章節 153: The Blood of Kings
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Nothing. No one.
The place was completely empty. Monika's [Danger Sense] read only three lifesigns deep in the fortress.
/"See? That right there? That… is what we call a trap."/
But we had no choice but to spring it.
I blew open the door to the fortress' throne room with a kick and shouted "OI, ZORAH YA CRAZY BINT, DID YA BITE OFF ANYBODY'S DANGLIES YET!"
"You sure took your time getting here, fool."
/"Wow. You completely didn't worry about Zorah being r*ped at all, did you? As a woman this should be offensive to me, but you two completely hate each other and yet somehow you have such complete trust in each other's ability."/
Monika chewed on her thumbnails. /"Somehow it pisses me off."/
Inside, we found a large man with a broad grizzled chin and a faintly wolf-like demeanor lounging on the throne. He was wearing brass-colored plate armor and grinned rakishly as we rushed in.
Zorah was tied up like a caterpillar, with only her head exposed, hanging upside down from the ceiling. That was sensible. It robbed her of all leverage, and she could not pull bullshit with momentum to give herself super strength. Wiggling around would just send her swinging around in circles until dizzy.
She stared back with a dull, completely unimpressed stare.
"Are you from Belfast?!" screamed a pudgy man in ornate robes inside a cage hanging on the opposite side of the room to Zorah. "Save me! The General's gone mad! Treason! Murder! Heresy! HEEEEELP!"
The General in question said "What's this? Is this all that Belfast can send to me? Children? Adventurers still with milk on their lips instead of their proper soldiers?" He tilted his neck at a jaunty angle, and we could almost feel a physical sensation of his lusty leer. "Well the girls don't have as much meat on them yet, but I guess they'll do fine as tribu-."
"DOUBLE LIGHTNING BOLT!"
KRAK-THOOM.
"What the shit!" Elze screeched as she shielded her face. Linze eeked and shut her eyes. Yae… sprang into acton.
We were told about his antimagic field. But because we could see my spell travel across the room, we knew that it had a range. And of course, no magic shield ever stops ambient light.
While everyone was blinking light spots from their vision, she had already moved towards the other side of the room well within the antimagic zone, cut down the metal chains that bound Zorah, slung the noblewoman over her shoulders like a bag of rice, and ran all the way back to her starting position.
In less than three seconds.
But those were still three seconds of a continuous lightning barrage. A heat haze obscured the other end of the room for a few moments until it cleared.
And sitting there, still lounging carelessly on the throne, with a wolf-like smirk on his face, the General Bazoar was as expected completely unscathed.
The wall behind him was blackened by carbon scoring, the drapes were on fire.
"Huh," the General grunted. "You kids aren't as bad as I thought. All right then. I won't kill you. I'm still keeping the girls, but I'll only break your legs and then give you a fair chance of taking them back."
I bristled. What mercy from a rapist! No one sane would believe that. He was just toying with us.
He really didn't see us as any threat, huh. I did expect to be constantly underestimated, not the least because of my apparent youth. Someone dressed in such bright primary colors like I did wearing a mask was either a useless fop or like Landschecks or Rondeleros were not afraid of anything, least of all charging into a wall of pikes.
"… Could we just leave Zorah here instead?" I had to say it.
"Gyahahaha. No. You were dumb enough to want to take her back. Keep her."
I regret this already.
Okay then. Well our job was done, immediately I started walking backwards because exposing your back to the enemy was just dumb.
I heard a frightened squeak from Linze behind me.
"... The Demon Lord's behind us, isn't it?"
/"It's outside the door, yup."/
"Oh my lord, you could grate cheese on those things," Elze mumured about the Demon Lord's impressively well-defined ten-pack abs, which were the only things visible past the door.
The creature had to bend down to enter the hall. It had the face of a goat, the horns of a ram, the furred neck and shoulders of a lion, the arms and muscular chest of a man, the furry legs of a bear, the wings of a bat, and were those eagle talons for feet?
Shite, this thing looks like the Icon of Sin. Do I have enough rocket launchers for this?
Monika helpfully reminded us of Leene's information from earlier:
/"A Demon Lord is a creature of magic. I'm not sure if it's related to that Crystal Cricket, but probably not. That thing got stronger the more magic it was exposed to, but a Demon actively needs magic to live. To think. To grow.
/"Magic is useless against a Demon Lord because it absorbs it completely. It's not anti-magic, it's magic-immune. Only physical attacks would work, but the problem is that it is also a supernaturally powerful creature with its own ability to cast magic.
/"What a cheatery existence."/
So Elze's [ONE-PUNCH] wouldn't work.
/"No. It would absorb her magic and nullify her inherent self-protections against her own magic's side effects. Magical weapons would be ineffective for the same reason."/
The General still wasn't getting up. He sat there, slowly becoming bored with our inaction.
Yae and I shared a look. We looked down at Zorah on the ground like a worm, and then together at the nearby open window.
"Tell me you are not going to just toss me out that window," Zorah hissed dangerously.
I gestured, and Yae with nary a shred of hesitation chucked her out the window.
"OH YOU ABSOLUTE CUN-…!"
Leene would catch her. Probably.
"HAH!" the General laughed and slapped his palms down on the armrests of the throne. "Good enough. I will allow that." Then his eyes narrowed. "But if you think you're going to escape that easy, better think twice, children."
I clenched my fists, and lightning crackled up and down my arms. "... Why don't you just tell us all about your nefarious plot already."
"Whut," said Elze.
Without looking back I answered "Man like that, not leaving the scene of the crime? He wants to monologue. To brag about his great work to people that don't matter. It's no fun if no one understands the horror of not being able to stop it from happening."
