Chapter 65
Translator: RaidenTL
Chapter 65
Blood, a shade deeper than the crimson sky, splattered across the ground.
A young man, having barely escaped the unfolding carnage, ran desperately toward the inner castle.
The moment their formation collapsed, the battle against the undead was over. To put it simply, everyone was slaughtered.
The only residents who managed to flee were those who had been in the rear. The vanguard—including the Captain of the Guard, the retired mercenary, and the mage—had been wiped out without exception.
Barely twenty percent of them had escaped.
And of that twenty percent, the young man was closest to death.
“Pant, gasp…”
It had been a stroke of luck that his poor health had gotten him stationed in the rear, but the problem was that his ailment was in his leg. Limping as he was, no matter how hard he ran, he stood no chance of outrunning the undead.
The young man raised his head.
In the distance stood the Lord’s Castle.
It felt so close, as if he could reach it at any moment. If he could just make it inside, he would survive—but damn it all, his body refused to keep up with his desperate will.
He forced his feet forward. The screams of the people behind him seemed to whisper that he was next, driving him to run past his limits.
Faster, faster, faster.
Somehow, with everything he had.
Just a little faster…
“…Huh?”
By the time he realized what had happened, half of his body was already pressed against the cold ground.
His limbs wouldn’t move.
I tripped…
Only after the metallic taste of blood filled his mouth and a searing pain from his broken nose spread across his face did the young man fully grasp his situation. Immediately, the backlash from pushing his body past its limits hit him all at once.
The sounds of the undead closing in from behind did not wait for him.
When he managed to look back through the pain, an undead was already reaching out, less than two meters away.
He was going to die. It was over.
“Ah, ah… Damn it…”
He was too hollowed out to even cry. All he could do was pray.
God, please. Have mercy.
His vision flashed.
Low-tier magic, <Ignite>.
A massive pillar of fire erupted from the zombie reaching for him, shooting several meters into the air.
Low-tier magic, <Fireball>. <Rowan’s Red Arrow>. <Diffuse Ignition>.
“Kieeeeeeeek!”
A barrage of spells followed. A sphere of fire incinerated a neighboring zombie, while a shower of flaming arrows rained down on the approaching horde. The moment the flames touched them, they spread across their entire bodies. Engulfed in fire, the undead writhed helplessly.
“As expected. They burn well since they’re so dry.”
The “mercy” that had suddenly appeared muttered to herself.
The young man stared blankly at the flames for several seconds before snapping back to his senses. He immediately turned his gaze toward the source of the magic.
A woman stood there.
She was a mage holding a black staff, her beauty striking even at a glance. Though she wore a violet dress instead of white robes, in the young man’s eyes, she was more dazzling than anyone he had ever seen. “An angel…”
“Incompetent human. What nonsense are you spouting? If you value your life, get lost this instant.”
Melju, having been mistaken for an angel, kicked the young man in annoyance.
The kick sent him rolling onto his stomach. Perhaps the blow had finally shocked him back to reality, because he began to crawl toward the Lord’s Castle—a pathetic sight.
“How unsightly.”
But for Melju, that was enough.
Everything before her was undead, and with the last human gone, nothing held her back.
“I never imagined the day would come when I’d be helping humans.”
“There certainly are a lot of them,” Melju muttered, counting the undead before her.
“…Even if I counted ten on each finger, I’d run out of fingers in no time.”
And they had all once been human.
Even as Melju stood still, hundreds of undead rushed toward her, their wailing screams ringing noisily in her ears.
Only when they closed the distance did she deploy another magic circle. This spell was on a completely different scale.
Blue mana swirled around her staff as it floated in the air before her.
Spreading her hands, Melju closed her eyes. The condensed blue mana dyed itself crimson, shaping into a perfect sphere in front of the staff’s mana stone. Only then did she slowly open her eyes. As she parted her lips to draw a breath, her sharp fangs were revealed.
A slight tremor ran through her body as she inhaled.
High-tier magic, <Prominence>.
From that single condensed point, crimson flames erupted explosively.
