Murdergalsh

That moment, the murdergalsh reached out with its free hand and tore off the canopy covering the carriage, revealing a mother and daughter trembling in each other's arms, too frightened to even scream.

The monster's face twisted into an eerie smirk, its humanlike features making it look all the more terrifying. The blood that stained its teeth dripped down from its fangs, forming small puddles below.

Drip, drop, drip, drop.

The knights and adventurers stayed in their positions, bracing themselves to protect the merchants and travelers trying to get inside the city. They watched the scene with bated breath, but made no move to save the mother and daughter.

However, Allen saw no need to follow what they were doing. He took out an iron ball from Storage, not caring who saw him do so.

The murdergalsh reached out toward the mother and daughter. It did so slowly as if purposely trying to evoke as much terror as possible from its prey.

'Drop dead, you piece of shit!'

That instant, Allen threw his iron ball with as much strength as he could muster. The projectile flew straight and true, soon squashing one of the monster's eyeballs.

"AAAAAAAAUUUUUHHHHHHH!" the monster shrieked in a hair-raising cry.

"Hey, you want a piece of me?! I'm right here! I'm gonna kill you!"

Allen had managed to destroy one of its eyes. He threw a second iron ball, but the murdergalsh, which was now aware of Allen's existence, easily swatted it away with its front limb. He heard voices shouting things like, "What're you doing, boy?!" and "Hurry, run away!" behind his back, but he paid them no mind, dashing off to position himself on the opposite side of the monster from the carriage and city with the White Dragon Mountains at his back.

When he turned around briefly to provoke the monster again—"What's wrong, you stupid mutt? You scared of me? What a coward!"—he saw adventurers, knights, and travelers all looking his way with unease in their eyes.

Ignoring them all Allen threw another iron ball, but the murdergalsh easily deflected that one too. Although it had lost one eye, it clearly remained more than capable of protecting itself from taking any further damage from Allen's iron balls.

Even so, the boy was about to throw another one, simply for the sake of drawing the monster's attention. But just then, the monster, which had only turned its head toward Allen's direction so far, slowly stood up on its hind legs, reaching almost seven meters in height.

"AAAAAUUUHHHHHHHHH!"

It howled, then threw away the half-eaten horse, sending it flying through the air in an arc before slamming into the ground with a loud crash. The monster then got down on all fours and turned to face Allen.

"Come at me!"

In response to Allen's goading, the murdergalsh started off at a trot, quickly accelerating into a full-speed charge.

'All right, I succeeded in making it target me instead of the passengers of the carriage.'

Allen shouted loudly at the knights and adventurers, "I'm going to draw the murdergalsh toward the White Dragon Mountains!" before turning around and running off at full speed.

He called out his grimoire to check his MP and found it still at zero. 'Still?! It should be back anytime now!'

As they ran, the distance between Allen and the murdergalsh gradually began to shrunk as the two continued racing on.

"Holy cra—!" It didn't took long for the monster to catch up to Allen, despite his Agility being over 600.

Suddenly, it took a swing with one of its front arms. Allen barely managed to dodge the attack, but doing so caused him to lose his balance and fall over.

After rolling several times on the ground, he quickly got back up and whirled around to regain a visual on the monster, fully expecting a follow-up attack.

However, it simply stared down at him with a smirk, showing no indication of attacking. Apparently it had enjoyed the sight of Allen falling. The way it no longer seemed bothered about losing an eye only added to its eeriness.

'What the...?! Ah, could it be?'

Allen had, in his past life, played computer games with turn-based combat systems where the player's and the game monster's sides took turns attacking each other. Sometimes, however, the monsters did nothing during their turn—instead, there was only a pop-up that read something like, "The monster smirks at you." Back then, he only counted it as a lucky break and did not give it any further thought.

Now that a monster was actually doing it to him in real life, he finally understood why it happened. In the murdergalsh's single remaining eye, Allen was nothing more than a toy. A toy to be played with.

'Well, I'll still count this as a lucky break 'cause my MP just came back!'

Allen cast a quick glance at his grimoire and confirmed that the MP field in his Status was no longer zero.

'I need more Agility. The two types of cards that buff Agility are Bird, which also buffs Intelligence, and Insect, which also buffs Endurance. Okay, Agility and Endurance are exactly what I need right now.'

While slowly backing up, Allen did his best to act like he was in despair so as to make the murdergalsh lower its guard. He even shivered and pulled a look of absolute terror.

"AAAAUUUHHHHH!"

Seeing Allen's reaction the murdergalsh's human-dog face twisted into a look of ecstasy and delight.

