24 Hearts

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The twenty-fourth fragment, Carpe Diem

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It was now the fourth day since we started hunting black wolves in the edges of the southern forest. I had wanted to head further into the woods, but we found no suitable camping spot, so we used the clearing where we had spent our first night as a base.

Thanks to this, the surrounding area, which had been undiscovered on the -map-, could now clearly be seen, and we were able to determine the lay of the land yet found nothing special.

The only thing of note was a stream that flowed nearby.

When we awoke in the mornings, we went looking for wolves, killed them, ate food at a suitable spot, and then returned to our clearing.

I had repeated four days in this manner.

On the fourth moonlit night, I suggested that Tia go to sleep first.

I was concerned, as she had been caring for me for three days by going to sleep late and getting up early. Tia didn’t say anything, but I could see she was thankful and very tired, so she prepared for bed. It didn’t take Tia long to enter her sleeping bag. She fell asleep, her breath wheezing.

As I watched Tia toss and turn in her sleep, I fed wood into the fire.

The fire engulfed the fresh fuel and burned brighter and harsher. As I heard the ‘crackle, crack, crack,’ I checked my status screen.

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»Calculating«

[—] You hunted a group of black wolves and showed amazing fighting power. Strength and agility have risen by 1[—]

[—]You tested your limits by winning the battle with a wounded body. Stamina has increased by 2[—]

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「Status Window」

[Name: Judah Arche]

[Title: None]

[Level: 15]

[Job: Black Claw _ Shadow Magic Swordsman (Hidden_A)]

[Number of resurrections: 1]

[Strength: 36(D) / Potential A]

[Health: 37(D) / Potential S]

[Agility: 31(D) / Potential SS]

[Magic 41(C) / Potential B]

[Magical Resistance: 51(C) / Potential S]

[Knowledge: 17(F) / Potential B] ◀ Special

[Luck: 84(A) / Potential S] ◀ Special

[Remaining points: 14]

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In the end, nothing seemed as important as waging actual battles.

It was worth it for me to enter risky fights. After several months of training and hunting animals, I didn’t even gain a single point properly. Now that I had risked my life by killing black wolves for four days, my points have risen by a total of 4.

I was proud as I looked at my status screen. The fact that I had 14 points available made me laugh. Unfortunately, Tia had watched my fights, so I could not use Shadow Justice.

Thanks to that, my Magic hasn’t risen, but my strength did due to the severe strain I was putting my body through. My other stats had also risen by appropriate amounts, and I was looking forward to the gains I’d make in the future.

‘I think it would be pretty good if I just went on like this.’

At age thirteen, no one would have stats as high as mine. The moment I thought this, some characters did come to mind, but I immediately stopped thinking about them. Meeting them was something for the distant future.

Anyway, I felt somewhat satisfied, but I hadn’t reached my ideal level yet. If I claimed some fragments, I could naturally have stats like Strength and Agility rise to 100, but for now, I had to do things the hard way.

‘Just like you’ve done before.’

I didn’t know why the black wolves were flocking to the eastern woods, but their movement benefited me quite a bit. We had already removed 120 pelts by skinning the wolves, and if I added all the gemstones I had cut from them, then my net profit would be a few gold coins at least.

If it wasn’t for Tia’s training from the very beginning, I would have never been able to come so far. I now had the need to evenly raise all my stats, except Knowledge and Luck. No matter how high my Strength and Agility, if my Stamina is low, it was probable that I would not be able to endure through a battle that lasted long.

‘In the end, it means I have to improve them evenly.’

It’s usually a waste to distribute points early on when the player’s potentials are still low. However, to delay the distribution of points indefinitely can only lead to ruin.

It is not for nothing that some say, “If you save them, your character becomes shit.”

If I distributed them now, I would only see the results later. Personally, I wanted to spend them when it was appropriate. I turned off my status screen and put another log onto the campfire. I then opened -Notes-.

