Chapter 54
The road to the trap that began as a rebellion and turned into a revenge operation.
Hana headed for the city of the dead.
After whipping their mounts until they foamed at the mouth, Hana and her retainers arrived at the city, where armed citizens greeted them.
“Why should we serve a heaven that neither shields us from bloodshed nor accepts our blood! Heaven has abandoned us, so we will choose a new heaven to survive!”
Someone who appeared to be the rebellion’s platoon leader shouted, mocking Hana’s weakness.
Hana and her retainers kept their distance and examined the rebels’ condition.
They looked somewhat pale, yet their complexions also seemed ruddy, and their voices gave the illusion of being full of life.
If Duke and Rex had not warned her in advance, she would have thought they were living citizens.
Even now, they were swaying slightly, so if she had seen them without knowing the truth, she would have been convinced they were genuine citizens.
But Hana did not lose her composure.
Maintaining the standoff, she extended her shadows beneath their feet.
Shadow magic’s infiltration reacts differently depending on whether its target is animate or inanimate.
If the opponent resists with mana, as with Duke’s telekinesis, the space covered by the opponent’s shadow becomes unusable.
Unlike telekinesis, whose outcome is determined by the strength of one’s will regardless of the difference in tier, shadow magic’s outcome was determined purely by the difference in realm.
But the shadows Hana extended infiltrated the citizens’ shadows without resistance.
The tiers she perceived with appraisal magic seemed to be around Tier 1 or 2, but their shadows reacted as though they were infiltrating the shade of a tree.
‘Ah···’
She sighed.
If there had been even a little resistance, there might have been a little hope.
But the response returning from the infiltrated shadows filled her with certainty.
“Gentlemen.”
She spoke solemnly.
“Everyone, observe a moment of silence.”
Her retainers silently bowed their heads and observed a moment of silence.
And in their midst, Hana pulled her hat low and clasped her hands before her stomach as though in prayer.
“Thank you to the heroes who remained valiant until their final moments.”
Under normal circumstances, they would have rebelled after yielding to threats, if only because they valued their lives.
But the citizens of this city had chosen death instead.
As she observed a moment of silence for those whose very rest had been desecrated, the one who had desecrated their deaths issued an order from behind the citizens.
<Archers, fire a volley>
Once the necromancer’s order was entered into their minds, the citizens drew their bowstrings with vacant eyes.
The corpses linked to a single necromancer released their bowstrings simultaneously without a single deviation.
A rain of arrows poured down over Hana and her retainers.
Even so, they did not stop observing the moment of silence.
At last, just before the arrows reached them···
Slash.
A chill blade intent spread outward with Hana at its center.
The arrows, robbed of their momentum, fell limply to the ground.
A moment later, the citizens’ bodies began collapsing.
The heads of the living dead at the front of the army rolled across the ground like potatoes after a bumper harvest.
In a dark room far from that gruesome scene.
The necromancer who had been watching the Sneria forces through the corpses’ eyes understood what had happened in that instant.
‘What was that behind that woman···’
A gaunt figure fashioned from shadow, its face hidden beneath a hood, swung a great scythe.
An ordinary superhuman would not even have realized what had happened.
‘As I thought.’
Hilly, the Netherworld hero, slowly ran her tongue over her purple lips.
It was a technique she had seen during the days of the empire.
A form from the Black Wing School, a one-person hereditary school.
It had supposedly been lost after its sole inheritor died on the battlefield at the time,
‘So it was here.’
That magic was precisely why she had appeared in this city after the empire fell and she was hunted by multiple kingdoms and forced into hiding.
She had been uncertain when she heard that the Sneria lord controlled shadows, but after seeing it herself, she was certain.
‘That magic is mine.’
The Black Wing School was highly compatible with her Netherworld School.
It would let her hide herself among the corpses, or hide that cumbersome army in the shadows.
A blush rose over Hilly’s pale makeup.
‘I want to dig through that woman’s brain already.’
