The Second Son of The Marquis Runs Away from Home ~ Lacking Talent, He Abandons Everything and Becomes an Adventurer ~ - 14

### Episode 14: A Bloody Welcome

(Five for now)

The men in black attire… assassins known as Hizuchi’s ninja, grip their blackened knives.

“Rakul, I’ll take care of the right side, so you handle the left.”

“What about the middle?”

“How about first come, first served?”

“Got it, I’m in.”

They split and face the attacking ninjas. One ninja’s knife strikes from the right, but it is blocked with a sword, while another knife approaches from the opposite side.

Grasping the knife-wielding hand with a white gauntlet on his left arm, he kicks the right-side ninja away and cuts off the left ninja’s arm. Then, he thrusts the knife along with the severed arm into the eye visible through the ninja’s hood.

As the ninja collapses, splattering black blood and smoke, he punches it away. The ninja he had kicked earlier returns, swinging his knife.

“Be careful, these guys have poisoned their weapons!”

“Yeah! And they’re very sensitive to magic activation!”

He dodges the ninja’s knife, grabs its arm, twists it behind the ninja, and uses the power in his white gauntlet to pierce through from the back.

(One’s coming at me!)

A third ninja lunges at him, pinning him down and trying to stab him with a knife. He grabs the ninja’s wrist, pulls out a tube hidden in his sleeve, and presses it against the ninja’s jaw.

“Ignition!”

The gunpowder inside the tube ignites and explodes, sending a bullet through the ninja’s brain.

Pushing the convulsing, smoke-emanating ninja away, he stands up to see Rakul finishing off the second ninja.

Then, two more ninjas leap from the sea towards the pier where Hinowa is. Serena’s water barrier blocks the ninjas, and as they are propelled back into the air, one is burnt and cut by Aria’s flaming blade, and the other is pierced by Shurin’s wooden arrow, falling into the sea.

“That makes seven.”

As he looks at the ninjas turning into magic stones, he says this, and silence returns to the port.

—

Upon inspecting the barracks stationed at the port, they find soldiers and sailors dead everywhere.

Judging by the state of the blood and corpses, they were killed just before they arrived. The bloodstains indicate that the bodies were being hidden when they arrived, making it impossible to mask the smell of blood.

“Should we have captured at least one alive?”

“It’s tough to say if we could have extracted information from monsters… But at least, it’s clear that humans orchestrated this attack.”

As he carries the bodies outside, he examines the knives used by the ninjas, noticing the blades gleam dully with poison.

“When monsters are defeated, their weapons and clothes usually vanish. But since these remain, it can only mean one thing.”

“Someone controlling them prepared these to kill Hinowa and the others…”

“Yes, but the question is whether these are all the ninjas that were here.”

Hinowa and the others say it’s their first time seeing ninja monsters. During the previous attack, it was humans who attacked.

This raises the question of whether these monsters were not used before or if they couldn’t use them… At this point, they had no conclusion.

“In any case, it looks like this situation will be more troublesome than we thought.”

Rakul nodded deeply at his words.