The Slime That Wouldn't Die
Thalaze's ability was simple.
Being a slime-type undead, he could freely transform his shape through 'liquefaction' and even sever pieces of his own body to create clones.
And with the dark magic of Legion Commander Magnus amplifying that power to its extreme, he had succeeded in extracting his one and only weakness—his heart—outside of his body.
Thalaze currently kept ten hearts stored externally, and even if his body was destroyed, he could consume a heart to reproduce asexually on the spot and be reborn as a new individual.
His revival ability closely resembled that of Simon's Ancient Undead, Prince—but the difference was that Thalaze burned through his own hearts to be reborn.
The ultimate in survivability.
Thalaze's abilities weren't specialized for search and rescue, but Magnus rated highly the fact that no matter how thoroughly he was detected, surrounded, or beaten down, Thalaze returned alive one hundred percent of the time.
And now, on Magnus's orders, Thalaze was tracking the traces of the unknown Ancient Undead he had encountered in the Screaming Jungle.
[......]
There had been results.
Thalaze, running his long tentacles down through the grass, dragged them back and forth across the dirt of the forest floor.
[Unidentified underground ruins discovered. Ancient Undead traces: match confirmed.]
He sensed at once that he had found a critically important clue. Part of him longed to plunge deep into the ruins, but from here on, the air smelled of danger.
He was just deciding that he should return, report to Magnus, and summon reinforcements to search the ruins together when—
CRRAAAACK!
The surrounding trees were flying skyward, their pale cut trunks flashing white. Thalaze turned around.
[!]
There stood the very skeleton of the very Ancient Undead he had been searching for. What was more, a necromancer was wearing it as bone armor.
[Who——]
The words never finished.
In the same instant the trees were cleaved apart, Thalaze's head slid down along a clean diagonal line and dropped to the ground with a soft thump.
"Nine."
A man's voice rolled out, dark and brooding.
"Nine more deaths and you're gone for good, isn't that right?"
Glrrrglgglgl!
Thalaze's decapitated body sank down like water, pooling into a pitch-black pond.
A moment later the pond swirled, and a fully intact Thalaze burst out of it.
[I am. Thalaze.]
The center of his body split open, speaking like a mouth.
[Captain, Magnus Legion. Unidentified necromancer. Request: identify yourself.]
Simon answered with his greatsword instead of words. The air split vertically—and this time Thalaze deceptively bent at the waist, slipping beneath the blade.
[Attacking me. An act that makes Magnus Legion an enemy.]
"Obviously!"
Simon stomped on his Jet-Black and leapt.
"I know exactly what I'm doing!"
Wearing the bone armor as 'Pion' for the first time in a while, power surged through his whole body.
With a single step, the ground caved inward beneath his foot, and Simon's new form shot forward like a beam of light.
Crack!
The strike that followed his charge sent one of Thalaze's arms spinning high into the air.
[Regenerate.]
Clutching his severed left arm, Thalaze twitched and shuddered—but nothing happened.
[Regeneration. Failed.]
Simon slammed to a halt, planted his feet, and twisted his hips into a swing.
That long-range sword slash had proven genuinely threatening, so Thalaze hastily retreated.
KWAKWAKWAKWAKWA!
But the slash struck not Thalaze, but the ground right beneath his feet. With a thunderous roar the earth split open, and a geyser of dirt and gravel surged up, blinding Thalaze's view.
"Like this—!"
Bursting through the dust cloud, Simon drove his right foot hard into the ground and tightened his grip on the greatsword.
"You can't dodge what you can't see!"
CRRAAAAASH!
The second strike, swung like a continuation of the first, tore through the curtain of earth and cleaved Thalaze's upper body cleanly from his lower half.
Simon's face lit up.
I did it! That's already two kills—huh?
But this time it hadn't killed him. From the upper half lying on the ground, Thalaze's head rotated in a direction no head should turn, fixing its gaze on Simon.
Then Pier's urgent voice echoed in his mind.
[Boy! Not the chest—aim for the neck! It seems the only way to burn through its lives is to cut off its head!]
That does check out.
Just as Simon re-gripped his greatsword, Thalaze's mouth opened.
[You. Legion.]
Simon charged in with a grim expression, and the half-bodied Thalaze sprouted tiny legs beneath himself and began to scuttle away.
[Ancient Undead. Cannot be controlled except by a Legion Commander. You are a Legion.]
