The Priest of the Forbidden Forest
Dick headed with Simon toward a secret route he knew.
It led to the stables on the outskirts of Kizen — a place that, true to the academy's nature, raised not only ordinary horses but enormous skeletal steeds as well.
After slipping outside through the secret route, Dick and Simon split up to head for their respective destinations.
Simon walked through the forest, found some Rehak mushrooms, and reached out to begin gathering them. Once he had filled the box he'd brought, he closed the lid and stowed it in his subspace.
Just as he was about to return to Kizen, Simon heard a strange sound.
A human voice was repeating itself over and over.
Curiosity stirred in him. He walked carefully toward it, ears pricked, one cautious step at a time.
The closer he drew, the more something felt wrong. The words reaching him were things that should never be spoken in the Dark Coalition — and least of all at Kizen.
Prayer?
When Simon arrived a short distance from the source, his eyes went wide.
It was an altar. Someone in a long gray robe was prostrate on the ground, performing what looked like a ritual.
Strange objects hung from the altar in clusters, and at its center stood a cross — a nude woman carved in a grotesque form, suspended, her body covered in thorned vines. An object that absolutely should not exist in the Dark Coalition.
Every piece of the puzzle clicked into place in Simon's mind. A Priest was at Kizen.
He stepped back without thinking and accidentally crushed a branch underfoot.
The crack rang out through the trees. The Priest halted the ritual and turned their eyes toward him.
A hand stretched out, and crosses forged of jet-black darkness flew straight at Simon.
A Priest using jet-black?
Simon ran, dodging the crosses streaking toward him.
Jet-black and holy power repel each other — they can't coexist. And a Priest using jet-black… Could this mean…
It was a situation that made no sense unless there was a traitor or a spy on the inside. Simon ran for his life.
If he was caught, he would be killed. Having been discovered, the Priest would stop at nothing to eliminate the witness — him.
Black crosses kept flying without end. Simon reached for the skull-shaped brooch he carried.
It was a fragment containing the will of Peer, administrator of the 7th Corps — the legion once led by Simon's father, Richard Polentia.
Unable to handle this alone, Simon summoned him.
"Keheheheheh! You alright, boy?!"
A massive skeleton cloaked in darkness appeared, sinister blue flames burning in both eye sockets. He stood well over two meters tall, an intangible cloak billowing at his back, a pure white greatsword gripped in one hand.
"Fall back! This one's still too much for you!"
Peer raised his enormous greatsword. Simon nodded without protest.
Please!
"Kahahahaha! How long has it been since my last battle?! Here I go!"
Peer stepped forward. The Priest formed a jet-black shield across their front.
The two clashed again and again.
Peer! How is it?!
"Krgh! Not easy!"
Peer's voice was trembling.
Undead bound to a legion grow stronger in proportion to their Legion Commander's skill. In other words, every undead of the 5th Corps — Avaris included — was overwhelmingly stronger under Ainz now than they had been under Magnus.
Simon was still inexperienced, and so Peer too was far weaker than he had been in Richard's day.
"This bastard! Even with just jet-black magic, he's absurdly strong! Might even be professor-level!"
Peer was being pushed back. The Priest raised a jet-black cross, then — suddenly looked somewhere else entirely and hurled it in that direction.
"?!"
"!!"
In the direction the Priest had thrown the cross, there was a wall. The massive wall began to move.
"Wooooooooooooooooo!"
A roar that seemed to shake the very air rang out. What had looked like a wall was an enormous shield.
The figure was taller than Peer — around two hundred thirty centimeters. In its left hand it held a tower shield large enough to cover most of its massive body; in its right, a flamberge whose blade alone was longer than a child's height.
Its body was clad in pitch-black full plate armor etched with crimson vein-like patterns and studded with sharp spikes. And in its rotting, crumbling face and hollow eye sockets, a cold resolve to carry out someone's orders and a hunger for slaughter both burned with a vivid red light.
"U… undead?"
The Priest hurled crosses at it, but the undead blocked every one with its shield.
Simon had no idea what it was. He had never seen this kind of undead before. But standing like the incarnation of an iron wall, weathering the assault of a Priest that Peer had rated as professor-level — he could tell this was no ordinary undead.
When the Priest's attacks seemed to have no effect, they paused for a moment.
Peer recognized it.
"That… is a Death Knight?"
"D… Death Knight?!"
Simon's eyes went wide at the name. It was written in the Summoning textbook — one of the Three Great Secrets of Summoning. A powerful undead said to be made from the corpse of a Swordmaster.
