Apollo's Chronicle by Seraph Wedd (book club reads TXT) 📖

Chapter 1 Part 3

After months of training, his father quickly realized how talented the boy is at manipulating his own mana. On watching alone, he managed to reproduce all the skills his father used as exercises for trainees.

By guiding him just a little, he could quickly grasp the logic behind it.

A year passed. His skills continue to develop further and further.

He is now about the same level as an adult soldier of their village, possibly on par with his father.

As a test, his father took him and a few other trainees for their first test run at actual battle.

As a result, he manage to slay a whole horde of goblins singlehandedly. The rest of the trainees only managed to quell a measly group of a dozen. Their gap in skills is as far apart as the earth and sky.

The only difference to them is that the trainees took attitude appropriate to what they are doing.

The child, on the other hand, seems to be only playing around. As if all he wanted was to be praised by his father, he always run towards his father for everything he does.

His father is pleased to see his son’s own strength. However, he is always bothered by the attitude that his son is taking. That sort of attitude can easily cause the demise of the front line.

His father thought that one day, his son will be in danger, and he will not be there to help him.

Days passed continuously.

Days turned to weeks.

Weeks turned to months, and months to years.

Three years passed and he is now seven years old.

He is now at the age where he properly understands words and logics.

And due to that, many things changed for the boy.

One thing is, anyone can barely say that he is living as a normal child.

Instead of playing with kids around his age, he would continue training outside the village.

Instead of learning properly from the village’s small school, he is being taught by his parents personally.

When kids learn how to wave a stick, he learned how to wield a sword.

When kids learn how to bully the weak, he learned how to properly act as strong and protect the weak.

At the age where the names of children are only known by relatives and neighbors, he is well known throughout the village, even to other nearby settlements.

At times where children go to sleep, he is often at the border and guarding. Sometimes even fighting off monsters who tried to invade deep into the night.

However, he is not being forced to do these things.

Rather, he was the one who decided to do all these.

He is always acting older than his age ever since he reached 5.

He could even react to a kid’s logic properly without flinching.

However, he do not engage in any sort of fight with anyone in the village.

When someone throws stones at him, he will either avoid it discreetly or catch it with his own hands.

If someone picks a fight with him, he is just evading and never lifted even a finger against his peers. He would just wait for them to deplete their strength on their own.

There was once a time where a dozen children with varying ages ganged up on him.

All he earned are bruises from unavoidable attacks.

All the attackers though were left with heavy injuries.

Upon investigation, they discovered that the injuries he received were from pipes waved at him.

And the injuries that the bullies received are all inflicted by their own attacks coming back to them.

He was ostracized by most of his peers. Adored by some.

However, he doesn’t even once lost the smile on his face.

His smile is what gives hope to his parents and makes them work harder.

He is the one who gives the courage to fight to the adults acting as the village’s soldiers, thinking that a child to protect them is like having their priorities reversed.

Instead of protecting the children and women of the village, they are being protected by a child themselves.

This lit the fires within them and caused the influx in trainees.

Now, all of the males in the village knows how to protect their families at least.

Since the numbers of children started bolstering the population, the number of citizens of the village was almost reaching a thousand.

Soon, they would need to expand their settlement to make space for others.

Even nearby settlements who was destroyed by monsters’ waves decided to take refuge on their small village.

The population more than tripled in the small span of 7 years.

As their village grew larger and larger, the food stores of the village slowly became unable to keep up.

Hunting became more and more often.

The number of fields started to increase.

Their borders expanded, causing the absolute need for more soldiers.

The anxiety of the chief started to increase as they had more land area to patrol at night.

Not only that, but as the number of soldiers increases, there will always be slackers here and there.

How many times did monsters manage to invade due to those sort of slackers?

Thanks to the father and son’s efforts damage were always kept at the minimum.

However, whenever this happens and they are both out, damage accumulates continuously.

They are now reaching the point that being lenient will cause the demise of their village.

However, they couldn’t change the way they do things halfway.

This causes the chain of failure and damage to continue.

Fatigue slowly accumulated to the few serious soldiers that is a great help towards the protection of the village.

They believe in the strength of their soldiers. However, fighting tired will slowly cause them to damage their bodies. Both physically and mentally.