His voice was flat and toneless, but he must have been rattled, because the words kept pouring out of him without pause.
[Magnus's eighth hypothesis: confirmed. The 7th Legion Commander has returned. Must inform.]
"Like hell—!"
Simon leapt again and again, closing on the short-legged Thalaze, and swung his greatsword.
"You're not telling anyone!"
Thalaze, for his part, twisted his torso like a wrung cloth and lashed out his one remaining arm.
The arm morphed into the shape of a drill and thrust out like a lance; Simon hastily shifted from offense to defense and blocked it.
In that instant, as Thalaze tried to slip away—
Open Gate!
Overlord's blades erupted from the ground, trapping Thalaze's body. Simon clenched his empty left hand into a fist and twisted it sideways.
Grind him!
SHRRRRRRUNCH!
The tentacle-blades coiled around Thalaze's body and squeezed. The creature shrank and shrank, until finally—with a pop!—lumps of his flesh rained down onto the ground.
Eight lives left.
One of the fallen lumps of flesh transformed back into a black pond. It soon came to a roiling boil, and a larger Thalaze was reborn from it—the arm Simon had cut off earlier included.
[Stubborn as expected, I see.]
Pier's voice rang out.
[That's not regeneration—it's closer to recreation. No matter how extreme the battlefield, that thing's survival rate is one hundred percent! Letting your guard down is absolutely forbidden!]
"Right!"
Breaking that very one hundred percent was the whole reason Simon had come as Pion.
Gripping his greatsword, Simon glared at Thalaze. The key was to hammer him relentlessly, never giving him a moment to collect himself, and shave his lives away one by one.
I need to burn through at least five more lives within ten minutes.
Shrrk.
Just then, Thalaze bent at the waist and planted both palms on the ground. His body erupted upward like a geyser, deploying drills large and small in every direction.
"Hah!"
While Simon weaved through the barrage of flying drills, Thalaze's main body fled into the deep woods.
Shlik.
But something sharp bit into him, slicing his body nearly in half. If he had simply walked on, ignoring it, he would have fallen apart into two pieces on the spot.
Startled, Thalaze pulled back and stared straight ahead—and there, in the darkness, he glimpsed a thin line catching the moonlight, flickering in and out of sight.
[Where might you be hurrying off to?]
FWOOSH!
Spider webs came surging in from every direction like a whirlwind, binding Thalaze tight.
Erzsébet, emerging from the darkness with an elegant flourish of her hand, sent the webs burrowing into Thalaze's body and shredding him to pieces.
"Erze!"
[All seven of Thalaze's clones have been dealt with cleanly by the spider legion, as you command! That leaves seven lives on the main body.]
Glub-glub.
Thalaze, already killed three times, dissolved into a pond and immediately re-emerged with his massive bulk restored.
[Fall back.]
He thrust his drill-formed right arm at Erzsébet, and she raised her index finger with a light, careless grace.
THRAAANG!
The drill stopped dead an inch from her face. A slender thread was stretched taut across its front, holding firm.
[Ancient Undead. Another one present.]
Consternation was plain in Thalaze's voice.
[New Legion Commander. Possesses two Ancient Undead. Threat level: increased. Must survive and report.]
Kzzt!
Thalaze poured strength into his arm and tore straight through the web. Erzsébet flung herself out of the charge's path and raised her palm skyward.
[So full of openings, aren't you?]
Webs snagged Thalaze's back leg, its weight pitched forward, and hoisted him clean into the air.
As if they had been waiting for exactly this moment, dozens of corpse spiders came arcing in like the weights of a clock pendulum and sank their fangs into Thalaze's body. Green fluid dripped in fat drops as Thalaze howled in agony.
[Now, if you please!]
"Nice work, Erze!"
Simon, already in his cutting stance, swept a single stroke through the air. The head of the poison-stiffened, paralyze-locked Thalaze was split precisely in two by the blade and dropped to the ground.
Six lives left!
There wasn't a single second when he could afford to let his tension slip.
The severed head on the ground turned into a black pond and came to a roiling boil, and out of it a shrunken Thalaze leapt into the air with a pop!
[Magnus. Must inform. On Roc Island—Ancient Undead. Two of them.]
Thalaze looked around wildly for an escape route—and then saw something surging up from the ground on the opposite side.
[!]
It was astonishingly fast. A small boy appeared right in front of Thalaze in a blink and swung his fist.
WHAM!
