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Overlord - Chapter 12
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1
They spent one night on the road back to Carne and one night in the village. And then they left for E-Rantel early in the morning to complete their two-night, three-day itinerary; when they arrived, the city was just beginning to put on its evening face. On the main street, Continual Light lamps threw white glows, and the people walking were gradually changing to a different sort. Young women and children were gone—most of the pedestrians were men on their way home from work. Lively voices and warm light spilled out of the establishments lining either side of the street.
Ainz took it all in. It didn’t seem like the city had changed in the two days he’d been gone. Well, he’d left for Carne the day after he arrived, so he didn’t have the knowledge of or fondness for it to be able to tell. Even so, he felt that there was nothing different about the peaceful cityscape.
One road behind the main street, the party halted for a moment. They would surely have been in the way, stopping in the middle of the street, but there was no one close enough to complain. That is to say, people were steering clear of them.
Ainz peered at them feebly, with his back rounded. Almost everyone going by stared at them—no, they stared directly at Ainz and whispered to one another. He could hear them, and he felt like everyone was having a laugh at his expense, but that was just his paranoia. Actually they were all speaking highly of him, expressing their surprise—and fear.
But that didn’t quite assuage his paranoia.
Ainz looked down—at the pearl-white hair. Yes, he was mounted atop the Wise King of the Forest.
All the passersby were amazed at the majestic (though Ainz had his doubts on that point) Wise King of the Forest and saying things like “My, what a noble magical beast that warrior is riding!”
Ainz wondered if he should be proud. He knew he should—everyone was
saying what a splendid magical beast the Wise King of the Forest was. But
Ainz felt like he was on some kind of sketchy game show. The closest thing he could think of was if an older dude was riding a merry-go-round with no girlfriend or family, looking straight ahead and deadly serious.
Knowing how to ride a horse was no help at all. The hamster’s shape was entirely different, so Ainz had his butt stuck out and his legs spread wide. If he didn’t assume perfect gymnastics vaulting form, he couldn’t keep his balance.
Obviously it hadn’t been his idea to ride the monster. The Swords of Darkness and the Wise King of the Forest herself had suggested it, and then Narberal chimed in that a ruler shouldn’t have to walk, so he found himself thinking it might not be that bad. How wrong he was.
I shouldn’t have gone along with this… It’s like someone set a trap for me… Riding a hamster was like something out of a fairy tale, which would have been fine if he’d been a little kid—or maybe a woman, but that was a stretch. It certainly didn’t suit a robust warrior in full plate armor, but everyone said he was the weird one for thinking that.
Is my sense of aesthetics off or theirs? Or maybe the whole world’s? Needless to say, the answer was clear. If the majority of people said something was beautiful and Ainz felt otherwise, then it had to be Ainz’s sense of aesthetics that had gone haywire. That was why he couldn’t put up a proper resistance to the idea of riding the Wise King of the Forest, especially if doing it would distinguish him and help Momon the adventurer carve out a sturdy position in the social order of this world. Still…
Why the humiliation play…? His mind would suppress any emotional wave of a certain strength, but there wasn’t any sign of that happening. In other words, he wasn’t feeling too humiliated—a fact that taught him something about himself. If I have a high tolerance for shame, that means…! Could I be a brilliant masochist…? I always thought I was more of a sadist, but…
“Well, we made it back to the city, so the request is fulfilled.”
Peter and Nfirea were talking, oblivious to Ainz as he agonized over his kinks while comparing his current mental state to the videos and images of that persuasion he had collected.
“Yes, you’re right—request complete. So, the agreed-upon reward has already been arranged, but I’d like to give you the extra reward I mentioned in the forest, so could you come with me to my shop?” Behind Nfirea, the cart was crammed full of medicinal herbs. Not only that, but there was also tree bark, strange fruits that had been hanging from the branches of the tree, mushrooms that seemed bigger than Nfirea’s arms could get around, and long grasses—i.e., a whole bunch of miscellaneous loot. For someone not in the know, it looked like just a pile of plants, but for someone with the right knowledge, it was a sparkling mountain of treasure.
The reason they’d made such a haul was that the Wise King of the Forest, at Ainz’s command, had escorted them around her territory so they could gather things safely. In return for the extremely rare herbs and other useful potion ingredients, Nfirea had promised them all a handsome bonus on top of the original reward.
“Okay, Momon, you’re off to the Adventurers Guild, right?”
“Oh, right. Any magical beast in the city needs to be registered at the guild, huh?”
“It’s a pain, but that’s how it is.”
“What’s the plan? We defeated those ogres, so should we all go and collect for that, too?”
“Hmm… No, Momon held our hands through every step of this trip. Let’s go to Nfirea’s place and at least help him unload the herbs and whatnot. If we don’t do some work, I’d feel bad taking an equal share of the reward.”
The Swords of Darkness nodded in agreement, but Nfirea tried to politely decline. “Oh, you don’t need to—”
“Well, there’s the extra reward you promised us, too, so just consider it a favor.” Peter was so casual about it that Nfirea gave in to their kindness.
“Okay, then, I’ll give you guys a discount when you buy potions at my shop.”
“Wow, that’s awesome. Okay, Momon will go to Nfirea’s after he swings by the guild. And the rest of us will go straight to Nfirea’s, help out with odds and ends, and then head to the guild to settle up. We’ll apply for the ogre compensation and then we can pick up the reward tomorrow, so I’m sorry to trouble you, but do you think you could meet us at the guild again tomorrow? Around the same time as when we first met?”
“Sure thing.” That was just what Ainz wanted to hear. He’d managed to nonchalantly ask how beast registration worked, but he was glad he was able to avoid the situation of having to ask them to read or write for him if they had come. There was a chance that something like that would make all his efforts so far come to nothing.
“Okay, see you later, then!”
With a shallow bow of his head, Ainz, still riding the Wise King of the Forest, accompanied by Narberal, took leave of the Swords of Darkness and proceeded to the guild. Once they were far enough away, Narberal sidled up to him and asked with some suspicion in her voice, “Are you sure it’s okay? To trust them like that?”
“…I’m fine with it. Even if they betrayed us, all we’d lose is the reward for the ogres. I imagine we’d lose more if we obsessed about such a small sum and gave the impression we were greedy.”
Ainz had come to this city to get famous. Having a reputation as petty would be a huge hurdle to his plans.
A warrior may not be able to eat, but he’ll still pick his teeth. Remembering that saying, Ainz put a hand in his pocket and fingered the small pouch containing his change. It was flat as a pancake and he couldn’t feel much of anything hard inside, so it was depressingly easy to tell how little it contained. It was still somehow enough to get two people a room for the night.
If paying for food had been necessary, they would have come up short, but since Ainz was undead and Narberal wore a ring that made eating and drinking unnecessary for her, they were able to save quite a bit of money. The idea behind having one of her two rings be something so boring was to take precaution against poison, but it ended up coming in handy in this unexpected way.
But this thing eats, Ainz was thinking, looking down at the Wise King of the Forest, when Narberal continued their conversation.
“It would…be strange for a Supreme Being such as yourself to cling to such a paltry sum. Please excuse my lack of thought, Lord Ainz.”
Ainz grunted a response and fingered the pouch again; his spine wasn’t breaking into a cold sweat, but it sure felt like it was. Why am I making things harder than they need to be? And again with the “Lord Ainz”… Whatever, Narberal, it’s fine. As long as nobody is listening, I don’t care.
As Ainz was inwardly slumping, Narberal chattered on cheerfully. “Oh yeah, those crane flies were bowing down before your awesome power, my lord.”
“I hardly think they were ‘bowing down.’”
“So modest, Lord Ainz! I’m sure that ogres and the like are below worms in your eyes, but you still put on a display of first-class swordsmanship for us. I was impressed.”
Ainz could feel the Wise King of the Forest trembling strangely beneath him. Ignoring that, he said, “That? I was just swinging it around…”
“One-hit kill” made him sound good, but really he wasn’t. The motions of Gazef in the battle he’d witnessed earlier had a flow to them. Meanwhile, when Ainz thought back on his motions, they were as lame as a kid recklessly swinging around a sword. Everyone’s praise was only due to the overpowering destructive power that stemmed from his extraordinary physical power. His technique was nothing compared to that of a real warrior like Gazef Stronoff.
“Not that I expected I’d be able to move like an actual warrior.”
“…So why not use magic to become a warrior?”
Wearing armor, Ainz was capable of using five spells. One of them would take his level as a caster and make that exact number his warrior level. In other words, Ainz could temporarily become a level-100 warrior.
There were pros to this, like being able to use gear that only certain classes could use, but naturally, there were also big cons. For starters, during that time, he wouldn’t be able to use any magic. Also, while he would become a warrior, he wouldn’t acquire all the warrior skills, and the recalculation of his ability points would place him lower than a warrior who had been one from the beginning. Essentially, he’d be transformed into a half-assed warrior. Maybe he’d be able to defeat a priest knight or other quasi-warrior class in a sword fight, but against someone who’d collected pure warrior classes, it was doubtful.
Still, he’d be far stronger than he was right now. The problem was—
“There are too many drawbacks. If I was suddenly assaulted by another warrior and couldn’t use any magic for even a short amount of time, I would undoubtedly be defeated. Even if I could use a scroll and cast a spell that way, considering the amount of prep that takes, I’d be at too big of a disadvantage.”
At the present time, when they didn’t know if there were enemy players out there, he couldn’t let his guard down. There was no point in going to the trouble to use that magic just to give himself a weak point.
“Well, this warrior thing is just an act to hide who I really am, so it’s probably not worth getting so upset about.”
The Wise King of the Forest jumped with a gasp and turned to look up at Ainz. “I’ve been listening to your conversation… Y-you’re not really a warrior?!”
Ainz looked her in her black eyes and answered in the negative with a confident shake of his head.
Narberal explained, her voice oozing superiority, “Lord Ainz is just pretending to be a warrior. It’s like a game. If he were to use his true power, he would rend the heavens and split the earth!”
*Faced with her absolute faith, her belief that him being capable of so much was a given, Ainz couldn’t get himself to say, No, that would never happen. “…Mm, yeah, pretty much. You’re lucky you didn’t have to fight me for real, Wise King of the Forest… If you had, you probably wouldn’t have survived more than a second.”
“I-is that so, master? I, Hamusuke…will be even more loyal to you!”
Hamusuke. That was the first thing that had popped into Ainz’s mind when the Wise King of the Forest asked him for a name. He’d given it to her that very moment, and the Wise King of the Forest was happy with it, but he realized it was totally lame. Yeah, Hamusuke was a hasty decision… Creampuff*—that would’ve been more witty. Even all my old guildmates used to tell me I had no sense for names…
So it was that Ainz, full of regret, trundled along to the Adventurers Guild atop the Wise King of the Forest, also known as Hamusuke.
•
Nfirea pulled the cart around to the rear of the house and parked right outside the back entrance. He hopped out of the driver’s box carrying a lantern lit with magic, and then unlocked and opened the door. He banished the darkness of the room inside by hanging the lantern on the wall. Several barrels appeared in its glow. The smell of dried herbs coming from them indicated that this room was used to store medicinal herbs.
“Okay, then. Sorry to trouble you, but do you mind carrying in the herbs?”
The Swords of Darkness gave a willing reply and carefully took the bundles of herbs off the cart and put them in the storage room. As Nfirea gave directions on where to deposit each item, he had a strange feeling.
“Grandma must not be here?”
She was getting on in years, but her eyes and ears were still sharp, so she should have heard them clattering around and come in to greet them. That said, when she was focused on making potions, she didn’t let little noises interrupt her. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary, so he didn’t raise his voice to call her or anything.
It wasn’t long before all the bundles of herbs had been put in the appropriate places. The Swords of Darkness were looking a little out of breath. “You must be tired! There should be some cold fruit water in the main building. Would you like some before you leave?”
“Sounds great!” said Lukrut happily. A few beads of sweat stood out on his forehead. The other Swords of Darkness nodded their agreement.
“Right this way, then.” Just as Nfirea turned to lead them to the main building, the door across the room opened.
“There you are. Welcome home!” Standing there was a cute woman, but there was something troubling about her. Her short golden hair swung with each step she took. “I was so worried about you! Because you were just gone! What horrible timing you have. I’ve been waiting this whole time, wondering when you’d get back!”
“…Uh, umm… Who might you be?”
