episode_0054
by fnovelpia
The old man who approached us had his back bent like a bow and his face was almost touching the ground.
No, the long beard, which could be said to be part of the face, touched the ground, so it would be no exaggeration to say that the face had already touched the ground.
Looking at his beard and his elegant appearance, like that of an old wizard, he might be the chief of this village.
“I am not a lady.”
First, I corrected myself by calling her a young lady and asked the old man what had happened in the village.
The old man seemed to be more surprised by the fact that I was a man than by any incident that occurred in the village.
The sight of him shivering and breaking into a cold sweat made him look like he had encountered a bear while hiking.
“… This was rude. Baby――Do you know that there is a land around here where the undead appear?”
“I know.”
In addition to being created by warlocks, undead also occur naturally in lands with a strong energy of death.
Representative places include battlefields and cemeteries where many corpses are buried.
Usually, in such places, a priest holds a separate ceremony to purify the dead energy and send the soul of the deceased to the underworld.
The problem is when so many people die that the area of land on which rituals must be performed is too large.
Because manpower is limited and the cost of performing the rituals is so great, this measure is not taken everywhere.
Before the goddess abandoned humanity, she could purify a large area of land with a single ritual, but now such a thing is impossible.
Since I am not a priest of the goddess, I do not know the details, but it is said that it costs about 10 gold coins to purify about 5 pyeong of land.
Of course, this is only the cost of cleansing the fraud in the land.
It was only a stopgap measure because if the dead who stayed in that land were not returned to the underworld, fraud would occur again someday.
“I heard that there was a big war around here a long time ago. What was the name of the plain where the war took place… .”
“Pilton Plain. Undead occur periodically in that land.”
Fortunately, thanks to the passage of time, the level of the undead was not that high, and most of them committed suicide while fighting among themselves.
It is said that sometimes the surviving undead came down to this village, but by then they were already completely devastated, so they were able to defeat the villagers.
Adventurers often visited this village because magic stones could be obtained from the corpses of the undead.
“But since a few weeks ago, there has been a series of incidents where adventurers who visited the plains have not been able to return.”
At first I thought it was an accident.
Even though the monsters in the plains were weak, losing one’s life in an unexpected accident could happen at any time.
However, if such accidental accidents occurred several times in succession, I could not help but be suspicious.
“I had a feeling that something must have happened, so I asked the Adventurer’s Guild for a search party. But not all of them came back.”
Only then did the Adventurer’s Guild, recognizing the seriousness of the situation, send a B-class adventurer party.
They came back with great results, as if they had won the B grade by accident… .
“Only one person returned. Even they were almost dead. Because the cuts were so severe that even the bones were visible.”
“… Severe write-down?”
It was a little difficult to understand.
It was common for the undead to bring out weapons they had used in life, but since such weapons were essentially antiques, their performance was poor.
If he were to become a B-class adventurer, he would have been equipped with at least some decent armor.
It may be a profession that has no connection to heavy armor, such as a wizard or a priest, but that is also unnatural.
The viability of the rear ranks cannot be said to be good even with empty words.
If the party had reached a point where it was destroyed, they would not have been able to escape and would have died on the spot.
“Was it a warrior who ran away?”
The old man nodded.
The fact that the warrior who first faced the enemy ran away may be because the moment he first encountered the enemy, he realized that he was not the enemy and ran away.
As a result, the front line collapsed and party members died one after another.
Is that roughly what it feels like?
When I conveyed that thought, the old man also nodded, saying that he had a warrior’s wound on his back.
“When I looked at the path the warrior walked along the blood trail, I saw a huge amount of blood soaking the ground, as if a bucket filled with blood had been sprinkled. It was nothing short of a miracle that he arrived here.”
“… Did you have any last words?”
There was “. As the villagers gathered, they uttered just one word in their dying voices. It’s called a ‘demon sword’.”
“… … .”
Demon sword.
Devil’s sword.
My heart started pounding at the name of a rare being that had only appeared a few times in the original work.
The fact that there had been no such event in this area further spurred the pounding of my heart.
Since I’m not a swordsman, getting a magic sword wouldn’t have been particularly useful, but I was very interested in the being holding the magic sword.
“Hey, Sarah. Should I go see you soon?”
When she asked that question while turning her head to the side, Sarah let out a small sigh with an expression that said it was the beginning again.
“What?”
“Demon Swordsman.”
“Felt says strange things sometimes… .”
He spoke firmly, not caring at all even when people looked at him for shame.
As soon as I turned my horse around and headed towards Pilton Plain, an old man and several young men came running from behind and blocked the road.
“Didn’t you hear what I just said? Is there something dangerous in the plains?”
“Didn’t the old man hear my confident declaration? Aren’t you going to meet something dangerous?”
The old man’s brow begins to furrow.
At the same time, people around them also showed bad feelings by sighing or crossing their arms.
The village chief’s eyes were looking at something pitiful, and as I continued to look at those eyes, it seemed as if he was scolding me, calling me a child who knew nothing.
“It’s not that I don’t understand your heart, but don’t mistake courage and fortitude. Every man has times like that――.”
As expected, the old man began to admonish the young man.
I feel an unpleasant sense of déjà vu.
It was similar to the feeling of leaving the air-conditioned classroom and gathering in the playground to listen to the principal’s sermon under the scorching sun.
