The Dark Warrior (26 page)

“Mine’s a skeleton centipede. If the adventurer on guard nearby hadn’t run over I’d a been a goner.”

“A skeleton centipede? The ugly ones only come out if you overlook weak ones. Just wipe ’em out while they’re wimpy, and we won’t have to deal with the strong ones.”

“Exactly! The liquor the squad patrolling the tombs sent us the other week after our leader gave them what for tasted great, but I never want to go through an ordeal like that ever again.”

“But when you think about it like that…doesn’t it kinda give you the creeps that nothing has spawned lately?”

“Why?”

“Well, like, maybe we’re missing them or something…”

“You worry too much. Supposedly there aren’t usually that many to begin with. There’s talk that the reason we had such a high rate of appearance was because we were burying people who died in battles against the empire. In other words, maybe this is what it’s like when there’s no fighting.”

The guards nodded at one another. Villages buried people just like they did, but they’d never heard of a place with so many undead.

“Supposedly the Katze Plain is just a mess.”

“Yeah, the undead that spawn there are on a whole ’nother level.”

The plain where the kingdom and the empire clashed was known as a region with frequent undead outbreaks, so adventurers requested by the kingdom and knights from the empire worked together to clean it up. Sweeping the area was so important that the kingdom and empire both sent goods to maintain a little town built out there to support the people suppressing the undead.

“I heard a rumor that—” one of the guards started to say and then closed his mouth.

One of the others got anxious. “Hey, if you’re trying to scare us—”

“Quiet!” The one who had closed his mouth was looking toward the graveyard as if he could pierce the darkness if he stared hard enough. The others followed his line of sight and looked, too.

“…Do you hear something?”

“Probably just your imagination.”

“Nah, I don’t hear anything, but it smells kinda like dirt. Like when we had to dig that one time? It smells like that.”

“Okay, not funny. Cut it out.”

“…Huh? Ah, hey! Look over there!”

One of the guards pointed out into the graveyard. Everyone turned to look.

Two guards were running frantically toward the gate. They were both breathing heavily, eyes wide and bloodshot, hair plastered to their foreheads with sweat.

The guards in the lookout had a bad feeling. Patrols went out in groups of at least ten. Why were there only two? Running that desperately with no weapons, they could only be running
away
from something.

“O-open up! Open the gate!”

A guard ran down the stairs in response to their panicked screams and opened the gate. The pair tumbled out of the graveyard as if they couldn’t wait for the door to open. “What the heck—?” the guard started to ask, but the two patrollers, faces white as sheets, interrupted him, shouting with what little breath they had left.

“C-close the gate! Hurry!”

Frightened by how upset they were, the guards all helped shut and bar the gate.

“What the heck happened?! Where are the others?”

The guard who looked up to respond had terror written all over his face. “Th-they were eaten! By undead!”

Learning that eight of their comrades had been killed, the guards looked at their squad leader. He responded with orders.

“…Hey, someone go look from up top!”

One of them sprang up and started running up the stairs but froze partway.

“Wh-what’s wrong?”

Trembling uncontrollably, the guard screamed back, “It’s undead! A huge mob of them!”

If they listened closely, they could hear a kind of squirming noise coming from the other side of the wall. Everyone followed the first guard, and one by one they were rendered speechless by the view.

A number of undead for which there were no words was coming across the graveyard, heading straight for them.

“What the heck? How are there so many…?”

“It’s not even a hundred or two… There’s gotta be…at least a thousand?”

There were so many even just in the areas the light reached that they couldn’t count them. Figuring in the human shapes wriggling in the darkness, their number was unfathomable.

The undead shuffled their swaying way toward the gate in a horde, accompanied by the smell of rot. Among them were not only skeletons and zombies but also stronger undead—though not as many—such as ghouls, ghasts, wights, swollskins, and corrupt dead.

All the guards were shaking now.

The city proper was behind another wall, so unless that was breached, no residents would be attacked. But they weren’t sure they could take this mob, even if they called for a general mobilization of all the guards. They may have been called “guards,” but they were just burlier versions of regular citizens. They weren’t confident they could subdue this many undead.

And some undead possessed the ability to turn anything they killed into the same type of monster. One wrong move and they’d be getting attacked by their undead comrades. On top of that, there weren’t any flying ones now, but they knew that if they didn’t wipe these out soon, some fiendish fliers would show up, and that terrified them even more.

The flood of undead reached the wall.

Bam-bam…

Undead with low intelligence made use of their inability to feel pain to senselessly beat on the gate. They must have known they’d get to attack some living things if they broke it down.

Bam-bam…

The repeated pounding sound, the squeaking of the hinges, the moaning of countless monsters.

They didn’t need a battering ram. The mob of undead that rushed the gate without even considering if they could break it or not performed as well as any siege weapon.

The cold sweat that drenched the guards’ backs when they saw that was like a bucket of ice water.

“Ring the bell! Get help from the garrison! You two, alert the other gates that this is an emergency!” The squad leader returned to his senses and started commanding. “The rest of you, use your spears to stab the undead near the gate from above!”

His voice reminded the guards what they were supposed to be doing, and they began plunging their spears into the throng of undead below. There were so many they couldn’t even see the ground. They could stab at random and still skewer one. Thrust, wind up, thrust again.

Murky blood spilled, the reek of decomposing bodies numbed the guards’ noses, and the repetitiveness of their frantic motions made them feel almost like zombies themselves. Several undead lost their un-lives, tumbled to the ground, and were trampled by the ones behind them.

