Chapter 80
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Translator: 8uhl
Chapter: 80
Chapter Title: Invasion and Corrosion (9)
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"Urk... Hah...!"
In a cramped warehouse within a dark, underground research lab, a person was thrashing, drenched in a cold sweat.
With a will of steel and burning rage, Reina had been rubbing her face against her arm. Imprisoned until now, she had finally succeeded in removing the gag from her mouth.
"Roses... Orne!"
She spat the names of the Vice-Chairman and the Research Director, who had committed an atrocity that defied all heaven and earth and had even attacked her.
She had been taken down before she even knew what hit her.
Panting, she struggled against her body, which hung like a slab of meat. Both her hands were in cuffs, raised and chained to the wall.
There was only one way to get out of this.
Barely managing to right herself, she grabbed the chains and, as if climbing a rope, somersaulted into the air, planted her feet on the ceiling, and wedged the chains between her knees.
In that precarious position, holding on with trembling arms, she began to bite and turn the bolt on the cuff's connector with her teeth.
The rusty, poorly maintained bolt soon clattered and loosened.
"Ack!"
The moment the cuffs came undone, her strength gave out, and she fell to the stone floor with a loud crash.
Twitching, Reina managed to push her aching body up. The flow of mana, blocked by the mana-sealing cuffs, began to circulate once more.
She stretched out her hand, fired a flame bolt, and shattered the locked warehouse door, stepping outside.
'What in the world happened?'
Her eyes wavered. She couldn't sense a single soul.
She knew something had happened.
Right after waking from the electric shock, she had faintly heard the horrifying screams and shouts from above ground.
But she couldn't make any sense of it.
Who would dare to attack the mansion of the Society's Research Director? Bandits? Or some group with a grudge against the Society?
"Haha..."
However, as Reina staggered up to the ground floor, she dismissed all those possibilities.
Because neither bandits nor a rebel group could ever create the scene that now lay before her eyes.
Her strength left her, and she collapsed to the ground.
Bright sunlight illuminated the trashed interior of the mansion's first floor.
Considering this had been a grand, three-story mansion, the list of those who could have created this disastrous ruin, which looked like a complete collapse, was very short.
"This is...!"
Just then, a great wave of mana, carried on a faint breeze, tickled her skin.
She shot to her feet and hastily looked around.
Then, she scrambled up a pile of shattered roof debris.
'A Magician's Eye...! And one of that size!'
She could see something in the distant sky.
A magically-wrought eye, glowing blue, was rolling its eyeball, scanning the surroundings. And there were four of them.
She knew of this spell. To cast it on such a scale, one would literally need an 'army'.
'What in the world is going on?'
Her face paled as she hurried back down and gulped down some rainwater that had pooled on the ground.
She had no idea that in the two days she had been unconscious and imprisoned after the ambush, the world had been turned upside down.
"Let's go."
She slapped her own cheeks and began to walk. She had already decided on her destination.
If the Research Director's mansion was attacked, there was no way the nearby city of Rihelm was safe.
She didn't know what had happened, but an instinct told her that if she headed toward those eyes, which now served as a beacon, she would find some answers.
"A communication crystal...!"
As she was about to leave the mansion, she picked up a cracked crystal sphere.
But she soon lowered her head. She had tried contacting all the identification numbers she knew, but no one answered.
Reina trudged on.
*
"The enemy is now..."
"A new group has appeared from the northeast!"
"Keep watch. Can we not deploy more Eyes?!"
Here, in the heart of the encampment, while Reina, having spotted the Magician's Eyes, was hurrying in this direction.
The ten thousand troops that had hastily gathered here were unable to make a bold sally to crush the enemy's base, despite having assembled.
"There are too many of them. We must split the army and focus on defending each region first!"
The reason was the enemy, who seemed to know their weakness, spreading out in all directions and pushing deeper inland.
Most of the ten thousand soldiers gathered here had ties to this region. It meant they would find it difficult to blindly follow the central command's order to advance on the enemy's den while leaving their own homes and families to be attacked.
"Damn it all. But we don't know their objective, their exact numbers, or their identity. If we waste time, there's no telling what might happen!"
