Skeleton Knight in Another World Vol. 5

by Ennki Hakari

  I turned my attention away for a moment to look up at the darkening sky. Once night fell, it would become infinitely more difficult for me to use my teleportation magic.

  The original plan had been to slip into the town unnoticed among the chaos and free the enslaved mountain people, but I couldn’t just leave the dark giants to run around freely, causing havoc.

  Well, havoc had already been caused. But I didn’t want to see it get any worse.

  From where I stood, I counted seven dark giants assembling around the church.

  I took a deep breath, drew the Holy Thunder Sword of Caladbolg with my right hand and hefted the Holy Shield of Teutates with my left.

  “Kyii!”

  Sensing that it was time for battle again, Ponta dropped down from my head and wrapped itself around my neck like a scarf. I brushed its fluffy tail aside to keep it from obscuring my vision.

  “Off we go.”

  I let out the breath I’d been holding and used Dimensional Step to teleport me atop one of the buildings inside the church grounds. It gave me a good line of sight over the surrounding area.

  The church was larger than any other building in town and immaculately decorated, though its design was still more reserved than the churches I’d seen back up on the northern continent. Probably the most unique feature was the large wall that enclosed the church grounds.

  Back in my world, I couldn’t recall seeing any churches surrounded by walls, given that the whole point of a church was to be open to all. It seemed a bit odd to me. But this was a different world. Back before the town had exploded in size, the church might have been designed as an evacuation point in the event of a monster attack.

  In front of me, I watched as people flooded through the church’s entrance.

  Anyone who showed even a moment’s hesitation was snatched up and thrown into the mouth of one of the pursuing dark giants. I could hear the awful sounds as they crunched down.

  Just watching the scene unfold was enough to make me sick to my stomach.

  Unfortunately, even those who did make it past the church’s walls weren’t necessarily safe. The dark giants were already aggressively swinging their stone axes into the wall.

  More crashes. More screams.

  The dark giants lumbered through the hole they’d bashed in the wall and began screeching as they stomped on the people in the courtyard as if they were ants.

  I couldn’t get a clear look from where I stood, but the screams I heard told the whole story.

  My sword hand trembled. Was this…fear? Why?

  I remembered what I’d done for the fallen woman earlier. I dropped my sword, took off my helmet, and touched my face.

  It wasn’t that of a cold, hard skull.

  I let out a sigh as the tips of my fingers touched flesh.

  Apparently, the effects of the spring water hadn’t worn off yet. So this emotion causing me to pause in the face of giants was…real. The feelings of fear surfaced whenever I returned to my elven form, and that was causing my feet to betray me and keep me from moving forward.

  I squeezed my fists several times, trying to force the fear down.

  No matter how overpowered this body of flesh and blood might be, without the proper experience and training to prepare the soul, it was like a weapon left in cold storage. I laughed weakly.

  “Kyii?”

  Ponta looked up from my neck, concern clear on its face.

  “It’s okay, Ponta. This will be a good exercise for me. If I plan to face my foes as an elf, I’ll need to prepare myself for combat.”

  Though I was speaking to Ponta, the words were more for me. I put my helmet back on, closed my eyes, and banged on my forehead several times with my fist.

  “I’m ready.”

  I made a brief list of skills that could be useful in the upcoming battle, then retrieved the Holy Thunder Sword of Caladbolg from the roof with an energetic yell.

  For my first target, I picked one of the dark giants a little farther into the courtyard, away from the others. Getting the drop on your enemy was one of the essentials of combat. Now that I thought about it, the very first battle I’d gotten into, when I first appeared in this world, had also relied on the element of surprise.

  It seemed a bit easy, considering all the power I could harbor, but I thought it best to build up my experience slowly.

  I held my sword at the ready and focused on a spot behind the dark giant.

  “Dimensional Step!”

  In an instant, I was standing atop another roof, staring at the giant’s back. Holding my sword up, I readied my next attack.

  Just then, I heard a man’s voice booming from within the church grounds.

  “Now just wait a minute here! You leave my house alone, you hear me?!”

  The voice shook the very ground beneath me and left me with a deep sense of unease. And yet, there was also something incredibly immature about it, which only contributed to how uncanny it sounded.

  “You’ve got me real mad now! I’m going to rip you to shreds!”

  The eerie, immature voice echoed around me. A massive explosion tore through the air as part of the church’s wall blew away.

  The panicking masses, and even the dark giants that were munching on them, all looked over in surprise.

  Amid the slowly dispersing cloud of dust stood a hideous, indescribable form that somehow managed to make the dark giants look cute by comparison.

  The best description I could come up with was that it looked vaguely like a scorpion with the face of a caterpillar. Its massive body was pale white, and it was about ten meters long. It looked rather squishy. Countless human heads, tortured expressions on their faces, covered the body of the creature. I could faintly hear moans escaping their lips, as if they were still alive. The whole thing was supported by innumerable pale, white human legs running along its stomach like fine hairs. The legs caused the creature to undulate as it slid its body along.

