No One Dies Without My Permission
Kyaaaaaaa——
Kugaaaaaa——
As the demonic domain reached completion and the wicked energy swelled even stronger, crimson light burst from the eyes of the undead under the thrall of Nozgna's cultists.
"Ugh—aaagh!"
"Stay back! Stay the hell back!"
On top of that, the mercenary company Chelbe had belonged to turned on the others, slamming into their flanks alongside the undead. The defensive formation prepared for the Dead Moon collapsed in moments.
"Run!"
"You idiot! We're already surrounded! It's over!"
"Waaah! Mommy!!"
Surrounded by undead, with a demonic domain unfurling over their heads—and Chelbe's voice booming as if through a megaphone so that every last man could hear—the mercenaries finally understood they had walked into a trap. Despair at the death rushing toward them took hold.
Worse still, there were rumors that souls sacrificed inside an evil god's demonic domain were absorbed as offerings and would never find salvation. Their terror twisted into raw, screaming panic.
"Wolf! We have to punch through and open an escape route!"
"We'll break the path! Everyone just keep your eyes on my ass and follow! Kaisent! Lay down magic in the direction we're running!"
Fredrick had already read the situation and argued for a concentrated breakthrough. Lillian agreed at once.
"What? Escape? Then what about everyone left behind?"
"They'll figure it out! We never took an official contract for this anyway—it doesn't matter!"
"But…!"
Kaisent recoiled at the thought. If they fled alone, everyone remaining here would die.
If he poured out everything he had, he might still save the mercenaries. That possibility existed—and the idea of abandoning every soul outside the Wolf Mercenary Group struck his soft heart like a blow.
"Kaisent. Your talent is beyond anything the word 'gifted' can cover. But if you shine here, people who stomp on growing sprouts will come looking for you. I've told you this before."
Lillian stepped close, trying to persuade the hesitant boy.
"So hundreds of people can die just so I can hide my talent?"
"Yes. This world is far filthier and more vicious than you think."
"…"
Coming from a woman who had clawed her way through this world as a mercenary, the words were hard to dismiss. Lillian and Fredrick themselves had been harassed by other companies simply for being rising stars.
But Kaisent's gentle nature could not accept that such a reason justified ignoring the deaths of hundreds standing here. Guilt clawed at him.
If you have no power, running is fine. That's only natural. But if you have the strength—and you still abandon people you could save just because future enemies might appear—is that really all right?
No.
It was a moral problem, yes—but more than that, if he ran now, something inside him nearly as precious as life itself would snap. Once broken, that something would never rise again. It would sit in his chest like a knot of regret he would carry for the rest of his days. He could feel it.
And above all—
I learned Father's heart method. I can't run!
As he cultivated Jincheon's techniques, the blood of absolute beings sleeping in his body had begun to awaken—and that blood would not permit so cowardly a retreat.
"…I'm sorry. I… I can't throw away the lives of the people here for a reason like that."
"What? Kaisent!"
For the first time, Kaisent defied Lillian's decision. He invoked his father's movement art and vanished in an instant.
"I can feel it! I can feel the god's blessing—aaaaah!!"
Standing over Kaan Kel's corpse, Chelbe howled with manic laughter as Nozgna's blessing flooded him with power.
Thuk!
"…Huh?"
Sudden pain. A jolt from outside. Chelbe looked down.
A luminous blue blade had punched up through his body.
"What is th—"
Shraaaaaak!
Before he could finish asking what kind of blade that was—metal that didn't feel like metal—the edge ripped upward and split his torso and head clean in two.
"Haa. Hoo…"
Kaisent kicked the bisected body off the watchtower and let it tumble. Below, mercenaries were dying under the onslaught of the evil god's thralls and the undead. He hauled up his mana.
"Sun Fire! Sun Fire! Sun Fire! Sun Fire!"
"Sun Fire—Sun Fire—Sun Fire—Sun Fire—"
⟨ Sun Fire ⟩
From the top of the watchtower he cast the spell again and again, slight delays between each, firing in every direction. Spheres of searing flame—radiant enough to melt undead flesh—streaked outward. Mercenaries who had never expected support spun toward the tower.
