Wandering Mercenary in an Open World
chapter-57

Even after moving nonstop for a long time, the passage engulfed by darkness showed no sign of ending. To make matters worse, the torch that had burned up all the pine resin was fading away. Kyle sighed. Damn it.

Igor offered to use his divine power to create a light source, but the party dissuaded him. It was not a good choice for him, a priest, to recklessly expend his power in a situation where they didn’t know what kind of fight awaited them.

Fortunately, the party had Ego Sword, who had the ability to make his body glow brightly, and thanks to him, they had no big problem moving forward.

Ruin, who was treated like a torch by Zolji, grumbled discontentedly.

Something’s weird.

The first one to feel a sense of incongruity in the ongoing march was Ruon.

He didn’t know what the structure of the underground was, but considering the size of the temple that was exposed on the surface, the endless passage was too long.

He quickly came up with a few assumptions as questions tickled his mind.

First, the place he thought was simply the temple’s underground was actually as large as the entire area.

Second, this was a damn magic. For example, a kind of magic that makes you lose your sense of direction or makes you circle around the same place.

Third, both.

He didn’t know if the second assumption was valid considering Kyle’s shield that followed him, but Ruon didn’t think so.

Paradox Shield, Spell Breaker… The shield that had such plausible names had amazing abilities, but it wouldn’t be able to block all magic.

If it was such a level of item, the master of the tower who recognized the power of the shield or Garan wouldn’t have been so relaxed.

Therefore, Ruon stopped his brisk steps abruptly. Kyle, who bumped his face into his broad back, pinched his nose and muttered.

“Ouch! What, what is it?”

Ruon raised his arm to show the back of his hand, signaling him to be quiet. He closed his eyes.

Soon, he raised his concentration, and his senses, which sprang up from within him, began to tear through the formless darkness.

The scent, movement, sound, and appearance of the darkness.

Ruon, who schematized sentences that were nothing but metaphors and could not be established, felt a slight distortion in them. A sinister gaze that hid in the dark and gripped this space.

Ruon opened his eyes and stabbed his sword into the ground, grabbing the bow from his back. He pushed his divine power into his fingertips, and at the same time, he pulled his arm back and finished loading in an instant. He muttered as he aimed at the darkness that looked like a bottomless pit.

“I found you.”

The moment his fingers holding the transparent bowstring opened, a flash of light flashed, and the arrow of light flew across the darkness and hit the wall.

“Huh? What is it?”

Strabo stretched out his arm toward the direction where the arrow flew, his eyes wide open. He was not surprised by Ruon’s sudden action.

“It swallowed the arrow, didn’t it?”

A ripple spread beyond the faint afterimage of the light. The space that was unnaturally rippling seemed to be screaming.

Igor frowned.

“This place was not normal…”

He swallowed his words and put on his gloves and recited a prayer.

“Merciful Mother! Grant your power to your weak lamb.”

Boom-

The bunch of light that sprang from Igor’s body plunged into the ripple that was shaking uneasily.

Soon, the grains of light that spread like paint began to blink white and explode, and a crack appeared between the ripples with a clack.

Then, the darkness began to be sucked into the crack. The crack widened as it swallowed the darkness, and at some point, it crossed the threshold and collapsed with a loud noise.

Beyond the scenery that shattered like glass and crumbled like sand, a gloomy voice was heard.

“I can’t believe you found the core of the barrier… There was no mage among you, I knew that. You have an incomprehensible ability.”

The party, who was adapting to the situation where the surroundings that they thought were passages turned into a vast open space in an instant, turned their heads toward the direction where the sound came from.

Someone was standing in the center of the open space.

Kyle shouted at the being who gave off a strange feeling even without any movement.

“Are you Belducius? You’re smaller than I thought.”

At his words, a snickering laughter came from inside the hood that covered his face.

He thought he was ignoring him, and Kyle flared up and drew his Arming Sword.

“Shut up. You’re a nasty bastard.”

Did his curse work? The laughter gradually subsided. Soon, the opponent regained his gloomy voice and answered slowly.

“Kyle, the woodcutter with a shield full of anger. I salute your rudeness and ignorance.”

“…You know me?”

Kyle flinched at the word woodcutter. The guy who seemed to find his reaction amusing continued his words.

“I know. Not just you.”

The sinister finger that came out of the black hood pointed at the party one by one.

“The slave of the goddess, the half-baked druid, and…”

The finger stopped abruptly. He couldn’t see the giant who should have been the last.

He sensed something was wrong and tried to back away, but at that moment, a red sword flew in from outside his sight.

The severed head rolled on the ground, leaving no time for anyone to react. The headless body flailed its arms towards the empty space where its face used to be, then collapsed with a thud.

Ruon stepped lightly on the back of the corpse and asked coldly.

“And then what?”

Surprisingly, he got an answer.

“Having experienced it myself, it was truly a matter of seconds. It was terrifying…”

The head that was licking its lips was engulfed by darkness. After that, the darkness lifted and the same figure stood tall in its place, as if it had gone back to the moment before its neck was cut.

Ruon, who was still looking down at the body under his feet, tilted his head.

He said.

“You were clearly dead, weren’t you?”

