Chapter 168
Chapter 168
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Translator: Ryuma
Chapter: 168
Chapter Title: The King's Room
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The ones who infiltrated the palace interior were Arsen, Eloise, Bazkal, Reno, and the soldiers following him.
The inside of the building looked as if it belonged to another world entirely.
The inner walls, pulsing as if alive, were shrouded in black shadows that obscured their material, and the floor was sticky and slimy.
It was unmistakably an unnatural space infused with magic.
Bazkal, looking around at the sight, grumbled in complaint.
“Something feels unpleasant... it’s all sticky too...”
Reno, at least, voiced something a bit more productive than complaints.
“Where do we go from here?”
As he said, the paths inside the palace twisted unnaturally right away.
In a normal building, there should be a straight path from the entrance leading inward, but here it was blocked by a wall from the start, forcing movement left or right. No way that was normal.
Arsen dismissed their hesitation by spurring his black lion forward.
“Follow me. This way.”
Arsen knew where they needed to go.
Thanks to the helmet that recognized mana, activated from the power he gained at the Narvik ruins—the first ruins he had ever excavated.
He could see how the mana flowing throughout the entire palace connected to somewhere. And how to get there.
Kieeeek!
At that moment, unidentified abominations began bursting out from spots all over the palace. To Arsen, they were quite familiar foes. They resembled the failed genetic experiments he had seen in the red palace ruins in the past.
The difference was that, since they hadn’t undergone immortality procedures, blood flowed through their bodies instead of mana smoke.
“Break through!”
“Yes, sir!”
“I’ll hold them off!”
Light surged from Eloise’s hand, and vines immediately sprouted to bind the monsters’ bodies.
Then came the feast of cold steel piercing those bound forms.
Arsen, Bazkal, and Reno—the three knights—displayed astonishing coordination as they slaughtered the abominations appearing before them.
The soldiers following behind did the same.
They lacked the knights’ overwhelming physical prowess, but they had the experience to know exactly what to do.
They formed ranks, using the power of the relic armors they wore to push back enemies and protect Eloise.
Their movements were so proficient that, in the art of defending a mage, they surpassed even the knights of the underworld.
“Charge!”
The commando unit mounted on Jin and their riding beasts tore through the black palace interior with momentum like splitting bamboo.
Smashing, ripping, slashing, covered in blood and flesh.
The palace was vast, but not vast enough to hold back those who knew their destination and charged straight for it for long.
They soon reached the end of the palace.
* * *
The king’s room was luxuriously opulent to the point of being burdensome.
The floor was covered in soft carpets of unknown material, and the walls gleamed as if thinly coated with gold and silver.
And on one wall hung a massive portrait.
A portrait of a blond man with purple eyes standing alongside a woman with dark blue-black hair and pale green eyes.
‘Me?’
The man in the portrait resembled Arsen so closely that the thought flashed through his mind instantly. Even down to the eyes not being depicted with an overly glowing purple hue.
Before he could think further, someone rose from the bed in the center of the room.
A woman who looked like the portrait’s woman enlarged, with bluish veins bulging all over her body and two extra arms added.
“You’re finally here. I was getting tired of waiting and nearly fell asleep.”
A relaxed voice.
The woman with the grotesque appearance rose from her seat.
Her demeanor was leisurely, as if she had just woken from sleep, but Arsen wasn’t fooled.
She had to be the owner of the voice that had just moments ago spurred the thralls into berserkers.
Arsen immediately directed a question at the thrall queen.
To confirm what he had inferred from the information heard from House Everick’s patriarch and from interrogating the thralls.
Especially after seeing the monsters they had just encountered and the portrait moments before, his suspicions had hardened into near certainty.
“Yerika, right?”
“Yes. You’re my descendant. Or should I say, Radus’s descendant?”
Yerika acknowledged it with surprising simplicity.
Of course, there was no real need to hide it. The foundation of her power was ultimately the thralls, and they wouldn’t particularly care that their king was a mage over hundreds of years old.
At that moment, Yerika’s eyes widened slightly upon seeing Arsen.