"Woooooooooooooo!!"
When the Death Knight roared again, every bird in the forest fled at once. The moment the Priest tried to deploy more crosses —
A bolt of lightning streaked toward them. The Priest blocked it with defensive magic.
Then two more undead appeared.
One wore a luxurious but tattered robe and held a twisted staff. Its rotting face — little more than skin stretched over bone — gleamed with a light of wicked wisdom, and jet-black mist shrouded its entire body. It drifted slightly through the air and casually approached Simon and Peer.
"That… a Lich?"
More precisely, it was an Elder Lich sent by someone — but Peer's guess wasn't far off.
Simon's eyes grew even wider. A Lich, like the Death Knight, was one of the Three Great Secrets of Summoning.
Another Death Knight approached and took position as if to guard the Lich.
The Lich began casting magic.
⟨ Summon Undead — 4th Rank ⟩
The Lich summoned four Skeleton Warriors and positioned them in front of itself. At the same time, the two Death Knights charged the Priest.
"Whose undead are you? Belong to another legion? Why help us?"
When Peer asked, the Lich opened its mouth.
"Call it the will of the Great One. You two should flee for now."
"Th… thank you."
The Lich seemed to have no intention of saying more, and it wasn't a situation where they could press further. Simon and Peer withdrew for the time being.
The two Death Knights drew the Priest's aggro, alternating between blocking attacks and countering, while the Lich supported them with offensive magic.
Simon returned to Kizen. Peer returned to his dwelling in the ruins.
Simon made it safely back to Kizen thanks to someone's help, but Dick still hadn't returned.
Some time later, Dick finally came back. Camibarez and Meirin had been left alone in the practice room, and when Dick explained that he'd been delayed shaking off the sentries, they understood.
In the end, Dick had also successfully obtained the materials in Rochester. Thinking they would be able to make potions the next day, Group 7 headed back to the dormitory.
Some time later the door burst open and Kazan returned. He stripped off his uniform, flopped onto his bed, and within a minute was snoring away.
Ainz, too, seemed to be asleep, eyes closed.
Dick went to his own bed. Simon, the moment he got to the dorm, was already looking through the Summoning textbook.
"It's not in here either…"
"What have you been looking for this whole time?"
Dick rolled over on his bed and asked. Simon hesitated a moment, then spoke.
"Well… about Death Knights and Liches."
"D… Death Knights? And Liches? There's no way that stuff would be in a first-year textbook."
"I figured as much…"
Simon closed the book with a look of disappointment.
Ainz, who had been pretending to sleep, smiled in satisfaction. Simon acting like this meant the undead Ainz had sent had done their job.
"How do you make a Death Knight… and a Lich?"
Dick nearly fell over.
Death Knights and Liches were high-tier undead that almost no one on the continent possessed. At Kizen, Death Knights were taught in the third-year Summoning major curriculum — and even then so many students failed the creation process that a degraded version, the Demon Knight, was prepared as an alternative. Liches required the caster's talent for creation, so even Kizen didn't teach the method in the regular curriculum.
Among Kizen graduates, necromancers who possessed either one could be counted on one hand — and a first-year like Simon was asking how to make them.
"Hey, you… What's gotten into you all of a sudden? Did something happen in the Forbidden Forest earlier?"
"No… No particular reason."
Simon brushed it off as nothing, but his mind was full of what had just happened.
Who sent those Death Knights and that Lich earlier?
Even under the Priest's barrage of attacks, that Death Knight had stood firm. The Lich's offensive magic rivaled that of any decent jet-black magic specialist.
Watching them, Simon's heart raced as an aspiring Summoner. Summoning was a discipline people entered with the dream of commanding undead like those.
But…
That "Great One" the Lich mentioned — is that someone on my side?
The undead had appeared with almost perfect timing. No matter how he looked at it, they could only have been sent by someone who knew his situation.
That could be a little dangerous. That necromancer might know about the legion. Those three undead had even seen Peer.
Ainz smiled in satisfaction. When the opportunity arose, he planned to put the Death Knights and Lich to use. That way, he could divert some of the vigilance of that Priest — whom both he and Kazan were tracking, and who had been drawn toward Simon — onto himself.
And all three undead had managed to escape somehow. The Priest hadn't been in a position to go all-out, which made that result possible. Ainz figured that Priest might now assume those three were the full extent of their side's maximum combat power.
Simon lay down on his bed lost in thought and fell asleep, and Ainz drifted off as well.