Then what had happened? It almost seemed like the lizardmen had powered up somehow. The way they were now, probably only the skeleton archers and riders could match them.
Even as he watched, the skeletons rapidly crumbled. SO THE ONLY PURPOSE THE SKELETONS AND ZOMBIES SERVE IS TO TIRE THEM OUT? In that case, his only effective units were the three hundred undead beasts, the one hundred and fifty skeleton archers, and the hundred skeleton riders—only five hundred and fifty. It was a reversal in numbers.
Cocytus did some calculations in his head. Undead were strong. Especially in a protracted battle, there weren’t so many who could defeat them. Undead didn’t feel fear, pain, or anything. Fatigue was also a nonfactor, and they didn’t require sleep. It went without saying how much of an advantage that became during a war.
Suppose one were hit in the head with a stone mace. That would mean instant death for a living thing, if it’s unlucky, but even with luck, there would be severe pain and a lot of bleeding. It’s a self-evident truth that it would very quickly lose the will to fight. Of course, there were soldiers who underwent training to withstand pain and wouldn’t give up so quickly, but for most, that would be their breaking point. That was only natural for a living thing.
But what about an undead?
If its head was cracked open? It would attack with its brains spilling out.
Its arms were broken? It would attack with its broken arms.
No legs? It would crawl.
Indeed, an undead would continue to move until it lost every remnant of its false life. As long as the conditions for instant death weren’t met—often decapitation for lower-level undead—they wouldn’t succumb to pain like humans did. In that sense, undead were the ideal soldiers.
THE LIZARDMEN HAVE BESTED THEM ON AN INDIVIDUAL LEVEL—I’LL ADMIT THAT. BUT HOW LONG CAN THAT LAST? Cocytus raised his opinion of the lizardmen up a notch and concluded that it wouldn’t be possible to crush them all at once. What he needed to do was draw out the battle.
“SHOULD WE PULL BACK AND SEE HOW WE’RE DOING?”
“That seems like a good idea.”
“I think we should send the archers and riders out there.”
“Nah, nah, keep pushing like we are now and wait until they’re exhausted.”
“And then what? If we don’t take the enemy base, they’ll just go there to recover and that’ll be that.”
“That’s true. It seems like they’ve strengthened their defenses, but those walls are flimsy. Why don’t we sack that village, then encircle their forces and annihilate them?”
Having gotten input from a number of minions, Cocytus picked up a Message scroll. He glanced at Entoma.
She was looking with disinterest at the mirror. She had brought something like a green cookie up near her jaw. Soon after came light crunching noises. Her attitude suggested she thought none of this was her concern. Perhaps that explained her expressionless face.
NO, THAT’S JUST FOR LOOKS. He recalled her true form and realized how foolish he was for checking her expression. Cocytus’s friend and one of the five most-evil beings in Nazarick, the Prince of Fear, called her a “most horrible” predator of his relatives. That was her true nature.
He gave up on trying to grasp the feelings of their master (who must have been the reason she was there) from her face and used the scroll to Message the commander.
“Are they underestimating us?” Zenbel murmured. His voice was low, but from where he was, getting a view from the top of the mud wall, it was loud enough that everyone could hear him.
“The archers and riders haven’t budged!” complained Zenbel. “All I can think is that they’re mocking us.”
“Yeah. I figured they’d come all at once to crush us…,” said the Small Fang chief.
“Zombie fight…going well.”
There were only forty-five lizardmen facing the zombies, mostly consisting of the few hunters. They repeatedly threw rocks and retreated. And little by little, they were leading them farther away from the skeletons. The females had moved to dig into the skeletons’ flank.
“Their movements are kinda strange.”
“Seriously.”
The zombies were moving less like they were following orders and more like they were just completely distracted. Was there a commander who would approve of their troops moving like that? No, that was out of the question. But that was how they were moving. So was it part of the enemy’s plan? Everyone racked their brains.
“I just don’t get it.”
“Yup, agree…Shasuryu.”
No matter how hard they thought, they couldn’t come up with any meaning the zombies’ actions could possibly have.
After watching everyone for a while, Zaryusu told them what he thought. “Could it be there’s no commander?”
“No commander…? Oh, you mean like they were just given initial orders and are following those only?”
“Yeah, like that.”
Lower-tier undead like zombies and skeletons, for all intents and purposes, had no intelligence of their own. It was most effective to give them orders in real time. It seemed like in this instance the zombies had only been given the order to kill nearby lizardmen.
“So they think they can win as long as they outnumber us? Or could this fight just be a test to see how long they can last with no commander?” said Zenbel.
“Maybe.”
“Are you fucking kidding me? Those bastards!” The one who had yelled wasn’t Zenbel but Shasuryu. Even he couldn’t take this sitting down. They were all risking their lives.
“Do you mind calming down, Shasuryu? It’s not like that’s for sure what’s going on,” said the Small Fang chief.
“Yeah, sorry… I’m glad things are going well.”
“Right, brother. For now, we just have to cut down their numbers as much as we can.”
