The Undead King

by Kugane Maruyama

  Whenever he was with Sebas, he couldn’t help but think of former guild member Touch Me. Not that there was anything strange about that, considering Touch Me had created Sebas. But why did they have to be so similar that they’re both equally scary when they’re mad? Grumbling inwardly, he turned his attention back to the mirror.

  Once he figured out how to control this thing (it was taking a while), he was planning to teach Demiurge to use it. This was the idea he’d had for the warning network.

  Even though it would be easier to leave this up to his subordinates, he was doing it himself with the questionable aim of getting them to think, That’s our ruler, all right, when they saw him working. That’s why he couldn’t just get fed up partway and abandon the project. I gotta figure out how to get the viewpoint up higher. If only there were a user manual…, he thought as he continued working.

  How long had he been doing this?

  Probably not that long, but if he didn’t get results, he would feel like he’d been wasting his time. With a glazed look on his face, he moved his hand absentmindedly and the view changed dramatically. “Whoa!” He shouted a mix of surprise and triumph. It was like the cheer of a programmer in his eighth hour of overtime who made a random edit that somehow got his code to work. There was applause in response—from Sebas obviously.

  “Congratulations, Lord Momonga. I can only say that I would have expected nothing less.”

  He’d only been using trial and error, so it didn’t seem like the type of work that deserved so much praise—it made him a little suspicious—but the look on Sebas’s face was genuine admiration, so he decided to accept the sentiment. “Thanks, Sebas, but I’m sorry to make you hang around here with me for so long.”

  “What are you saying, Lord Momonga? As a butler, the reason I was created was to stand by and obey your orders. There is nothing whatsoever to feel sorry about. However, it is true that some time has passed. Would you like to take a break?”

  “No, that won’t be necessary. I’m undead, so I don’t get negative status effects like fatigue. If you need a break, though, you can take one; I don’t mind.”

  “I thank you for your kindness, my lord, but what butler can rest while his master is still at work? I also experience no physical fatigue, thanks to an item. I will accompany you until you are finished.”

  Momonga had realized something about his conversations with the NPCs. They talked using some video game expressions as if they were totally normal: skills, classes, items, levels, damage, negative status effects… There was something sort of funny about saying all those words with a straight face. Putting that minor issue aside, he was glad he could give orders using game lingo.

  He told Sebas he understood and threw himself back into operating the mirror. Then, after repeating similar movements over and over, he finally figured out how to adjust the height of his viewpoint. Grinning, he earnestly set about searching for people.

  After a while, something that looked like a village appeared. It was about six miles south of the Great Tomb of Nazarick. The village was surrounded by wheat fields, and there was a forest nearby. Pastoral was definitely the word for the scenery. At a glance, it didn’t look as if the civilization were terribly advanced.

  As he zoomed in, something seemed off. “Are they having a festival?” Though it was early morning, there were people going in and out of houses, running. Everyone seemed to be in a hurry.

  “No, that’s not it…,” Sebas, who had moved beside him, answered in a steely voice as he watched the scene with a piercing gaze.

  Sebas’s hard tone gave Momonga a bad feeling, and he furrowed his brow as he zoomed in farther.

  Knightlike figures in full plate armor were brandishing swords at simply dressed people who seemed to be the villagers.

  It was a massacre.

  The villagers fell one by one each time a knight raised a sword. They must not have had any means of resistance. All they could do was flee in desperation while the knights just chased them down and killed them. Horses the knights must have ridden in on were standing in the fields eating the wheat.

  “Tch!” Momonga clicked his tongue and went to change the view. This village held no value for him. If he thought he could have gotten some information, there might have been a point to saving it, but like this, no.

  I should ignore them. As he made this coldhearted judgment, Momonga suddenly felt confused. There was a slaughter in progress and all that came to mind was what Nazarick stood to gain. The emotions he would have taken for granted—pity, anger, uneasiness—were completely missing. He felt like he was watching animals on TV, or insects in the dirt, playing out survival of the fittest.