The thought of turning her opponent into a corpse, searching her brain, and taking the secret manual of shadow magic already made Hilly’s cold heart throb passionately.
‘Then I should shake her mind first.’
She was not a person of an honorable disposition, even in the loosest sense.
She preferred to shake her opponent’s mind and pry into their traumas and weaknesses.
After all, the mentality of those who used Netherworld magic had to be like that.
Hilly borrowed the mouth of one of the living dead to provoke Hana.
“How frightening~ So your claim to care for the citizens was hypocrisy after all? Seeing how you cut them down without hesitation because they were in the way of your rule.”
“···”
Hana did not answer.
Sensing a faint trace of anger and hesitation in Hana’s rigid expression, Hilly continued provoking her.
- Mommy··· Mommy··· Where are you···
- My lady. It hurts···
- Why did you abandon us?
- Please save me! Please!
At Hilly’s fingertips, the corpses’ screams formed a chorus.
For a more stimulating performance, she made blood spurt from the severed necks of the decapitated corpses.
That was why living dead were so convenient.
Unlike other undead, they still bled, and they did not have any particularly rotten parts.
Thanks to that, there were no undead better suited to provoking an opponent’s guilt.
Those who retained their humanity would often crumble easily at such a sight.
But Hana’s expression did not change.
She brought to mind the words iron-blooded woman.
If anything, perhaps it was only Hilly’s imagination, but Hana seemed even angrier than before···
At that moment, Hana spoke to the living dead containing Hilly’s consciousness.
“Stupid.”
“?”
At that instant, killing intent could be felt behind Hilly’s true body.
The imperial hero was cut in half before she had time to react to the killing intent.
Hana and her retainers appeared behind the split hero.
As Hana emerged behind Hilly’s true body, the clone of Hana that had been confronting the living dead belatedly vanished.
She spoke to her retainers in a cold voice.
“It’s not over yet.”
As though signaled by those words, Hilly’s body, split in half, rolled its eyes.
“You didn’t fall for it~?”
“···”
“I guess you fought our school back when you were with the resistance during the empire’s days?”
Without a word, Hana transformed the great scythe into a spear.
Then she told her retainers,
“Everyone. Fight with the resolve not to let this woman leave alive.”
At those words, Hilly burst into manic laughter.
“Who says you can! A woman barely around Tier 5! I should be thanking you! Coming all the way to my hideout yourself···”
Hilly could not finish her sentence.
Before her eyes, Hana and her retainers’ tiers had all risen by one.
Hana had reached Level 60, and her retainers had reached Tier 4.
A bead of cold sweat ran down the forehead of Hilly, who had been Tier 6.
“Huh?”
Only then did the corner of Hana’s mouth lift slightly.
“I’ve been using deception for hundreds of years. I’m sick of it.”
With those words, Hana began her offensive.
***
While Hana fought Hilly of the Netherworld,
Duke observed Hana’s battle from the southern fortress using Rex’s abilities.
[Stay calm.]
He also took the opportunity to offer advice.
[Their deaths are tragic, but this is a time to suppress your grief.]
In the original story, Hana had to face that necromancer under the worst possible conditions.
Before the battle began, she had not known that the citizens were corpses, and she had to feel guilty as she put them down.
Her mind was worn down once amid the corpses’ screams,
and after barely managing to kill Hilly through a combined attack with her retainers, she allowed the woman, who had pretended to be dead, to ambush her.
Moreover, Hana in the original story had been Tier 5.
She had only recently reached Level 50, at that.
As a result, she was toyed with by the Tier 6 Hilly and eventually had to devour her retainers.
She could not even think of a way to kill Hilly, who kept rising no matter how many times she was killed, and was forced to devour that filthy woman as well.
But in this world, Duke did not allow even the slightest possibility of that happening.
[Look closely at the blood. That is not the blood of the living. You were not the one who desecrated their rest, so set aside your guilt.]
[Close your ears to the screams. Those are empty shells. Your citizens must be cheering you on, wishing for you to avenge them.]
