8. The Ancient Proving Ground (2)

— Fwoosh!

The magical flames flickering across the walls lit the interior up bright.
Yujin’s eyes flicked left and right a few times.

Just like I heard.

Then they curved into a bow, bending like a crescent moon.
A cavern roughly fifty meters across, a magic circle inscribed in a ring at its center.

A trial hidden inside a specific gate.

Comb the whole world and you’d find barely a handful of places this rare.

“Guoooh.”

The zombies, swept along by the flash of light, had been carried over too.
Mouths half-agape and drooling, they looked around at their surroundings.

Summoned beasts count as part of my own ability, so they don’t trip the headcount limit.

Heh heh.
It matched the information he’d heard in his past life exactly.

By the time this gate’s secret came to light, I’d already passed the 2nd Rank.

He couldn’t say how bitterly he’d regretted it when he first learned of the secret hidden in the Garden of Antiquity.
A gate only 1st-Rank Hunters could enter.
With Yujin’s skill, he could have claimed the fortuitous encounter the Garden of Antiquity offered.
But what good was that when he couldn’t even get in?

There’s an Ancient Proving Ground in France, too.

But there it was already the subject of disputes among powerful guilds vying for ownership, and being another country, it was out of the question, not even worth dreaming about.
For Yujin, this counted as his first attempt, before the regression and after it both.

A Draconian.
A half-human, half-dragon monster carrying the blood of the dragon race.
The trial’s quarry was a powerful monster classified as 6th Rank at minimum.
A being that could fire off aura freely from any part of its body, and was well-versed in magic besides.

Dragon race it may be, but I heard it gets adjusted to suit a 1st-Rank gate.

This was a gate with a 1st-Rank entry restriction.
Drop a 6th-Rank monster into it out of nowhere and the balance would be off, wouldn’t it?
The Draconian summoned as the trial’s quarry took a stat penalty under the gate’s influence.

That doesn’t mean I can take it lightly, though.

If the pre-regression information held, the Draconian’s combat power sat at the tail end of the 2nd Rank.
A formidable foe Yujin’s abilities would struggle to handle.

All right, time to get ready.

He rubbed his palms together and called a nearby zombie over.

“Greuuuh?”
“Hold still.”

He laid his right hand on the zombie’s forehead and surveyed every nook of its body with the essence of death.

Let’s put that enhancement value to use.

Yujin was a master of undead structure.
By steering the spirit-power seeped into a body during reinforcement in a different direction, even a finished undead could be remodeled.

Let’s start by converting some strength.

He swapped the zombie’s doubled strength stat into Corpse Poison.

— Crrk. Crrrk.

The zombie’s flesh shuddered.

“I said hold still. Big Bro’s trying to concentrate.”

After needlessly chiding the zombie, he poured the boosted agility stat into Corpse Poison as well.
Sunken spores bubbled up all over its skin, and the zombie’s flesh turned a notch more hideous.

Its strength and agility stats had dropped, but it now carried a far stronger poison.
His trump card for taking down the Draconian.

The pocket watch let out a loud vmmm.

Don’t get worked up over every little thing. I was a 9th-Rank Necromancer, you know.

The essence of death the remodeling consumed wasn’t much.
What it demanded instead was a thorough knowledge of undead structure.
And since the essence of death had to be controlled flawlessly to keep any strength from being lost in the process, it called for extreme concentration.
An ordinary Necromancer would have taken a full ten minutes or more to remodel a single body.

“Extreme” my foot, over remodeling a measly zombie.

Yujin finished that difficult task in twenty-five seconds.
He remodeled one more body, leaving ten seconds to spare.
Once he’d arranged the zombie horde at regular intervals, light leaked from the ring at the cavern’s center.

— Fwooaaah!

Radiance surged from the summoning circle, and a three-meter Draconian came tearing through the pure-white shaft of light.

“Kraaaa!”

The Draconian spat out a monstrous shriek.

The Ancient Proving Ground.
A space the Constellations of the Pantheon had the dragon legions create, meaning to handpick exceptional Hunters.
Those who oversaw the trial were members of the dragon legions serving under the Dragon Lord.

The dragonkin Zerkaden flared his nostrils the instant his descent finished, then furrowed his brow.

“You command a foul-smelling breed.”

Ancient Proving Ground I, opened for the second time after France’s.
He’d faced scores of Hunters by now, but a caster who commanded the dead was a first.

“I’d rather not hear about smelling foul from a breed that never washes its whole life.”

Yujin shot back with a grin.
A single thread of derision slipped past his lips and rang through the cavern.

You think I’m making it up? Of course not.

It was a useless scrap of trivia he’d picked up while hunting the dragon race that turned up in higher-tier gates.

Look. That dragonkin can’t even argue back, can he.

“Not content with handling the dead, and frivolous to boot.”

Zerkaden ground his teeth.
The fury surged up in him.
But being a member of the dragon race, who could speak no falsehood, he couldn’t refute Yujin’s jab.

“The basest creature I have seen among all who have come to this proving ground.”

Ancient Proving Ground I connected to the same place no matter which gate one entered through.
The number of Hunters Zerkaden had tested ran to scores.
All were promising talents of powerful guilds, and among them were figures like Germany’s ranker Michael Dreist and France’s rising star Guillaume Schneider.

“I shall watch with my own eyes whether you can endure ten minutes as they did.”
“Though it will likely prove impossible.”

Tacking on those last words, Zerkaden stepped forward.

— Boom. Boom.