And then, after months passed with the border barely being protected, a special day for the boy approaches.

However, he didn’t yet know that that day will mark a dark page in his history.

Chapter 1 Part 4

Morning came and the boy woke up as usual.

He was just sleeping lightly actually. He was only allowed to sleep for 4 hours a day.

Despite being young, he has way better control of his body than an average adult.

However, his young body still couldn’t keep up with the fatigue that continues to pile.

He got up of the bed with a tired face. His lips are slightly pale, and so is his cheeks. Staring down for a moment, he then shook his head and assumed a smiling face.

He is good at concealing his state with his smile.

As he tried to stand up, he slightly wobbled before managing to regain his balance.

No matter how good he is at concealing his fatigue, his body slowly started to show signs of it.

Over fatigue.

If it is an ordinary person, in this state, they surely couldn’t even muster strength to stand up. Some may even run a fever at this moment. However, the boy pushes himself and continues working till noon.

His smile gives energy to others, how he wish it could give him strength too.

He walks out of his room and goes towards the dining room.

There, he started to randomly eat his breakfast from what is left over from dinner.

After eating, he started patrolling the town borders.

Walking towards there, he was greeted by various individuals. He greeted them back out of necessity.

Some praised him about working on a young age. Some offered goodwill in terms of refreshments, fruits and some random items.

He walked eastward of the village, towards the eastern gate.

At the east end, he noticed a broken wall slightly away from the eastern gate. He waited on the spot for quite a moment to pass the message on to others.

Minutes passed and nobody passed.

Usually, patrolling and guarding is done in pairs.

However, the boy patrolling alone was already a matter of course to the soldiers.

Most of the time, when he encounters a monster, it is eliminated in an instant. If not, the longest record lasted a minute. Thus erasing the necessity for a partner.

His father too patrols alone. However, his was on night shift often rather than day. Both of them took Sunday as their day-off and that is for tomorrow.

While waiting, he suddenly notices an anomaly in the mana of the surrounding air.

“…!!!”

He quickly jumped away from the slightly destroyed wall, now completely destroyed.

A large bull-like monster was rushing towards him.

Regaining his bearings, he quickly drew his worn out iron sword. This sword has been together with him since he was 5. It was looted from a nest of some monsters.

The bull-like monster, towering a total of 3 meters height and 5 meters length with around a couple meters in width, was rushing towards him like a large boulder. Its body was covered in black, thick and bulging muscles uncommon to a bull. It frankly looks quite disgusting.

The boy took a deep breath and tried applying mana to his legs to fix its position on the ground.

He then brandished his sword, aiming to impede the charge of the monster.

A split second later, a loud clash was heard throughout the whole eastern forest. Sparks flew from the sword and the tough horn of the monster.

Despite all that, he wasn’t even pushed back by a centimeter. He managed to hold his ground.

If he tried evading the monster then, it would continue charging towards the village, therefore causing great damage.

He then increased the mana in his back, shoulders, elbow and wrist.

After a small groan, he pushed the monster back by a few meters. One of the two curly horns of the monster were cleanly cut by his blade.

It all happened in an instant.

In his left hand was the slashed part of the monster’s horn.

The monster was clearly confused on what happened. However, the monster decided to ram him instead of running away.

He again focused his mana on his legs and knees.

The moment before the impact, he let the mana explode causing his speed to increase.

This is one of the skills taught to soldiers after their advanced level of training. A type of body reinforcement using mana.

When he uses this skill, only his father can keep up with his speed.

And so, the bull-like monster couldn’t even see what hit him.

The moment before the impact, he disappeared from the eyes of the monster. The monster tried to continue charging but instead fell to the ground.

Looking closely, all its legs are amputated from the knees below. That is, all four legs in an instant.

The monster quickly realized its fate. It flailed wildly trying to avoid its unfortunate end.

However, it was useless. By the time its leg was amputated, its body was also slashed three times. Twice vertical and one horizontal. Dividing its body into 6 parts.

In just matters of seconds, the enemy was annihilated.

After the monster’s death, it slowly turned transparent and then light particles started coming out of its body. Within 10 seconds, the body completely vanished.

The horn and the legs that are separated from the main body