Ch. 110: Attack after Midnight
Time passed, and when the moon was high up in the sky.
As Loren was keeping watch, fighting the urge to fall asleep, he noticed a smell that reached his nose in a night breeze, and slapped himself on the cheek to wake himself up completely.
He had meant to hold back, but his sleepiness caused him to fail, so along with a sharp pain that almost made his eyes tear up, a sharp clear sound rang out, and Lapis, who was crouched near him, trembled slightly and her head shot up and she looked around in a panic, while Dia, who was leaning against the dirt wall, rubbed her eyes and looked at Loren with an annoying gaze.
Loren was too busy dealing with his sleepiness that he didn’t notice the two of them, but it seemed like they were almost asleep.
Loren didn’t even try to scold them, but instead he looked past the dirt wall to see what the smell on the wind was, and his expression hardened, teeth grinding, at what he saw.
With his sight being linked to Shayna’s, it allowed him to see the sight before him, regardless of it being night time.
What he saw was dense crowd of corpses of rotten flesh and bones that he didn’t even want to attempt trying to count how many there were.
“They went down in rank, but increased in number.”
Lapis walked up beside him, hitting her cheeks to chase away her sleepiness and said in a bored voice as she saw the enemy in the distance, but when she saw Loren’s face, she knew that he was looking at something more, so she squinted and looked again into the approaching enemy, and pulled back in surprise at a shadow towards the back.
“What is it…?”
Dia knew from Loren and Lapis’ reaction that they weren’t looking at the herd of zombies and skeletons, so she looked in the same direction, saw the shadow in the back, and her eyes widened slightly.
It was the shadow of a giant dragon.
But the dragon’s eyes were dark and its body was in tatters with no webbing on its wings, holes all around its body, and some sort of liquid dripping from its body, smoke rising from where it hit the ground.
Usually where there would be sharp fangs lined up, more than half of them were missing, giving it a creepy feel.
“A dragon zombie…”
A monster that was born by turning a dead body of a dragon into an undead.
As a monster, it was no different than a normal zombie, which was the lowest rank undead, but since dragons were large and powerful to begin with, dragon zombies were a great threat.
Unlike normal dragons, dragon zombies lost the ability to use their breaths as well as their magic.
Although dragon corpses were very rare so they were barely seen, their size and strength, as well as their sturdiness on top of being undead, dragon zombies were monsters that could topple a whole nation.
“Seems like our opponents are quite serious.”
“Unfortunately…”
“You don’t seem so surprised Loren.”
Seeing a rotting dragon corpse should be quite shocking, so Lapis expected some sort of reaction.
But although Loren did look surprised that such a thing was their opponent, there was nothing than that, which confused her.
“It’s not the first time I’ve seen one. There was one that was buried beneath a battlefield that woke up during the night and it was a nightmare.”
It was hard to meet a living dragon, but Loren said that corpses were found quite often.
Although it was unknown if it died of age, fighting another dragon, or some other unknown reason, but every now and then there would be a corpse buried under the ground in plains, forests, and swamps that people wouldn’t step foot in.
They would usually return to dust, but rarely, due to a few bad conditions being met, it would become undead and crawl out of the ground.
“Those places usually become battlefields since there’s nothing around there to be damaged or destroyed. I have no idea if they become zombies since a lot of people die above it or it’s the land itself that’s like that though.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. Just wondering, how did you survive it?”
“I just held my head down and ran. I was lucky I didn’t die. It crumbled on its own when the sun came up.”
Since the dragon zombies that appeared on the battlefield had no master, after spreading death and destruction for the night, they normally burned away in the sun after.
If the body remained, they could sell the body for a high price, but since everything burned when the sun came out, nothing would remain of it.
Which meant it was nothing but an annoyance as well as a disaster.
“How about this time?”
“I don’t think I have the option of running this time.”
Even if he ran, since Loren and the party were the targets, it would continue to chase him down.
The reason why Loren escaped the dragon zombie on the battlefield was because its targets included his allies as well as his enemies.
Repeatedly taking care to not become a target and by running as far as he can while someone else was being attacked was the reason why he survived, so when it came to straight up running away by himself, he wasn’t confident if he could pull it off.
“How about fighting it full strength?”
“Are you telling me to die?”