  As an undead, am I already counting humans as a different species?

  Nah, couldn’t be.

  He hurried to justify his thoughts with an excuse.

  I’m not some hero.

  I may be level 100, but as I said to Mare, normal people here might be that. I can’t just go charging into a situation when I’m in a world where anything could be possible. The knights may be killing the villagers in a very one-sided way, but there could be a reason for it: disease, crime, a lesson. There are any number of possible reasons. If I step in as a third party to drive the knights away, I might make an enemy of the country they serve.

  Momonga put a hand to his head—to his skull. It was absolutely not the case that the scene failed to faze him because he had ceased to be human and transformed completely into an undead, immune to psychic effects.

  His hand slipped and a different part of the village showed up on the screen. Two knights were breaking up a struggle between a villager and another knight. They forcibly dragged the villager away and made him stand up, with one knight restraining his hands. Then, as Momonga watched, the other stabbed him with his sword. The blade went clear through the flesh and came out the other side. That’s probably fatal. But the sword didn’t stop there. The knight stabbed once, twice, three times, over and over, as if taking out his anger. Finally he kicked the body away, and it fell, splurting blood, to the ground.

  Momonga and the villager’s eyes met. Or perhaps he just thought they did.

  Nah, this has to be a coincidence.

  Unless there was anti-intelligence magic involved, there was no way the villager could know he was being observed.

  His mouth worked frantically, spilling a bloody froth. His eyes were already glazing over, and it was impossible to tell where he was looking. Still he clung to life and was able to get some words out. “Please, my daughters…”

  “What will you do?” Sebas asked, as if he’d been waiting for the right time.

  There’s only one answer. “Ignore them. We’ve nothing to gain by saving them,” Momonga answered calmly.

  “Understood.”

  Momonga casually glanced over at Sebas; behind him appeared a vision of his former guildmate.

  “Right, Touch?”

  But then Momonga remembered something Touch Me had once said.

  “When someone’s in trouble, it’s only natural to help them.”

  Back when Momonga had started playing Yggdrasil, there were people going around hunting grotesques like him. The quote was a memory from those times. He’d kept getting PK’d and was almost to the point of quitting the game when Touch Me had reached out to help him. If it weren’t for that, Momonga wouldn’t be here.

  He slowly exhaled and broke into a resigned smile. With that quote in his mind, he couldn’t very well not go and help them.

  “I’ll repay the debt I owe you. I have to test out my combat abilities in this world at some point, anyway…” Talking to someone who wasn’t there, he zoomed out to look at the entire village. He combed over it, searching for villagers who were still alive.

  “Sebas, put Nazarick on the highest alert level. I’m going ahead. Albedo is standing by in the next room; tell her to fully arm herself and follow—but no Ginnugagap. Also, prep reinforcements. If something happens and I become unable to re
treat, send in a party with good stealth abilities or invisibility.”

  “Understood. But if you need an escort, then I would—”

  “If you escort me, then who will relay orders? If there are knights rampaging through that village, there’s the possibility another group could appear near Nazarick while I’m gone. If that happens, I need you here.”

  The scene in the mirror changed and he saw a young girl send a knight staggering with a punch. Then she took a younger girl—was it her little sister?—by the hand and tried to escape. Momonga immediately opened his item box and took out the Staff of Ainz Ooal Gown.

  Meanwhile, the girl’s back had been cut. There was no time to lose. The spell glided out of his mouth. “Gate.”

  Momonga traveled by way of the most reliable teleportation spell in Yggdrasil. It could cover any distance and had a failure rate of 0 percent.

  His view changed. Momonga felt a tiny bit of relief that there had not been any magic blocking his teleportation. If there had been, he wouldn’t have been able to save the village, and it might have ended with someone getting the jump on Nazarick.

