The Invaders of the Great Tomb

by Kugane Maruyama

  “I wonder why they underestimated the Old Guarders so badly.”

  That was a question.

  Maybe they’d just been thinking things would go their way? Not because they were stupid but to distract themselves from despair and rouse their courage. Maybe their survival instincts as human beings had maxed themselves out.

  “Either way, looks pretty hopeless.”

  “Yeah. Things are going downhill.”

  “IF THEY HAD A CHANCE, I GUESS IT WOULD BE TO FOCUS ON DEFENSE AND BUY TIME UNTIL THE OTHER BURGLARS RETURNED?”

  Everyone’s chilling gazes pierced Entoma.

  “You don’t think they’re actually going to come back, do you?”

  “……It’s obvious they won’t.”

  “It’s impossible. No one can get out of the Great Tomb of Nazarick alive.”

  An agonized scream along with the sound of something collapsing. The combat maids looked in the direction the sound had come from and voiced their disappointment.

  “AH, THERE GOES THE THIEEEF.”

  “That’s that, then.”

  “Maybe we should have given in when they begged for their lives…”

  “But they were so sure they would win! Anyone would think they had some kind of trick up their sleeves.”

  The thick scent of fresh blood the thief must have spattered reached the maids.

  “SMELLS GOOOOD…”

  “Leave them,” Yuri said reprovingly.

  They’d been ordered by their master to gather up all the incapacitated, whether dead or alive. There was no way they could be so rude as to present him with bodies with bites taken out of them.

  “FRESH MEEEAT…”

  “I’ll ask Lord Ainz later, so please control yourself for now.”

  “Isn’t this kind of bad, though? Weren’t we supposed to be testing to see if the minions could deal with escapees?”

  “I think so. That’s why there are such strong undead waiting near the walls.”

  “MASTER COCYTUS SEEMS TO HAVE TAKEN THE SCENARIO IN WHICH THEY ARE CAUGHT TOO EASILY INTO ACCOUUUNT.”

  “That they would challenge the Old Guarders head-on was a surprise.”

  “That’s what happens when you don’t analyze your opponent’s strength. Okay, anyone who is breathing even a little, heal them and send them to the torture chamber. The dead ones…let’s report to Lord Ainz.”

  Thus, that night, the worker team led by Palpatra disappeared.

  2

  “Push them back!” Gringham’s shout echoed in the burial chamber filled with the stench of mold and death.

  The room was twenty yards square. The ceiling was high, probably sixteen feet. The figures practically overflowing the place could be seen by the magic light a caster had created plus a torch that had fallen to the floor.

  Gringham and his team, Heavy Masher, had been driven into a corner. The rest of the burial chamber was crawling with zombies and skeletons, a mob of low-tier undead.

  There were so many it was absurd to try to count.

  Gringham and a warrior with a shield took the muddy torrent of death head-on, creating a bank so it wouldn’t reach the rear guard.

  Zombie fists pelted Gringham’s full plate armor. As corpses, they were more powerful than regular humans, but there was no way they could damage steel armor. Their rotting, fragile hands smashed against it, leaving behind foul-smelling scraps of decomposing meat.

  The skeletons were the same. There was no way their rusty swords were going to pierce enchanted armor.

  Sure, coincidences were conceivable, but thanks to the magic defense they’d cast, none occurred.

  Gringham swept his ax through the area in front of him, but as soon as one undead fell, another stepped up to take its place. They kept closing in, all but crushing the workers.

  “Dammit! There’re too many of them!” The warrior with the shield next to Gringham let his distress slip. The shield was big enough to cover his entire body, so no attacks were connecting, but its entire surface was slick with foul liquids.

  He was bashing in the heads of zombies and skeletons with his mace, but even so, he was losing to the pressure, slowly retreating.

  “Where the hell did they all come from?!”

  The warrior’s question was a natural one.

  After parting with the other teams at an intersection, they had searched a number of rooms. Unfortunately, they hadn’t discovered as much treasure as had been in the smaller mausoleums. Still, they’d found a decent sum, and they had continued steadily making their way, bit by bit, through other rooms. Then they had entered this one, and when they began investigating, the door suddenly flew open and so many undead flooded in that no one could guess where they’d come from.

  Zombies and skeletons weren’t such terrifying foes. But with these numbers, they could do a great deal of damage.

  If the workers got pulled down and buried, even if they didn’t die, they wouldn’t be able to move. Then the undead would descend on the rear guard.

  Not that Gringham thought they would fall so easily, but against the threat of these numbers, he was a bit worried.

  At this rate, it’s sheer luck that our line is holding. Having made that observation, Gringham unleashed a power he’d been saving.

  “Let us finish them all at once! I’m counting on you!”

  The rear guard, who until now had just been throwing rocks, leaped into action.

  Really, for Gringham and the other members of Heavy Masher, undead like these weren’t so tough. That’s why the rear guard had been on standby, saving their energy as much as possible. Once those reinforcements were in action, mopping up these undead would be a cinch.

  “Our god, god of earth! Cast out the impure ones!” Clenching his sigil, the priest’s shout became his strength.

