22. Snatching Someone Else's Fortuitous Encounter First — That's The Real Flavor (2)

“Eheheheh!”

A shriek rang out the instant they stepped into the shrine. A half-naked giant with striking red tattoos and two horns jutting from the crown of his head glared at Yujin’s group with murder in his eyes. A Fallen Worshipper, one of the guardians of the Forgotten Shrine.

— With clothing like that, does he feel no shame?

“You’re not wearing much yourself.”

— Hm. Even the dead are owed a measure of respect, master.

Muttering his trivial little remarks, Fafnir surged ahead and slammed head-on into the Fallen Worshipper. The two monsters locked fingers and strained against each other.

“Boss. The Fallen Worshipper’s strength is at the tail end of 2nd Rank. Shouldn’t we back you u—”

— Crrrunch!

Before Kang Minho could even finish, all five of the Fallen Worshipper’s fingers bent backward the wrong way.

“Gwaagh?”

— How feeble. This thing you call strength.

The Worshipper, flustered, tried to wrench his body back. As if he’d seen it coming, Fafnir didn’t pull; he matched the Worshipper’s retreat and shoved forward instead. The Worshipper’s balance broke, and as he toppled, Fafnir mounted him in a ground-and-pound stance.

— Crack!

A heavy fist came down and shattered him, skull and all. Blood spattered across the floor in every direction. Even without the limp, dangling arm, the message that Experience had been gained confirmed the thing’s death.

“A monster with combat power rivaling a Martial-line Hunter at the tail end of 2nd Rank, and look at that.”

— Hahaha. To this body, it’s nothing.

Fafnir mimicked a hearty burst of laughter through his stray thoughts, oblivious to the fact that all he spread was the eerie, sinister aura of the dead.

“What a pointless thing to do.”

— Was that not a splendid fight to open the gate clear with?

“You smashed his head in, so now I can’t make him into an undead.”

Spirit-power gathers in the head. Other parts of the body can take a degree of damage and still serve as material for necromancy, but once the head’s blown to pieces, the corpse is useless.

— Ah.

“What’s with the ‘ah.’”

— I’ll take more care from now on.

Tch.

Clicking his tongue lightly, Yujin drew up his spirit-power.

Bone and flesh, separating.

Secure the bones ahead of time.

Making an Armored Zombie requires a catalyst. The Forgotten Shrine is a high-difficulty gate, hard enough to go a year without being cleared. Its structure shifts every twenty-four hours, one problem in itself, but the monsters that emerged at random from the reassembled shrine drove the clearing difficulty far higher, too.

The Fallen Worshipper, vulnerable to magic attacks but high in physical defense. The Demon’s Eye, weak to physical attacks but striking in an instant-cast form, with high magic resistance. The Mask Beast, using a mask as its medium to cast all manner of curses and buff spells.

To shut out the variables, I have to prepare in advance.

I’m just a measly 1st-Ranker. Call it 2nd Rank to be generous, but the actual difficulty here is a 3rd-Rank gate — I can hardly afford to relax.

He was in the middle of recovering the bones he’d stripped out with Flesh Control.

“Eheheheh!”

“Ehit!”

Four Fallen Worshippers spotted the group and charged, eyes gone bright red.

— Being too popular is its own thing to ponder, I suppose.

“This time I’ll lend a hand.”

A Necromancer-exclusive magical armament. The five Cursed Fangs he’d crafted in the workshop shot up into the air. Gripping the Staff of Resentment to cut his mana consumption, he sharpened his focus to pack as much force as he could into Bone Control.

— Sphat!

Spirit-power spun around an axis honed sharp as an awl. When Yujin swept his hand, the Cursed Fangs launched in slanting lines, splitting the air as they flew.

“Hehit!”

The Fallen Worshippers didn’t slow their charge. The Cursed Fangs sank into their bodies, but as though they’d struck iron plate armor, only the tips bit in shallowly.

“That’s got to hurt.”

Then he released the spirit-power he’d set spinning around the Cursed Fangs.

“Ehit?”

The alien energy seeping into their bodies clamped down on the Fallen Worshippers’ movements. It was an energy opposed to life force itself; pouring spirit-power straight into a body is no different from injecting poison.

This much would be fine for a healthy person, though.