  The scene before him was the one he’d been watching a moment before—the two scared girls. The older one, probably the elder sister, had shoulder-length hair in a braid. Fear had drained the blood from her healthily tanned face. Her eyes brimmed with tears. The younger one had buried her face in the older girl’s back; her whole body was trembling.

  Momonga looked coolly at the knight standing before them. He must have been thrown off by Momonga teleporting in; he’d forgotten he’d been swinging his sword and was just staring at him.

  Momonga had lived a nonviolent life. And he felt this world was real, not a game. Despite that, confronting an opponent with a sword didn’t scare him one bit. His calm made a coolheaded decision for him.

  He opened his empty hand, stretched it out, and promptly cast a spell.

  “Grasp Heart.”

  Magic tiers went from one to ten, and this was a ninth-tier spell—one that caused instant death by crushing the enemy’s heart. It was one of Momonga’s specialties, since he was strong in ghost magic, which often came with effects like instadeath.

  The reason he’d chosen this as his opening move was that even if his opponent resisted it, there was stun as a secondary effect. In that case, he planned on taking the two girls and jumping through the still-open gate. When the strength of your enemy is unknown, you need to have an evacuation strategy and plan B ready.

  But in this case the prep was unnecessary.

  Simultaneously with the sensation of something warm being squashed in Momonga’s fist, the knight silently crumpled to the ground.

  Momonga looked down coldly at the lifeless body.

  He’d had a hunch it would be this way, but sure enough, he felt nothing upon killing a human… His mind was like the surface of a placid lake—no guilt, fear, or confusion. Why?

  “Hmm, so it seems I’ve quit being human in mind as well as in body…”

  Momonga walked forward. As he passed the girls, who must have been frightened following the death of the knight, the elder sister made a hesitant noise.

  One look was enough to tell he had come to save them, and yet they were panicked as if he had done something insane. What do they expect?

  He wanted to know the answer, but he didn’t have time for a Q and A. He confirmed in passing that the elder sister’s shabby clothes were torn and her back was bleeding; he hid the two of them behind him and shot a penetrating glare at a new knight who had appeared next to a nearby house.

  The knight registered Momonga as well and took a step back, as if he were scared.

  “So you’re fine chasing little girls around, but I’m too much to handle?” Momonga sneered in response to the knight’s terror and set about selecting his next spell. For his first move, he had chosen a pretty advanced one. Grasp Heart was from the magic tree he specialized in, so he got the ghost magic boost, and a boosted rate of instadeath success, as well. But there was no way to tell how powerful the knights really were like that.

  I should use something else on the next one, not instadeath, as a chance to test not only how strong beings in this world are, but also how strong I am myself.

  “Well, since you’re here, I’m going to have you help me with my experiment.”

  In comparison to how strong Momonga’s ghost magic was, his basic attack magic was fairly weak. Plus, metal armor was weak against electric magic, so in Yggdrasil most players added electric resistance to their armor. This all meant that using electric magic would be a good way to see how much damage the knights could take.

  He wasn’t going for the kill, so he didn’t need to use a skill to boost it. “Dragon Lightning!”

  White lightning appeared writhing like a living thing from his hand to his shoulder. A beat later it leaped off the end of his finger pointed at the knight like an electric discharge from a cloud. It was impossible to dodge or guard against.

  The energy took the form of a dragon and lit the knight up glaringly white for just a split second. Ironically, it was beautiful.

  The flash dimmed and the knight fell to the ground like a marionette whose strings had been cut. The strange odor of his charred flesh beneath his armor could be smelled faintly.

  Momonga had been prepping for his follow-up attack and was astounded to see how fragile the knights were. “How weak… They die this easily?”

  To Momonga, Dragon Lightning—a fifth-tier spell—was way too low level. When he, as a level 100, went out grinding, he’d been using mainly spells in eighth tier and up. He barely used five at all.