[To the Netherworld School, bodily death is merely one stage of the process. That woman’s soul has not yet left this earth, so keep watching her.]
Hana maintained her composure by using Duke’s deep voice echoing in her head as ASMR.
Moreover, unlike in the original story, Hana had reached Tier 6 as well,
“Aaaagh!”
“Don’t be so dramatic. This is the mayor’s revenge.”
and had reached the point where she could butcher Hilly one-sidedly.
“Don’t make me laugh! You said she was Tier 5! That’s what I heard from the lords’ brains!”
“I have a condition where my level rises when I wake up in the morning.”
“You damn bitch! Die!”
Hana leaped into the shadows to lightly evade Hilly’s attack, then drew thread from the shadows and severed Hilly’s ankle.
Hana was not the only one troubling Hilly at every turn; her retainers did so as well.
Although the difference in tiers prevented them from landing any proper effective blows, they could at least wrap chains around her arms and make it troublesome for her to move.
“You rat bastards!”
Her retainers brushed off Hilly’s curses.
Compared to the greatsword of a certain knight, which would likely send her to the afterlife if it truly struck her once, Hilly’s rusty whip was both lighter and slower.
As Hilly’s body was gradually whittled away, she grew increasingly frantic.
‘These people know the Netherworld School’s weakness.’
Netherworld
A space located on the boundary between life and death.
The heroes of the school who kept their souls there could not die from bodily death.
But that did not mean there was no way to kill them.
One was to keep slicing their bodies apart until their mana ran out.
The other was to sever the anchor of the soul that had descended into this world.
The latter method exploited the fact that a soul disconnected from its anchor was expelled from the boundary and swept into the underworld.
And Hana was aiming for the latter.
‘They’ve been looking for my anchor this whole time.’
Much like an elder lich’s life vessel.
That anchor was also hidden somewhere within the body.
Hilly was subtly moving the core to different organs in real time, preventing it from being discovered,
but at this rate, it was only a matter of time before she was swept into the underworld like her fellow disciples.
‘It can’t end like this!’
How hard-won was her freedom?
How hard-won were her secret manuals?
When one of the Thirteen Calamity Stars stormed the Netherworld heroes’ headquarters and slaughtered her master and fellow disciples, Hilly had hidden alone in the secret-manual vault and escaped after stealing several manuals.
Using those manuals, she piled up countless corpses and reached Tier 6.
Even though she was wanted in every kingdom, she had reached a level where she could not easily be captured.
But to die here···
‘No!’
She had a mission to restore her fallen family.
Remembering that mission, Hilly clenched her teeth and made one last desperate effort.
“Kyaaagh!”
Hilly’s body transformed into a black cat with four pairs of eyes.
“I—!”
But when Hilly met Hana’s eyes, she clamped her mouth shut.
Throughout the battle, Hana had been as impassive as though wearing an iron mask, yet she was now lifting the corners of her mouth as she looked at Hilly, who had transformed into a black cat.
Hana even snapped her fingers as though she had been waiting for this.
“Forehead.”
A chill ran down Hilly’s spine at that single word.
In her Cat of Calamity state, Hilly could place her soul’s anchor only in her forehead.
Of course, that would not normally matter, since her head could not be shattered even by most Tier 6 attacks in this state,
‘She’s smiling?’
Anxiety swept over Hilly when she saw Hana’s smile.
Then, as though affirming that anxiety, Hana neatly clasped her hands before her chest as though in prayer.
A hooded grim reaper appeared behind her, its hands clasped together.
“Soul Guide of the Underworld”
A reaper who guides souls to the afterlife.
As though responding to its true name, the reaper dropped the great scythe into the shadows and removed its robe.
A woman with long, flowing hair appeared beneath the robe.
The woman’s robe fluttered as she drew a saber with her pale hand.
Her hair, dark as shadow, extended into Hana’s shadow, seeming to connect the two of them.
At last, a dark, ink-colored saber appeared in Hana’s hand.
