“I see. Then I’ll relax a bit. By the way, stopping here is pretty dissatisfying for me. If there’s a next time, I’ll attack first. Anyhow, I have to load the wagons, so I’ll be going now.”
“Why not let the others load the wagons? That’s not a job for you, is it?”
“No, I disagree. No matter what status you hold, when you’re given a job, you should do it well.”
With that, Momon walked back toward the wagons, and the peerless beauty followed behind him.
The two who arrived just as he was leaving ended up watching him go.
His broad shoulders…
“Hya-hya. You look like you want to ask something.”
“What did you think of him, sir?”
Palpatra’s wrinkled face screwed up. It might have been a bitter smile, but it seemed like something else, as well.
“He’s strong. No, I knew he was strong because he’s adamantite rank. I just had no idea he was this strong. The second we faced each other, I had the feeling that no matter where I tried to hit him, he would block it.”
Hekkeran had felt the same thing—that Momon would easily stop and counter all his attacks. Even if things went according to plan, that armor would repel all the attacks anyway—that was all he could imagine. Palpatra, who had faced him directly, must have experienced the feeling more intensely.
“So that’s…adamantite rank…”
“Yep, that’s adamantite. He’s a being in a realm only a handful of people will ever reach. Ah, he really is magnificent—beautiful. That’s a height I’ll never make it to… You must be pretty satisfied having seen it, though?”
“Truly! I have a better understanding of how you both move after watching that match. It would have been impossible to observe so calmly if I had been the one facing him. Apologies, sir, but I really wanted to see Sir Momon attack.”
“Impossible. He didn’t seem very interested in attacking me. He had no desire to fight. Probably it’s as he said, that he’s not good at holding back. He probably thought hitting me would kill me just like that.”
If that were true, some might have found it arrogant. Palpatra, old though he may have been, was a fairly skilled warrior; it could be argued that Momon had underestimated the veteran without even seeing what he could do.
But the reason he could do that was because he was an adamantite-rank adventurer.
“Well, can’t be helped. The gap in our abilities is just that big. It was frustrating at first, but even if he stuck to defense, once he dodged everything I threw at him, I couldn’t really say anything.”
They’d been shown the meaning of strength.
He had chosen a weapon he wasn’t used to, with totally different heft and balance, because he was that confident. The gap between the two men was that big.
Palpatra walked off, mumbling, “I’m beat, so tired.” He was headed, of course, for the covered wagons.
As Hekkeran watched him go, he heard a quiet voice.
“I couldn’t make it to that realm even in my younger days. So that’s adamantite… So high above me…”
Palpatra’s shoulders looked so small. In comparison, Momon looked enormous—they could sense his power.
“So that’s the most elite rank, adamantite…”
“Yeah, just amazing.”
There was no lack of people who agreed with their admiring comments.
2
A single carriage raced like the wind over the cobblestones of imperial capital Arwinthal.
Pulling the resplendent carriage was an eight-legged magical beast known as a sleipnir. Two able-bodied warriors were seated in the box, and on the roof—the cargo bed had been renovated—crouched four people, including a caster and a warrior with a crossbow, keeping an eye on their surroundings.
Naturally, the reason this rolling defense force, a security detail that was arguably overkill, could go openly down the street was due to the standing of the people inside.
One look at the crest of three crossed staves carved on the side of the carriage was enough for someone with a little education to know whose carriage it was and who was inside. That was why the knights guarding the street didn’t challenge them.
Inside the carriage were three men. In their robes, they all looked like casters.
All three were well-known names in the empire’s magic world, but their attitudes clearly indicated a hierarchical relationship. The most superior of them had white hair.
Just as Gazef Stronoff was known far and wide as a warrior, there was no caster in the region more famous than this elderly man. He was the great caster, the strongest, most elite in the empire—“Triad Caster” Fluder Paradyne.
Sitting across from him were two of his leading disciples, who were so skilled they had good command of tier-four magic.
Though they’d just left the imperial palace, the atmosphere was ruled by an oppressive silence. One of the disciples cautiously spoke, unable to bear it any longer.
“Master, what do you intend to do about His Imperial Majesty’s order?”
Silence reigned over the carriage once more. But it didn’t last long. Fluder answered in a voice that was profound in its quiet. “It’s His Imperial Majesty’s wish. As a retainer, my only choice is to carry it out and investigate. But it’s too dangerous to try with magic. We’ll start by sifting through the records, then we’ll summon demons to gather intelligence.”
“You don’t know him, then, master?”
Fluder closed his eyes and waited a few seconds before opening them again. “Alas, I do not. I’ve never heard of this immensely powerful demon, Jaldabaoth.”
The previous month, a horde of demons had attacked the capital of the kingdom. As far as he had been able to gather, Jaldabaoth and the demon maids who attended him were terrifying beings who might as well have been from another dimension.
