Rebirth of the Sword Saint: A Reincarnation Epic Fantasy Saga

by DB King

  Even on all fours, the Magical Beast stood much taller than him. Its tusks notwithstanding, it was probably tall enough to level the tip of its snout with Hamada’s chin, which meant it utterly dwarfed the five-year-old Jin, who stood his ground. Luckily, this particular Magical Beast lacked any long-range attack and relied heavily on its brute strength. It wasn’t particularly rare, but it was said that plenty of foolish mages have died to its tusks, gored to death and trampled underfoot.

  The Earth-Shaker Boar roared and charged at Jin with reckless abandon, its eyes brimming with fury and hate.

  Jin’s grin only seemed to widen. This creature had truly earned its name. The ground was shaking as it neared him. Tiny pebbles danced at his feet. Truly fascinating…

  Jin bent down and formed the Leaping-Tail Stance. As the enraged boar neared him, Jin flashed to the left, whilst slashing the Magical Beast’s nose. His attack did little more than nick its skin, however, and Jin felt his sword almost bounce off its thick hide. Then again, that had been a cursory attack that hardly carried any true weight behind it.

  Jin turned and leapt back just as the boar, carried forward by its immense momentum, slammed into a tree, charging right through it. It wasn’t a thin tree either. The Magical Beast had utterly crushed and splintered the base of a redwood tree with a single charge. Oh damn… if I get hit once, that’s the end for me.

  Heck, a single charge from that thing would probably breach through the reinforced walls of the Murasaki Castle. Meeting it head on was definitely not an option.

  Jin’s eyes narrowed as the boar circled back. As it moved, Jin studied the creature intently. It can’t make quick turns. If it wants to turn around, it needs to trot forward, whilst slowly turning either left or right, Jin theorized.

  The creature’s stubby legs were powerful. Perhaps he could disable them with a few quick slashes to its ankles—that wouldn’t be easy, but it was an option. Its skull, however, was not; it had charged at a solid tree and didn’t seem even slightly disoriented, so Jin could reasonably assume its skull was far too thick for him to drive a blade through it.

  Its hide, too, seemed similarly thick - thick enough, at least, to have deflected his blade easily. So he couldn’t slash through the creature’s flesh, let alone its skull…. Leaving him with one option: blunt force. Well, it would have been an option if Jin wasn’t a fraction of its size, as tall as he was for a five-year-old.

  I need to find a weak point, he decided.

  Jin slipped to the left once more as the Magical Beast charged him. While killing it seemed difficult, avoiding the beast was almost trivial.

  But once he found its weak point, killing it would be too.

  The easiest and simplest weak point was its eyeballs. If Jin simply jammed his wakizashi into its eye, the creature was as good as dead… probably, or it might start thrashing wildly and he’d end up gored to death. Sure, it was a good place to stick his sword into, but that’ll be the last place he’d stick his sword if it didn’t kill the beast immediately. First and foremost, he needed to disable the creature. Taking out its legs was a good way to do that.

  The boar charged through another tree and slowly circled back. This time, however, Jin did not simply wait for it to charge him again. Instead, he rushed forward as it slowly turned and exposed its left side.

  There we go. Jin raised his sword and, holding it in a reverse grip, drove the glistening point of Agito into the Earth-Shaker Boar’s left foreleg joint. His crimson-bladed sword went right through its knee and out the other side, severing cartilage and sinew. The Magical Beast roared and immediately fell onto the forest floor as it began thrashing its massive head from side to side. Unfinished and undeterred, Jin leapt back and pulled out his sword, eliciting another cry of pain from the creature.

  The gigantic creature roared and screamed, its pained throes echoing through the woods. Lacking a single, usable leg, however, it could do little else. Its upper body was simply too heavy to support itself with only three limbs. That didn’t mean, however, that it was now harmless. On the contrary, desperate, wounded animals were more dangerous than they ever were.

  Wasting no time, Jin then surged forth and thrust Agito into the knee joint of the Magical Beast’s left hind-leg. That’s one side down…

  Jin vaulted over the creature’s massive, muscular back and landed on the right side of its body, where he similarly disabled the Earth-Shaker Boar’s limbs, both foreleg and hind leg.

