The Guardian's Grudge
The moment Circe caught the twisted smile on X's face, she pressed a hand to her brow as if a headache had just announced itself. Then she snapped an order at her skeleton soldiers.
"That idiot...! All units, attack—!!"
The command dropped, and her soldiers loosed a storm of arrows. The hundred-man unit—already thrown into chaos by the Guardian and X's rampage—was shredded by the rain of shafts, bone dust exploding in every direction.
What had been a three-way melee among the hundred-man unit, the Guardian, and X became a four-way brawl the instant Circe crashed the party. The hundred-man unit, which held the largest force of anyone on the field, paid for that distinction in catastrophic losses.
"Gyaaaaaagh—!!"
On the commander's order, the soldiers moved to intercept Circe's troops. But X had already cut down several of their officers, and the chain of command was a wreck. Circe's unit pressed a one-sided assault.
Even so, Circe refused to read the situation as a victory.
"X! Use Blink and get over here already!"
X was still boxed in among the hundred-man unit. For reasons she couldn't parse, he was tearing through the ranks under a ferocious assault from skeletons that were anything but ordinary, fleeing more than fighting. Every new wound that opened on his body tightened something in Circe's chest.
Do I go get him?
She was on the verge of deciding exactly that when X shouted across the field.
"The Guardian is still pursuing me! If I come that way now, I'll have to face the hundred-man unit and the Guardian at the same time! I have to stay here!"
"What?! Wasn't it just chasing the treasure chest?!"
"I don't know why, but the Guardian is determined to kill me! It must be absolutely furious! The hundred-man unit, the Guardian—they're all targeting me alone!"
"What kind of grudge do these things even have against you?! You didn't do something to them, did you?!"
That, X had to admit, was one of the things bothering him too. These mana-born creatures were as good as undead. They weren't supposed to have intellect, let alone feelings. The original had never described anything of the kind.
I didn't fight this the way the original went, though...!
X lifted the Dragon Sword and turned aside an elite knight's descending iron blade, then rolled to evade a beam of light from the mage. Coming out of the roll, he knocked away a thrusting spear-tip. A line of heat opened across one cheek, bright and stinging.
They're strong.
The coordinated assault of four elite skeletons was more seasoned and more dangerous than he had imagined. So this was what it felt like to fight a veteran party that had spent years learning one another's timing. It was a blessing that X's goal was flight rather than victory; beating them outright did not look easy in the slightest.
All of them 4-Star, 4th-Circle or higher.... No—the mage is 5th-Circle.
The skeleton mage, buried in a heavy robe, drove a staff of withered wood into the ground and unfolded its magic. Ten fireballs, each the size of a human head, bloomed in the air and screamed toward the path X was trying to take, detonating in a wall of heat and flame that made him hesitate for a fraction of a second. In that fraction, spear and sword came for his back.
The coordination is seamless.
He had no choice. He spent the mana and used Blink, snapping across the field to an officer he had marked earlier, throwing the command structure into further confusion before he ran again. All he had to do was keep running until the Guardian collapsed from exhaustion or the hundred-man unit was ground to dust.
A blue spark cracked across Python's Leap.
Blink did not fire. The spell failed, and the mana bled away into nothing.
X knew this phenomenon.
Damn it...! I forgot! The skeleton mages here had a technique that shuts down magic...!
It was the same principle as the mana interference Circe had once used on a golem, applied to spellcasting. Interfering with a spell in the instant of its completion and forcing it to fail was a technique of extreme finesse. Even Circe didn't use it lightly—and this skeleton mage could do it.
Why the hell did they build something like this...!
He had no choice but to throw up a shield spell and a barrier of divine power across his back. Sword and spear slammed into the two hastily raised walls a heartbeat before they would have cut him in half at the waist.
Steel screamed.
X rolled forward before either defense could shatter, slipping the follow-up, and before the elites could reset their stance he loosed a Golden Form Sword at the spearman.
Thud-thud-thud!
The shot died against the shield of another elite. The timing was exquisite—the kind of ally-cover that only came from real skill.
X, of course, was not in the business of simply taking it.
"You might want to watch your feet."
They wouldn't understand him. It didn't matter.
Before the elites could even shift their weight, a threatening red light erupted from the ground beneath them. They registered the anomaly and looked down—and found a blazing fireball pouring out a torrent of mana. A spell X had planted before he rolled.
The world went white with fire.
Flame and storm swallowed the elites whole. They hadn't been ready for it. The hit would have landed.
I keep doing nothing but dodge, so I guess I've gotten better at the dirty tricks.
The only one the explosion hadn't touched was the skeleton mage.
X poured Internal Energy into his legs and the ball of his big toe and launched himself. He was in front of the mage in a blink, Auror flooding the blade as he swung. Even if it meant this elite would never serve as a soldier again, he would put it down. He poured that single intent into the cut.
The sword stopped dead in front of the mage's face.
"When did they set this up..."
Invisible chains bound X's body and his sword alike—a binding-chain spell the skeleton mage had laid in advance.
"Kh—!"
The binding force was considerable. Even straining with everything he had, the chains didn't give; they only cinched tighter around his throat. At the same time, the skeleton mage leveled the tip of its staff at him.
A flash of light magic at this range might punch through a shield and a divine barrier both.
Nothing ever comes easy.
He wanted to lament a life that kept throwing him into unwinnable situations. Instead of wasting the time, X smiled at the thing, easy and unhurried.