“Huh? You don’t know her?!” Peter yelped, surprised they weren’t on at least acquaintance terms given the woman’s familiar tone of voice.
“Hmm? Eh-heh-heh-heh! I’m here to kidnap you! I want you to use the spell Undead Army to summon a legion of zombies, so come be my pawn! Pretty pleeease!”
Sensing the malicious mood, the Swords of Darkness immediately drew their weapons. She kept talking even as they all assumed fighting stances.
“A seventh-tier spell. Tricky for a plain old person to use, but doable with a Crown of Wisdom. Furthermore, though it’s impossible to control all the undead that are summoned with it, they can be led! Perfect plan, don’t ya think? Awesome, right?”
“…Nfirea, get back! Get away from here!” said Peter in a hard voice, focused on the woman with his sword at the ready. “The reason she’s rambling on and on is that she’s a hundred percent certain she can kill us. So as long as you’re her aim, the only thing that can change the current situation is you running away.”
When Nfirea panicked and fell back, the Swords of Darkness formed a wall in front of him.
“Ninya, you should also fall back!” Dyne shouted, and then Lukrut spoke up as well.
“Take the kid and run for it! You have something you need to do. It doesn’t seem like we’ll be able to help you…but we can at least buy you some time.”
“But—”
“Oh, your story’s a real tearjerker, huh? You’re gonna make me cry, yup. But I can’t have ya runnin’ away on me. I wanna play with at least one of ya.” She laughed delightedly at Ninya as he bit his lip in hesitation and slowly pulled a stiletto out from under her robe. As if timed for that moment, the door on the other side of the room opened, and a man like a sickly pale, bony undead appeared.
The Swords of Darkness’s faces turned grim when they realized they were caught in a pincer.
“…You’ve played enough.”
“Ohh, whaddaya mean, Khaj? You made it so no one outside will hear their screams, right? Can’t I play with at least one?”
Her toothy grin sent chills up Nfirea’s spine.
“Well, there’s nowhere to run now, so let’s get to it, shall we?”
2
The actual registering of Hamusuke went smoothly enough, but they got caught up for an hour and a half. The part that took the longest was the sketch—the time it took to draw Hamusuke. It would have been faster if they’d done it with magic, but Ainz would have had to cover the fee, so he passed.
Of course, he didn’t want to seem tightfisted, so he was forced to come up with a random excuse. “It’s too late now, but ‘I’m interested in drawing’ was a bit forced, huh? …Well, whatever. So now we head to Nfirea’s?” he said to Narberal in front of the guild after the registration was taken care of. Then he went over to Hamusuke.
He was already used to it. Or rather, the merry-go-round was not a ride for only the affluent (lovers and families). What was wrong with solitary older dudes getting on? Ainz no longer cared what anybody thought.
Making full use of his high physical ability, with movements as graceful as a celebrated gymnast, he sprang onto the Wise King of the Forest. He had neither saddle nor harness, but his few hours of experience had turned him into a fine equestrian.
The passersby who witnessed the spectacle oohed and ahhed. Some women even squealed. The looks from adventurers were particularly intense—and incredulous once they’d checked the plate hanging around his neck.
I’m the one who can’t believe it! What happened to your concept of aesthetics? he grumbled in his head and was about to give the order to depart when a voice called out to stop him.
“Say, aren’t you the one who went to gather herbs with my grandson?”
He turned toward the elderly-sounding voice and found an old woman standing in the road. “…Who are you?” He already had a guess. If what she said was true, then there was only one person she could be.
“My name is Lizzy Baleare. I’m Nfirea’s grandmother.”
“Oh, so it is you! As you say, I escorted Nfirea to Carne—I’m Momon. And this is Nabe.”
Nabe bowed, and Lizzy smiled at her. “What a beauty! I can hardly believe my eyes. And what is this magical beast you’re riding?”
“This is the Wise King of the Forest, Hamusuke.”
“I’m Hamusuke, I am, and very pleased to meet you!”
“What! This mighty beast is the Wise King of the Forest?” Lizzy’s shout caused all the eavesdropping adventurers to look even more surprised and voice their shock among themselves: Is that really the legendary magical beast?
“She is. We ran into her on the way to gather herbs. I forced her to surrender.”
“Wow… The Wise King of the Forest…” She was seeing stars. “So… where is my grandson now?”
“Ah, he took the herbs and went home a little while ago. We’re actually on our way to your place to pick up our reward.”
The old woman was visibly relieved to hear as much. Then, with a strange look in her eye, she said, “Oh, I see… Why don’t we go together, then? I’m very interested in hearing about your adventure.”
Her offer was music to Ainz’s ears. “Gladly!”
Lizzy guided the group through the streets of E-Rantel.
“Okay, let’s go in.” They’d arrived at the shop, and Lizzy had taken the key out in front of the door when she cocked her head. She pushed and the door opened silently without any resistance. “…That boy! So careless…,” she grumbled as she entered, and Ainz and Narberal followed.
“Nfirea! Hey! Momon’s here!” she shouted toward the back, but a deep quiet reigned over the shop. There was no sign anyone was there. “Where could he be?”
Ainz gave a short answer to the puzzled query. “Well, this is trouble.” Ignoring the uncomprehending Lizzy, he placed his hands on the hilts of his great swords. Narberal knew immediately what that meant and removed the sheaths.
“Wh-what is it?”
“Just follow me.” With that curt reply, he fully drew his swords, gripped them properly, and strode toward the back of the shop. He threw open the door and turned right down the hallway. He was in a stranger’s house, but there was no hesitation in his footsteps.
When he came to the door at the end of the hallway, it took a moment for Lizzy to catch up. Then he asked her, “What’s behind this door?”
“I-it’s where we store the herbs. And the back door is there, too…” She didn’t know what had happened, but she could tell something was wrong.
Ainz ignored her and opened the door. The smell that assaulted their noses was not medicinal herbs but something more foul—the stench of blood.
Peter and Lukrut were near the door, Dyne farther away. And all the way in the back was Ninya. All four were slumped against a wall, legs splayed, arms flopped limply at their sides. And all across the floor was a puddle of dark blood—enough that it looked like every drop in their bodies had been bled out.
“Wh… What in the…?” Lizzy tottered toward the threshold in shock, but Ainz held her back by her shoulders and entered swiftly ahead of her.
All of a sudden, Peter began to make a jerky attempt to stand. But more quickly than he could, with not a split second of indecision, a great sword sliced through the air. Peter’s head landed with a thump and rolled across the floor. Then, as Lukrut was trying to get up, the sword returned in one fluid motion to slice off his head as well.
Lizzy could hardly believe the horrors occurring before her eyes while Dyne managed to get upright. The face he turned to them was not the face of a living thing. From its bloodless pallor, clouded eyes stared them down. There was a hole in his forehead, and one glance was enough to tell it had been fatal.
There was only one reason the dead would walk—they’d been turned into undead.
“Zombies!” Lizzy screamed, and Dyne lurched toward them with a hostile groan. Ainz hastily stabbed with his great sword and the huge blade went through Dyne’s neck. His destabilized head wobbled loosely as he sank to the floor.
No one moved anymore. In the silence, Ainz looked at Ninya in the back, who didn’t so much as twitch.
“Nfirea!” It finally dawned on Lizzy what had happened, and she ran off to look for her grandson.
Ainz glanced at her briefly before turning to Narberal with an order. “Guard her. My passive skill Immortal Blessing doesn’t detect anything, so we can assume there aren’t any more undead around, but there may be some live enemies hidden somewhere.”
“Understood.” Narberal gave a quick nod and ran after Lizzy.
After seeing that both of them were gone, Ainz turned his attention back to Ninya. He slowly knelt down before him and patted him down lightly. Satisfied there was no corpse booby trap like he used to use when PK-ing in Yggdrasil, he raised Ninya’s head. Needless to say, he wasn’t unconscious but dead—probably beaten to death with a blunt object.
His face was swollen up and in such rough shape that the word pomegranate was perhaps the most apt metaphor. If Ainz hadn’t known it was Ninya, it would have been difficult to tell who it was. His left eye had been crushed, and its vitreous humor had run down his cheek like tears. Every bone in each of his fingers had been smashed; the skin had split, revealing the bright red flesh beneath. In some places, even the flesh was mangled.
When Ainz loosened the youth’s clothes and looked underneath, his eyes widened; he put them back the way they were and cleared his throat. “I see… All over, then…” His body had been beaten into a state just as gruesome as his face. Internal bleeding had discolored his skin, and it was hard to find anywhere that wasn’t damaged.
Ainz silently closed Ninya’s eyes. No one heard him whisper, “It’s just a little…unpleasant.”
“My grandson! Nfirea isn’t here!” Lizzy returned, practically screaming.
Ainz, who had just finished gathering all the bodies into one corner of the room, answered her calmly. “I went through their things, and there’s no evidence that someone was looking for anything in particular. That must mean their aim from the start was to kidnap Nfirea.”
“Agh!”
“Take a look at this.” Ainz pointed to some writing scrawled in blood on the wall behind where Ninya had been. If he hadn’t moved the body, they probably wouldn’t have found it.
“The sewers…? Does that mean they’ve taken him into the sewers?”
“Hmm. The people behind this atrocity could be trying to mislead us. We shouldn’t rule that out. And I don’t know how big the city’s sewer system is, but…I think it would take quite a while to search it. What’ll we do about that?”
“Look, there are numbers written before the words! Two-eight! That must mean something!”
“That’s even more suspicious. It’s not clear what those numbers stand for, but…one idea would be that they divided up the entire city into a square grid of eight or more boxes to a side, and those numbers indicate an intersection. Or it might indicate some sort of address, but…would Ninya even have had the energy to think that far? Even if Ninya wrote it, do you think the culprits would really let that much information slip? It seems altogether too convenient.”
Even more wrinkles appeared on Lizzy’s wrinkled face. She seemed just about ready to explode in anger at how awfully coolheaded Ainz was. Then her eyes moved to the corner where the four bodies were laid out.
“Who are these people?!”
“Adventurers who undertook your grandson’s request along with me. We had parted ways; they were supposed to be unloading the herbs…”
“What? Then, these are your friends?!”
Where another adventurer might have nodded, Ainz shook his head. “No, we just happened to be traveling together.” Lizzy blanched at his cold reply. “More importantly, faced with their corpses, I’ve been thinking about a lot of things, but what do you make of the fact that they were turned into zombies?”
“Create Undead. That means they have someone who can use at least tierthree magic, right? What else could it mean?”
“Here’s what I think: You should take care of this as soon as possible.”
“That’s a given…but what do you mean?”
“These guys could have manipulated them with mind control, or they could have hidden the bodies—there were other options, but instead of taking them, they set up this little game. Maybe they didn’t care if they were found out? Or were they just that confident that they could get away? Hmm…it has to be one of those. If they were going to go to the trouble of making zombies, they could have taken them with them.”
If their aim was strictly to kidnap Nfirea, they could have gained plenty of time just by concealing the corpses. The fact that they didn’t do that meant that either they had some secondary aim or they wanted to force Lizzy to do something. The latter was a simple matter, but the former would mean that Nfirea’s life and powers had value to them. And probably, whatever they wanted could be completed in a short amount of time. Would these brutal killers send him home safely when they were done?
Lizzy’s face, as she understood what Ainz was getting at, went past pale to white as a sheet. To figure out where in this huge city they’d gone, and then begin searching from there—it would take way too long. The only clue they had was the sewers, but Momon was voicing doubts. This time slipping through their fingers was the waning light of Nfirea’s life.
Ainz made a quiet suggestion. “How about making a request?” His icy voice continued. “This is definitely the sort of thing you should hire an adventurer to take on.” A light in Lizzy’s eyes seemed to indicate that she had grasped his meaning. “You’re in luck, Lizzy Baleare. Standing before you is the best adventurer in town. I’m the only one who can bring back your grandson. If you make a request, I might even take it on. But…it’ll cost you! I can tell what a tricky job this is going to be.”
“But yes, you could… You had that potion…and you must be strong if the Wise King of the Forest obeys you. I’ll do it. I’ll hire you!”
“I see…and you’re prepared to compensate me?”
“How much will it take?”
“Everything.”
“What?”
“I’ll take everything you have.”
Lizzy’s eyes grew wide and she shuddered.
“Everything you have. If Nfirea comes home safely, give me everything.”
