Cracking the Formation
“KRAAAAWK!!!”
Given that numbers were everything, the first thing to catch the eye was Hive. The colossal murder of crows pouring endlessly from the shadows looked vicious enough to be threatening even from a distance.
If they had been ordinary summons, no one would have thought twice. But every single one of those birds was under the effect of Subjugator. The sheer pressure each crow radiated was no joke.
And now that entire flock was charging in formation. Even if you desperately tried to shoot them down, for every crow you dropped, twice as many came screaming in to take its place.
No matter how hard you tried to clear them, the only end to that infinite wheel was your own collapse.
“GRAAAAAH!!!”
“Get away! Get the hell away from me!!!”
“S-save m—khahk…?!”
Those who grasped that truth began to scream, and their lines crumbled fast. At first they had held some semblance of formation, wiping out swathes of the flock with blood techniques. But as time dragged on and the enemy showed no sign of thinning, the ones screaming became them.
They could not be killed. That fact became terror, and the terror began to eat their resolve from the inside out.
In a normal war, a general would have ordered a rapid regroup. At the very least, there should have been someone in the position of a knight-commander from a fantasy novel, or a party leader to hold them together.
But who were these people? Arrogant, insolent creatures who only bothered to lift their heavy asses after watching several of their own kind die. A rabble of trash who swung swords on the strength of their birthright alone and had the gall to call themselves a knight order — it was almost embarrassing.
Even their method of growing stronger amounted to nothing more than sucking the blood of someone stronger. Most of them had never faced a genuine threat to their lives. Trash that had settled comfortably into the frame of “superior” and gotten drunk on the empty prestige of knighthood could not possibly possess the intelligence to break this situation.
Of course, I didn’t let my guard down. Every now and then, even among trash like that, you found one who had been somewhat enlightened — a little less trash, or even useful.
I kept a careful eye on the flow and had Hive perform the appropriate act of hit-and-run. The textbook move against any enemy was to hit the weak points first. But if you went after nothing but weaknesses too blatantly, you only put them on alert and made their alliance even more solid.
Can’t have that.
Hive only looked overwhelming because the enemy had been caught flat-footed by the sudden assault. Given time, they would recover their composure.
If you weren’t certain the opening strike could finish them, you simply treated that first move as a means of preparing the next. You used the gap you had created to set the stage for an even larger fracture.
Deceiving the enemy wasn’t something that only worked from the inside. Sometimes, standing in the enemy’s position made it even easier.
The most troublesome factor at this stage was that those arrogant bastards could form a united front at any moment. So what I needed to do from here was simple: make breaking their gathering the absolute priority.
I would dangle the bait right in front of their eyes — discreetly enough that they couldn’t help but step forward, yet unmistakably clear. The enemy that had been driving them into a corner was being rapidly reduced.
I would plant the illusion that the enemy’s strength was failing.
“Now!! Everyone, chaaaaarge!!!”
““UOOOOOOH!!!!””
Anyone who thought about it for even a second would have realized it was bait. But these were creatures whose emotions Echidna had been continuously amplifying. There was no way they could see it clearly.
“Ugh?! Everyone, stay calm and hold formation! If you move recklessly now, you’ll be dancing exactly as the enemy wants!!”
Sure enough, someone mid-battle quickly assessed the situation and sensed something wrong. But I didn’t care. Because these vampires were so arrogant and insolent that they were, in reverse, honest.
“Shut up! Don’t you dare give me orders, you spineless coward who can do nothing but shout without even being ashamed of your own weakness!!”
An honest fool never listens to others. He believes only what he sees with his own eyes.
“As Sir Veli says! If you truly call yourselves knights, prove it not with a hundred words, but by stepping forward boldly and cutting the enemy down with your own power!!”
“Sir Ollos speaks well. Now is the time to show the strength of our knight order!!!”
““OOOOOOH!!!!””
And once a fool found others agreeing with him, he swelled with confidence at once. The idiocy that had begun to heat up spread with uncanny speed, infecting everyone around it.
“Khuhuh… Even among the same blood, the concentration differs. Even if we share the same superior rank, it seems a mere baron’s power reaches its limit here.”
Meanwhile, the slimy ones never thought about what came after. They simply lunged for the profit right in front of them, greed first. Even if that meant biting their own comrades, they put their own desire first.