The moment the other’s neck fell, something surged inside him. It was undoubtedly experience points, albeit very little.

“Yes, I died. One of many lives.”

The one who uttered those ominous words slowly raised his arm.

Then, the ground of the empty lot began to tremble as if there was an earthquake.

Was it a wide-area magic?

Ruon straightened his sword and quickly adjusted his posture. But contrary to his expectation, the reason for the shaking ground was not magic.

A rotten arm pierced through the hard ground. The blue glow of the monster’s eyes that lifted its buried body shone menacingly.

Kee-eh-eh-eh!

“Shit! How many of these things are there?”

“Ruon! Are you there? Damn it!”

“Both of you, don’t stray away from me.”

As if echoing the noisy voices of his companions, countless corpses sprang up from the wide ground.

Ruon’s brow furrowed as he and his companions were naturally separated by the sudden appearance of hundreds of undead.

This is bullshit.

Then, a gloomy voice came from beyond the wriggling corpses.

“In the long history, this place was a great altar where the royal sacrifice was performed. ‘We’, who shed our mortal shells and were buried in the cold ground, were reborn as one self in the grace of the king over a long time…”

At that moment, hundreds of corpses moved their mouths at once.

“We are his army.”

Kra-ah-ah-ah!

With a horrible scream, they rushed in like a wave.

Ruon did not run away. He had nowhere to run, but even if he could, he wouldn’t.

Why would he, when he had all the experience points gathered in one place?

He faced the living corpses that surrounded him from all sides and swung his sword without hesitation. A red afterimage was engraved in the air along its trajectory, like a scar.

Ruon, who severed three heads from their bodies at once, did not stop and twisted his waist with his right foot as the axis.

The sword that slashed diagonally swept the ground with a tremendous force and sprang up again.

Kra-ek!

The huge movement that was forcibly connected by his overwhelming physical ability drew a huge arc and cut the body of the undead that approached him in half.

The blackened innards that had lost their function long ago scattered in the air. Before they fell to the ground, a red light shot out from the front. At the same time, the corpses whose heads were pierced let out an incomprehensible scream.

Against the unpleasant scream, Ruon roared loudly and swung his handle with both hands. The blade that came out of the head split the chest of the large corpse that was raising its arm next to him.

That was just the beginning.

Every time Ruon swung his sword without mercy, at least two or more than seven corpses were torn apart.

The artificial gap created by his explosive momentum was filled with corpses that crawled in without getting tired, but that was all.

None of them could deliver a proper hit to Ruon, and they were literally ripped apart in an instant.

Kyle, who was watching the unbelievable scene from afar, frowned.

He swung his Avan Sword with his right hand and cut off the arm of the undead that grabbed his ankle. He stomped on the forehead of the suffering corpse and burst it.

Then, Igor’s voice came.

“Kyle! Strabo! When all eyes are on Ruon, we have to take down the undead’s main body!”

As he said, more than 80% of the undead in the lot were rushing towards Ruon. As if they would be in big trouble if they couldn’t catch him.

Of course, considering Ruon’s amazing strength, it seemed no problem to sweep them all away, but there was another problem.

In the meantime, new undead were crawling out of the ground.

Igor shouted again.

“They are the corpses that were sacrificed! We don’t know how many more will pop up.”

Strabo, who had turned his hand into a bear’s paw and smashed the corpse’s leg, retorted.

“That main body, you mean the one who got his neck cut by Ruon?”

Igor nodded vigorously.

“That’s the most reasonable thing to do, given the circumstances!”

“Didn’t that kid come back to life earlier?”

“That was because of the divine power…”

Igor stopped in mid-sentence and clamped his mouth shut. Then he shouted.

“We don’t have time to explain everything!”

As he said that, Kyle came close to his side. He spoke in a calm voice.

“That kid is hiding over there.”

In the direction that the Arming Sword pointed, there was a figure hiding among a horde of about thirty undead.

It was the same one who had greeted them at the empty lot.

Kyle, who had stabbed his sword into the body of a charging corpse, quickly added.

“Let’s go now. Even if it’s Leon, he can’t fight forever.”

They had no more time to spare for conversation, so the three of them slammed the ground at the same time.

Strabo, who was leading the way, took out a few branches from his bosom and threw them forward.

At the same time, green veins popped out on his face, and the flying branches swelled up and smashed and entangled the bodies of the undead blocking the way.

The one who was hiding inside the corpses felt the ominous momentum and stretched out his twisted arm toward the approaching party.

Kyle, who had passed by the dwarf who was bleeding from his nose and falling back, stepped forward with his shield tightly drawn to his body.

Kwang-!

He staggered from the recoil of being hit by an invisible spell, but he did not fall down. He quickly regained his balance and slammed the ground again.

It was the moment when his hard work of falling down thousands of times in the duel with Leon paid off.

He swung his Arming Sword roughly and cut off the neck of the corpse blocking the way. He shouted.

“Igor!”

As if responding to his cry, a light burst out from behind and swept the front without mercy.

“Kyaak!”

The one who was hit by the light that rushed in like a raging fire writhed as if he had been struck by lightning. As he was still trying to do something, Igor walked up to him with a dry voice.

“There is no prayer for you. You are a demon.”

At the same time, the light exploded.