“You…,” Lizzy murmured, backing away as if she were frightened. “You don’t mean money or potions by this everything of yours, do you…? They say a demon can grant a wish in exchange for your soul. You’re not demons, are you?”
“Even if we were, does it matter? You want to save your grandson, don’t you?”
Lizzy said nothing, just nodded once, biting her lip.
“Then there’s only one answer, right?”
“Yeah…I’ll hire you. I’ll give you everything I have. Save my grandson!”
“Okay, the deal is sealed, then. To get right down to business, do you have a map of the city? If you do, I want to borrow it.”
She seemed dubious but went to get him a map right away.
“Okay, now we’re going to find out where Nfirea is.”
“You can do that?!”
“This time, I can. Either our enemies are idiots, or…” As his sentence trailed off, he looked at the four bodies. “Well, we’re going to get things under way in here, so go look in the other rooms and see if you can find anything that might lead us to Nfirea’s kidnappers. Things’ll get hairy if this was just a diversion. Anyhow, this is your house, so you know it best.”
Having made up some reason to get rid of Lizzy, Ainz watched her go and then turned to Narberal.
“What are you going to do?”
“It’s simple. Look, their plates are gone. It was probably the kidnappers who took them. The question is, why would they take those when they didn’t take any of the more valuable items? What do you think?”
“My apologies. I don’t know.”
“They’re—”
“Lord Ainz!” A slightly shrill voice sounded in his head—and some kind of squeaking noise layered over it like a second audio track.
“Entoma?”
“Yes, sir.” Entoma Vasilissa Zeta was, like Narberal, one of the Pleiades. “There’s something I need to talk to you abou—”
“I’m busy right now. I’ll contact you when I get some time.”
“Understood. Then, please contact Mistress Albedo when you have time.”
The spell vanished and Ainz continued his conversation with Narberal, who was looking at him curiously. “Trophies. They’re hunting trophies. The criminals must have taken them as mementos. But that was a fatal mistake. Narberal, use this.” He reached into an Infinity Haversack and pulled out a scroll. “It’s Locate Object. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you what we’re looking for.”
“Understood.”
The moment she unrolled the scroll and was about to cast the spell, Ainz grabbed her hand. She was caught by surprise. “…You fool,” he declared icily.
His level tone made her shoulders jump. “M-my apologies!”
“When you’re using intelligence-gathering magic, preparing adequately to guard against your enemy’s potential counterspells before casting is an iron rule. Considering your opponent could be using Detect Locate, protecting yourself with Fake Cover and Counter Detect is the most basic of the basics. Then you have—” Ainz had prepared ten scrolls. He went on to explain the rest of them to Narberal as if he were lecturing at a university.
When collecting intelligence using magic, it was necessary to take elaborate defensive measures. That was fundamental.
When Ainz Ooal Gown was going to PK someone, they first collected any information they could get about the player and then sneak-attacked to win in one fell swoop. That was their basic strategy, No Fuss PK-ing, developed by guild member Squishy Moe, who declared, “The battle is over before it begins!”
That was why Ainz was teaching Narberal now—so that in the future, when they encountered players, she would be able to fight with an advantage.
“—and that’s it. Really, it’s also basic to use skills for boosts and counters, as well, but we probably don’t need to go that far against these guys. If they had casters able to do anything stronger than this, they wouldn’t have cast such low-level spells on those corpses. Okay, Narberal, do it.”
Finally free to act, Narberal unfurled each scroll in order, naming each spell as she went. The scrolls burst into heatless flames and burned up in a matter of seconds to release the magic sealed inside.
Once she had used them all and was protected by numerous defensive spells, she cast Locate Object. Then, she pointed at the map.
“They’re here.”
Ainz couldn’t read what was written there, so he searched his memory to remember what was in that area. “…The graveyard? So there’s a good chance it’s not the sewers.”
The graveyard in E-Rantel was in a league of hugeness all its own, partially because the city was used as a military base. The magic was pointing to the location farthest in.
“Okay, then next use Clairvoyance. Cast Crystal Monitor at the same time, and show me what’s going on over there, too.”
Narberal used the two scrolls, and they saw countless human figures on the screen that appeared in the air. But something was strange about the way they were moving—many of them were jerking awkwardly. There were also countless figures that were definitely not human.
And in the center of it all was a boy. He was dressed differently, but there was still no mistaking him.
“Got him. And the plates are in this area… An undead mob, huh?”
The place was occupied by a huge swarm of undead. They were all lower tier, but there were lots of them.
“…What will you do? Should we teleport in to attack all at once? Or take them by storm from the air with Fly?”
“Yeah, sure, we can wrap it up on the down low—don’t be stupid.” Narberal looked confused, so he explained. “They have this huge mob of undead, so they must be trying to do something big. If we can put a stop to that while saving Nfirea, it’ll be great for our reputation. If we deal with this in secret, all we’re likely to get is the reward from Lizzy.”
Of course, if they didn’t deal with it as soon as possible, Nfirea could be killed. Even Ainz couldn’t summon and control that many undead at once, so there had to be some trick to it. Maybe it’s somehow dependent on Nfirea’s life? But if that were the case, then he wanted to know that trick, even if it meant sacrificing Nfirea. Ainz was most concerned with strengthening the Great Tomb of Nazarick. If letting Nfirea die would benefit Nazarick, he would choose that.
“Well, we can’t gather much more intelligence as we are, and it would take too long anyways…,” Ainz murmured as he proceeded to the door. Flinging it open, he shouted, “Lizzy! We’re done! And we’re going to the graveyard!”
“What about the sewers?!” she screamed from somewhere, and they could hear her footsteps rushing over.
“They were just misleading us. Their real aim was the graveyard. And as a bonus, there’s an undead army numbering easily in the thousands.”
“What!”
He’d just taken a guess. It wasn’t like he was going to count them all.
“Don’t be so surprised. We’re going to break through. The problem is what happens if the undead overflow the graveyard. Please tell as many people about this as possible, that we need people to stop them as they start escaping. It’s not a very convincing story, but you’re famous here, so people will listen to you, right? If the undead overflow the graveyard and no one is ready for them…there’ll be trouble.”
Ainz frowned under his helmet. He needed people to make a fuss. The bigger the fuss, the better his reputation would get at the end. Telling her to spread the word was a strategic move.
“That’s enough chitchat. Time is running out, so we’re leaving.”
“Do you have a way to break through the undead army?!”
Ainz looked calmly at Lizzy and pointed at the great swords on his back. “…It’s right here, isn’t it?”
3
Taking up about a quarter of the area inside E-Rantel’s outermost wall in a huge block that occupied most of the western district was the E-Rantel Public Cemetery. Of course, other cities had cemeteries, but not as gigantic as this one. They needed it to prevent undead from spawning.
How undead spawned was still a mystery in many ways, but they often appeared, with their impure “life,” in places where a living thing had met its end. If the person died a tragic death or went unmourned, the chances of undead appearing were much higher. For that reason it was very common for them to spawn in ruins or places where battles had been fought.
Since E-Rantel was close to the sites of the battles with the empire, they needed to build a huge cemetery—a place to mourn—so that their dead wouldn’t turn undead.
This went for the empire as well, so the two sides arranged it so that even though they were at war with each other, they would both make sure the other could properly mourn their dead. Even if they were killing each other on the battlefield, they knew that the undead who attacked the living out of hatred were the common enemy of all life.
There was another problem with undead. If they were left alone, the probability that a stronger undead would spawn went up. That’s why adventurers and guards swept the graveyard every night and took out any undead while they were still just lower tier.
The graveyard was surrounded by a wall. It was the boundary between the world of the living and the world of the dead. At about thirteen feet, it wasn’t as tall as the city walls, but it was fairly thick, and it was possible to walk along the top. The gates were sturdy, too. This was all as a precaution against the undead that spawned inside.
Flanking the gates were staircases that led to lookouts. Five men to a side exchanged yawns while keeping watch.
Although it was nighttime, light posts lit with Continual Light kept the place bright. That said, there were still pockets of darkness here and there, and gravestones impeded visibility.
One guard with a spear, gazing absentmindedly out over the cemetery, said to the fellow next to him through a yawn, “Quiet night.”
“Yeah. Just those five skeletons so far? Seems like the spawn rate went way down all of a sudden.”
“Yeah. Maybe everyone’s souls were called to be with the Four Gods. If so, we lucked out!”
The other guards joined in.
“As long as it’s skeletons and zombies, we can handle ’em…although skeletons are a pain to get with spears…”
“The worst one I ever saw was a wight.”
“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. ******, wind up, ****** 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.
“What…! That warrior, what the…?”
There were bodies everywhere. A mountain of them. There were so many corpses lying around that the guards couldn’t see the ground. Some of them, twitching, hadn’t completely lost their negative life, but none were able to fight.
As they thought, the sounds of a far-off battle drifted over on the putrid-smelling breeze.
“You gotta be kidding me… He’s still fighting?! He made an enemy of that whole mob…and broke through?! There’s no way…”
“Who the heck is that guy?!”
“…He said his name was Momon, right? That copper plate has to be a lie, right? He’s gotta be one of those adamantite plates you hear rumors of, don’t ya think?”
Everyone nodded to someone’s muttering. There was no way that was a copper-plate adventurer. He was a hero who had to have the highest-ranking plate. That was all they could think.
“We may have just seen a legend… The Dark Warrior… No, the Dark Hero…”
The others all nodded in agreement.
•
Every time his right arm moved, undead went flying. Every time his left arm moved, undead were sliced in two.
Ainz had advanced like a tornado of one-hit death, but now he stopped. “You guys are such a pain.” Holding both great swords he’d remade with magic, he scanned the crowd of undead surrounding him with fed-up eyes. He addressed his sword, grimy with bodily fluids, to the monsters.
With a flurry of flinches, the undead tried to squirm away from him. Undead shouldn’t have been able to feel fear, but they sure seemed scared of Ainz.
“…I apologize for the trouble, that I do.” The voice came from above Ainz—quite a ways above. The Wise King of the Forest was floating floppily, four legs splayed, in the air. Her hair drooped and her voice was cheerless.
The one she was apologizing to wasn’t Ainz. “Could you…not move around? You’re so soft and fluffy it’s hard to hold you.” Narberal’s voice came from somewhere around the Wise King of the Forest’s belly. It wasn’t the king who was flying—Narberal, half sunk into her squishy body, was holding her up using Fly.
“I’m sorry, that I am…”
The lower-tier undead with their subpar intelligence didn’t immediately treat Ainz as an enemy. Their senses were keenly attuned to life, so they took Ainz to be one of them.
But they weren’t going to miss the living Wise King of the Forest. As a result, Ainz was drawn into a brawl, and to avoid the albeit medium-low possibility that the beast would be injured, Narberal had to heft her out of the undead’s reach.
Ainz took a step forward. The undead mob took a step back. The distance between them didn’t change one bit, and the circle remained intact.
The circle moved according to how Ainz moved. They seemed to be looking for openings to attack, but if they set one foot inside the circle, they’d be destroyed in one hit. That’s why they simply encircled him and none were attacking. It was the result of the low-intelligence monsters finally learning, after a ridiculous amount of repetition, that they would be annihilated if they made a careless approach.
“But I’m not going to get anywhere at this rate…” Ainz was only grumbling about the annoying amount of undead still remaining. If he were to make a serious attempt at getting by, he’d plow right through this mob. But if he barreled ahead and the undead spread out, the guards back there might be killed. If that happened he would lose the witnesses who would testify that he resolved the incident; to minimally guarantee their safety, he needed to draw off at least a good chunk of the monsters. It did slow his progress, though.
But Narberal took his comment at face value. “Then let’s call the army from Nazarick, my lord. With a hundred minions or so we could eliminate all in this graveyard who oppose you in the blink of an eye.”
“…Don’t be stupid. How many times do I have to tell you the reason we came to this city?”
“But Lord Ainz, if your aim is to gain a reputation, would it perhaps not be better to wait until the undead had breached the gate and racked up scores of human casualties?”
“I’ve already considered that. If I were well-informed as to the aim of our enemy, the war potential of this city, and so on, I may have taken that route, but as it is, we know barely anything, so I’d like to avoid losing any more initiative. I don’t want things going according to their plan. It’s also possible that another team would swoop in to steal our show while we were standing around.”
