Pain wracked One Swing’s body as he tumbled across the floor of the cave, dropping his weapon to the stone below.
After kicking him back through the tunnel at his back, the troll descended on One Swing, its flesh-picked skull bobbing along limply as the meaty hand puppets at the end of each arm directed the beast towards him.
The grotesque amalgamations of meat, teeth, and eyeballs grinned down at him, their guttural taunts echoing out from their meaty mouth flaps.
“Human small. Shur squash.” One of them nodded.
“Human weak. Burt break.” The other nodded back.
Sprawled across the floor, One Swing found the large foot of the troll bearing down on him. As the huge beast went to stomp him into the stone, his eyes were drawn to its other foot. Or rather, something under its other foot.
One Swing smirked.
Before the weighty foot could squash him into the floor, One Swing reached for the scarf at his neck and gave it a sharp tug.
“Wha—?!”
“—Guh!?”
Knocked off balance, the troll toppled to the floor with a resounding thud.
With a smirk still on his face, One Swing crawled to his feet, wrapping the scarf around his neck and flicking it behind his back once again.
When the troll had kicked him across the tunnel, the length of One Swing's scarf had unravelled itself across the cave floor in a tangled mess. As the troll approached to finish him off, its leg had swept across the length of red cloth, and—spotting that—One Swing tugged it out from underneath the troll's foot, causing it to trip and fall to the floor.
In response, an enraged roar echoed out from the two meaty hand puppets as the beast began to scramble to its feet.
With his body still in pain, One Swing took a moment to catch his breath, as well as plan his next course of action.
He still had to kill the troll, but the issue still lied in how to kill it.
Because his sword was too long— Rather, because the cave was too short, he was not able to swing his sword inside the underground tunnel. His best course of action would be to take the sword outside and cleave the entire formation from the landscape in one powerful swing.
But One Swing was not confident he could outrun a troll in his weakened state while carrying his weapon.
The alternative was to leave the sword in the cave, run ahead without it, and then pull the opposite end of the blade out of the tunnel once he had left. However, tugging the blade from the tunnel would take a while, and the troll was sure to catch up to him in that time.
As a master of both vertical and horizontal length, there had to be some way for him to take advantage of this situation… And then it hit him.
Coming up with the perfect plan, One Swing’s smirk widened.
Clambering to its feet, the troll immediately lunged towards One Swing once again, the two meaty puppets at the end of its thick arms outstretched in front of it. Their grotesque faces contorted into one of anger.
But One Swing had already begun to make his way up the long tunnel and back towards the exit.
Leaving his sword to lay on the ground at their feet, One Swing limped his pained body back up the tunnel, the troll stomping loudly after him at his back. As One Swing continued ahead—
He suddenly fell, collapsing to his knees across the blade of his sword still buried in the stone.
“Hah! Human weak!” One of the meat puppets laughed. “Shur break!”
“Puny human!” The other joined in. “Burt squash!”
As the creature descended upon the kneeling man once again—
One Swing turned to face them, the smirk still on his face.
“Cobalt Cleaving Guillotine—!”
Digging his fingers into the stone floor, he hooked them beneath the blade of the lengthy sword and threw it up to the ceiling above.
“—GRAHHH—!” The voice of the two heads cried out in unison as the edge of the thrown blade cut up through the middle of the troll like a reverse guillotine, splitting it cleanly in two. The two halves slowly peeled away from each other, and thudded loudly to the floor.
As both a master of vertical and horizontal length, One Swing had devised a plan to strike the troll vertically, while still keeping his blade horizontal in the confined space. As trolls were both very large, and very wide, there was nowhere for the creature to escape to as the gigantic blade carved its way up from its groin to the tip of its skull in one swift movement.
Letting his blade fall from the ceiling and clatter to the floor once again, he walked between the twitching halves of the troll's corpse and found the handle of his weapon. Slinging it awkwardly over his shoulder—the blade pointed forward—he slowly made his way past the twitching masses of meat and back up the tunnel. Eventually, making it back outside.
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Breathing a short sigh of relief, he readjusted the sword on his shoulder so that it was pointed at the sky, and then turned towards the direction he had initially wandered in from, where Condie Mints was presumably still waiting for him to return.
Stepping back through the forest of trees, a low rumbling at his back caused him to pause in his tracks.
“… Hm?”
Thud. Thud. Thud. Thud.
Turning his attention to the source of the noise, he found that it was coming from the cave he had just come from. A low, wet, thud was rumbling out from the entrance, slowly making its way towards him.
One Swing gripped the handle of his sword in preparation.
He was positive he had killed the troll inside, but Troll King Shur-Burt was undoubtedly Cursed. Though he had never met one with a Curse before, he knew to at least be cautious of the unexpected.
As the thudding drew closer and closer, One Swing’s suspicions were proven true as the lumbering beast emerged from the darkness of the tunnel and out into the afternoon light...
Still split apart, the two halves of the troll's corpse slowly stumbled out of the cave. Leaning on one another for support, the two halves had sloppily pieced themselves together. Blood and gore cascaded wildly from the gash torn up through the troll's body, leaving thick globs of crimson to pool at its feet and trail back down the tunnel behind it.