Hana took a draw stance and muttered,
“The living to this world, the dead to the next.”
Hilly was horrified.
The Black Wing School’s ultimate technique.
The Living Go to the Sunlit Realm, the Dead Return to the Underworld
An ultimate technique that could not affect anything with life, but could cut anything without life regardless of its condition.
That single technique could make every necromancer wail from the neck.
‘But that is···’
It was unquestionably an ultimate technique that only someone at Tier 7 could learn.
But Hana’s realm was nowhere near sufficient for her to learn it.
‘The price of failure would be offering my life to the reaper.’
It was not difficult to determine whether it had failed.
If the sword was drawn from its scabbard, the reaper would attack the enemy; if it was not drawn, it would behead the caster.
But Hana drew her dark saber without hesitation.
Shing.
“Ah.”
As the saber shyly emerged from Hana’s hand, Hilly sighed.
The reaper, which had been hanging its head as though sobbing until just moments ago, raised its head and met Hilly’s eyes.
That alone left Hilly’s body unable to move.
As though her shadow had been pinned somewhere.
“Save me—”
The reaper unsheathed its sword without giving her even enough time to speak her last words.
As the reaper’s sword passed through, the Cat of Calamity’s head split in half, and a split core rolled out from within it.
The cat that had lost its core no longer moved.
“··· Is it over?”
When one retainer tactlessly muttered that, the others looked at him as though they were about to roll him in a mat and beat him.
“That guy.”
“Someone should sew his mouth shut.”
But whether fortunately or not, the cat no longer moved.
Afterward, they thoroughly inspected the corpse just in case and confirmed Hilly’s death.
“My lady. What should we do with the corpse?”
“Recover it and burn it outside the city. There is no place for anything filthy on this sacred ground.”
Hana ordered her retainers about and headed for the surface.
Having defeated the evil hero of the empire, the Sneria lord once again began observing a moment of silence for the city.
[Even if your chest burns like a conflagration, even if indignation chokes your heart, this is not yet the time to express it. It is your duty to honor their souls by offering that woman’s head on a pike as flowers.]
Recalling Duke’s advice during the battle, she lowered her head.
“Now let us hold the belated funeral.”
Paying her respects to those who had departed, she buried countless emotions in her heart.
***
After finishing her revenge, Hana hurried back to Duke’s side.
It certainly was not because she was looking forward to the ‘formal contract’ that would await her after the victory.
··· To be honest, she was looking forward to it just a little.
The fact that this little amounted to eighty percent was her secret alone.
As Hana hurried toward the southern front,
the ashes of the being once called Hilly, carefully burned, rode the wind toward the wasteland.
Before long, the ashes gathered over the wasteland and took the form of a woman’s body.
[Damn it damn it damn it damn it]
The soul formed from ash threw a hysterical fit.
[My tier!]
A secret art of the Netherworld School.
Wraith of Ash
A technique that uses a trace of the body no bigger than a pinch of dust as an anchor to escape the underworld once.
However, because this method extracted only the soul’s consciousness, most of the realm contained within that soul had to be left behind in the underworld.
As a result, Hilly’s wraith, which had been Tier 6, had fallen to Tier 4.
Hilly vented her anger by killing innocent goats in the wasteland, and only calmed down after the goat corpses had formed a hill.
[Right. I’m starting over from the beginning.]
Although she had lost her realm, her knowledge of the secret manuals remained in her head.
Moreover, she had gained something from the final battle.
‘This is supposed to be Ophir’s stone tomb.’
Normally, one had to rummage through a dead person’s brain to read their memories, but with a little effort, it was possible to read the surface memories of the living.
It was difficult to obtain the desired information, and she could only skim the information the other person remembered most intensely at that moment,
and, finally, the right half of her soul had melted away as the price of overexerting herself, but it had been worth it.
‘I don’t know why the Sneria lord knows the location of Ophir’s stone tomb, though.’
It was the greatest harvest of all.
