Episode 34
When he searched for it, the structure proved to be breathtakingly simple.
*Could it be that even this is difficult to find for the people here?*
“What is the matter!”
“What happened?!”
Startled by the sound of the bookshelf breaking, Pol and Albereu came running.
Loki shrugged and pointed at the passage.
“I found it. However, it is dark.”
With no windows and being a passage leading underground, it was pitch-black. Yet Loki alone could see clearly even in that darkness.
“What?! Did you find it!”
Azar had already run into the room.
He looked at Loki with an unpleasant grin.
“Well done! Nodin! Ha, if I get out safely, I’ll reward you handsomely!”
“…….”
Azar shouted as though he were the master.
The mercenaries, overjoyed at the discovery of the secret passage, hurriedly gathered their things.
Seeing them, Azar shouted.
“Hey! Bring the slaves! Quickly!”
Though they frowned at Azar’s imperious tone, the mercenaries obeyed readily.
Loki inwardly marveled that mercenaries were a more trustworthy profession than they appeared, seeing how faithfully they followed orders even in this situation.
As the mercenaries pulled the cart loaded with slaves, they looked puzzled at the mercenaries collapsed in the corner where the slaves had been.
“…What’s wrong with these guys?”
At the mercenary’s words, Loki flinched.
Come to think of it, he had been the one to knock them out.
“They passed out from drinking?! At a time like this…!”
“Should we just leave them?”
“Hey, quit joking and wake them up!”
The sharp mercenaries slapped and kicked them to wake them, but to no avail.
In a way, it was only natural.
They hadn’t fainted from drink, but from blows to their vitals.
“Hey! Stop dawdling! Carry them if you have to! Or leave them! Those things will be here any moment!”
Azar lost his temper, fretting over his own safety and the slaves.
“I’ll carry them.”
Loki had no choice but to step up, bothersome as it was.
After all, he had sown the seeds himself, so he would take responsibility.
When Loki lifted the unconscious mercenaries, Azar misinterpreted the gesture and curled his lips in a pleased smirk.
“That’s right, Nodin. You carry them! Then I’ll take you on specially! I, the slave merchant Azar, will see to it that you’re rewarded handsomely!”
“…….”
Loki ignored him.
“What about Rapilta?”
When the person who had been utterly forgotten until now was mentioned, Pol finally showed a startled reaction.
“Ah! Rapilta…!”
When Pol looked at Albereu, Albereu merely shrugged. It was a relaxed gesture filled with trust rather than worry.
“He’s a man who was once a knight. He must have resigned himself to dying.”
…Though it had likely been a pessimistic resignation.
“…Ugh! My apologies. For being alive.”
Everyone looked toward the window in surprise.
A heavy body was barely managing to climb through where the curtain had hung.
It was Rapilta.
His armor had apparently been discarded as ill-suited for the cramped storeroom, and he wore only light clothes.
He barely squeezed through the window and slumped to the floor.
“What? You were alive? Youth really is a fine thing.”
Albereu asked in a light, jesting tone, but he felt no small amount of relief.
For despite being a knight, Rapilta was like a disciple he had taught.
Rapilta sweated and let out a sigh of relief.
He had been defending the castle gate until moments ago.
Now Wights who had been villagers roamed the fortress grounds, and without his main weapon, his shield, armed with nothing but a cracked sword rather than a proper weapon, he could never have taken them on alone.
“Damn it, to think that horrible plague was writhing right before my eyes! I was scared to death…!”
“Rapilta!”
At Pol’s desperate cry, Rapilta smiled. Seeing Pol’s worried expression, he was moved inside, but waved his hand to hide it.
“Aah, are you that glad? Don’t worry. I won’t die from something like thi—”
“No, that’s not it! Why did you come in through there! Wights enter wherever they sense life! If a Wight saw you climbing through the window…!”
“…Huh?”
As Rapilta tilted his head, a hand with long claws began to appear in the window directly above him. Then a face with black skin slowly came into view.
The Wight’s hand climbed up, and its grotesque face hung open.
The Wight, wearing a sinister smile at the tasty prey within the fortress, stretched its face and body inside, trying to squeeze through the window.
Between the corners of its mouth, Wormpest flowed down along with a viscous liquid.
“Uwaaah! What?!”
Not only Rapilta but the mercenaries as well cried out in fright and stumbled backward. While everyone’s attention was drawn elsewhere, Loki quickly pulled a large crossbow from inside his coat and took aim.
With a *-Tung-!* and a slight recoil, the bolt flew.
At the same time, the Wight’s head burst.
Blood splattered in every direction, and the Wight’s body, losing strength, tumbled forward and fell right before Rapilta’s nose.
As wriggling Wormpest spread with the sludgy black blood, Rapilta shrieked.
“Uwak?! Mr. Hun! Please, help me! I don’t want to end up like those things!”
“…Then you had better come this way quickly.”
Before anyone knew it, another Wight was sticking its face through the window.
Loki tried to reload and shoot, but this time the barricade at the fortress entrance broke.
By their clothes, most seemed to have been farmers.
But among them was one who stood out.
A Wight wearing the armor of the mercenary captain who had guarded Azar’s slave caravan.
Though its facial structure had not changed much, its pale face with its gaping mouth no longer looked like any ordinary person.
“C-Captain?”
“The captain too?!”
The mercenaries stepped back as if falling into despair.