While others could not see it, I clearly saw the holographic notepad appear before me.

At the top of the notepad, I had scribbled down a memo with only the title ‘The 24 Hearts of Pernen’ in red and no content beneath.

It was the title of my game, the world which I had entered. It was a memo that I had written so I would not forget the fact that I was in the game or a world like it.

Whenever I opened -Notes-, what I wrote down in the most visible space naturally caught my eyes first. I still didn’t understand how I had entered into my own game.

I stared blankly at the note with only a title, then shifted my gaze elsewhere. I wrote down important things that should not be forgotten into -Notes- all night long.

Whenever I had spare time like this, I would also read through my notes and correct things that I thought I transcribed wrongly, or just write down anything else that suddenly entered my mind.

Time gradually passed. After I had been in the same posture for a while, my body began to stiffen.

I shifted only a fraction, but the sound of crackling joints still came. As I stretched my neck to relieve my stiff body, I saw the stars shining so beautifully in the night sky.

A large full-moon floated beneath the stars and lit up the Black Forest.

However, the trees and shrubs grew thick, so the moonlight rarely reached the forest floor.

At that instant, I heard a faint rustling sound coming from some distance away.

I hadn’t heard it wrong, even if I had heard it by chance: It was the sound of footfalls.

The direction remained unknown, but something was coming out of the forest.

I looked to Tia to wake her, then saw that her eyes were already open as she lay in her sleeping bag.

She put her index finger to her mouth and shaped an ‘Shhh.’ A faint, rust-colored glow emanated from her eyes.

I had seen her slowly raise her finger to her mouth and knew that I had to stay still, so I sat down again. I pretended to look at the campfire, scanning the area all the while.

The forest was dark enough to do the name ‘Black Forest’ justice, but there were a few gaps where the moonlight poured into the undergrowth.

The red glow of eyes appeared in such an area, then quickly vanished.

‘Black wolves… but they’ve never come to us at night like this.’

With my next glance, the number of eyes I saw seemed great. Going by the sounds coming from everywhere, it seemed as if at least four of five packs were stalking toward us.

Tia also seemed nervous, clearly also guessing that this was an unusual situation. She unzipped her sleeping bag silently and was ready to jump up at any time.

‘Shall I use Justice?’

I could find out the exact number of enemies and their locations by activating Spreading Shadows. I couldn’t share my minimap with Tia, but I could at least give her an approximation of the number of wolves and their locations. It would help her.

Still, I figured that I should rather hide my Shadow skills from Tia, even in this dire situation.

[—]

Shadow Justice

└Form 1 – Spreading Shadows

[—]

The moment I quietly whispered the words and activated the skill, the shadows that seemed to dance with the blazing bonfire suddenly scattered, spreading wide out into the forest. Tia stared at the shadows that rapidly blackened the ground, and she almost jumped away in surprise.

As the shadows spread, they conveyed information about the wolves in the area to me.

On my minimap, which was a circular screen bisected by radial lines, there appeared red marks, marks which confirmed that my suspicions as to the extent of the assault were correct.

My mouth was agape. That’s a huge number of wolves! At most, I had figured them to be four or five packs, but that was a mistaken estimation.

‘They’re crazy! Did they come for revenge?’

The rough number of wolves seemed to be a hundred.

Tia alone would be able to flee, but I doubted that she would be able to get me out of there safely. Tia was also feeling the pressure, and her expression seemed harsher than I had ever seen it before.

My hands started to sweat.

All I could think was: When are all of them going to charge in at us? Suddenly, one of the black wolves entered the clearing and approached us.

I had locked its location on my minimap and drew my sword as I stood up.

‘Shusasak,’ came the sound as Tia swiftly jumped from her sleeping bag and moved to my side, all the while shifting her stance as she scanned her surroundings.

Then Tia saw it too: The black wolf that slowly walked out of the darkness and into the light of the campfire. Why did they all choose to attack us while we could clearly see them? Why not at another time?

