Master of the Sword
Master of the Sword
The noise was like an advancing tide, a constant rustling born from the sheer, rampant mass of Bugs. At the grating, incessant sound, Angie lunged forward.
Boom!
And she threw a punch. The impact of her fist against the leaping swarm of Bugs produced a sound no human hand should ever make.
A brutal crash, as if a colossal weight had been dropped, and the Bugs burst apart in the shockwave. Standing in the epicenter, Angie squeezed her eyes shut, closed her mouth, and covered her ears as she stopped. The Bugs swarmed her all at once, tearing into the girl's flesh.
"Urrrgh...!"
Booom!
As if shaking off the clinging vermin, the girl stamped hard and dropped her stance low. The Bugs caught in that violent movement were flung away and pulverized.
Those that she failed to catch hurtled past her, heading straight for the party. Dmitri's crimson longsword flashed toward them.
"Damn, there's a lot of 'em. A lot!"
Dmitri kept grinning even as he fended off the rushing Bugs.
Amid the chopped-up Bug carcasses littering the ground, Aslan silently observed the creatures' movements.
He was hardly a stranger to fighting Bloodworms, but this was his first time against a swarm wielding a sword that could drain vitality. He was wary of any potential pattern shift.
And sure enough, a shift existed. Without a host, the Bloodworms, once cut, swiftly retreated back to their Swarm Mother. They returned to hurl themselves against a barely visible piece of metal or to leap into the Swarm Mother's heart.
Whenever a Bloodworm hurled its body against that metal fragment and died, the Swarm Mother pulsed from its brain and heart, spewing out dozens of times as many Bugs. The overflowing Bugs surged toward the party like a tidal wave.
And among that horde, the Bloodworm that had burrowed into the heart would emerge intact from a different vessel, seamlessly joining the swarm.
Aslan narrowed his eyes and spun his flail.
The flail he had stolen, the weapon once belonging to the Priest of the Poison-spitting Dragon, had four heads deeply steeped in venom.
It inflicted poison on those it struck. Against Aslan's overwhelming damage output, this had been a negligible benefit—until now.
The flail, which had been rotating at a low speed, was whipped forward with full momentum. His targets were the Bugs charging past Dmitri.
Crunch!
The four heads of the swung flail precisely shattered four Bugs, grazing several others with a sickly clatter. The ricocheted Bugs screamed as they retreated back to the Swarm Mother.
Bloodworms again hurled their heads against the metal fragment, or crawled back into the heart. Aslan tracked their movements with his eyes before lunging forward.
The Bloodworms that emerged next would be sluggish or short-lived. The venom would be taking hold by now.
Just as Aslan predicted, the emerging Bloodworms moved with a distinct lethargy. Some were sluggish, while others flipped onto their backs, already convulsing.
'Using the weapon's traits is the basics.'
You couldn't defeat a priest with just one or two tricks. Having sent hundreds of priests to their deaths, Aslan knew perfectly well what it meant to use every available means.
Naturally, the Bloodworms trying to intercept Aslan were drastically slowed. Aslan swept his gaze over the area and shouted,
"Angie, this way!"
At his words, Angie, who had been surrounded by Bloodworms, burst out. She sprinted in a straight line toward the source of Aslan's voice. At the center of her path stood Aslan, and beyond him, the Swarm Mother.
The Bloodworms' movements began to grow frantic. Some that had been charging at Aslan turned toward Angie, while others hesitated, unsure whether to return to Aslan.
Aslan paused for a moment, gauging the timing while considering the situation.
The Hive Mind could be seen as a massive collective with immense resources and a singular intelligence. A legion of Bugs acting as one could only be powerful.
But that was also its weakness. The flaw of having only one thinking entity.
It controlled thousands and had many methods, but ultimately, there was only one command tower.
The best strategy to exploit that weakness was confusion.
Create chaos. Introduce multiple variables. Those variables would cause the Hive Mind to make mistakes.