Combat fatigue wasn’t something to sniff at. In a melee fight, the mental wear and tear was unimaginable. On a battlefield, where they could be attacked from any direction, just swinging their weapons a few times would cause double the exhaustion.
But the undead didn’t feel that. They would just keep attacking without rest.
The more time passed, the more obvious that gap between the living and the dead would become.
In other words, time was the lizardmen’s enemy.
“Tch, I should be out there.”
“Contain…self, Zenbel.”
Certainly if they brought out Zenbel’s powerful arm, the skeletons would be gone in no time. But that would mean showing their hand. Zaryusu and the other five had to remain as trump cards. Of course, they would go if they were truly out of options, but otherwise they needed to keep their potential to themselves until a really strong enemy appeared.
“But it’s quite convenient for us that they aren’t coming this way,” said Zaryusu, garnering agreement. Then he asked Crusch, “Are things going okay on your end?”
“…Yes, the ritual is going fine,” she answered, looking into the village. The priests were currently conducting a ritual that had the potential to give the lizardmen another trump card. Normally it would take an extremely long time, but with all the priests from each tribe cooperating, they would finish in time to use it during the battle.
“…It’s amazing what we can accomplish when we work together.”
“Hmm…yeah. After the war we shared just a little bit of information, but…this time, after the fight is over, there are so many more things I want to do.”
The other chiefs nodded emphatically at Shasuryu’s remark. This was the first time they were exchanging and pooling knowledge, and they could clearly see how much it would help all the tribes to grow. The realization hit hardest for the three chiefs who had allied before yet never exchanged knowledge.
Zaryusu looked at the five chiefs and laughed.
“What’s so funny?” asked Crusch.
“Nah, I mean, I know it’s a bad time, but I’m just happy.”
Crusch
instantly understood how he felt. “I get it, Zaryusu.”
Zaryusu crinkled his eyes, as if Crusch’s smile were the sun itself. Both their gazes were full of longing and affection.
Their bodies were separated. Of course they were. At this very moment, there were lizardmen going to their deaths. They couldn’t answer the feelings in their hearts while that was going on. But their tails were moving with minds of their own, poking and drawing back.
“Mph…”
“Whaddaya make of it, big bro?”
“They’re in their own world.”
“Steamy.”
“My conclusion: It’s great to be young. You have a future.”
The four older lizardmen nodded as they watched the cute couple.
Of course, Zaryusu and Crusch could hear them talking. As their tails whipped around, they got their expressions under control.
“Brother, they’re on the move.”
The change of topic was so fast Shasuryu and the others grinned awkwardly as they turned their attention to the enemy army. The skeleton riders had set out on a big curve.
“Whoa, whoa, are they coming this way?”
“With the riders? Are they trying to unsettle us by attacking this position?”
“No, aren’t they trying to get around the rear of the warriors and males to surround and wipe them out?”
This is bad.
Without saying it, everyone reached the same conclusion. The skeleton riders were a problem.
If they had moved right away, the lizardmen could have crushed them. But now the warriors and males were in a melee battle, the hunters were drawing the zombies away, and the females had begun hurling rocks at the skeletons’ flank. The lizardmen didn’t have the force to suppress the skeleton riders now.
“Maybe it’s time for us to move.”
Shasuryu nodded at the Small Fang chief’s idea. “The question is who should go. Yeah, it’s time to make our first move.”
Skeleton riders—or skeletons equipped with lances mounted on similarly bony horses. They didn’t have any special powers aside from how easy they were to deploy, but their mobility in the marsh was outstanding. Since their bony bodies didn’t sink very far into the mud, they were able to move at a horse’s pace.
The hundred units took a long detour to arrive behind the lizardmen for a rear assault.
They detected the figures of three lizardmen coming toward them up ahead on the left, but they ignored them. The newcomers to the battle weren’t included in their orders, so until they were attacked, they wouldn’t have anything to do with them. That was just how undead with no intelligence operated.
They had nearly reached the back of the lizardman army when the rider out in front found his vision spinning wildly. The skeleton had been thrown high into the air, falling swiftly into the marsh.
A human would’ve been confused and unable to act right away, but the unintelligent, undead skeleton rider promptly moved to carry out its orders. It stood up immediately but did stumble from the heavy damage.
Another rider went tumbling into the first, and the two units’ bones broke apart and scattered into the marsh.
This was happening here and there on the marsh, but why?
The answer was extremely simple: traps. The lizardmen had buried wooden boxes in the water. When the horses stepped into them, their momentum caused them to trip.
Skeleton riders went tumbling one after another. Humans would have slowed down or taken some kind of countermeasure, but these riders did not. They might have had the judgment to detour around a gaping hole but not to guard against hidden traps—such thinking was outside the scope of their orders, and they didn’t have the intelligence to adapt to their situation.
Maintaining their speed and charging straight into the traps was like mass suicide. Still, although the traps were effective, all they did was slow them down. They dealt some damage, but it wasn’t enough to destroy them. The riders scattered around just picked their muddied selves up.
