Chapter 227: The Tin Knight and The Tower of Greed (7)
Translator: RaidenTL
Chapter 227: The Tin Knight and The Tower of Greed (7)
There is a game called hide-and-seek.
It’s a game where people are divided into two teams: one hides, and the other finds them.
It’s exceedingly simple, but its very simplicity necessitates certain restrictions.
Typically, you might limit the hiding area with a rule like, ‘You can’t go outside the house,’ or impose conditions on movement, such as, ‘You can’t move from your hiding spot once you’ve hidden.’
What happens if you don’t?
While it depends on the skill gap between the seeker and the hiders, it’s usually the seeker who ends up in a world of trouble.
And right now, the members of the Tower of Control were experiencing, down to their very bones, just how horrifying a game of ‘hide-and-seek with no rules’ could be.
“Damn it, you still haven’t found him?! Isn’t this what detection magic is for!”
“W-well, because it’s a magic doll, we have to find it by its mana signature alone, as there’s no biological response. But with the continuous battles and use of attack magic, the flow of mana within the castle is extremely chaotic, so it’s not working properly.”
The Tin Knight never fought its enemies head-on.
It constantly moved throughout the castle, concealing itself behind terrain and structures, repeating a cycle of surprise attacks and retreats.
A soldier, stabbed to death by the Tin Knight waiting on the other side the moment he opened a closed door.
A knight, losing his leg to a blade that suddenly shot up from the floor while he was searching the second story.
A mage, his head split open by the Tin Knight who abruptly leaped from a high floor while he was casting detection magic in the castle courtyard.
There were no restrictions on where or how it could hide. No place was safe, even those that had already been searched. And worst of all, in this game of hide-and-seek, the seeker was not some invincible powerhouse but merely a target for slaughter.
Little by little.
The main forces concentrated in the castle were being whittled away.
Bruha ground his teeth and commanded.
“All personnel, assemble in the training grounds. Knights, mages—gather every useful asset in one place!”
In Bruha’s mind, the Tin Knight did not possess the strength to overwhelm the entire castle on its own.
If the Tin Knight’s power was 100, the combined power of Bruha and his subordinates was over 1000.
The reason they were being so helplessly defeated was that the ‘force confronting the Tin Knight at any given moment’ was always 100 or less.
Therefore, if they stopped their half-hearted search and simply gathered in one place, the Tin Knight would no longer be able to run rampant.
Putting the specific numbers aside, Bruha’s judgment—that they should stop scattering and fight together—was not wrong.
There was just one thing.
《Below! Right below! The dirty old man’s blood is here!》
[The ‘Tin Knight’ announces it has found the boss!]
His judgment had come just a moment too late.
Slice. The ceiling of the room where Bruha was staying was carved out in a perfect square.
The ceiling that should have been protecting their heads transformed into a press, crushing those below.
CRASH!
The reason mages often keep familiars is to protect their bodies.
Bruha couldn’t react to the sudden ambush, but the spirit he was contracted to faithfully protected its master.
The moment the lizard-shaped spirit’s eyes flashed, an egg-shaped flame enveloped Bruha and erupted in an explosion.
The blast, which left the inside of the egg completely untouched while incinerating everything around it, blew away the collapsed ceiling in an instant.
But all it could protect was Bruha’s own safety.
His comrades in the same room were engulfed by the flames and died before they could be crushed by the ceiling.
“How dare you!”
Fury filled Bruha’s eyes.
It wasn’t grief for his fallen subordinates… but rage at the realization that he himself could have lost his life in that moment.
Bruha quickly drew upon all the mana in his body.
WHAM!
And before he could even manifest his magic, his body was sent flying sideways like a tennis ball.
“Keuk!”
The only reason Bruha wasn’t killed instantly was that the egg-shaped barrier had withstood the Tin Knight’s slash.
As befitting a member of the Rognir bloodline, which had mixed its lineage with the blood of countless powerful mages, his mana was vast, and his familiar’s defensive capabilities were equally superb.
Among the skills Bruha could wield were wide-area attack spells, sniping techniques that could precisely target a single individual, and various summoning arts.
The title of 4th rank mage was not just for show. He served as a unit commander not merely because of his bloodline, but because he possessed more than enough skill for the role.
[The ‘Tin Knight’ declares it’s short on time and will end this before the pattern emerges!]
However, no matter how many abilities and skills one possessed, they were meaningless without the chance to use them.
The moment the Tin Knight struck the egg-shaped flame with its shield, the three gems embedded in it unleashed their mana at once.
KRA-KA-KA-BOOM!
Bruha’s body was violently thrown back, smashing through several of the castle’s interior walls.
Faced with the immense impact, the lizard spirit shrieked.
The moment Bruha’s body broke through the castle’s outer wall and was flung outside, the egg of flame protecting him shattered as if fading away.
Bruha’s body came crashing down on top of another unit that happened to be passing by.
