Grimgal of Ashes and Illusion - Volume 17 - Chapter 8

8. Gaps Can Form Anywhere

The door out of the inner courtyard was on the second floor, not the first. There were no stairs anywhere to be seen, so everyone clambered up to the second floor through the hole in the palisade where the balcony had collapsed. With just one exception.

Anna-san threw a tantrum about having to climb up by herself, so Tada carried her on his back. He might have grumbled about it, but wasn’t it a problem that he basically let Anna-san get away with anything? Wasn’t that spoiling her? It seemed to be the Tokkis’ policy, though, so it wasn’t Haruhiro’s place to say anything about it. But even once they got onto the second floor and everyone gathered in front of the exit to the next area, she was still riding piggyback. Was that really okay?

“What?” Tada said in a menacing tone, while Anna-san mockingly looked down at Haruhiro from his back, enjoying her elevated position.

“Uh, no, it’s nothing.”

“Parupiro!” The masked dread knight stepped up, placing his hand in the depression on the door. “Let me do this one! Oops! I already did! Gah ha ha ha! Oh?!”

The door opened as if folding into itself.

“It would seem Shinohara-kun and Mr. Renji already unlocked theirs,” Kimura said, glasses flashing. “Now then. I think I’ve taken the measure of your capabilities... But! All of this has been a mere prologue for what is to come. The true test of the Graveyard is the burial chamber. It is no exaggeration to say that we are only just getting started. Even we of Orion have only made it through the corridor, antechamber, and central room of the burial chamber. I want all of you prepared for a literal battle to the death in there.”

“The corridor is shaped like this...” Haruhiro said, making a square with an open side using his fingers. “The door we opened and the door Shinohara and the others opened are separated from each other.”

“Correct. The door into the antechamber is at roughly the midpoint of the corridor.”

“A battle to the death, huh?” Tada pushed up the bridge of his glasses with his left index finger. “Not bad. Anna-san, get down.”

“Aww...” Anna-san reluctantly got off Tada’s back with a look on her face you could have pasted into the dictionary next to the entry for disappointment. “Why do I need to walk on my own feet, yeah? It’s not fair, yeah!”

Why do you think Tada should keep carrying you? was what Haruhiro honestly thought, but he didn’t say it.

“Okay, then...” Haruhiro tried to move down the corridor, but Tokimune stopped him.

“Wait, Haruhiro.”

“Uh, yes?”

The corridor was three meters tall and three meters across, looking about the same as any other they had encountered so far. There were no lights in it. Light shone in from the well-lit inner courtyard, but it was too dark to see deep inside.

There was a noise. Haruhiro listened carefully. What was it?

It was coming closer, right?

This tap, tap, tap sound.

Were those footsteps?

“They’re coming,” Tada said, striding forward with his warhammer on his shoulder.

“...Why are you a priest, Tada-san?”

“Huh?” Tada responded without looking back. “So I can heal myself if I get hurt, duh.”

“Oh, of course.” Haruhiro had figured as much.

The tapping sound was getting closer and closer. Tada ran forward.

“Murgh?!” Kimura’s glasses flashed. “These enemies are...!”

“Grahhh!” Tada bellowed as he took a sharp swing at one with his warhammer. Just before he did, Haruhiro was finally able to visually identify the enemy.

They looked pretty creepy. Like pairs of slim, white legs were running on their own. Okay, no, not just the legs. It was more like the lower half of a person’s body. That’s what they looked like.

“Take—” Tada’s shout was drowned out by an explosion. The moment his warhammer struck the white pair of legs, they burst.

“O Light, may Lumiaris’s divine protection be upon youuu!” Kimura made the sign of the hexagram in front of his forehead. Tada, who had been thrown by the explosion, had reacted in time to at least cover his face with his left arm. But the front of his body was cut and torn, leaving him in pretty bad condition. Kimura turned his palm toward his fellow priest’s sprawled form.

“Sacrament!”

Powerful light radiated out, mending Tada’s wounds in mere moments.

“Tada!” Tokimune burst out laughing. “That was a good one! Getting blown up like that right after saying you could heal your own wounds!”

