It may have been protected by a tough shell, but the impact shook through its body, knocking the breath out of it. Yet the demon showed a dogged refusal to be beaten. Out of nowhere, it issued four jointed, insectile limbs from its body and wrapped them around Al, pulling him in towards it. The two fell to the ground and rolled, fighting. Then, a piercing, alien scream arose from the tangle. Sticking into a gap in the Scarabaeus’s shell near its neck was a right-wield stiletto. Blood’s favorite custom dagger would not permit its opponent to fight back at this range, and healing miracles would be of little help to the demon with that blade still lodged into its neck.
“What you’ve taken—” Al held the struggling demon down and forced the blade in farther still. “You will return!”
The demon twitched two or three times. Then, at last, it stopped moving completely.
Blood’s voice, which I remembered so fondly, revived once more in my mind.
— One thing is always on their minds, day in and day out. The question of what is worth laying down their life for. What is their reason to fight.
“The enemy general,” Al yelled, “is slain!”
— And when they find it, they go into battle with their souls burning with the fire of courage, and never once fear death.
“Wow...”
You were right, Blood. You really were. It was just as you said.
Dwarves are true warriors.
◆
After Al had claimed the head of the Scarabaeus, the demons who had been surging towards us until that point suddenly slowed. Perhaps they had been under the Blessing of Frenzy, which the evil gods often gave to their followers.
If this was a story, the enemy would probably have taken flight at this point. However, it seemed that the demons weren’t such easy foes. The mere death of their general hadn’t caused them to lose the will to fight or their ranks to collapse. On the contrary, a few Commander demons immediately took over leadership and rallied the Soldier demons, putting up a strong resistance; meanwhile, several demons with bat wings flew around the hall, perhaps trying to take back the head of their leader. They darted at Al, who had mostly checked out mentally after claiming the demon’s head.
“You feckers!” Menel shot down most of them, firing arrows in quick succession, but finally his quiver was empty. Two demons came from above, descending quickly upon Al. There wasn’t time for him to defend—
I tossed my shield aside, bent my body backward, and hurled Pale Moon with all my strength.
It wasn’t a spear meant for throwing, but my body was well trained and my weapon familiar, and they answered my unreasonable request regardless. Two dying screams overlapped. Its blade glinting and its handle bending, the spear I had thrown had flown through the hall, impaled the two demons through the chest, and pinned them to a distant pillar.
“We’re not done, Al!” I called out. “Keep it up just a little longer!”
Coming to his senses, Al shouted back, “Yes, sir!”
Blood had told me once in the past that on the battlefield, the moment when a warrior defeats a strong foe and claims their head is the moment when they leave themselves the most vulnerable. I even had a memory of a relevant picture I’d seen in my previous world, in a book about Japanese history. I think it was about the Sengoku period or Edo or something. It had showed a warrior in the process of claiming the head of the enemy he’d defeated getting his own head chopped off by a different enemy. It showed that the moment of sweet victory is exactly when defeat and loss creep up on you.
Even as my mind wandered over these irrelevant thoughts, my trained body never stopped moving. Seeing that I’d lost my weapon, a demon swung its two-handed greatsword down towards me. I stepped towards it and to the side, dodging the swing. Then I placed both my hands on the back of the handle and continued the arc downwards, forcing the swing of my opponent’s sword to continue beyond the point where it should have stopped. The natural limits of the demon’s body prevented it from keeping hold of the sword.
And then I snatched it.
At the same time, using the momentum from my opponent’s swing, I sliced the demon wide open from its thigh to its stomach with its own sword. In terms of time, it was a mere moment. From the demon’s perspective, in the single instant it had swung its sword down, its opponent had dodged and closed in, and simultaneously its sword had disappeared from its hands and its thigh had been slashed. The demon might not even have understood what had happened. While thinking that I’d never expected to use this showy technique in an actual battle, I swung the sword I’d stolen without a moment’s hesitation and finished the demon off.
To be honest, this weapon’s center of mass was a little too close to the hilt, and I wasn’t very fond of two-handed greatswords. However, under Blood’s teaching, I had learned how to handle pretty much anything that could be called a weapon. Whatever a weapon’s intended purpose, as long as it wasn’t something difficult like a chain weapon, I could probably use it, and I wasn’t about to be choosy in a situation like this.
Another demon charged towards me. I gave it a slight opening which it took, attacking me head-on. With perfect timing, I pulled one leg back and dodged, then countered by chopping off its hand at the wrist.
It was useful, and honestly to be expected given the greatsword’s weight, that all I had to do was connect and wrists would fly off regardless of bone or anything else. I personally preferred spears, but I felt like maybe I could understand why Blood had adored two-handed swords so much.
I continued brandishing the greatsword for a while, lopping off limbs and chopping through torsos. Then, I checked the situation around me again.
Reystov was breathing quite hard. I couldn’t blame him. He’d been going too wild for too long by this point. Ghelreis was similar. Only the sound of heavy breathing could be heard from beneath his helmet. Even Menel, who commanded a view of the whole battlefield and had been lending his support to everyone, was starting to dull, and Al was hard at work protecting him in spite of his own injuries.
