Chapter 82
I’m translating the chapter now and converting every system-style line into the required HTML blocks while keeping the narration in novel-style English paragraphs.CHAPTER_TITLE: I Kneeled Only to Pick Up a Blade of Grass
"Good, keep at it like that!"
"Mino-om! Understood!"
Eollugi seized the troll by the throat, hoisted it into the air, and drove it straight into the ground. The brute force on display was monstrous.
He even finished it by stomping the downed troll’s head beneath one hoof.
"A chokeslam! With strength that far outclasses the norm, pro wrestling moves actually work. Awesome!"
"Tr... trol...?"
The trolls had been terrified out of their wits and could not bring themselves to rush in.
"Trol...! Those are monsters!"
"Trol...! Monsters, I say!"
With invisible attacks bursting the heads of their own kin and every blow they landed smashing only their weapons, the trolls were in no state to fight back. Holy knights were frightening enough, but the Minocentaurs were terror of a different order altogether.
"Did you see that, Dominic? Truly terrifying, isn't it?"
"To think they're handling trolls like goblins...."
Not only the soldiers guarding the relay station, but even the marquess’s mages were staring with their mouths hanging open.
"What kind of man is this Byeonbangbaek, who can casually command monsters like that...."
"Brother, he's even ordering the vice-captain and the holy knights around like they're his own subordinates."
The one-sided slaughter loosened the tension that had been pulled taut to breaking.
"At this rate, won't there be nothing left for us to do?"
One guard even propped his halberd carelessly against the barricade.
"Have you all lost your minds? What do you think you're doing in the middle of battle? Have you already forgotten what Lord Byeonbangbaek said?"
Unable to stand it any longer, Rio stepped in and straightened out the slack discipline.
"The battle isn't over yet... huh?"
Warning! A variant troll, Squatroll, will be summoned shortly.
Wormholes opened around the troll horde. Black spheres burst out through the torn seams in space.
"Everyone, fall back!"
At Ho-yeong’s shout, the holy knights pulled away from their positions, but one of them was thrown from his horse.
"Trol...!"
A troll that had been lying on the ground grabbed the horse’s leg and toppled it.
"Th...hahaha."
The black sphere grew larger and larger, scorching everything around it to ash. The upper half of the troll, the lower half of the horse it had seized, and even the fallen holy knight’s leg.
"Kraaah!"
Ho-yeong immediately sprinted toward the knight.
"You crazy bastard... As if I needed another reason to hate trolls. They even troll while dying."
The troll’s madness was grotesque, refusing to let go of the horse even as its arms and head turned to ash.
Black smoke spilled from the dark sphere, which had finally stopped expanding.
I couldn't see it properly in Rainpa because it was dark at night... but that's it, isn't it? Black mist!
The black mist that had blanketed the unexplored region.
I thought it was just part of the map. So it could spread like this?
He remembered the conversation Daliha had once shared.
“The evil laid across the twisted seams of the world’s fabric can be called a ‘bug.’ It is an element that obstructs the proper progress of the game. A bug itself is merely a mass of gathered thought and does not possess a true body, but it can be multiplied or erased.”
“A bug that multiplies. So something like an area-expansion bug?”
The creeping black mist spreading outward carried an unpleasant, sickly air even at a glance.
“The entities that summon monsters are hostile NPCs, in other words, enemies. They possess a tangible existence as characters. (...) Bugs spread and come into contact with characters. In the process, enemies grow stronger, and neutral or allied characters may be infected by a wicked will and become hostile themselves. However, the bug itself does not directly control or aid the enemy.”
As Ho-yeong ran with all his strength, batting trolls aside, the warning he had heard earlier echoed in his head.
Hostile NPC interference has caused a negative event.
Negative event has occurred.
It has occurred.
This event, the summoning of the variant troll, was caused by hostile NPC interference. And if black mist appeared where those bastards summoned the monster...? That means the ones spreading it are them. The black mist is part of the evil bug.
He didn’t know it himself, but his instincts, sharpened to a razor’s edge by crisis, kept rolling the dice on his intuition stat and landing on 100.
Progress of the important quest Black Hand has increased substantially!
(A) Condition Discover the cause of the black mist has increased from 0% to 50%.
(B) Condition Reveal the effects of the black mist has increased from 40% to 60%.
The booming congratulatory chime never reached his ears. The holy knight’s eerie groan had already wrapped around his eardrums.
"U...ugh...."
The battlefield was packed with screams and shouts.
Even as tinnitus battered his ears, only a rasping, ragged moan drifted calmly through them.
"Pull yourself together!"
The holy knight was clutching his head and howling, his burned legs reduced to ash and no longer there to support him. The sight struck Ho-yeong as deeply strange.
Damn it, hurry and use a healing potion...!
Just as he set down his shield and sword and rushed to retrieve one, a troll charged at the incapacitated knight.
"You son of a..."
Ho-yeong snatched the stone hammer’s shaft with his left hand.
As the troll brought it down with both hands, its body left open, he drove his right fist into its gut. The troll doubled over, spitting sour bile and blood.
"Graaagh...!"
He clamped the beast’s neck beneath his armpit, slammed a knee up hard, and threw himself backward. The troll’s face hit the Dandanum shield.
Crack.
Rolling sideways, Ho-yeong climbed onto the troll’s body, pressed both knees into its shoulders, and brought the shield’s edge down on its throat.