“You almost become one-hit wonder though, yeah!” Anna-san clutched her sides as she howled with laughter. Wait, was this really something to laugh about?

“Shut up!” Tada jumped to his feet and readied his warhammer. “The hell was that?! It hurt! A little!”

Man, imagine having the brass balls to take a hit like that and then say it only hurt a little. The guy was nuts. If Kimura’s Sacrament had come even a moment later, Tada could easily have died. Also, considering Anna-san was a priest, she really shouldn’t have been in a position to laugh about it.

“They’re specters,” Kimura explained. “Their special technique is self-destruction. Actually, it’s all they can do. They’re dangerous enemies.”

“So we can’t fight up close with them?!” Kuzaku shouted.

“Mewww!” Yume got down on one knee and fired an arrow down the corridor. Then another, and another.

There were two, then three explosions. Had her arrows caused the specters to go off? But the corridor was dark, so she couldn’t aim for them. Yume was just firing at random and hoping that with enough shots one would hit.

The specters that hadn’t taken an arrow rushed toward them.

“O Darkness, O Lord of Vice...!” The masked dread knight unleashed an ominous miasma from the tip of his katana. “Dread Wave!”

The specters enveloped by the miasma all blew up.

“Mew, mew, mew, mew, mew, mew, mew...!” Yume followed that up with over ten more arrows, and four or five specters blew up. No more were approaching.

“Heh! Out already?!” Holding his beloved katana, Ranta strode forward triumphantly, acting as if he alone had been responsible for that result, but then, “Nwuh?!” he nearly fell flat on his face.

“Shadows!” Setora thrust her spear at Ranta’s feet. One of the flat black snakes called shadows had apparently wrapped itself around his leg.

“I-I didn’t need your help!”

“Why can’t you just be grateful, man?! Huh?!” Kuzaku twisted around. It looked like there was a shadow wrapped around him too. “I-I can’t move...!”

“Do something about it yourself!” Setora snapped.

“Aren’t you a little too harsh with me, Setora-san...?!”

“Wa ha ha!” Ranta cut up the shadows clinging to both of Kuzaku’s legs. “She hates your guts! Take a hint, moron!”

“I’m shocked!” Kuzaku swung his large katana upwards. A number of shadows were dropping from the ceiling.

“Wow!” Kikkawa pointed his lantern toward the ground. There were a good number of shadows slithering soundlessly across the floor. No, not just the floor, the walls too. Kuzaku had just slashed a bunch of them, but there were shadows rushing toward them across the ceiling as well.

“It’s an all-out offensive, huh?!” Tokimune twirled his longsword, slicing through the shadows on the ground like it was a lawnmower, then crushed some of the ones on the wall with a shield bash. “We’ve got specters incoming too!!”

It was true. Haruhiro could hear their steps.

Yume wasted no time loosing an arrow, causing a specter to explode.

“Haru-kun! Yume’s runnin’ out of arrows!”

“Gotcha!” Haruhiro replied, but what could he do about it?

“I have an idea.” Tokimune sprang into action with a flourish.

The specters were coming.

“Mew!” Yume was trying to fire an arrow, but Tokimune was in the way, standing in front of her. Hold on, though, there was no way a guy like Tokimune didn’t notice he was in Yume’s line of fire. He had deliberately stood in front of her. Don’t fire, I’ve got this, he was telling her.

“Have you noticed?! There’s a lag before the specters self-destruct!” Tokimune leapt into the air, slashing a specter with a twirl of his longsword. He bashed it with his shield too, almost simultaneously. Then, pushing away from the specter, he jumped back and away.

The result was that when the specter went kaboom, there was a gap of several meters between it and Tokimune.

“Yep.” Tokimune turned back to them with a flash of his pearly whites. “That’s how it’s done. Did you get that?”

“Sure... Not that we can imitate it,” Haruhiro replied.

“Oh, yeah? It was surprisingly easy to pull off.”

Maybe for Tokimune it was, but not for everyone else.

“It’s worth a shot.” Mimorin rushed forward.

“Huh?”

Why Mimorin, of all people? The shadows were attacking her too, trying to wrap around her legs and stop her as she sprinted ahead.

“Mimoriiin?!” Anna-san screamed. “Gooo! Yeah?!”

