Ch. 105: Battle after Attack
Time passed, where the position of the moon told him that it was halfway through the night, Loren was looking up into the sky, sitting down and leaning back against the blade of his great sword, which he had stabbed into the ground.
Near him was Dia, still drinking wine, and next to her asking her questions was Lapis, who for some reason kept on glancing at him.
In the end, even though they set up camp, no one went to sleep.
As she had declared earlier, Dia planned on not sleeping at all, and Lapis, out of curiosity, was trying to extract as much information as she could out of her.
Loren felt a strong opposition against sleeping while his client was awake, so all of them were currently awake.
Part of Loren’s reason was Dia staying up, but the stronger one was the feeling that he shouldn’t let Lapis and Dia alone together.
Although she didn’t interact with people at all, Dia was someone who lived during the final years of the Ancient Kingdom, someone you usually wouldn’t be able to meet.
There was bound to be some dangerous knowledge within the things she knew, but since she was an Elder, things that were dangerous to humans might not seem so dangerous to her, so Loren was anxious that she would say something that could possibly mean the end of the world.
“You’re not trusted at all.”
When Dia said with a laugh as she saw Loren all worried, Lapis puffed out her cheeks slightly.
“He has faith in me so it’s okay.”
As Loren wondered if there was a difference between the two, he smelled something on the wind and slowly stood up.
“They’re here.”
“It seems so.”
Seeing Dia and Lapis stand up at the same time as he pulled his great sword out of the ground, Shayna, who took the form of a girl with wings, suddenly appeared in front of him.
‘Onii-san, I’ll tune our sights.’
Loren, who was but a human, didn’t have the power to see in the dark.
But when his sight was linked with Shayna’s, he started to be able to see things the same way as a no life king.
The dark of the night turned bright in the blink of an eye, and where he saw nothing but an empty plain before, what he saw now made him grimace and take a step back.
At the end of his sight was a countless number of beings.
The beings who were surrounding them didn’t have any expressions, but instead their faces looked like masks.
Their clothes were ones that ordinary people would wear in villages or cities, but they weren’t something that would be seen worn on the plains in the middle of the night.
As Loren asked himself why he didn’t notice until now, he saw the beings wavering red with hollow eyes within the no life king’s sight, he got a good idea of why.
It was because all the beings surrounding had become vampires.
Unlike living beings, the undead had a very thin presence.
Since they were moving, it wasn’t like they didn’t have any presence at all, but since he was with beings with very strong presences such as Dia and Lapis, as well as himself, he wasn’t able to differentiate them.
“Lapis, how did you not notice?”
“I’m sorry Loren. I was too busy talking with Dia.”
Lapis, whose eyes were prosthetics, were able to see through the dark and should have been able to spot the vampires faster than Loren.
But she was too busy trying to extract as much information as she could from Dia, she wasn’t paying attention to her surroundings.
“Don’t blame her. I didn’t notice until now either.”
Dia said to him as Lapis looked embarrassed, Loren had no intention of blaming Lapis ofr anything.
He had no intention of pushing the fact that he didn’t notice to someone else in the first place.
“More so, I didn’t notice because I wasn’t worried about them.”
“That should be something to be worried about…”
In a situation that decided whether or not she could be on her own or not, Loren thought that not paying attention to her surroundings was too careless.
But when he thought about it, normal vampires weren’t a threat at all to her, so it wouldn’t be surprising if she wasn’t worried.
“There’s way too many. They’re all vampires, too.”
“Not all of them. Look again.”
Loren looked again at Dia’s words and saw that indeed only a part of them had glowing red eyes, while the others were looking forward with dark, hollow eyes.
“I told you that only pure men and women could become vampires, right? If there were that many, what in the world have they been doing this whole time, won’t you think?”
“So you mean…”
Lapis wrapped her arms around her and looked around with her eyes wide.
Dia sensed what Lapis was about to say and nodded.
“The Elder probably attacked some village or town and sucked the life out of all of the people there. What a disgusting thing to do.”
At her words, the beings surrounding them slowly started coming closer.
With blank expressions and hollow eyes, and with their arms stretched forward as if wanting something, the beings started trudging forward, and seeing them, Loren hesitated for a moment, but quickly tightened the grip on his great sword.
He knew it was a sad thing that happened, but there was no way to save someone who had drained of their blood and killed.
“There’s no choice, huh.”
Even if they left them alone, they would find their way to someplace else and look for victims.
Rather than showing them mercy by not killing them, Loren thought that killing them here and letting them move on, not letting them kill anyone else, was a better mercy, immediately stepped forward and swung his great sword through the shoulder of one that was closest to him.
The heavy blade sunk into the poor victim’s shoulder and cut down all the way down to the stomach without any resistance, as if there wasn’t a difference between bone and flesh, and sprayed blood and flesh around.
