By the Grace of the Gods (LN) - Volume 15 - Chapter 6

Chapter 9, Episode 15: Glen the S-Ranker

Despite not knowing the way, Glen the S-Rank adventurer plowed through the woods without hesitation, bellowing with laughter. “This makes the walk a lot easier!”

Since he practically gave me no choice but to walk through the forest with him, I had no reservations about letting him lead the way and double as a human shield...or a bulldozer, by the way he cleared a path by wiping out weeds and vines with every swing of his hand. Even though I was using soil slime magic to make it easier to uproot the vegetation, it was an impressive display of strength.

“Are you sure you want to go with me?” I asked. “I won’t ask you not to—I’ve given up on that—but don’t you have a quest, or, anything to do?”

“As long as there’s monsters to hunt, I don’t care where I go. I was just wandering around when I bumped into you, and it’s all the better if you’re headed deeper into the woods. Some of the monsters we’ll run across are bound to fetch a good price. Besides, you won’t catch me taking quests from the guild without good reason. I go where I want, when I want, and fight whoever I want. I’m not dealing with the guild and their endless lists of ‘go here’ and ‘hunt that.’ I make enough by throwing the monsters I’ve killed to the guild and letting them handle the rest. And once you’re S-rank, they’ll lend you cash anytime, no questions asked. They almost never bug you about paying them back either,” he said.

“It sounds like you regularly borrow money.”

“Oh, yeah. This time, I apparently racked up more than usual. My lender came begging. I was in a slump for a while, staying in the city. With all the food, booze, and chicks... Who knows how much I spent?”

He was out here to repay his debts, but didn’t even know how much he had to repay. And he’d accumulated those debts just so he could party away. Apparently, he was an S-rank jerk too. Both in strength and character, Glen was something else. I thought I’d been acting selfishly lately. Compared to him, I was an altruist.

The S-rank grunted in frustration again. “Can’t remember. Whatever. I’m going to pay it back, anyway. They wouldn’t be lending me money if they thought I wasn’t good for it.”

“Sure, but won’t they take advantage of you if you don’t know how much you owe them?”

“No problem. You just have to go beat the crap out of anyone who tries to rip you off. Soon enough, no one will try!” he boasted.

I shouldn’t have expected anything less brutish from him. If he hadn’t been protected by his S-rank status, he would have been imprisoned on assault charges. Then again, maybe I was looking at it the wrong way. Regardless of his rank, Glen might have only been a free man because of his absurd strength.

“Anyone who seeks you out for a fight must be as reckless as you are,” I said.

“You think so, huh? There’s a good number of them,” he said.

“Really?”

“The ones that try to make a name for themselves by beating me aren’t so bad. They fight me fair and square, and they don’t try again after I punch them out. The ones I hate are the leeches, going on and on about this opportunity or that, trying to get rich off of me. Ever since I got S-rank, there’s been more and more— Something’s coming at us. Ahead,” he added casually.

After counting slowly to ten, I finally detected the monster horde he was talking about. Just as I wondered how far his detection reached, he gave me more information about them. “There could be a big one in the back, Ryoma. Let’s clean up the little ones in the front first!”

“You got it!” I answered, just as raptors jumped out of the woods in all directions. Because of our position, I readied myself to take on the ones that circled through the woods to flank us from behind.

“Out of the way!” Glen bellowed, whirling his giant war hammer and mowing down a handful of raptors. One that had been spared the hammer leapt at him, biting down on his arm. “Your breath stinks!” With the shake of that arm—without so much as wincing—Glen sent the raptor flying and crashing into a heatwood tree.

Watching him fight, I was beginning to understand how he was so strong. Just as I’d guessed from our brief battle, he was bolstering his strength with physical energy. It was entirely possible for him to be wielding some other power I wasn’t aware of, but the primary source of his strength was undoubtedly physical energy—channeled with incredible expertise. No physical energy fighter I knew, myself included, could completely contain the physical energy coursing through their body, resulting in some amount of it trickling out during battle. When a fighter prepared a powerful attack, the leak became particularly visible, like rising steam.

Glen, on the other hand, didn’t let a single drop of energy leak as he fought. There was no doubt that he was utilizing it—his speed and strength would have been impossible to achieve otherwise—but none of it was being wasted. He wielded physical energy at maximum efficiency, and that showed in his defense as well as offense. Glen didn’t bother to dodge or block the raptor fangs and talons that would have been lethal against the average adventurer. It’s no wonder he wore no armor—there was no armor more durable than his bolstered body.

“Take care of the small ones, Ryoma! The big one’s mine! If you’ve got the free time to keep glancing at me while you fight, you’ll have no problem wiping them out!” Without waiting for my confirmation, he leapt forward—literally. He jumped several meters with a single move, then zigzagged through the heatwood trees without touching the ground, using their trunks as footholds. Following his aerial path ahead, I spotted the leader of this particular pack. Each raptor here was much bigger and stronger than the ones on the rim of the Sea of Trees, but Glen’s target was so enormous that its head poked out from the thick branches of trees above.

Before even half a minute had passed, though, a gurgled roar sounded through the woods. Glen had made quick work of the monstrous pack leader. With their leader slain, the few remaining raptors scattered into the woods.

