Dark Mage Clichés 5
A solid, heavy weight settled against his fingertips. The mace, reinforced not with mana but with holy power, smashed clean through the skull of a zombie that had just spun to face him.
That part was familiar. The sensation of a weapon crushing through flesh and shattering bone — something like cracking a walnut with a hammer, or slamming a hard-boiled egg against a desk. Almost no resistance, yet the hand still registered that something had been thoroughly wrecked.
What came after, though, was anything but familiar.
"Th-these bastards explode too!"
"Poison! It's poison! Dodge the armor shards and the gas!"
The orc corpse whose skull had just been pulverized swelled up like a balloon and transformed into a purple smoke bomb. There was no grotesque spray of guts flying in every direction — more like a monster's corpse converting into a mana stone, the flesh itself mutating into poison. But the armor it had been wearing shattered outward like grenade shrapnel, and a thick plume of dark-violet gas billowed free.
The startled knights wheeled hard, carving furrows through the grassland as they spun away. Physical explosions they could tank. Breathing a faceful of what was clearly lethal poison gas was another matter entirely.
"Roland, are you okay?!"
"Holy power's got me covered. I'm fine!"
He'd almost forgotten — he never ran into dark mages in this world. But thinking back, the dark mages of his previous life had always been fond of corpse explosions and bone magic.
The lucky part was that what he'd drawn up this time was holy power, not mana. No grand reason for it — just a casual might as well smack these meat-shield zombies around with some holy power impulse — but it paid off handsomely. If dark mages detonating zombies was common knowledge, then dark mage tricks being weak to holy power was equally common knowledge.
"These ones only seem to spew poison! They're not chaining explosions!"
"Knights, fall back! We'll handle them at range!"
So naturally, cleaning up the zombies fell to their party rather than the Ice Cross Knights. Irene's holy power could go beyond purification all the way to full immunity — but casting a purification blessing on all twenty-six knights just to deal with a bunch of shambling corpses would be pure waste.
Roland, able to tank the gas by channeling holy power, smashed zombies one by one from the heart of the pack while Grace's arrows and Han Se-ah's magic swept through the slow-moving horde. Sluggish meat shields isolated without any support troops — a perfect buffet for an archer and a mage.
Come to think of it, Katie's sword is one thing, but Irene's holy magic is another hard counter.
Meanwhile Katie, who must have finally badgered Irene into blessing her, circled the outer edge of the zombie pack and started peeling them down. Once again the Special Enhancement Stone was earning its keep — anything her blade cut didn't explode, it simply collapsed into a mana stone. Which led to a terrifying conclusion: three out of five party members were hard counters to dark mages.
He remembered arena PvP in mobile games — if three of the enemy's five were counters, you just closed the app and walked away. Was this another free win?
His body stayed busy pulverizing zombies one after another, and he found himself thinking suicide goblins would actually be preferable. Those at least died in clusters when the explosions chained. Zombies released gas on death, so you had to kill them one by one. Sure, the armor shards sprayed out like buckshot on detonation — but if a zombie died from a few metal scraps, it wouldn't be a 60th Floor monster.
"Roland! Katie! Get clear of the area — casting magic!"
"Got it!"
What finished the zombie pack was Han Se-ah's high-tier spell, Summon Ice Storm. Apparently reluctant to dump too much mana on a bunch of slow meat shields, she locked the storm of snowflakes precisely around the zombie cluster alone, and it shredded them like a high-powered blender.
Whether it was shoving catapult boulders aside with Earth Control or calculating rarely used high-tier magic with surgical precision — when she cast, she really did look like a proper hero. The problem was that the hero act only came out during spellcasting. The rest of the time she steamrolled everything with inventory bombs and gamer-brained cheese. Still, watching the zombies thrash under a barrage of mana-packed snowflakes and collapse without even getting their purple gas properly dispersed was deeply satisfying.
…Maybe the AoE high and the bomb high were starting to rub off on him from hanging around Han Se-ah.
For a 60th Floor, zombie soldiers had shown up — but fortunately, their outpost hadn't turned into a corpse-strewn wasteland, nor was it so contaminated that people couldn't stay. As if to prove that the main force here was an army and not a dark mage, the zombie soldiers had been neatly stowed in a corner barracks like spare equipment. Main force: the legion. Sub-element: dark magic.