Of course, this had happened by chance.
The urge to return to Duke after the battle, the fact that the Netherworld School had been a school from the imperial era, and the funeral for the city’s citizens···
Duke, the empire, and the funeral.
Those three keywords had briefly made Hilly think of Ophir’s stone tomb, and she had read it.
‘This is worth more than a secret manual.’
To a necromancer, Ophir’s corpse was more valuable than the knowledge possessed by the Netherworld School’s grandmaster.
The magic that could be obtained from a corpse was valuable enough, but if she could revive that corpse and restore the skills of its former life···
‘I can become the emperor of a new empire.’
Imagining herself controlling Ophir’s corpse like a puppet, Hilly burst into manic laughter with the left half of her body that was at least still normal.
[So this is the stone tomb.]
She opened Ophir’s stone tomb with an eager heart.
When she dispelled the barrier and opened the door, the thick afterglow of mana poured out from within.
Feeling that lingering mana, Hilly became certain.
‘Mana this dense even after death!’
It had to be Ophir’s tomb.
Hilly entered the tomb with her heart pounding in anticipation.
It was the worst choice Hilly could have made.
Just as Hana had been so distracted by heading back that she had carelessly failed to confirm Hilly’s death,
(Of course, no amount of vigilance would have allowed her to notice.)
Hilly, too, neglected her vigilance as she stepped into the tomb.
When the wraith made of ash crossed the entrance to Ophir’s stone tomb, a concealed alarm spell was transmitted to Duke.
‘Hm?’
Duke, who had been dozing while leaning against his greatsword on the southern wall, raised his head.
‘That bitch?’
Duke’s mind began turning faster than ever.
After finishing his calculations in a few seconds, Duke immediately devised a scenario.
‘I hadn’t had anyone to play the final boss against in this event.’
That damn woman was making the plot happen for him all on her own.
Duke pulled his greatsword from the wall and returned it to subspace, then called over a knight of similar build to himself.
“Something has come up. I’d like you to take my place.”
“Yes?”
Just as he had done on the eastern front, Duke dumped the southern front on the knight and began preparing to leave.
‘Ophir won’t be a problem.’
If Duke appeared in three or more locations, there would be a problem.
That was why he had been unable to follow Hana.
But even Duke’s mind could understand that there would be no military problem with Duke remaining as he was in two locations while appearing as Ophir in one.
‘You’re walking into your own grave.’
Duke headed toward the fake stone tomb where Hilly would find him.
***
Meanwhile, Rex was enjoying the peace in his office.
After finishing all his work for once and idly spending time in his office, a red warning light suddenly appeared in his field of vision.
<Warning! Warning!>
“What?! Has a dragon appeared in the domain?!”
Rex hurriedly checked the red warning window.
The system thrust a status window in front of Rex’s face.
<Hero Duke Urwick has been temporarily deactivated!>
“????”
Rex tried to figure out what was happening, but heroes who did not belong to Rex could not share their location or field of vision with him.
“What? Why?”
There was only one fact Rex could confirm···
“Why did he suddenly turn back into Ophir?!”
The fact that Duke’s status window had changed to Ophir.
===========
Ophir
[Title]-------
- <The Snake That Devoured the Empire>
- <One of the Thirteen Calamity Stars>
Other information unavailable
===========
One piece of information flashed through Rex’s mind when he saw this.
‘No way···’
===========
<The Blade of Cruel and Beautiful Loyalty -EX>
- If loyalty goes unrewarded, a penalty worse than betrayal is imposed!
===========
‘Heeeeeek!!!!’
When Rex began convulsing, Ari, who had been cleaning on the other side of the mansion, hurriedly ran to the office.
“G’narhl k’thalu vrakk! Zai r’luhhor ai nafl kadishtu!
(We are all falling into ruin!)”
“What? Master? What’s wrong!”
“Aaaagh!!!!”
Rex’s convulsions continued for the next two hours, until Ophir returned to being Duke and the misunderstanding was cleared up.