He raised one shaggy eyebrow. "Huh. Weak. But smarter than you look."
"Who even are you, if you don't mind my asking. We're not really all up and up on important figures on the continent."
"Hmmf. As ignorant adventurers, I will forgive that. I am Guron Bazoar, Wolf of Regulus! Know my name and despair!"
"What do you get from trying to incite war between Belfast and Mismede?"
"Heeh? What do I get?" He spread his beefy arms wide. "Is it not obvious? WAR! WAR ITSELF IS THE ANSWER! A GLORIOUS WAR! _MY_ WAR! BEAUTIFUL WAR!
He threw his head back and quivered as if in orgiastic bliss. "THE WAR TO REPLACE THE OLD AND ROTTING REGULUS EMPIRE WITH THE NEW AND VIGOROUS BAZOAR EMPIRE!"
The fat noble trapped inside a hanging gibbet began openly sobbing.
"That is bugnuts insane, how are you even planning on accomplishing that? Even if you do manage to win the inevitable Regulan Civil War, there's still the rest of the continent ready to dogpile the weakened empire. Is what I should be saying right now, right?"
My fingers twitched. Light. Fire. Light. Fire. Wind. "You wouldn't be so confident of saying that even to no-name adventurers like that if you didn't have a way to fix the drastic difference in manpower."
"Heheheh. You know how a nation can't have all its people under arms, right? But what if you could exchange useless civilians for soldiers instead? You kill a demon, and it only goes back to its plane, harmed none! Eaten happily from the life power and magics of this plane! They don't fear death at all!
"I will take your Belfast, and offer it to a glorious sacrifice! Let Rodmere send its army, it will be eaten! All your men will be an offering, every one of them in exchange for a demon! Your children! Boys and girls, we don't need them! Throw them to the offering pile too! Ugly women, old women! More fodder for the army! All beastkin!
"We will have only a new beautiful generation of the BAZOARIAN PEOPLE. GWAHAHAHA!"
… This guy is total fruit loops. What the hell.
/"Player, an extraplanar summon can only exist in this plane as long as magic power is supplied to it from its summoner. If the Demon Lord is gone, so will the Army that is bound to it. Sacrifices can only allow them to remain for so long./"
The General grinned fiercely. "Tell this to your pathetic King. Declare war. Fight for his life. Struggle mightily, entertain me! If he is too much of a coward to battle Regulus with men, I will drown his pitiful kingdom with under a tide of demons and hang him by his own intestines."
Then he relaxed back on his chair. "Women, surrender. Kneel down. And I won't have my demons breed you. At least you will be only broken by my soldiers. You - boy - beg for your life and you will be able to flee back to your pitiful king to deliver this message unharmed. If not… well, you only need your mouth to say the message, legs to get there.
"Arms, nose, your manhood… you won't need them."
"You… you're evil!" Elze hissed. "You won't get away with this!"
"It may cost us our lives but we will stop you!" Linze spoke with a heart full of righteousness.
I grinned back. "Then aren't you, oh future Emperor, the weak point of this whole scheme?"
Then I switched my stance to point both palms out front and back, and Monika and I shouted at the same time "[Fire] [Light] [Boom Tube] - Oh Light from the Heavens, in infinite power, shine! [SOLAR LASER!]"
The girls dived to a crouch and closed their eyes with their arms over their faces in a defensive fetal position.
Portals opened in front of my palms. They connected to a pair of smaller Boom Tubes in the upper atmosphere that accumulated photons continually moving between two points, and exited into searing heat of the purest heat of the sun's anti-vampiric holy symbolic potency.
The noble up on the hanging cage squealed like a pig as the ambient heat and light surged to flesh-roasting levels. It didn't take extra effort to mentally project an [Air Shield] around him.
The Demon Lord's chest was struck by the 20cm laser and roared in pain. The fur on its forearms as it instinctively tried to protect itself was set aflame. Then, strangely enough, the blindingly white disk on its body was being... pushed away?
Ah, magic shield. Of course. The Demon Lord is a spellcaster too.
General Bazoar was nowhere to be seen, the shield that suddenly sprang up in front of him coruscated with blinding light as if staring directly at the sun.
Stones crackled and fizzled. The air hissed with steam. I had to pump new summoned [Wind] to keep everyone around me from suffocating or being cooked.
The girls slowly got back up to their feet and prepared to fight.
"So you have chosen death…" General Bazoar's deep and scratchy voice said through the fog of superheated air. He stood up to his full height. The silhouette of his brass armor and long red cloak flapped in an unseen wind. Shite, I thought there might be a loophole with photons being allowed through because of course how else are you going to see, but apparently even natural light counted as a magic attack.
If you think about it, looking outside of its anti-magic absorption property, [Solar Laser] is pretty much just a heat ray, so any magic shield would do.
He roared: "Pathetic. Ignorant fools, you don't know your place! If you don't want to accept my mercy to leave, then why not just stay foreverrr!"
He waved forward and an unseen force rammed into us.
Elze and Linze let out a gasp, and fell down instantly unconscious.
Yae grunted, but after a small puzzled shiver, remained standing.
I felt myself suddenly blank out, cold and drained, as all my magic power was instantly drained out of me - and then almost immediately refilled.
Antimagic wave? Wait, what? He can do that?!
Monika's face abruptly appeared over my vision /"Player I need to shut down don't freak ou-"/
There was a cracking sound.
And then I knew only darkness.
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Bluepencil
Bluepencil I'll be updating about twice a week until we get to the end of Book 2.
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