“You really look just like Radus. For a second, I wondered if he had come back to life, young again...”
How she recognized Arsen’s face under his helmet was unclear. Had she used some special magic?
Unexpectedly, her muttering face looked amused.
It didn’t feel like she was in danger of being assassinated amid an assault; she acted as if welcoming guests.
Then, Eloise whispered secretly through her earring.
[Sen. Can you feel it? That woman’s mana.]
[More or less.]
Normally, knights couldn’t gauge a mage’s power, but Arsen was an exception.
His magic helmet had mana recognition capabilities, allowing him to assess how much mana a mage possessed.
And the mana he sensed from Yerika through it was,
[Like a dozen times yours?]
[Yeah. I’ll block as much magic as I can for now, but with this gap, I can’t block it all. Be careful.]
Even Eloise was a mage with power that had virtually no equals on the surface.
Among the mages they’d met during their long journey, only her master Luden and the top mage of Byulburmi, Elder Uman—two people—matched her mana.
But Yerika’s mana was on another level entirely from them.
From the surrounding environment, Arsen could roughly guess the source of that mana.
‘This space is the issue, huh.’
This bizarre palace was a space filled with magic itself, and its origin connected to Yerika.
Probably something akin to the guardian of the Dark Forest.
The immediate solution that came to mind was smashing the entire space, but it was quite difficult to execute.
They had already confirmed that anti-magic permeated the whole building, making it hard to destroy with magic, and having knights dismantle it with spears and swords would be a horrific labor taking ages.
At that moment, Yerika elegantly extended her hand and said,
“Now that we’ve met like this, how about a cup of tea...”
Arsen coldly cut off her seductive, alluring voice.
“Call off the thralls and withdraw. Do that, and we won’t touch you.”
Yerika’s face twisted briefly as if offended, then she laughed in disbelief at the content of his words.
“You know I won’t do th—”
She had no leisure to finish with “...at, don’t you.”
Winged blades sprouted from Arsen’s hand like blooming flowers and surged toward her.
It wasn’t hard to guess that his earlier words were just to create an opening.
For her, who had wanted to chat with her descendant after so long, it was quite irritating.
What’s more, this descendant had interrupted her twice now!
“Stop!”
At her irritated command, the winged blades halted instantly in place.
Even though they still contained their owner Arsen’s mana inside, instead of striking the enemy in response to the call, they lost all power like junk on a tray and clattered to the floor.
Seeing this, Yerika smiled leisurely.
“I can’t have an item I made turned against me, now can I? More importantly, interrupting your ancestor like that—doesn’t it go against etiquette? Maintain your dignity. I created you all hoping you’d become the royal family of this underworld, so you must possess the fitting grace.”
A mocking tone.
Arsen stared at her calmly, utterly unshaken. In his mind, he added information: winged blades unusable.
His opponent wanted to converse leisurely, but Arsen couldn’t oblige.
Even now, humans outside were locked in desperate battles with the thralls, and every delay in killing the queen meant more deaths.
“Surround her!”
At Arsen’s shout, Bazkal, Reno, and the soldiers instantly scattered to encircle Yerika.
Their movements, like unfolding a crane-wing formation, were incredibly swift.
Behind them, Eloise gathered mana, preparing to respond to any situation.
Yet Yerika remained leisurely even in this. As if there was no chance she’d be harmed.
‘Something’s up.’
Thinking that, Arsen activated his drill spear and charged straight at Yerika.
If she didn’t block, he planned to pierce and shatter her head right then. No matter how powerful a mage, a shattered head meant death. Since the source of magic resided in the brain.
“How dare you!”
Yerika reached out toward Arsen. As the glow signaling a spell’s prelude appeared, Arsen narrowed his eyes slightly, bracing for impact.
A knight’s anti-magic was tremendous; even a grand mage struggled to land a killing blow on one. Attacks to neutralize required long casting times.
In other words, he could endure and break through any hastily flung spell.
No sooner had he thought that than a spell formed from Yerika’s hand, accompanied by an explosive sound.