Why don’t they stop her? The Tokkis make no sense.

Haruhiro could have stopped her himself, but he’d totally missed his chance. Mimorin was already past Tokimune. And right on cue, a specter stepped up to meet her.

Here it comes. I’m telling you, that’s dangerous!

Mimorin was amazing in her own way, but she was in a different category from Tokimune. Completely different. It was blatantly obvious that she couldn’t pull off the same trick Tokimune had.

“Marc!”

As Mimorin ran, she drew elemental sigils with the point of her longsword.

“Em Parc!”

A Magic Missile flew toward the specter and obliterated it. No, the bead of light didn’t have that kind of force on its own. The self-destruct must have triggered.

“Oh, yeah... She is a mage, after all.” Haruhiro had completely forgotten.

“That’s some originality!” Tokimune said with a casual laugh.

Yeah, that’s right. Er, wait... Is it?

“Marc em Parc!” Mimorin spun around, drawing elemental sigils with the tip of her longsword, and fired off another Magic Missile.

“Marc em Parc!”

Explosion followed explosion. Haruhiro couldn’t see the specters running out of the dark corridor, but maybe it was different for Mimorin and she was able to make them out?

“Marc em Parc!”

Or was she firing blind? Either way, another specter had just self-detonated.

“Marc em Parc!”

And another one went off. Still, why did Mimorin have to spin every time she fired a Magic Missile? It was unnecessary.

“Marc em Parc!”

Was Haruhiro small-minded for dwelling on the pointlessness of it? Was he too hard-headed?

“Marc em Parc!”

“Aww, yeah!” Kikkawa did a wiggly dance. “Their suicidal explosions are blooming like flowers! Flower power! Yes, Mimorin-san, yes, yes!”

“We’re all just too badass,” Tokimune concluded with a shrug as he sliced away more shadows. “Gotta keep our awesomeness under control!”

Incidentally, Haruhiro and his party were busy taking care of the shadows coming at them on both the floor and the walls. They didn’t have time to do a little dance like Kikkawa. Which, hold on, should he really be dancing now?

“Urgh...!” For some reason, Inui was wrapped in shadows, bound and unable to move. Weren’t all of the Tokkis supposed to be badass? Was Inui any use at all?

“Hmm...” Kimura’s glasses flashed, and he smirked. “That’s miiiild.”

That didn’t even make any sense.

“Tada!” What did Anna-san, who was running from the shadows, plan to do?

“C’mere, Anna-san!” Tada welcomed her approach. Welcomed her? What was he crouching down for? “We’re gonna link up!”

“Yeah...!” Anna-san hopped on Tada.

She was riding on his shoulders.

“Power up! Yeah!”

“One hundred times! Hoorah!”

With Anna-san on his shoulders, Tada swung his warhammer around, knocking shadows into the air whether they were down low or up high. Was that really one hundred times more power? Anna-san was small but by no means light. She had to be weighing him down a fair bit.

“Rah!” Despite the added burden, Tada slammed his warhammer into the wall with gusto. But doing that was probably the reason a whole pile of shadows rained down from the ceiling onto Mimorin.

“Ngh...!” Mimorin vanished in an instant, buried under the monsters.

“Haruhiro!” Tokimune said urgently, a serious expression on his face. “Please assist!”

“Me?!”

Honestly, Haruhiro wished he could refuse, but if he left Mimorin buried in that ominous pile of dark snakes, she might suffocate. If he let that happen, it’d keep him up at night. Haruhiro didn’t particularly dislike Mimorin. Her powerful one-sided affection confused him, but he didn’t wish her dead for it.

“But still...!”

Why Haruhiro? Tokimune could go himself. Anna-san and Tada, as a pair, or Kikkawa, or even Inui could too. Okay, maybe not Inui. Yeah, no, that wasn’t happening.

Haruhiro took off at a run. He stomped shadows into the floor as he went, or just jumped over them and left them behind.

When he sheathed his dagger and rammed his hands into the abominable mass of darkness, the shadows hissed and attacked him. He shrugged them off, wrapping his arms around Mimorin and pulling.

“Haruhiro!”

“Grahhhh!” When he shouted, a shadow got inside his mouth. “Gwogh?!”