With a thunderous crack, Thalaze went sprawling head over heels.
[HAHAHA! Not a chance, you fool! You complete idiot!]
Prince crowed triumphantly from midair.
As Thalaze lay wedged into the ground with his waist twisted, zombies swarmed over and clamped down on him. Simon, sprinting in behind them, spread a magic circle with his empty left hand and squeezed his fist shut.
⟨ Corpse Explosion ⟩
BOOOOOM!
A massive explosion ripped through the helpless Thalaze.
Taking the blast dead-on, Thalaze shriveled back into a pond.
[Boy! That's five!]
[Five lives remaining, my lord!]
Pier and Simon, Erzsébet, and the freshly descended Prince each took up positions ringing the pond—a net to answer him no matter which way he fled.
[Ancient Undead. Estimated: three.]
Thalaze's voice drifted up from the pool of slime.
[Critical threat. Top-priority report target. Growth of the 7th Legion: beyond imagination. If not stopped now: extreme danger.]
The pond began to seethe.
[Must survive. Report to Magnus.]
FWOOOOOOOM!
Countless drills burst out of the pond. Simon and the commanders each dodged the attacks while simultaneously raining blows down on every single drill.
Pier shouted.
[We don't know which one is the main body! Wipe out every last one of them!]
The moment the drills touched down, legs sprouted from them and they began to scurry.
Simon swept his Sword of Ruin in wide arcs, cutting down several at a stroke, while controlling Overlord with his other hand to skewer the clones like shish kebabs.
Pier, supporting Simon through the bone armor, simultaneously directed the legionified skeletons to snatch up fleeing drills.
Erzsébet fed Jet-Black into the webs she had spread across the wide area, wielding them like blades to slice the drills apart.
Prince led his zombie horde to seal off the escape routes, cutting down the fleeing Thalazes one after another.
And the one who caught the main body was—
Crack!
Prince. Thalaze's main body burst apart under his indiscriminately swinging fists, dissolving into a bubbling pond.
Prince let out a gleeful laugh.
[Got it! The main body's over here!]
[Stay focused! Four more to go!]
Prince licked his lips with his tongue and waited before the pond.
[Come on! Come on! Show yourself! The remaining four lives will be gone in a flash—!]
FWOOOOM!
The pond surged into a towering wave. Out of it burst a single colossal drill, punching a hole clean through Prince's torso as it passed.
"Prince!!"
[Must survive. Must survive. Must survive.]
Human legs sprouted from beneath the flying drill. Thalaze, his body lengthened enormously at some point, sprinted madly through the Forbidden Forest.
Shluk!
Shlurk!
But wounds as if carved by blades began opening all across Thalaze's body.
[Not a chance, I'm afraid.]
The webs Erzsébet and the spider legion had laid tore at Thalaze's body, dragging his speed down. Forcing his way through, he was left in tatters.
TADADADADADAT!
And atop the gossamer-thin webs Erzsébet had strung, a boy came sprinting, his shadowless cloak streaming behind him.
"Pier!"
[At your service!]
Simon vaulted down off the webs and swung the Sword of Ruin.
SHRING!
Thalaze's left leg was severed mid-flight and he crashed to the ground. But even as he fell, his torso sprouted fresh legs of its own, and this time he crawled away like a centipede.
"Get ready, Prince!"
Simon pulled a zombie out of subspace, pressed the grey ring against it for an instant, and hurled it with all the strength the bone armor could muster.
As the zombie flew like an artillery shell, a black bolt of lightning cracked down onto its body.
[HAHAHA!]
Prince, descended into the zombie, landed squarely on top of Thalaze.
[You're not the only one—!]
The boy's interlocked fists rose high overhead.
[—with a revival trick!]
KWAAAA-BOOOM!
Prince's fists smashed through Thalaze's waist and nailed him into the ground like a great iron spike.
Thalaze went limp, and Simon and Pier finished it off, cleaving the incapacitated creature's head from its body with their blades.
Thalaze's form melted back into a pond once more.
[Three!]
[Three lives left, my lord! Everyone, just a little more!]
Erzsébet didn't join the circle right away; she and her corpse spiders bustled about, laying fresh webs all around the area—as if to declare that this time, no one would be caught off guard. Prince, apparently done with complacency, took a proper defensive stance and glared at the pond.
Simon stood a short distance away, gripping his greatsword, and waited.
Absolutely! No matter what it takes, I'm taking all three of his remaining lives right here!