Chapter 46
What is the most important element in a boss fight?
A pig-like health bar that can withstand attacks?
Overwhelming power, with every blow posing a threat?
A special ability that could be called the very embodiment of unfairness?
I want to say that all of these are correct answers.
But at the same time, I think they are all wrong answers.
The virtue I consider most important in a boss is reasonableness.
The kind of reasonableness that offers despair through overwhelming grandeur, yet can somehow be overcome.
Even a health bar that seems like despair itself should decrease if you keep attacking it,
and attacks that leave you dizzy with a single hit should become avoidable once you get used to their patterns and rhythm,
while even an unreasonable special ability should have a gimmick that allows it to be countered if you study it properly.
That is why I faced the Hero party according to this principle.
“Charge up! Duck!”
When I drew my sword back and charged up, the Hero party, having seen this once before, ducked.
Fwish!
The greatsword cut through the air, sending sword aura outward.
The sword aura left a deep slash across the fortress wall behind them.
The baron’s expression upon seeing the slash was exactly what I had expected.
His hair, drenched in cold sweat, spoke for itself.
After launching such a powerful attack, it was the Hero’s turn to attack.
“This is for Fria!”
The Hero swung his sword with blood vessels bulging in his eyes.
Fria had probably been the tank of the Hero party who had stepped forward to try to block my charged attack with her shield.
Naturally, she had failed to block it, and the upper half of her body had been neatly sliced off.
I hadn’t known because she had been wearing a helmet, but it seemed she had been a female knight.
Judging by how desperately the Hero called out to her as though she were his lover, they must have been in that sort of relationship.
But her sacrifice had not been in vain.
Now that they focused on dodging instead of blocking whenever I charged an attack, perhaps she had left the Hero with a valuable lesson.
Thinking that, I silently endured the Hero’s attacks.
Of course, unlike in a game, this was reality, so I did not allow myself to be wounded; instead, I used up my barrier in place of my health bar.
“Hmm.”
Three attacks came in over the course of two seconds.
Now it was my turn.
Following the principles of the Three Calamities Swordsmanship, I swung my greatsword three times.
Horizontal, vertical, thrust.
As an added detail, I inserted an Iron Mountain Strike before the thrust to break through the opponent’s defense.
When I first showed them this attack, the female samurai who served as the party’s swordswoman had been pierced through the chest and killed.
She had done well to parry the horizontal and vertical slashes, but she had not expected an unparryable thrust after the Iron Mountain Strike that broke her stance.
The Hero learned from this as well and began rolling to avoid the final attack.
Was it called a Narak Tagon in wuxia stories?
It was an embarrassing way to evade an attack, but it was the correct answer.
If you tried to look cool on a battlefield, you would end up dead like that samurai woman.
From then on, the Hero and his party members avoided my attacks by rolling or jumping, while cramming in attacks whenever they found an opening.
Before I knew it, they were covered in mud as though they had come to a mud party.
Even so, thanks to the sacrifices of two members, they seemed to have learned all the patterns I had prepared, and the battle continued somehow.
Then, the archer of the Hero party made a mistake.
As the price, her right arm was sliced off.
I did not kill her instantly because she had made a mistake against a normal attack pattern.
Unless it was a special pattern like the thrust after the Iron Mountain Strike or the charge-up, I did not kill them instantly; I let them get away with losing only one limb.
The healer would then reattach the severed limb, but considering even those severed limbs, it would not be wrong to say that their strategy guide had been written in blood.
Then the healer shouted.
“I don’t have much holy power left, Hero!”
Oh dear. When you were running a raid, you should have managed your mana properly.
I felt sorry for them, but I did not compromise.
They were a Hero party, not the protagonist.
Even if they died, it would not cause any particular problem for my story.
There had been plenty of Heroes to replace them since the imperial era.
‘Don’t blame me.’
The Heroes had slaughtered demihumans as though the player in a game were merely leveling up, hadn’t they?
Then they should have nothing to say about being treated like players.
If they wanted me to spare them, they should have become the protagonist of the story instead of players.
With that thought, I mercilessly cut down the party’s healer, who had neglected to evade my patterns while treating the archer.
Once she became a heal/er, despair descended upon the party.
“Haha···”
The archer, whose arm had not yet been fully healed, let out a hollow laugh and dropped her bow.
“Don’t give up!”
The red-haired Hero charged at me with the hot-blooded spirit one would expect from his appearance.
And, as though he were undergoing a protagonist’s awakening, the Hero’s rank rose at exactly the right moment.
As his rank rose, so did his strength.
Enough to parry the thrust that had been an instant-death pattern.
“See? This is the power of bonds!”
The Hero shouted triumphantly.
Watching him shout like a Hero from a traditional fantasy story···
‘Sigh··· This is why I hate Heroes.’
I could barely hold back the sigh that escaped me.
***
Heroes do not lose.
Even if they experience the pain of losing their companions, they rise to their feet and defeat the great evil to the very end.