Due to this demon disturbance, the order of imperial knights who attacked the kingdom every year hadn’t marched. Usually invading when one’s enemy is exhausted is the proper way to wage war.
But there were two main reasons the empire was invested in this fight.
One was to exhaust the kingdom. While the empire had a standing army, the kingdom’s troops were conscripted. For that reason, whenever the empire mobilized soldiers, the kingdom had to mobilize even more—they were at a disadvantage when it came to the quality of individual soldiers. The empire timed their attack for the harvest period to force the kingdom to draft farmers so they would have a shortage of able hands in the fields. The long-term plan was to make the crops go to waste.
The other reason for the campaigns was to chip away at the power of the nobles within the empire. Nobles who opposed the emperor were made to cough up funds via a special war tax. Naturally, if they refused, their families were ruined for suspected treason. In the end, it was only a difference of being tortured slowly or killed swiftly once and for all.
The reason the empire hadn’t moved this time was that the emperor—Jircniv—had judged that since the kingdom had done them the favor of wearing themselves out, it was unnecessary for the empire to do anything. Besides, the empire’s nobles in the opposition had already lost most of their teeth.
There was just one problem.
Where was Jaldabaoth, the perpetrator of those truly demonic deeds? And what kind of being was he? Both of those things worried him.
It was only natural that Fluder, the most capable caster in the empire, would be tasked with investigating.
“Then there’s the one who routed the demon, Momon of Raven Black, and his companion, Beautiful Princess Nabe. I’m very interested in them. And the mysterious caster Ainz Ooal Gown. Have the retired heroes been stirring? Perhaps a war as fierce as the one with the evil spirits two hundred years ago is about to begin…”
“…Is it?”
“I don’t know. But only a fool prepares for war after it breaks out. A wise man makes arrangements in advance.”
Soon the carriage reached its destinat
ion.
Spacious grounds were enclosed by a thick, high wall with several watchtowers guarding both the interior and exterior. Mixed patrol groups of select knights—of the eight orders of imperial knights, the most elite first order—and casters were making their rounds.
Looking up, the emperor’s personal guards mounted on magical beasts, the Imperial Air Guard, and elite casters on watch using flying spells could be seen.
This place was the symbol of the empire’s power, the thing they’d been pouring most of that power into since the previous emperor: the Imperial Ministry of Magic.
The soul of the empire’s magic activities—manufacturing the enchanted arms provided to the knights, developing new spells, performing experimental research to improve the standard of living with magic, and so on—could be said to reside here. And the one in charge of it all—although he wasn’t minister of magic—was Fluder.
The carriage proceeded across the grounds and eventually stopped before the tower at the farthest reaches of the compound.
They had passed by a variety of differently shaped buildings on their way, and a great many people were bustling in and out of all of them. Only this tower had hardly any visitors. Its security, oddly enough, was incomparably tight.
For starters, the knights guarding this tower looked different. They weren’t knights of the first order like the ones who could be seen patrolling the grounds.
Enchanted full plate armor enclosed their bodies head to toe, in their hands they held enchanted shields, and slung on their hips were enchanted weapons. Their crimson capes featuring the imperial crest were also, of course, enchanted.
The magic those items were imbued with wasn’t strong, but even the empire couldn’t outfit ordinary knights with this much magic gear. More than anything, mere knights wouldn’t be assigned to guard one of the empire’s critical agencies.
They were the most elite knights and therefore belonged to the emperor’s personal Imperial Earth Guard.
The casters next to the knights were just as impressive. They had fought in many battles and honed their combat skills, so they seemed every bit as powerful as the veteran warriors.
The entrance to the building was additionally fortified with four stone golems easily over eight feet tall. They fulfilled their guardian duties with no food, rest, or distraction.
The only people allowed in this place, which was protected as well as the emperor himself, were the more advanced tier-three casters or, in rare cases, research casters with specific errands. Of course, Fluder and the pair of leading disciples were among those with entry permission.
Returning the knights’ and casters’ deepest bows with a light wave of his hand, Fluder entered the tower. Upon following the hallway leading straight back, he and his disciples came out at the top of a funnel-shaped space. Many casters were working there industriously. The one who seemed to have the highest status hastened over to Fluder, flustered.
“Anything?”
“Nothing, master.” The disciple swallowed, and his Adam’s apple undulated.
His response was both good and bad news.
Nodding just once with a subtle expression, Fluder turned around to look at him, the deputy head of this place. He was one of the famous Chosen Thirty, the thirty disciples Fluder taught personally.
“I see. So you can’t get them to spawn naturally yet?”
“No, we still can’t get even skeletons of the lowest tier to appear spontaneously. Now we’re experimenting to see if we can get zombies to spawn by placing corpses nearby.”
“Hmm, hmm.” Fluder stoked his long beard and gazed at the scene below.
There were a little over a dozen skeletons—working fields.
They raised their hoes and plunged them into the dirt. The movements of each skeleton were exactly the same. Looking from the side, they all overlapped—they looked like a single monster.