“Y-you fools…”
The result: the one who had spoken sense found himself isolated. Even if he ordered those who overestimated their own strength and abandoned formation to return, people whose stubbornness matched their pride would never bend a decision once made just to listen to him.
“Khuk…!”
Which meant that by exploiting that gap, I could easily shatter their cohesion while also eliminating a potential danger who might have become a rallying point.
In an instant the crows swarmed him, crushing his face, boring through his throat, and thrashing inside his lungs. Growl leapt and bit the falling vampire to death.
Once with the Magic Armor, twice with the teeth of his jaws, and finally with those sickle-sharp claws — the vampire was torn through three times in a blink, thrashing as blood poured from him.
But escaping Growl’s saw-like teeth was no easy feat, and under Growl’s trait Bloodshed, the vampire bled far more than usual and rapidly lost strength.
“Ah… aaaaah…”
Gulp!
In the end he became a handful of bloody pulp and nourishment for Growl. The number of vampires who had already vanished that way was already past ten fingers.
To them, Growl was probably a hard counter in a different sense entirely.
Of course, that only held as long as the matchup favored him. Against something like this dungeon’s boss, whose blood itself carried a petrifying ability, even Growl would struggle. But once the same pattern repeated, it couldn’t help but draw the eye. Naturally, vampires began to swarm Growl’s side as well, and a bloody free-for-all erupted.
And the one who stepped in as if she had been waiting for exactly that was Echidna. From the moment her skill Self-Faith reached its maximum of level 10, she had been able to wield divine power as naturally as any other priest.
She had never been directly taught the techniques that served as a standard, so for now she was operating entirely through imitation. But the divine power forged from her faith was unmistakably the real thing.
“Khuh…! This light… a human from the Papal Court?!”
“It’s a little different from the power those damned servants of light used, but it’s just as dangerous! Everyone, be careful!!”
Regardless of their opinion of humans, they at least recognized that divine power was poison to them, and they immediately shifted into a defensive stance.
“Grrrrr… Keng!!”
“Khup, a mere beast dares…!!!”
Growl immediately exploited the opening and began attacking, while Echidna used Divine Aura to infuse the axe-spear form of her Magic Armor with divine power and charged the enemy.
Just as when Kallion constructed a Magic Armor and the weapon surged with mana carrying the Holy attribute to the same effect, the Magic Armor Echidna now wielded was, quite literally, divine power solidified into the shape of a weapon.
She still had no traits of her own, so no particularly outstanding force was packed into it. But separate from that, the inherent power of divine energy mixed with Echidna’s abilities as a devil, purifying those she struck while simultaneously shaking their minds and amplifying their emotions.
Put simply, anyone hit by Echidna inevitably found their field of vision narrowing until they could look at nothing but her — a kind of forced “taunt” effect. Even without being struck, simply entering the range of her divine power was enough to trigger it.
It was proof that the Magic Armor was gradually becoming familiar to the summons’ bodies.
Aside from the initial framework, all subsequent growth had to be left entirely to individual skill, so I had stamped it as incomplete. But watching it produce proper results like this — I would be lying if I said I wasn’t proud.
If data continued to accumulate this way, it would clearly work in my favor in the end. The original purpose of Magic Armor had been to fully melt non-standard powers — traits and skills — into a weapon, after all.
In that sense, the way Echidna was using her Magic Armor right now aligned perfectly with my initial goal.
The problem was that by the time it produced this much effect, the Magic Armor itself had already fused so thoroughly with the user that peeling it off was nearly impossible. That was a problem for another day.
While Growl and Echidna steadily whittled the enemy down, the ones drawing the most aggro and wiping them out in bulk from the rear were, without question, the duo of Keres and Comet.
The principle was simple.
The light Keres emitted inevitably drew in lingering thoughts. For vampires, who were treated as part of the undead lineage, being pulled toward that light was only natural.
While Keres finished them off one by one, Comet bought time. Controlling blood ultimately meant that if you blocked the blood flow, gaps would open whether you noticed them or not.
Comet turned that into a systematic operation. She casually deflected the enemy’s attacks with nanomachines. Naturally, those nanomachines mixed into the blood.