When Angie finally shot past Aslan and lunged ahead, the Bloodworms eventually turned to swarm her.
At that exact moment, Aslan moved on a different trajectory. He angled his dash, feigning an attempt to bypass the swarm and strike the Swarm Mother directly.
'As long as the Heart Piercing exists, the Swarm Mother will keep recovering. The key right now is to steal it. Victory depends on that.'
With a clatter of chains, Aslan stopped. The Swarm Mother, the Hive Mind itself, pulsed. Its thoughts rippled like a void through the swarm.
The venom was draining vitality. A countermeasure was needed.
The charging girl was immune to the Bloodworms' attacks. Assaulting her was pointless.
But her offensive power wasn't exceptional, so she posed no major threat.
The current threat was the man wielding the poison. His offensive power was sufficiently dangerous.
The man was missing an arm. He had only one weapon. That weapon left large openings.
Using the Heart Piercing, it would recover the vitality lost to the poison and turn the tables.
Having reached its decision, the Swarm Mother gathered Bloodworms to mimic the shape of an arm. The limb formed from Bugs drew the Heart Piercing. It was a long appendage, longer than a human arm.
And then it shot forward—a thrust.
It was the Swarm Mother's best effort, a thrust carrying its full intent. The linear trajectory traced a clear line of death.
It was exactly the attack Aslan had been waiting for.
He dodged the incoming Heart Piercing by dropping low, practically collapsing. He let his balance crumble completely, lying flat against the ground to avoid it. The Heart Piercing stabbed through the space where his head had been. The blade that sliced the empty air reeked of decay.
It was a stone sword, seemingly crudely carved from rock. Aslan glanced at the longsword and extended his flail. The heads of the swinging flail meticulously wrapped around the blade, arresting its movement.
With a sharp rattle, the longsword halted. Aslan instantly released the flail and flipped his body over.
He planted his one hand on the ground, reinforcing it to the extreme with Wild Magic. Using his boosted arm, he kicked his legs upward as if doing a handstand. His feet aimed at the flail.
His goal was a disarm.
'Thunder Call.'
As his Fighting Spirit drained, Aslan's legs blurred white before striking the flail. A direct hit on its handle.
Crackthoom!
The flail shot forward with a rolling boom of thunder. Propelled by the flying weapon, the Heart Piercing twirled and drifted near Aslan's feet.
The Bloodworms holding it abandoned the sword, descending upon Aslan to devour him. In that gap, Aslan flipped his body back.
Landing on his feet with a somersault, he snatched up the Heart Piercing.
The firmly held Heart Piercing was a peculiar sword.
A grayish stone sword seemingly carved from rock, its edges were honed to a razor sharpness that gleamed white, limited to the cutting part of the blade.
It was a double-edged longsword shaped like a leaf.
Thick and broad, the blade connected directly to the hilt without a crossguard.
A crude sword. In unskilled hands, it would struggle to inflict a proper wound, let alone sever a limb.
But for Aslan, it was more than enough.
From the moment he heard of the Heart Piercing, he had thought of using it this way.
Beneath the longsword held in his left hand, his shadow vanished.
'Shadow Flip.'
And the moment that shadow returned, the Heart Piercing consumed life. The dozens of Bugs that had been leaping at him were caught in a double-slash trajectory and erased.
Aslan felt the unique sensation of his vitality flooding back as he swung the tightly grasped longsword.
Minimal movement. All Aslan performed were cuts, thrusts, and slashes executed with the barest necessary motion. He steadily swung the stone sword at the Bugs leaping toward him.
He poured mana into his eyes, using his enhanced vision and Luck to sense the incoming Bugs and react. He tilted his head to evade, and used the freshly grown flesh—the stolen vitality—to push away the Bugs trying to devour his arm.
His vitality rose. The stamina worn down by the reckless battle returned. Aslan steadily cut through the Bloodworms, then stepped back and pulled a scroll from his tool pouch.