  The back of the creature was curled up like a shrimp. At the tip of the raised section was a body that looked like a cross between a frog and a man. This appeared to be the source of the voice I’d heard earlier. A large, fleshy mass grew out of the frogman’s back with a multitude of long, multi-jointed arms sprouting out of it. Each of the hands carried a hatchet, club, mace, or some other weapon.

  It was truly a creature of nightmare.

  The disturbing scorpion-caterpillar launched its raised section toward a nearby dark giant, the innumerable arms descending on it with weapons drawn, but I knew the dark giant’s stiff fur did a good job protecting it from being harmed by most normal weapons.

  The giant pulled up its axe and tried fighting back, but it was only a few moments before it dropped to the ground from its injuries.

  The large scorpion-like creature opened its immense mouth lined with hundreds of teeth. It looked like a giant alligator as it swooped in and swallowed the dark giant whole, a sickening squishing noise filling the air as its mouth closed.

  Even given its immense size, I was amazed to see the scorpion-caterpillar swallow a dark giant whole. I could hardly believe my eyes.

  I briefly considered the possibility that maybe there was someone else out there who could also summon demons and was trying to protect the townsfolk, but I knew in my heart that the world wasn’t that kind.

  After taking down the dark giant, the creature slithered toward some of the humans cowering in fear nearby. It opened its mouth again and chomped down on them.

  I realized that this was no angel of the church, but yet another of the many indescribable monsters that inhabited this world.

  The people quickly descended into panic, which was a pretty reasonable reaction.

  I heard them scream and flee in terror as the bizarre creature called after them.

  “Aww, but being like this makes me soooo hungry.”

  He sounded so casual as he spoke, inhaling people with his large mouth, like a whale might suck up krill. It was a scene of indiscrimina
te carnage.

  After seeing their comrade taken down, the rest of the dark giants descended upon the massive creature. However, the result was the same each time: They, along with the other humans running for their lives, just ended up as another snack in the creature’s belly.

  The faces howling in agony along the creature’s body increased.

  All I could do was watch as the large, pale creature wriggled forward on countless legs, its frog-human body gazing at the carnage in front of it.

  “Kyiii…”

  Ponta’s worried cry brought me back to reality.

  “Sorry about that, Ponta.”

  The scene only got worse as a swarm of skeleton soldiers swept in, chasing after the refugees who’d escaped to the church.

  It didn’t do me any good to try and make sense of the situation right now.

  If the tiger clan ran across this creature, it wouldn’t end well for them.

  Fortunately, the creature still hadn’t noticed me. I still had the element of surprise.

  I began waving the Holy Thunder Sword of Caladbolg, its blade slowly taking on a light blue glow. With a smash, I brought the blade straight down into the ground.

  “Sword of Judgment!”

  The scorpion creature was looking in another direction, so I was sure everything was about to play out perfectly.

  Despite putting in even more power than usual, in order to make sure I’d finish the thing off, as soon as the rune appeared underneath the creature, the faces that lined its body let out moans of agony, and it quickly skittered out of the way. The sword of light shot straight up into the air, totally missing its mark.

  I was impressed at how fast a thing that size could move.

  The frog-man looming over the creature seemed to be steering it around like some living vehicle—a kind of demon go-kart.

  I silently cursed as I readied myself for my next attack. Unfortunately, the creature had finally caught sight of me. That didn’t take long.

  The creature undulated as it moved, turning its massive body toward me.

  “Who dares oppose me?! All right men, destroy him!”

  His eerie voice rang in my ear like that of an impetuous child. The countless legs lining its belly trembled as the creature came toward me at full speed. Yep, I’d been found.

  “Holy Shield!”

  I took off in a sprint, shield at the ready as I called forth my defensive spell.

  At nearly the same instant, the multi-armed creature descended upon me. I could hear its blows smashing against my glowing shield as I slashed out with my own sword, lopping off several of the incoming arms.

  Fortunately, the pale flesh had nowhere near the defensive abilities of the giants, and my weapon easily cut through them.

  “You jerk! You big, fat, stupid jeeeeeeerk!”

  The creature was clearly annoyed as it began throwing a fit. Deciding on another strategy, it rushed at me, trying to crush me.

  I was able to dodge the attack with a quick teleport. The creature turned frantically from side to side, trying to see where I went.

  Apparently, his view was fixed, and he could only look in the direction his body was facing.

  In that case, I should be able to just attack it from behind, constantly moving out of its line of sight and attacking again.

  I readied my sword once more and called forth another of my skills, this time a fast, short-range technique.

  “Holy Ray Sword!”

  I swung my glowing blade down, sending out a beam of light in a straight line toward the creature’s feet. It let out a loud, wailing cry.

  The creature slumped to one side as it turned to face me. There was something rather nauseating about how it moved.

  “You jerk! You bastard! You, you, you… I hate you!”

  The frog-man attached to the back of the creature continued screaming a variety of epithets at me as it lunged in once more. I wasn’t really interested in fighting this thing face to face, though.