Then a sharp whistling sound rang out, and one of the fallen skeleton riders’ heads exploded.
Detecting a hostile party, the riders scanned the area.
Then another head shattered like glass.
The riders discovered the three lizardmen at a distance of a little over eighty-five yards—and that it was rocks launched with pinpoint accuracy from their slings that were knocking off their heads. The skeleton riders advanced.
At the same time, the battle with the skeletons on the ground was reaching a turning point. After the twang of a great many bows came the sound of arrows raining down. The one hundred and fifty skeleton archers fired the bolts over lizardmen and skeletons alike. It wasn’t over with one volley; there was a second, a third…
This attack took the lizardmen by surprise. Several were hit and crumpled to the ground. They couldn’t protect themselves against the cascade while in combat with the skeletons.
Of course, the arrows hit the skeletons, too, but they didn’t take damage. While the piercing damage-resistant skeletons pushed forward, the skeleton archers loosed their arrows from behind. It was a brilliant maneuver. Considering the time it would take to completely obliterate a 2,200-strong vanguard in order to reach the archers, this should have doomed the lizardmen.
The problem was that it came too late. If they had carried out this plan in the beginning of the battle, it would have proven fatal for the lizardmen. They would have been overwhelmed by the numerical disparity, and the battle would have ended differently. But now the outcome was already decided.
The lizardmen ignored the skeletons, having already whittled their numbers, and charged directly at the archers. One hundred and fifty arrows rained down, and several lizardmen collapsed into the mud—but not all of them.
Lizardmen had thick skin and tough scales. Even without armor, they had the same defenses as a human in leather armor. Even if an arrow pierced their skin, their thick muscles would save their life.
Part of the reason fewer fell was that the skeleton archers didn’t have a great deal of strength for drawing their bows. The force behind their attacks wasn’t enough to kill a lizardman.
With battle cries, the lizardmen fearlessly pushed through. When the deadly barrage came a second time, they protected their heads with their arms. They ran for their lives as the hail of missiles pierced skin and tore through bodies.
A third volley…
That was about all the skeleton archers could do. If they’d had any intelligence, they probably would have retreated. If they had fallen back temporarily and fought cohesively with the rest of the remaining undead army, there might have been a way for them to retain their usefulness in the fray.
However, they lacked the brains that allowed for such a complicated directive, and in any case, those orders had never been given. They followed the simple orders they had—and continued shooting arrows at the lizardmen even when they were practically on top of one another.
A war cry went up, and a wave of lizardmen swallowed the skeleton archers just like it had the skeletons. The long-range fighters didn’t have any room to use their bows. They fell into the soggy earth under the lizardmen attacks. There were still zombies remaining, but almost all the skeletons had been defeated.
This was when a new enemy was finally unleashed—the undead beasts. They were undead made from the corpses of a variety of animals like wolves, snakes, boars—monsters that combined zombie endurance with animal dexterity.
The undead beasts headed straight for the lizardmen. Some were fast, some were slow—it was a disjointed charge with no sense of rank or formation.
Attacks that came from below were surprisingly hard to dodge. The beasts employed the animal-like method of biting at their enemies’ ankles to slow and drag them down before dealing the final blow.
For the lizardmen, who were already tired, this was a problem indeed. A number of them who were slow to react had their throats ripped out. When a comrade fell at a warrior’s side,
it didn’t matter if they’d braced themselves mentally or if they believed the ancestral spirits were with them—they couldn’t deny that their morale was shaken.
The head warriors fought at the front of the line, but the pressure was gradually increasing; it was only a matter of time before the lizardman lines broke, and they routed. It was at that moment when the marsh rippled with excitement.
Two cones of mud standing a little over five feet high with no arms, legs, or heads appeared…
…and began to move.
Though they had no feet, they moved nimbly across the marsh, gliding, advancing on the undead beasts. Once they’d gotten closer, they reached out whiplike appendages, longer than the mud creatures were tall, from about where the arms would have been on a person.
These were one of the lizardmen’s trump cards, which the priests had combined their powers to summon: swamp elementals.
The swamp elementals plowed into the pack of undead beasts, struck with their whiplike tentacles, and yanked some of them off the ground. Of course, the undead beasts countered, scratching with their claws and biting with their fangs.
Both sides were fearless in the fray, but gradually it became clear the swamp elementals had the advantage. It was simply a matter of an imbalance in individual potential.
The power of their own priests was winning against the undead. Seeing this restored the courage of the lizardmen warriors, and they took up the charge once more.
Thus began a gruesome brawl. In this battle, unlike the one with the skeletons up till now, numerous lizardmen lost their lives. But the lizardmen held the numerical advantage now, and the balance of battle began to tip in their favor.
WE’RE GOING TO LOSE.
Cocytus understood that. None of the undead in the troops he was given had intelligence. That was why they’d lost, and he’d been afraid of that since the beginning. But he hadn’t expected them to be so weak.
The Lizardman Heroes Page 13