After collecting the carcasses of the raptors I took out, I followed Glen’s grunts into the woods to meet up with him. Beside him lay a tyrant raptor—an advanced species of the raptor—with its head smashed in. The enormous monster encased in thick scales reminded me of the T. rex from the dinosaur movies I’d watched on Earth.

“I’d heard of the tyrant raptor, but I didn’t realize it would be so big,” I said.

“It’s not hard to take it down,” Glen said. “It’s got more muscle than the little ones, but it’s slower for it. Unlike the snake you fought earlier, it stays dead too. It’s a good moneymaker.” He was dragging the carcass into a small fanny pack he wore under his shirt. It was bizarre to watch a T. rex carcass being stowed into that tiny pack—comically so, in contrast to Glen’s stature—with the help of Space magic that it must have been imbued with. “Did you figure out why I’m so strong?” he asked suddenly, apparently in reference to me watching him earlier. When I honestly explained what I took away from him, he laughed heartily. “Going back to what we were talking about, plenty of wannabe fighters—adventurer or not—come up to me, asking how I got so strong. How they could train to be like me. Why should I teach them jack? It’s annoying because they think they’re entitled to advice.”

“Okay. I would be annoyed too,” I admitted.

“I don’t get how to use physical energy either. I was just born this way.”

“So you’re doing that subconsciously?”

“Guess so,” the S-ranker said nonchalantly. “It’s really rare, apparently. I’m not a scholar or anything, but physical energy is just your life force, pretty much. Everyone has it. The technique comes with controlling it—making it do what you want it to do.”

So his physical energy was always on. Even now, when we were just talking, his body was as powered up as it was during the battle. Because of the continuous application of physical energy, Glen went on to explain, he was protected from all sorts of threats when exploring the woods.

For example, I protected myself from leeches and venomous insects in the woods by covering most of my skin and applying special bug repellent. Glen’s skin was simply impervious to stingers and teeth. Even when something managed to break his skin, he added, the minor injuries or venom had no effect on him. Even when it did have an effect on him, he was cured of it in minutes.

“Your physical energy boosts your immune system and self-healing too...” I interpreted.

So far, the physical energy channeling Glen was born with sounded like an extraordinary gift for the lucky brute, but he went on to add that it had its drawbacks. Like he said, energy was a form of life force—their internal strength. Expending it would lead to exhaustion, or even death in serious cases. Being drained of magical energy caused adverse physical symptoms like that of an illness. Physical energy drain affected the body in a similar way, just more severely. Most people who manipulated physical energy—myself included—would pass out before the expenditure caused any serious damage.

Glen had no control over his physical energy, though. He couldn’t turn it off, even if he were to pass out. When he was growing up, the constant flow of physical energy became a strain on his body, the boost in his strength preventing his muscles from growing naturally. His condition was so rare that no one had a clue how to treat it. His parents—who were commonborn and far from wealthy—could only try and feed him as much as they could so he could replenish some of the constantly draining energy.

Glen went on to say that he and his parents were mistreated in his village because of it. “Mom and pops would always say that the villagers were happy to help us. I was too young, so I only remember how annoyed they looked. After crappy harvests, some of them told off my parents. ‘There’s no extra food for a kid who could drop dead any day. The sooner the better, so there’s more food for us,’ or something like that. That got me to start hunting monsters outside the village for food, so I soon had plenty to eat. But then a bunch of them came out of the woodwork, demanding I share my game with them to repay them. Just so I’m clear, we never took food for free. Mom always paid a fair price, and pops—he was a blacksmith—took on jobs for close to nothing in return. Pops once said that he could go out into town and fetch five times the price he was offering the folks at our village. But I don’t hold a grudge against any of them. Mom and pops agreed to a price and paid it to feed me. There’s nothing I could say to take that back. By the same token, that was all business. And now they’re asking for charity? Tell me they’re not entitled pricks for that!”

“I know the type,” I admitted. “And the type who try to push off the hard work on others and reap the reward for themselves.”

“Right? When those types swarm around you, it pisses me off. It’s the same thing as starting a fight, whether they see it that way or not,” Glen said, no hint in tone that he was bothered by those events in his past. It seemed that he really was over those experiences, and was just making a point with them. “Humans are pretty much the same, anyway. The whole world’s full of selfish pricks, so why should I hold back? I do what I want, when I want, how I want. That makes life fun and easy.”

I considered his words. To be honest, I saw where he was coming from. I’d made myself a hermit in the woods because I’d grown tired of human society too. I didn’t have it boiled down quite so clearly as Glen had, but I couldn’t really argue against his philosophy...not that I intended to.

“I do agree that it’s more fun,” I conceded.

“Oh? We’re more alike than I thought. I would have pegged you for more of a stick in the mud.”

“Most people are sticks in the mud compared to you.”

Glen guffawed. “You got me there, Ryoma! I’ve never met anyone as easygoing as me!”

I pretty much insulted you... I thought, noticing how Glen had a habit of skipping a few steps in conversations. But it never felt like he was hiding or lying about anything. If he was laughing, he really wasn’t offended by my comment.

Glen’s voice continued to ring through the dangerous depths of the forest. Although unexpected, I was beginning to enjoy my outrageous new companion.