“I think you’d do pretty well against it. You can use your self-enhancement as well so.”
“I don’t think it’s something you could go against with a bit of enhancement.”
“Hmm.”
Wondering if it was really impossible, Lapis threw the stone she was holding.
Thinking that it was a lot easier to deal with their opponents since they completely looked like enemies, the stone that Lapis threw flew straight in the air and went through several skeletons and zombies, scattering rotten flesh, and turned them back into corpses.
The next stone that she threw right after went through several zombies and completely decimated a skeleton.
“Damn…”
“I’ve got my physical arms back after all. All thanks to you Loren.”
As Loren wondered if he did anything, Lapis continued to throw stones.
Although there was a great number of them, zombies and skeletons moved very slowly.
Since they could see in the dark, Loren and Lapis noticed them and started attacking while they were still far away, so currently they were completely on the offensive.
Loren couldn’t throw stones like Lapis could, but he still used his sling and managed to defeat them one by one, but using their sheer numbers as a weapon, the undead that surrounded them came closer and closer.
“I don’t understand.”
Dia muttered as she threw stones at the undead as Lapis was doing.
“I can see that the dragon zombie in the back is a threat, but the rest are just rotting corpses and bones.”
“That’s more than enough for me.”
“That might be so, but this is interference directed at me, isn’t it? Does the enemy really think this is enough to stop me?”
The goal of their enemy was not to kill Loren or Lapis.
It was to interfere with Dia and cause her to fail.
But since Dia was and Elder, she couldn’t be stopped easily.
Even attacking with normal vampires wasn’t enough, and although the dragon zombie was a threat, zombies and skeletons wouldn’t even be close enough to stop her.
“What is she thinking?”
“Get rid of the assistance and then go for you. Or this attack is a bait. Or she has a way to defeat an Elder with this attack. These are some obvious possibilities.”
Lapis picked up a stone that was larger than the rest, and threw it in the same manner as the smaller stones.
It flew off with the same speed as the smaller stones and crushed even more undead, but even as her brows furrowed as the smell of rotting flesh began drifting in the air, she picked up the next stone.
“By the way, would defeating the dragon zombie be easy for you?”
“I wouldn’t have any trouble, but because of what it is, it would be difficult to do so in one hit.”
‘It would be slightly difficult for me in my current state.’
Shayna said to Loren, as she was listening to Lapis and Dia’s conversation from within him.
Loren thought that since she was the most powerful undead, a no life king, she could easily defeat a dragon zombie, but her answer was not what he expected.
‘Since I don’t have a physical form, it’s hard for me to affect things in the real world. It’s too large to energy drain it completely, and if I want to use magic, I have to do it through Onii-san.’
This wasn’t based on the knowledge and experience of Shayna herself, but it was judgment based on her knowledge as a no life king, so Loren guessed that she was correct.
When Loren silently asked her what if she was a proper no life king, Shayna replied to him proudly.
‘I can erase it without a trace in a blink of an eye.’
Loren was reminded again that he was housing an incredible being inside of him.
‘When they get close, I’ll activate my energy drain slowly. It will weaken the dragon zombie as well, so good luck with the rest.’
Thanking her for doing what she could to assist him, Loren swung his sling around.
They had to do something about all the undead before they could focus on the dragon zombie.
“There’s no way you could purify it using <Turn Undead>, is there?”
“No matter how much of a pure and faithful follower I am, there is a limit to what I can do.”
Loren wondered if Lapis could do something with her powers as a priestess, but her response was something along the lines that he expected, so he listened to it without reacting.
“So we either hold them back until morning, or I go in and start attacking…”
“Umm, Loren? You just ignored me!? Loren, come on…”
As Lapis started to persist, Loren shoved a stone into her hand and made her go back to throwing them, then picked up a stone for himself.
But they didn’t have an unlimited amount, and soon there were only a few left.
“Looks like I’m going to have to get in there after all.”
Although it seemed like the number of undead decreased by quite a bit, there were still enough of them that their number couldn’t be counted.
Loren thought that the only way was to cut through them when they ran out of stones.
He felt like he could manage the zombies and skeletons, but he was worried about whether he could defeat the dragon zombie.
Since he couldn’t think of any other way, he steeled himself and slowly pulled out the great sword on his back.