“I see… Brilliant, Lord Ainz. I should have expected that a Supreme Being would have thought everything out. I’m struck anew by admiration. By the way, I apologize for still being so ignorant, but I wonder if you might tell me if you don’t think that sending in some minions who specialize in stealth abilities, like eight-edged assassins or shadow demons, would have been a better plan? Then you could just stand back and watch the fight, unless anything major changed, to gauge the best timing…”
Ainz said nothing and just looked up at her. The undead took the silence as lowered guard and stepped into the circle. And were hastily cut down. “… I-if I tell you everything, how will you ever learn to think for yourself?”
“Yes, sir! My humble apologies!”
Shaken, albeit slightly, Ainz whipped around to see how far from the gate they had come and to check if the guards could see them. “But! That said, time is short. I have no choice—I’ll have these guys slice through for us.”
Ainz unleashed a power. “Create Middle-Tier Undead: Jack the Ripper, Create Middle-Tier Undead: Corpse Collector.” As the skill was used, two undead appeared.
One wore a trench coat and had its face covered with a laughing mask. Its fingers turned into oversize, sharp scalpels partway through.
The other had a robust enough physique, but its body was covered in pus and wrapped in yellowed bandages. At the ends of chains anchored to its flesh by several hooks were moaning skulls.
“Get ’em.”
Taking Ainz’s order, the two undead sprang at the surrounding monsters. There were only two of them, but their power was overwhelming. While the Jack the Ripper sliced off limbs with its scalpels and the corpse collector ripped off heads with its chains, Ainz took an added measure.
“Those plus these should be good. Create Lower-Tier Undead: Wraith, Create Lower-Tier Undead: Bone Vulture.” He summoned a few of each and gave them all orders. “If anyone enters this graveyard, chase them out. I don’t care if you kill adventurers, but leave the guards.”
The wraiths drifted into the air, and the bone vultures flapped their bone wings. Ainz chuckled to himself in satisfaction that his preparation was complete. He’d dispatched the lower-tier undead to make sure that no adventurers stole this great job out from under them by using flight magic to swoop in and defeat the ringleader.
“Now, then, shall we?” Thanks to the two undead Ainz had sent out, the mob had thinned out quite a bit. Ainz gripped his swords and jumped in.
Accompanied only by Narberal, Ainz reached the mausoleum farthest back and saw a group of suspicious-looking people doing something in a circle outside. The black robes concealing each member were not dyed very well, so there were patches of lighter and darker areas. Black triangular caps covered their heads except for the eyes. A strange pattern was carved into the ends of the wooden staves they held. The figures were all different heights, but judging by their silhouettes, they were all male.
Only one man, standing in the middle of the circle and looking a bit like an undead himself, had his face uncovered; the impression he made was not so shabby. In his hand he clutched a black stone, and it seemed like he was focusing his spirit on it.
The wind carried the sound of undulating murmurs to where Ainz stood; sometimes they were high-pitched, sometimes low. The harmonizing undertones sounded almost like a prayer, but this was no solemn service for the dead. It was more like some kind of blasphemous, evil ritual.
“Should we launch a sneak attack?” Narberal spoke softly so only Ainz could hear, but he shook his head.
“That won’t work. It seems like they’ve already noticed us.” Because neither of them had stealth skills, they walked right over. They’d avoided the lights, but if their opponents had Night Vision, they’d be able to spot them as if it were the middle of the day. And in Ainz’s experience, there was a mental connection between summoned monsters and the summoner. There was no way their approach hadn’t been sensed after they’d killed that many.
There were actually a few people looking right at them. Ainz guessed the reason they didn’t attack immediately was that he wasn’t the only one who wanted to talk, so they walked straight toward them.
When they reached the light, the members of the group braced themselves, and one of them spoke to the man in the center. “Lord Khajit, they’re here.”
Welp, now we know they’re idiots… Or I guess it could be a fake name. I’ll take it with a grain of salt. “Hey there, isn’t it kind of a waste to perform a boring ritual on such a beautiful night?”
“Hmph, I’m the one who decides what night is appropriate for a ritual. More importantly, who are you? How did you break through that mob of undead?” The man in the center of the circle—Khajit, if it wasn’t a fake name—did seem to be the highest-ranking one among them and addressed Ainz on behalf of the group.
“I’m an adventurer who undertook a request. I’m looking for a certain boy… I’m sure I don’t even have to say his name for you to know who I mean.” As the members of the group shifted into subtly more defensive positions, Ainz whispered, “Okay, then,” under his breath. The possibility that they were innocents who had just gotten mixed up in the incident vanished.
As Khajit scanned the area, Ainz smiled wryly at him from under his helmet.
“Are you the only ones? Any others?”
Ha-ha, what? Who asks that? I get that you’re worried about an ambush, but maybe you should think a little more before you start chitchatting. This guy must just be another pawn. Ainz seemed to have lost interest, and his shoulders slumped. Then he replied, “It’s just us. We flew in a straight shot.”
“That’s a lie. That can’t be.”
Sensing something in those words of conviction, Ainz countered, “Whether you believe it or not is up to you. More pertinently, if you return the boy unharmed, you won’t have to die, Khajit.”
Khajit glanced at the foolish disciple who’d said his name. “What’s your name?”
“Tell me something first. There’s someone besides you guys, isn’t there?”
Khajit shot Ainz an icy stare.
“We’re it.”
“It’s not just you guys! You must have someone with a stabbing weapon…so you’re trying to hide him? Or is he hiding because he’s scared of us?”
Suddenly a woman’s voice came from inside the mausoleum. “Aha, so you investigated those corpses, I seeee. Nicely done.” She slowly moved into view, jangling with each step.
“You—”
She heard the harshness in his voice and smiled guiltily. “Ehhh, they figured it out already. There’s no point in hiding. Plus, I can’t use Conceal Life, so I really was just hiding.”
Even though Ainz had told them what he was after, they weren’t holding Nfirea for ransom. He was considering the possibility that he’d already been killed when the woman spoke to him.
“So, hey, can I get your name, Mr. Guy? Oh, I’m Clementine. Nice to meet ya.”
“…I don’t think there’s any point in you hearing it, but it’s Momon.”
“I’ve never heard of him…have you?”
“I dunno him, either. I collected all the info on high-ranking adventurers in this town, but there was no Momon. How’d ya even find this place? I left ya those dying words about the sewers!”
“The answer is under your cape. Let’s see it.”
“Whoa, pervert! You dirty lech.” Having said that much, her face twisted into a grin that sliced across her face ear to ear. “Just kidding. You mean these?”
Clementine flipped open her cape to reveal something that looked like gleaming scale armor. But Ainz, with his superior vision, saw what it was right away. Those were not the tabs of metal used to make scale armor.
She was wearing countless adventurer plates: platinum, gold, silver, iron, copper. There were sparkles of mythril and orichalcum among them. These were the marks of all the adventurers she had killed, her hunting trophies.
The rubbing of metal on metal was almost like innumerable resentful voices.
“Those told us where you were.”
Clementine pulled a face that said she had no idea what he was talking about, but Ainz wasn’t in an explaining mood.
“…Nabe, you take Khajit and the rest of those men. I’ll get this lady.” Then he dropped his voice and told her to keep her eye on the sky.
“Understood.”
Khajit’s face was something between a bitter smile and a sneer.
Narberal shot him a chilly look that implied how bored she would be.
“Clementine, how about we go kill each other over there?” He strolled away without even waiting for her response. He was sure she wouldn’t object, and the footsteps following leisurely after him confirmed it.
After they’d taken some distance, an explosion of lightning flooded the area near Khajit and Narberal with a blinding glare. As if that was their cue, Ainz and Clementine stared each other down.
“So were the adventurers I killed in that shop your friends? Are ya mad ’cause I killed your buddies?!” She continued in her mocking tone, “Ah-ha-ha-ha! That caster really cracked me up—believing to the very end that someone would come. There was no way to survive my attacks until help arrived with that flimsy physique! …But maybe you were the one who was supposed to save them? Sorry—killed ’em all!”
Ainz shook his head in response to Clementine’s taunting laughter. “Eh, there’s not really any need to apologize.”
“Oh? Bummer. Getting people who are all pissed, like, How could you?! to surrender is hilarious! Why aren’t you mad? That’s no fun! They weren’t your friends?”
“…I might have done something similar under certain circumstances, so it’d be pretty hypocritical to come down on you for it.” Ainz slowly moved into a fighting stance. “However, they were tools I was using to build my reputation. They were supposed to gossip about my exploits to other adventurers when we got back to the inn—about how I’m a hero who, with just one other party member, repulsed the Wise King of the Forest. The fact that you upset my plans is extremely displeasing to me.”
Perhaps picking something up from his tone of voice, Clementine grinned. “I see. Oh noooo, you hate meee! By the way, coming over here was a mistake. That pretty lady’s a caster, right? Then she’ll never beat Khaj. Maybe if the pairings had been reversed she’d’ve had a chance, but… Well, nah, she wouldn’t be able to beat me, either!”
“Oh, I’m pretty sure Nabe could beat you.”
“Don’t be ridiculous! A caster couldn’t win against me! I just swoop in and shoonk! That’s how it ends! Always is!”
“Ah, so you’re a very confident warrior, then…”
“Ya, of course. There aren’t any warriors in this country who can beat me! Well, almost none, anyway!”
“Okay, then, I have an idea. I’ll give you a handicap. That’ll be my revenge on you.”
Clementine narrowed her eyes; it was the first time she looked uncomfortable. “According to the intelligence gathered by the Flurry gang, there are only five people who could put up a decent fight against me: Gazef Stronoff, Gagaran from the Blue Roses, Louisenberg Arbelion from the Drops of Red, and then Brain Unglaus, and Vesture Kloff Di Laufen, who’s retired. But ya know, they don’t really have a chance—even if I did throw away the magic item my country gave me…” She looked at Ainz with her lips drawn so far back her smile was disturbing. “I dunno what kinda piece of shit ya got for a face under that helmet, but Clementine doesn’t lose! I’ve entered the hero realm!”
Compared to Clementine’s fury, Ainz was infinitely calm. “That’s why I’m giving you a handicap. I refuse to take you seriously.”
4
“Twin Max Electrosphere!” Two electrospheres double their normal size appeared in the palms of Narberal’s outstretched hands. She fired them simultaneously.
—Impact.
The electrospheres with increased destructive power swelled to scatter their electric shocks over a huge area. The graveyard was illuminated with a dazzling white light. The magic shocks disappeared a moment later, but their destruction was absolute. Khajit’s underlings were all sprawled on the ground. In their midst stood a single shadow.
“Argh. If only you were as easy to squash as the caterpillar you are… Did you cast Electric Energy Immunity or something?” As soon as she asked, she noticed a scorch mark on his cheek. That meant it must have been something weaker than Electric Energy Immunity, maybe Electric Energy Protection.
Narberal was a little disappointed she hadn’t wiped them all out in one shot but comforted herself by deciding the offense was forgivable. Besides, ending it all at once would be no fun.
“So you’re not just an idiot, you’re an idiot who can use tier-three magic!”
“…An idiot? A human mite like you dares to call me an idiot?!” Her eyebrows twitched.
“What’s wrong with me calling the fool interfering in my plan an idiot?! But you’re going to be dead before you can even recognize my strength for what it is! My preparations are already complete! I’ve gathered enough negative energy—behold the power of this supreme jewel!” Khajit held up the stone in his hand.
It was a plain jewel with a gleam like black iron, neither polished nor cut. Raw ore were probably the words that came closest to describing it. Narberal thought she saw it pulse.
Suddenly, six of the leading disciples who should have been burned to a crisp sluggishly stood up. These motions were not willed by life but ruled by death. They moved on unsteady feet to stand between Narberal and Khajit.
Narberal looked on quizzically. “You’re making me fight zombies?”
“Wa-ha-ha-ha-ha! That’s exactly what I’m doing. That will do! Attack!”
Zombies were the lowest tier of undead and had no magic ability. The former leading disciples came clawing at her, but she cast a spell. “Electrosphere!”
Another sphere of white light scattered shocks throughout the area, swallowing up all of the leading disciples. When the electric flash died down, the disciples collapsed to the ground once again. Although she had mopped them all up with ease, Narberal’s face was somber.
Create Undead didn’t have the power to turn multiple corpses into undead at once. Did he use some kind of supporting skill? Her eyes flicked to the black lump in his hand. It was probably that item that allowed him to create and control multiple zombies at once.
