Ch.63Midterm Exam – 6
by fnovelpia
“You think you can just keep running away!”
The situation began to take a strange turn.
As I dodged the blood flying over my head, the droplets that hit the ground scattered into dark red mist. The floor visibly corroded where it made contact with the mist. I could clearly see black smoke rising from it.
Everything around was covered in dark red blood and melted traces. It was all because of that creature’s indiscriminate attacks. I had managed to avoid them all so far, but the moment I got hit even once, it wouldn’t end well for me.
That said, the current situation wasn’t entirely unfavorable for me. His speed and strength had increased dramatically, but I could still dodge his attacks. I just needed to heighten my concentration much more.
‘Regular attacks won’t work, huh.’
The real problem was that I had no means to kill him without destroying the dungeon in the process.
I glanced at the crater at my feet, easily over 10 meters deep. It was the mark left from when I had slammed him into the ground with Scale Drop. That was the limit. Any attack more powerful than that would collapse the space itself.
I had considered escaping with teleportation magic, but for some reason, the coordinates weren’t being properly set. In other words, if this place collapsed, I would inevitably die.
I refused to die such a pointless death.
Not knowing the cause of the coordinate disruption, I had no desire to gamble on assumptions like “If I kill this bastard, the disruption will be fixed!”
“Where are you looking!”
He closed the distance in an instant. I immediately launched a counterattack.
I sliced off his left arm that was closest to me and twisted my waist to avoid his right arm. A distinct dark red trajectory brushed right past my face.
I released mana to momentarily stun the tentacle-like things flying at me from all directions, then took that opportunity to cut them to pieces. Finally, I infused mana into Eternity and thrust it into his chest.
The Extreme Distortion that hit his chest directly ground his thorax to pieces. Dark red blood droplets splattered everywhere.
I put up a barrier to block the blood droplets flying toward me. Even a single drop of his blood could be used against me. I had almost lost my entire left leg because of that.
“Can’t you understand that your efforts are futile!”
His chest pushed back my Eternity. His body, which had been continuously regenerating even as it was being ground away by Extreme Distortion, had finally outpaced the rate at which it was being destroyed.
It was an absurdly powerful regenerative ability. I kicked off the ground and retreated. Instead of immediately pursuing me, he stood in place, laughing maniacally, intoxicated by his own power.
I couldn’t understand why he had abandoned his dignified demeanor and was acting like this.
“Mira Crate? Do you have a moment?”
Professor Jeyna’s voice came through the brooch-shaped magical tool that had been distributed before entering. Startled for a moment, I drove a pillar of mana into the Vampire Lord’s body to immobilize him and quickly responded.
“Yes, Professor. What is it?”
“I’ve been detecting unusually powerful forces coming from the dungeon you entered. Can you tell me what you’re doing in there? I was going to contact you when things calmed down to avoid interfering with your battle, but then I thought you’d probably be fine, so I called now.”
Given my past behavior, I couldn’t argue with her confidence in me. I racked my brain. What kind of monster was supposed to be in this dungeon again?
After considering, I spoke.
“I encountered an enhanced form of a High Troll and was testing my swordsmanship a bit. It’s not often I get to face an opponent with such strong regenerative abilities.”
An enhanced form of a High Troll, which was already an enhanced form of a Troll. It sounded funny, but such monsters actually existed.
High Trolls were monsters with particularly high intelligence that had joined the Demon King’s army, and when given demonic energy, their physical abilities increased dramatically.
When I answered, I heard a deep sigh.
“Of course you’d go after the one I specifically put in there with instructions not to engage… You’re really something…”
So it was something I wasn’t supposed to fight.
“Anyway, I understand. Be careful not to get hurt, just in case.”
“Understood. Thank you.”
The communication ended with that perfunctory exchange. It seemed that even with monitoring magical tools scattered around, they couldn’t visually confirm what was happening this deep inside.
That was fortunate for both me and Professor Jeyna herself. If she had seen the current situation, she would have come to rescue me even at the risk of losing her position.
Honestly, if I was outmatched in firepower, adding one professor wouldn’t make much difference.
“You can’t stop me with such crude techniques!”
With perfect timing, he broke free from the mana pillar.
I gripped Eternity again. This would take longer, but I had no choice. The Demon King still hadn’t shown up for whatever reason, and I couldn’t just keep fighting here forever.
First, I needed to try various attacks, and if nothing worked, I’d have to consider whether or not to bring out that—
‘…?’
For a moment, I felt like one corner of his mouth had turned up slightly.
As soon as I noticed this, another change began to occur in the Vampire Lord’s body. The blood droplets, which until now had merely been dark red, turned completely black.
At the same time, black blood vessels bulged grotesquely all over his skin. His eyes were no exception. The whites were filled with an unsettling number of black capillaries.
It was a very disturbing sight.
While my mind was registering the strangeness, my body was already countering his attack. As Eternity moved to block the attack, his arm bent at a sharp angle.
‘What?!’
Ignoring Eternity, which had been bent at an impossible angle, he aimed for my blind spot. I twisted my arm at maximum speed, somehow managing to bring Eternity’s side edge to that spot in time.
—CRACK!
Eternity collided with his arm and was sent flying by the tremendous force.
My wrist, which had been holding it, twisted along with it. With a horrible sound of bones twisting, my wrist bent at an angle impossible through natural rotation. My wrist had spun around twice before returning to its original position.
Before my broken wrist could go limp, my entire right arm was torn off from the shoulder. A black mass of blood had erupted from the floor, pierced through my right arm, and shot upward.
The lower part of my vision turned bright red as pain radiated from where my arm had been torn off, but it was a familiar sensation, so I ignored it and focused on finding a way to respond.