  At that point, the only thing left of the creature that was even remotely capable of movement was its powerful neck, which it used to thrash its head this way and that with a wild, reckless abandon. A single mistake on Jin’s part would leave him getting impaled on its tusks.

  Jin chuckled. “Well… that was easy. Now, just how do I kill you?”

  It was definitely disabled now, but jamming his wakizashi into its eyeballs still wasn’t a safe option given the Magical Beast’s continued thrashing.

  “Hmmm…” Shrugging, Jin leapt up and landed atop the massive boar’s back. He stood and balanced just over the hump between its powerful shoulders. “I’m sorry about this. You were probably just going about your day in peace, before I came and took away your legs. Don’t worry…”

  His grin returned. “This’ll only hurt a bit.”

  Jin raised his sword high into the air, before plunging it into the Magical Beast’s neck vertebra. With a heavy grunt, Jin managed to force the tip of Agito through the creature’s thick hide and powerful flesh before stopping at its spine. Let’s see here…

  Despite the gigantic boar’s desperate thrashing, Jin’s balance remained unbroken as he maneuvered the tip of his wakizashi toward the tiny space between the creature’s large vertebrae. Finding the gap, Jin drove the point of his sword in and severed the Magical Beast’s spinal cord in a single stroke. The boar fell silent almost immediately. Its thrashing stopped and its eyes glazed over. Jin leapt off its back and landed right in front of it, laying a hand on the edge of its snout where his sword had nicked the thickened patch of skin.

  It wasn’t dead, but it’d take a miracle before it could move again soon.

  Jin huffed, his breathing heavy from the effort of piercing the beast’s hide. Climbing over its head, Jin raised his sword and plunged its tip into the boar’s exposed eye and drove it out the other side, where it emerged with a wet squelch.

  The creature died instantly. Jin leaned against its tusk and released a mighty sigh. He wiped the sweat from his brow. “Well… you were a lot harder to kill than I’d like.”

  Now, onto the harder part of having to flip it, cut open its stomach, and rip out its core.

  How delightful…

  Chapter 8

  It had taken Jin an inordinate amount of time to actually find the Beast Core within the corpse of the Earth-Shaker Boar. Surprisingly, it wasn’t because it was particularly difficult to find. The books were accurate in their instructions, which stated that the concentration of raw magical energies was located in the chest cavity. That part wasn’t the problem; heck, that had been the easiest part of the whole affair.

  No, what made everything so damned difficult and ridiculous was the fact that Jin simply could not pierce through the beast’s hide.

  The Earth-Shaker Boar had fallen on its stomach, where its hide was presumably thinner and softer, though not by much. The first hurdle was that there was no way he could flip over the damn beast; it was simply too heavy. Jin doubted if ten, heavily trained bushi could even flip this thing over on its side. Twenty bushi could probably do it, but….

  The bitter reality was that he was alone and he’d have to deal with this by himself, which meant that flipping it over on one side was off the table. The next best option was simply carving it out manually through the Magical Beast’s flanks, which meant he’d need to cut through its thick hide, even thicker muscles, and the nigh-impervious bones underneath all that.

  Oh, he did try—really.

  Stabbing through its hide
was made easier with Agito’s unnatural sharpness that made it superior to mundane weapons. Carving through its red meat came next and that was where the hardship began. See, Jin found that, if he did have enough strength in his whole body, slicing and dicing through the Earth-Shaker Boar’s flank muscles would’ve been a lot easier. Hamada could’ve done it rather easily. Jin, however, was stuck in the body of a five-year-old and that meant he was limited by its physique, even if he was probably ten times stronger than any other child his age.

  Regardless, after two hours of rigorous and repeated stabbing, the tip of Jin’s wakizashi finally met the rib bones.

  And that was where the whole affair came crashing down on his head.

