Future Knight

Chapter 3

“Huff! Huff! Huff!”

“This level of tree magic? Amari?”

When the elves gathered in front of the stranger turned around, they saw two women standing there.

One of them had her hand extended toward him, indicating that the giant tree roots that suddenly sprouted were her doing.

All the elves bowed their heads to the elf standing behind her.

“Greetings, Arteon.”

As the woman who received everyone’s respectful greetings slowly approached the stranger, the other elves politely stepped aside.

The woman named Arteon, who lightly nodded back to them, stood before the stranger and spoke.

“Stranger, you have finally awakened.”

The elf who spoke to Kang Chan appeared to be an elderly woman, an uncommon sight even among the elves known for their long-lasting youth.

She had only a few wrinkles and white hair, yet she seemed to be the eldest elf in this village.

“How are you feeling?”

Her voice was as warm and gentle as a spring breeze, but the face of the stranger standing before her was cold enough to match the harshest winter wind.

“Huff! Huff! What nonsense are you spouting, damn it.”

Exhausted to the extreme, the stranger glared at the woman who spoke to him in an incomprehensible language, as if he wanted to kill her instead of replying.

He had tried to escape, enduring severe pain by entering battle mode, but even that attempt had ended in failure. With no weapons and his body tied up by tree vines, a shadow of despair slowly spread across his face.

Then, as if making a decision, he glared at the woman speaking in the bizarre language and said with a determined expression,

“Heh heh… Damn it. Cough, spit! It’s frustrating to die without a proper fight, but in our special unit, Red Mars, there are no prisoners!”

As he activated the suicide mode at the end of his declaration, the suicide poison stored in his body was injected into his heart, spreading rapidly throughout his body.

His expression twisted in severe pain.

“Ugh!”

Suddenly, the stranger’s face turned purple, and black blood flowed from his nose and mouth. The elves watching him were startled, and Amari shouted after checking his condition.

“It looks like he took poison!”

“Suddenly taking poison…”

The surrounding elves began to panic at the mention of poison.

Even amid the turmoil, the elf named Arteon remained calm. She reached out her hand toward him and shouted,

“Cure.”

As the green light enveloped his body, his pale complexion gradually returned to normal.

He had been ready to accept the approaching death, feeling the pain of his veins burning.

But suddenly, he felt a strange freshness throughout his body.

‘Does this poison make you feel this refreshed when you die? Nice. But when do I die? Am I already dead? It doesn’t seem like it…’

In his confusion, he opened his tightly closed eyes slightly and looked around.

The people he had seen before taking the poison were still there, staring at him with expressionless faces.

“What, what’s this? Computer, what’s going on?”

– The suicide toxin C-13 used in your body has been completely removed. The cause is unknown.

“What? The poison is gone? Once C-13 spreads through the bloodstream, no medicine can save you! This doesn’t make any sense!”

As Kang Chan, talking to himself and getting excited, Arteon frowned while watching him.

His actions, talking and getting excited by himself, seemed strange to her.

The elves and Amari whispered softly to her.

“Lady Arteon, that human seems out of his mind, no matter how you look at it.”

“Yes, he seems to be strong because he’s crazy.”

“Indeed, he doesn’t seem normal to me either. And he’s not even wearing pants…”

Arteon and Amari glanced down at his grotesque member, their faces turning red.

“Well, it doesn’t seem that impressive,” she said, though Kang Chan’s item was nothing to be ashamed of anywhere.

“Anyway, judging by his attempt at suicide, it seems he’s hiding something.”

“From what I heard, he seemed to be speaking a different language from ours. I’ll try using a translation spell to communicate with him again.”

Gathering her courage, Arteon approached the stranger once more.

“There’s no other way. If the poison doesn’t work, I’ll have to bite my tongue. It’s better than enduring brutal torture and dying painfully…”

Having witnessed countless enemies tortured to death without relief, he knew that ending his own life was the easiest way to die.

While lost in these thoughts, Arteon spoke to him again.

“Can you understand my words?”

The stranger raised his head and looked at the elf.

His face showed a determined look.

“Computer, switch to sync mode for conversation.”

– Switching to sync mode for conversation.

‘Stay calm. I can’t give up here. Yes, don’t lose hope. Computer, check if her language can be translated.’

– Yes, understood. Please wait a moment. Beep… Beep… Beep… We apologize. We have searched all 1,469 languages stored from the solar system, but no similarities were found.

‘A language that even the computer, which stores all human languages, doesn’t recognize? Who are they? Could they not be humans who arrived on this planet before us? Or are they really aliens living on this planet?’

He recalled the data injected into his brain chip during the briefing the day before departure.

A thousand years ago, OGLE-2006-BLG-109L, discovered by the Korean Astronomical Research Institute, had caused a stir in the academic world as an exoplanetary system very similar to the solar system.

Later, ‘Neo Earth,’ discovered by the unmanned exploration satellite sent there, was identified as a planet with conditions very similar to Earth. Scientists believed it highly likely that organic life forms existed there, just like on Earth.

It had been 500 years since humanity lost its mother planet Earth to the Last Impact and settled in space.