That made it hard to breathe, obviously. It was trying to block his windpipe, but he wasn’t just going to let that happen. Haruhiro bit down on the creature as he tried to tear Mimorin free from the dreadful pile of shadows. But pull as he might, the shadows held on.

“O Liiight, may Lumiaris’s divine protection be upon youuu!”

Kimura. That voice has to be Kimura.

“Scold!”

“Gah!”

“Ngh!”

What was that light? Haruhiro felt like it was pummeling them. His whole body felt numb, and he couldn’t move so much as a finger. It wasn’t just Haruhiro either; Mimorin was affected in the same way, as were the shadows wrapped around the two of them.

“Hmm...”

Kimura. What did you do, Kimura?

“That seems to have done little good. I suspected as much...”

What do you mean, you suspected as much? That it would be pointless? Oh, I see. So that’s how it is.

Haruhiro felt the exhaustion ebb, and his body was able to move again, but that wasn’t true for just him and Mimorin. It was the same for the shadows. Ultimately, all it did was freeze them all for a few seconds without changing the situation in the slightest.

“Bwehhh?!”

No, the situation was worse. The moment it could move, the shadow went down his throat.

“Mnngh!” Mimorin was panicking about something.

Oh, crap. I can’t see. I can’t see anything. The shadows. They’re on my face.

“Haru!”

Merry. That’s Merry, right?

She yanked out the shadow that had been pushing itself down his throat and tore the one covering his eyes off too.

“Kimura, you help too!” Merry ordered, not bothering with an honorific.

“Yes’m!” Kimura shouted, oddly quick to comply.

Merry put Haruhiro in a pinion hold, pulling him backward while Kimura tossed his mace and buckler aside to tear the shadows off Mimorin with his bare hands.

“Looks like we’ve got more incoming!” Tokimune wooshed through the air, slashing specters with his longsword, pushing them away with his shield, and making them self-destruct.

“Fwoo!” Yume fired off a rapid barrage, hitting two more specters, which exploded with a boom-boom. “Arrows’re all gone now!”

“But I’m still here!” Ranta ran in even deeper than Tokimune, moving instantly from the right wall to the left.

Boom went a specter. Ranta had apparently cut it down.

“Ha ha ha!” Ranta cackled. “There’s nothing to it, now that I try! Damn, I’m good!”

“Oooh. That was cool, just now.” Yume said.

“Y-Y’think? I-I-It was cool? Well, duh, of course it was. I mean, I’m the guy who did it...”

“Yeah! But we’re making no progress!” Kuzaku complained.

Kuzaku’s right, thought Haruhiro. We’re not moving forward at all.

Thanks to Merry, and maybe Kimura too, the majority of the shadows wrapped around Haruhiro and Mimorin had been driven off, stomped, or cut to pieces. But they kept pressing in from the floor, walls, and ceiling, and the specters periodically came in for a suicide bomber attack too. The group had hardly progressed since entering the burial chamber’s corridor. They’d been stuck in the same spot this whole time.

The way things were now, they weren’t too exhausted yet. Not physically, at least. But just as Yume’s arrows had run out, their options to keep the fight up were guaranteed to run out eventually.

They could fall back and regroup, but the question was how far back. The enemy was sure to pursue. Besides, Orion’s information told them that as long as the Lich King, who was somewhere in the burial chamber, was still around, the enemies in the Graveyard could regenerate themselves indefinitely. If they pulled back, it was entirely possible that enemies they had already defeated would be lying in wait.

This was not a good situation. If they were going to withdraw, it needed to be after they joined up with Shinohara and the others. For now, the only way to go was forward. They had no other choice.

“Tokimune-san! Let’s push up little by little! We need to join up with the others as fast as possible!”

“Yeah, leave it to me!”

Haruhiro wished he could be the kind of person who was able to smile and say that without hesitation in a situation like this. He felt like it’d be tough for him, though.

Tokimune suddenly made two specters blow up, advancing five or six meters forward in the process. The key to the method he’d come up with was to slash them, push them back, and then move away. If you took a step forward, you had to retreat the same distance. Yet Tokimune had blown up a pair of specters and still managed to make that much progress forward. However, mimicking him was easier said than done. And Tokimune had cut up a good number of shadows too while doing it.