Thud. A figure who appeared to be a mage was crushed beneath Bruha.
“Shit, which bastard— L-Lord Bruha!?”
Bruha’s eyes were half-lidded, and drool trickled from his mouth.
Seeing his clearly abnormal state, the mage and his unit were stunned but quickly assumed a battle formation.
A 3rd rank mage and several knights. It was Bruha’s good fortune to have run into one of the most skilled squads in the castle.
It was also their misfortune.
Thwip!
From the hole Bruha’s body had created, the Tin Knight leaped out.
Crack. The mana orb Gale had given it shattered, its essence seeping into the Tin Knight.
Combining its remaining mana with the newly charged amount, its reserves were now at about 70% of maximum.
The Tin Knight drew out all but 20% of that power.
In the next moment, no one besides the Tin Knight, who had unleashed the technique, could comprehend what had happened.
The knight who tried to swing his sword at the descending Tin Knight, the mage who had deployed a protective spell, the familiars that had revealed their power to protect their masters.
Without a single exception, they were all shattered into countless pieces.
The scene looked as if dozens of giant swords had viciously minced the ground.
An elite unit that would have boasted countless victories on the battlefield and a 4th rank mage raised by the Rognir family met their miserable end without a single chance to display their true strength.
The Tin Knight’s skull necklace sang.
《Gone! It’s gone now! The dirty old man’s blood isn’t here!》
[The ‘Tin Knight’ says it seems to have reached four digits and will now withdraw!]
A considerable number of enemies still remained in the castle, but the Tin Knight ignored them and began its journey back.
It took a rather long time for the remaining forces, leaderless and clamoring to find a Tin Knight that was no longer there, to see the silver hair buried in a massive pool of blood and flesh and realize that it was all over.
*
The relationship between Gale Elilaz and the Tower of Control had never been good.
In fact, when the Tower of Control first tried to recruit her, they had immediately promised her a 4th rank position.
Considering that even those who had served the same tower for decades had to shed blood and tears to reach the 4th rank, this was an absolutely incredible offer.
What’s more, the marriage candidates mentioned at the time were Jeras, Valdeus, and Teur—all of whom were leading contenders to be the next ruler of Control.
The gray old man had essentially offered Gale the position of the next queen, and people assumed she would ‘of course’ accept the proposal.
However.
“—Huh? No, I don’t want to.”
The offer was brutally rejected, and Gale joined the Tower of Protection instead.
Worse, the reason she gave was a single sentence: ‘I wanted to build the best magic doll.’
It was a major incident where their vaunted royal bloodline was pushed aside for a mere doll. Although Control appeared to handle it with magnanimity on the surface, there were more than enough people who held a grudge. It was no accident that Jeras had tried to kill Gale the moment he saw her.
So when the White Knight, Gale’s veritable symbol, appeared before a unit under the Tower of Control’s command, it was only natural that they burned with the desire to smash it to pieces.
Especially since it wasn’t a group of enemies, but a single White Knight that had appeared all by itself.
“It’ll be glorious to turn that magic doll into a pile of scrap and throw it at that damn girl’s feet!”
In another castle, about a thirty-minute journey from Bruha’s, the unit commander in charge laughed heartily as he spoke.
RUMBLE-CRACK!
A single blow was all it took for his smile to freeze solid.
“Block it! Block it, whatever it takes!”
“Shit, what… what kind of ridiculous power is this! Just how much money did she pour into this thing?!”
The White Knight didn’t just leap into the castle alone and engage in a game of killing hide-and-seek like the Tin Knight. That was a perverted act only the Tin Knight could pull off.
Instead, it executed its own version of a hit-and-run tactic.
It would charge the castle, spear-first, with a fast and powerful strike, then bounce off again before the enemy could react.
Logically, it made no sense.
A castle wasn’t made of paper, so what kind of damage could a mere spear charge do?
It did damage. A lot of it.
Crack.
Craaack.
CRA-A-A-ACK!
At first, it was just a tremor. After a few repetitions, cracks appeared. After about ten, an entire section of the castle wall collapsed.
The Tower of Control was no fool; they tried to deploy defensive magic and send out interception units, but the knight’s power was too immense to be fully blocked by their barriers, and its speed was too great for their units to catch.
Considering that the mana the White Knight unleashed in a single charge-and-retreat exceeded the total mana capacity of an average mage, the outcome was, in a way, inevitable.
This horrifying guerrilla attack only stopped when the exasperated commander personally attempted an interception and was skewered by the White Knight. Having felled the member of the Rognir bloodline, the White Knight departed as if it had no further business there, returning to a ship flying far away in the sky.
The Tower of Control urgently ordered nearby units to pursue them, but the ship cut through the air at a terrifying speed and leisurely escaped.
And about an hour later.
A similar process was repeated at another unit.
The dolls had no need for rest.
And the mana required to move them was still overflowing.