46. Spider Hunt (3)

“You son of a bitch. Come out here right now!!!”

A booming voice shook the forest. A murderous glare cut out from between strands of hair gone disheveled and damp with sweat. Each step Choi Hyeongtae took drove his footprint deep into the ground.

— KWAAANG!

His grudge-laden shout was answered by an explosion. A corpse burst apart right in his face, and the blast slammed across his whole body.

Blood, gobbets of flesh, and shards of bone hammered into him, yet they couldn’t leave so much as a scratch on him. His body had been honed to the peak of the 5th Rank. However powerful a spell Corpse Explosion was, the gap in Stellar Rank was simply too wide for it to do any real damage.

“Damn it!”

Choi Hyeongtae’s face darkened. He’d taken Corpse Explosion head-on without a scratch, but his subordinates hadn’t.

“B-boss! Save me— gah.”
“Grrrk.”

The fog stained crimson. Blood spattered across the trees and dripped down below, tok, tok. Not one of the Hunters Choi Hyeongtae had led in had come through unharmed. Five dead. Three gravely wounded.

“A-a healing spell, please.”
“The priest’s dead. Use this instead.”

He hurled a potion to a Hunter clutching his spilling guts. The man caught it with effort and twisted off the cap with trembling hands, but more of it spilled onto the ground than onto the wound.

I can’t even begin to guess how many have died.

Corpse Explosions had gone off all at once. Anyone 3rd Rank or below was killed outright, or left wounded badly enough to be out of the fight. Even the 4th-Rank Hunters hadn’t gotten off unscathed. The fog smothered his sight, so he couldn’t gauge just how heavy the losses ran.

“Gaaaagh!”
“Khh, khhhh.”

Groans rose from every direction. There was no doubt about it. The Red Spider’s Hunters had been driven to the edge of annihilation without ever managing a real fight. Choi Hyeongtae’s lips trembled. If he didn’t clench his jaw, a sigh would slip loose.

“Ha. We are well and truly screwed.”

Things were already well past the point of salvage. If Kim Jaewoo learned the full story of this disaster, he might make an example of him and have him killed. The only choice left was to run. Choi Hyeongtae drew a deep breath.

Even if I run, I’m at least getting a look at the face of the bastard who screwed me over.

The explosion just now had told him one thing. A mana circuit lay buried across the ground, and whatever kind it was, someone was triggering it from a distance to set off the blasts. By the time he’d worked out the trick, he’d already taken fatal losses.

“But at least I know where you are now!”

The mana circuits all ran in one direction. At the end of them waited the goddamn man-hunter. By now he couldn’t even say for sure whether the bastard really was one of the Kaesong crew, but that hardly mattered. He’d tear the architect of this whole disaster limb from limb to vent his rage, then get out of Ground Zero.

Choi Hyeongtae kicked off the ground with all his might and chased the mana circuit.

“I’ll rip off your arms and legs and leave you nothing but a torso.”

— That’s a bit of a problem. He’s my master, you see.

A black shadow leapt out without warning.

A hand-blade wreathed in Dark Fighting-Aura came down at a slant, and Choi Hyeongtae couldn’t shrug off that momentum either; he caught it on a forearm sheathed in aura. A black current and a blue light collided with a violent crash.

“Hraaah!”

When Choi Hyeongtae poured more strength into his forearm, Fafnir gave himself over to the flow rather than resisting and drew back a little.

Stings.

The eyes that had been twisted with rage cooled back to normal. His skin hadn’t taken a single scratch even from Corpse Explosion, yet one exchange of blows with Fafnir had carved a red gash the length of his wrist into his forearm.

“So you’re the one who wrecked all our boys. Undead.”

— Well, most of them, anyway.

“There’s no way a naturally-occurring undead is this strong. Who are you.”

— Cheon Yujin’s champion. I am Fafnir.

Cheon Yujin? A name he was hearing for the first time.

“Doesn’t matter. You’re going to die either way.”

— I never said I’d let you go, though?

“Don’t worry. Once I’ve killed you twice over first, I’ll send this so-called master of yours to join you!”

— Peong!

Choi Hyeongtae’s and Fafnir’s hands locked together in midair.

So it’s begun.

Yujin rose from where he’d been sitting.