However, despite the state that it was in, the meaty hand puppets still held at the ends of its thick arms simply grinned back at One Swing with their jagged clump of teeth.
—And then they began to eat themselves.
Tearing at the flesh of the troll, the puppets of meat began to rip chunks off its own body, gulping it down into the horrific toothy holes between their flapping mouths.
“Human make mistake…” one of them cackled, slurping down more troll innards into its gullet. “Just like Troll King…”
“Big mistake!” the other howled, peeling the thick skin from the troll’s body and grinding it between its mass of teeth. “Become next Shur-Burt!”
As they ate more and more, the puppets themselves seemed to grow in size. Very quickly, long meaty tendrils had started to sprout from the torn flesh of the troll, squirming their way out like wriggling maggots. The more the puppets ate, the more the tendrils would spread out from its body, licking out towards the sun as if wanting to escape the confines of their broken and bloodied cage of flesh and bone. With more crunching and slurping of their feeding frenzy, the tendrils began to ooze out of the gaping wounds, and then—
“Guillotine of Erasing Life—!”
—One Swing swung his blade down in front of him.
The colossal blade tore down from the sky like a screaming comet, leaving a gleaming arc of violet in its path. Cleaving through the cliff face like paper, the blade continued to tear its way down at tremendous speed, striking through the entrance of the cave.
Quickly connecting with the mass of writhing meat and tendrils, the horrific creature could barely let out a pained screech before the absolute entirety of its form was obliterated into nothing but a fine mist beneath One Swing’s hefty blade, scattering out into the air above and being whisked away by the resulting force of wind.
As the split cliff collapsed in on itself—crumbling inwards like an avalanche of stone—One Swing pulled his sword from the debris, and carried on back towards the railway.
No longer interested in whatever off-putting display the grotesque creature had hoped to show him, he had simply cut it down before it had a chance to. Although he was curious about what it was trying to do, he feared that the writhing tendrils of the creature might have affected his future relationship with spaghetti. And One Swing loved spaghetti.
And so he killed it, leaving absolutely zero trace left across the land. Whatever it was trying to do, and whatever it did to the troll it was puppeting, would have to forever remain a mystery. That was just the nature of Curses, after all.
Stumbling back through the forest, the orange-haired dwarf was still there waiting for him, a grin already on her face.
“Oh? Done already?” she asked. “Ah, I don’t really need to ask, do I? I mean, I could hear it from here.”
In response, One Swing simply smirked.
As the two of them boarded the rail trolley and made their way back to Zwieback—albeit, a lot slower than their arrival due to One Swing’s injuries—they filled the long ride back with idle conversation.
“So, what will you do now?” Condie asked. “Plan on sticking around Zwieback? I could probably hire you to guard the workers while we lay the tracks if you want? We've still got a ways to go before it's finished.”
“Ah, thank you for the offer, but…” One Swing shook his head. “I think I’ll leave for the Capital tomorrow. There’s bound to be much longer quests to be found there, especially ones for an F-Rank adventurer.”
“Longer quests…? I, uh... still don’t really get it, but sure! Oh! Speaking of ranks, the quest to kill Shur-Burt was B-Rank, remember? Which means they might even promote you straight to B-Rank as a reward!”
“Hah-hah-hah-hah!” One Swing laughed. “That would be a pleasant surprise! Hah-hah-hah-hah-hah—!”
“Right? It might happen, you know! And you’re—”
“—hah-hah-hah-hah-hah-hah-hah! A pleasant surprise indeed!”
“… R-right. Like I was saying, you’re probably stronger than a B-Rank anyway, so I don’t know why they wouldn’t promote you all the way up.”
“Hmm… I suppose it’s possible. I’ll have to wait and see.”
Finally approaching the high walls of Zwieback once again, the trolley creaked to a halt, and the two of them hopped off. Walking along the outside edge of the town, Condie spoke up once again.
“Ah, if you’re heading to the Capital, me and the workers are gonna get back to laying the track tomorrow, so I can take you on the trolley if you want. It won’t get you all the way there, obviously, but it’ll take you most of the way at least.”
“Mm. That would be helpful. Thank you.”
“O-oh, and before I forget again…” Condie stopped in her tracks, turning her eyes away bashfully as she scratched awkwardly at her dirt-stained chin with a blackened fingernail. “Th-thanks for saving me from that guy back in town. The one holding me hostage… I never did thank you for that…”
“Ah.” One Swing nodded. “Don’t mention it.”
“No, I should’ve thanked you earlier…”
“No, no. Don’t mention it.”
One Swing did not want her to mention it.
The fact that he had no intention of saving her at that time, and only wanted the elf to unhand the offensively short daggers he was wielding, made One Swing feel a little guilty by the fact. So he really hoped she would stop mentioning it.
“Well…” Condie began, plodding her little feet along the dirt path once again. “After tomorrow, the next time I see you, you better be an S-Rank adventurer!”
One Swing smirked.
“Very well,” he replied. “But you better have that rail engine up and running as well.”
Turning towards One Swing one last time, the orange-haired dwarf responded with a wide grin.