One Versus a Thousand
The ground thundered like an earthquake…!!
Nearly a thousand orcs charging at once sent a towering dust cloud billowing up from the horizon.
I raced forward to meet them head-on.
Four hundred meters. Three hundred. Two hundred…
As the distance shrank, acceleration built in both our strides until—
With only a hundred meters left, the instant we closed the gap—
Whoosh!
“KUWOOOOOOH!!”
The orc legion and I erased the distance in a blink and collided at a single point.
BOOOOOOM!
A deafening explosion erupted as a thick dust cloud swallowed everything. Shredded chunks of orc flesh mixed with blood sprayed outward in every direction.
But that was only the beginning.
Incinerating Radiance Lv.15 (Soul)(Flame)(Aura)(Holy)
{Phaethon’s Sun Chariot} — Increases Incinerating Radiance range by 100%. Ignores all enemy fire resistance. However, the skill also affects allies at 50% power.
Every orc within a fifty-meter radius of me ignited in sacred white-gold flames.
Fwoooosh!
“GYAAAAAAAH…!!”
“My body… it’s burning!”
“It’s hot! Too hot!!”
Thanks to Thanatos’s Baptism, the radiance that should have only reached ten meters instantly expanded to fifty. Orcs caught inside the zone screamed in agony as they collapsed, consumed by the holy fire.
Because of Phaethon’s Sun Chariot, I could ignore every ounce of their fire resistance. Their armor and accessories might as well have offered zero protection.
If orcs didn’t already possess such high innate fire resistance, simply walking around would have turned me into a living eraser that wiped out monsters on contact.
Unfortunately, their base fire resistance sat at a staggering seventy percent. That was one of the reasons they were so terrifying. The most efficient and destructive magic against horde-type monsters was fire magic, yet orcs boasted some of the highest resistance to it.
Still, any fire resistance granted by their equipment had become meaningless. And while their natural resistance was formidable, my Incinerating Radiance was no weakling either. Regular orc soldiers lasted about ten seconds before crumbling into ash. Even elite soldiers couldn’t endure longer than thirty.
In other words, anything below elite rank posed no real threat to me.
It was an absurdly overpowered cheat ability capable of neutralizing hundreds of orcs with a single cast. But it carried a fatal flaw.
Phaethon’s Sun Chariot took its name from the myth of the young demigod who borrowed his father Helios’s sun chariot and accidentally burned his friends to death. True to that legend, the trait amplified the skill’s power at the cost of also burning allies. It was effectively unusable whenever friendly forces were nearby.
Even so, I had deliberately chosen this trait as a kind of insurance policy for exactly this kind of situation.
When my minions weren’t with me.
When they had all been wiped out.
When I had to face an overwhelming number of enemies completely alone.
When I needed to win a battle with no one else to worry about.
This was precisely the scenario I had prepared for.
Clang!
A massive clump of platinum flame hurtled toward me. I reacted instantly, swinging my sword to deflect it. My eyes met those of the orc warrior who had launched the surprise attack.
His unwavering gaze made me flinch.
What the hell? Is Incinerating Radiance not working? Does he have fire immunity…?
I glanced at him again. For a split second his expression looked so calm I wondered if he really was immune, but that wasn’t it. His skin was visibly melting, his hair and beard already burning away.
This wasn’t immunity.
These crazy bastards…!
He was enduring it through sheer willpower and spite.
This was the thirtieth floor—a boss layer where even normal monsters received powerful buffs and became incomparably stronger. The gap between a twenty-ninth-floor orc warrior and a thirtieth-floor one was like heaven and earth.
Warriors on this floor could withstand Incinerating Radiance. They endured the flames, pushed through, and came at me from every direction with swords, axes, spears, and halberds.
Their mental fortitude and pain tolerance were grotesque. Even though the agony of having your body melt in holy fire should have been beyond imagination, their attacks never wavered.
A race of natural-born warriors. To them, pain wasn’t something to submit to—it was something to overcome.
Even the lower-ranked orcs who couldn’t last thirty seconds still fought through the torment, swinging their blades or throwing punches in one final attempt to hinder me before they died. Those desperate attacks created openings the true warriors never missed, and the resulting threats were beyond counting.
If I’d known it would be like this, I should have brought at least a few minions!
Attacks rained in from every angle. It was hard to even stay focused. Cold sweat ran down my back. Razor-sharp blades whistled past my face more times than I could count. Orcs I thought were dead kept reaching out to grab my ankles.
I couldn’t let my guard down for even a single instant. The moment I did, my head would fly.
From my perspective, it was an incredibly difficult fight. But from the orcs’ point of view, the situation looked entirely different.
This monstrous bastard!!
He’s a devil of fire!
The devil of fire.
Was there any better way to describe me from an orc’s perspective?
A single use of Incinerating Radiance was already a nightmare for them. They were born with high fire resistance and equipped with armor and accessories that granted even more. They knew exactly how dangerous wide-area flame attacks were against a horde like theirs.
That was why they had never feared fire magic or skills.
At least… until now.
Yet the true horror had only just begun. The swordsmanship of the human who wielded those flames was on an entirely different level—even to a race of warriors.
They were sickeningly familiar with facing swords, yet not one of them could predict what would come next from my blade.
Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom!
And then there were the bright and dark explosions that sometimes erupted from the tip of my sword.
The orcs had no idea those were the effects of the Black-and-White Spiral Sword, but it didn’t matter. What mattered was how masterfully I used those unpredictable blasts.
It was impossible for them to anticipate and counter random explosions even the user couldn’t predict.
The same was true for me.
But the instant an explosion occurred—
Whoosh!
I would either hide behind the blast or charge straight into it, using a perfect mix of stealth and boldness. Even seasoned warriors couldn’t help but be drawn in by those tactics.
At the same time, my senses allowed me to respond fluidly to their airtight coordinated assaults as if I could see the future. My strength let me fend off four or five warriors at once with a single blade. And my speed was so overwhelming that I could vanish from sight in the blink of an eye…
I truly was a devil. An unbeatable devil.
Yet the orcs kept challenging me. They fought. They refused to give up.
It wasn’t only because of the powerful provocation effect unique to the Radiance skill. Even without it, they would have come at me.
Battle was their life. Combat was their destiny.
Challenging an overwhelmingly stronger foe wasn’t pointless labor—it was joy.
Plunder was merely the result of fighting, never the goal. That was why not a single one had broken off toward the city.
That might have been fortunate for the city, but for me it was an enormous burden.
Hoo… This is getting dangerous.
The orcs kept pouring in, one wave after another. No matter how many I killed, their numbers never seemed to decrease. At times it even felt like they were increasing.
On top of that, I had kept Incinerating Radiance active the entire time, spamming wide-area skills like Night Crow and Eris’s Mockery every time their cooldowns finished. The drain on both my stamina and mental power was severe.
At this rate, I’ve got about sixty percent left…?
The heavy mental drain made my vision waver and afterimages flicker at the edges of my sight.
Under normal circumstances it wouldn’t have been a big deal, but right now I couldn’t afford to lose focus for even a fraction of a second.
Slash!
A spear grazed my thigh, spraying red blood. My brow furrowed slightly.
Not from the pain. I had failed to dodge an attack I should have easily avoided.
That was when it happened.
An orc warrior completely wreathed in massive flames charged at me with terrifying speed.
“KRAAAAH!!”
With a thunderous battle cry, he brought his double-handed greatsword down on my head like a lightning bolt.
BANG!
I raised my blade and blocked the strike. It was far heavier and fiercer than the others. A grin spread across my face.
“So you finally showed up, ugly.”
“You…!! I’ll cut that mouth of yours off first!”
Mauchi ground his teeth and endured the Incinerating Radiance burning across his body through pure willpower, swinging his greatsword in a frenzy.
Yet it wasn’t a blind, reckless assault born of pain. His strikes were fast enough to leave more than a dozen afterimages, powerful, and each one aimed precisely at vital points in a lethal chain of attacks.
I was no slouch either.
I endured my rapidly dropping stamina and mental power, blocked Mauchi’s onslaught, and counterattacked. Cutting down the orcs swarming in from every side was just extra work.
There was no breathing room. One wrong breath and I was dead.
My mouth tasted of iron from constantly chanting skill commands. My vision had grown hazy from depleted mental strength, but I couldn’t stop the skill.
“Looks like you’ve reached your limit! Why don’t you just offer your neck and die comfortably?!”
“Sure. If you die first, I’ll think about it.”
At that moment, the greatsword descending toward my head suddenly changed trajectory, slicing toward my waist in an instant.
Got him!
Because he had never used this kind of attack before, I instinctively knew—he had seen my limit and decided to go all in.
But Mauchi didn’t know.
Spit.
That was exactly the moment I had been waiting for…
“Damn… it…”
Thud.
Mauchi’s severed head and body toppled forward. At the same time, Incinerating Radiance deactivated.
It wasn’t because my mental power had run out. I simply no longer needed to keep it active.
“Huk… huk… huk…!!”
I panted heavily and looked around.
The orcs that had seemed endless were finally gone.
“Haa… I really thought I was going to die…”
I collapsed on the spot, catching my breath.
My limbs trembled from exhaustion, and my head spun from depleted mental energy. If the battle had lasted even a little longer, the head rolling across the ground would have been mine instead of Mauchi’s.
But the fight wasn’t over yet.
I needed to recover quickly for the next battle.
“Lullaby of the Night.”
Lullaby of the Night Lv.10 (Soul)(Buff)
{Hypnos’s Sanctuary} — Lullaby of the Night now restores both mental power and stamina.
The skill that originally only recovered mental power now restored stamina as well thanks to the trait. On top of that, because it carried the (Soul) tag, Thanatos’s Baptism made the recovery speed absurdly fast.
Except for the fact that it couldn’t be activated during combat and would cancel if I moved, it was the perfect recovery skill.
I restored my stamina and mental power in a short time, then completely healed all my wounds with Healing Radiance.
“You’ve recovered too, huh.”
Meanwhile, the Black-and-White Spiral Sword had automatically restored its durability, and its edge had returned to full sharpness.
That was when it happened.
Fwoosh!
Starting from the north gate I was responsible for, three columns of signal smoke rose into the sky above each of the castle gates.
What that meant was—
“Nice! Everyone completed their defenses.”
It was a resounding victory in the first wave.