The red-haired Hero genuinely believed that.
That was why he had chosen to become a Hero instead of a lord, and had defeated countless evil magical beasts, demons, and demihumans.
And he had no doubt that he would do the same this time.
The Hero would defeat Duke, the knight of the evil Providence Domain that oppressed humans and favored demihumans.
Then, by erasing that evil domain from the map after stepping over the knight’s corpse, the name of the red-haired Hero Ghis would spread throughout the kingdom.
As proof, the Hero’s rank had risen at the most desperate moment.
Even the heavens seemed to be cheering him on.
- Hero
- Hero.
- Ghis
It was as though his companions were pushing him forward.
The Hero gripped his sword with both hands and parried Duke’s attack.
Clang!
He knocked the sword aside with a parry he had learned from the samurai,
“Hup!”
blocked it with the defensive technique he had learned from the knight,
“This ends now!”
and imbued his sword with the holy blessing he had learned from the priest, finally shattering Duke’s barrier.
The sword barely grazed Duke’s chest.
‘Tch. Was it too shallow?’
His decisive blow had ended with nothing more than a cut across Duke’s uniform.
But the Hero did not lose hope.
Now that even that seemingly invincible barrier had been broken, all that remained was···
That was when it happened.
A thick killing intent began to rise from Duke.
Seeing Duke’s reaction, the Hero taunted him.
“You acted so carefree, but now that I’ve caught up with you, are you getting desperate?”
But Duke did not answer.
He merely stared silently at the red flower ornament that had fallen at his feet.
He lowered his head and carefully picked up the ornament with one hand.
“Who dares bring military boots into the flower garden?”
“?”
Duke raised his head.
When the Hero met eyes of red more intense than blood flashing beyond the helmet, he swallowed a nervous breath.
Magic began to flow through Duke’s sword.
Seeing this, the worst possibility arose in the minds of the Hero and his remaining companions.
‘Could it be that, until now···’
‘He hadn’t been using sword aura?’
As though confirming their suspicion, a dark red aura gathered around the sword.
It seemed as though screams were coming from the sword.
The horrific screams of those who had been claimed by it.
Was it tinnitus? An auditory hallucination? Was I going mad?
The screams seemed to ring in their heads like music.
Only after fastening the fallen flower ornament carefully to the hilt of his greatsword did Duke continue his line while holding the red-black sword.
“The pretense of humility ends here. I am Duke. The knight of this land.”
Immediately after Duke finished speaking, he kicked off the ground.
The party had never imagined that the man who had done nothing but walk around slowly while attacking until now could move like this, and they could not even react before allowing his attack to hit them.
A red-black afterimage remained where he passed.
The Hero’s companions were reduced to a handful of blood, while the Hero was seized by the collar in Duke’s left hand.
Duke threw the Hero into the air and pierced him with his sword.
Duke tossed the impaled Hero aside as though he were taking out the trash.
The Hero’s eyes closed.
‘No, I can’t die like this···’
As his consciousness faded, the Hero closed his eyes to Duke’s voice as the last thing he heard.
“You will have to endlessly reflect on why this flower is red.”
***
‘Tsk. These brats have no sense of romance.’
Even so, touching the flower ornament had crossed a line.
I had not originally planned to make the second phase unreasonable.
The kind of boss I aimed to be was a normal raid boss, not the kind of boss from a genre where the character died and revived endlessly while the player, rather than the character, grew stronger.
But they touched the flower ornament, so I changed my mind.
If that was how they wanted to play it, then I would become a thug from that point onward as well.
If they felt it was unfair, they could set up something like a bonfire and retry.
I turned away from the Heroes’ corpses and approached Remesis, whom I had covered with my cloak.
“Rise.”
“···”
“I know you’re not dead.”
“Phew··· I’m sorry. I’d rather not work overtime. But why are you here?”
“Because you discovered the Hero, Lord Rex sent me here.”
“···Weren’t you in the domain capital?”
“Hmm.”
“It’s been an hour since I reported it.”
“Hmm.”
Remesis briefly recalled the distance between this place and the domain capital.
A distance that took about half a month on foot.
He had come here in one hour?
Remesis was briefly flustered, but then remembered that the man before him was one of the thirteen people who could cut through imperial fortresses like tofu and accepted it.
“Then what did Lord Rex say?”
“Now that a Hero has appeared, this is no longer a provocation.”
Heroes were infamous among demihumans as slaughterers.
If slave hunters abducted demihumans one or two at a time and sold them, Heroes were walking disasters that burned down entire demihuman villages.
They even burned any humans who tried to protect demihumans, calling them witches as well.
The Heroes’ relatives included the heresy inquisitors of the Holy Kingdom and the international criminal organization known as the Human Continuity Brigade.
Moreover, the Hero’s participation implied something else as well.
“Lord Rex judged that the royal family was behind this war.”
Heroes were soldiers of the royal family.
Of course, they wandered around causing trouble wherever they pleased, but they fundamentally belonged to the royal family and only did such things to targets the royal family considered enemies.
