With an aggressive shout, I put strength into my arms, trying to force the halberd down. Taken by surprise, the cernunnos grunted and resisted with his own strength.
If he had a resistance to magic, I merely needed to settle this in close combat.
The strike of a blade had proven effective even against the demons’ High King that Blood and his allies had once fought. I couldn’t imagine that there was any demon with greater defense than that. This demon had a physical body like any other, and that meant that some kind of physical attack would probably work on him, whether that was cutting, thrusting, or striking.
Our clashing weapons came violently apart, we both leaped backwards, and then a furious battle started, the two of us running along the tops of roots as wide as roads as we exchanged attacks. Our positions swapped and shifted at dizzying speed and attacks came from all directions, sometimes even from above or below, before we collided face-to-face once more with a crash of metal on metal louder than anything before it.
The spear and the halberd interlocked, twisted, and groaned as both of us tried to force the other’s weapon down. Veins stood out on the cernunnos’s thick arms, and its muscles bulged. I got myself into a solid stance, grit my teeth, pressed down with greater force, and gradually, my spear began to overpower the halberd.
“A-Are you human?!” The color was draining from the cernunnos’s face.
I thought that was a horrible question. These were nothing more than the results of my training.
Breathing out slowly, I pushed even harder. The cernunnos let out a desperate roar, and tried suddenly applying his strength in another direction and using footwork to shift his body around. As he tried to mask his inadequacy in strength with these moves, I pushed ever harder, relying only on my muscles.
He probably didn’t have much experience with being overpowered in a straight-out contest of strength, and I wasn’t going to be beaten by little gimmicks like this from someone whose inexperience and uncertainty was plain to see. I used my trained muscles to push and push until I was totally in control.
Now was the time to use technique.
I shouted and yanked the spear in a different direction. The spear sprang upwards, and its blade connected directly with the wilderdemon’s enormous antlers, exactly as I’d intended. A look of shock spread over its face. I deliberately didn’t apply enough power to crush them; instead, I smacked the end of its long, moose-like antlers upwards.
Now then… if there were a pair of long antlers growing out of the head of a humanoid creature, and the end of those antlers were to be violently forced upwards, what would happen to the creature’s neck?
“Ghk—”
The answer: it would bend and twist very easily. It was simple physics, and there was very little the cernunnos could do about it.
I caught the blade in its antlers and tugged the wilderdemon towards me. It stumbled wildly. Because it was being dragged around by the antlers, its neck was being wrenched about, and it couldn’t keep its balance.
There is a close connection between your sense of balance and the angle of your neck, which is why it suddenly becomes difficult to balance on one foot when you’re looking directly upwards. All that considered, no experiments would be necessary to answer whether a person could keep their balance while having their neck forcibly twisted.
I dragged the demon to the ground and flowed into a downward swing of the spear. A spear wasn’t just a stabbing weapon; the handle I held in my hand was over two meters long and made to withstand full-force collisions. If I swung it down with all my might, that strength and its centrifugal force would come together to make my spear nothing less than an absolutely brutal blunt instrument.
I slammed it down. I heard, and felt, the demon’s antlers and skull break. A roar of pain rang through the forest.
Even then, the cernunnos made a frenzied attempt to fight back — it was a General, after all — but that resistance was very short-lived.
By the time I’d made sure the wilderdemon had turned to ash, and claimed the halberd left behind, Menel had already completed his work.
“Phew.”
I hadn’t noticed because I’d been incredibly preoccupied, but he looked exhausted. His silver hair was dull with dirt, and unless I was seeing things, even his cheeks looked a little sunken. Menel had been the one with the most exhausting job this time around, so it was probably only natural.
All this had started on the day of the summer solstice, when snowdrops had blossomed out of season. By the time a few days had passed, a completely peculiar situation had developed, where all the fruit was overripe and falling rotten off the trees, and the trees were growing rapidly and dying at random, and eventually, even the wild animals and the fairies were going mad and wreaking havoc.
Menel was quick to notice something was wrong, and told me with a sour look on his face that the woods were being thrown out of kilter. Since we happened to be stopping in Whitesails at the time, His Excellency Ethel asked us to resolve the situation, and we accepted. And where we headed was the domain of the Lord of Oak.
According to Menel, the woods in the area were ruled from the winter solstice to the summer solstice by the Lord of Oak, and from the summer to the winter by the Lord of Holly.
He told me that on the winter solstice, the day that marks the return to spring when the sun recovers its shine, the Lord of Oak takes over sovereignty from the Lord of Holly. Then the sun rises and sets, and when it reaches the summer solstice, when all its best days are over, the Lord of Oak hands its sovereignty back to the Lord of Holly once more.
As he described it, it was the relationship between the two great and ancient Twins, also referred to as the Fraternal Kings, that maintained the cycle of nature in these woods. That was why we’d headed to see the Lord of Oak. The natural order of the woods had gone wrong the moment the summer solstice passed, so Menel had reasoned that the Lord of Oak must not have handed over the sovereignty for some reason, or perhaps was in a state where he couldn’t hand it over.
But that turned out not to be the case. In the woods’ other domain, the incarnation of the Lord of Oak appeared before us and told us that the problem was the Lord of Holly, who was in a state where he couldn’t accept sovereignty over the woods. Because of this, the Lord of Oak said, the sovereignty had remained with him for too many cycles of the sun and moon, and many abnormalities were starting to occur in the woods.
The sovereignty the Twins possessed was a powerful thing and would bring only harm unless it was passed into the proper hands at the proper time. It would not be long before the forest suffered a critical failure that would damage it so badly that it would be unable to fully recover for a good many years.
I asked if there was any way to surrender the sovereignty, and the Lord of Oak answered that it could not be relinquished unless someone showed himself strong enough to be fit to receive it, as the Lord of Holly had for him and as he had for the Lord of Holly. His voice sounded as if he had given up on everything and accepted his doom.
“Then leave it to me,” Menel said vehemently. “Great Lord of Oak, please, entrust your sovereignty to me.”
But the incarnation of the Lord of Oak told him it was impossible. Perhaps it could have been done, he said, if Menel was one of the earliest generation of elves created by the god of the fae Rhea Silvia herself; but as he was, with his half-human blood, he wouldn’t last more than a month bearing the burden of the sovereignty of the woods.