“Get behind me,” Tia said as she took up a stance before me. In her hand, she held a dagger smaller yet sharper than mine. It seemed she was going throw it at any moment, but the approaching wolf took turns to look at Tia and me and then turned its back on us.

‘Hroh, horoh,’ it shook its head at us as if telling us to follow it.

“…?”

It was the first time either of us had seen such behavior, and we were both vainly trying to grasp the portent of such an action.

“Tia, it says what I think it’s saying, right?”

“Well, this is also my first time seeing this.”

It was unlikely that the beast was trying to offend us, but would it lead us into a trap? My mind swirled with these troubling thoughts.

‘Will I follow the wolf, or run away from it?’

“At a quick glance, there about a hundred wolves around us. Will we be able to escape?”

I could see that Tia wondered how I could have guessed that. I was sure that she had connected it to the shadows she had seen crawling across the ground earlier. She would probably be asking me about it later.

“Do you want an honest answer?” Tia asked.

“Yeah.”

“It’ll be hard. When I figured them to be forty or so, it seemed possible. If there are a hundred—I can’t escape with you.”

When Tia enters concealment, the smells, sights, and sounds of her body are hidden. She moves very silently, but if she was carrying me, the smallest of sounds could be heard without her knowing about it.

If she was alone, it would have been easier. She would escape while mocking the wolves’ attempt at a siege and then start killing them off one by one while hiding in the dark. With me with her, it all became so difficult, almost near-impossible to carry me while fighting to defend me at the same time.

I knew that truth all too well.

If Tia had thought on it for a while, I would have figured that we had a chance. She had answered immediately, though, so there now only seemed one option left to us.

“Well, this isn’t great,” Tia grumbled.

“Shall we fight?”

“No, let’s follow it along. Just wait a bit.”

The black wolf had kindly not paced away yet; it merely sat there and waited. The surrounding wolves did not move, as if observing the situation.

I knew that if we didn’t follow, we would be attacked, and the wolf before us would attack first.

“…” Tia had a thoughtful face as she looked at the wolf. She took a deep breath and then suddenly sheathed her dagger and began taking her clothes off.

“Tia?”

“We can talk later.”

She handed her clothes to me. As I stored them and our other tools in the -Bag-, hair sprouted from all over Tia’s body, and she morphed into a black tiger, about the same size as a small horse.

The wolves on the edges of the shadow became agitated as they witnessed Tia’s transformation.

‘Crushkl,’ the wolf closest to us also sprang from its haunches, no longer looking so arrogantly in our direction. I was now fully alert.

Tia had turned into a black tiger, and this had made the black wolves yip and yowl as if they were talking among themselves.

After a while, Tia laughed as she looked at me.

“Judah. It sounds like these guys want a duel. What do you want to do?”

“A duel?”

“Hah. If you win the duel, you will be able to leave safely. If you lose, they cannot guarantee your life.” Then Tia mumbled, “Cheeky things.”

At that instant, a quest screen similar to the tutorial screen I had first seen when I entered this world popped up.

[—]An unexpected quest begins.[—]

[—]The black wolves have realized that there is an entity that has been hunting them in the forest for some time. They have found many corpses of their own people flayed.[—]

[—]When only one or two packs disappeared at first, they didn’t care. When they found the cooling bodies of a large number of their fellow wolves, they reported it to the alpha wolf -Korkan-.[—]

[—] Alpha Wolf Korkan led a group to kill you, for you have killed his own people. He then noticed through his senses that you had killed wolves while facing them alone, so he decided to challenge you to a 1:1 duel.[—]

[—]This was reported to -Requiem-, the king of all black wolves, and his permission was obtained.[—]

[—]You can decide whether to follow the wolves and accept the duel against the alpha wolf -Korkan-, or whether to fight desperately here.[—]

[—]If you win the duel, you will be able to survive. If you lose, your life is not guaranteed.[—]