For a moment, sight and sound were paralyzed. A massive storm of fire, like a <Dragon Breath> unleashed through Draconic, swallowed everything in its path.
It took a mere five seconds to incinerate it all.
Only when the storm subsided, leaving nothing but black ash drifting through the air, did Melju raise her head to look ahead.
Embers still flickered across the parched earth, and shards of glass formed from the scorched ground gleamed between them. The ground itself had been shallowly gouged out.
There was no way any undead within the spell’s range could have survived.
“…”
But it was not over.
Though she had lowered her staff, hostility remained clear on Melju’s face. Soon, a Lich approached from far beyond where the flames had reached. Farther behind it, an army resembling tiny dots rushed toward her position. It was a horde of thousands of undead, pouring into Hastin from beyond the Veil.
“Not a human… You are a monster,” the Bishop, Simon Magus, spoke first.
Melju sneered in response.
“A creature who sold his own flesh because he couldn’t grasp the truth in a living body. Did you think you would become something grand by forcibly extending your life? How utterly foolish.”
“For a monster to harbor such mana in a humanoid form… are you a Demon King? Or a Dragon? Why side with the humans?”
“Hmm, I have no idea what you’re talking about, but I do know that out of all the dead, you’re the only one running your mouth so noisily.”
This time, Simon Magus laughed. At the same time, he raised his staff.
“I suppose I can extract your true intentions after tearing off all your flesh. Foolish creature, overconfident in your own power—do you truly believe that Simon Magus, the ‘Darkness’ of the Ten Calamities who serves the great Lord of the Dead, could lose to a mere monster?”
Four magic circles manifested simultaneously in front of Simon. Even among Liches, whose mana was comparable to a Sage’s, he was the only one capable of multi-casting four spells at once.
At the same time, undead with sharp claws emerged from the surrounding alleys. More than ten Ghouls—the very kind that had slaughtered hundreds of residents—approached, every one of them wearing a Rosary around its neck.
“I don’t really understand what you’re saying,” Melju said, her smile never wavering. “But your opponent isn’t me.”
This was something the Lich had overlooked.
A heavy, dark energy settled over them, crushing the very air.
Simon trembled. Even as a gatekeeper among the Elders, known as the “Darkness” of the Ten Calamities, he was feeling sheer terror. Until now, only one being had ever made him feel this way: their lord, Erebos.
Yet, he knew with absolute certainty that the source of this terror was not Erebos.
It was behind him. The source of this dread stood directly at his back.
“Found you, you bastard.”
Without a sound, before he even knew it.
At the voice coming from right behind him, Simon turned his head.
And then—
“I told you I’d remember you, didn’t I?”
“…!!”
Before he could even identify his enemy, Simon Magus’s body was sent flying dozens of meters, slamming into the wall of a building.
Crash!
With a thunderous roar, his body smashed through the structure. It had happened in a fraction of a second; if the wall hadn’t collapsed, no one would have even realized what had just occurred.
A gale-force wind swept through the path Simon had been blown away. Swallow lowered his hand, not seeming to care about his disheveled hair. He stretched and spoke in a satisfied voice.
“That felt pretty good.”
Noticing some rotten flesh stuck to the hand he had just swung, he shook it off in disgust.
Watching Swallow from across the way, Melju swallowed hard.
I expected as much, but…
An Elder. A Lich, known to be the strongest alongside the Dullahan.
On top of that, a being who claimed the title of the “Darkness” of the Ten Calamities.
If Melju’s guess was correct, he was undoubtedly a gatekeeper of the undead legion. A gatekeeper of a Great Evil Cave, no less. He was a powerhouse on a level she couldn’t imagine defeating in a straight fight.
And Swallow had sent such an opponent flying with a casual swing of his hand.
I shouldn’t think about this any further. Deciding this, Melju spoke tentatively to Swallow.
“Lord Swallow, that Lich…”
“I know.”
He hadn’t died.
She could tell because the mana inside the Lich’s body hadn’t dispersed. In fact, he seemed to have taken barely any damage. Perhaps—
“I didn’t hit him hard on purpose. He needs to get beaten up a bit more.”