A weighty noise rang out with every lift of his foot.
Yujin, matching that pace, set the zombies up in a U-shape with himself as the axis.
A formation like wings spread to either side.

Zerkaden narrowed his eyes.

I’ll play along with your little scheme.

Go in a straight line and the zombies lined up on either flank would latch on.
The very picture of walking straight into an encirclement on your own two feet.
It was a far too transparent ploy, but Zerkaden gave no thought to turning back.
However many there were, they were 1st-Rank zombies.
A Draconian’s solid scales were harder than a finely forged suit of iron armor.

“Your pain will not be long, mortal.”
“Yours is gonna be a little long, though. My apologies.”
“I shall watch and see how long that mouth of yours keeps flapping.”

The moment Zerkaden walked into the center of the U-shaped zombie horde, Yujin snapped his fingers and the zombies pounced on him all at once.

— Crrrk, crrk.

He clenched his hand, his muscles swelling, his forearm bulging to the limit.
He swung his right arm hard, and the upper body of a zombie lunging in burst apart.

“Mere zombies…?”

Strange.
Too light a feel on the strike. For having shattered a rigor-mortis-stiffened zombie in a single blow, the shock that traveled into his fist was slight.
An ominous premonition flickered across his mind.

“It’s already too late.”

— Splrrtch!

The venom packed inside the plague zombie’s body erupted, splashing across his forearm, his shoulder, and part of his torso.
A toxic substance leaching from the corpse.
An acidic fluid derived from concentrated corpse poison began to melt the Draconian’s solid scales.

“Hngh.”

His right arm trembled in fits and starts.

The strength won’t go into it properly.

An attack that would have been nothing to his true body.
Right now, his physical abilities were weakened to match the Ancient Proving Ground’s trial level.
Pale smoke wisped up from the spot the acidic fluid had touched.

— Zzzt.

The scales melted away one by one.

“Greuuuuh!”
“You play petty tricks!”

In place of the right arm dulled under the corpse poison, he drew his left arm far back and thrust it with all his might, crushing a zombie’s body.
With part of his body paralyzed, his movements had grown that much larger.

— Thwack!

Yujin didn’t miss the opening, advancing the zombies fast to press in close.

“What do you intend to do once you’ve spent all your zombies?”
“Beats me. I never said anything about enduring.”

Yujin gave his zombies their orders, then kicked off the ground and sprinted with everything he had.

“Mortal. Don’t tell me…”
“You only just caught on?”
“You—you dare entertain the absurd notion of bringing me down?!”

Zerkaden raised his left foot and slammed it down with all his strength.
The instant foot met ground, he discharged mana.
A shockwave spread out, rocking the zombies’ bodies.

“I, Zerkaden, am not so weak as to fall to mere zombies like these.”
“Yeah. You’re not.”

Zerkaden twisted his body with all his might, trying to fling the zombies off.
Reinforced to twice their strength though they were, the zombies fell short of the descended Draconian in stats.

A little more and I can break free.

A glimmer of hope shimmered in Zerkaden’s eyes.

— Boooom!

The second plague zombie Yujin had prepared detonated at point-blank range.
Venom poured over Zerkaden’s body.
The scales, robbed of their natural color and gone a murky black, had softened past the point of protecting his body any longer.

“What. Something not working out?”

A whitish current wrapped around the Staff of Resentment.

— Crack!

Yujin raised the sharp tip of the staff and dug it wildly into the softened scales.

Weakened by the restriction it may be — yet to overwhelm a dragonkin.

Kronos swallowed a gasp of admiration.
A divine king who had once reigned at the summit of the Titan race.
He didn’t need Yujin’s explanation to grasp how unreasonable this fight was.
The two of them, their mana reserves. The gap in physical ability. Not one of those factors put Yujin in the lead.

Crude undead like those should have a hard time harming a dragonkin’s body.

Kronos’s warning to Yujin had been sincere.
He may have carved into a domain no one else presided over and become a Constellation, yet, having never even registered with the Pantheon, he had no constellation to his name.
If Yujin died for nothing, it wouldn’t stop at a fallen Constellation; the very existence called Kronos would be snuffed out.
That long-winded speech he’d given out of needless worry had been only a short while ago.

Wasted words, it seems.

Kronos watched the battle with an easier mind.

“Gwaaaaah!”

Zerkaden writhed, his eyes bloodshot.
Half his body wouldn’t obey from the repeated exposure to the venom, yet he summoned superhuman willpower and lunged for Yujin, only for what came back to be the staff boring into his blind spot.

“Keuhk.”

Cracking the scales and dealing further damage drained Zerkaden’s vitality at a rapid clip.
Confirming that the thing’s movements had dulled, Yujin pulled the Staff of Resentment back.
He reached out without hesitation.

The Draconian’s life force was sucked in.
Yujin meant to wring every last thing out of Zerkaden.
The sensation of life force being torn out whole.

“Gh, ghhh.”

Zerkaden’s movements grew duller and duller, until at last his head dropped low.

A permanent buff of a different order from a Constellation’s blessing or an auxiliary spell.
Since both Martial- and Magic-line Hunters can benefit from it, it counts among the very highest of emblems, a powerful ability.

It’s the System’s blessing.

Kronos muttered in a puzzled tone.
Rather than answer that, Yujin slid a sidelong glance at the fallen Draconian’s corpse.

The real reward is something else.

A dragonkin’s corpse.
For a Necromancer, a powerful material he couldn’t help but go wild-eyed over.

A dragonkin’s corpse with hardly any damage.
Truly. I can’t hold myself back.

Yujin’s eyes glistened with greed.