A massive crater where the park had once been.
This was the trace left behind by the battle between Soph’s party and the Giant Monarch.
The fact that the city was far more devastated than it had been back then was likely due to that battle as well.
A pit like a nuclear bomb had gone off, and a battle that had destroyed the entire city.
I thought I had grown quite a bit stronger myself, but I couldn’t even begin to guess what kind of fighting would lead to this.
And Soph had said that the one who had fought such a battle was dangerous.
I immediately burst out from the ruins of the building where I had been hiding.
Kiiiiiiik!
As soon as I came out of the building, the magical monsters flying through the sky saw me and let out shrieks.
The ones nearby began firing magic at me.
The spells they shot came flying in.
Whoosh.
Fireballs poured down from the sky.
Boom! Kwaang!
Buildings exploded and the dry ground burned, but not a single spell reached me.
[Shield.]
It was thanks to the magic Soph had cast.
Spells hastily thrown out by magical monsters could easily be blocked by Soph’s shield.
Tap, tap, tap!
While Soph blocked the magic with his shield, I ran toward the crater.
The enormous pit rapidly drew closer.
Watching the pit approach, I shouted loudly.
“You said you killed him! Then what do you mean he’s coming back to life? You didn’t expect that?”
I hadn’t seen the battle this time, but Soph’s claim that he had killed the giant could not have been a lie.
As if Soph disliked the situation as well, he poured out an answer to my question.
[I saw him detonate his black stone and self-destruct! This pit was created then. If not for Shamara’s barrier at the time, all of us would have died!]
You could do something like that with a black stone?
A black stone was a storehouse of dark energy, and if it was one possessed by a Monarch-class giant, it must have contained an enormous amount of energy.
Now that I thought about it, it did seem possible.
[Before that, his body had been smashed to pieces, and the explosion shattered his black stone, so of course we had no choice but to think he was dead! His corpse was completely destroyed, and even the fragments of the shattered black stone were scattered everywhere, so how were we supposed to find each and every piece? We ignored the useless black stone fragments and went to the Demon King!]
I hadn’t seen the battle, but I knew what had happened up to that point, so I had nothing to say to Soph’s words.
Even I would have done the same as Soph.
But he could revive even though his black stone had been shattered?
“What do you mean, revival?”
[It seems he was gathering the fragments of the shattered black stone and restoring his body. A life-form signal is growing stronger at the center of that crater!]
Wasn’t a black stone useless once it shattered?
I was dumbfounded by the idea that he could gather it up and revive.
“Don’t tell me Monarch-class beings can revive by gathering the fragments of their shattered black stones?”
Surely those below Monarch-class couldn’t do it too, right?
If that were the case, we would have to check every monster whose black stone we had destroyed until now.
[I knew the Demon King could do it. But I only found out just now that Monarch-class beings could as well!]
Fortunately, it seemed that wasn’t the case.
Soph’s answer made me understand why they had sealed the Demon King instead of killing him.
It wasn’t that they couldn’t defeat the Demon King—they had no way to kill him.
A monster that wouldn’t die even if its black stone was shattered. That meant it had no weakness at all.
In any case, after hearing Soph’s answer, I realized the mages had made a mistake.
[If the Demon King could do it, you should have considered that a Monarch might be able to as well!]
For an archmage to overlook that.
I knew the situation had been urgent, but judging by the result, they had been uncharacteristically careless for mages.
However, there was no way the mages would have missed what I had thought of.
[It’s not as if we didn’t consider that possibility. But the results said it would only be possible after thousands of years, and even then at an extremely low probability. At the time, do you think we had any reason to worry about something like that?]
Certainly, no person would worry about something thousands of years in the future.
Of course, ten thousand years really had passed, and for the person who had hit that minuscule probability, the situation had become one that could only make me sigh.
Now that I understood the situation, it became difficult to keep blaming Soph.
Thinking of the humans of Earth, who barely thought even ten years ahead, I couldn’t say anything to Soph.
While I was bickering with Soph, I arrived at the crater.
Seen up close, the crater’s immense size was painfully clear.
It was an enormous pit that could rival the traces of a nuclear explosion I had seen in movies or photographs.
‘Don’t tell me even a nuke wouldn’t work?’
I shook off the dreadful thought that had risen in my head and jumped into the pit.
I ran down the long slope toward the center of the crater.
Boom! Boom!
I had been trusting the shield and paying no attention, but the magical bombardment was still continuing even now.
The magical monsters kept pouring magic down from the sky.
Perhaps because magic was their specialty, they did not come close to attack directly.
Thanks to that, I was able to enter the pit easily, but from here on, I had to deal with the monsters that had come out to meet me.
Hearing the shrieks of the magical monsters, scouts crawled up the pit and blocked my way.
Several scouts, each of which had once been difficult for me to face even one at a time, stood in my path and unleashed their tentacles.
Dozens of tentacles stabbed toward me from the front as if to pierce me through.
When I had first fought a scout monster, even dodging the tentacles of a single monster had been truly difficult, but now I could instantly find the gaps in the air covered by dozens of tentacles.
And as I slipped my body into those gaps, I could swing my spear at the same time.
Slash!
Several tentacles were cut off at once.
With the tentacles cleared away, my field of vision brightened.
Any other time, I would have attacked the monsters and finished them off, but right now, reaching the center of the pit was more important.
Of course, if I didn’t finish them off, my back would become a problem, but no tentacles came after me.
It was only natural.
Pajijijijik!
The scouts whose tentacles had been cut were screaming as they were electrocuted.
I had moved quickly and swung my spear, but I was a mage.
Naturally, the spear of a half-baked mage had magic placed upon it.
“Lightning.”
Electric magic.
The current traveled along the tentacles and electrocuted every scout that had attacked me.