Wasn’t that language a bit presumptuous for such a wimpy effect? The Forty-One Supreme Beings who ruled the Great Tomb of Nazarick and created Narberal and the other NPCs were the ones worthy of the word supreme.
Those were the unpleasant things on Narberal’s mind when Khajit shouted with joy. “That’s plenty! I’ve absorbed enough negative energy!”
The black lump in Khajit’s hand looked like it was absorbing the darkness of the graveyard and giving off a faint glow, and it was pulsing more obviously than before, beating quietly like a heart.
There’ll be trouble if I let him do much more, Narberal decided. Just as she was about to make her move, she heard something—something slicing through the air. Remembering her master’s words, she jumped clear.
Something enormous buzzed the spot where she’d been standing before pulling up to hover in front of Khajit and landing slowly.
It was an agglomeration of human bones around ten feet tall. Made up of countless pieces, the form it took on had a long neck, four legs, and wings—a dragon. Its tail, composed of innumerable bones, gave the ground a heavy whack. It was a monster called a skeletal dragon.
Level-wise, it wasn’t so strong compared to Narberal, but it did have one trait that was potentially fatal for Nabe. For the first time in this fight, her face registered surprise and annoyance.
“Wa-ha-ha-ha-ha!” Khajit’s unhinged laugh echoed throughout the area. “Skeletal dragons have absolute resistance to magic! Casters are helpless against them!”
Nabe’s magic wouldn’t be able to do anything against the skeletal dragon. In that case—
She took out the sword her master had instructed her to carry, still in its sheath. The sword was bound to the sheath with a cord, so it wouldn’t come out so easily.
“—I’ll clobber it to death!” She charged.
The dragon tried to counter by stomping with its front legs, but she slipped neatly past them. Her hair waving in the gust of air created by the attack, she dove for its chest. She took a focused swing using every muscle in her body.
The skeletal dragon may have been ten feet tall, but it went flying. A moment later the vibrations of its impact reached them with a giant thud.
“What?!” Khajit was astounded.
Skeletal dragons were lighter than they looked, since they were made of bone. That’s still lighter, though. Knocking it back was not the type of feat a caster who had spent their days in the pursuit of arcane-type magic should be able to perform.
Hastily moving behind the skeletal dragon for cover, Khajit screamed, “Wh-who are you?! A mythril—no, orichalcu —adventurer?! I didn’t think there were any in this city—are you after Clementine?!” He gnashed his teeth so hard it seemed like they would break.
Narberal sighed. “It’s ’cause you get all worked up like that that you’re a click beetle!”
“Wh-why you—” He’d used up a huge amount of negative energy and spent two months performing a huge ritual to create this skeletal dragon. Was it going to be defeated this easily? In the final stretch of his multiple-year plan?
As Khajit’s face grew blotchy with rage, the skeletal dragon slowly creaked and squeaked its way to its feet. There were large cracks in the bones making up its chest, and broken pieces were crumbling out. He couldn’t let her hit it again.
“No! You can’t! I won’t let you! Ray of Negative Energy!” A black beam shot out of Khajit’s hand and hit the skeletal dragon, rapidly healing the wounds with negative energy.
“You were talking so big about its absolute resistance to magic, but you can still use magic to heal it, huh?”
Khajit ignored her quip and cast a series of spells. “Reinforce Armor! Lesser Strength! Undead Flames! Shield Wall!” All of them were buffs for the skeletal dragon. Its bones grew harder, its strength was magically increased, and its body was enveloped in black flames that would drain life energy. Then, an invisible wall formed to cover one side of its body like a shield.
“Two can play at that game! Reinforce Armor! Shield Wall! Negative Energy Protection!” Narberal cast a handful of defensive spells.
Once they had both protected themselves well enough, they returned to fighting as if the bell for round two had rung.
Narberal brandished her sword. While beating on the skeletal dragon’s front legs, she furrowed her brow. Things had gone well before, but she couldn’t call the present situation good. She wasn’t built for physical clashes, and her weapon was lousy.
Since the dragon was made of bones, stabbing and cutting weapons didn’t do much damage. A battering weapon would’ve been the most effective, but Narberal didn’t have one. That’s why she was using her sheath. But although
she was on the offensive, she wasn’t balanced well when she swung, so it didn’t seem like she was dealing damage very effectively. An actual warrior might be able to keep their balance, but Narberal was a caster—she wasn’t performing very well in that department.
The skeletal dragon swung a front leg and missed as Narberal ducked. Part of her caught the dragon’s black flames, but Negative Energy Protection blocked them and they disappeared immediately. If she hadn’t defended herself, she would’ve probably taken damage despite dodging the attack.
“Ray of Negative Energy!” Khajit sent a beam to heal the dragon’s wounds.
This was another cause of Narberal’s brow furrowing. Even if she managed to hurt the monster, Khajit would just heal it from his position in the rear. Why didn’t she attack Khajit first? She couldn’t because of the skeletal dragon he’d stuck right between them.
Even if she used a piercing spell like Lightning, the dragon’s absolute magic resistance would block it. An area-of effect spell like Electrosphere would have almost no effect because of the defensive spells Khajit had cast. Then how about mind control? Barring resistance, it would let her win in one shot.
“Charm Person!”
“Undead Mind!”
Narberal and Khajit both cast at the same time—Narberal, a spell that would charm humans on Khajit; Khajit, a defensive spell that would block psychic magic on himself. The result? Khajit flashed a triumphant smile, and Narberal frowned and practically clicked her tongue in disgust.
Was she too distracted by Khajit’s smile? A shadow fell over her face.
Her entire field of vision was taken up by a white mass.
Evasion seems difficult.
Her mind was immediately racing—she brought the point of her sheathed sword to her opposite shoulder and held the whole thing across her body like a shield. The impact sent numbing vibrations through the sword to her hands, shoulders, and whole body—which went soaring into the air. A tail attack aimed right at her face had sent her flying.
“Hup, okay.” Balance intact, Narberal nimbly landed on her feet and retreated farther away.
It would have been the perfect time for the skeletal dragon to follow up its attack, but it didn’t. It had to protect Khajit, so it couldn’t stray too far. Keeping an eye on the dragon, Narberal tried to shake the numbness and pain out of her trembling hands.
Then, Khajit peeked out from behind the monster. “Acid Javelin!”
“Lightning!”
His green spear went flying straight at Narberal. Normally she would have been wounded by the spray of acid, but it was repelled a couple inches away from her body and disappeared. At the same time, the bolt of lightning that sprang from Narberal’s finger was nullified when the skeletal dragon moved to block it.
The two adversaries glared at each other.
“…You cast a defensive spell? What a pain.”
“…A pain? That’s my line, bagworm moth. Why don’t you quit hiding and come out here?”
“Why should I have to do that?”
“Won’t your plan go haywire if you’re tied up fighting?”
She was right. Khajit narrowed his glare while Narberal just smiled.
“…I see I have no choice.” Having made up his mind, Khajit squeezed the strange sphere once again. Then, he held it up high. “Behold the power of the Jewel of Death!”
Narberal lost her balance—proof that the ground was shaking. It was a sign that something big had arrived. A moment later, the ground cracked open and something white slowly climbed out.
“…Another one?”
“Hmm! I’m already out of negative energy. But if I kill you and your friend and then spread death throughout town, I should be able to get quite a bit back!”
Narberal was unfazed, but Khajit was yelling furiously. She exhaled sharply and broke into a run—a run far faster than any normal person could run. Khajit was caught off guard and didn’t have time to react.
As Narberal entered the skeletal dragon’s range, it tried to attack her with its front legs. She twisted her body to slip past the stomps on her right, but then the other dragon’s tail came to sweep her feet out from under her.
She jumped clear and not a second too soon. Right below her, the tail plowed noisily through the spot she’d been standing. Then, it changed directions and whipped into the air to swing down at her.
The tail strike shook the ground, but Narberal had managed to dodge to the left, except the dragon on the right closed in to hit her with a front leg.
“Guh!” She took the forceful hit with her sword. It was not very light, but she stopped the foot and then shoved it back. The attacking skeletal dragon retreated, creating another brief interlude in the fighting.
“What are you?! To be able to block those attacks without using a martial art… How did you get so strong?”
“I was created by Supreme Beings whose powers surpass even the gods!”
“I won’t buy that, you idiot!”
“You can’t recognize the truth when you hear it and call me an idiot? This is why humans are nothing more than planarians!” Narberal flashed her eyes at Khajit.
It was such a strong gaze that it gave him the chills, and he took a step back. As if to shake himself free of his fear, he gave an order. “Get her, skeletal dragons!”
The dragons, maintaining proximity to Khajit, attacked Narberal again. She dodged one blow and tried to move in but lost her chance while evading a second. In the midst of that back-and-forth, Khajit made a decisive strike.
“Acid Javelin!”
The magic spear flew straight at her face, and Narberal moved her head, without thinking, to dodge it. That was a mistake. It wouldn’t have done anything if it had hit her, so she should have ignored it. But since it was aimed at her face, her instincts had taken over. This was an error only a caster who hadn’t concentrated their efforts on melee combat would make—and she paid for it.
With a screeching noise, Narberal’s view abruptly changed—everything flew by sideways. After a moment of weightlessness, she crashed into the ground. She’d taken a swipe of a skeletal dragon’s tail to her left upper arm, but still tumbling over and over, she couldn’t tell what had happened.
The multiple defensive spells she had cast meant there wasn’t much pain. She was flat on the ground, but before her eyes were two skeletal dragons. Both of them were brandishing their front legs.
It seemed like the end of the line. Normally, it would be.
“If you surrender, I’ll spare you!” Khajit, sure of his victory, grinned sadistically. Surely he had no intention of sparing her. That grin spoke louder than his words—he would simply savor the look on her face as he crushed her after she’d pleaded for her life.
Narberal had sat up, and her face was twisted in anger. “…an…sc…m…”
“…What?”
She glared at him. “Human scum, don’t talk that shit to me, you piece of garbage!”
Eyes bulging, Khajit shivered and screamed a panicky order. “Crush her, skeletal dragons!”
As the feet began to move, Narberal smiled. She couldn’t miss the voice of the one she worshipped, no matter how far away it was coming from:
“Narberal Gamma! Show them the might of Nazarick!”
“…As my lord wishes. Then, I shall face them not as Nabe, but as Narberal Gamma!”
She was still on the ground, and the dragon legs seemed like they were about to crush her. One blink of an eye and she’d be stomped flat. Then she cast a spell—
“Teleportation!”
Her view changed instantaneously—to one from more than 1,600 feet in the air.
Naturally, having no wings, she plummeted toward the ground.
The wind roared past her, and the ground grew closer. She cackled. “Fly!” Gradually slowing, she eventually came to a stop hovering in the air. Looking down, she saw the battlefield she had just been on, Khajit, and the two skeletal dragons. They glanced around restlessly, no doubt bewildered by her sudden disappearance.
•
“Ahh! I’m tired!” Clementine commented loud enough that Ainz could hear. After several minutes of action, Ainz’s great swords hadn’t so much as grazed her. “But ya know, ya do seem pretty strong. You’re probably pretty proud of that, but—” Her smile turned carnivorous. “—are you some kinda dummy? You’re just swingin’ that thing around with brute strength. There’s no technique—you’re like a kid swingin’ a stick around. I mean, it doesn’t do ya any good to have a sword in each hand if ya can’t use ’em right; it’d be smarter to use just one. I dunno if you appreciate the complexities of being a warrior!”
“Then maybe you should attack me. All you’ve been doing this whole time is evading. You’re the one who’s deeper in trouble the more time goes by, right?” Ainz sneered.
Clementine scowled. It was true that she hadn’t attacked him even once; she’d just been dodging. Faced with his superior physical abilities, she hadn’t been able to find an opening. In other words, she wasn’t having such an easy time, either. Her irritation at herself stemmed from her earlier bragging.
“I thought there weren’t any warriors who could beat you! Where’d that confidence go?”
“…” Finally, allowing Ainz to provoke her, she drew a weapon. From the four stilettos and a morning star she had hanging from her waist, she had selected a stiletto.
Noticing with his extraordinary vision that the morning star was caked with what looked like meaty blood, Ainz clenched both of his great swords with his full strength.
Just as both of them were about to step forward, the ground shook.
In combat mode, Clementine couldn’t shift her gaze too much, but she did take a look to see what was going on—there were two dragons made out of bones over where Narberal was fighting.