This scene of utter synchronization, like a group of people doing aerobics together, was the empire’s huge, secret project—undead labor.
Undead needed neither food nor sleep, and they never got tired. They were the perfect workers. Certainly they had low intelligence, so they couldn’t do anything beyond what they were ordered and nothing too complicated, but that could be solved by giving them detailed instructions from nearby.
The benefits of unleashing undead on farmland with orders to execute were unfathomable. By lowering labor expenses, the price of produce would decrease, farms and fields could be larger, injuries could be prevented—this project was truly dreamlike.
Similar plans using summoned monsters or manufactured golems had been proposed, but undead were the most cost-effective.
Naturally, there was a reason they couldn’t execute this perfect-seeming plan on a large scale: opposing forces led mainly by the priests. They were against it on the grounds that giving orders to embodiments of death, the antithesis of life, sullied the soul.
There were other, even more religious reasons, as well. They argued that from a spiritual standpoint, using even the corpses of criminals was desecration because once their punishment had been carried out, their souls were wiped clean. That was problematic.
Perhaps if they had been in the middle of a food shortage and many people were starving to death, the ministry would have had more leverage. As it stood, however, the empire had a great supply of food, and there were no signs of labor issues, either.
And so the priests opposed the project.
The ultimate goal was stronger soldiers. If the empire relied on undead to meet production capacity, they could use their human resources for other things and possibly discover powerful knights.
There were also concerns that human workers would be laid off if undead labor became the norm; worries about whether undead would really obey humans forever; fears that with countless undead around, the balance between life and death would collapse and stronger undead would spawn spontaneously—but these were things not only priests but anyone who heard about the plan would think.
This facility existed to verify each concern and solve the problems.
“You haven’t discovered the fundamental cause?”
“No, my apologies, master.”
Why did undead spawn naturally? Their pursuit of the answer had major implications for the future.
The Katze Plain was known as a cursed land, covered by a mist that only cleared during the war between the kingdom and the empire. The spawn rate there was so high that skeletal dragons, one of the most powerful undead, capable of neutralizing all magic spells, could appear.
Even if the empire eventually conquered E-Rantel and its environs, they didn’t want an expanse of land where undead were constantly popping into existence in their territory. Knowing the process by which undead spawned would surely be useful for governing the area. Perhaps they could stop them from spawning ever again.
“I see. Understood.”
The deputy bowed, relieved there was no rebuke, and Fluder set off, walking around the outside of the funnel-shaped room.
By the time he reached the door on the opposite side, the number of leading disciples behind him had grown.
The knight guarding the door pushed it open for them, and the party continued inside. It was another hallway similar to the previous, but this one was completely empty—not a person to be seen. The air smelled dusty, and the light seemed to be in a losing battle with the darkness.
Proceeding straight down the eerie corridor, they came upon a spiral staircase extending below.
They passed through several doors on their way, but their clacking footsteps didn’t echo for very long. They went perhaps five floors down, but the air seemed much heavier than that.
It wasn’t simply because they were underground. This much was clear from the hard expression born of anxiety worn by everyone in the party, including Fluder.
Their faces were grim as they reached the deepest floor, a large open space. The atmosphere was so tense they were practically brac
ing themselves for combat.
Everyone’s sharp eyes were gathered on the single thick door. This door, so imposing it seemed to be a division between worlds, was fitted with layer upon layer of physical and magic defense so it wouldn’t break or open easily. It was a door that would not permit escape.
The doors they had passed through on their way here also hinted at the danger lurking in the depths. They’d been built as barriers so that if the threat behind this thick door made a move they could seal it away or at least buy time.
Fluder spoke in a hard voice to warn his disciples. “Don’t let your guard down.” His words were brief and to the point, which was what made them terrifying.
The casters accompanying him all bowed low. Fluder gave the same warning every time they came here. Still, knowing what was beyond the door, they couldn’t crack a smile.
Across this threshold was the ultimate undead. There was no doubt that if it was released, an unprecedented disaster would befall the imperial capital.
Several of the disciples began casting protective magic—not only pure physical defense spells but also mental protection. After an appropriate amount of preparation time, Fluder eyed each of his disciples’ faces to make sure they were ready.
With a nod, he spoke the words that unsealed the room’s entrance.
As the magic took effect, the heavy door slowly groaned open.
Darkness made it difficult to see inside the room, but something like a chill radiated out of it, and a couple of the disciples shivered. Even with magic items to protect them from environmental effects, the sheer hatred of the living that emanated from inside was enough to make their blood run cold.
An audible gulp resounded throughout the hall.
“Let’s go.”
At Fluder’s signal, magic light created by the disciples chased the darkness from the room. The banished gloom seemed to gather at the edges of the light and grow even deeper—that’s what it felt like.
With Fluder in the lead, the party entered the room where the presence of death hung in the air.
The Invaders of the Great Tomb Page 10