As I ran on with a satisfied smile, Soph’s voice reached me.
[Your skill has improved greatly. If you can just solve your long-range problem, you might hear people call you a fairly useful mage.]
This was a fairly useful mage?
An archmage’s standards were beyond imagination.
Aside from Soph’s companions, I had never seen a mage who used magic this freely.
It was only through Soph’s memories, but all the mages I had seen were mages their kingdoms had boasted of.
I thought I was doing better than those mages, and yet I was merely useful.
If this hadn’t been the situation, I would have grumbled for a while.
Instead, I abruptly stopped and drove my spear into the ground.
Thud.
The moment the spear pierced the earth, I recited a spell.
[Dig.]
The magic I cast spread through the spear and into the ground.
Ruuumble.
The ground ahead sank downward sharply.
It was not wide, but it was deeply dug.
A pit large enough to drop the defensive monster approaching from the front into the earth.
Kueeek!
A huge monster resembling a beetle crashed into the pit.
Dust rose and the ground shook, but I kept moving the earth and covered the monster with soil.
Shwaaaak!
The monster screamed from within the pouring dirt.
Of course, it was an ordinary pit covered with ordinary soil, so the thing would soon crawl out.
But I needed that “soon.”
I stepped over the writhing earth and continued forward.
After breaking through the group of scouts and crossing past the defensive monster, my destination came into view.
A deep pit at the center of the crater.
Inside it, the control entity and other monsters had gathered.
The monsters were no longer digging.
They were not charging toward me either; they simply stood in a circle, staring at the black body that had slightly revealed itself above the ground. From humanoid monsters to the control entity.
As I wondered at the strange sight, tentacles burst out from the center of the ground where the monsters were gathered.
Chwaaak!
They were long, distinctly black tentacles, different from the tentacles of the monsters I had seen before.
I was startled by the sudden appearance of the tentacles, but they did not shoot toward me.
Absurdly, the place the tentacles headed was toward the monsters gathered nearby.
The tentacles pierced through the monsters’ bodies.
Puaaak!
White blood gushed out.
Black tentacles drenched in white blood.
They were new tentacles, but I had seen them before.
They were the tentacles I had seen a little while ago in Soph’s memories.
Back then, they had served as the Giant Monarch’s arms and legs.
Now, those tentacles were attacking their own kind.
It was an unexpected situation.
I was close enough to reach them in moments, but I had no choice but to stop.
Seeing me stop, Soph said nothing either.
The monsters attacked by the tentacles stood still in place.
It looked as though they had willingly offered their bodies to the tentacles.
On the surface, it simply looked as if they had been stabbed by black spears, but to my heightened senses, it felt completely different.
The energy possessed by the gathered monsters was being sucked through the tentacles and into the ground.
More precisely, it was being absorbed by the monster buried beneath the earth.
Seeing that, Soph said,
[So he was using the other monsters to replenish his lacking energy?]
“Is this what you were worried about?”
[I didn’t know it would be exactly this sort of scene, but he did seem to be lacking energy. If he’d had enough energy, he would have awakened first when humans appeared.]
It meant that in order to revive that Giant Monarch, the monsters had run all the way here and sacrificed themselves.
Or perhaps the Giant Monarch had summoned the monsters, but either way, it amounted to the same thing.
In the end, the monsters had accomplished their goal.
Watching the energy being drained, I asked Soph,
“Should we stop it even now?”
[Once the tentacles have pierced them, it’s already too late.]
I thought the same, which was why I had stopped moving.
Thud. Thud. Thud.
While I exchanged a few words with Soph, the monsters began to collapse.
From the humanoid monsters, to the scouts, the magical monsters, and the defensive monsters.
The monsters had been completely drained of dark energy.
Finally, the control monster crumpled to the ground, and then—
Ruuumble.
With a tremor, the black body began to emerge from the earth.
The black, egg-like head I had seen in Soph’s memory came out, and its black upper body also revealed itself.
At the same time, all the tentacles that had been embedded in the monsters returned to where they had come from.
After absorbing the tentacles, the giant continued to rise.
Rururung.
A black left arm and a right arm that seemed to be made of stone. Both legs looked as though they were made of metal.
Its appearance was different from what I had seen in Soph’s memory, but the immense power I sensed was not greatly different from back then.
“I think we should run.”
Its appearance had changed, but that was not an opponent I could face alone—no, not even together with Soph.
Of course, the same would be true even if I brought the other squad members.
“At that level, I think we’d need to bring a nuke to have any chance of doing something.”
Even if we had to bring more nukes from Earth, that seemed like the only way to deal with the thing in front of us right now.
[I don’t think we have that kind of time. We can run, yes, but if we do, the Earthlings beyond the mountain range will be in danger. All Monarch-class monsters can use magic to fly. Creatures like that can locate humans on the opposite side of the continent even from here.]
In the end, that meant I had to fight.
To me, it looked like there was no way to deal with it, but Soph wouldn’t have said something like that for no reason.
“Do you have some kind of plan?”
[He replaced his shattered body with mismatched materials. If it were his original body, there would be no answer, but with a body like that, it should be worth a try.]
At Soph’s words, I examined the monster’s body, which had changed from before.
Limbs and various parts of its body that looked as if they were made of stone or metal.
Just as Soph said, there was room to take a stab at it.
In truth, even if there were no method, I could not run away now.
“More importantly, why is it always like this? You and I have terrible luck, Soph.”
To encounter an enemy every time things became dangerous—at this point, I couldn’t tell whether this was bad luck or good misfortune.
[Well. I’m not sure this is luck.]
Soph uttered something strangely meaningful, but now was not the time to think about it.
The giant had begun moving toward me.
I gripped my spear again and began to chant a spell.
Giant Monarch (3)