The Source of Corruption 4
The more I learned about Roland as a character, the less I understood what the developers had been thinking when they made him. One of the skills ranked among the most broken in Heroes Chronicle — Ignore All Damage-Mitigating Techniques — somehow ended up on a tank?
A single, utterly shameless extreme-damage skill that completely ignored tank passives that reduced damage taken by allies, escort skills that redirected hits, priest-cast barriers, and defense buffs alike, slamming straight into the target's bare body.
Whatever logic had gone into creating this dealer-exclusive special ability, it casually ignored the boss monster's physical-damage-nullification barrier as well. The same shameless performance that had single-handedly reshuffled the arena tiers for tanks, healers, dealers, and supporters alike was still fully intact.
W-what is this?! How—?!
Even so, a boss was still a boss. The thing was clinging to life by a thread, a massive crack split clean through its skull. Proof that the difficulty had clearly ramped up from the 40th floor onward — I'd beaten on it for the entire duration and it still had a pulse.
Granted, no matter how easy a game got, a tank soloing a boss to death was only a thing in the early game. At least it had given me a chance to get comfortable swinging a greatsword instead of a mace against a skeleton sandbag.
With the Temple joining the fight and safe floors appearing, the entire field had changed. Trying to one-shot a boss as a tank character was a little shameless — even if I had transformed into a dealer, the opponent was a heavily enhanced boss too.
Why? How did my barrier—?
Duration: roughly five minutes. Cooldown: probably twenty-four hours. For a stretch of time that felt endlessly long or endlessly short depending on how you looked at it, the skeleton had been beaten like a dog and now lay sprawled across the ground.
Nothing left but a skull.
The black mage's robe that had wrapped the gaunt skeleton couldn't withstand the blazing aura and crumbled into a handful of ash. The body that had been nothing but bones likewise turned to powder and became one with the dirt of the clearing.
All that remained was a jaw-clacking skull, a staff that still produced a voice, and Han Se-ah's camera, which had somehow returned at some point and was filming the whole thing.
"Hoo. You're stubborn, I'll give you that. For a black mage, why are you so damn tough?"
The life force refined from Holy Power — where do you think it resides?!
The thing snapped back at my muttering as if deeply wronged. Whether it was obsessed with being a researcher-slash-black-mage, or whether it considered its own "toughness" crude and barbaric, it was thoroughly pissed off. Maybe without its Doppelganger legion it had ended up with all kinds of buggy specs.
At this rate, from the 50th floor on I was going to have to quietly follow the quest line for real.
Sure, I could summon Durandal through Hector's Bloodline for five minutes a day, but soloing a boss with it didn't seem like a great choice. Right now some unknown entity had intervened and handed me the skill through a quest, but there was no way that would keep repeating on the 50th floor, the 60th, and so on.
The absurd durability of the natural 6-star Paladin Roland still worked on the 40th floor — but the raw attack power of just swinging away with nothing but a massive mana pool and no proper offensive skills was starting to fall short. Regular monsters I could still eat like cake, but a boss monster wasn't cake anymore. It was a giant wedding cake three meters tall.
"Roland! Rolaaand!"
"Hm?"
The Goddess's dogs dare set foot here?
I was thinking that while tapping the skull with my returned mace and shield when a booming voice rolled across the clearing. I turned around — and something pure white came whistling down from the slope. No, from midair.
More precisely, it was falling.
Temple knights, wrapping their bodies in Holy Power and leaping straight off the cliff instead of taking the slope the civilized way. Watching the pure-white Temple knights rain down into the dim clearing like shooting stars, the first word that popped into my head was three thousand court ladies.
"Oh—ohhh! The holy sword! You have received the holy sword's choice!"
"The holy sword?"
Temple knights who were normally fairly composed came swarming toward me like a fan club meeting their idol for the first time — no, like cultists howling that the hour of their testimony of faith had finally arrived.
They ignored the toxic miasma filling the clearing. They ignored the black mage reduced to a skull, still rolling on the ground spitting curses. Eyes sparkling, they charged straight at me. Even the furry tank uncles at the Adventurers' Guild who'd shouted about admiring me hadn't gone this far.
The one small mercy was that a few female knights were mixed in among the sparkling-eyed Temple knights.
"A holy sword, you say?"
"From above this wicked, filthy pit — I saw it! The radiant holy sword gripped in Sir Roland's hand!"