‘Already?’
The strike flying at Arsen was faster and stronger than he’d imagined.
Especially the casting speed—it was so quick that Eloise had no time to counter or disrupt it.
In an instant, an incomprehensible shock slammed into Arsen’s head.
“Guh...!”
A massive impact that nearly blew his consciousness away for a moment.
Arsen realized he was embedded in one wall, his connection to the black lion severed, the beast flung far away.
At least he still gripped the drill spear tightly.
‘What the hell?’
To cast a spell capable of that impact on a knight so quickly—it defied understanding.
Magic grew longer in casting time the stronger and more complex it was; even vast mana couldn’t manifest such a spell instantly.
The mystery resolved soon enough.
“Uwaaaah!”
“Ugh!”
Bazkal and Reno, who had charged alongside him, screamed as they were struck and sent flying.
Seeing it, Arsen finally grasped the attack’s nature and unwittingly let out an exclamation.
“Ha.”
Yerika was shooting compressed air.
Not projecting explosive force directly at the knight, but compressing air, detonating it within the air, then directing the blast without dispersion to fire at the target.
In other words, using air as bullets and magic to shoot a gun.
‘A method like that existed!’
The high-pressure air projectiles themselves were pure physical matter, not magic, allowing them to bypass anti-magic.
Of course, their power wasn’t lethal to an armored knight, but they stunned even Arsen for a few seconds—more than enough for use against knights.
Even Eloise, a grand mage, couldn’t inflict that on Arsen.
“Now! Fire!”
“It’s not working!”
Ranged attacks didn’t land easily either. The soldiers, surrounding Yerika, fired crossbows to harass her, but the bolts lost power and bounced off as soon as they neared her body.
Yerika had made her body the eye of a storm, generating a fierce whirlwind that battered away approaching objects.
‘As expected of an ancient mage.’
Arsen didn’t cling to the black lion. He guessed Yerika was keeping eyes on him even while checking others, waiting for the moment he mounted it.
Just then, Yerika was clashing magics with Eloise. Eloise’s flames swirled to encircle Yerika’s neck, but she moved walls of air to block the approach entirely.
She clearly knew and exploited that even flames bowed to air’s dominion.
As the flames burst spectacularly, briefly illuminating then darkening the room, Arsen timed it and launched himself.
‘Now!’
He feinted toward the sprawled black lion, then abruptly shifted direction, charging at Yerika.
As expected, Yerika’s spell shot toward the black lion’s location, slicing empty air.
‘Her reaction speed is slow, after all.’
The spells were fast, but the caster was ultimately a mage—an ordinary human, not much different.
Of course, Yerika possessed superior reflexes to normal mages due to her grotesque body, but nowhere near a knight’s level.
She couldn’t track and react to Arsen’s movements. She could only predict.
“Eek!”
Startled by the charging Arsen, Yerika flailed her hands in desperation. Condensed air instantly enveloped her.
‘I’ll endure it!’
He’d only been caught because it was unexpected; calmly speaking, her magic was at the level of an ordinary knight’s attack.
If he anticipated the fierce impact and gritted his teeth, it was fully endurable.
“Urk!”
Boom—a deafening roar as the gathered wind blasted out. Stronger than before, like a shotgun blast slamming his whole body.
But he endured because he was prepared. Partly because Arsen deliberately angled his drill spear to shatter some of the wind, and partly because Eloise intervened with her magic.
Eloise couldn’t directly interfere with Yerika’s spells due to the mana gap, but at the moment of launch, she used telekinesis to place obstacles in the path.
Air bullets, though weightless, lost massive power upon any collision, being so light.
Eloise hadn’t known the physics; she’d acted on instinct and intuition.
Realizing the spell wouldn’t fully strike and couldn’t stop the onrushing Arsen, Yerika shouted rapidly like rapping.
“Wait, stop! Let’s talk...”
Her voice desperate for the first time.
Hearing it, Arsen simply replied as he swung down his spear.
From earlier, Yerika had talked far too much mid-fight.
“Shut your crap!”