  Getting through its iron-like flesh had been nearly impossible, but still doable; it was utterly exhausting and ridiculously time consuming, but Jin had succeeded in putting a hole in the side of the animal, even if said hole was not at all sizable. The bones however…

  Stabbing it was like stabbing a stone. The sword would simply bounce off. Even with a perfect stance, and a perfectly aimed and balanced strike, the Earth-Shaker Boar’s bones were simply too tough for him to deliver anything powerful enough to break through. Agito was a powerful weapon, true, but Jin was not the perfect wielder—not yet. At the very least, given its unnatural properties, he wouldn’t have to worry about wear and tear.

  And so, that left him with option number three.

  Supposedly, Magical Beast Cores were nigh-indestructible. Due to how the incredibly rare materials were formed, their structural density allowed them to survive in extreme environments and extreme pressures that would kill normal people a thousand times over. All of this, combined with Jin’s growing annoyance, allowed him a third and final option.

  And that option was to simply burn away the skin and the meat, until the only thing left of the damn creature was its bones and its core.

  And so Jin began gathering dried wood and sticks, piling them around the dead boar until most of the creature’s body was obscured by a veritable wall of firewood. Shivering at the sudden onset of cold and freezing winds as he moved his Fire Salamander tattoo from his chest and onto his left forearm, Jin unleashed a cone of sustained fire and walked a circle around the Magical Beast’s corpse, igniting all the firewood almost instantly. He didn’t like it; the third option was crude and unrefined, but he had no choice in the matter. Trained mages often held dedicated rites and rituals, which honored a Magical Beast’s death—well, according to the books in the Murasaki Library.

  Jin would’ve loved to have done the same as… he was taking the life of a sapient creature. It was the least he could do.

  He wouldn’t be doing that anytime soon by setting the damn thing on fire.

  Unless another Magical Beast just happened to walk by and it just so happened to be an easy kill, then he was stuck with the remains of this lumbering brute of a boar.

  Jin sighed and shook his head. At the very least, I gave it a… relatively painless death.

  As the first of the twigs and the sticks caught aflame, Jin simply moved his Fire Salamander tattoo back onto his chest and heaved a sigh of relief as a powerful heat spread across his body. The flames raged, scorching the gigantic boar’s fur. Jin took several steps back and looked on as the fires slowly consumed the dead Magical Beast.

  What came next was… oddly familiar.

  He had lost count of just how many battles he’d joined in his previous life. From his teenage years all the way to the last decades, before his crowning, he had been engrossed in war and death. After every skirmish, after every engagement, after every minor battle, it was a necessity to gather the dead and burn them to prevent the spread of diseases.

  The pungent, sickly odor that barged into his nostrils was… very familiar indeed. The smell of burning death and blistering fats as flames devoured all semblance of life was all too familiar, and looking back… what a sad life he had lived back then. No child should’ve had to crawl over the corpses across a burning battlefield just to survive. And yet he’d had to anyway. He was there, after all, watching from behind the tree line, alongside his friend, who would someday become the Hollowed Knight, as friends and family were dragged by their heels, piled together, and burned.

  The smell of it had clung onto the darkest pits of his mind.

  Jin hated the smell.

  It took almost four hours and a constant supply of dried wood before the whole creature was finally reduced to blackened bones and ashen meat. Digging through the putrid, burnt remains, Jin finally found the glowing form of the Magical Beast Core. It was about the size of a peach, and perfectly round. True to the descriptions from the books in the family library, the Earth-Shaker Boar’s core emitted a soft, almost golden glow that was warm to the touch and smelled intensely of earthy notes and… were those nuts? Huh. I’d honestly expected it to smell like burnt pork fat and ashes, but this is much better.

  Walking away from the massive pile of ashes, Jin noted how the sun had already begun setting in the distance. The light of the world was rapidly fading and nights in the wilderness were always a dangerous affair. He’d need to find some shelter soon, before the dark creatures and the elements descended upon him. By Jin’s estimation, he had roughly an hour and a half of sunlight left, maybe less, before darkness snuffed out the last of the light.

  Shelter, however, could wait until after he was finished.

  Jin held up the beast core and grinned. He reached into the warm, glimmering object with his magic—the same way he had done with his Fire Salamander all those years ago. His energies swirled and connected with the core, pulling the mass of highly concentrated magic into himself. The core glowed brightly—brighter than the flames that’d devoured the Earth-Shaker Boar’s corpse. Something warm, heavy, dense, and powerful slammed into his body from the core itself.

