Chapter 16
ALONG THE WAY, the korpokkur sisters displayed their prowess in battle. What less could one expect from Mira’s summons? Upheaval of the earth, flying pebbles—since they were spirits who governed the land, no monster could rival the korpokkur sisters on their home turf.
However much the fog obscured their vision, the korpokkurs were unaffected in the forest. They occasionally pointed into apparent nothingness, which was quickly followed by monsters’ dying cries. Even Zef, who had some confidence in his ability to sense incoming danger, knew he was hopelessly outclassed.
“You’re on another level, Mira.”
“Another level of cute!” Flicker had relapsed at some point along the way. Now she gazed needily not just at Mira, but at Uneko as well.
Emella stood dutifully between them. The sisters would warn the group if too many monsters were coming, so Emella could focus on defending against the party’s own predator. That was becoming a full-time job.
As they walked on, the number of ambushes ramped up dramatically. More monsters slipped past the sisters’ attacks, and thanks to the poor visibility, Mira and the others had their hands full. Yet the party continued without any major issues until they stepped into the depths of the forest at the heart of the stagnation.
It was a field about the size of a small village, overgrown with blue flowers. Strangely, the fog lifted to hang above the field—leaving the writhing crowd of monsters within quite visible.
Standing right at the boundary between the flower field and the forest, Emella pointed to the center of the meadow and piped up, “I-Isn’t that the stolen cargo?”
“Hrmm. I do see something over there.” Mira strained her eyes and spotted a multitude of sacks beyond the mass of monsters. The enemy was so focused on the sacks that they didn’t seem to notice the party.
“Forget that for now. I see two real pains in the ass…” Zef muttered as he beheld the horde. A pair of especially large beasts towered over the other fifty-plus monsters.
Noticing their striking features, Cyril and Mira quickly surmised that they were fiends.
“Those look like an Argent Wolf and Aureate Lion,” Cyril said.
“They do,” Mira agreed. “I’m surprised to see fiends in the monsters’ ranks.”
Their comments were as calm as if they were merely admiring wildlife, but their friends tensed in horror at the word “fiend.”
Generally, adventurers fought monsters. How those spawned was a total mystery. The only common features among monsters were that they attacked living things indiscriminately, and they were good at it.
Fiends, on the other hand, were native animals that had mutated for some reason. They were essentially creatures that had been exposed to magic and possessed enormous magical power. They generally didn’t stray far from where they manifested and often became the leaders of herds.
Still, fiends possessed unusually strong fighting abilities. Powerful wild animals were physically strengthened by magic mutation, and they could learn spells specific to their species. Even the weakest known fiends required at least five B-Rank adventurers to defeat.
While Emella and the others gazed grimly at the beasts, Cyril and Mira divided the work between them with simple hand gestures.
“Okay, you take care of the Aureate Lion, Mira.”
“Hrmm, right.”
Both fiends were foes worthy of multiple A-Rank adventurers’ attention. Cyril and Mira would leave the rest of the party to deal with the surrounding monsters. Emella, Flicker, and Zef didn’t object. They knew well how strong Mira and their leader were.
Still, they were frustrated to see the two decide which enemies to fight by playing rock-paper-scissors.
To defend the party from any sudden ambushes from the forest, the korpokkur sisters split up and kept watch. Thus began the battle to defeat the monsters, recover the lost cargo, and stop the ecological damage from spreading.
Mira and Cyril charged into the flower field. They vaulted over the crowd of monsters and dealt the first blows to their respective fiends. Soon, the sound of their strikes and the roars of the fiends echoed through the clearing.
Emella’s group and two of Mira’s summoned Holy Knights came right behind, ripping apart the monster horde.
None of the creatures were as big as the tyrant spikeback, but Cyril knew that three adventurers against fifty monsters was a hard task no matter how skilled his guild was. Mira had suggested summoning twenty or thirty of her closest friends to end it quickly, but Cyril responded, “Let’s let them get a little bit of experience.” In the end, they settled on Mira summoning a pair of Holy Knights to act as tanks.
Emella and the Holy Knights served as the front line while Flicker stayed a step behind and culled the monsters with magic. Zef acted as a floater next to Flicker.
With perfect cooperation and flashy magic, the three successfully attracted the monsters’ attention and kept them clear of Cyril and Mira.
Mira’s opening Immortal Arts blow knocked the Aureate Lion backward. Even though it was a powerful strike, the fiend quickly regained its footing and counterattacked.
That was no problem for Mira, who swiftly got to summoning. Between her and the Aureate Lion appeared a white tower shield, blocking the fiend’s claws with a fierce metallic shriek. Its job done, the partial summoning vanished, leaving Mira only a few meters from the lion. She faced it head-on.
The Aureate Lion’s body was massive, perhaps three times larger than a normal lion’s.
They’re scarier in the flesh…
Mira felt the fiend’s breath, and its roar reverberated through the air. Then the behemoth made a mad charge straight for her. Once again awash with the awe of facing dangerous beasts in reality, Mira fended off the assault with another partial summoning. Then, wasting no time, she lunged forward.
[Immortal Arts Heaven: Refined Thrust]
Multiple shock waves made direct contact with the lion, sending it flying back again. It smashed helplessly into a tower shield that appeared in its path.
Mira pressed the attack. A magic circle appeared above the collapsed lion’s head a second before two arms sprang forth and swung black swords down.