Steering the bones to tear through the skin had eaten up a great deal of energy, and for an ordinary creature brimming with vitality, this little spirit-power wouldn’t prove fatal. A touch of fatigue, at most. But the Fallen Worshipper was a different story: it strengthens its physical abilities through a corrupting curse, at the cost of its resistance to negative attributes. The Fallen Worshippers slowed noticeably.

— Is that the curse you used during the sparring?

“That was a buff. And no, I didn’t cast Unholy Blessing.”

— Either way, they slowed down by your scheming, did they not.

A storm of fists came raining down. The pack of Fallen Worshippers flailed, trying to weather Fafnir’s onslaught, but against strikes whose destructive power had risen a full 20% from the holy spell, they buckled one after another.

Classified as 2nd Rank like the Orcs but far stronger, so the experience they coughed up was far greater, too.

“Right. I forgot about Life Drain.”

— With your skill, master, anything you close in on turns to pulp anyway, so either pin them down or kill them first and then suck out their vitality.

“Thanks for the bone-deep advice.”

— Don’t mention it. Serving you, master, is my mission.

Yujin let the roundabout dig slide with such smooth ease that Fafnir couldn’t press the matter any further. Honestly. It takes two to keep a quarrel going, after all.

Park Haneul, who was always so taciturn before the regression, is just a little bit missed.

Even if they’re hard to approach, there’s a way. Swell the ranks of the dead first, then pin down a Fallen Worshipper and drain its vitality at leisure; that would do it.

Indeed. Looks like I’ll have to make a fuss again.

Stamina management matters when you’re clearing the Forgotten Shrine.

Right now he needed knowledge that helped with a drawn-out fight more than a momentary burst of power. The knowledge obtainable at the 1st-Rank level is rudimentary. A signature Necromancer spell like Corpse Explosion can only be inherited after a rise in Stellar Rank.

“Answer my call.”

A Fallen Worshipper rose, lurching to its feet. No. Two revived Armored Zombies belched out phlegm-rattling groans.

“Boss. Isn’t the Fallen Worshipper stronger than an Orc? In that case….”

Yujin shook his head side to side and cut Kang Minho off.

“You know why a zombie’s a low-grade undead?”

“No idea.”

“Because there’s a limit to how much spirit-power a corpse can take in.”

Two factors decide an undead’s combat power. The first is the corpse’s own ability; the second is the crafting method.

“If you crafted an undead with a low-level spell and got a high-tier undead out of it, that wouldn’t be fair, would it.”

To draw out the full strength of a strong corpse, several conditions have to be met: a fitting incantation, an enormous amount of spirit-power, and more. Which means a low-tier undead like a zombie has a fixed ceiling on its combat power.

“So you can’t make any undead other than zombies and Skeletons, Boss?”

“You seem to have forgotten — I’m still only 1st Rank.”

At Yujin’s rebuke, Kang Minho gave a sheepish, embarrassed laugh, hahaha.

— This body is no mere low-grade undead, is it?

“You weren’t made with a skill.”

Fafnir had begun as a Draconian corpse obtained by irregular means. The man who would one day be the Grand Alchemist had lent his support, and Yujin had carved the incantations into it, marshaling every scrap of his pre-regression knowledge. On top of that, he had triggered the curse and reinforcement formulae not with his own mana but with smelted mana-stone liquid. And finally, the soul of Park Haneul, who in life bore the Martial-Mage Unique trait, had synchronized so closely with the Draconian corpse that it could move at all, incomplete as it was.

Even if I explained all this, would he follow it?

If another Necromancer laid eyes on Fafnir, their eyes would go wide as saucers. He was a being that bordered on the miraculous, something only Yujin, risen to the highest seat in all of necromancy, could ever have made.

I’ll take that as a compliment.

Yujin recovered the cursed bones.

“Let’s pick up the pace.”

— Heh. My blood’s boiling.

Fafnir made some remark about his dried-up blood and took the lead again.

Yujin’s group skirted the edges of the temple entrance. The Forgotten Shrine was classified as Large, its interior as vast as dozens of soccer fields strung together, and just as many monsters roamed it.

“Eheheh!”

— They really do swarm in without a moment’s rest.

A Fallen Worshipper that had latched onto Fafnir swung its fists wildly.

— Crack!

A scratch opened across one scale, and the shock he couldn’t fully deflect seeped all the way into muscle and bone, a blow that would have left a living thing crippled with deep internal injury.

— I don’t normally favor this sort of fighting style.