There, white hair blazing even brighter against the dark, stood a boy. Kaisent.
Having roared his name, Kaisent turned toward the mercenary companies being crushed and unleashed the black magic he had kept hidden until now.
Chrrrrrrrrrak!
First he raised a colossal wall of bone. Then—
Every undead corpse in sight detonated, blasting open space for the mercenaries to breathe.
Sseeeek!
Arrows steeped in death-qi hissed out of the dark toward him. Kaisent raised an energy shield from his mechanical gauntlet and swatted them aside as if they were nothing.
The mercenaries, dragged back from the brink by Kaisent's magic, watched undead explode or melt under a continuous barrage of casting that even Kaan Kel—who had stood on the threshold of Master—could never have managed.
"Fuck! If a damn kid is fighting like that, we sure as hell aren't sitting here crying!"
"Grab your weapons, you bastards! Swing once more instead of bawling!"
"Uwaaaaaah! All of you die!"
Amazingly, men who moments ago had been drowning in despair felt their fighting spirit ignite at Kaisent's shout. They began to resist with savage fury.
"Guards! Attack Nozgna's followers!"
"What? But if we do that—"
"You idiots! Look at this and still don't get it? If you don't hit those bastards, the formation collapses—and if the formation collapses, we're all finished!"
"You lot—get out there and fight!"
Even the caravan masters who had been sheltering behind their private guards forced those men to strike at Nozgna's thralls hammering the mercenaries' flanks, and so kept the lines from completely disintegrating.
"Fuck it! Dead this way or dead that way!"
"Uwaaah!"
"Elenaaaaa! I'm coming home alive!!"
Even the laborers, trembling with fear, snatched up whatever came to hand and threw themselves against the undead and cultists assaulting the caravan.
The roar of a boy who carried the blood of the greatest dragon in the cosmos had dragged the will to fight back out of people frozen in terror.
"AT! Get over there and hit those undead!"
Where friend and foe were too tangled for magic, Kaisent sent AT in. A nameless mercenary company that had been slowly crumbling found enough room to reorganize instead of breaking entirely.
"Captain!"
"Don't we have to do something too?"
"He's right! We can't just run from this!"
Even the Wolf Mercenary Group, which until now had obeyed Wolf's every order, began clamoring to fight rather than flee.
A moment ago the air was pure despair—and one shout from Kaisent flipped it. He doesn't just have talent for raw strength. Does he have a leader's gift as well?
Even Lillian, who always watched situations with cold clarity, felt her heart surge at his roar.
Forget fear.
Kill the enemy in front of you.
As long as a great being stands with you, you will not fall.
"Wolf Mercenary Corps! Hold the formation!"
"Yes!"
"Got it!"
"Hold the line!"
"Just hang on and Kaisent will handle the rest! Block them!"
Sensing the tide had turned, Lillian chose to dig in and hold.
"Sun Fire!!"
Kaisent kept casting the most efficient anti-undead spell he had, incinerating the horde.
Power's overflowing! I could cast all day!
Sun Fire burned through a considerable amount of mana. Even chaining the spell without pause, Kaisent felt no shortage. He simply kept casting.
Dozens of Sun Fires bloomed beyond the formation. Undead charging the mercenaries collapsed into charred husks and crumpled where they stood.
The ones thrown into confusion now were Nozgna's followers controlling the dead.
"What the hell is that!?"
"How is he chaining magic like that!?"
They had believed killing Kaan Kel had removed the strongest piece on the board. None of them had imagined a hidden variable like this.
He was pouring out magic that would already have left Kaan Kel exhausted—and still melting the undead legion without stopping.
Faced with an unexpected variable, common sense said to fall back and look for another opening.
But the demonic domain itself closed that door. Raising a demonic domain was a signal flare to Nozgna. To create one and then flee in disgrace was to invite the god's wrath in full.
A painful death was the best outcome most could hope for. More often they endured curses so hideous that death would have been a mercy.
"We have to deal with that brat."
The followers' consensus formed at once. Kill the boy who had created this disaster.
