The Graveyard of Knights (2)
⊳ Objective: Slay all of the moving dead, the 'Phantom Knights'.
🎁 Reward ①: Hidden Route — Entry to the 'Nameless King'.
There was no time to stand around like an idiot.
I immediately swung my spear and charged, wedging myself into the gaps between the phantom knights.
Kwa-jik!
The spearhead punched straight through a knight's chest.
So this was what they meant by a superior matchup.
The armor crumpled like a clamshell, making a mockery of the gate's C-rank label.
Graaaaah—!
The holy power flowing from my spear swept away the knights' mournful, spectral aura.
One attack, one kill at minimum... no, wait.
'I'm taking three!'
Gritting my teeth, I whirled the spear around. The more I cut them down, the harder the phantom knights swarmed in.
I smashed the skulls of the ones at the front with thrusts, then swept the shaft in a wide arc to carve through the waists of the ones behind.
Kwagak!
Scrap metal scattered roughly through the air.
No time to catch my breath. I fired off my knees and drove the clutched spearshaft out in a long, sweeping thrust.
Slash.
KGWAGAGAGAGANG!
The knights directly ahead ascended to the afterlife all at once.
After a solemn moment of silence lasting all of 0.001 seconds—
"...!"
I felt a knight behind me swinging a blade at my back.
My Body stat had climbed, and my senses had sharpened right along with it.
Chaeng!
Pivoting on my right foot, I turned my body and parried the blade with my spear.
"Ugh, dammit!"
I was busy enough as it was — who had time for tactical maneuvers?
I kicked the knight square in the torso, and a heavy weight reverberated up my leg. My kicks carried no holy power, so they couldn't deal much damage — but knocking an enemy off balance was another matter entirely.
I drove my spear into the torso of the phantom knight as it staggered, trying to recover its footing.
Pagak!
Once again, its defenses shattered with almost insulting ease.
When facing an enemy with better specs than your own, the most troublesome hurdle is always this: their defense. You can dodge a powerful attack, you can keep up with complicated techniques — but if you can't punch through a thick shell, you will never win, no matter what.
Put the other way—
If my attacks landed, I could talk about victory against any opponent in existence.
"Hoo...!"
Exhaling the stale air pooled in my lungs, I twisted my grip on the spearshaft.
This wasn't the amount of effort I'd planned on exerting. I'd intended to carve out only the path to the castle where the boss waited, nothing more.
'The hidden route!'
Something about the reward's terms was far from ordinary. Thanks to that, I was on an unplanned time attack.
I had to clear out every knight and take on the boss, all within five hours.
"Come on out, all of you! Rush me at once!"
"Hah... hah..."
My shoulders were starting to ache. Strength was draining bit by bit from the hand gripping the spear.
'How does this never end?!'
I'd been fighting nearly nonstop for an hour, and still the knights kept crawling out.
I pulled a potion from my subspace and downed it. The fatigue washed away, but the situation was hardly a cheerful one.
Ddeugeureok!
I crushed an onrushing knight with my holy spear, thinking hard.
"Something's off here."
Their numbers were excessive. I was dropping roughly ten a minute for a straight hour, yet instead of thinning, the knights only multiplied.
A strange unease flickered inside me.
'This is not the volume a C-rank gate should be producing.'
When a gate's monster quality falls below its difficulty rating, it's usually because their numbers are overwhelming instead. But the phantom knights, judged objectively, were exactly what a C-rank gate should have contained. Even at my current level, I would have struggled considerably without a spear charged with holy power.
And monsters like that come in overwhelming numbers too?
"Don't tell me..."
I stopped mid-swing and withdrew from the battlefield for a moment. The knights gave chase with glinting eyes, but their speed wasn't all that impressive.
Ta-dat, tat!
Stepping over the wreckage, I climbed a collapsed watchtower and scanned the surroundings. A ruined kingdom stretched out beneath a blood-red sky — and beneath it, the knights churned like a rolling wave... flowing toward me in long, stretched-out lines, as if from somewhere far off.
It looked like a marching column, but there was no balance to it, no formation. The way they moved, pushed along from behind, was closer to a river current than an army on the move.
"Just as I thought."
The knights weren't hiding somewhere and emerging.
They were being summoned. Knights conjured from somewhere distant were pouring toward my position.
'No wonder killing them never ends.'
Summoner types usually worked like this. Because killing the summoner could neutralize every summoned monster at once, their gate ratings tended to get set a notch lower. But this same type was also what wiped out inexperienced rookie parties more often than anything else. They'd slaughter the endless oncoming monsters without a shred of suspicion, burn through their stamina completely — and by the time they realized it was a summoning pattern and went looking for the summoner, it was already far too late.
Solion Guild had been slightly over-spec for this gate. That was the only reason they'd been able to just carve a path straight to the boss without ever figuring out it was a summoning setup.
"Tch. Wasted time."
Would it kill whoever compiled these reports to investigate a little more carefully?
Scratching my head, I traced the knights' line of march. The swarm stretched long toward the northeast from the castle. Follow that current far enough, and I would find whatever was summoning them.
Twenty minutes of running through the ruined buildings, and a vast plain opened up in the distance.
Grrrhhh—
Ddeugeureok! Ddeugeureok!
Across the ground, a black miasma spread wide and thin like fog. Where a sliver of it seeped into the earth, an armored knight burst up from below, parting the soil.
"There it is."
No need to deliberate. At the center of the wasteland, I could see a figure in a black hooded robe sweeping a staff back and forth.
Muttering incomprehensible words while brandishing a staff twice its own size — an unsettling sight, to say the least.
"So it really was... a necromancer."