If we continued this much longer, we really would reach our limits. But now that we’d killed the majority of the high-level demons, the rest of them were starting to show signs of faltering. It was about time I acted. I dashed at the final Commander I could spot, chopped off its head, and belted the Word of Departure at the demons in the hall.
“Discede!”
I felt a colorless, transparent pulse of mana spread out from me like a wave.
We had secured the upper hand now. The point of this attack, using a Word that left strong mental effects, was to give the demons a final extra push.
The demons who were hit by it cringed and stopped dead in their tracks. Some of them who were especially weak or took a direct hit from the Word immediately turned to dust and crumbled where they stood, and the rest who survived finally started to scatter.
◆
The demons started to flee. Al must have been at his limit; he sunk to the floor on the spot.
Menel and Reystov, who were used to fighting for real, summoned the last of their energy to sink arrows and blades into the backs of the escaping demons, inflicting as much damage on their forces as possible. Even though they had lost their leadership, having demons on the loose would be a recipe for chaos in this area. The fewer of them there were, the better. If our enemies were showing us their backs, we had a duty to take them out and not ignore them.
Meanwhile, Ghelreis kept a vigilant watch, and as for me, after finally taking a moment to catch my breath, I set about healing everyone’s wounds.
“Gracefeel, goddess of the flame, grant us healing and vitality...” I put my hands together and prayed. Warm light flowed from everyone’s wounds, returning them to normal as if the injuries had never existed there to begin with. However, I couldn’t bring back the stamina everyone had used up. We couldn’t afford to get overconfident.
After that, we did a once-over to make sure there weren’t still any enemies hiding anywhere. After
we confirmed that we had completely chased the demons from the Hall of Light, we all shared smiles again. Each of us spontaneously raised a hand, and the crisp, refreshing sound of palms clapping against palms reverberated around the hall. My arms were tired, but a gentle warmth was left behind in my palm. It was the warmth of victory.
“Thought we were really gonna die there,” Menel said, laughing in relief. “Turns out charging into the main base of the demons with just the five of us was pretty reckless.” He put an arm around Al’s shoulder. “Good job, brother! You really pulled it out of the bag!”
“N-No, I hardly...”
“No, you holding the boss back made it a ton easier for us to go all out,” said Reystov.
Ghelreis nodded, too. “If their general had been allowed behind us, we could have been smothered and killed.”
I was in total agreement as well. “It was you who took them back. The mountain, and the crown.”
I picked the crown off the Scarabaeus’s head, which was rolling on the ground, and tried to hand it to Al. However, he turned it down with a shake of his head. “No. Not yet. We still haven’t taken everything back.”
After hearing his voice so full of determination, I nodded too. He was right. Indeed, we hadn’t yet taken back the whole of these mountains. The dragon remained.
“But if we do take it all back, Sir Will, I’d like you to be the one to crown me.”
“What? That’s a job for a high-level priest, isn’t it?”
“You are a high-level priest, numbnuts!”
“Huh? Oh... So I am.”
Everyone burst into laughter. I laughed, too. It had only just occurred to me that we could laugh. We could all still laugh.
Our opponent was going to be a strong foe the likes of which we’d never faced. It was difficult to call our situation ideal, but battle was always like that. Even if the situation left a lot to be desired, we had to do the best with the cards we had. We’d used up quite a bit of stamina, but we were still brimming with the will to fight. Our spirits hadn’t been dampened. We were in the best condition we could hope for right now.
“Let’s go. We’ll start by putting all the magic and blessings we can on us ahead of time.”
“Wait.” Reystov was frowning.
“What’s wrong?”
“Look over there.” He pointed to the area in the center of the hall, where countless demons had turned to dust. There were little mountains of the stuff all over the place.
“Huh?” Al tilted his head. Then, all at once, he turned completely pale. “It’s gone.”
“Gone? What’s gone?”
“The Scarabaeus’s body!”
“What?! Wait a fig second, we’ve got the head right here...”
We had its head. But—only now did I realize—it hadn’t turned to dust! Demons, who were visitors from another dimension, always turned to dust when they were killed. Sometimes weapons or other small parts of them would remain, but nothing like this.
“It ran off...”
“Will, slow down, brother, how the hell could a body without a head—”
“If its body is like a bug’s, there’s a chance. Haven’t you ever seen a bug moving after its head’s been pulled off?”
Insects have a rope-ladder-like nerve cord running throughout their body from the cerebral ganglion that corresponds to their brain. I remembered reading somewhere in my previous life that it was one of the unique features of insects’ bodies that they could distribute their information processing because of that structure. In other words, if that beetle-demon’s body resembled a bug’s on the inside as well...
“It had its head taken off and it still ran. I don’t know how capable of thought it is right now, but...”
Some high-level miracles could regenerate missing body parts. I had my doubts whether a head could be regenerated—such a thing was impossible to test or verify for humans—but it wouldn’t be at all surprising to me if it was possible for demons.
“Menel, track it.”
“Got it!” Menel immediately started tracking its movements.