  I dodged the attack and unleashed another Holy Ray Sword, but this time I was only able to lop off a few more legs as it deftly moved out of the way.

  I glared back at the thing, silently hurling similar complaints back at it.

  The massive creature seemed to grow in size, the faces lining its body bloating, their mouths going wide. In unison, they each vomited up a pale, amorphous mass around the size of a grown man.

  These vomited lumps of muscle began twitching about in a grotesque manner before standing up under their own power. They looked like eels that had embedded themselves deep in the sea floor, wriggling about as they searched for food.

  Numerous tendrils began growing out of the sides of these writhing creatures before they started crawling along like inchworms.

  They squirmed about in bizarre fashion for a short time before bounding into the air like fleas, flying right toward me.

  “Yeagh, ewww!”

  I used my shield and sword to block and chop down the numerous masses of flesh that came flying at me.

  Everywhere I looked, all I could see was more of these writhing creatures. I couldn’t get a fix on a location to teleport to.

  None of the incoming enemies were particularly strong on their own. They posed little individual threat, but there were just so many of them…and they were disgusting to boot.

  I wasn’t making any progress, so I decided to use one of my Magus area-of-effect spells.

  “Flame Viper!”

  Flames began licking around my feet before turning into a column of fire surrounding me. A flaming snake rose up from the column and began torching the monsters.

  At least they weren’t resistant to fire, as far as I could tell.

  My surroundings looked like a sci-fi movie, the landscape covered in the charred remains of alien larva.

  Now that I was ready to get back into the fight with the creature itself, I discovered that it had its large, alligator-like mouth wide open, an ominous sound echoing out from deep inside. The wailing of the faces embedded in its skin increased in pitch.

  “Veeveeeeveeeveeveeeveeaaaaaaaaugh!!!”

  The sound on its own was enough to make me feel uneasy, but the volume made it all the worse. My legs wobbled, then gave out on me entirely, sending me to my knees. Ponta slipped off my neck.

  “Ngah, does he have debuff spells too?”

  I used my sword like a cane to support myself, running through the litany of recovery spells I knew in an attempt to ward off the debuffing effects.

  “Uncurse!”

  “Anti-disease!”

  They seemed to have at least some effect, since I felt my strength come back to me. Just to be on the safe side, I used the recovery spells on Ponta as well.

  I let out a yell to focus myself and turned toward the creature, ready to face it head-on. Once I got a look at it, however, I immediately understood the purpose of its debuffing attack.

  New fleshy-looking objects were growing out of the creature’s stomach. It looked like it was regenerating before my eyes and growing new legs.

  Its regeneration wasn’t fast by any means, but this whole situation didn’t look good.

  Back in the game, enemies that had regeneration abilities usually needed to be attacked by multiple people, all timing their attacks perfectly to prevent the monster from regenerating. Right now, it was only me.

  I felt like I was fighting the boss all on my own.

  Of course, the solution was simple: I needed to keep attacking the creature and not give it any time to regenerate.

  While my mind ran over my options, he lunged again, attacking with his many arms.

  I knew that I’d already lopped off quite a few arms at this point, but I didn’t seem to be making any progress in reducing the number. This was bad. I might need to make a run for it and find a better place to make my stand.

  I glanced around at my surroundings, desperately trying to come up with a plan. The square was now blanketed in darkness, which severely limited where I
could teleport to.

  I really didn’t want to do this, but I didn’t have many other choices. I teleported to the farthest place I could see. This would at least give me a little breathing room.

  “I’m really sorry about this, Ponta, but I’ll need you to fly around on your own for a bit!”

  “Kyi? Kyiii!”

  Ponta tilted its head inquisitively before sliding off my neck and onto my head. From there, it called up a gust of magical wind, spread the membranes between its legs, and took off into the air.

  Good.

  I watched Ponta for a moment before turning my attention back to the creature.

  Next up, I needed to summon one of my demons—one I’d never used before.

  “Come forth, Guardian of Time! Aion, I summon you!”

  A large rune appeared on the ground beneath my feet and began glowing. It looked like the inner workings of a clock with intricate springs and cogs all moving together in unison.

  The rune began warping, and a giant snake with the head of a lion appeared in the center of it.

  The snake-lion coiled itself around my feet and moved up. To anyone watching, it must have looked like I was being attacked by a giant snake. But all was going as planned.

  The lion head made it all the way up to my shoulder and flashed its fangs at me. Then it bit my neck. My armor flashed, taking on a snake-lion design as flames flickered out from the gaps.

  This was one of the Summoner class’s top-tier demons, Aion. Upon summoning forth Aion, it would lock the player’s status for a full three minutes. It was a rather unique, though abnormal, skill.

  It was a little hard to describe what locking a player’s status actually meant, but in short, it basically meant that for three whole minutes, the player wouldn’t take damage from attacks and wouldn’t consume any magic. You were essentially invincible.

  It wasn’t without its downsides, however.

  First off, you had to achieve a fairly high level in the Summoner class before you could learn it. Even then, despite all that hard work you put in, using this demon was actually pretty inconvenient for most Summoners.