to hide and wait for the other Hunters to arrive.

“Let my maid go,” Elise said, her voice deliberately firm.

The leader just snickered. “I’ve already been paid, and I’m due to be paid more. Afraid I can’t do that.”

He struck the maid down with his longsword and then gestured with his head. The bandits began to approach Elise with lecherous smiles. She backed away, the terror she had been holding back finally breaking through.

The moment Sevha saw the fear on Elise’s face, all caution vanished. He forgot that rushing in headfirst meant putting himself in danger.

He grabbed a handful of dirt and burst from the bushes.

“Eli!”

He threw the dirt at the bandits. While they were disoriented, he swept Elise into his arms and ran.

Startled, Elise was about to scream, but her expression turned to one of relief when she saw his face.

“Sevha!”

“Eli! We’re going to run like hell, so watch out for branches!”

The bandit leader was stunned by Sevha’s sudden appearance, but only for a moment.

He roared, “Kill that little shit and grab the woman!”

The leader and his men crashed through the undergrowth after them.

A short time after the people and their commotion had gone, something else stepped into the empty clearing.

THOOM!