First, I needed to grip Eternity with my left hand—
‘Damn. Too late.’
Seeing his bloodshot face right in front of me, I instinctively knew I was too late. I tried to thrust Eternity as quickly as possible, but his cold fangs sinking into the right side of my neck were faster.
—CRUNCH!
With a bite force that seemed intent on tearing off flesh rather than just drinking blood, a chunk of flesh from my right shoulder was ripped away. After swallowing the torn flesh, the Vampire Lord bit into my neck again.
I began to feel something being drained from me. In a final desperate move, I thrust Eternity, but it only managed to lodge in his side.
My vision turned white. Paradoxically, as my vision whitened, the excruciating pain from my severed right arm and torn neck began to fade.
The sensation in my extremities gradually disappeared.
After finishing his bloodsucking to the very last drop, Rakul roughly tossed aside the corpse. The pale body, drained of all blood, rolled across the floor.
With the battle over, his sanity returned. Rakul wiped his blood-soaked mouth with his sleeve and looked down at his own body.
He saw his body covered in bulging black blood vessels, in stark contrast to the overflowing power that made him feel almost omnipotent.
‘…Strange.’
As his excitement and elation subsided, his first thought was that something was wrong. No matter how excited he had become in battle, he had never lost control of himself like that before.
The black blood vessels bulging on his skin were also strange. The energy he had received from the Demon King was definitely red, but the blood vessels covering Rakul’s entire body now were all black.
‘Was the power I received from the Demon King this strong…?’
No, he needed to ask an even more fundamental question.
‘Is this truly the power bestowed upon me by the Demon King?’
Even when he first received it, he had thought it was an astonishing level of power, but it wasn’t this strong.
After taking time to examine his body more carefully, Rakul came to a conclusion. This was clearly not the power he had received from the Demon King.
It was something much deeper and broader. Something so awe-inspiring that he felt reverence for the fact that such energy even existed.
To make an analogy, it was like an ignorant fool who had only known lakes suddenly seeing the ocean for the first time. The gap between the power he had received from the Demon King and the power now in his body was that vast.
‘How blasphemous.’
Rakul chastised himself for his blasphemous thoughts, but once the idea had surfaced, it wouldn’t easily dissipate. In fact, the more he tried to suppress it, the more it filled his mind.
The thought that with this power, he might be able to defeat even the Demon King.
If that were possible, the vampire clan could rule the entire demon realm, and Rakul himself could ascend to the position of Demon King. His heart began to pound again at the thought.
“…Still alive?”
The fantasy was brief. Rakul raised his head as he detected the faint smell of life. It was coming from the corpse he had just drained of blood and discarded.
This human was full of surprises. He had definitely drained enough blood to fill an average adult male, yet somehow the human was still alive.
“Then I’ll tear out your throat. Let’s see if you can survive that.”
Rakul was walking over with the intention of severing the head completely when he stopped in his tracks. Then, abandoning all dignity, his jaw dropped open.
The torn-off right arm was beginning to reconstitute itself.
Soon after, he sensed a blood scent incomparably greater than before. It meant blood was rapidly filling that body. Color began to return to the previously pale skin.
“…How?”
Rakul muttered involuntarily.
The only healing methods available to humans were the white light that only clerics could use and the strange red liquid called potions. That had been the truth for hundreds of years.
“Really. I was trying not to bring this out because it reminds me of the old days.”
But that truth was being denied right before his eyes.
“You could have at least told me there was a phase 3, not just phase 2. I can let most things slide, but… not this.”
The human, whose arm had somehow fully recovered, slowly stood up while uttering words Rakul couldn’t understand. In his left hand was a spear made of light that hadn’t been there before.
As the human’s body recovered, the light bursting from the spear grew stronger. Rakul unconsciously covered his face.
‘…The sun?’
And he saw his skin smoking and burning.
The sun, the natural enemy of all vampires and something even Rakul the Lord couldn’t overcome, the source of all things in the world, was blazing in that spear. Rakul hesitated and took a step back from that searing light.
“You! What are you? How can someone like you wield the sun?!”
Rakul shouted in a rage, feeling both the shame of retreating and a strangely rising exhilaration at the realization that the battle was about to resume.
“You don’t need to know. Why would I explain that to you? I’m not an idiot.”
The human dismissed him simply and took a javelin stance. I can’t dodge this. Rakul instinctively realized this fact. A grinding sound came from between his clenched teeth.
It couldn’t be. To admit defeat to a mere human? Him, a Vampire Lord? Impossible. It must not happen.
“Go ahead and try! I don’t need your head! I’ll tear your entire body to shreds!”
Rakul approached with explosive speed. In his eyes was nothing but hatred for Mira Crate. His mind was filled with inexplicable anger and exhilaration.
The javelin, pulled far back, was released with force. A mass of light flew toward Rakul.
Rakul summoned all the blood he could muster with his full power and spread a massive barrier. A wall of unprecedented thickness and strength appeared before him, unlike anything he had seen in his hundreds of years of life.
But the wall of blood melted away like dry straw in a wildfire, not even touching the light spear.
“AAAAARGH!”
The spear of light struck Rakul’s shoulder directly. The impact site immediately began to burn, and not only the Demon King’s energy but also the black energy covering his body began to dissipate completely.
Although the light spear pierced through his shoulder and disappeared into the floor below, melting it away, his body continued to burn.
‘That light… yes… I’ve read about it…’
The remaining part of Rakul’s head that hadn’t yet disintegrated had a final thought. It came to him even before the indignation of being destroyed as a Vampire Lord.
‘Similar to… the holy… sword… that destroyed… our… ancestor…’
Rakul couldn’t complete his thought.
Because even that last bit of ash dissolved and disappeared into the light.
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