Bang, bang, bang!
For the first time, gunshots rang out across the gray snow mountain, the Sanctuary.
Clang, cl-clang!
But the sound of bullets ricocheting soon followed, and Sergeant Woo clicked his tongue as he lowered the gun.
“Even guns don’t work.”
At Sergeant Woo’s words, Tom shook his head.
“Of course they wouldn’t. Captain Hyun’s spear attacks didn’t work, and neither did magic attacks. There’s no way bullets like that would pierce it.”
After confirming the shield—the seal—surrounding the mountain, we each tried our own methods to see if we could break through it.
The team members thrust spears, swung whips, and even shot arrows.
But the shield covering the mountain blocked every one of those attacks.
I tried stabbing it with my spear and casting powerful magic as well.
As expected, none of it worked.
Finally, Sergeant Woo fired the gun he had brought from Earth, but as we had just seen, it had no effect whatsoever.
“Maybe a nuke would break through it.”
“You want to use a nuclear bomb here?”
Hannah recoiled at Sergeant Woo’s words.
Seeing her expression, Sergeant Woo shrugged.
“Well, it’s the strongest bomb we have.”
Hannah was startled by the mention of a nuclear bomb, but Sergeant Woo wasn’t wrong.
Since every other attack had failed, the only thing left was a nuclear bomb.
There was still magic I hadn’t tried, but using that spell would consume black stones.
Fortunately(?), Soph assured me that that attack wouldn’t work either, so there was no need to test it.
But the same problem applied to nuclear bombs.
We couldn’t just throw away a nuclear bomb to test it.
“Just from looking at it, I don’t think one or two nukes would even come close.”
Moreover, as Tom said, this shield didn’t look like it would collapse from a single ordinary(?) nuclear bomb.
Magreta clicked her tongue as she looked at the gray mountain.
“They said it sealed the king of monsters, and they really did make it sturdy.”
The seal had no choice but to be sturdy.
It had been made using the dark energy possessed by this planet.
“So in the end, Hannah has to become the planet’s guardian?”
If there was no other way, then Hannah would have to release the seal according to the proper course.
The team members looked at Hannah.
Hannah herself seemed to have been pondering something for a while now.
Of course, I knew what she was thinking about without having to ask.
She was probably wondering how she could awaken as a guardian as quickly as possible.
As everyone looked at Hannah, Sergeant Woo pounded with his fist on the spot he had shot.
Thud. Thud.
There was not even a trace of the bullets in the empty air.
Yet a pounding sound came from that place.
“With this much, there shouldn’t be any problem for the time being. We can just wait until Hannah learns magic.”
Everyone agreed with Sergeant Woo as he pounded on the empty air.
The prophet of the ancient kingdom had said the same, so waiting was probably the right choice.
But why did I feel so uneasy?
It seemed my super senses were acting up.
Unlike me, once they confirmed the safety of the seal, the team members brought up a more relaxed alternative.
“But do we really have to undo this seal? It feels like we’d just be waking a sleeping dog for no reason.”
At Tom’s words, Sergeant Woo and Magreta both wore troubled expressions.
Even though I had said we needed to release the seal quickly, seeing those expressions made it clear that emotionally, both of them agreed with Tom.
In the end, was this just scratching at something only to make it worse?
Rationally speaking, Tom was right.
There was no way it could be a good idea to deliberately undo a seal that had bound the Demon King for over ten thousand years, just to kill him.
As Tom said, it might simply end with us releasing the Demon King.
Of course, even now my senses were telling me that we had to kill the Demon King quickly, and the prophet of the past had also said that I had to kill him. Her seal, too, had merely been prepared so that the future me could kill the Demon King.
But it wasn’t easy to make the team members understand that.
If even they were like this, it would be even harder to make other people understand.
If I could face him alone, I wouldn’t have to worry about this.
But in the worst case, we might have to scrape together every person who had crossed over to this planet, as well as as many weapons from Earth as possible, and fight the Demon King.
If that happened, those people would need to understand too.
That would be truly difficult.
As I was thinking that, something strange caught my senses.
Tuk.
I sensed movement in the quiet mudflat.
It was strange.
Even now, it was a mudflat where I could sense no life.
It was only a place where corpses lay hardened in the mud, yet I had sensed movement.
And that movement was coming from where the buried corpses were.
No, the corpses were moving.
Crack, crack, crack.
Lumps of mud rose to their feet.
Old mud mummies, their arms fallen off and their bodies cut apart, had risen.
The other team members saw the mummies moving as well.
“Good God! What are those?”
Along with Tom’s scream-like words, the team members who saw the mummies grimaced.
“They look horrible, but they feel really awful too.”
As Magreta said, the mud mummies looked extremely grotesque.
But the team members didn’t feel bad because of the mummies themselves.
It was because of the dark energy rising from around the mountain the moment the mummies moved.
It wasn’t the dark energy we had been feeling all this time, but dark energy altered by monsters.
Not everyone could see it, but they were all feeling that dreadful sensation.