In other words, the royal family had already explained to the Heroes that the Providence Domain was evil.
“The Heroes may come in droves.”
“Then our marquisate···”
“As of this moment, we are enemies of all nobles. It is safe to consider every domain except the Sneria Domain hostile.”
Duke already knew this from the original story, but he spoke as though he were hearing it for the first time now.
His explanation left Remesis with one question.
“Why our domain, specifically?”
I pondered for a moment.
I knew the answer, but this was a spoiler. Would it be all right to tell him?
My deliberation was brief.
I decided to tell him only part of the truth based on the information revealed so far.
“It’s only my guess, but it may be because of an old man named Peter who had been staying in the mountains of the domain.
“The swordsman Lord Rex and Captain went to find.”
“Yes. He is one of the few remaining imperial bloodlines. Though he is of a collateral branch, he could undermine the kingdom’s legitimacy.”
I have emphasized this several times, but the countless kingdoms that arose on the land after the empire disappeared had no legitimacy.
What was the reason again?
I couldn’t remember the complicated details, but I think they said it was because they had merely placed a spoon on something someone else had destroyed.
Thus, apart from the Rebellious Stars, the royal family’s legitimacy was precarious.
To the point that they would have to step down if even an illegitimate child of the imperial family appeared somewhere.
Another reason was that they feared someone descended from the imperial family might one day revive the empire if they were allowed to live.
The empire’s khans had been incredibly warlike, after all.
‘Now that I think about it, I think I heard there was a related prophecy too.’
But I did not believe in prophecies, so I could not remember what prophecy it was.
Fate was something I forged with my own hands, so what use was there in believing in prophecy?
In any case, the point was that all of this was because of old man Peter.
The royal family had become hostile because the two domains had tried to recruit him while he was settled in the mountains between the Sneria Domain and the Providence Domain.
“Hmm··· Something seems to be missing, but I have no other way to explain it right now.”
Of course, Remesis was intelligent enough to notice that my explanation was not perfect, but he lacked the information to uncover anything beyond it.
Perhaps he simply was not interested.
Remesis was a civil servant by nature and was not the sort to dig into things more than necessary.
Remesis lit a cigarette and changed the subject.
“In any case, thank you, Captain.”
“You are one of my people. There is no need to thank me; it was only natural.”
“And thank you.”
“?”
“You didn’t need to take revenge so brutally.”
Ah, was that what this was about?
Did he think I had toyed with them because I was taking revenge for Remesis?
His intention was mistaken, but the fact that I had toyed with them was true, so I did not particularly deny it.
However, there was something I had to say for the sake of maintaining my character.
“A knight···”
“Yes. We don’t humiliate our opponents. I’ll pretend I didn’t see it.”
Remesis looked at what had once been the Hero party and raised the corners of his mouth.
“Now that we’ve defeated the Heroes, are we the Demon King’s army?”
“There have always been many hypocrites since the imperial era. Those who oppose them have always been evil.”
“If that’s the case, being a villain isn’t so bad.”
“Hmm.”
Well, seeking to become a Demon King by opposing things like that was not necessarily a bad idea.
Remesis and I finished our conversation and looked toward the baron’s fortress.
“There is nowhere left for us to return to now. We can either become a kingdom or become rebels.”
“Isn’t it a revolution if we succeed and treason if we fail?”
Hey, wasn’t it dangerous for a soldier to say something like that?
I stepped ahead of Remesis, who was wearing a sardonic smile, and spoke.
“Just follow my back. I will open the path of conquest.”
“Yes, Captain.”
Before we knew it, the personal guards Remesis had evacuated had also approached from behind us and saluted with restrained composure.
““Understood!””
“Sound the trumpet of departure. This is the beginning of the Providence Royal Family.”
.
.
.
.
***
“But, Captain.”
“Hmm?”
“You arrived just in the nick of time. You nearly got purified. Surely you weren’t secretly watching us, were you?”
“···”
“I’m joking. Don’t look so offended.”
Remesis chuckled as he took a drag from his cigarette.
Meanwhile, Duke was sweating like a waterfall inside his helmet.
‘Shit. How did he know?’
***
Meanwhile, Rex···
“Duke! What do you mean!”
He shouted while clinging to the innocent system window.
“The royal family?! No! That’s not it! It’s not!”
Of course, he knew that they had no choice but to oppose the royal family in order to survive.
He also knew that, from this moment on, they would have to wage a war of conquest against the kingdom whether they liked it or not.
But Rex’s plan was to place a reasonably decent prince or duke of the royal family on the throne once all of this was over.
Naturally, the reason was that he did not want to bear responsibility on the scale of a kingdom.
But Rex’s desperate cries did not reach Duke.
“Hehe··· I suppose I should study royal etiquette in advance too.”
Even Ari was not on his side.
“Aaaah!”
Rex tore at his hair in despair such as he had never known before, and the success story of the Providence Royal Family, which he had never wanted even once, began.