“Skeletal…dragons…?”
“Bingooo! That’s right—ya know your stuff, huh? They’re a caster’s worst nightmare!”
“I see. So that’s why you say Nabe can’t win.”
“Exxxactly.” Having regained composure with the appearance of the skeletal dragons, Clementine returned to her previous mocking tone.
The illusion face under Ainz’s helmet grimaced. Skeletal dragons were a tough opponent for casters. And against two of them, Narberal the way she was now had as good as no chance at winning.
Perhaps sensing his frustration, Clementine made a subtle move. It could have been a feint, but it wouldn’t be only a feint. If a warrior showed a talented adversary a weak spot, they could bet that advantage would be taken.
Pushing Narberal to the edge of his consciousness, Ainz ****** his left hand’s great sword out like a spear as a threat and held the one in his right hand over his head.
Clementine’s weapon was a stabbing weapon; it didn’t have the variety of attacks a cutting weapon did. Stab—that was all it could do. And her stilettos were delicate, not sturdy enough to clash with a great sword.
So with his left sword up, making it difficult for her to approach, he just waited for her. But she realized what he was up to.
“Do you have a way to close that distance?”
“Oh, I dunno…” Her casual attitude, relaxed appearance, and flippant smile told him she wasn’t lacking ideas.
Slowly her posture changed. It was as if she were crouched and on her mark but standing up—an odd posture. In a way, it was kind of a funny pose, but it definitely wasn’t a stance that could be taken lightly.
Then, she moved. To Ainz’s alert eyes, she was like a spring that had been compressed to its limits and sprung. She was racing directly at him at a speed that was hard for Ainz to believe; it seemed beyond what flesh was capable of.
Like a storm moving in to swallow everything up in a moment, Clementine closed the distance in the blink of an eye and slipped past the pointed great sword without losing speed.
Her movements were like a snake going in for the kill. Startled, Ainz swung his right arm with his immense strength. The mighty attack seemed to cut the very air and was accompanied by unimaginable destructive power.
He had less than a split second but noted the fissure-like smile on her face intensify.
“Impenetrable Fortress!”
Beholding something that should be impossible, Ainz shivered in astonishment. The slim stiletto had taken the full force of the blow from his great sword, more than ten times its weight.
That sword taking Ainz’s glorious attack should have snapped in half, or even if by some miracle it didn’t, Clementine should have gone flying. On the contrary, Ainz’s sword bounced hard, as if he’d hit a tremendously solid castle wall.
Clementine jumped at his wide-open chest like a lover slipping into an embrace. Her well-formed features and the smile widened across them loomed large in his field of vision.
The attack came well before he could retreat. Uniting her full-throttle sprint with the strength of all her muscles, she took advantage of her body’s momentum to deliver a strike that deserved the word meteor.
The sparkle of a flourish and the awful kreeeee of metal scraping metal echoed loudly through the graveyard. Ainz hastily swung his left great sword, but Clementine jumped aside.
He knew her trick. “A martial art?” They were moves to be careful of— skills that didn’t exist in Yggdrasil, warrior magic. It must protect her sword and give her physical indomitability. That had to have been how she’d repelled Ainz’s attack.
“…Tough stuff! What’s that armor made of, adamantite?”
There wasn’t any pain at all, but at the time of that abrasive noise, he’d felt something with a sharp point stick into the area near his left shoulder. Shocked, he looked at his shoulder and discovered a slight dent. It may not have had any special magical powers, but this was still armor made by a level-100 caster—and it was proportionally hard. The fact that Clementine had managed to damage it spoke volumes to her destructive power.
“Well, whatever. Just the next time I gotta hit somewhere less heavily protected. Aw, but I wanted to chip away at ya till ya couldn’t move and torture you! Too bad—what a shame.”
Hearing that she attacked his shoulder not by chance but because she was aiming to incapacitate his arm caused Ainz to respect her—a bit—for the first time.
Ainz always ended up swinging with causing damage in mind. That was sufficient enough when one sound hit would kill his opponent, but against a tougher one, he had to think about how the battle would play out. A good lesson to learn…
“Okay, here I go!”
While he’d been admiring her, Clementine had once again taken the odd bent-over posture from before. In response, Ainz raised the great sword in his right hand. But this time he didn’t ****** out the left sword.
Seeing that, Clementine smiled and rushed forward. She was moving so fast, even Ainz’s dynamic visual acuity couldn’t make her out. If she hadn’t been coming in a straight line, he might have lost sight of her.
She flew at him like a sinister arrow, and in response, he carried out his planned attack. The great sword in his right hand swung and—
“Impenetrable Fortress!”
—bounced back against the same martial art from before. But he’d expected that. The previous time he had swung as hard as he could so the rebound had broken his stance. This time he didn’t use as much force.
The shock felt like hitting a hard wall, but he overcame it with the strength of his arm and then swung his left great sword. He was confident she couldn’t withstand two of his transcendent full-power blows.
But before he could connect, she used a different martial art. “Flow Acceleration!” It made something mind-boggling happen.
It was almost as if she had manipulated time. In this sluggish space where everything moved as if it had fallen into a highly viscous fluid, Ainz’s great sword moved at a snail’s pace.
Only Clementine maintained her speed in this quiet world; she easily evaded his counterattack and slipped right in front of him.
Perhaps it was in Ainz’s head. He was wearing rings against time manipulation and that hindered movement to prevent external forces from slowing him down—not that this couldn’t be something new…
It must have just been her sudden acceleration causing him to perceive things that way in his heightened battle mode. After all, he’d seen this martial art before, and it hadn’t affected him like this.
“Gaze—” It was a martial art Gazef Stronoff had used.
Before he could get the shout out, the stiletto stabbed at him. She’d aimed for the narrow slit in his helmet—his eyes.
Ainz shook his head away and avoided getting it stuck in the slit, but the sound of metal grating on his helmet was horrible. Before he could feel any relief at having dodged, he caught Clementine in the corner of his vision holding her stiletto back, as if she were coiled and ready to spring.
“Tch!”
Even taking into account their difference in strength, Clementine’s direct line of attack was faster than the arc of Ainz’s sword. This time she didn’t miss, and her sword stabbed into the slit of his helmet.
“Huh?”
“Guh!”
The puzzled question and flustered grunt occurred at the same time.
Pressing his helmet with the hand that held his sword, Ainz retreated quite a ways without countering.
Watching him from the corner of her eye as she looked curiously at the tip of her stiletto, she joked, “Better stop talking about handicaps—if ya don’t start fighting for real, you’re gonna die!” Ainz didn’t say anything, so she asked a question to clear up her doubt. “But how did ya not take any damage from that attack before? I thought for sure it’d be a pain parade!”
“Sheesh. I’ve learned…a lot during this fight—first about a new martial art, and then about how important it is to use your whole body for balance and not just swinging your weapon around.”
“Huh? Are you stupid? You figured this out now? Some warrior you are! Well, you’re gonna die now, anyway, so it doesn’t matter. But I did want you to answer my question… Was it a defensive martial art?”
Sensing her annoyance, Ainz smiled wryly under his helmet—about his qualifications as a warrior, she was right. “Ah, I really came underprepared. I apologize. But we’re running out of time. Let’s stop playing games.” Ignoring the confusion on Clementine’s face, he raised his voice. “Narberal Gamma! Show them the might of Nazarick!”
Ainz spun the hilts of his swords till their blades pointed down and ****** them into the ground. Putting his empty hands out in front of him, he beckoned her gently. “Now come at me like you’re ready to die.”
•
“…So it wasn’t a bluff, ’ey? You can actually use Fly. But how did you dodge that attack? I couldn’t see because I was behind the dragon…”
The voice directed at Narberal as she slowly descended back to earth was cautious. He couldn’t fathom why she hadn’t used Fly to run away. Especially having encountered two skeletal dragons, who wouldn’t pull out if they could?
“Hmph. You think you have a chance at winning? Against skeletal dragons with absolute magic resistance?”
“There are any number of ways for me to win, but first…” Narberal grabbed the shoulder of her robe and tore it away. “Rejoice, human scum, for you have received the honor of facing Narberal Gamma of the Pleiades, combat maids loyal to the absolute ruler of the Great Tomb of Nazarick, Supreme Being Lord Ainz Ooal Gown!”
All of her gear had transformed. She wore vambraces and greaves of silver, gold, and black metal, armor like a maid outfit from a manga, and instead of a helmet, a white lace headpiece. In her hands she gripped a staff of silver-coated gold.
The performance of custom items in Yggdrasil could be changed by changing their data-crystal makeup. Narberal’s robe had the quick-change crystal, so she could change her whole gear set without spending any time swapping pieces.
The robe was put “away” into space.
Khajit blinked several times at the maid who’d just appeared before his eyes. Then he finally grasped the situatio—“What?!”—and shouted in disbelief.
Sure, it was perfectly normal for the caster in front of him to turn into a maid.
Her outfit was a joke and made him uncomfortable, but the exceedingly calm look on her face made him panic, and he ordered the skeletal dragons to attack. The two dragons approached Narberal with surprising agility. One of the huge bony monsters went to crush her with a foreleg, but when it was a hair’s breadth from whacking her, she cast a spell.
“Dimensional Move!”
“Not again!”
Narberal vanished once more.
Trying to see where she went, Khajit remembered last time and looked up in the sky. But this time he would learn where she’d gone via pain.
“Gyahh!” His shriek echoed across the graveyard. A white-hot sensation suddenly shot through his left shoulder and a dull pain radiated through his body with each beat of his heart. Stupefied, he looked at the spot and saw a sharp point jutting out.
The next second, the blade was ripped carelessly out, creating a new wave of acute pain. “Gah! Gyah!” The vibrations of his bone being sawed propagated through his body, combining with the pain to increase his discomfort. Blood glubbed out of the puncture, soaking his black robe. In so much agony he was drooling, he spun around to see what had happened.
Narberal was standing there with a puzzled look on her face. “Does it hurt that much?”
“Ngh!”
She was toying with a freshly bloodied black-bladed dagger in the hand that didn’t hold her staff.
Khajit was in so much agony he couldn’t even speak.
Because he was a caster, he was never out on the front lines, and he was waited on by so many people that although he had occasion to give pain, he was rarely on the receiving end. As a result, he had low tolerance.
As clammy sweat coated his forehead, inside his head, he gave orders to the skeletal dragons. Narberal leaped away—Fly was faster than running.
The dragons inserted themselves into the open space. Behind them, Khajit, who, having secured a safe location, had regained a shred of composure, finally understood the significance of Narberal’s previous spell.
It was—
“Teleportation magic?!”
Dimensional Move was a tier-three spell, but it was generally thought of as an escape spell used to quickly put distance between the caster and their opponent.
But that was in the case of a physically inferior caster. If one had strength that could put a warrior to shame, the spell could be just as valuable as an attack spell—no, since it was unblockable, it was actually better than lesser attack spells.
Holding his shoulder, he scowled at Narberal. “I see. So your ace move is teleporting in for the kill! And that’s also how you evaded that attack earlier!”
It was certainly a pesky ace. If magic didn’t work on the skeletal dragons, she could kill the summoner. An obvious strategy. And if she made effective use of teleportation magic, there was a good chance he wouldn’t be able to stop her.
But Narberal scoffed lightly in reply. “I don’t think so!”
Khajit’s eyelids fluttered for a moment as he failed to comprehend what she was saying.
Then, to clarify, she began to move. “I just demonstrated one way I could easily kill you!” Narberal had been at an overwhelming disadvantage, but the moment she seemed to reveal the way she would turn the tables, she renounced it instead.
Khajit had no idea why she would do that. “Are you insane…?”
“I get that you’re a flea, but what kind of reply is that? It’d be nice if you’d use your head a little more!”
Her frigid glare made his whole body tremble—not from anger but from fear. Anxiety flickered through his mind.
“Let’s end this soon. It’s rude of me as a follower of Lord Ainz to keep him waiting… You seem to think magic won’t work on skeletal dragons, so allow me to create a learning opportunity for you, pond skater. The lesson fee is your life.”
She dropped her staff, and the sound of her hands clapping together rang out. When she pulled them apart, white shocks arced between them. Reacting to the lightning writhing like Chinese dragons, the nearby air sparkled as it
discharged. It was like she was enveloped in a white light.