At that moment, Hannah chanted a spell in a small voice.
Wooooong.
A shield unfolded around the group.
It was a weak shield incomparable to the shield spread over the mountain, a faint shield that could hardly be compared even to Shamara’s shield I had seen in the memory.
But thanks to that shield, everyone was able to wear relieved expressions.
“Does the shield have some kind of air-purifying effect?”
Sergeant Woo said that with a much better complexion.
“Can you cast buff magic now too?”
Magreta asked Hannah with a delighted face.
But that wasn’t it.
Hannah had simply spread the shield to block the contaminated energy.
That alone had blocked all the harmful effects of the contaminated energy.
However, the shield’s effect only applied to those of us inside it.
The mummies that had risen were still coming toward us.
“How are they moving? After ten thousand years, there shouldn’t even be any cells left.”
Seeing that, Tom asked from an expert’s perspective for the first time in a while.
It certainly made no sense scientifically.
But Soph, the real expert, told me what was happening.
[They are moving through the contaminated energy spread by the Demon King. You have seen corpses moved by contaminated energy before. It is the same method that moved the dead Jafmel.]
Unlike the team members, I had definitely seen it before.
Soph’s colleague, the Tower Master, had moved in that way.
“They’re undead.”
At my words, everyone jumped in shock.
“Eek, you mean the undead we see in movies?”
The team members seemed more surprised than I had expected.
I had even told them about fighting Jafmel, yet they were making those faces.
“Making the dead move… This isn’t something a human should do.”
Sergeant Woo spoke first with a serious face, but of course the Demon King wasn’t human.
“Ghosts aren’t going to show up too, are they? I can somehow get through zombie movies, but I absolutely can’t watch horror movies.”
On top of that, Magreta revealed an unexpected weakness.
Fortunately, there didn’t seem to be anything like ghosts, but she still looked frightened.
I told the group what I had heard from Soph.
“The Demon King raised them. The Demon King is moving the dead.”
Soph had been explaining continuously for a while now.
He had said that so many corpses had risen because the Demon King had contaminated the dark energy of the Sanctuary, and that since they moved through energy, they did not need the bodies they had possessed while alive.
There was no need to give the team members such a long explanation.
Hearing me, Tom twitched his eyebrows.
“Damn it, this wasn’t sci-fi, it was fantasy. If magic exists, then of course undead would exist too.”
Unlike Tom, who was grumbling, Sergeant Woo asked the question we needed right now.
“How do we bring those corpses down?”
I recalled the time we had taken down Jafmel.
The fight had not been easy, but killing him itself had not been difficult.
“They’re moving their bodies with energy, so destroying the body should be enough.”
Those mummies were imitating the movements they had made in life through dark energy and magic.
If their bodies disappeared, the magic and energy that had nothing left to imitate would return to their original state.
At my words, Sergeant Woo loaded his gun with a satisfied expression.
“Then we can take care of them easily. Fortunately, the mummies move slowly, like zombies.”
The mummies moved with hardened mud clinging thickly to them. They were shambling like the slow zombies seen in movies.
Because of that, they still hadn’t reached us.
However, Sergeant Woo was wrong to say we could deal with them easily.
When we had fought Jafmel, the reason he had been difficult to face was because he had been a mage while alive.
The mummies approaching us now weren’t Tower Masters like Jafmel, but in life they, too, must have been mages or energy users.
Wooooong.
Was it because I had thought that?
Magic circles began to appear in front of the approaching mummies.
Boom, boom, boom!
Magic shot out from the magic circles toward us.
At the same time, Soph chanted a spell.
[Shield.]
A dense shield unfolded again over Hannah’s shield.
Kwaaaang!
The spells slammed into the shield.
Fireballs burned against it, while water and lightning hammered at it.
But the shield Soph had made endured all of those spells.
Thanks to having fought Jafmel, Soph and I had been able to prepare for the mummies’ magical attacks.
The defensive magic Soph had prepared in advance blocked all of the mummies’ spells, and several of the deflected spells even shattered other mummies.
After the wave of magic passed, the team members confirmed the shield was intact and tightened their grips on their weapons.
Even if they hated horror movies and couldn’t believe in the existence of undead, if those undead became enemies and attacked, they had to fight.
My team members knew that well.
I was the same.
There was one thing bothering me, but Soph cleared that up immediately.
[Those are not mages. They are merely corpses capable of using magic. Clean them all up.]
Soph’s words rang in my head.
Thanks to those words, I was able to cast aside the worry that we would be desecrating the corpses of the dead.
Now that I had heard Soph’s assurance, there was nothing left to hold us back.
We had blocked the enemy’s attack, so now it was our turn to attack.
Magic circles created by Soph rose overhead, and with the two layers of shields around us, we charged at the approaching mummies.
A whip swept across the front, and arrows burst the mummies apart.
The bullets fired by Tom and Sergeant Woo blew away the mummies’ bodies along with the mud.
I cast magic together with Soph.
Flash.
Lightning fell from the sky.
New Base