The unavoidable blow pierced the Aureate Lion, which perished.
“Hrmm. Works just fine on fiends too.” Mira smiled. Her partial summonings had proven their worth against a more powerful foe.
Mira’s innate curiosity and ingenuity—the two factors that had led her to become a Wise Man—spurred her to find any opportunity to test new techniques.
Her skirmish over, Mira turned around and spotted Cyril finishing off his Argent Wolf.
Ah, fantastic.
Mira saw only a single gleam of steel as Cyril deftly dodged the wolf’s fangs and swung his sword against its stomach. The wound went deep, but it didn’t seem like enough to be fatal. A few beats later, however, the fiend’s torso suddenly tore open, and it breathed its last.
The fatal blow was, in fact, from Cyril’s blade, although it seemed to come from elsewhere to the naked eye. Members of the warrior class could focus their fighting spirit in battle, manifesting various powers such as setting their weapon ablaze or shooting cutting beams of light from their sword.
In general, these were called “manifestations.” As a fighting technique, warriors could use one or more manifestations to create “Crafts”—basically, ultimate moves. The variety of Crafts was nearly endless, since they were combo skills. Warriors tended to use them as a calling card.
Mastered Crafts had effects almost like magic, and Cyril’s proficiency in this particular Craft supremely impressed Mira.
Their work done, Mira and Cyril hurried to back up Emella’s group. Unsurprisingly, it took under a minute to finish off the monster horde after they joined the fray.
“This many corpses could cause some nasty problems,” Cyril said. “Let’s get them dealt with quickly.”
“Gotcha,” Zef agreed. “I’ll lop off the useful bits.”
The blue flower field was dyed with blood and littered with monster remains. The party could leave a few corpses without causing a problem, but dozens were a different story. If they didn’t burn the cadavers, that could lead to a rise in undead monsters or other negative effects on the area.
In the meantime, Zef quickly and skillfully picked and sliced off valuable monster parts. On closer inspection, his work seemed to be another kind of Craft. Mira’s admiration grew as she realized that Crafts could be used for things other than battle.
Before long, Zef finished his grim harvest, and it was time to burn the monster remains. As the sky filled with smoke, a monster landed before the group: a great rhinoceros. Its thick leather armor could deflect even steel swords. When it caught sight of Mira’s party, it charged.
Since there was only a single great rhinoceros, Emella and the rest of the party quickly cut it down. Zef took a moment to dismember it as well.
Meanwhile, part of the sky turned black again, and monsters descended once more.
“This is annoying!” Emella groaned as she cut down the additions. Their numbers seemed inexhaustible, so her complaint was perfectly reasonable.
Once the gang finished cleaning up the monsters yet again, they realized that this was the distortion the korpokkur sisters had warned of. Time and time again, new monsters spawned as they killed the last. If they didn’t do anything about the distortion, this cycle would never end.
“Uneko! Etenoa! Start the ritual!” Mira called out.
“Leave it to us, Madam Chief!”
“Toootally. But it’s gonna take, like, a while. So watch our backs, ’kay?”
Once the sisters began their rite, the air changed instantly. The forest rustled, and light gathered.
Mira and the party watched the process, but monsters continued to pour in. The adventurers could do little but mow them down as they came. After several waves of monsters, the sky warped yet again, and something more terrifying appeared. A fiend—much larger than the two from before—fell a short distance away, let out a hideous roar, and charged.
“Ack, the cargo!” Emella shouted as the fiend kicked the scattered crates and bags around.
Then there was a great rumbling crash, and two Holy Knights held the beast at bay.
They swung their swords down on its head. Mira heard a thud, as if they’d hit it with blunt weapons, and the fiend dropped to the ground for a moment…but it did not stay down. In a fit of rage, it shook off the Holy Knights and stormed into their tower shields. The knights took the impact head-on.
Cyril closed the distance in the blink of an eye and swung his sword. A single flash of steel, and countless wounds opened across the beast’s neck. Blood sprayed as it fell to the ground.
“That was something else,” Mira mused.
“Ah, it was nothing compared to you, Mira.”
She and Cyril chatted with total composure. The rest of the gang watched in equal parts exasperation, envy, and lust. The latter was directed toward Mira, and only by one particular person.
***
After that, the party left protecting the korpokkur sisters to Mira’s Holy Knights. They spread out, defeating the monsters that appeared and cleaning up the corpses when they could.
After they’d burned yet another crowd of monsters, Mira noticed a sack laying among the blue flowers and picked it up, assuming it was part of the cargo.
“Hrmm, what’s this?”
The damaged bag was quite heavy. When she lifted it, its contents spilled out.
Lithographs? Hrmm… What would monsters want with these?
Mira didn’t know much about archaeology, but familiar symbols were inscribed on the stones. “Wait a second. Is this…?”
The hexagram with unique marks and shapes was the spitting image of the symbol known as the Demon’s Blessing—the presumed reason Soul Howl sought the Holy Grail of Heavenly Light.
Why are those markings on this stone? Mira reached out, curious.
As she touched the lithograph, vertigo assailed her. She felt as if she was floating and the ground had disappeared under her. Then the world swayed. She managed to hold herself up and not get sick, but when she looked ahead, she was speechless at the sight.
What used to be a small blue flower meadow surrounded by forest was now an endless field of dazzling blooms.
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