Impurities — nanomachines — mixed into pure blood. Vampires, hypersensitive to blood above all else, would feel the wrongness immediately.
The moment their attention shifted from Comet to something else, Keres and Comet pressed the attack. If a flustered vampire tried to block, they twisted the blood flow in that opening. Explosion, reshaping — it didn’t matter. What mattered was shutting down whatever action the vampire was about to take.
Once panic set in, even someone with excellent self-control needed time to recompose their emotions. In a battle where every second was critical, panicking hard enough that you couldn’t respond was as good as death.
Once a gap was made, the rest was Keres’s stage alone.
Fwoooosh!!
“….!!!!”
“…?!!”
She moved the soul-scorching blue flames as if they were part of her own body and swallowed the enemy whole. From the roots of their souls they slowly carbonized, denied even the common mercy of a death cry, and met a wretched end.
The vampire army that had seemed endless crumbled away completely.
“Well done.”
It wasn’t over yet, so I sent words of praise through the Link for those still holding their positions to hear. Different emotions came back, but all of them carried joy.
As expected of a dungeon, levels rose quickly. Hive’s involvement in this fight must have been especially high — the level that had barely budged until now shot up by a full one in an instant.
At this pace, two more times, maybe three, and we would reach the target of level 30. Comet’s level, which had been rising slower than Shiz’s due to lower activity, was climbing fast as well. By the time this dungeon ended, my summons as a whole would have advanced another stage of evolution.
Somehow I had ended up taking it easy, but even that was starting to show its end.
“Truly a pointless act, isn’t it?”
Thwack!!
I tilted my head slightly to the side, dodging the crimson blood blade that punched through the shadow chair, then turned my body just enough to look behind me.
“You go on and on about nobility this and that, and then there’s still a bastard who tries a proper assassination. Unbelievable.”
A single vampire stood there. His entire body was wrapped in a black hood, and in his hand was a red dagger that had clearly just pierced the chair.
“I concealed both presence and killing intent. How did you know?”
“From the beginning, you stupid parasite.”
From the moment this creature had set foot in the city until the moment he arrived at my side, Haze had been observing and recording every single second. And among them all, this one had been watched the closest.
The reason was simple. This individual was the strongest in the group. Infinitely weaker than the dungeon’s boss, but far superior to the idiots who had been strutting around calling themselves knights.
Halt!
The body that had been about to move the instant my sharp criticism landed froze unnaturally in midair. Haze had fixed the space his body occupied.
“…My body won’t move.”
“Struggling will only make it hurt more, so just give up.”
“So the price that madwoman paid, begging to be killed, was worth something after all. The situation grows complicated.”
Crunch, crack.
Ignoring my warning, he forced his body to move — and his entire frame twisted. No: he was deliberately contorting himself, tearing his own flesh to draw out blood. Blood that should have been a vivid scarlet was somehow dead black.
Well now.
“Planning to die?”
“I cannot leave you alive in this place.”
Squelch!
His body completely came apart. Haze, no longer willing to tolerate any more recklessness, crushed him as if wringing him out. With every compression, jet-black blood gushed from his body and soaked the floor.
“That doesn’t usually mean choosing self-destruction.”
“I judged that defeating you with my own power was impossible. Therefore I chose the best available means to complete the duty entrusted to me. All of it… for the great Emperor…!”
Vwoooom!!
Just before his neck twisted and burst completely, the blood pooled around him condensed into the form of a black sphere. I fed mana to Haze to isolate the space itself, then added Kallion’s mana and Annihilated every unclean thing inside.
Pop!!!
With a short sound like a balloon bursting, the black sphere ruptured and vanished. That alone drained half the mana that Subjugator had elevated.
If I hadn’t isolated the space, whatever was inside that thing would have erupted and delivered something very close to death. That was only a matter of possibility, though.
The reality was that my power was more than enough to stop that attack, and I had simply done so because I could.
The death of a vampire who had gone mad in a direction entirely different from the ones over there became, quite literally, a dog’s death.
Was that all of them? Then it was time to farm.
“Shiz.”
I watched the lantern drift across the corpses of the parasites that had died on my order, collecting souls, and wondered what a vampire’s soul would feel like. Then I repaired the hole in the shadow chair and settled back into my seat.