A monster that reared the dead and kept them as servants. Whatever it looked like, however it behaved — everything that stalked the inside of a gate was, by definition, a monster.
'The phantom knights are everywhere around it, and that suspicious black fog is thick as anything.'
Honestly, the knights weren't the problem. The fog was. One careless breath and I'd pick up a curse, and that would be a headache and a half.
'In that case.'
I found a suitably flat spot: the rooftop of a half-collapsed stone building. Roughly a hundred and fifty meters separated me from the necromancer.
"At this range, I could do it blindfolded."
The corner of my mouth curled up as I set my stance — legs spread slightly apart, gripping the spear at its midpoint. I drew in a deep breath and focused every nerve on the target I had to hit.
The javelin throw is much like firing a bow. The process is silent and still — but the result is more violent than anything else on the field. Once you commit to the throw, it must end in one strike. Anything short of a single clean shot means nothing.
That is the sniper's state of mind.
Whoong—!
The spear tore through the air in a perfect line, gleaming silver as it closed the distance at a fearsous speed.
"Guhrok...!"
Only then did the necromancer notice the spear and begin moving its hand to do something — but that was all it managed. Nothing could move faster than a spear already in flight.
Puk!
The spear ripped clean through the necromancer's abdomen.
"Keuheheoak!"
A short death rattle. The black mist scattered into the wind.
And with it, the phantom knights' bodies crumbled, clattering to the ground like so many empty cans.
"It's been a while for that one, too."
Frankly, the javelin throw isn't a very wise technique. Throwing away your own weapon — of all things — means you should almost never use it unless you're hauling a whole bundle of spare spears on your back. I only did it this time because I was certain of the kill.
"Heave-ho."
I scrambled down from the rooftop. First, retrieve the spear; then, on to the boss.
Walking at a brisk pace and surveying my surroundings, this place looked to be a cemetery. Half-sunken headstones were lined with names in a language I couldn't read.
"..."
I withdrew my gaze and pressed on.
The necromancer, fallen dead on the ground, was barely recognizable as human. Nothing remained but skin stretched over a skull-like face, with black holes gaping where its eyes should have been.
The moment I twisted the spear to pull it free—
You have granted eternal rest to the knights.
The hidden route, the 'Nameless King', has been unlocked.
The quest's completion had been announced.
"The hidden route!"
The words burst out of me before I knew it. Anything hidden is a good thing, whatever it turns out to be. Hidden elixirs, hidden weapons, hidden vaults... If it isn't a sweet pot of honey, there's no reason to hide it, is there?
— Ah... aah...
Just as I was soaking in the anticipation, a dry voice drifted faintly through the air. The necromancer I'd assumed dead was moving its lips, forcing out each word one agonizing syllable at a time.
— My savior...
Somehow, I could understand the words.
— Thank you... for granting them... rest...
"Er, sure."
All I'd actually done was sprint over on the quest's word and hurl a spear. Savior seemed like a bit of an overstatement.
— I entrust my task to you... To the king who lost his name... offer up this name...
— Braver... and greater... than any who ever lived... the king who sat upon the throne and shielded them all...!
The resplendent name came riding on the last breath it could twist out of its throat.
— The Knight King, Grempel!
Having delivered its final line, the necromancer crumbled to dust and vanished. Only the long staff remained, planted in the ground like a discarded pole.
Offer the name to the boss, the 'Blind Knight'.
You have slain the Epic Monster, 'Necromancer Wengrum'.
You have acquired Introduction to Necromancy (B).
You have acquired the [Pine Staff (C)].
"That thing just now was an Epic monster?"
Epic monsters were the mid-boss-grade creatures that occasionally appeared within gates — the kind you normally wouldn't see outside of B-rank gates or higher. I set my suspicion aside for the moment and gathered up the rewards scattered on the ground.
[Pine Staff (C)]
▸ A staff carved whole from a pine tree soaked rich with mana.
The first was a C-rank staff — the very one the necromancer had been wielding until a moment ago. Nothing special about it; I could sell it once I got outside.
"...And what's this?"
The other reward was the problem. It looked like a skill book, but its cover was a dark violet, etched with the image of a crow. No matter how I looked at it, the book radiated nothing but ominous menace.
[Introduction to Necromancy (B)]
▸ A legendary necromancer's exhaustive treatise on the art of necromancy. It is said that simply mastering its contents would make one a first-rate necromancer.
▸ Special Effect
① Unsealed Grimoire: The deeper your understanding of its contents, the greater the value of the rewards you can obtain.
Reading the book's description, my eyes went round. On top of gaining a necromancy skill—
"It's not single-use?"
Skill books, regardless of grade, were always one-time use, no exceptions. Once you absorbed the skill inside, the book vanished without a trace — certified and documented right in the description. But this book had no such clause. It only said that the more thoroughly you studied it, the higher you could raise your level of necromancy. Nowhere did it say the thing could be used only once!
"Jackpot!"
Clutching my thrilled chest, I flipped the book open on the spot.
"..."
And immediately closed it again.
I had seen it. That grotesque script — lines of text thrown together with no rhyme or reason, as if someone had vomited out every pictograph and ideogram in existence all at once. The illustration of a crushed human corpse crammed into the margin was just a bonus.
"Haha...!"
I... thought I might postpone my academic pursuits for later.
I slid the book discreetly into my subspace.
With every phantom knight dealt with, the road ahead came easy. Where a bridge had collapsed, I detoured; where rubble blocked the way, I punched through with my spear. Reaching the boss's location would have taken considerable time the normal way — but a gate with no monsters in it ran like a highway.
Time remaining: roughly two and a half hours.
I arrived before the gates of the castle where the boss waited.