Was Durandal a holy sword? Given that my title was Paladin, I supposed the skill had some connection to the Goddess's faith… Beyond "it's the sword Roland uses," I knew absolutely nothing about Durandal, so I had no idea how to answer.
So I went with the internet option. With safety guaranteed against whatever vicious threats X-Keeper or whatever it was protected me from, I intended to use it thriftily. Being surrounded on all sides made it easy to casually roll my eyes as if feeling the pressure, which was convenient.
With the same guilty pleasure of goofing off in the back row behind a big friend in school, I blocked the camera with a pure-white suit of armor and searched the internet for Roland, Durandal, and Hector. As expected, the plant wiki had the miscellaneous lore neatly organized.
"I mean, I just figured Roland was stalling for time. But listening to the Temple knights, maybe it's not that he was hiding his power — maybe he just got chosen? If I reset and the holy sword doesn't show up, I feel like the whole run is screwed."
Roughly speaking: Hector was the protagonist of the Trojan myth who fought for honor and principle and was called the foremost knight; Roland was a figure from chivalric literature said to have inherited Hector's blood; and so Durandal was supposedly the sword Hector had once wielded — that was the lore.
The sudden talk of Hector's Bloodline and holy swords made a kind of sense. The plant wiki called it setting, but I was already possessing a game character, so.
Hector, one of the dual protagonists of Homer's ancient Greek epic the Iliad; Roland, a figure appearing across medieval and Renaissance literature. The two settings had been stitched together into a mobile game character.
And that mobile game character had crossed over into a virtual reality game and become my body.
So instead of hunting the boss, I'd ended up capturing it alive.
Maybe because this was a hyper-realistic VR game, bosses didn't always have to be killed. It wasn't like the giant snake on the 30th floor that snacked on oversized worms — this was just a skull with nothing but a head left, plus a long staff.
The Temple knights had been walking down the slope when they saw the surging aura, felt the resonance of Durandal — the holy sword — and immediately went full "hold meee~" mode, using gravity to drop into the clearing at high speed. Holy-sword-sensing fanatics ignored the clearing's toxic miasma entirely and had far more initiative than I'd expected.
"Prepare the holy rites! We fill this space!"
"In the Goddess's name, the 40th floor too shall be purified!"
I'd figured I'd just hand the skull over to the Magic Tower so they could research the gate or whatever. I had never imagined thousands of wild-eyed fanatics would come pouring in.
Sturdy-bodied Temple knights rained down like meteors wreathed in Holy Power. Priests and holy maidens, as if marching to wage a Holy Crusade on the 35th floor, once again cradled sacred relics to their chests and turned the abyss's slope into a pilgrimage path.
"A Holy Crusade! It is a Holy Crusade!"
"Ah—aaaah! This foolish servant failed to grasp Your will—!"
The Mouth Is the Gateway to Disaster
— The mouth invites calamity.
Even for a skull whose flesh had rotted away and whose mouth no longer held a tongue, the words of the ancient sages held true. The whole mess had started because the skull, spewing curses at the Temple knights, had proudly boasted that it had created the colossal tree on the 35th floor.
An evil tree that desecrated Holy Power, declared a target of the Holy Crusade. They'd thought the crusade was over once it was smashed — only to learn that the adventurer brother who had stepped forward as the crusade's sword had found and detained the wicked black mage who had personally created that evil tree.
And this was the result.
"Thank you — thank you, Sir Roland!"
"O Goddess, forgive the ignorance of Your little lambs…"
They had declared a Holy Crusade in the Goddess's name, and all the Temple knights had done was patrol and thin out the Doppelgangers.
In short: the Temple faction's berserk button had been pressed.
Fanatic mode: ON.
Nuns sobbing as they recited scripture. Priests who had brought small whips and were flogging their own backs, blood and Holy Power streaming down. Temple knights tearing at their hair as they drove holy rites into every corner of the clearing. Looking at the asura-field that religious people alone could produce, I genuinely wondered if this was hell.
Faced with that madness, even the chatty skull went quiet.
"I… I'm scared of the Temple…"
Thanks to the priests who'd started a repentance self-harm show with whips, even Han Se-ah — camera glued right up to her face — muttered like she'd had enough.
Well, of course she had.
The Temple had begun slamming raw Holy Power into this vast clearing under the banner of purification work.