“…Gah…” Khajit’s eyes nearly popped out of his head. He had no more words. He knew she was casting a spell far beyond anything he was aware of. Within the white light frying his eyes, he could see her faint smile. Recalling the huge skeletal dragons standing between them, the clamorous alarm bells in his head made him scream. “Y-you can’t defeat skeletal dragons with magic! They have absolute resistance! Go! Kill her!” he ordered in a trembling voice that betrayed the fear he couldn’t hide.
As the dragons approached, Narberal smiled like a cruel instructor who was about to educate a foolish pupil. “Absolute resistance? They do have resistance, but the power they have is to nullify spells from tier six and below.”
It took a little more time for the dragons to reach Narberal, during which Khajit realized, with an awfully level head, what she meant by that.
“In other words, I, Narberal Gamma, can use more powerful magic than that, so they won’t be able to nullify my attack!”
She wasn’t lying—Khajit’s gut told him that.
Which meant that this woman’s magic could slay the dragons and then kill him, too.
“Why?! You’re going to destroy the fruit of more than five years of labor in less than an hour?!” Khajit squawked. Scenes of his past flickered before his eyes like the shadows of a revolving lantern.
Khajit Dale Badantel.
Given life as the only child of a father with a robust physique forged by village labor and a gentle mother in a remote Slane Theocracy village, he had a “normal” childhood.
He started down the path from then to his current self when he found the remains of his mother.
That day—the sun had been low on the horizon—Khajit had been racing toward his house. His mother had told him to be home early, but he was late for some reason he couldn’t even remember anymore: He’d been on the outskirts of the village looking for cool rocks; he’d picked up a stick and pretended to be a hero—some stupid thing like that.
Thinking his mother would scold him, he’d flown into the house—and seen her sprawled on the floor. Shocked, he’d panicked, and even now he could remember the warmth he’d felt when he touched her.
You’ve got to be kidding me. His expectations had been betrayed.
His mother was dead.
The clergyman said the cause of death was “a lump of blood that formed in her brain.” In other words, it was no one’s fault. No one was in the wrong. No, Khajit felt there was one and only one person to blame—himself.
If he had gotten home sooner that day, would he have been able to save her? There was a huge number of the Slane Theocracy’s faith-magic casters, including several in his village. If he had gone to them for help, would his mother still be alive and smiling?
The face of his precious mother twisted in pain…was a crime he had perpetrated.
Khajit made up his mind. He would live to right his wrong, i.e., to bring his mother back to life.
The more magic and knowledge he acquired, the bigger the obstacles he faced.
There was a resurrection spell on faith magic’s fifth tier, but he couldn’t bring his mother back with it. During the resurrection, the deceased consumed a vast amount of life force; if the body didn’t have enough, it would be impossible to resurrect and turn to ashes. His mother didn’t have the life force in her for that.
But he didn’t have enough time to develop a new resurrection spell. So, he would give up being human and turn undead to buy the time. That was the conclusion he came to.
He abandoned the faith-magic path he’d been walking and turned down the path of using arcane magic and becoming an undead, but he was confronted with another wall.
It would take an extremely long time to plow ahead as an arcane magic caster, quit being human, and become a powerful undead. Then, there was also the hurdle of talent and ability—it was possible he wouldn’t be able to become an undead.
The breakthrough plan he conceived was to gather a vast amount of negative energy—yes, the amount that killing every person living in a city and turning them into an undead would generate.
Why, at the moment his desire would be realized, was there someone getting in his way?
“Why should you have the right to make my five years of preparation in this city, the feelings I can’t forget even though it’s been more than thirty years, all for nothing?! You just came out of nowhere!!!”
The response to Khajit’s howl was a sardonic smile. “I’m not interested in your feelings. But I do have something to say to you for all your laughable hard work… You made a lovely stepping-stone for Lord Ainz. Twin Max Chain Dragon Lightning!” Lightning writhing like a dragon shot out from each of Narberal’s hands.
The skeletal dragons’ giant white frames trembled when the lightning bolts, each thicker than a human’s arm, met them. The lightning that coiled like Chinese dragons around the skeletal dragons’ bodies burned up the false life that made the dead bones move.
The result was immediate.
The skeletal dragons, who were supposed to have absolute resistance to magic, were turned to rubble by magic lightning.
Even after they had completely crumbled, the lightning didn’t disappear. The two electric dragons raised their heads as if searching for their next prey and raced through the sky to their last remaining target.
Khajit’s entire field of vision filled with pure white electric light. There was no time to beg for mercy, no time to scream. The tears that welled up in the corners of his eyes vaporized in an instant, leaving nothing behind but a whisper: “Mother…” Khajit was devoured by the lightning.
His muscles went into convulsions, and his body writhed where he’d stood, as if he were doing a strange dance. After rapidly burning through his insides, the electricity vanished, and Khajit fell to the ground, smoking from his burns.
The stench of cooking flesh wafted throughout the area.
Narberal shrugged and called out to Khajit, whose body had curled up into a ball as his muscles burned up. “Even worms smell good grilled… Might make a nice souvenir for Entoma.” Dropping the name of her fellow Pleiades member who preyed on humans, Narberal sneered.
•
The warrior before her opened up his arms as if he were going to hug her.
“What’re ya doing? Ya give up?”
“No, what? I just figured that since I gave Narberal the order, I should probably settle this pretty soon as well.”
“Huh? Are you serious? How can you win against me with no martial arts or any decent skills? How much more annoying can you be?”
“You talk a lot of crap for a wimp.”
You’re the wimp! she nearly raged but instead calmed her seething heart. The man before her had little skill as a warrior, but his physical ability easily exceeded the realm of ordinary humans. As far as she knew, it was surpassed by only two demigods: the Black Scripture’s extra seat and its captain, who occupied the first seat. But because of that, he swung his sword around however he felt like, which made both his offense and defense sloppy, which meant he was in danger of being dealt a fatal blow.
Clementine put on her usual sneer and taunted him. “…Welllll, I do agree that we should settle this.”
Momon the warrior merely shrugged in reply.
She coolly observed the way he carried himself. He was full of holes, but that couldn’t be true. It had to be a trap.
But she didn’t have a choice. What she’d said a moment ago had sounded like a joke, but she’d meant it. She figured she could escape if she could borrow a skeletal dragon, but she couldn’t afford to lose any more time. Even if it was to throw off the Flurry Scripture members who had come to the city, playtime was going a little long.
She slowly moved into a crouch and tightened her grip on her stiletto. She wanted this critical clash to be short—if possible, over in one hit. She didn’t have time, but the other thing was that the warrior seemed to be gradually getting the hang of things. It was safer to crush him before he grew into a monster she couldn’t handle.
With a sharp exhalation, Clementine charged. “Stride of Wind! Greater Evasion! Ability Boost! Greater Ability Boost!” She used the same four martial arts from before all at once to get her physical ability even a little closer to his. Regardless of how Momon had fought so far, there was still the possibility he could use martial arts.
In her accelerating world, she could see her opponent’s every move. He was going to take his swords out of the ground and attack. Or use a martial art, or hand-to-hand combat, or a hidden weapon—no, a throwing weapon. She could think of a zillion ways he could attack her, but she was confident she could prevail over any of them. Then he betrayed her expectations.
He’s not doing anything?!
The dark warrior just stood there, arms open, as if he was welcoming her attack.
A chill ran up Clementine’s spine—fear of the unknown; he was acting completely outside the scenarios she’d imagined. Should I keep charging or retreat? Those were her only two options.
Clementine was cold-blooded and cruel, but she wasn’t stupid. In the split second left, she calculated out countless possibilities and countermeasures. What gave her the push to continue was self-confidence and pride in her abilities.
Even though she’d betrayed them, she was a member of the Slane Theocracy’s strongest special-ops unit, the Black Scripture, and she could count the number of warriors powerful enough to defeat her on her fingers. There was no way she could run from this Momon character who had no reputation and little skill.
Once she’d made her decision, the rest happened quickly. Her hesitation vanished, and having regained the cool composure befitting a top-class warrior, she leaped in close to Momon’s chest.
“Die!”
The stiletto she ******, mobilizing all her body’s muscles, stabbed into the slit in his close helmet. Then, she twisted it. She increased pressure to reach the back of his skull and then wiggled the blade to break the nearby blood vessels so the wound would be fatal beyond a doubt.
An armored arm wrapped tightly around her body, but she paid it no mind and followed up with another attack. Responding to her desire to kill him dead, the magic power contained in her stiletto was unleashed—Lightning.
Electricity coursed through Ainz’s entire body.
Clementine’s weapon was invested with the power of Magic Accumulation. The magic was drained in one shot, but it was possible to load up all different spells over and over. One could prepare according to their specific needs, so it was a really easy power to use.
She’d stabbed to the back of his skull and left him a lightning souvenir. He’s definitely dead.
But—
“I’m not done yet! Flow Acceleration!” Clementine accelerated, whipped out another stiletto, and stabbed that through his helmet slit as well. On top of that, she unleashed the Fireball spell it contained. She hallucinated Momon’s flesh burning up from the inside out and had the feeling she could smell the meat grilling.
Instead, her eyes widened in shock at how wrong she was.
“Hmm. Yggdrasil didn’t have magical weapons like that. The more you know!”
As he spoke at leisure with a stiletto still sticking out of each eye, she realized that it hadn’t been a coincidence that there wasn’t blood on the blade when she’d stabbed him earlier.
“No way! This can’t be happening! Why won’t you die?!” She’d never heard of a martial art that made the user invincible. Was there something protecting him from stabbing? Even then, how did he block the magic follow-up? Even the veteran warrior Clementine didn’t know the answer.
“?!” She was pulled in close. Their bodies bumped together, and her adventurer plates jangled.
“You want to know if you got the answer right?”
The raven-black armor—poof—disappeared, revealing Momon’s horrifying face. It was a skull with neither flesh nor skin. Stilettos were stabbed into both of his vacant orbits—through his mirrored shades—but he didn’t give any indication he was experiencing any pain.
That appearance rang a bell for Clementine. “An undead… An elder lich?!”
“…? Well, I sure have some questions for you, but meh. Let’s just say you’re close. And then…”
She shouldn’t have been able to read an expression from a face with no skin or flesh, but she had the feeling he was wearing a wide grin.
“So, how does it feel fighting a caster with a sword? How does it feel to not have it end with a swoop and a shoonk?”
“D-don’t make fun of me!” Clementine struggled violently to get away, but it was as if she were bound to him by sturdy chains, and she couldn’t.
An elder lich was certainly a mighty undead, good at using magic and so on, but it shouldn’t have much in the way of physical ability; in a comparison with Clementine, she should come out on top. But…
“Wh-why?!”
I can’t get away.
Her entire body went cold when it dawned on her that his incredible power and physical ability wasn’t due to some magical effect in his armor. The image that ran through her mind was of a butterfly caught in a spider’s web—a helpless creature.
“This was the true nature of your handicap. Basically, you weren’t an enemy I had to take seriously enough to use magic on.”
“You piece of shiiiiiiiiit!”
“Well, now that the cat’s out of the bag, let’s begin after I get these out of my way.” There was a dragging noise as the elder lich pulled a stiletto out of his head and threw it away. Clementine was still struggling as he removed the other, but it seemed even one of his hands far exceeded the strength of her entire body, and she couldn’t budge in his embrace.
Once the stilettos were gone, the sinister red flames in his empty eye sockets turned to Clementine, who was breathing irregularly as she strained against him.
“Okay, let’s begin.”
Begin what? thought Clementine as the already intimate distance between her and the elder lich shrank even farther. In her ears was an unpleasant creaking noise.
When she realized what he was trying to do, she felt as though she’d been stabbed in the back with an icicle.
“You aren’t…? You can’t be…! Youuuuuuu!”
The noise was the shriek of her armor beginning to dent.
He’s trying to crush me against his chest.
The elder lich should have been getting squashed against the armor as well, but he must have changed his body to be more powerful somehow. It was immovable and made her think of a thick wall.
“If you were weaker—”
The elder lich took a dagger out from somewhere. The blade was black, and there were four jewels set in the hilt. “I considered ending your life with this, but I figure there’s not much difference between dying on a sword, getting snapped in half, or being crushed. You’re dead no matter what.”
Her whole body shuddered. Throughout his commentary, the pressure was gradually increasing. The strange weight on her chest was becoming oppressive. Ping! Ping! Unable to bear it, the plates of the adventurers she’d killed began popping off her armor and falling to the graveyard ground as if they were finally being interred. The first to go were the ones she had most recently acquired.