The plague called Wormpest, which had dyed the continent in nightmares, had already driven them into a panic.
In the midst of that, the mercenary captain they had trusted and followed had become one of the dead; the shock was inevitable.
“Everyone, run!”
At Pol’s cry, the mercenaries ran in a fluster toward the noble’s room where the secret passage lay. But that lasted only a moment before dissatisfied voices echoed from within.
“What! Why is the entrance blocked!”
The entrance was blocked by the cart in which the slaves were confined.
“Quickly pull the cart out!”
“A-are you crazy?! The slaves…! What about my slaves! I have to sell them to pay your wages! Push the cart! Push it, I said!”
As the mercenaries tried to pull out the blocked cart, he struggled to stop them, but it was Azar who was thrown aside.
He was no mercenary, and having done nothing but drink without exercise, there was no way he could match their strength.
Azar was slammed flat onto the floor.
“They’re slaves anyway! Even if they die, we have to survive!”
“Uwaaah! My livelihood! Without them, I’m ruined!”
“Our lives are more important! You expect us to die for mere slaves? Rather, this is better. If we have the slaves, they’ll serve as bait and buy us time. In that gap, we escape!”
*…What is the value of a human.*
Loki shook his head as he watched them. Even so, he approached the cart and smashed the lock with his crossbow.
Startled by the sight, Azar glared at Loki and tried to speak, but froze at the gaze visible beneath the crow mask.
Blood-red eyes were glaring at him.
“…Do not try to give me orders. If you remain here, whether slave or master, everyone dies.”
“I-I got it! I got it!”
At Loki’s threatening words, Azar involuntarily nodded and backed away.
As the slaves confined in the cart came out, the considerably lightened cart barely moved under the desperate strength of the mercenaries’ survival instinct, and the passage opened.
“Everyone, run!”
The mercenaries ran toward the passage without looking back.
“Hun! Hurry!”
Pol, Albereu, and Rapilta ran inside as well, and Loki glanced at the last remaining cart with a frown.
It was the cart the dark elf had been in.
Though he had clearly removed the lock, the dark elf was not coming out.
“…Are you not going?”
The dark elf, Sallet, kept her mouth tightly shut and trembled.
The moment she had laid eyes on the Wight, she had frozen solid and had no intention of moving.
*What a troublesome one.*
Loki sighed and grasped Sallet’s hand.
Only then did she flinch and react.
Sallet looked up at Loki with eyes that seemed ready to burst into tears at any moment.
Her crimson pupils trembled as they darted between the Wight and Loki.
*What’s with her?*
“Hurry out. Unless you want to be their food.”
“Ah, th-that…”
As she faltered, two Wights rushed at Loki with their mouths gaping wide.
Loki shot the crossbow at the charging Wight’s body, and for the other one, he kicked it away while regulating his strength with his leg so its head wouldn’t shatter.
“Annoying!”
*I can’t deal with them properly because I’ll get dirty.*
Loki slung the crossbow on his back, forcibly lifted Sallet into his arms, and ran straight into the secret passage.
Loki glanced down at Sallet in his embrace.
The arrogant, conceited attitude from their first meeting was nowhere to be seen.
Rather, like a child who had heard a frightening tale, she trembled in fear and buried her face in his chest.
*Is there some history?*
Loki’s steps through the long, dark passage gradually slowed.
At the stench assailing his nose from the end of the passage, he unconsciously covered his nose and mouth with his remaining hand.
Along with the foul odor, screams came from the end of the passage.
***
“…W-why…! Why are they here too?!”
At the same time as the mercenary’s despairing cry, his entire body became minced meat beneath a sharp, thick lump of iron.
His flesh crumbled as if a giant boulder had fallen upon him, and blood splattered in every direction.
“…….”
The remaining mercenaries retreated in terrified haste, but the shadows moving in the darkness were faster.
Whether by instinct, they first seized those trying to flee, stabbing, biting, tearing, and licking them, *devouring* them.
If the Wights from moments ago had worn farmers’ clothes, these were different.
All of them wore surcoats over leather armor.
Their appearance, wielding swords and spears, showed that they had been trained regular soldiers.
They swung their weapons wildly without form, and those who fell to their blades were bitten and devoured.
That primitive sight brought on an even greater wave of terror.
Particularly, there was a presence that exuded an even more overwhelming aura than the rest.
A Wight wearing plate armor.
Well over two meters tall, wielding a giant morning star, it clearly showed that it had been a knight.
That Wight knight raised its morning star and brought it straight down upon a mercenary.
With a single blow, the mercenary was crushed without even managing to block. The shield he had been holding bounced away and fell right before Rapilta.
“This should be quite useful.”
Rapilta immediately picked up the shield.
Rapilta looked at the Wight knight before him and broke into a cold sweat.
“…I underestimated this as the countryside, but it seems this was a territory with quite a powerful knight.”
Before they knew it, surrounded, Rapilta’s group formed a line with their backs to Pol.
“Hey! Mage. Send out a nice blast of magic.”
“I’m concentrating right now, so be quiet! I’ll do it as fast as I can…!”
“But… does magic even work on these things?”
“Aah! My God! Please save me!”
Azar trembled beside Rapilta, covering his head and crouching low.
Most of the mercenaries, as well as the slaves who had fled in terror, had fallen to become prey for the Wights.
Now only Rapilta, Pol, Albereu, and Azar remained.