However, since no life forms had ever been discovered in space other than on Earth, the mission given to their vanguard team was to confirm whether life existed on Neo Earth.

If life forms existed, their secondary mission was to determine whether those life forms had an intelligent civilization.

Their tertiary mission was to carry out destruction operations to transform this planet into a second Earth for the Universal Alliance Military (UNA), comprising the US, NATO, and ASIA.

However, even if these beings before him were truly intelligent alien life forms, Kang Chan had no strength left to continue the operation.

He had nothing left.

The battleship, weapons, and his comrades had all disappeared, leaving him alone in a remote forest village on Neo Earth.

It was enough to drive him mad.

‘What on earth happened while I was asleep?’

While he was lost in various thoughts, Arteon extended her jade-like hand and cast a spell on him.

A small halo of light gathered in her hand, forming a beautiful shape as it flew towards the stranger. Startled by the light flying towards him, the stranger screamed.

“Aargh!”

Thinking it was a laser weapon, he braced himself for certain death.

However, after a few minutes, he felt no pain in his body.

Startled, he lifted his head again and looked up at the unfamiliar woman standing before him.

‘What is this? Nothing happened. Could it be that these beings are mocking me?’

Feeling as if he had been mocked, anger surged within him.

But just for a moment, as the unfamiliar woman spoke again, he couldn’t hide his astonishment.

“Can you hear me now?”

Hearing his own language fluently from the lips of the woman who had previously babbled in an incomprehensible tongue, he was shocked.

‘She was definitely speaking a strange language, but now she’s speaking our language fluently. Could it be?’

For a moment, he thought that these beings might not be aliens after all.

“Are you human?”

“What is a human? I am an elf, a race that lives in this forest.”

“Elf? That’s a race I’ve never heard of. Then how do you know our language?”

“That is possible through magic.”

“Ma, magic?”

“Yes, do you not know about magic?”

The only magic he knew was the trivial tricks his comrade Dick showed during downtime, like card tricks or coin tricks.

Of course, magic and tricks were fundamentally different things.

“It is a high-level mental magic called ‘Speak.’ It allows one to convey and understand intentions regardless of language or race, even to animals and plants. It’s strange that you don’t know about magic.”

“Whether it’s magic or whatever, it has nothing to do with me! Just untie me now!”

“That, that bastard!”

His arrogant and rude attitude made the surrounding elves’ eyes blaze with anger.

The young and lowly human boy was consistently rude and arrogant towards their lord, Lady Arteon.

The elves, who already disliked humans, shot their wrathful gazes at the stranger.

Such hostility was something he was accustomed to receiving from enemies.

However, Arteon’s next words left his mind blank.

“Excuse me, but before we continue our conversation, could you please put on some pants? We elves do have a sense of modesty.”

Her fresh smile and words left the stranger momentarily stunned, and he realized just how bare his lower half was. Desperately, he tried to cover himself.

Even someone like him, who had lived a merciless life, felt a shred of shame.

But his tightly bound arms refused to comply with his will, and the stranger, trembling with humiliation, shouted at her with furious eyes.

“You, you guys took them off! Ugh!”

As he roared in anger, he suddenly lost consciousness.

Having spent a year bedridden, his extremely weakened body had exhausted itself by pushing his battle mode to its limits, leading to his fainting.

Arteon, watching the unconscious stranger, gestured to the elf behind her.

The elf woman, her face flushed, reluctantly took off her outer garment and covered his lower body.

“Oh dear, he’s lost consciousness again.”

“Who exactly is this human? The brute strength he showed earlier was terrifying.”

“His strength was indeed terrifying, but I’m more curious about his identity.”

“Carrying suicide poison in his body is very suspicious. It might be best to isolate and interrogate him.”

“He seemed extremely anxious about something. Perhaps it would be better to calm him down first and then question him?”

“Understood. Let’s do that.”

“To prevent another suicide attempt, always have a healing magician on standby.”

Amari slowly nodded and gestured to the elves behind her.

“Move him back to the house.”

“Yes, Lady Amari.”

* * *

Flames roared all around, and everyone was screaming, running in all directions.

It was a familiar scene. This was the Plant Edai, where the Imperial Army families on Mars lived, and where he had been deployed for his first real mission after ten years of grueling body modification surgeries and combat training.

His comrades who were also part of the surprise attack were all laughing.

Everyone seemed to enjoy the situation.

They aimed their rail guns at the fleeing civilians with a sense of detachment and pulled the triggers.

Small metal balls accelerated by the rail guns’ magnetic fields started to spew out at incredible speeds.

Adults and children alike turned into bloody lumps, their bodies splattering everywhere.

No matter how much they were enemies, these were civilians. At age 12, the first enemies he had to kill were women and children. What sins did they commit? He was terrified to shoot at them.

His comrades looked at him with contempt.

When the instructor sternly repeated the order, the frightened boy had no choice but to pull the trigger of the rail gun aimed at them.

The bullets he fired, just like those of the others, heartlessly turned them into chunks of meat.

After that, he continued pulling the trigger madly, and with each person exploding from his rail gun, his emotions grew numb.

He didn’t remember how many people he killed that day, but after that day, people began to call them this:

The demons who drenched Mars in blood, the Red Mars.