The Proof of Worth (13)
"It's fine."
When she came to herself again, that was the first thing she heard: his voice.
"Nothing's wrong."
His quiet reassurance swept away, all at once, the vile self-loathing and fear that came crashing over her the moment her senses returned.
It was all right to fail. She wouldn't be cast aside. She would be given another chance.
...Yes!
That was enough to move Lena's heart; no grand reward was necessary. That one belief alone was enough to make her resolve harden once more, enough to drive her loyalty even deeper than before.
"Haaah..."
Opening her eyes, Lena instinctively reached out, tore through the cocoon's membrane, and spilled out in a rush along with the nutrient fluid that had filled it, slapping down onto the nest floor.
She gagged and retched, coughing up stream after stream of water, but even then she immediately felt at her neck and body. The hard carapace wrapped around her without a single gap, the monster's hands still there exactly as they had been when the enemy's blade came down on her throat.
"You bastard!"
And after the joy and ecstasy of being alive again came fury. Rage at the one who had dared attack her, wound her, and make him worry for her.
1. Continue advancing.
Just then, a general order had gone out to the allied forces that had fought and won their battle. Lena immediately opened her back armor, pulled out her rain-soaked wings, and spread them wide.
The wings dried in an instant as she infused them with mana, beating once as her body—too heavy to be lifted by those thin, light membranes alone—shot up into the air.
I'm going to kill him. I will, no matter what.
Her eyes flashed with a frenzy stained by wrath as she tore across the sky and headed for the battlefield.
By the time Lena was nearly there, the enemy had already begun assembling yet another massive force and was trying to strike back at their army.
"W-we've got nothing left. This is our last hope!"
Baut, the baron who had gone mad with his own ambition and taken hands with a calamity that should never have been touched, screamed while half out of his mind, staring at the crystal orb that showed the state of the battlefield.
Inside the orb, his soldiers were charging bravely at the enemy. But their appearance was strange.
They rushed forward with no real discipline or tactics, having lost all reason. They looked like lunatics. In the first place, their bloodshot eyes and writhing veins were proof that the soldiers were far from normal.
"Wipe them all out. Please!"
He had turned his own people and soldiers into zombies—walking corpses under his control—and now, with a deathly pale face, he clasped his hands together.
He had already come too far to be ashamed of the contradiction and hypocrisy of committing such vile sins and then falling to fear and begging the gods for help.
"Quit making a fuss and look. We can win this easily."
He wasn't the only one hoping for victory. The skull, having poured everything it possessed into this strike, clacked its teeth and stared at the crystal orb without blinking, not allowing itself even the slightest distraction.
"My power works better the stronger the vessel is. Soldiers and knights aren't the same as ordinary villagers. There's no question they'll overwhelm those things!"
The skull tightened its grip on its staff and growled. It could not bear to admit that its insight was weaker than its opponent's; instead, it stayed obsessed with proving itself once more.
"Look!"
In truth, the skull's confidence did seem to bear out somewhat when the first clash with the enemy finally broke out.
"Our lord is more of a monster than I expected. To think he'd go so far as to turn even his soldiers and knights into these things and throw them into battle."
Inside the fortress, where the zombies and the defenders were colliding, Robinson clicked his tongue as he looked toward the enemy massing in front of them.
The armored zombies carrying weapons were, naturally, much stronger than those who had only teeth and claws. The minions they mass-produced as their main force were mostly beast-type soldiers with tough bodies and real combat strength.
In particular, the mainstays were giant spider beasts and four-legged creatures. Even against those savage monsters, the zombie soldiers fought without giving ground.
"This might drag on longer than I thought."
A spider that had lunged at them was cleaved apart by a soldier's halberd, and Robinson clicked his tongue before sweeping his tail to fire a beam cannon. Then he raised a mana-charged claw and blocked a fireball that had come flying in from far away.
The magic attacks the zombie mages occasionally hurled were deadly, irritating blows to ordinary minions who lacked mana and had no way to answer in kind.
"Send the warriors to take out the mages first."
Robinson took direct control of the troops to improve their odds. At his command, the waiting warrior-class soldiers charged forward and threw themselves at the zombie mages.