Fafnir balled his hand into a fist and brought it down, wham, onto the head of the Fallen Worshipper pressed up against him. The crown of its skull caved in, and the half-naked giant collapsed. He was hemmed in by several more Fallen Worshippers clinging to him, a posture that wouldn’t let him bring his full strength to bear, and yet his stats had soared, thanks to the Wedge of Retribution stacks piling up through one fight after another.

— Time I got used to it.

Fafnir’s past life. He mustn’t fight the way Park Haneul once had. Putting the realization he’d reached during the sparring to full use, he broke into the enemy ranks at the vanguard, stoically taking their blows on his body while he downed the Fallen Worshippers one by one.

“Grooaaah!”

Then came the Armored Zombies’ charge. Their whole frames were wrapped in bone armor, flesh packed inside to swell their muscle, and they sent the pack of Fallen Worshippers, attention fixed on Fafnir, flying every which way. The Armored Zombies swelled to nineteen in the blink of an eye. The bigger the undead army grew, the faster the hunting went.

“Ugh. Here we go again.”

“Good thing we bought collection tools with the settlement money.”

The Scraps team kept their own hands moving without rest, too. The mana stones sat nestled in the monsters’ hearts, and a Worshipper’s body was tougher than an Orc’s, so they had to put that much more muscle into the work.

So Kang Minho isn’t the only one with a head on his shoulders.

— Gugugung—!

They were deep in the thick of the hunt when the ground heaved and a menacing rumble spilled out from every direction.

Kang Minho shouted urgently.

“The shrine’s about to reconstruct itself. We have to get out.”

Even as Yujin nodded, his eyes flicked left and right. Through the shaking of the whole shrine, a pillar here and a pillar there caught his eye, ones that didn’t move.

A mark so faint he had to concentrate just to make it out at all.

If it’s an eye symbol… then once the reconstruction’s done, that thing comes out.

An eyeball monster. You’ll know it when you see it.

Yujin’s group withdrew from the shrine as it reconstructed itself. How much time passed? When the rebuilding was done, the shrine greeted the Hunters with a form changed completely, right down to the entry passage.

“Whoa. No wonder it’s an uncleared gate.”

“Big Bro. Can we really clear this?”

Pretending not to hear the fraternal twins’ grumbling, he headed straight back into the shrine.

“Kwiririt!”

A Demon’s Eye. It ran about two meters long, more than half its body a single eye and the rest a bundle of tentacles thick as rope, a hideous monster.

The instant it met Yujin’s gaze, a bright red light flickered in a pupil as big as a man’s torso.

The Demon’s Eye lifted its lid and opened wide. A killing ray streaked in at supersonic speed, a formidable eyeball laser superb in both cast speed and destructive power.

I already know your traits.

He crossed five Cursed Fangs over the path the gaze was aimed at, and by a hair’s breadth the killing ray, fired off, was stopped by the crossed bones, leaving only a dark smear of ash.

Heavy mana drain.

The reinforcement formula he’d had Shin Junseok carve into the Cursed Fangs is what lets the magical armament hold its shape even after taking a Demon’s Eye’s attack. The trouble is that the formula draws its driving force from the very spirit-power steering the armament, so its cost-efficiency is poor.

Should’ve brought the Skeleton Guard along.

He’d crafted that one with no small care, using the Orc chieftain’s corpse as its base. But the Ring of Black Darkness can only hold one corpse at a time, so he couldn’t bring it on the gate clear.

— A gaze, is it. A rather vicious method of attack.

“Block their line of sight to me.”

— Stay hidden behind my back, master.

The red beam fired once more, melting away part of Fafnir’s scales, but it lacked the destructive power and the area of effect to take a three-meter giant out of the fight.

— Crack!

Because its structure concentrates mana into that abnormally large eye, its defense is as good as nonexistent. Stoically taking the laser as he closed in, Fafnir dropped it in no time.

— You’re not making this monster into an undead?

“What good would it do me to turn it into a zombie.”

The corpse would have made fine material for crafting a Dark Hood, a Magic-line undead, but for Yujin, who can only use Raise Undead, the basic spell of necromancy, it held little meaning.

Just as I remember it.

Yujin shot the toppled Demon’s Eye a sidelong glance. That pattern he’d glimpsed just before the shrine reconstructed was the secret to clearing the Forgotten Shrine.

All I have to do is gather the materials.

Before the regression. Recalling once more the clearing method Jang Miseon had uncovered, he swallowed a laugh.