"You might want to watch your head."
The words had barely left his mouth when four Golden Form Swords dropped from the sky, screaming toward the skeleton mage's skull.
He had already expected some kind of trap. He hadn't guessed it would be chains, but that hardly mattered. All he needed was to pull its attention this way for a single moment. That single moment would cost the thing its life.
If the ambush had landed, that is.
The Golden Form Swords failed to punch through every layer of shielding the mage had prepared. A countermeasure from a creature that had seen the surprise coming.
Chains clinked. The mage cocked its skull to one side, looking at X as if to ask, Is that all? Whether that was really the meaning, X couldn't know. He answered anyway.
"Not that. Watch out for the other thing."
And X vanished.
Blink had fired.
The skeleton mage startled at the sudden absence and hunted for the cause. If X had tried to use Blink, it should have already cut the spell with mana interference. It had sensed no such sign.
I knew you'd do that, so I poured demonic power into the ring.
If the thing blocked magic by reading the flow of mana before a spell was cast, then all he had to do was hide the casting itself. In a situation this frantic, a blurred presence was impossible to catch. As expected, the mage failed to interrupt X's Blink.
The price was far greater than it could have imagined.
In the instant the mage's attention was stolen by the anomaly in front of its eyes, a colossal shadow fell over it. It recognized the shadow for what it was. It was already too late.
The impact shook the earth.
A massive slab of stone—the Guardian's stone greatsword. The blade that had been meant for X lost its target in vain and buried itself in the ground. What the stone sword crushed in X's place was the skeleton mage.
While X had been fighting the elites, the Guardian had somehow smashed its way through the soldiers. It had come running to finally kill the man caught in those chains, and it had brought the sword down. Even that rage, in the end, had been used.
A low groan rolled out of the construct. It had clearly overreached; the Guardian's entire body was tattered now, hanging in rags of cracked stone. Damage accumulated from fighting the hundred-man unit had made its movements far more sluggish than before.
The two most dangerous pieces on the board—the elites and the Guardian—had been neutralized. All that remained was to end it.
The place Blink delivered him was directly in front of the hundred-man unit's commander. The soldiers who had guarded it like an iron wall now numbered a handful. Circe's unit was closing the distance by the second, grinding down what remained of the company's rank and file. Circe herself seemed to have found some breathing room; she was sniping officers one by one with magic. With the skeleton mage that would have checked her spells gone, the field was hers.
X raised his sword and settled into a stance, facing the commander.
"Wouldn't a wise commander sacrifice themselves instead of their soldiers' lives?"
The Dragon Sword, wreathed in Auror, and four Golden Form Swords all found the commander's neck. No soldier left on the field could stop them.
The commander's head left its body and flew into the sky.
The moment the commander died, the surviving forces joined X's unit as they stood. Their number exceeded fifty. In a single stroke, X's force surged past a hundred, swelling to the size of a hundred-man company in its own right.
"We managed to deal with the Guardian, too."
"...Let's not use any more strategies that involve using the Guardian."
The wreck of the Guardian went down under the remaining soldiers' attacks and became a pile of rock. It had been so hell-bent on killing X and X alone that putting it down was almost trivial.
"We somehow solved the problems. And we picked up the elites except for the mage, so that's a relief."
"At this rate, even ten lives wouldn't be enough.... Anyway, what are we doing next?"
"Well.... We don't have the forces to challenge the Fortress yet, so we'll have to gather more...."
The army occupying the Fortress was a different caliber of soldier altogether. Elites were thick on the ground, and the combat power of their supreme commander—the Skeleton General—was nothing to take lightly. In the original, they had challenged it with a Legion-scale force. They had fought a brutal battle even with that, which meant they needed at least that much strength.
It was doable if they simply spent the time. But—
I can't afford to take it easy. Not with the situation outside being what it is....
Even if time here ran slow, it had not stopped. Darius would move rationally, so X wasn't worried about him. The problem was the variables that couldn't be controlled or predicted.
Lady Beatrice...! Please don't do anything. Just stay still...! We can't come this far only to have it all fall apart...!
He clung to that futile hope with a look of quiet despair. In any case, getting out of this place was the first priority.
"Let's draw up a plan first. We have information from the future, so if we think it through, a good method will come to us."
"Even I don't have a way to beat the army guarding the Fortress. The scheming department is your specialty."
"Hmm. I get the feeling that the way I'm being treated has grown rather harsh of late. Would you be willing to revise that?"
"Depends on how you do."
While the two of them were sniping at each other, a warning ward hummed in both their ears, announcing an enemy intrusion.
A skeleton on watch let out a guttural roar of alarm and snapped into a defensive stance. X and Circe finished their preparations in a rush and ran toward the intruder.
I thought we'd gotten far enough from where the fighting happened....
Apparently there had still been skeletons on their trail. They could handle a platoon-sized force without breaking a sweat now, but a commotion would only draw more enemies. If they wanted to rest in peace, they needed to put this down quietly.
They arrived in a hurry—and found something neither of them had expected.
"A-a person! Please save me! These skeletons are trying to kill me!"
Standing there was the 2-Star martial-arts student, a girl who had been on X's team.
"Atel? You're Atel Dane from the same team in Class F, right?"
"Th-this voice...? C-could it be Prince X?!"
It was none other than Atel Dane.