◈ [Property 1]
◈ [Property 2]
He had earned an achievement he had failed to get when facing the Hogriphon, but there was no time to notice, let alone feel pleased.
"Troloooh!"
All around him, trolls were swarming in.
Time remaining until Squatroll summoning: 130 seconds. The variant troll to be summoned next is Elitroll.
The status window was sending out warnings, too.
"Why the hell are these bastards suddenly going berserk?!"
The trolls that had looked ready to charge straight for the relay station suddenly began swarming the holy knights and Minocentaurs instead.
"Minoho!"
They threw themselves at everything in sight, heedless of death, making life difficult even for their allies.
With all allied units pinned in place, Ho-yeong was the only one who could tend to the injured.
"This is brutal...."
The burns on the holy knight were beyond description. Flesh and muscle had been reduced to blackened cinders, and the shinbone jutting from the wreckage of tissue blazed red like a piece of heated charcoal.
Ho-yeong sprayed the wound as if disinfecting it. The chill from the healing potion chilled in a refrigerated jar helped to drain away the heat from the injury.
"All right, for now it... what the hell?!"
Just as he was about to breathe easier, he recoiled in alarm. Even as the legs regenerated, residual heat kept obstructing the healing and inflicting more burns. Even the aura supply from the earlier Pillar of Divine Blessing buff was useless; it evaporated the instant it emerged.
Warning. Burns touched by the aftereffects of a demonic-dimensional rift are difficult to heal with potions alone. Assistance from a mage or priest is required.
"You should have said so sooner! Still, I can't do that now. Better to let them blister than keep burning the leg off...."
But the holy knight, Brey Braham, was still clutching his head and trembling.
"Hariad... has abandoned... us...."
"Hey, pull yourself together!"
He was oblivious to both the healing leg and the fact that the restored flesh kept ulcerating again. The sight was grotesque.
This character has been consumed by the high-grade abnormal status effect Despair. Unless this abnormal status is purified, the mental strength stat will continue to decrease.
Warning. Of the beings granted the special buff Pillar of Divine Blessing, one has suffered a severe drop in mental strength. Buff duration will be greatly reduced.
One of Lance’s pillars of light flickered out.
Despair?! What the hell is that? Was that even in this game? From the status, I thought it was Fear, but is this something else?
Ho-yeong was thrown off by a status effect he had never heard of before.
A unit afflicted by Fear can do nothing but wander aimlessly. It is an extremely dangerous abnormal status, since the target cannot attack, defend, or use skills. Its tendency to move to random coordinates, however, can sometimes be useful, helping them dodge attacks or retreat on their own.
This is... way worse than Fear, no, even worse than being stunned. Continuous mental-strength loss is a massive debuff. And if all they can do is cower there and babble about how hopeless it is, it'll drag down the other allies too. On top of that, if it needs a priest or mage right away, it even forces troops to break off from the fight. This thing is straight-up broken!
Unlike Fear, which at least could sometimes produce a variable by making someone stumble backward and catch a mouse by accident, Despair simply made them huddle in place, unable to dodge an attack. Worse, the continuous drain on mental strength would create all kinds of bad effects in later battles as well.
No, I can ask Daliha about this later. For now I just need to carry this man somewhere safe....
While dragging in ragged breaths, Ho-yeong accidentally inhaled the black mist.
?!
His vision filled with soot.
W-what is this? Why did everything suddenly go pitch black?!
Darkness far deeper than the gray that appeared when time itself stopped now coiled before his eyes like a cloud of ash. Acrid soot seemed to pour straight into his skull.
"You will never be able to protect it... neither the people of this world nor the love of another."
The voice of a stranger rang in Ho-yeong’s swaying head.
"If you save one, you will lose the other. At the end of despair’s choice, your life and the lives of others will be placed side by side upon the scale. Which side will you protect then?"
"U...gh...."
The sharpness and beauty laced through that dark voice dug into his brain like an obsidian blade.
"In the end, you will choose your own life. That is the limit of humanity. But even if you protect that miserable life of yours, you cannot escape your final fate."
Ho-yeong fought desperately to keep from collapsing.
"If you are the only one left in the world, who will protect you?"
He dropped to one knee.
"At the end of the crossroads there is nothing. A dead end with no choice and no decision. No way back, no way forward."
He clawed at the ground, but there was not even a branch he could grab to pull himself up.
"Futile resistance only brings pain."
Among the burned-out weeds, Ho-yeong seized a single bent blade of crabgrass.
"Achoo!"
At the same time that it tickled his nose, the aura he had drawn up into his throat burst outward. The violent sneeze spewed out every last bit of black mist he had inhaled.
"Ah, that’s better. Hwoof!"
The breath he blasted out a second time scattered the black mist completely.
"The hell are you mumbling about, you little brat? Shut up with your apartment-rent nonsense! Stop throwing up events in the middle of battle! I'm so busy I could die, and you're just sitting there whispering creepily like some back-alley weirdo. Tch!"
The world brightened again.
Wait. If the soot that even magic-wind couldn't disperse vanished because of my sneeze... does that mean it was aura?!
Aura was life energy that arose when one held a strong will. Controlling it also required equally strong resolve.
The progress of the important quest Black Hand condition (B), Reveal the effects of the black mist, has increased from 60% to 80%.
Trait awakening! Because the Guardian held a powerful will and drove back despair, the trait What the Saintess Held Last has become permanently active. The Guardian and nearby allies are now granted high resistance to black mist. The power to overcome despair is hope! I will protect you. So you protect everyone.