  Something refreshing entered the atmosphere, like a pure breeze had blown through the burial chamber to sweep away its foul air—a stronger than normal wave of holy energy. It was the priest’s exorcism ability.

  At the same time, beginning with the ones nearest the priest, the undead crumbled and turned to ashes.

  In the case of an overwhelmingly large ability gap, undead could be destroyed instead of merely exorcized. But destroying a large number of undead was quite a bit more difficult and required that much more energy.

  In the end, twenty were annihilated at once.

  “Fly, Fireball!” An arcane caster launched a fireball, and it exploded right in the center of the undead mob. Flames blazed for only a split second, and the zombies and skeletons in range collapsed, their false life burned up.

  “I’m not done yet! Fireball!”

  “Our god, god of earth! Cast out the impure ones!”

  Additional area-of-effect attacks decimated the undead.

  “Let’s go!”

  “Right!”

  The warrior abandoned his shield, brandished his mace with both hands, and accompanied Gringham into the mob. The reason they charged in even though the casters could have made short work of the undead was that they preferred saving the magical energy. The priest’s exorcism, especially, had a limited number of uses. His specialization in anti-undead moves made him an essential asset in this tomb.

  Leaping into a group of zombies, Gringham swung his ax. A liquid less like blood and more like glop oozed—if their hearts had been beating, it would have sprayed—from the stumps of severed body parts. A nauseating smell wafted out of the cuts, but it wasn’t more than he could stomach.

  Or rather, his nose just couldn’t even distinguish it any longer.

  He worked with the warrior to attack, attack, attack. Defense didn’t even cross their minds.

  They were able to make such a reckless offensive because they had magic support and tough armor and because they were up against such weak undead.

  Now and then Gringham felt the shock of a zombie punch to his head, but his helmet absorbed it, and the burden on his neck was almost nonexistent. His chest and abdomen may
have been getting punched as well, but sure enough, he didn’t really feel it.

  After all, their opponents were undead of the lowest tier. The number of them was what had made things tense; now that the cleanup had progressed to some degree, they began to feel more comfortable.

  Without pausing his swings, the warrior shouted, “We’ve only encountered small fries, but this tomb sure has a lot of ’em!”

  “That in itself means there could be a stronger one somewhere. That said, if there is one, I don’t get why it doesn’t come out.”

  The who one answered was the priest, who had picked up the warrior’s shield and was watching the progress of the battle from behind them.

  “…Mm, these undead might have been summoned somehow, like with ritual magic or an item.”

  Strangely, the undead vanished after a set amount of time, so there weren’t so many of them that there was nowhere to stand. The wizard had warned the team because he noticed their disappearance was vaguely similar to the way summoned undead expired.

  “A way to summon a huge number of low-tier undead? …No, sir! Do not make me imagine this entire tomb crammed full of zombies!” Gringham answered as he sliced off the head of a skeleton like he was cutting a branch off a tree. Then he flicked his eyes around the room. He could count the number of undead on two hands. The door was still open, but no new monsters were coming in. A little more fighting and this battle will be over.

  Just as he thought that, he was assailed by a creeping sensation that started at his feet.

  His ability to sense danger was ordering him to get out of there, but that was next to impossible under the circumstances. Still—

  “Watch out! Leave the r—!” The thief must have sensed the same thing.

  But it was too late. The hard, sturdy floor abruptly morphed into something that couldn’t be relied on. Instead, the workers felt like they were floating. A beat later, they lost their balance and smashed into the floor.

  Gringham could hear his teammates groaning in pain. He, however, had managed to keep hold of his ax despite the fall and destroyed the skeletons on the floor with it as he got to his feet.

  “Annihilate them!”

  The undead had taken damage in the fall—especially the skeletons, who were weak against impact damage—so they were easier to kill than before.

  After finishing them off, Gringham finally took a look around the room.

  They must have dropped to the bottom of a magical pitfall where the floor of the room simply vanished. When he looked up, the ceiling was so far away—eyeballing it, probably almost forty feet. About ten feet up was a closed door, and another ten feet up—a total of twenty—was an open door. That was the one they’d come through originally. It probably made sense to assume they had fallen two stories.

  Overall, the construction of the room could perhaps best be described as a tall, four-sided pillar with a floor that sloped steeply downward like an inverted square pyramid; if they weren’t careful, they would slide down to the lowest point in the center of the room. Actually, one of his teammates had tumbled to the center in their original fall and was in danger of being buried under the zombies that tumbled down after them.

  Gringham couldn’t believe they had plunged into such a place virtually unharmed.

  The strange thing was that ten feet up, at the height of the closed door, there were sixteen passages, four on each wall of the room.

  “It seems like a water torture chamber. It’d just come gushing out of those passageways… Ugh. Or slime—that would be even worse!”

  “I totally agree. Let’s hurry up and investigate that door. If it’s safe, let’s escape through it.”

  It would, naturally, be difficult to scale two stories of a wall that had no handholds. The only one who could do it was probably the thief. For those in full plate armor, like Gringham, it would be nearly impossible. While the unknown lower door made them anxious, it would be easier to reach.

