The boat continued forward amid the sounds of oars creaking and pushing through the water. There was some conversation at first, but even that lessened as time went on. Around the time that the dismal atmosphere of our surroundings finally caused us all to go silent, I sensed something in the water to starboard.
When I looked, I saw bubbles forming, and then several hands appeared, followed by horribly pale arms, extending out of the stagnated water. Some had rotted, while others were all bone. The arms began to struggle and cling to the boat. The vessel groaned.
◆
As our boat wobbled, Reystov and Ghelreis each brought out their weapons. They were magical weapons, newly acquired in the city of the dead, and would probably work well against undead.
“Enemies?” Menel was especially cool-headed. He took the time to ask me, even as he stood ready to draw his weapon.
“No.” I shook my head. “They’re just suffering.” I extended my hand to one of the arms grasping the boat. The arm had become bloated with water and stank of a raw, fishy smell. As I took its hand, I heard Al’s breath catch. “It’s okay,” I said, hoping that my intent would get through to the undead. “It’s okay now.”
You don’t have to suffer anymore. You don’t have to keep resenting. You don’t have to keep trying.
“You won’t wish misfortune on anyone anymore. You won’t curse them, and you won’t make them suffer.” I felt the strength leaving the arm I was holding onto and all the other arms around the boat. “I’ll handle everything somehow.”
It’ll be okay now, even if you don’t keep on trying.
It’ll be okay, even if you don’t keep on protecting.
It’ll be okay, even if you don’t fight.
It’ll be okay, even if you don’t bear the burden.
You can let it go. So—
“Please, rest long and easy.” I spoke each word slowly and prayed. “Gracefeel, god of the flame. Repose and guidance.”
Divine Torch lit up in the cloudy sky. The miraculous floating flame began to guide the wandering souls back to the eternal cycle. Several pale-blue specters appeared, fading softly into vision. They had beautiful braided hair, pointed ears that reminded one of bamboo leaves, and handsome features.
“————”
They faced us in silence and gave us a proud and elegant bow.
“Ohh...” Ghelreis’s voice trembled. This must have been exactly what the elves of Remmirath Branch had looked like in bygone days.
“————”
They tried to speak; perhaps they had something they wanted to tell us. But it wasn’t to be. Their slumber at the bottom of the river had stolen the language from their throats. It was a hard sight to witness, but they were graceful in spite of this. They gave a beautiful shrug, then pointed in a direction with a slender finger. Spinning the finger in a circle—perhaps that meant “as fast as you can?”
“We should go that way? As swiftly as possible?”
A nod came back. Then, the one standing at the front raised two fingers, made a fist, and held it in front of his heart. The motion was seamless.
“Will, that’s...”
“Don’t worry, I know what it means.” I returned them the same gesture. It was a friendly gesture of parting. “May the blessing of the flame be with you,” I said. Then, with gentle smiles, the ancient elves of Remmirath faded and disappeared.
As Al, Ghelreis, and Reystov stood in silence, Menel spoke suddenly. “Let’s go. Full speed in that direction. Now. Hurry!”
“Huh?”
“Don’t trust an elf’s sense of time!” Sounding slightly panicked, Menel called to the elementals with a quite forceful tone and used the Tailwind spell once more. Then, as he applied the Waterwalk technique on himself extra thoroughly, he shouted, “You know those stories you hear? About when elves say, ‘Wait a bit,’ it means, ‘In a year or so’? Those are true!” The boat rocketed forward at incredible speed, cutting through the stagnant water and advancing through the mist. “Those guys with their chill sense of time just told you ‘as fast as possible,’ brother! You better—”
A scream reached us from somewhere deep in the mist.
“I feckin’ knew it!” Menel cursed, and then yelling loudly, he sprinted into the mist with the quickness of a skipping stone.
Menel didn’t normally speak when he was fighting. Shouting a war cry brought out your power and helped to negate fear, but that was a warrior’s way of fighting, not a hunter’s. Menel moved in silence and killed in silence. There were probably two reasons he was raising his voice now despite that: to communicate his presence to the screamer and to allow us to follow him without losing track of where he was. Leaving his voice as our guide, he led the way farther and farther into the mist.
“Row! Hurry!”
Due to the timing of when we heard the scream, the Waterwalk spell hadn’t been cast on anyone except Menel. He probably wasn’t able to cast it on everyone with a single spell in this place where the fairies’ boon was weak. Since the situation was already difficult, it was only natural that Menel, who had the most precise grasp of what was going on, should take the lead.
We pushed harder against the oars and rowed faster. The bank approached rapidly. It was wetland with sparse patches of weak-looking plants growing here and there, and there was no clear water’s edge separating it from the river.
“Easy! Watch your blades in the mud!” I called out and lifted my oar. We all knew what we were meant to do. We quickly jumped out of the boat, submersing ourselves up to the thighs in stagnant water, and pushed the boat up onto the bank.
Immediately grabbing our weapons, we started sprinting one after another. My feet kept sinking into the mire. I forced them up as I ran. The ground was terrible. If a battle unfolded, my ability to move around might be heavily restricted. As I worried about this, we all pushed forward as a group.
