Phantoms of the Past
His arms and legs were sliced by dull blades.
But Arthur pressed on through the ordeal.
The trial continued to torment him in ever-changing ways.
Every time the thought of giving up crept in, Arthur endured solely on his mental fortitude.
Warmth began to circulate through Arthur's body, which had been frozen stiff, as if it might shatter at the slightest touch.
Arthur looked around, awaiting the next trial.
Soon, a presence stirred in the darkness.
"My lord…"
Arthur's head turned toward the voice.
There stood an eighteen-year-old boy who looked incredibly youthful, his hair cropped short.
"Beneto…"
Arthur swallowed dryly.
The youngest soldier to fight in the final war.
"Ran."
The soldier who had fathered a beautiful baby princess just days before.
"Blod."
The knight who had grinned cheerfully, claiming Arthur's army was invincible.
All of them had died in the final war.
Beneto's head had been severed, Ran's limbs torn apart and devoured by a beast.
Blod had blocked Arthur's path, leaving the words "Win no matter what" before turning to ash and vanishing.
"Why did you send us to the battlefield?"
"You killed us."
"What about my daughter now?!"
The title of Monarch.
The immense weight it carried was never light.
Hundreds, even thousands of lives and their families' livelihoods hung on his every command.
Arthur swallowed hard.
"I… I…"
He had witnessed their horrific deaths on the battlefield.
He didn't know what to say. Soon, the space around him filled with people he knew.
All of them were dead.
Splat!
Squish!
"Gaaah!"
"Uwaaak!"
Screams filled the air. They died in exactly the ways they had before.
Beneto's head tumbled off, Ran's body was ripped to shreds.
Blod's form crumbled to ash.
They all perished around him from every direction.
Arthur shook his head.
"Enough…"
His chest ached.
He hated his incompetent self.
"It's your fault!"
"You drove us to our deaths!"
"We could never have won!"
Arthur plugged his ears against their voices piercing his mind.
Their cries choked him.
Headless Beneto grabbed his own severed head with both hands and thrust it forward.
The head spoke.
"I resent you."
"…"
The moment he heard those words, Arthur's eyes flashed open.
He looked around.
An illusion.
All of it was an illusion.
Only now did he realize.
The trial had kept him from awareness.
But Beneto's words had snapped him out of it.
"Do you truly resent me, Beneto?"
"Yes, I resent you. You're an utterly incompetent fool of a monarch who led us all to death."
At those words, Arthur seized the hair of Beneto's head—now just a head.
"Wrong."
Arthur scanned his surroundings.
Beneto had once told him:
'Even if I die in battle, I won't resent you, my lord. It's the path I chose, and I know full well you're suffering more than anyone.'
On the eve of the final war, Arthur had told Beneto to return to his family.
But those were his words.
"My little daughter is fatherless because of you!"
"Wrong again."
Ran had said there was no place for his daughter to grow up in land defiled by other races.
For her sake, for future generations, he would take up the sword—even if it meant death.
That was Ran's declaration.
"I died protecting you."
"Wrong on that too."
Blod was the most loyal of the loyal.
He had said sacrificing his life for Arthur wouldn't be a waste, for it was another path to saving humanity.
"You're nothing but illusions."
Arthur coldly surveyed his surroundings.
"My subordinates are stronger than you and wouldn't waste time resenting anyone."
Whoosh!
Whoosh!
Whoosh!
All those around him dissolved into dust and scattered into the air.
Amid them, one man remained, gazing at Arthur.
"Doesn't it hurt so much you'd rather die?"
A man with short-cropped red hair, one eye blinded, a long sword scar over it.
He was said to have slaughtered countless souls.
"It hurt."
"Didn't you want to run?"
"I did."
"Then why endure?"
"Because I had to."
Arthur swallowed a bitter smile.
He couldn't break here.
The road ahead was long.
"I need your power, Valos."
Valos met Arthur's calm gaze.
He nodded slowly, very slowly.
"Good eyes. Now go back."
Arthur watched Valos fade into the silent darkness.
A faint light leaked from one corner of the gloom.
Arthur chased the light.
The moment he reached it, a vast brilliance engulfed his vision.
Whoosh!
A temple appeared before Arthur's eyes.
Without hesitation, he stepped inside, one foot after another.
At the temple's center stood a statue holding a sword in one hand and the severed head of one he had slain in the other.
Fitting for Valos, Arthur thought.
