PROLOGUE

Straining to hear the cry of a distant copper pheasant, the huntsman came to a stop.

Listening carefully to the sounds of the mountain, his ears were filled with the noise of approaching footsteps behind him.

It was nothing to worry about. The footsteps belonged to the huntsman’s apprentice.

“…T-too fast… Haa, haa… You’re too fast, master.”

“Catch your breath.”

His apprentice pleaded with him. His slight frame, not yet fully out of boyhood, was trembling.

He was fourteen. It hadn’t been much more than a year since he’d begun training in earnest.

Compared to the huntsman—who’d devoted thirty years to trekking through the mountains—he was still wet behind the ears.

It wasn’t that their physical strength was all that different. In fact, in terms of sheer strength, the boy might beat him. After all, the kid’s beard still hadn’t grown in yet, while he himself was going on fifty and his hair was graying.

Put simply, there was a knack to trekking through the mountains.

Ways of carrying your weight, ways of judging the stability of footholds, breadth of stride, posture: All were crucial. Without them, you’d end up wasting your strength.

Unlike the village, the mountains were a harsh world. Fundamentally, it wasn’t a world that would tolerate humans. In the village, human laws were accepted, but in this green place, a human was just another animal. They were forced to fight on equal terms, the same as other living creatures.

Death was all that waited for those who spent their strength unwisely in this world. Deep in the mountains, simply surviving was a considerable ordeal.

…Or it was for the People of the Earth, at any rate.

For Adventurers, with their nearly inexhaustible strength, this wasn’t the case. The huntsman had seen an Adventurer who looked younger than his apprentice running through the mountains, practically humming to himself as he went.

The sight had convinced him, to the depths of his soul, that they were different beings altogether.

Unlike people who lived in villages, the huntsman lived in the mountains. He was already well into middle age, but in the village to which he belonged, he was considered a skilled man.

His thick arms and legs, which seemed to have been polished red, and the solid line of his jaw gave him the unmistakable air of an expert. As a matter of fact, no one had ever gotten the better of him, even in drunken brawls.

The boy who panted and wheezed beside him, gasping for breath, had chosen to become a huntsman out of admiration for him. Once in the mountains, the huntsman used his skills with a bow to bag deer and boar, bringing precious meat back to the settlement, and he was a key figure in his small, impoverished village.

However, for that very reason, he knew his limits.

No matter what he did, he couldn’t compete with an Adventurer. They might as well have been wind and thunder. Although he’d never met one personally, to him Adventurers were like dragons or other mighty monsters simply condensed into human form.

“Let’s go.”

With that brusque declaration, the huntsman set off.

Behind him came a pitiful wail, but he paid it no attention. He’d been put through grueling training like this by his own master, and in the process, he’d stolen the tricks of mountain trekking. If the boy broke this easily, he wouldn’t learn a thing. Besides, the pack the boy carried wasn’t even half the size of his own.

He detoured around a thicket, making for the ridge.

There was a regular rhythm to his pace, and he seemed nonchalant, but the huntsman was keeping a watchful eye on the undergrowth. The route they were traveling wasn’t one of the trails that deer and boar used regularly. However, a man who let his guard down simply because that was the case would never last as a huntsman.

It was summer. The deep mountains were coming to life, and he knew bears would be out and about. He wanted to avoid a sudden encounter with one.

“M-master, where are we going?”

“The east ridge.”

The mountain range they were hiking along was a vast region commonly known in Yamato as the Mountains of Ouu. Of course, the huntsman and his apprentice were from a nameless village up in the mountains; everything that surrounded them was “mountain,” and they weren’t particularly conscious of how far Ouu proper extended from where they were. To them, the mountains were just mountains.

The stream with monkeys. The great, craggy peak. Lone Cedar Ridge. If prominent landforms were referred to such that each party recognized them, that was enough.

The huntsman had planned to climb to Kite Rock Ridge by afternoon, then circle around toward its stream.

However, from the look of the boy, that might be overdoing it a little. Either way, once they were up in the mountains, he’d planned to stay for a week or so, and he’d prepared accordingly.

If today isn’t going to be good for much, I might as well train him a bit.

Once he’d decided that all they had to do was reach the ridge, they had more leeway.

Although it was nothing compared to the man’s tightly strung hunting bow, the boy did have his own short one. It wouldn’t hurt to put him through the mill for a while on the ridge. It sounded as if he’d been practicing his shot in the village, but no matter how good an archer he was there, it was pointless if he couldn’t shoot in the mountains.

Shooting at a straw post on level ground was just a game.

If he couldn’t shoot up toward a ridge or down into a valley, bagging prey that had hidden itself in the shadows of thick grass or poked its face out of a thicket, his skills would be useless.

The sound of the huntsman’s short exhalations; the sound of the boy’s ragged breathing.

The occasional sound of a machete slashing through the undergrowth went on for a while.

In the mountains, they couldn’t make straight for their destination. As long as they were limited by the abilities of human feet, they had to find and follow a walkable route if they wanted to go anywhere. Although they were climbing the ridge, sometimes their path meandered away from it, and in some places they had to go downhill.

Not only would an amateur have gotten sick of the repeated changes in direction, they probably would have lost their sense of direction. After all, the forest that surrounded them was dense, and its wild growth—undisturbed by human hands—nearly blotted out the sky.

However, with a certainty that came from long experience, the huntsman made his way steadily toward the ridge.

Struck by a sudden sense of wrongness, the huntsman lifted his eyes from the ground. The feeling was like an aura. In specific terms, it was probably trivial information—the smell of the wind, the soundless sounds of the songbirds and insects that filled the forest—and none of it was at a level where it could be put into words.

However, the middle-aged hunter did feel that something was different from the way it usually was, and he stopped.

“What’s wrong, master?”

“Shh…”

Checking the boy with a hand, the huntsman began to make for the ridge. Up until now, he’d moved at a rather leisurely pace, but now his body rocked from side to side he moved so fast. He forced his way up, practically tunneling through the bases of thickets, and when he reached his destination, he could see all the way to the next two ridges.

The land was like a crumpled, gathered tablecloth. Even from high places it wasn’t possible to see all that far, but from this vantage point, he had a good angle.

He could see the winding, rushing stream, and the direction of the forbidden land that lay at its upper reaches.

The swift mountain stream, the one the huntsman’s people called “the monkey stream,” stretched far beyond the limits of his vision. Compared to the other streams that ran through these valleys, it was broad, and with the dry, rocky riverbed at its edges, it formed a long rift in the greenery.

“That’s…”

The boy’s words trailed off.

He had no words to describe it.

That was only natural. The man was more than three times older than the boy, with thirty times more hunting experience, and even he had never seen anything like this before.

The stream was blotted out.

Blotted out by something dark, and rough, and crawling.

Living creatures.

The distance was too great and their numbers were too vast for him to really tell, but their movements were definitely those of living things. A huge horde of something alive—most likely some sort of demihuman—was making its way downstream. No, with numbers like that, they probably weren’t just advancing along the stream. The trees hid it from view, but a group of such size that it provoked vague dread was advancing through the forest that spread below, rustling the trees as it passed.

The huntsman stared and stared at the scene, as if he’d lost his soul.

It was an overwhelming interruption. A premonition of the end.

No matter what sort of creatures they were, the huntsman was certain he wouldn’t be able to do a thing about them.

That probably would have been true even if he’d been an Adventurer.

The horde stretched as far as he could see, deep into the mountains— Toward Seven Falls, which the huntsman’s people called “the forbidden mountain.” Their numbers were so enormous that, for a long time, the huntsman and the boy could do nothing but stare at the sight.