Yujun Draws the Absolute Sealing Orb
Yujun drew out the Absolute Sealing Orb.
It was not the one that held Miura Genshin. This was the orb that contained Colchi.
The instant Colchi burst free, he squirmed like a larva, and sure enough his face wore the look of a man lost in pleasure. Yujun's sword moved faster than it ever had.
Thuk!
By all rights the gulf between them should have knit the wound shut in a heartbeat, but Chaos was bound into the point of Yujun's blade. Colchi died where he stood.
"Wh-what was that just now?"
The Emperor asked, a flicker of alarm in his voice.
"Ah. He used to live somewhere else. Nasty reputation, a real piece of work, so I'd been keeping him locked up for a bit."
"And you mean to put me in the same place you keep a man like that? Right now?"
"Don't get the wrong idea. It isn't some hell."
"...Wait. Hell? You said hell?"
"You saw how much the one locked in there was enjoying himself, didn't you?"
Colchi had, in fact, worn a face of pure rapture when he came out of the Absolute Sealing Orb. Anyone who had seen it would understand that being sealed inside was not an unmitigated evil. Yujun himself, of course, had not the slightest intention of ever stepping into that orb. He had already seen, in full, the state of every creature that had come back out. No matter what crisis found him, he would sooner die than accept the Sealing Orb. The Equanimity trait might steady his mind, but it did nothing to dull pain—and here he was, recommending to the Emperor an orb he himself would never enter.
"Get in. We're out of time. Even while we stand here talking, soldiers are dying by the dozen."
"Very well."
The Emperor watched him with open suspicion, yet he stepped into the Absolute Sealing Orb without further protest. Instinct told him that obedience was the wisest course, and he understood that Yujun's assurance of safety was no lie.
Once he confirmed the Emperor was inside, Yujun allowed himself a satisfied smile.
One nuisance, removed.
Keep the Emperor alive. A problem that had tied him in knots, solved with a single item. If the man were simply out of sight, that would have been fine—but the moment Yujun had to watch him in mortal danger, he could no longer give the fight his full attention. Apologies to the Emperor aside, putting him in the Absolute Sealing Orb had been the prudent choice.
Yujun shot high into the air and looked around.
The situation...
Manuela was pouring curses over the monsters and blessings and buffs over their allies, with no breath to spare for anything else. For all her brilliance, she could not halt the advance.
A thunderous crash split the wall. A single lash of a monster's tentacle swept more than ten soldiers away.
"Guhk!"
"Gyaaaaaah!"
"N-no! Yorchi!"
The soldiers' own attacks, by contrast, did the monsters next to no harm at all. A hundred ordinary men together could not bring down a single one, and there was not the slightest exception. Not one monster fell. Soldiers could not fight these things.
Haren shouted.
"Mages! What are you doing? Cast something!"
"But..."
"You can use them now! That problem's been dealt with! It won't go like it did before!"
At Haren's word the mages conjured a host of powerful elemental spells, and magic of every attribute poured down on the monsters without discrimination. The barrage cracked and thundered across the field.
"Kkirik!"
"Kiiik!"
Under the magical bombardment the charge faltered. The mages' firepower was nothing to dismiss; monsters armored in that hard hide took the blows and went down. Even so, the dead were only a tiny fraction. Most sealed their wounds in moments and hurled themselves forward again, and the soldiers fell back again and again.
Meeting the monsters head-on with no plan was stupider than charging a brick wall with your skull.
Preserving our strength matters.
Nothing good would come of letting the soldiers' losses grow any further here. Having judged as much, Yujun leapt from the wall.
From the antenna of the monster at the fore, a powerful pulse shot toward him—an attack it had never used before. Recognizing him as a serious threat, it seemed to have played a card it had been hiding. He swept his sword lightly and scattered the wave. In the next instant he kicked off the ground and sprang clear above the creature's head, and the blade came down in a rush of air.
Shhk!
Yujun's sword, tiny beside that bulk, split the monster cleanly in two.
"Kkiruk..."
"What. A seagull?"
So stubborn was its hold on life that even cleaved from crown to heel, it still made a sound. Yujun frowned and looked for the next target.
In truth, he hardly needed to look. Dozens of monsters were already rushing him at once, and in that moment he unfurled a blade veil—a translucent blue membrane sheathing his body. Thousands of tentacles that struck it were sheared away.
"Kkirik! Kiiik!"
"Kyaaaak!"
The monsters' horrible, phlegm-choked shrieks blanketed the field. Yujun was not satisfied with that. He charged straight into them, and the sight of him coming on at speed with the veil still raised sent the monsters recoiling in terror. They were too late to dodge. The instant they touched him, the membrane that ground everything to nothing left them no chance to strike back. He defended and attacked in the same breath, and the numbers behind both his offense and his defense pierced the sky. To any single monster, Yujun was a wall far too vast to bear.
He cut them down with ease, his mind already elsewhere.
It would be nice if there were contribution, or a score.
If the monsters he killed now affected the final reward, he was perfectly willing to hunt every last one of them alone.