“Everyone, follow me! We don’t need to take a single step back!”

Tokimune didn’t tell them not to retreat, he told them they didn’t have to. Haruhiro didn’t have the sense to choose his wording like that. And though he might eventually be able to emulate the way Tokimune spoke, if he couldn’t back it up with actions, it wouldn’t do him any good.

“Hah!” Tokimune made another specter blow up. Incredibly, this time, after slashing it and pushing it away, he didn’t back off. It looked like he’d defended himself with his shield, but that still took guts.

“We can do this! Onward!”

“Yay! Me too! Me too!” Kikkawa slashed a specter and shoved it with his shield.

“Whoa...?!” When the specter exploded, Kikkawa landed flat on his butt. He got up in no time, though, so it was probably no big deal.

“Nice one, Kikkawa!” It was so like Tokimune to encourage him rather than telling him, Don’t be crazy. You can’t pull off the same stunts as me.

“Cheers!” It looked like the praise had Kikkawa eager for more.

What if he messed up? Wouldn’t that be dangerous? That was how Haruhiro tended to think, but Tokimune must have trusted his comrades. If it didn’t work out, he and the rest of the party would cover for Kikkawa. That was what the Tokkis had been doing all this time. It seemed reckless, but they hadn’t lost a single person. They must have had a line they recognized as too dangerous, and they didn’t cross it. But after facing difficulty and death so many times on their own whims, the Tokkis had developed their own unique sense for how to manage danger.

“Personal skill!” The masked dread knight ran around. He slashed two, three specters with high-speed cuts, setting them off. “Sudden Cicada Serenade! Damn, I’m so cool!”

Ranta might have been a lot like the Tokkis. That was why he and Haruhiro didn’t mesh.

“I...!” Kuzaku swung his large katana, slicing up shadows over his head, at his feet, and on the walls. “Shouldn’t even bother trying that, right?!”

“Yeah, give it up,” Setora told him on Haruhiro’s behalf.

If he was able to realize that he shouldn’t try something like that, Kuzaku would never be able to be one of the Tokkis. Then again, Haruhiro wouldn’t want Kuzaku acting like them too. It’d be a real problem.

“Hm?!” Tokimune deflected something with his shield. “Whoa, hold on...”

It wasn’t like Haruhiro had relaxed his guard. But even he had gotten a bit excited about their progress. That was all blown away in an instant. What was it that Tokimune had deflected?

“That was a bullet!”

There were haunts here. The bullets. They came flying. More and more of them.

“Kikkawa, we’re gonna block them! Kimura, you too!” Tokimune shouted while blocking the bullets with his shield.

“Yessir!” Kikkawa, who also carried a shield, did likewise.

“Umph!” Kimura smacked down a bullet with his buckler. He was even knocking them out of the air with his mace too.

“Anna-san, time to split up!”

“If we have to, yeah!” Anna-san hopped down from Tada’s shoulders.

Had they even needed to hook up like that in the first place? With that weight off his shoulders, Tada swung his warhammer, knocking down three or four bullets in one swing.

“Mrrgh!” Kuzaku narrowly blocked a bullet with the flat of his large katana.

“Tch...!” Ranta nimbly jumped about, dodging the projectiles. “If you go around hitting them with your sword, it’ll break in no time!”

“Ah!” Haruhiro reflexively crouched to avoid a bullet.

The haunts’ bullets hit a certain sweet spot in size, weight, and hardness. Tokimune’s shield could defend against them without issue. There was no risk of it being broken. But knocking them away with a sword was difficult. Not impossible, no, but unless the weapon had a pretty sturdy blade, it might chip or bend.

“Rah!” Tokimune deflected a bullet, then immediately slashed a specter and used his shield to knock it back. A specter. There were specters too. The pair of legs blew up, and it looked like Tokimune might back away, but he held his ground. “Urgh...!” Without a moment of leeway, he managed to block the next bullet with his shield. And the next specter was already coming.