When the old man started telling stories about his childhood, I couldn’t hold back any longer and said,
“I couldn’t say it because I didn’t have a chance to say it, but I’m level 51.”
“What?”
“This is not my ministry.”
With the sound of a finger snapping, a green gap opens in the empty space, and the dinosaur, the loser of the forest and representative of the Cretaceous period, appears.
Two massive legs that seem to claim to stand alone in this world, and both extremely short arms compared to them.
The sharp head imbued with unknown wildness, once thought to be the head of a dragon, was emitting an eerie glow.
The name of the dinosaur that is twice its actual size and exudes an overwhelming intimidation that is difficult to find an opponent even in this fantasy world is Tyrannosaurus.
AKA T-Rex.
As the T. rex took a deep breath and let out a thunderous roar, the villagers instantly froze as if they had been hit by a petrification spell.
“… … .”
While everyone rolled their eyes and fainted, only the village chief remained sane.
Is he trying to show his pride as a former adventurer?
Let’s wait and see what they say next… .
“I will take the bath water and wait for you! Let’s go! Hero!!”
The old man shouted proudly.
“… Star.”
By the way, you are a hero.
These were truly ominous words, considering the last years of the only warrior in this land.
*****
Death literally means the energy of death.
In this world, when a person dies with a grudge, he or she becomes a vengeful spirit and wanders the nine heavens. The negative energy that this vengeful spirit scatters is fraud.
Because most of those brought to the battlefield were forcibly conscripted, the battlefield is considered one of the places with the highest morale.
“The land where fraud resides has a bad smell unique to fraud. Isn’t it similar to what happened at the Skeleton Soldier’s Tower back then?”
Sarah sniffed around and nodded with a displeased look on her face.
“It smells like a rotting corpse… .”
“Yes. But actually, it’s a little funny.”
A vengeful spirit without a body and the scent of a wife’s body is the smell of a rotting corpse.
It’s a story that feels somewhat contradictory.
So much time had passed in Pilton Plain that morale was so weak that even the scent of decaying corpses could not be known unless one smelled them carefully.
What was the war that took place here?
Although I was somewhat interested in the game settings, I didn’t bother to memorize the settings for this useless land.
All I knew was that it was a war that took place at least hundreds of years ago.
When I suddenly looked down, what caught my eye was cracked ground without a single blade of grass, as if there was a drought.
Fraud is a concept that is completely opposite to life.
A land where fraud has resided for a long time becomes a barren land where life will never sprout again unless special measures are taken.
Because of this, in the past, the land where fraud resided was urgently purified, but now that the goddess has disappeared and costs have increased, this is not necessarily the case.
For your information, if it were me, I could purify this land.
The world tree, Yggdrasil, was a being that governed life, so it could not only revive lands that had died due to fraud, but also deal with ghosts.
However, it is not a gentle method of achieving Buddhahood like the magic of the Goddess Church, but a method of killing with life force.
In terms of humanity, the Goddess Church was clearly superior.
It is only natural that the goddess who loved humanity in the first place improved magic to be human-friendly.
While I was thinking about such useless things, we got into quite a deep place.
A new scent reached my nose.
The smell of blood and decay, a bit vivid and not like fraud, was so bad that I furrowed my eyebrows reflexively, and it came with the wind.
“Undead.”
Zombies of swordsmen, priests, and wizards holding shields wandered around with unnatural movements, as if their nerves were twisted.
Judging by their clothing and the level of equipment, they were probably the prosecutor’s colleagues who had run away to the village.
The prosecutor said he was carrying a great sword, so I could roughly guess what kind of party they were.
“… If these guys are here, does that mean the guy who uses the magic sword is also nearby?”
“Well? Maybe I missed it because I missed it. Shall I handle it?”
“No, I will do it.”
When Sarah stepped forward and made a gesture, the night lark hiding in her arms flew quickly and pierced the zombies’ heads in an instant.
Sera’s level has also risen significantly.
Even zombies who had lost their intelligence could be blown away with just a wave of their hand.
“Tree (木) Avalokitesvara Bodhisattva.”
I prayed briefly towards the corpse with its head blown off.
In fact, my prayers will not guarantee that their souls caught on this earth will attain Buddhahood, but it will at least provide some consolation.
“Be born as my colleague in the next life.”
I raised my head again and moved forward.
I kept walking like that, and when I realized that the number of corpses was growing closer… .
“Felt… .”
I stopped at Serah’s small muttering and noticed a skeleton in the distance holding an ominous sword that glowed an eerie purple color.
The skeleton’s bones were stained black as if they had been hit by fire magic.
The skeleton seemed to not have found us yet, so it wandered around looking for its next prey.
“Were you black during your lifetime? Are your bones black?”
“Now is the time for such pranks… . Ah, that guy this way!!”
The skeleton, which was turning its head in search of its next prey, suddenly stopped and looked at us.
But it didn’t move.
The skeleton looked at us blankly, frozen as if it had been shocked.
“What is that kid?”
Usually, undead do not have intelligence unless they are a higher species such as a lich.
Of course, there are no emotions, and all that remains in that empty mind is the ugly instinct to make at least one more person a companion.
But he stopped and observed us deeply.
While I was momentarily taken aback by his behavior as if he had intelligence… .
-Just!! Just!! Just!!!
The guy started running, his jaw clenching.
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