The odds of that are high, actually.
As with every event, achievements within the event mattered enormously. A few more kills, or a few less, might decide the grade of the reward, and extra compensation might be paid out according to the tally. He therefore meant to give the hunt everything he had.
"Kkiriik!"
"Kkiik!"
Besides the monsters that nullified magic, he occasionally spotted ones with truly bizarre abilities—blinding their foes, binding movement, paralyzing the body, scrambling the senses. The result, however, was not so very different. Even the aberrant monsters, gifted with powers unlike the common kind, vanished without a trace the moment they met Yujun's sword.
"Now's our chance!"
"Charge! Charge!"
"Smash 'em! Start with that one!"
"Joji! Give it everything you've got!"
On the strength of his performance, the knights and mages were committed to the field. The meaningless war of attrition—using relatively weak soldiers to bleed the monsters' stamina—was over, and the real fight had begun.
The knights and mages performed well enough. Much of that was thanks to Yujun having already swept through the horde once, but they too were people who had weighed heavily on the EX-tier difficulty rating. Working together, they could pick the monsters off now and then without much trouble, and little by little the numbers dwindled.
Before even half a day had passed, the empire annihilated them. Soldiers, knights, mages, and even the nobles beyond them raised a cheer.
"F-finally!"
"We won! We won!"
"That man... I don't know who he is, but he's incredible. How many monsters did he take down by himself?"
"Thousands, at least. He went in alone and swept up half of them. You saw how many there were at the start..."
"Hah. A real one is a real one."
"You've known him for how long, calling him that? Quit the theatrics."
"Does this look like something you stay quiet about? He fought for the empire so hard that even calling him a hero would be selling him short."
Once the results were plain to see, praise for Yujun multiplied. He was the foremost contributor who had made the empire's victory possible. A natural reaction.
The Emperor was never really going to die.
Yujun sat on a large rock and rested. He was not exhausted—only a little tired from using skills without a break. A hologram message rose before him.
The first wave has been safely repelled.
30 minutes remain until the second wave.
The end of the first wave, and the announcement of the second.
"I knew it felt too easy..."
Yujun sighed as if he had expected as much. The enemies had clearly been beyond what the empire could stop on its own, but he had never felt the difficulty soared past EX tier. He had roughly anticipated that something would come after.
The problem was the soldiers, the knights, and the mages. They had been breathing easy, convinced it was over, and the news that a second wave was imminent drove them to despair.
"What is this."
"Haa..."
"Do we even have a chance?"
"We already fought like we were dying..."
"Let's be honest. If that human player hadn't been here, we could have struggled all we liked and still never held them off."
The jubilation of a moment ago collapsed as if it had been a lie, and the empire's mood sank into gloom.
"Come on, come on. As you all know, this isn't over yet, so get ready, and quickly!"
Conte shouted—the same Conte who, not long ago, had been brainwashed into attacking his own allies. The imperial knights were dumbfounded at first by his shamelessness, then nodded. Falling under that brainwashing had not been his fault, and dwelling only on the worst would only make things worse. Rousing themselves and planning for the next wave was a far more constructive thought.
"Hup... Let's fight with everything we have, right to the end. Think of the families who have no one to count on but us."
"My armor's completely shot. This is bad."
And so time passed, and the second wave began.
One difference from the first wave was immediately obvious. The gigantic monsters were nowhere to be seen.
Thirty. That was the number of enemies that appeared as the second wave opened. They were beings with skin so pale and thin that their veins stood out like those of demonkin, and not a hair upon their bodies. Smooth-skinned, they appeared stark naked, without a thread to their name—and yet there was nothing sensual about them. They had no genitals, and no expression on their faces. They seemed more like artificial life.
That did not mean they all shared the same form. Their builds, to be precise, were each different. The largest of them stood at the front, and it looked at least three times the size of the others.
That one's the boss.
The presence it gave off was unmistakably different, and the beings behind it were formidable as well.
There's truly no end to this.
The moment he grew a little stronger, enemies capable of threatening his life appeared one after another. It was not as if he weren't walking into the jaws of death of his own accord, but it was an uncanny business all the same.
"So they're called Hawks."
Paranet, summoned at some point without warning, murmured it.
"I don't recall summoning you."
"You have left me uncalled for so very long that I simply came, my lord."
"Didn't you tuck yourself away of your own accord earlier, too?"
"That I did—to evade a crisis, you see. Is it not by virtue of my swift judgment that I am privileged to attend my lord even now?"
"I didn't ask you to attend me."
It was then that a message appeared before Yujun's eyes, declaring that his inventory synchronization was complete.
Current Synchronization Rate
108%
Only now?
The sync had been slower than before, but it seemed to have finished at last.
Does it take longer every time?
Unwelcome news. Nothing good came of a delayed synchronization. The faster the update, the faster the items arrived, did they not? In any case, the rate had risen. Last time nothing had been transmitted, so perhaps this time something new had appeared in his inventory. This was a moment when it was fair to hope.
Yujun opened his inventory without delay.