It got harder and harder to breathe. This is awful.
She hated the arm wrapped around her back.
She blamed herself for wearing light armor in order to increase her evasion and be able to attach the adventurer plates.
Having learned that swords had no effect on the elder lich, she began beating his face with her fists, half crazed. She was hitting so hard she was hurting herself, but she wasn’t at leisure to feel the pain. Then, she drew her morning star and began frantically pounding with that, but she couldn’t do it right and only ended up wounding herself.
It was easy to imagine the fate that awaited her. The choking breaths, the weight on her chest, and her breaking armor made it crystal clear what would happen.
“Don’t struggle so much. If the position of my arm slips, it’ll end too simply. You took your time killing them, so I want to take my time on you, too.”
Clementine desperately continued her attacks. She tried pushing off of his head with her hand, scratching at him till her nails peeled back, biting him with her front teeth… None of it worked and the pressure continued increasing.
No matter how much she flailed, there was no escaping the jaws that were his arms. She still fought. Even as her breathing grew more difficult and her field of vision began to shrink, she fought for the chance to survive.
“La Danse Macabre?”
She couldn’t even spare the effort to hear that quiet remark.
There was a gurgling sound, and Ainz was splashed with vomit and filth. Something dark flashed through the red flames in his vacant orbits.
Clementine, who had flailed and tried so desperately to escape, had devolved into something that could only convulse.
But Ainz didn’t let up. On the contrary, he increased the pressure. Eventually Ainz felt the crack of a thick bone snapping against his arm. He let go of a body that was no longer even twitching.
Clementine’s corpse fell to the graveyard ground with a thud, like a bag of garbage. Her face looked ghastly, distorted by pain and fear. Like a deep-sea fish that had been reeled in all at once, her innards were poking out of her mouth.
As Ainz took out his Bottomless Pitcher of Water to wash the vomit and filth from his body with its endless stream of fresh water, he spoke quietly to Clementine, who could no longer reply. “Oh, I forgot to tell you—I’m extremely self centered.”
5
Shrinking from his clothes that were sopping wet after their cleansing, Ainz sensed that something large was scampering his way. When he looked, it was Hamusuke, as he’d thought.
Hamusuke’s combat ability was far inferior to Ainz’s or Narberal’s. If he’d have forced her to fight and she got hurt, it would have led to unnecessary expenditures, so he’d had her stand by a little ways away, but apparently she had come out once she could no longer hear battle noises.
Ainz was a little depressed he was able to read the subtle change in expression (concerned for her master’s safety) on the super-giant hamster’s cute face.
Having no idea her master was feeling that way, the giant hamster ran over surprisingly quickly and scanned the area. When her eyes met Ainz’s—
“Blegh!” She keeled over belly up and continued shouting. “There’s some kind of crazy monster here, that there is! Masterrrr! Masterrrr!” Steeped in the torment of full-body weariness, Ainz held his head. Now that he thought of it, he had never shown Hamusuke his real face. But he couldn’t leave it like this. When he looked out at the wall in the distance, he saw there were some adventurers battling his wraiths. He wanted to think they couldn’t be overheard at this distance, but he couldn’t say for sure.
“…This is like a bad comedy routine. Would you cut it out?” Ainz scolded in his dignified tone.
“Oh? That magnificent, valiant voice… Could it be…? You’re my master, are you not?!”
“Yes, so could you keep it down?”
“What! Your appearance is far different from my most wild imaginings! I thought you possessed great power, but…now I will be even more loyal to you, that I will!”
“Uh-huh. More importantly, I’ll say it again: Keep it down.”
“M-master, you’re so mean, that you are! I would like that you not dismiss my oath of devotion so casually, that I would!”
“Did you not hear what Lord Ainz just said, you fool?!”
A dent appeared in Hamusuke and she went flying.
Where she’d been standing up until a moment before, Narberal was slowly lowering her foot. “Lord Ainz, I don’t believe there is any value in keeping such a stupid creature. May I grill her with lightning?”
“Don’t. She’s quite valuable to us in terms of reputation if we use her as the Wise King of the Forest. Even just taking her around with us live is beneficial. More importantly, Narberal, we don’t have much time. Start looting these guys. Assuming the peacekeepers in the city will request us to turn everything in, we need to check for valuables first.”
“Understood.”
“I’m going into the mausoleum. I’ll leave the cleanup to you.”
“My lord! What shall I do with the corpses? Will we take them to Nazarick?”
“No. We need to point to them as the masterminds behind this incident. Just strip their gear.”
“Understood.”
“It hurts, that it does…”
Narberal heaved an exaggerated sigh and sent Hamusuke, who had returned, a chilly glare. “Pay more attention to anything Lord Ainz says than your entire existence. That is the duty of a minion. Even a creature like you counts as a minion—barely—so keep that in mind! If you don’t, I’ll promptly kill you.”
Hamusuke shivered.
“Next time I’ll punish you with magic, not a physical attack. In accordance with Lord Ainz’s wishes, I’ll cause as much pain as I can without killing you.”
“I understand, that I do… Please don’t look at me with such a scary face, that I ask… But I’m astonished by our master’s new and powerful appearance, that I am. How magnificent!”
Narberal’s expression softened just a bit. “Yeah. Lord Ainz is truly wonderful to behold. If you understand that, you might have a pretty good eye.”
“I thank you, that I do. But if our master has a true form, do you have another form as well, hmm?”
“…I’m a doppelgänger; I just changed my face. See?” She took off her gauntlet to reveal a hand with only three fingers. They were longer than human fingers and looked just like inchworms.
“O-oh, I didn’t know, that I did not.”
“Why are you surprised? You’re a part of the Great Tomb of Nazarick as one of its lowest-class minions now, so you can’t let a little thing like that shock you. More importantly, why don’t you help me loot these corpses?”
“Yes, ma’am! That I will!”
Nfirea was inside the mausoleum. When Ainz saw him, the red sparkles in his orbits grew dark. He was wearing some strangely transparent garments, but what Ainz was looking at was his face. A cut had been made straight across it, and the trails of hardened blood like reddish-black tears showed that his eyes under their lids had been sliced. It was clear he had been blinded.
“Well, blindness I can fix… Magic is so handy.”
The bigger problem was his mental condition. He was standing stiff as a rod and hadn’t reacted to Ainz’s presence. Even if he couldn’t see, he should have been able to tell if someone was standing right in front of him. Since he didn’t, it meant he was being mind controlled. The question was, via what?
“It has to be this.” Ainz was looking at the spiderweb-like circlet around Nfirea’s head. There was nothing more suspicious around.
He casually reached out to remove it but stopped. Interfering before he understood what had caused this state was too risky. He faced the circlet and used a spell. “Appraise Any Magic Item.”
In Yggdrasil, the spell would tell who made an item and what it did, and it worked in this world as well. Actually, it worked even better. Things he never would have learned in Yggdrasil popped into his head.
“…A Crown of Wisdom…I see. But hmm, considering what it does, this couldn’t exist in Yggdrasil. I guess it couldn’t be reproduced there?” he commented, impressed after acquiring general knowledge about the item. Then, he thought about what to do next.
The most important thing he considered was the argument for taking Nfirea to the Great Tomb of Nazarick just as he was. Getting control of a rare item and a rare talent was huge.
But he only wavered for a moment. “Deliberately failing at a job I already undertook would be a disgrace to the name of Ainz Ooal Gown. Crumble away—Greater Break Item!”
Ainz’s spell shot at the circlet, and it crumbled elegantly into innumerable tiny sparkles. He gently caught the boy as he slumped over, then carefully laid him down and looked at his face. “All that’s left is…to fix his eyes. I guess it’d be better to do that somewhere else, though…”
Stroking his bony chin, Ainz stood up. The undead he’d summoned hadn’t been wiped out, but some of them had been destroyed. There was no doubt that reinforcements—the meddlers—would reach this place at some point. He had to recast his illusion and recreate his armor and swords before that happened.
And they had to finish looting. Ainz experienced a dark joy in the simple act of robbing all of a corpse’s gear at once, something that hadn’t been possible PK-ing in Yggdrasil.
As he thought to go help Narberal with that, she appeared at the entrance to the mausoleum with perfect timing. “Lord Ainz.”
“What is it? Did you take all their stuff? Money, too?”
“Yes, it’s about that. I found this.” Narberal went into the mausoleum.
She was clutching a black orb. It wasn’t a very nice-looking stone—it seemed like the type of rock one could find on the shore of a river. It certainly didn’t look valuable.
“…What is it?”
“It seemed very important to the hammerhead worm I was fighting. I don’t know what it does…”
“I see…”
Narberal the NPC didn’t know as many spells as Ainz, and most of them were for combat, hence her not being able to appraise the item.
Ainz took it and used the same spell as before. “Appraise Any Magic Item.”
The red sparks in his eyes burned brilliantly.
“What…is this? A Jewel of Death? And it’s an intelligent item?”
For having such a grandiose name, being “of death” and all, it wasn’t such a fancy item. It augmented the user’s ability to control undead and allowed them to cast a number of ghost magic spells so many times per day—neither of which powers held much fascination for Ainz. The downside was that it could control a human in possession of it, but Ainz and Narberal were protected against mind control and the jewel couldn’t control subhumans or grotesques anyhow.
“This is a pretty meh item, but…” There was one thing about it that interested Ainz, and that was that it was intelligent. When he poked it, as if telling it to say something, a voice echoed in his mind.
“We meet for the first time, O great King of Death.”
Ainz stared at the stone. This was a world with magic and monsters, so it didn’t surprise him that something like this would exist. “Hmm. You really are intelligent, huh?” He deftly rolled the stone in his hand and then stared at it again, but it didn’t seem like it was going to say anything. He wondered what the deal was but then had an idea. “I permit you to speak.”
“I humbly thank you, O great King of Death.”
That response reminded him of the ardent devotion of the Nazarick NPCs, and Ainz smiled faintly.
“I revere and worship your majesty’s presence of absolute death.”
Ainz was pretty sure he had all his auras turned off, so why was this item calling him the King of Death? Considering Ainz was undead, he figured it was flattery at best. “Go ahead.”
“Thank you, Being of Profound Death. I thank all death that exists in this world that I should get to meet you, whom I worship.”
For brownnosing, those were pretty serious words, and despite feeling self-conscious, Ainz puffed out his chest.
“And? Do you have anything to say besides flattery?”
“Yes. I am deeply aware how impertinent it is of me, but please, I beg that you would grant my wish.”
“What is it?”
“I always thought I was born into this world to bestow death upon large numbers of people. But now that I have met you, O great King of Death, I realize the true reason: I was born into this world to serve you, your majesty.”
“…Hmm…”
“O great King of Death, please accept my loyalty. And I humbly request that your majesty count me among the lowliest of your faithful servants.” It was a sincere voice. Had the jewel had a head, it surely would have been bowed low.
Ainz curled his right hand and placed it near his mouth while he thought—about whether he should make it one of his subordinates or not, about whether he could trust it or not.
After a time, he slowly returned his gaze to the item. To be “safe,” he should destroy it, but it seemed like a waste to destroy any more things that hadn’t existed in Yggdrasil.
After casting some defensive spells on the orb, he went to the entrance of the mausoleum and called out to the giant hamster. “Hamusuke!”
“Master, what is it, hmm?”
“I’m giving this to you.”
Ainz tossed the orb. Hamusuke nimbly caught it.
“Master, what in the world is this, hmm?”
“A magic item. Can you use it?”
“Hrm? …It seems I can, that it does! But how noisy it is! It clamors to be returned to you, master, it does.”
Seeing Hamusuke like that, Narberal’s eyes grew wide. “You would bestow it on a newcomer?!” Her slightly shrill voice showed how shocked she was.
“I took some precautions against detection magic, but I can’t say for sure that it’s a hundred percent safe; that’s why I’m having Hamusuke hold on to it.”
“Aha! Brilliant as usual, Lord Ainz. Not careless even for a moment, you make another admirable judgment call.” Narberal indicated she understood, and Hamusuke, with a lump in her cheek pouch (slightly smaller than a human fist), made a dignified bow.
As Ainz was giving the two of them the order to withdraw, the red of his cape caught his eye. Feeling a bit playful, he grabbed the edge of it. “Once you’re done looting, let’s take Nfirea”—he flourished his cape—“and make our triumphant return.”