While he worked, I began placing effects and strengthening magic on everyone. If we allowed the general to get away and rebuild its forces, we would be done for. There was every chance that next time, we really would be surrounded and killed.
“After it!”
Everyone raised a battle cry.
◆
Tracking the Scarabaeus took us out of the Hall of Light and following passages even deeper into the heart of the mountains.
Ghelreis said, “This is the way to the Great Cavern.”
“Maybe it went to get help from the dragon?”
“Possible. But it’s also possible it can’t think much and it’s just running blindly wherever its body takes it.”
I hoped it was the latter.
With a full set of strengthening magic upon us in preparation for an encounter with the dragon, we ran through the labyrinthine stone passages, shining up our surroundings with the light of our magic lanterns. The farther we advanced, the thicker the miasma became. If the dragon was the one producing this miasma, it had to mean that he was now very close by.
“Be careful, everyone!”
We made our way through the corridors, passing dusty, ancient rooms and halls. We crossed bridges over deep chasms. And finally, we reached a large, dark hall.
I couldn’t tell just how large it was; even with the range and brightness of Pale Moon’s blade set to their maximum, its light didn’t reach the far walls. It must have been an enormous smithy. Furnaces full of cold ash from which the fire was long gone were lined up like rows of giant tombstones. I could imagine that long ago, next to these roaring furnaces, experienced craftworkers had yelled at their apprentices over the racket of clanging hammers. There would have been songs to set the pace of the work as the contraption for transporting the ore clattered to and fro. But now, the fires were gone and the hammers had ceased; there were no voices of dwarves and no machines in motion. The darkness and silence was total.
Ghelreis, who knew how this place had once been, clenched his teeth. “Let us not lose track of it.”
“Yes.”
Nodding, we followed the demon’s trail.
It wasn’t very long before we were able to find the Scarabaeus. It had its back to us, facing the darkness of the Great Cavern, and it was making some very animated movements. It craned back and raised both its hands high above where its head should have been, as if pleading to a higher power for salvation.
At that exact moment, the demon was crushed.
Replacing it in my vision was a huge—altogether too huge—scaly arm. The General that Al had struggled so hard to defeat, who had been one of the highest-ranked demons there was, had been squashed like a mosquito in a single strike.
“Ghaha. How weak.”
From behind the Scarabaeus crumbling to dust came an inhuman laugh.
A black figure was lying there in the darkness. It was massive. No, the word “massive” didn’t even come close to describing it. What came to mind at this moment, as out of place as it was, was my old school in my previous world. If the school building as I looked up at it from the front gate had been a living creature, perhaps it would have made me feel like this.
The silhouette shifted. I was hit by a cloud of heated miasma. I could see the glint of gold and silver in the area around the silhouette, reflecting the light of our magic lanterns.
“Welcome to my bedchamber.”
A golden eye stared at me. I was gripped by an urge to turn around and sprint in the opposite direction. What the hell was I supposed to do against this?
I grit my teeth and tensed my stomach.
“Weakling, mortal, speak thy name.”
The black dragon cloaked in miasma with a golden eye, Valacirca—Calamity’s Sickle—slowly raised his head.
He looked exactly like most people’s conception of a wicked dragon, stretched out on a mountainous expanse of the dwar
ves’ treasure.
He had obviously strong jaws, twisted horns, and a thick and supple neck. His body was covered with tough scales, and from it grew a pair of large, membranous wings. The sharp, swordlike protrusions running down his spine became progressively smaller as they continued all the way to the tip of his long, elegant tail. They were as beautiful as they were fierce. I could see a brilliant mind in his golden eye shining in the darkness, and in the same body resided a nature that was horrifically vicious and savage.
“Well? Are you not going to name yourself? Struck speechless, I suppose.”
He was so imposing that none of us dared move. My throat felt raw. My heart pounded at a terrific rate. Instinct, reason, and all my senses told me to run, told me that an overwhelming predator was right in front of me!
I acknowledged that terror inside my heart. Fear and anxiety are inner monsters that grow the more you deny them, the more you avert your eyes from them. If I couldn’t acknowledge the frightened, cowardly part of myself, if I averted my eyes from it and pretended to be strong, the fear would grow even more vicious in the darkness. What was necessary for confidence was not swagger; what was necessary for bravery was not pretending to be strong. Everything begins with acceptance, I remembered Mary telling me. She was never disloyal to herself. She embodied all of this.
“Oh?”
I had to admit it. I was scared of this thing. I was hopelessly scared, and I wanted to run away. Taking conscious control of my breathing, which had become quick and shallow, I slowly inhaled and exhaled. I straightened myself up, raised my chin, tightened my abdominal muscles. Then I looked up at the dragon and asked him, “Shouldn’t you give your own name before asking the name of another?”
I was incredibly frightened. But I had decided to accept that and not run regardless.
“Hmm.”
The dragon looked down upon me, and with a noise that was neither a growl nor speech, it breathed miasma-tainted breath out of the corners of its mouth. The hot miasma belching out could have been mistaken for black smoke.
The Lord of the Rust Mountains (Complete) Page 29