The commander-in-chief dispatched for this crisis was a magician from the Continental Council, a man draped in a gold-embroidered robe.
Though the various magician societies had dispatched their mages in accordance with the mutual defense pact for crises, their power had been steadily growing, and they were not ones to meekly obey a commander from the Council.
"What's the hesitation! We can detect all their movements and we know what's happening. The answer is to quickly send communications to prepare defenses and defeat them one by one!"
Among them, one man was practically foaming at the mouth: Roses, the Vice-Chairman of the Blakehill Society.
That night, after knocking Reina unconscious and leaving the Research Director's mansion, he had miraculously managed to avoid the attack.
Hearing news of the assault in a nearby village, he had been terrified and was about to flee, but under orders from his superiors, he had no choice but to join the assembled army.
'What is this? Black monsters, Ruin Fiends? Weren't Ruin Fiends supposed to be extinct?'
Roses's brow furrowed, his confusion still not settled.
No, in truth, he had one suspicion. The desperate plea for help from a boy he had so mercilessly crushed.
What if the monsters now laying waste to the world were the same ones that had slaughtered the moonlight elves and crawled out of that labyrinth?
'I must keep this a secret. A-anyway, they said there were no survivors in Rihelm.'
He flinched and swallowed dryly. The fact that an entire society branch had been wiped out, that the world was in peril—none of it mattered to him, who was currently most concerned with his own safety.
"Hurry up with the calculations and report. Which region is in the most critical danger, and is defense truly impossible!"
The commander-in-chief finally conceded, partially accepting the opinions of the society magicians.
He issued an order to detach a portion of the army and dispatch it to regions where defense was difficult.
"We can see all their movements and know their scale. We also have real-time communication. If we move organically, it is sufficiently possible. In the meantime, the main force will attack the nest of those insects."
"Th-then I will lead that detached force!"
Roses quickly raised his hand and volunteered. The others, unaware of his true intentions, were all impressed, thinking it was far more dangerous to move separately from the main army.
"Very well. Roses Leblanc of Blakehill, you will go where I direct from here, stop the enemy, and save the citizens."
The commander-in-chief gave him a directly-linked communication crystal and a force of two thousand soldiers.
It was a gamble, trying to catch two rabbits at once, which could easily result in losing both. This was the move the human side had made.
Their confidence was based on their information gathering and transmission systems, which they believed to be overwhelmingly superior.
The ability to observe the enemy's movements in real-time and act accordingly.
[This is a bit of a shame. They split up as intended, but 2,000 and 8,000 isn't as large a chunk as I'd hoped.]
"It doesn't matter."
However, there was one fact they had not considered at all.
Eve sat upon the throne created in the nest, her eyes gleaming.
The Legion's gaze was currently tracking their every move. The scouts the Legion had sown—leisurely flying birds, insects crawling on the ground—were no less effective than the Magician's Eyes.
And even if they were both watching each other's every move, no communication device in this world could ever defeat the Legion's Hive Mind.
"Oh... you have got to be kidding me."
"Wh-what's wrong all of a sudden, Thomson!?"
"Wh-what am I seeing right now?"
The main force, completely oblivious to the fact that the enemy was also watching them, continued its advance.
Naturally, the Magician's Eyes, serving as a kind of watchtower, were constantly rotating.
But Thomson, one of the magicians maintaining an Eye, was horrified by the sight that appeared in the magical eye linked to his own optic nerves.
"There's a horrible... a horrible nest."
"W-we've already received reports on that! A strange and grotesque nest that appears to be their main base..."
"This isn't on that level!"
"U-uaaargh!"
"What is that?!"
Along with Thomson's shout, the other magicians maintaining the Eyes also screamed in shock or terror.
As they advanced a certain distance, what they were seeing was no longer just a base nest.
It was a vast, sprawling nest that was swallowing the green mountains and fields whole, staining them black.
From sticky, slimy pools where the Legion's all-purpose cells were being infinitely cultured, to trees that looked rotten to the core growing to a size rivaling the majesty of the World Tree—the sight left everyone speechless.