His arm hadn't regenerated, but the stamina in his remaining limbs, torso, and head had fully recovered. Amid the decaying Bug fluids, Aslan's body was immaculate.
And then the Equalization Magic unfurled from the scroll.
As if rewinding the process of turning to dust, particles formed from nothing, and his right arm regenerated.
Using the newly grown but scar-covered right arm, Aslan retrieved his fallen flail.
With a clatter of chains, Aslan moved.
He swung the flail, thrust and cut with the Heart Piercing. The Bugs that charged into every opening were shattered, sliced, and crushed away. Within that chaos, only Aslan remained whole.
The Bloodworms that clung to his body were repelled by the vitality-draining effect. Aslan trampled over those that fell to the ground as he moved.
"Urrrrraaaah!"
Crash!
Angie struggled against the Bugs. Ereta and Dmitri, lingering at the rear, posed no immediate threat. Only Aslan was the true danger.
So the Swarm Mother miscalculated.
It decided Aslan needed to be dealt with first. Like a frightened Predator fleeing at the sight of a bloated opponent, it poured every single Bloodworm toward Aslan. Within that surging tidal wave of death, Aslan kept moving.
And the moment the party saw this, they moved.
He hadn't given them a single hint of a plan, but the party recognized this as Aslan's offensive.
They perceived what he was doing, and what he wanted.
He was buying time.
Desperately buying time for the party to finish off the Swarm Mother.
Both Ereta and Dmitri charged toward the Swarm Mother.
Even Angie shook off the Bugs and rushed in.
While the three of them attacked, Aslan thoroughly annihilated any Bloodworms that tried to peel away from him. With every swing of his weapons, Bugs died, scattering fluids.
Craaack!
In the meantime, Angie slammed her body into the Swarm Mother—the combination of her Constitution 10, Strength 7 might, and her hardened physique. As her body blow crashed into the Swarm Mother, the amalgamation of its heart and brain quaked violently.
Shaken in the middle of birthing Bugs, the Swarm Mother was left open for Ereta. Gripping her axe and mace, she proceeded to ravage it.
She swung the axe to cleave, pressed the mace against the axe to tear, swung the mace to crush, and stabbed with the axe to rip open wounds. Amid the gushing fluids, Dmitri revealed himself.
Dmitri's crimson longsword flashed, layering cuts over the lacerations Ereta had carved.
It split apart. The Swarm Mother's frail flesh was brutalized and scattered to pieces.
Skriiiieeek!
As the Swarm Mother screamed and collapsed, the Bloodworms fighting Aslan simultaneously flipped onto their backs, their six legs thrashing wildly.
Thud.
The convulsing Bloodworms matched the sound of the Swarm Mother's massive body hitting the floor. Though far from death, Aslan calmly returned the fluid-soaked Heart Piercing and flail to his belt.
"Wh-what, what is this, what's happening?"
As Angie stood bewildered, Ereta and Dmitri remained composed. They knew about the Bloodworms.
This had been Aslan's lie to the bandit leader.
Bloodworms do not die immediately when the Swarm Mother is killed.
They do eventually die, but with conditions.
Only when there are no other living creatures to make into hosts, and only after some time has passed since the Swarm Mother's death.
In the interim, the Bloodworms go berserk, forcibly mutating other hosts' bodies and gathering nutrients to create a new Swarm Mother.
This frenzy was for that purpose.
Presumably, every Bloodworm across Randy Gorge was doing the same.
Aslan had never intended to let the bandits live from the start.
To draw Fay out, both the bandits and the Bloodworms needed to be sufficiently weakened or exhausted—reduced to a level 'Fay could clean up by herself.'
Aslan could guess what was happening among the bandits right now. It was obvious.
He noticed from Dmitri's cryptic expression that the man had figured it out.
But he voiced no complaint. Aslan silently ignored the gaze upon him and made a brief declaration.
"Let's head back."