“Marc em Parc!” Mimorin unleashed a Magic Missile at that specter and made it blow up, but Tokimune might have been in danger there. “Marc em Parc! Marc em Parc!” More Magic Missiles intercepted and detonated a few more targets before they could get close.

“Keep it up! Do your best, yeah!” Anna-san was doing what she could to cheer Mimorin on.

“Bwuh!” Kikkawa failed to block a bullet with his shield and took it in the gut.

“You’re still good to go, right?!” Tokimune wasted no time encouraging him. It was just bluster, though.

“Damn right I am! Yay!”

If Kikkawa could reply that quickly, he was probably fine. Unlike a thief like Haruhiro, as a warrior, Kikkawa wore armor, so as long as the shot didn’t hit him in a particularly bad spot, no single bullet was likely to kill him outright.

“Heh!” Inui was crawling forward. Fast.

It was disturbing how fast.

“Finally, my time has come!”

As low to the ground as he was, the bullets didn’t even graze him. Was Inui planning to close in on the haunts with his creepy speed-crawling and finish them off?

“Augh!”

“Uh, hey, there’s shadows, remember?”

Inui was caught by a swarm of the flat monsters, turning into a mass of darkness in mere moments. How could one man fail so much? If no one was calling him out for it, it was only because they couldn’t afford to take the time right now. Honestly, Haruhiro was busy dodging the occasional bullet and slicing up the shadows coming from every angle. If he lowered his situational awareness, maybe he’d have some spare energy to work with. But could he do anything decisive with it? That was questionable. He couldn’t think of what he might do. Was there any way for the group to get out of this situation?

It’s looking pretty bad...isn’t it?

Tokimune was up on the front line, putting himself at risk. Kimura too. Could either of them see the full picture of what was going on? Despite his shortcomings, Kimura was one of the leaders of Orion, and Tokimune was, well, Tokimune. Even so, Haruhiro felt that he shouldn’t just blindly believe in them and let them make all the decisions. He was back here, paying attention to everyone. Even if he might be overstepping his bounds, shouldn’t he be the one to make a decision?

It didn’t look like they could progress. The enemies were too strong.

If they stayed where they were, they’d eventually reach their limit.

In that case, retreat was the only option. They couldn’t, mustn’t retreat, so they had tried to proceed anyway. But they still hadn’t managed to make headway and would only be whittled down if they stayed, so there was nothing to do but retreat.

If they could fall back to the inner courtyard, they would no longer be forced to face these waves of enemies in a narrow three-meter-by-three-meter space. But even if they escaped temporarily, then what? Well? What would they do? Did he have some idea? No, not really. In that case, he was just flailing around. But if he didn’t make some decision now, in a moment someone might die. Yeah. It was possible his comrades could lose their lives here. But if Haruhiro just called for a retreat out of nowhere, that could cause chaos too. They were all managing to hold out somehow. But the slightest change might make that balance collapse. Was Haruhiro about to create that slight change? He wasn’t trying to, obviously, but what if that was what he ended up doing?

Honestly, Haruhiro was thinking they had no choice but to retreat.

If his comrades were the only ones here, he’d probably have already ordered a withdrawal a long time ago.

But the Tokkis were here. Tokimune was here, and so was Kimura. Could he make that call without them? Tokimune and Kimura might have been waiting for the right moment too. When it came, wouldn’t one of them say something?

Though he thought they needed to retreat, he wasn’t certain. It wasn’t like he was thinking that if they could pull back then they might find some way to handle this. There didn’t seem to be anything they could do regardless, so Haruhiro believed they had no choice but to flee. He had a completely pessimistic assessment of the situation.

Thanks to that, Haruhiro couldn’t do anything. He was in no position to laugh at Inui. Inui was at least trying in some way to do something.

It was a good thing he didn’t end up having to regret it. While Haruhiro was wasting time, there could have been a tragedy he would never have been able to regret enough.

“Rahhhhhhhh!”

Far up ahead—uh, well, not that far, but still up ahead, purple lightning tore through the darkness.

That was someone’s voice. Human. Probably male. And familiar. In fact, Haruhiro knew who it was.

“Hahhhhhh!”

Were those his swords, trailing arcs of electricity behind them as they swung?

“Renji!” Ranta shouted. “He’s here! The bastard made it!”