  As they were discussing how to go about climbing up, some things poked their heads out of the sixteen passageways, all at about the same time. They were corpses so swollen they looked like they were about to burst: plague bombers.

  Bulging with hoarded-up negative energy, plague bombers, which resembled chunks of meat, were exasperating undead that exploded when attacked, dealing damage to the living and healing undead.

  They jumped. Crashing into the floor, their bodies made a sickening sound, but the problem was what happened next. The rotund monsters falling onto the steep slope rolled down like boulders toward Gringham and his team.

  “Look out! Dodge ’em!”

  “You don’t need to tell me twice—I’m the brains of this team!”

  They all—including the whimpering wizard—just barely managed to evade the monsters, which continued rolling down to the center of the inverted square pyramid.

  When the next plague bombers peeked their horrible faces out of the passages, Gringham realized that these had been just the first wave and got an idea of what was in store for them.

  “Run! These things are going to bury us!”

  If they were hit by one of the plague bombers and tumbled to the center, they were sure to be crushed. If that didn’t kill them, repeated hits of negative energy from the bursting monsters their teammates were fighting would.

  “What a treacherous trap! Someone give me a boost!”

  “Don’t be ridiculous! We wouldn’t be able to dodge if we did that!”

  Even if they managed to evade the falling monster, their balance would be off, so they wouldn’t be able to dodge the next attack. Asking someone to be a foothold under those circumstances was too much.

  “Then I’ll use magic!”

  “Don’t Fly! You’re not strong enough to carry us all up there.”

  “No! Not—agh, watch out—that! Web Ladder!”

  “That could work! Aim for the closer door! Gringham, cover him!”

  “No! Stop! We’ll escape through the door two stories up, the one we came in through! The lower one is too dangerous!”

  They didn’t have time to ask what gave him that idea, but they trusted him.

  “Web Ladder!”

  The spell created a spiderweb that led straight to the door two stories up. The magic spiderweb’s stronger-than-normal adhesion was sticky when one wanted to be fixed to the web and released when one wanted to move again. The spell really could be used just like a ladder.

  With rushed but flawless movements, Gringham and his team climbed up the web one after the other like prayer beads on a string.

  When they finally reached the open door, Gringham cautiously looked inside. Getting shoved from there and falling all the way down would have been unbearable.

  He sighed in relief. They seemed to have escaped the scenario he’d been afraid of; there were no undead in sight.

  Having confirmed that, he scrambled into the hallway and began hauling the others up.

  “We’re saved! Getting crushed to death by undead has got to be up there among the worst possible ways to die.”

  “These ruins are built in a pretty nasty way. I hurt my leg a bit in the fall. Can you heal me?”

  “I thought I felt my toes tingling in the explosions of negative energy. That was terrifying!”

  “I was lucky I even managed to dodge! Don’t make your wizard dodge!”

  Everyone grumbled, breathing raggedly.

  “Hey, Gringham. Why did we avoid that door? I kinda thought it might actually be the right way. It would be logical to make the correct route dangerous, right?”

  “It’s just a hunch, but…try attacking it with a weapon we don’t need.” Gringham gave a raw answer, having run out of poise, and the thief immediately threw a dagger.

  Just as it hit—or would have—part of the door swelled up to form a tentacle and slapped it away.

  “It’s…a door imitator! Er, no, judging from the color of the appendage, an undead door imitator! They capture opponents in a sticky liquid
and go to town on them with their tentacles.”

  “Tch! A plan B trap, huh? How tricky. Nice job seeing through it!”

  “It was only intuition. No, honestly, all I did was choose the known over the unknown. And that spot was getting bathed in the negative energy bursts. I don’t think it affects nonliving things like doors so much, but I mainly doubted whether it really made sense to put a hallway there. Okay, should we get go—?”

  Gringham abruptly closed his mouth. The thief who had been so chatty up until a minute ago had put a finger to his lips and was focusing his ears.

  Gringham strained his own ears and noticed the regular sound of something hitting the floor.

  Everyone looked in the direction the noise was coming from—down the hall.

  “An enemy…I guess? I wish they’d give us time to rest.”

  “Yeah, if there’s one sound and whatever’s making it isn’t even trying to move stealthily, it must be an enemy. I’ll be glad if this is the end of them…”

  All of them quietly drew their weapons. The warrior took his shield back and stood at the front, protecting one side of his body. The wizard had his glowing staff pointed down the hall, ready to cast at any moment. The priest raised his sigil, and the thief took aim with his bow.

  The tapping sound grew louder, and finally the thing making it came into view.

  A gorgeous yet worn robe was wrapped around a figure thinner than a young girl. The noise must have been the gnarled staff the figure held in one hand.

  The thing had a face—a bit of skin stretched over bone, beginning to rot—that contained a dark wisdom. The negative energy its body gave off hung around it, mist-like.

  It was an undead caster. It was called—

  “An elder lich!” the wizard, first to identify the monster, cried out.

  Yes. It was the worst sort of monster, which appeared when negative life occupied the corpse of an evil caster.

  The moment they heard it was an elder lich, Gringham and his teammates changed formation. They staggered positions so no one was obstructed and kept some distance from one another as a precaution against area-of-effect spells.