But ordinary attacks simply met that strange shield and bounced off. That meant a powerhouse had to break through fast and finish him.
"And who exactly is supposed to—"
"I have Zenith's corpse."
"!!"
Zenith Alvarez.
A knight once whispered about as a potential second Count Akina. Like Akina, he had excelled at mounted combat—but he had never possessed a temperament to match his talent. He made enemies by the score, then vanished without a trace.
And now someone claimed to hold the missing Zenith's body?
Judging by the others' reactions, he had kept that fact locked down tight.
"I'm going to raise Zenith as an undead, force him up the ranks into a higher undead, and use him to kill that brat. If anyone has a better plan, speak now."
"…"
No one argued with the man who held Zenith's corpse.
"In the end I'll take the greatest share of the profit from this. But right now we have to get out of this crisis! Resolve this, and I'll use Zenith's power to help the rest of you with your own work. Or you can take a curse so foul you'll beg for death and live in agony for the rest of your lives!"
They had all seen seniors reduced to pleading for death under the god's anger.
In the end, fear stronger than death itself forced their hands. They brought out their trump card, raised Zenith's corpse as undead, and began artificially evolving and empowering it.
Chrrrrrrrrrak!
"Hahk! Hah—!"
"W-we made it…!"
Their fighting spirit had risen, but their stamina was spent. The mercenaries, barely holding on, finally caught a breath behind the massive bone curtain that now divided them from the undead.
Fwoooooosh!
"Kyaaaaa!"
"Grooooooar——"
Right after, heat punched through the bone wall—flame so fierce they could feel it—and the sound of undead being reduced to charcoal rolled over them.
"Incredible…"
"He's handling everything alone, and his eye for the battlefield is razor-sharp."
"A mage like that, and he's been a complete unknown until now."
Ordinary mercenaries were simply glad for the chance to breathe. The long-scarred veterans, though, were stunned by Kaisent's power.
His repertoire didn't seem especially wide; he kept recycling the same spells. But he covered that weakness with the blunt, simple method of casting them without end. On top of that, his field of view was broad enough to drop the right magic in the right place every time.
"If we told other mages about today, they wouldn't believe us."
"They'd call us crazy, wouldn't they?"
Claim that a fresh-faced, nameless boy had single-handedly held off a horde of thousands of undead on open ground, and any mage would sneer that you were making a mockery of magic itself.
"Ugh!?"
"Ghk!"
Then the veterans doubled over under a sudden, bone-deep chill.
"What's wrong with you!?"
Nearby mercenaries cried out in concern—but the veterans forced the words out as if wringing breath from their lungs.
"Scatter!"
"Disperse! Now!"
Those who had trained in the Mana Road howled for everyone to break formation. The company captains who shared that training felt an aura they had never encountered and barked the same order.
KRAAANG!
"Aaagh!"
"Hik!"
The bone wall Kaisent had raised shattered. Through the wreckage stepped a knight clad in thick magical plate and armor.
Beyond him, a zombie horse with eyes like banked coals. And a face like a walking corpse, sealed inside armor that poured out death-qi so dense that anyone nearby struggled to breathe.
"It's an Abyss Knight! An Abyss Knight—aaaaah!!"
When a knight-class powerhouse became undead, they were called Abyss Knights—warriors returned from the abyss of death.
Having announced its presence, the Abyss Knight—armed with a heavy halberd and a tower shield—carved through every mercenary in its path and charged straight at Kaisent.
Sseeeek! Kang!
Kaisent had already felt the Abyss Knight's aura before the mercenaries finished shouting. He loosed an arrow; the Abyss Knight casually caught it on the tower shield.
Hard.
The shield's toughness was one problem. The real shock was that it had blocked a powerful arrow at full gallop without so much as a twitch. Kaisent's nerves drew tight.
And by sheer presence alone, it casually outclassed both Lillian and Fredrick.
I have to handle this myself!
If he left it to the two of them, one of them would almost certainly die.
Kaisent swept his gaze across the field, slammed a few more spells into the most dangerous-looking clusters, then leapt from the watchtower—turning to meet the Abyss Knight thundering straight toward him.