'Talk about having a shit personality... I can never tell Mash about this. Father, you have the worst naming sense ever!'

This monster had been the inspiration for "Mash," the name of Allen's younger brother. Now that he knew its personality, however, he realized that it was not exactly the best thing to name a child after. He dearly wished that if Theresia had another child, it would be a girl so that she would be the one to decide on a name.

Allen kept up the act of being frightened as he quickly used his grimoire to change up the distribution of the cards he had in stock. Because the necessary magic stones were already inside Storage, he simply had to will the process and the book would take care of the rest by itself.

All twenty of the Grass E cards that he had been keeping to raise his max MP were now changed to Insect E instead. The grimoire's pages flipped furiously as cards were Deleted and Created in quick succession. While he was at it, Allen converted the Beast E and Beast F cards he had relied on for Attack to Insect E too. In the end, that left him with four Bird E cards and thirty-six Insect E cards.

The reason Allen had basically gone full Agility was because the murdergalsh had clearly been faster than him just now. He had yet to find out just how strong it was, but he had no interest in finding out by letting himself get caught.

Allen backed off a little more. Seeing that the monster was not going to immediately pounce, he turned tail and dashed off. A loud boom sounded at his back, followed by the pounding of footfalls.

Allen attempted to determine his relative distance to the monster through the sound and pushed himself to maintain his lead.

'This isn't enough. I've got to go farther away.'

Drawing the murdergalsh away from Granvelle City was a given, but considering this opportunity, Allen wanted to attempt killing it altogether.

Currently, he was only several hundred meters away from the collapsed carriage. The figures of the knights and adventurers in the distance were no more than mere specks by now, but he wanted to gain more distance so that he could freely use his Summons to fight.

The deadly game of tag continued, until the hunter and prey reached an area sparsely populated with trees almost two kilometers away from Granvelle City. This was far enough that they were entirely beyond the sight of everyone in the city.

'All right. Ageha, use your Ability!'

Allen called out three Insect Es behind himself without stopping. As the murdergalsh was a Rank B monster, three Insect Es were needed in order for their Ability, Scale Powder, to be effective.

Yellow powder fell on the murdergalsh's head. It stopped in its tracks, so Allen also stopped running and turned around, hopeful.

"AAAAAUUUHHHH!"

With a cry, the beast swung its front arm and swept away all three Insect Es in one blow, instantly reducing them to glowing bubbles of light that faded into the air.

'What?! It didn't work?! Does it have resistances? Or did I just get unlucky?'

The debuffs cast through the Abilities of the Insect cards were not a hundred percent guaranteed to work. After trying only once, there was no way to tell whether Scale Powder only happened to fail this time or it simply would not work, period.

'Crap, it's after me again.'

With the Insect E Summons gone, the game of tag resumed again. Allen Created more Insect Es to replace the ones he had just lost and continued running in desperation.

***

Three long, long hours later, Allen was hiding behind a tree. The murdergalsh was nowhere in sight.

'Ugh, I finally lost it. But man, Scale Powder just isn't working on it at all.' None of the other Insect card debuffs work either, for that matter.

Allen took out his mantle from Storage and draped it over his manservant uniform. During the chase just now, he had attempted to use the Abilities of Insects G, F, and E on the murdergalsh, but none of them had proved effective. Because of this, he had given up the idea of killing the monster and was focusing entirely on escaping. This was not an opponent that he could stand up to without the support of debuffs.

'All right, let's head back to Granvelle City. Dammit, I ended up using a lot of magic stones.'

Just as Allen was regretting the significant decrease in his stock of Rank E magic stones...

Crack. Snap.

The tree that Allen was leaning against suddenly shook, and a beastly stench filled his nose.

"What?!"

Allen whirled around in surprise to look behind the tree. What he found was the smirking face of the murdergalsh. It deftly used its humanlike hands to pull the tree out as if plucking a mere weed.

This served as the signal for their game of tag to resume once more.

***

Three days had passed since the murdergalsh appeared near Granvelle City.

One of the guards stationed at the north gate spotted someone approach the city. His black manservant uniform was all muddy, and he was huddled in his mantle.

"Hey there, lad!"

Naturally, he was instantly recognized by the guard.

'Oh, I'm finally back.'

"Good—" Upon reaching the gate with tottering steps, Allen collapsed in the middle of giving his usual greeting. He had lost consciousness as if a switch had been just turned off.

"Huh? Lad, a-are you okay?!"

The guard rushed over in surprise and found the boy already fast asleep.

This finally marked the end for Allen's first encounter with the murdergalsh.