  Seeing that his opponents were so fragile sent all his worry out the window. There was, of course, the possibility that those two had been particularly weak. Still, it was hard to feel nervous at this point. Nonetheless, he kept his option to teleport away open.

  It was possible that they specialized in attacking. In Yggdrasil, an attack that chopped a player’s head off would just be counted as a critical hit and deal a lot of damage, but in the real world, it would be instantly fatal.

  Since he could no longer be nervous, Momonga decided to be cautious. It would be stupid to die from carelessness.

  First, I need to test more of my powers. He used a skill, Create Middle-Tier Undead: Death Knight. This was one of his special abilities. He could create all sorts of undead mobs, but this one was his favorite tank. Its total level was low at 35, and its attack level was even lower, comparable to a level-25 mob. On the other hand, it had good defense but still only about what a level-40 mob would have. In other words, in terms of levels, this monster was useless to Momonga.

  However, the death knight had two handy special abilities. One was that it would pull all enemy attacks. The second was that it could withstand any attack once, with one HP (hit point) remaining. Momonga had been able to make good use of it as a shield for those reasons.

  And that was why he was creating one now.

  When the Create Undead skill was used in Yggdrasil, the monster would instantly shimmer out of thin air near the player, but it seemed to work differently in this world.

  A black fog oozed out of the air and covered the knight whose heart had been crushed. It puffed up but then began to melt into the corpse. Then, he abruptly stood up with jerky, inhuman movements. Momonga heard the two girls shriek, but he didn’t have time to care about that—he was just as surprised as they were.

  A black liquid glugged noisily out of the slit in the knight’s helmet. It must have been coming out of his mouth. The viscous fluid darkness flowed to cover his entire body without missing a spot—it was like seeing someone get preyed on by a slime. Once the darkness had enveloped him completely, his shape began to warp and change.

  After several seconds, the darkness drained away and what was standing there could definitely be called the vengeful spirit of a dead knight.

  He’d grown to a height of around seven and a half feet and his body had gotten insanely
thick. It made more sense to call him a beast than a person. In his left hand, he held a huge tower shield that covered three-quarters of his body, and in his right, a flamberge. Normally this blade of more than four feet would be wielded with both hands, but this giant could easily hold it in one. A horrifying aura of reddish black twisted around the waved blade, undulating like the beating of a heart. His huge body was covered in full plate armor made of black metal with a pattern of crimson arteries going through it here and there. It was quite the embodiment of violence, with sharp spikes jutting out in various places. His helmet had horns like a demon and an open face that left his rotting features visible. In his vacant orbits, his hatred for living things and anticipation of slaughter burned red. He stood in his ratty raven-black mantle awaiting orders, his posture appropriately imposing.

  Momonga could feel the mental connection to the summoned monster, just like he had with the primal fire elemental and the moon wolves. He used it to give an order. “Kill the knights”—he pointed at the knight he’d killed with Dragon Lightning—“who are attacking this village.”

  “Yarrrrrgh!” the knight howled. It was a scream that would make anyone’s skin crawl. The air vibrated with his bloodlust. He ran off, swift as the wind, and made a beeline like a hunting dog on the scent of its prey. It seemed his perception ability, Hate, was working.

  Watching his death knight get smaller and smaller in the distance, Momonga was made vividly aware of a difference between this world and Yggdrasil—the difference of freedom. A death knight was supposed to stand by near its summoner (Momonga) and intercept enemies. It wasn’t supposed to take orders and act on its own. That difference could prove fatal in a world containing so many unknowns.

  Momonga clawed at his face in frustration. “He’s gone! What’s the point of a shield who leaves the one he’s supposed to protect? Sure, I’m the one who gave the order, but…,” he mumbled.

  He could make more death knights, but since he didn’t know the strength of his enemies or what the situation was, he felt he should save up casts of spells that were limited. But Momonga was a rear guard magic user and had no one to go out front and tank for him. He felt naked.