Before long, we heard an aggressive yell, then the dull sound of flesh and bone being cut through. On the other side of the mist, Menel had used his longsword to behead a giant, eyeless serpent that had burst out of the lake of mud to attack him. The snake’s head spun and splatted into the mire.
On the ground beside Menel was the figure of a person I didn’t know. She had long, blonde hair that had frayed and spread—perhaps her hair had been braided and come undone—and long, pointed ears. It was an elf. Did one of them survive?!
“Menel, is she oka—”
“Not yet!” Menel shouted quickly. The next moment, several serpents burst out of the mud on either side of him. He dodged them as they bit at him, his tied silver hair flowing as he moved. In concert with that movement, he swung his sword at one of the serpents, but the blade failed to cut all the way through its body. It dug in and stuck there, and then, the next moment, something astonishing happened. The first serpent, made headless by Menel’s sword, lunged at his legs in an attempt to coil itself around them.
Cursing under his breath, Menel was forced to let go of his sword. He kicked away the headless serpent trying to entangle itself around his legs and leaped away from his attackers. With the Waterwalk technique cast upon him, his movements were graceful even in this bog.
“It’s coming! Get ready!” He helped the golden-haired elf to her feet and retreated in our direction. The serpents followed hot on his heels. And from the way they moved, finally, the complete picture became clear to me. It wasn’t serpents. Under the mud, all those eyeless serpentine necks, each thicker than a man’s torso, were connected to the body of an even larger serpent. The many-headed giant serpent bared its yellowed teeth and repeatedly lashed out its red tongues, threatening us.
“What the?!”
“The ruler of the bog...”
“A hydra.”
Once everyone grasped the nature of their opponent, their cautiousness of that enormous, bizarre body was plain to see. Then, the wound where one of its necks had been severed by Menel began to bubble and foam. Slowly, a new head began to form.
“Whoa!” Menel and the elf he had rescued, the pair with the most sensitive hearing, covered their ears. I didn’t have the time to pay attention to them. My eyes darted back to the head. It had been burned, and the scorched tissue had stopped regenerating.
“Fire works! Al, Ghelreis, Reystov! To the front!”
The enraged hydra bore down on us. Everyone drew their weapons, readied their shields, and advanced.
“Menel, take her and retreat!”
“Got it!” Menel pulled back, swapping places with the advancing front.
I couldn’t be there with them. Since I had to keep an eye on all the serpent heads spreading out in all directions and prevent them from regenerating as they were chopped off, I had to stand well back for a good view.
“So I’m at the back...”
I’d always been the kind to rush forward shouting. I’d managed to get through all my battles that way. Fighting from this position was something I hardly ever did. Now wasn’t the time to get sentimental about it, but it felt like a surprisingly fresh experience.
“I’ll burn them as you cut them off! The front’s up to you!”
“Yes, sir!”
“Understood!”
“No sweat.”
They all responded. And so the battle began.
◆
The flash of a blade, swift yet concealing tremendous power, took off one of the hydra heads. That slash belonged to Reystov. He had severed a mass of flesh and bone that was as wide as a trunk and thrashing around wildly. It couldn’t be accomplished with any ordinary level of training or skill. In fact, even Menel, who had reached an impressive level of skill himself, had already failed once and had his sword taken. But Reystov continued dropping heads one after another, making it look easy. I continued to cast Sagitta Flammeum after him.
His frightening level of skill didn’t seem to have dulled in the least. And he wasn’t done. A brief but energetic grunt accompanied his next slash, and one of the heads that the hydra had raised high into the air far out of the reach of his sword split vertically down its length. This had to be the effect of the new Word that Gus had engraved into Reystov’s beloved blade. Judging by what it had done, it was most likely a Word of Gus’s own making based on Extension and Sharpness. My senses as a user of magic told me that a sharp blade, formed out of mana for just an instant, had cut beyond the length of Reystov’s sword to split the hydra’s skin.
Gus really had good judgment. That upgrade was a very good match for Reystov. Given that the user was already at a high and stable level, simply giving them a sharper sword with a longer reach was a far better idea than trying to increase their power or giving them the ability to shoot fire or lightning.
It made it hard to judge the sword’s range from an outside perspective, making it a nuisance for enemies and incredibly useful for allies.
“Sagitta Flammeum!” Another head fell, and I followed it with another fire arrow. As long as there was no unusual change in circumstances, I was planning to go with this single strategy for the rest of this battle.
On the face of it, using a whole variety of Words according to the fine details of the enemy’s situation moment by moment might appear to be a wise approach and good support. But in actual fact, following the full four steps of “see, think, decide, use” in sequence would make you slow to act. It was better to choose a reasonably effective, short magic and follow just the two steps “see, then use” over and over. The front guard would also feel more at ease knowing exactly what was about to come flying over their heads.
A poor player overthinks the wrong decisions. And at least in a situation like battle, where things change constantly, being stubbornly simple about everything has fewer ways to fail.
I cast Sagitta Flammeum multiple times in succession. Double casting as Gus had taught me, I drew Signs with my right hand, guiding the magic to make sure I wouldn’t hit the front guard by mistake.