The warrior-class soldiers were all built from units with over 50 percent compatibility—an elite group, by their own standards.
But blocking their path as they forced through the enemy attacks with their tentacles and moved in to snipe the mages were zombie knights of their own.
The zombie knights fought the warriors with savage ferocity and never yielded. They had forgotten bodily injury, pain, and fear alike; their strength was nothing like what it had been in life.
And there were also the horrifying corpse golems, stitched together from bodies. It was only natural that they were being pushed back little by little.
"It'll be different once Lena gets here."
At the sight of all this, Karin bit her lip, then swept out her arm and summoned her tentacles into the battle.
Scattering Ascalas's essence, reduced to fine powder and used to encroach from a distance, was also being blocked by the enemy's power over the zombies. In a situation like this, she was waiting for Lena to arrive.
The spear that would smash through the enemy's thick shield—the strongest spear of Ascalas.
Direct attack on the lord's castle.
"What...!"
But the extra mission given to Lena was not simply to support the battlefield. Karin's eyes flew wide when she saw Lena, cutting through the sky, pass right over this battlefield.
"What's there to be surprised about? That one has always made the right choice. It's the same this time too!"
Robinson, on the other hand, burst out laughing as though he'd expected exactly this.
"We just believe and fight. That's our job."
The enemy had gathered every last shred of their strength and thrown themselves into their final resistance. In a way, it was only natural that the allied force, which had received no real reinforcement, would be pushed back. But holding the enemy's ankles and keeping them occupied was more than enough.
If that happened, then the allied force's strongest weapon could strike precisely into the opening and deliver a perfect shot.
That didn't mean they were disposable pawns to be used and discarded.
They simply believed in the web that bound them together, and because the information they gained through Insight told them victory was certain, they stayed their ground to the very end.
"Emergency... emergency! Enemy approaching!"
"Black Beetles! They're black wasps!"
And so, when Lena at last ignored the battlefield entirely and tore across the empty sky at tremendous speed, drawing near the fortress, the lord's castle rang out with frantic alarms and descended into chaos.
"Ah..."
The shock suffered by Baron Baut, the lord of the castle, was beyond words. To think that he would push past the objections of his escort knights and run to the ramparts just to see Lena appear overhead.
"Impossible. That's impossible! You were dead! Your throat was cut!"
He pointed at Lena, floating in the air alongside the type wasps, and screamed. At that cry, Lena's face, which had been looking down at him, twisted viciously.
"Trash..."
Rather than answer the panicked howl, she muttered the word under her breath, then closed her mouth and leveled her spear.
There was no need to speak at length. In truth, even enmity and revenge no longer mattered. In the end, this was an endless competition that could only end when one side died.
He had failed to kill Lena. So now, he would simply pay the price.
***
"Let's head back in soon. By the way, you really like mobile games, huh?"
"I've been getting into them lately."
"The guys say you even sit in the dorm glued to your phone. And ever since you joined, you hardly even play ranked anymore... Well, if you do well in scrims, I guess it doesn't matter. I hear the person who just won the championship recently is like that too."
The coach tossed the cigarette he'd finished into the trash can and laughed at me while I looked at my phone. I smiled and answered in kind, then put the phone away. It had been break time in the middle of practice, so I needed to head back in.
Lena was on the verge of her showdown, but I trusted her. I could feel it now. Even without watching through my phone, she and I were still connected.
"You know today's our online send-off ceremony. It's the first chance you'll have to officially greet the fans. And the season opener is next week already. Confident?"
He asked if I was confident. It was a meaningless question, one not even worth answering.
"Of course."
I answered without hesitation. It was a matter of course, a fact so obvious it didn't even need saying. It had to be true.
"W-wow. That's some confidence."
"Because there are people who believe in me, and people who need to believe in me. I can't ever betray that."
Faith is a double-edged sword. It can be a great strength, but it can also become a weakness. The coach seemed to misunderstand my words as referring to my teammates, but in my head, the people fighting in that other world still came first.
The contest where they trusted me and fought with their lives on the line.
So I had to repay that trust here, too.