I’ve already used it as much as I needed to.

That accounted for about seventy percent of the corpses he’d buried. The rest were no good now that the Red Spider survivors had pulled back deeper in.

You really don’t get it. Seventy percent is a huge hit rate.

He’d guessed the Red Spider’s Hunters would come in scattered clusters rather than one tight formation, so he’d breathed spirit-power into the corpses and buried them across a wide stretch of ground. And that wasn’t all. Even with his vision shared through the wraiths, the corpses didn’t blow the instant he tripped the Ignition Circuit; he’d had to half-predict each enemy’s path. It was painstaking, exacting work. Had an ordinary Necromancer been in his place, they couldn’t have made use of even fifty percent of the buried corpses.

Well, I doubt anyone but me would set up a stunt like this in the first place, though.

If you want to win a fight, you have to read the enemy’s moves.

His regression itself had come down to winning a vicious game of moves. To trip the activation conditions of the Pocket Watch of Kronos, he’d boxed Dmitri into a corner where the old man had no choice but to go all out.

Now, how should I go about cooking the remaining 5th Ranks.

Dealing damage doesn’t always mean leaving a wound.

Through Ghost Eye, he watched one of the Red Spider officers. Cloaked head to toe in a red robe, she walked leaning on a staff.

Just burning through their mana is enough.

A blue film wrapped around the officer’s whole body. An instant before he could detonate a corpse near her, she’d caught the Ignition Circuit’s reaction and thrown up a defensive spell. It would have been better still if she couldn’t react to Corpse Explosion at all, but Yujin never left the course of a fight to luck.

Let me teach you how a Necromancer fights.

Why was a Necromancer a thing to be feared on the battlefield? The Red Spider officer was about to learn it firsthand, in her own flesh. He’d simply never had the occasion to put what he knew to use.

“Send out the soldiers.”

Yujin gave the order to the Black Obelisk.

— Clatter. Clatter.

The hard knock of bone against bone began to ring out here and there through the fog.

How long can they hold out if it comes down to a war of attrition?
Heh heh heh.

Yujin’s lips twitched.

A woman with disheveled hair glared around her, eyes bulging.

“Hey. Are you all dead?”

All that came back was groaning. A long sigh slipped from the woman’s mouth, haaa.

“For fuck’s sake. If I weren’t in debt I’d never have come.”

Lee Seungyeon. The only woman among the Red Spider’s officers, a magic-line Hunter who’d climbed to the peak of the 5th Rank.

A defensive spell that releases the user’s mana in its rawest form. Magic Shield, of the same Stellar Rank, costs less, but Mana Barrier burns five times the mana; in a dire pinch, though, it’s exactly the spell for the job.

I nearly died for nothing, out here in the middle of nowhere.

There’d been a faint wave of mana when the Ignition Circuit fired. Lee Seungyeon, a superb mage, had caught the ill omen and instantly cast the fastest defensive spell she had.

And then the explosion went off.

Shielded behind the spell, Lee Seungyeon hadn’t taken so much as a bruise. The Hunters moving alongside her were another story. They’d been gravely wounded and knocked out of the fight, and so, magic-line Hunter though she was, she’d been forced up to the front line.

Finding the others is a lost cause too.

The fog was thick. It didn’t just gut her visibility; it jammed communications on top of that. She’d split the Hunters into several groups and kept sensible spacing between them, but the chain of explosions had blown the formation apart.

Now what do I do?

She had no wish to push forward without a vanguard, and no urge to go rounding up the subordinates scattered through the fog either. She was still gnawing at her fingernails in her anxiety when it happened.

“Ge-gel. Ge-gel-gel.”

Skeletons armored in pitch-black plate parted the fog and stepped out in front of Lee Seungyeon.

“Ha. So I’m being looked down on too.”

Lee Seungyeon’s brow furrowed. The woman who’d been gnawing her nails a moment ago was gone without a trace. Her disheveled hair swayed one way and the other, stirred by the wave of mana she was marshaling.

“Flame Wave.”

With a single swing of her staff, a wave of fire surged up and swallowed the Armored Skeletons whole.

“I don’t know who you are, but did I look like an easy mark to you? Huh?!”