“…I see.”
Blaming herself for feeling even a moment of tension, Melju gave up trying to understand and changed the subject.
“This might be my imagination… but Lord Swallow, you seem to have a problem with him. Do you hold a grudge against that Lich? Have you met before?”
At Melju’s question, Swallow recalled what had happened a few hours ago.
The one who had channeled mana into the Catacombs—since their energy matched, that Lich was definitely him.
How insolent. Who does he think he is, prying into someone else’s business without permission?
“He just needs to get beaten up more.”
“…Ah, okay.”
Whatever it was, she decided it was best not to ask. Heeding her instincts, the Demon King looked past Swallow.
Countless undead were pouring in, crossing the boundary of the red Veil.
The sheer number of them was more than enough to be called an army.
They intend to fill the town with undead, Melju thought. She had heard that the number of undead in the “Where Corpses Die” far exceeded the hundred-thousand-strong Orc army Nilkumbal boasted. The horde currently rushing in was likely just a fraction of Erebos’s full strength.
“Staying here won’t do us any good.”
Assessing the situation, Swallow asked, “Melju, what are the chances Erebos is inside the town?”
“None,” Melju replied. It was an assertion, not a guess.
With this kind of tactic, the enemy commander would either be at the very vanguard or wouldn’t show his face at all. If he were at the front, they would have encountered him long ago, so it was only logical to assume he was outside.
“So we have to get out of here anyway.”
“Regrettably, this doesn’t seem to be a Veil I can break through.”
“Well, I was planning on going out there regardless.”
Turning his gaze back toward the Lich embedded in the wall, Swallow narrowed his eyes.
They probably weren’t just coming from this direction. There was a high probability they had infiltrated from all sides, and if they didn’t suppress them early, it would become a hassle.
“Melju, can you take care of all the small fry from here on?”
“Do you mean these zombies and skeletons?”
“Yeah. Don’t overdo it. Just minimize human casualties. It looks like quite a few have already died, but the town still needs to function, so we need at least some of them to survive.”
“While protecting every single one of them might be difficult, I can certainly manage that much.”
“Then I’ll quickly clean up here and go have a little chat with Erebos.”
After their brief exchange, Swallow turned his head toward a loud noise in the distance and spotted a pack of Ghouls.
There were about thirty of them. They were all the “former believers” he had seen in the Catacombs. The fresh blood smeared around the mouths of the Ghouls poking their heads out from the alleys spoke volumes.
After a brief moment of sizing each other up, all the Ghouls rushed at Swallow simultaneously.
“Lord Swallow, how long will this take?”
“Not sure, but if I’m quick, it should be over in fifteen to twenty minutes.”
The first Ghoul to reach him lunged with its claws. At the same time, Swallow lazily flicked his wrist, striking the Ghoul and sending it crashing into the ground over ten meters away.
A flurry of attacks from the Ghouls followed. Swallow dealt with the rushing monsters with minimal movement, as if any more would be a chore. However, because each of his casual strikes carried immense power, any Ghoul that took a hit exploded hideously, becoming completely unrecognizable.
Swallow didn’t even bother to dodge. There was no need. These were Ghouls that even highly skilled humans would have to risk their lives to fight, yet their claws couldn’t even pierce his skin. Those that tried to tear at his flesh had their heads shattered, impaled by thin thorns that erupted from within his body.
The prestige of the unique species known as “Elders” was utterly shattered.
One of the Ghouls changed its target, bypassing Swallow to charge at Melju.
She immediately raised her staff.
Bang!
With a loud blast, the Ghoul’s body caught fire. It didn’t stop. After a brief stiffening, it accelerated again, aiming for Melju’s throat.
Once more, fire erupted.
As if it possessed some resistance, the flames on its rotting body were extinguished in an instant. Nevertheless, another blast rang out, followed by several more in rapid succession. Before one fully cast magic circle could fade, the next was already manifesting.
With each disappearing magic circle and repeating explosion, the Ghoul’s body was torn to shreds.