  Jin’s eyes widened and his teeth gritted as the energies of the Magical Beast flooded into his system—foreign and uncontained energies at that.

  He stood his ground, however—absorbing foreign energies was a battle of wills, and Murasaki Jin was not about to lose to a hairy, overgrown pig with anger issues. He was going to conquer its might and add it to his own.

  Again and again, the energies slammed into him, hoping to overpower him into the ground—again and again, Jin stood firm. If he wavered even once, then this whole thing would go to waste; the energies of the Magical Beast Core would simply dissipate into the air and disappear for good.

  He’d spent a ridiculous amount of time just getting that thing and he wasn’t about to lose it in something as mundane as a battle of wills.

  Finally, after several minutes, the magical energies of the Earth-Shaker boar bowed down and accepted Jin as its new host.

  Magic flooded his system. It prodded and poked and searched until it settled and became one with his Fire Salamander tattoo, which glowed a faint light for a moment, before settling back to its original look. A sudden influx of strength and durability flooded Jin’s whole body. His muscles bulged and his bones hardened. The cold of the forest, which was little more than a nuisance with the Fire Salamander tattoo on his chest, disappeared entirely.

  So… the Earth-Shaker was a mutant-type Magical Beast, which means its core wasn’t immediately compatible with my Fire Salamander’s innate magic, because it’s an elemental type.

  Magical Beasts, with all their unique abilities and characteristics, were categorized into four groups, which acted as a way to simplify how best to deal with them. Elemental types were capable of manipulating the elements to varying degrees: some could breathe fire, like Jin’s Fire Salamander, whilst others were capable of summoning great tidal waves to drown entire cities. Mutant-types had the power to control or otherwise alter their physical compositions. Some, like the Earth-Shaker Boar, had enhanced strength and durability far beyond anything natural, whilst others, like the reclusive shadow crows, were capable of moving through the use of shadows, appearing and reappearing wherever there was da
rkness. Controller-types were, as their name suggested, capable of controlling or manipulating the mind and the senses of other creatures. Creatures of this type were feared far more than the last two categories, but they were far rarer as well, though that was mostly due to the difficulty of tracking and finding them as opposed to their actual population. The last - and most dangerous - was the deviant-type; they obeyed no law and followed no reason. Their powers were simply too great and too varied to be properly categorized. The one thing that all deviant-types shared was their innately powerful magic that dwarfed all other Magical Beasts.

  Jin walked toward the nearest tree, reared back his right hand, and punched with all the strength he could muster. His fist impacted the tree’s trunk, and the whole thing shook. Branches and leaves rustled as though an earthquake had shaken the forest. Jin pulled back his arm and examined his knuckles. His skin hadn’t ripped, despite the tree trunk being coarse and rough, though it had reddened immensely. My strength has drastically been improved, but it’s not even close to the Earth-Shaker Boar’s original power.

  He wasn’t disappointed, however, as this was to be expected. Even then, this much increase in power was immense. Even fully grown humans, even bushi, were very much incapable of causing redwood trees to shake just by punching their trunks. Jin eyed his knuckles and grinned; barely ten seconds had passed and already the redness had disappeared.

  It’d be great if I could find an elemental-type Magical Beast… but just running into one—even if it was a mutant-type—was already a miracle. After all, with only his Fire Salamander available to him, compatibility with all other Magical Beast Cores was… tenuous at best.

  Beast Cores weren’t universal in the upgrades they offered to a mage. Compatibility was a huge factor in determining the effectiveness of Beast Cores. Jin’s Fire Salamander, for example, was hugely incompatible with the Earth-Shaker Boar’s core as the two shared no similar traits. The energies of the boar’s Beast Core would be housed in the essence of his Fire Salamander, thus vastly reducing whatever enhancements Jin might’ve otherwise received. If he’d carried something like a werewolf tattoo, for instance, then the Beast Core of the Earth-Shaker Boar would be housed in it instead, since werewolves were mutant-types. Hence, the enhancement he’d receive from the Earth-Shaker Boar would’ve been far greater.