I was just repeating the same words and the same characters in a routine fashion, so there was no delay or hesitation between each one. On the contrary, the more I repeated this, the faster I became.
Several arrows hit in succession. The hydra’s remaining heads screeched loudly in anger. One of the outside heads swept towards the three at the front like a whip, trying to knock them away. It was Ghelreis that braced for it with his large shield. With his short yet sturdy, barrel-like body, he held the shield at an angle. Viewed from the side, his body and the shield formed a shape like an upside-down letter “y.”
Sparks scattered everywhere as the hydra’s sharp, hard scales scraped across the huge shield. Ghelreis wasn’t blocking it; he was deflecting it upwards. The other two crouched down behind him, and the hydra’s swipe sliced through air.
Ghelreis roared. A powerful strike from his mace slammed into the hydra’s open body. Hydras had a strong ability to regenerate, but their internal organs couldn’t handle powerful impacts. The hydra recoiled, and attempted to fight back with several of its heads, but Ghelreis refused to move from the spot, as if he were rooted to the earth. In addition to his dwarven physique, his Sword-smasher armor set probably had some kind of magical effect to help him hold his ground.
“Now, young master!”
“Right!”
As the hydra’s attention was on Ghelreis, Al charged forward. He held his halberd of immense strength behind him, then swung it diagonally upwards, crashing it into one of the hydra’s heads. There was a sickeningly loud sound of shattering bone and scattering flesh. The result was less a slash wound and more a violent rupture. The head bent dramatically backwards, half-torn off.
Al yelled out as he pulled the long handle of his weapon back towards him and unleashed another strike. This time, the head was torn away completely. Unlike Reystov’s clean severing, the cross section left by Al’s attack was a mess, as if a giant had used all his strength to rip the hydra’s head away from its body.
While feeling a little disturbed, I cast another fire arrow. I heard a sigh behind me from Menel. “Well, looks like I’m not gonna be needed anymore,” he grumbled. “Whatever. Didn’t want to waste arrows anyway.”
It was already clear which side had the edge.
◆
While protecting Al from the hydra’s attacks, Ghelreis dealt steady blows to the hydra to make things harder for it and weaken it a little. Al secured a position where he was well protected by Ghelreis and could afford to take large swings. He sent another of the hydra’s heads flying. And whenever there was a spare moment, there was a brilliant flash from Reystov’s sword out of nowhere. Reystov was so good at hopping in and out of range that I kind of wanted to watch and learn. As for me, my only job was to watch them and repeatedly shoot guided fire arrows.
“Hey, you alright?” Menel was giving encouragement to the elf, who seemed to have been wounded, as he kept watch over the area. It looked as if he was just kicking back while the rest of us fought, but deliberately not getting involved with the fight and keeping a look out was an important job in itself.
In a pressing situation like battle, it’s only natural to want to join in and help if you have the ability, but if too many people get involved at once, it increases the risk of friendly fire and collateral damage. It’s an valuable decision to choose to stand by so that your allies don’t have to be concerned about additional enemies joining the fray and can concentrate on the battle before them. I wanted to believe that nothing would be crazy enough to jump into the middle of a hydra battle, but this was a dark region where people had never ventured. There was no way of knowing what might be lurking here.
“Sagitta Flammeum!” The three at the front continued to deal severe blows to the hydra, and each time, I
delivered a flaming arrow to the wound site to increase the damage.
It wasn’t long after that that all the hydra’s heads were severed. It sank into the bog without even giving up a final scream.
“D-Did we kill it?!”
“Remain on your guard. Hydra venom is so deadly that even most miracles cannot cure it.”
“Yeah. Snakes like this can struggle wildly even after all the heads are cut off sometimes.”
“E-Even once all the heads are cut off?”
“Yeah. Won’t help anyone to let it spite you just before it dies.”
After checking that the three at the front were on their guard, I turned to look at what was going on behind me. “Menel.”
“Will, need you right now. She’s bitten!”
I hurriedly ran through the bog over to them and had a look at the elf Menel was holding in his arms. Her frayed blonde hair was covered in mud, and her violet eyes were hazed over and unfocused. Although she was wearing plain travelers’ clothing that was covered in mud, she was clearly very beautiful. She had a well-defined nose bridge and slender jaw line, and looked to me like the perfect example of a female elf in every aspect. If we’d met under normal circumstances, I might have been a little stunned. If she wasn’t twitching and drooling from deadly poison like she was right now!
“Stay with me!” No wonder Menel hadn’t let her out of his arms! No wonder he hadn’t been fighting! Panicking, I started to pray for the Miracle of Antidote.
“There’s... no hope...” The elf extended a quivering hand to stop me. “It’s hydra... poison...”
I grumbled. This wasn’t good. Not just the Miracle of Antidote, but any prayer with the power to heal could fail to have an effect if the target rejected it. That was because the good gods didn’t want their healing to be used for torture or extending life when it wasn’t desired. There were many ways for an inventive person to put the ability to cure poison or heal wounds to evil use.
The Lord of the Rust Mountains (Complete) Page 22