He swung the blade back, into another one’s waist, ripping it in half, with the top flying away and the bottom sinking to the ground.
Although Loren had killed two of the undead in an instant, a smile didn’t appear on his face.
There were too many of them.
Killing just two of them didn’t change anything, as a countless number of undead still surrounded them.
And because Loren had killed them so extravagantly, spraying flesh and blood all over the place, the ones with red eyes started moving more smoothly, and started moving closer to the camp, leaving the slow ones behind.
“So annoying!”
As one of them tried to jump on him, Loren smashed his great sword into it.
His blows had easily ripped through the ones before, but this one caught the blade between its hands and tried to stop the blow before it reached its body.
A vampire’s body was a way stronger than when the body was human.
Because of their superhuman strength, it was very difficult for humans to fight them, which was one of the reasons why they were so dangerous, and the vampire succeeded in slowing down Loren’s blow.
But in the next moment, the blade in its hands accelerated again, and crushed the surprised vampire head on.
‘Onii-san, you’re able to use it now!’
It was the self-enhancing spell that used mana.
Loren had become able to activate the skill that Lapis had taught him how to use on his own.
With this, he could enhance his base strength, which made him be able to display superhuman strength for a moment.
“I can’t keep it activated constantly though. It seems that I don’t have that much mana.”
He had already confirmed that he could barely keep it activated for five minutes.
But a spell that only lasted five minutes wasn’t something that could be used in actual battle, so Loren thought of a different way of utilizing it.
Not looking back at the body that sunk to the ground after suffering the full brunt of the blow, Loren swung the sword sideways in a wide arc.
The sight of the undead in its path being ripped apart in half along with the sound of metal smashing into flesh and bone didn’t look like the work of a human.
It was proof that Loren was using the self enhancement just when he needed it when swinging his sword, dealing a stronger blow than usual.
Activating the spell when he needed it instead of activating it constantly seemed simple, but it was in fact a very difficult thing to do.
If he mistimed the activation, the power of the blow would fall, but by using his skill and intuition as a swordsman to cover it, he was succeeding in dealing powerful blows, incomparable to when he used his great sword normally.
“<<Turn Undead>>!”
Next to him, Lapis was using her abilities as a priestess.
Each time <<Turn Undead>>, which had the power to cleanse the undead, was used, a few of the undead were engulfed in white flames and turned to ashes without even letting out a scream.
Although it didn’t work on Shayna when they fought against her as the no life king, it seemed to have an instant effect on the undead around them, and as she saw undead after undead turn to ashes, Lapis gripped the sigil on her chest.
8
“Loren! Look! I’m doing priestess-like things!”
“Hearing those words from your own mouth…I’ve got nothing to say.”
Although exasperated, Loren turned the undead into chunks of flesh, blow after blow.
When facing off against the undead, weapons would usually be consecrated or be made of silver, but Loren’s great sword had a black blade made of unknown material.
Loren was worried if it would be effective against undead, but no matter how tough they were, it seemed that they couldn’t continue moving if they were cut in half or crushed.
“Incredible. I’m impressed that you could do something like this even as a human.”
Dia, who was standing behind Loren and Lapis, looking at the situation, raised a voice of wonder.
That was how well the two of them were decreasing the numbers of their attackers.
On top of that, neither of them was injured, and were waging a one sided battle, so Dia couldn’t help but be surprised.
“It looks like there’s nothing for me to do.”
“You can always help us a bit, you know?”
Although Loren did feel opposed to making his client work, but he had a good reason to ignore it.
It was because of the vampires mixed within the attackers.
He could make quick work of normal undead, but for the vampires, he couldn’t defeat them without using self enhancement.
Of course, he could immediately defeat them when he used it, but the more he used it, the more it drained his mana, and because of the numerous attackers, he soon started running out of breath.
But there were still many enemies left, so even though she was his client, it was natural for Loren to think of wanting the help of Dia.
“By a bit, do you mean this much?”
Hearing Loren’s words, Dia waved her small hand.
Although it was a small, simple action which didn’t cut through the atmosphere nor shatter the earth open, but with just that, the heads of the attackers in an area flew off.
Since they were already dead, blood didn’t spurt out everywhere, but the sound of the heads hitting the ground rang out, and the blood flowed out from the sinking bodies, dousing the ground in red.
The silent scene of death took Loren and Lapis’ breath away.
“I don’t care which is first, the attackers being wiped out or the sun rising, but do your best.”
Wiping out a portion of the attackers, Dia sat down, as if her job was now done.
If his client defeated more enemies than he did, him being hired would become meaningless, so Loren raised his great sword above his head and cut into the attackers, while Lapis, with her sigil in hand and using <<Turn Undead>>, continued reducing the number of their enemies.