Since they were so lacking in intelligence, they didn’t even try to counterattack. Lulled by the repetitive task, the guards gradually began to relax.

But just as if the monsters had been waiting for that to happen—

“Wah!” Someone screamed, and when the others turned to look, one of the guards had something long wrapped and wriggling around his neck.

It had a slimy pink gleam to it—intestines. At the other end was an egg-shaped, yet human, corpse with its front split wide open vertically. Inside the gaping cavity were more entrails than one person could ever possibly have, writhing like parasitic worms. It was an undead called an organ egg.

The squirming intestines yanked on the guard. “Yaaagh!” Faster than anyone could move to save him, he yelped and fell. “H-help! Someone! Aaarghghyaa!” he shrieked at the top of his lungs.

The other guards had no choice but to witness their comrade’s fate. Undead piled onto every part of his body and began to eat him alive. The armor protecting his torso and the efforts he made to protect his head only prolonged the brutality. First his fingers went, then his calves, then his face was chewed apart…

“Fall back! Retreat behind the wall!” ordered the squad leader, seeing that the organ egg’s innards were wriggling again.

Everyone rushed down the stairs. The pounding behind them grew stronger, and the screeches made it plain that the door was about to give.

The sense of tragedy gradually mounted. It didn’t seem very likely that the door would hold until reinforcements arrived, and the undead that appeared would only grow stronger. If the gate opened, a torrent of death would come flooding out and who knew how much damage would be done?

The moment all the guards’ faces had turned a sickly shade of despair, a metallic clank sounded. Everyone instinctively turned to see where it had come from.

It was a warrior in full plate armor astride a magical beast with wise black eyes. Next to him was a woman so pretty she looked out of place.

“H-hey! It’s dangerous here! Hurry up and—” Having said that much, the guard noticed the metal plate hanging from the warrior’s neck.

An adventurer!

But when he saw that it was copper, his slightly raised hopes deflated.
There’s no way an adventurer of the lowest possible rank will be able to turn this situation around!
Disappointment shone in all the guards’ eyes.

The warrior sprang lightly off the beast, as if he didn’t weigh a thing.

“Didn’t you hear me? Get away from here!”

“Nabe, my swords.” The warrior’s voice was soft compared to the guard’s yell, but strangely, it could be heard clearly over the symphony of noise the undead were making. The beautiful woman ran over to him, and the warrior drew a great sword.

“Hey, look behind you. Better watch out!”

The guards whipped around as if repelled by the sound of the warrior’s voice and faced The End.

A shadow loomed taller than the thirteen-foot wall. Countless corpses had gathered together to form an undead titan, a necroswarm giant.

“Wahhhh!” As the guards screamed and went to flee, every man for himself, an unexpected scene unfolded before their eyes.

The warrior held his sword like he was about to throw a javelin.

To do what?

The next moment answered that question. He threw it and at an unbelievable speed. Turning quickly back around to watch where it flew, they saw something even more unexpected.

The necroswarm giant—a colossal undead monster they would have never thought could be beaten—got knocked back as if it had taken a blow from an even bigger giant; it was defeated. As proof the giant had fallen, a colossal
thud
sounded over the squirming noises.

“That thing was in my way,” was all he said before striding forward with his other sword drawn. “Open the gate.”

For a moment the guards didn’t realize what he’d said. They blinked a few times, and the warrior’s words finally sank into their brains.

“D-don’t be stupid! There’s a huge mob of undead on the other side!”

“Oh? The name’s Momon. Does that have anything to do with me?”

The guards were all overawed by the black warrior’s overflowing confidence and couldn’t say anything.

“…Well, if you don’t want to open the gate, I guess I can’t blame you. I’ll just let myself in.” The warrior took a running start, kicked off the cobblestones, and vanished over the wall. He’d leaped over a thirteen-foot wall in a single bound—while wearing full plate armor.

Were they seeing things?

Unable to process what had just happened, they all stared gape-mouthed at the space where no one was standing anymore.

The beautiful woman who was left behind floated lightly into the air and was about to soar over the wall when a voice called out to stop her.

“Please wait, that I beg you! Take me, too, that I ask!” The voice’s owner was the robust magical beast the warrior had been riding. She sounded just as dignified as she looked.

The beautiful woman frowned slightly—not that it compromised her beauty one bit—and told the beast, “…Take those stairs. Don’t tell me you’re gonna break your legs falling from that height.”

“Of course not! Then away to my master’s side I go! Master, wait for me, that I ask!” The huge magical beast scampered past the guards, agilely ascended the stairs, and jumped down to the other side of the wall.

Then it was silent.

It was as if a typhoon had gone by. How long did they stand there, dumbfounded? Then one guard realized something and said, his voice trembling, “Hey… Can you hear it?”

“What?”

“The noises the undead were making.”

Even if they strained their ears, they couldn’t hear a sound; silence had swallowed them up. All the pounding on the door had stopped.

Awestruck, the shivering guard murmured, “Wow, can you believe it? That warrior…went in there against all those undead…and he actually broke through the mob…and is still going.”

The guards were overcome by amazement and admiration. The reason the noises had stopped was that all the undead in the area had been drawn away toward a new target. And the reason the noises didn’t return was that the battle was still ongoing, so the undead hadn’t come back.

The guards ran to the top of the wall in disbelief. Could this be real? They gasped.