His gaze fell on the altar.
A bracelet?
It was clearly a bracelet.
Arthur picked it up.
In an instant, his surroundings shifted.
He realized he was back at the place before entering Valos's temple.
He slowly raised his head to the moon.
The moon had regained its original color.
Without delay, Arthur examined the bracelet.
◈ Durability: 10,000/10,000
◈ Wound Recovery: 4%
◈ Heals the wearer's wounds by absorbing blood from corpses of creatures killed within the last 10 minutes. Growth type: Evolves after absorbing blood from 100 lives.
"…Perfect."
Valos's artifact suited the man called the Slaughterer perfectly.
And it was growth-type.
Growth-type artifacts were exceedingly rare.
It was listed as Ordinary Rare, but the ability seemed beyond Rare.
The more I kill, the more I heal?
Arthur swallowed a wry smile.
Monster hunting would be much easier now.
Arthur headed back to his original spot.
The second night.
Splat!
Blood from a slave sprayed across Preit's face.
He furrowed his brow and kicked the apprentice lord's decapitated body away in disgust.
"Filthy slave blood…"
He grimaced at the fallen rune stat, then smirked on one side.
He glanced around.
The others had gathered rune stats from the corpses of ambushed slaves and commoners.
They handed 10% to Preit and split the rest among themselves.
Thanks to the pills, Preit was the strongest among the nobles, and when he claimed the 10% rune stats, one dissenting noble's head rolled with a single stroke.
The others obeyed without question.
It was Preit who first suggested rune stats would drop from killing commoners and slaves.
The noble group had ambushed and slain them one by one the previous night.
As a result, Preit's followers grew overwhelmingly stronger at breakneck speed, with Preit at the pinnacle.
Moreover, after killing twenty, Preit gained a skill.
Leadership. Extremely useful.
Allies with combined stats less than 70% of Preit's would feel greater trust and obedience toward him.
This significantly reduced dissenters.
But the Leadership skill wasn't absolute.
It didn't affect those who inherently rejected or resented him.
Lewis was one such.
Foolish. Doesn't he realize what happens if you rampage in the training camp?
Lewis thought of two idiots.
Preit and Arthur.
Rampaging too much in the training camp was unwise, Lewis judged.
Once assigned territories as lords, commoners and slaves would band together and target Preit first.
Would the other nobles, who submitted this way, stick with him then?
Absolutely not.
They feigned loyalty now because death loomed close, but lordship would change everything.
"Lewis, on my continent, I've killed this many slaves and commoners."
He held up five fingers.
Lewis tilted his head slightly.
"Five hundred. Five hundred of those filthy bugs. Isn't it glorious, being born human like us, wielding power over lives so easily?"
Like Preit, Lewis hailed from a grand ducal house.
So Preit felt a camaraderie.
But Lewis flashed a fake smile.
"Impressive."
Lewis thought with a smile:
He's dead soon. Tsk!
Bragging like that from his own mouth. Preit was all talk, no substance.
The 79th.
Arthur realized no monsters were in sight, even after scouring with wide eyes.
Finding even one felt like plucking stars from the sky.
He pondered the reason.
Some are growing fast. They've expanded territories faster than regular apprentice lords and hunt monsters quicker. That's depleting their numbers rapidly.
Monsters on the Vice Plains were finite.
Two hundred people sharing them meant shortages were inevitable.
Especially with fast-growing groups.
But just one more.
One more, and Arthur would meet the condition.
For an hour, he wandered searching for a single monster.
Soon, he spotted a bipedal boar.
Bipedal boars walked upright like humans, their bulk massive as mountains.
Far stronger than goblins, with brute strength.
A full-speed charge would shatter bones on impact.
I have to catch it, even if I push myself.
Arthur watched the bipedal boar silently, biding the perfect moment.
"Urgh…"
After slaying the bipedal boar, Arthur felt throbbing pain throughout his body.
A groan escaped his lips.
The beast's hide was so tough it tore the calluses from his hands anew, and blocking its charge slammed his back into a tree.
Fortunately, jamming his spear into its gaping maw made the kill somewhat easier.
Sensing its user's injury, a tiny snake emerged from the Uroboros' Young Devouring Serpent bracelet on Arthur's left wrist.
The snake slithered to the bipedal boar's corpse and bit into it.
Slurp! Slurp!
The little snake's body swelled.
It was sucking blood.
Soon, the drained bipedal boar began to wither and shrivel.