Which meant the emerging consensus was that the boss would be a general, with a named dark mage adjutant as the elite minion.
"All right, everyone. Time to eat."
"Ahh, always so grateful!"
"It's nothing, really."
A zombie unit that had been heading back to base alone, only to get cut down mid-route. Checking where they'd been going, of course, led them straight to an enemy outpost.
After that it was the usual: snipe the ballistae, use landmines as stepping stones to infiltrate, carve through the catapults and orcs wholesale, then try to capture a suicide goblin alive… which failed. Whether their HP had been cranked down to the absolute minimum or not, the moment he broke its limbs it just keeled over dead.
Capturing those things alive would probably require magic tools from the Magic Tower — mana-suppressing restraints, or sealing devices that could defuse the bombs, something like that.
So when they linked up with the Ice Cross Knights and the merchant caravan delivering supplies, he handed over a letter. A simple note to Charlotte, who was busy with research at the Magic Tower, asking if she had any magic tools capable of capturing a suicide goblin alive.
Any mage with half a brain would immediately clock it: Ah, the hero's party wants to catch goblins and dump them on the Magic Tower! And that it would pad out their own research achievements, too.
"Hahh, that hits the spot. To eat like this out on a campaign…"
"Honestly, just thinking about going back north and chewing on jerky again makes my stomach turn."
"Hey, you think that's up to me?!"
"Don't imagine that sad future. Just eat your soup properly. Even hearing about it ruins the meal."
So: boss monster hunting was progressing smoothly, capturing suicide goblins and suicide zombies was a solvable problem, and ogres still hadn't shown so much as a whisker. Han Se-ah's voice cutting through the Ice Cross Knights' chorus of soup praise proved it perfectly.
After clearing every monster in the outpost, Han Se-ah had buried the zombie barracks entirely with Earth Control — too creepy to leave standing. Then, as always, the knights pitched tents and secured the perimeter while Irene and Han Se-ah prepared the meal.
"But seriously, isn't this actually a problem? Forget me not finding them — there's not even a rumor about the Empire's trainee commanders getting their lives ruined by an ogre encounter, right? I feel like I need to go to the Adventurer Guild, grab Alice, and figure out what's going on."
Today's Han Se-ah, however, had been thoroughly tormented by the enhancement-obsessed chat demons. She'd opened her eyes that morning, greeted her viewers, and immediately found the chat window occupied by "ogre." After cleanly wiping out the newly appeared zombie pack without overspending mana, she got hit with the "Should've enhanced the staff tho" treatment.
By now it had devolved into pure brainrot memes — viewers hammering her from angles she never saw coming, like claiming that enhancing Maman's rosary would make the food taste better. In response, Han Se-ah had been locked in continuous initiating mode against her chat, as if determined to prove she was Korean.
"No, but seriously, right? If it was just me being unlucky and only I couldn't find them, fine — but are there any ogre damage reports? The merchant caravan buying supplies right now says they haven't heard anything either, and the safe zone we stopped at before coming here, the adventurers and mercenaries all said they hadn't seen so much as an ogre's shadow."
True to her Korean roots, she'd already shouted "No, but—" a dozen times while sitting in a corner with her soup bowl.
Maybe that heartfelt stream of "No, but—"s finally got through to the viewers. The consensus was shifting away from "Han Se-ah has trash luck" toward "maybe something quest-related bugged out." He couldn't remember exactly which floor they'd last killed an ogre on, but they hadn't spotted a single one all the way up to the 60th. Looking at the suicide goblin troops and zombie bomb soldiers, some chatters even suggested the berserk ogres had been kidnapped as the legion's secret weapon.
Hmm. Plausible, actually.
Capture a berserk ogre rampaging in the wild and turn it into an undead — wasn't that exactly the kind of thing a dark mage was supposed to do? Just as knights charged with lances and mages did research, fantasy worlds had an unwritten rule that dark mages remodeled wild monsters into troops.
"H-hey! Hanna! Hanna!"
"No, so what I'm saying is, this isn't my fau— wait, what is it? What's wrong?"
"An ogre! There's an ogre coming this way!"
But in this world, trash luck outranked common sense every time.