Lee Seungyeon, too, was a Hunter seasoned in the lawless zone. It was only the crushing stress and the chaos of the moment that had tipped her into hysteria; her combat power was nothing to scoff at. She’d come through countless real fights, a talent who overpowered magic-line Hunters of her own Stellar Rank.

“Kyahahaha! Die! I said die!”

A fragile temperament and violent mood swings were her only real flaws; her abilities were every bit worthy of a Red Spider officer.

A wall of flame surged up in front of her. She loosed a burst of wind compressed to its limit dead ahead, and the flames scattered in every direction.

“Ge-gel!”
“Ge-, gel.”

Fire is the natural enemy of the undead. Dozens of Armored Skeletons swarmed in, but not one could so much as brush the hem of Lee Seungyeon’s robes.

— Whoooosh!

The fire magic, flung across such a wide area, caught in the underbrush. The moisture-heavy fog kept the flames from spreading easily, but the smoke boiling up here and there only thickened the chaos, and it even swallowed the sight of Lee Seungyeon, the one who’d set the fire.

And so.

“Answer my call.”

She never noticed Yujin slipping in close.

The battlefield was strewn with corpses. Red Spider Hunters cut down in the Corpse Explosions, and even the monsters that had poured in while the Necropolis spread. Only a fraction of the bodies buried underground had been seeded with spirit-power to serve as triggers for the blasts.

“The ground again, this time?”

Lee Seungyeon’s eyes blazed. As her lips parted, light spilled once more from her crystal.

“Fireball.”

The instant the blazing sphere of flame brushed the plague zombies.

— KWAANG!

The blast tore through them, and the venom pooled inside the plague zombies’ bodies sprayed out in every direction.

“Ow!”

Lee Seungyeon, who’d only just loosed the spell, was caught in the venom with no time to raise a shield. Only a few drops reached her. It would have been no trouble at all, if only they hadn’t landed on her face.

— Hssss.

“Agh! Aaaaagh!”

The flesh of her cheek, eaten by the venom, melted and sagged. In her panic she clapped a bare hand to the spot, and her fingers crumbled apart too.

“P-potion. Potion!”

She hurled up a barrier and slathered on an expensive, high-grade potion, but the wound was no ordinary one. The patch the venom had eaten away stayed exactly as it was, settling into her flesh like a scar.

The plague zombies raised themselves from the ground once more.

“I-I’ll fucking kill you!!!!”

This time she reached for the wind element, weaker in both matchup and raw destructive power. She carved the plague zombies down before they could close, keeping the venom from spraying loose.

Your grinning’s showing, you know.

It’s all going according to plan.

I told you at the start, didn’t I. That I’d show you a Necromancer’s way of fighting.

That it was Lee Seungyeon who’d come, of all the Red Spider officers, was a stroke of luck. Against a Martial-line opponent there’d have been no good way to deal with this, but a magic duel handed Yujin an endless supply of moves to play.

If the undead are destroyed, I just raise them again.

Why is a Necromancer called the lord of the battlefield? Because every corpse a battle leaves behind is power.

Whether I use Corpse Explosion or raise them as the dead.

So long as he had a medium to work with, his drain on mana, his spirit-power, ran lower than an ordinary magic-line Hunter’s. A beginner sweats buckets just scrounging corpses while he hunts. But once the stage is set for a Necromancer to show his true skill, no class is more powerful.

“Eeeee, gwaaah!!”

Look at her, hurling spells with her composure in tatters. Even a 5th-Rank Hunter doesn’t have an infinite well of mana.

She’s deployed the mana-guzzling Mana Barrier twice now.

The fire magic that worked so well on undead had been all but sealed off by the plague zombies, too. Unless she could bring down Yujin, hidden away in the black smoke, she’d have no choice but to keep fending off the undead that sprang up without end.

Got it all prepared.

He’d already confirmed during the Seongcheon Enterprise commission that the life force he drained could be converted into mana, into holy power.

Mana-recovery items are pretty pricey, after all. I’ve got to pull cheap tricks like this.

Yujin could top his spirit-power back up with potions. Lee Seungyeon, by contrast, had no way to recover the mana she’d burned.

Now. How long can you hold out?

Keeping out of Lee Seungyeon’s line of sight, Yujin grinned.