Polymath Redux Annex
Chapter 53 - Charge from the front
“Haa… this long-distance teleportation thingy is convenient, but also pretty tiring,” commented Yda as she slumped over with haggard breaths. Mordred studied her winded figure; he placed his hands on his chin and thought, ‘curious, perhaps it was due to my own innate constitution, but I didn’t take into consideration possible stamina drain from using items. Regalia seemed fine with it as well, so I never really noticed.’ After inheriting the carefully attuned super-traits of his game avatar’s body, he could no longer be considered to be on the same level as everyone else. This was a fact that he understood but did not put emphasis into conscious thought until now. ‘It might be a good idea to stress test my own body sometime down the line.’
From his ‘Phantom’ attire, he changed back to the same dull plate armour that was more attuned with the aesthetics of this city. “Come on, we’re almost at the church. Didn’t you want to rescue Rena and Charlotte?” Mordred asked as he offered a hand.
“I definitely do, but give me a moment. I’ll get right back up and knock the lights out of that shitty bishop,” Yda replied with a soured expression. However, not wanting to dawdle around in the middle of the street at the dead of night, Mordred took matters into his own hands. He crouched down and lifted her up like a newborn and then slung her entire body over his shoulders like a sack of potatoes. Even if he didn’t have the constitution of a superhuman, Yda’s frame was not that large, perhaps only reaching about 160cm in height and her weight was rather low for someone her size. “Uwah! Hey! Just what do you think you’re doing?!” she protested. “I can walk by myself!” when he ignored her and continued on their way back to the church, she gave up on the thought that he would let her down and changed the request, “at least if you’re going to do it, do it in a bridal carry or something! Not like this!”
As they arrived at the front gates of the church, another person had been suspiciously probing about. “Ah!” Yda shouted out as she seemed to realize who the person in question was. For Mordred, it was the first time he had seen a member of this race, ‘if I recall correctly, the people around town called them… ‘Titans’?’ he wondered to himself. A hulking figure that stood almost three metres tall. The moonlight hit his bleached platinum hair to give it a glimmering- almost radioactive- effect that intensified the wild aura about him. The stern glare in his eyes as he scouted out the cathedral was foreboding, almost as if he were about to burst down the gates and charge right in. Mordred thought that with his impressive muscular frame, if he were decked out in full-plate armour then he could serve as a literal tank on the battlefield. Currently he didn’t appear to wear any sort of armour, only tribal-themed clothing with a large brown, woolly coat that came down to his knees. He crossed his hands as he continued to observe, oblivious of Mordred and Yda’s approach. “Hey, aren’t you that Titan that was with that blacksmith girl before?” Yda called out as she climbed off of Mordred.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
The Titan glanced to their direction as his expression eased when he noticed that they weren’t enemies. “Ah… you’re that girl who told me about the church.”
“Yeah, my name’s Yda… I believe yours was, ‘Padan’? I think the blacksmith called you that.”
“Yeah,” the Titan, ‘Padan’, nodded. “What are you doing here?”
“Us?” Yda’s expression darkened as her lips quivered in anger, “that bastard of a bishop kidnapped my family. We’re here to take them back.”
“I see,” nodded the Titan, then extended a hand, “if that’s the case, why don’t we join forces to take them down? I know you said that it’d be best if I attacked on Wednesday but I couldn’t just sit around and do nothing. The plan was to hit them up and retrieve some of the stolen goods, so if you’re up for it, come with me.”
Mordred flashed a discrete grin beneath his helmet as he took the massive hands of the Titan, “that doesn’t sound like a bad idea; since our objectives overlap we might as well. Then, please to meet you, I’m ‘Mordred’: a ‘Human’.” When he introduced himself as such, Yda recoiled with an expression of disbelief. Probably what went through her mind right now was how dubious she was about his claim to being a ‘human’.
“Aye, good lad. I’m going to burst down the gate and then we’ll charge in afterwards to round up those bastards.” Yda took some steps back to make room while Mordred simply stood in place with his arms crossed. The Titan contorted his body in sprinting formation as the air and winds gathered around him. A fearsome tension started to boil around the large man as his mouth curled to a smirk and as though he had been possessed by the spirit of an Olympic runner he burst through the gate with an impressive shoulder-charge.
The display of destruction was such that it was impossible to tell if the gate was made from wood and metal or just cheese. The front burst open as it splintered but the Titan didn’t stop there and continued with his momentum into the actual halls of the cathedral. A truck smashed through the cathedral, or at least that’s what the impact looked like. The bishop and the hooded soldiers from before didn’t even have time to understand what was going on or who was attacking them before half of them were flattened by the Titan truck.
“Tch, useless!” the bishop’s eyes widened as he retreated a couple of steps until he noticed two additional figures. One of them he immediately recognized and leaked a smirk, “Heh… Yda, I knew you didn’t have it in you to actually assassinate that First Prince brat. No matter, you and your friends will all die here anyway.” He then directed the remaining hooded soldiers to attack the intruders.
“Die? Unlikely,” Mordred shook his head as he snapped his fingers. Upon doing so, a black shadow rose from beneath his foot and circled around the hooded soldiers. They stood petrified as the shadow coiled around them- like snake smothering its prey. It then sped up like a tornado and the shadows obscured what happened next. The sounds of a metallic weapon scraping across armour and the ‘thud’ of falling bodies. The shadow collected itself before Mordred ant took a solid form, Regalia. She appeared with her iconic black sword drawn with a thin layer of red running down and dripping onto the sacred floors of the cathedral. “Then, I’ll leave the rest to you, Yda.”
Yda nodded as she stood up to the bishop. “That’s fine by me!”