No matter how hard they pushed, they couldn’t go any farther. It was as if a huge, thick wall stood on the other side of the doors.
One of the kuagoa craned his neck to peer ahead.
He had the perfectly natural idea that perhaps the dwarves had built a wall.
And there was a wall. It was pitch-black.
The wall took up their entire field of vision. It moved.
“Rrrrrraaaaaaaaaaaaaaagh!”
The battle cry vibrated the air.
What they had thought was a wall was a giant shield.
The kuagoa didn’t use weapons or armor, but they had seen the dwarves use them enough times. They were never this huge, though. This shield was large enough to be mistaken for a wall.
As the kuagoa were struggling to comprehend their situation, a horrifying being showed itself from behind the shield.
Something in black armor with crimson eyes full of loathing.
The kuagoa may not have known much of the world, but this they understood. This was evil; it was violence; it was death.
Something whizzed by.
That instant, three kuagoa heads went flying.
“Rrrrrrraaaaagh!”
The battle cry hit the kuagoa like a physical blow.
Shocked in a way that made their hairs stand on end, the kuagoa were assailed by the urge to flee in the face of what they knew to be a futile fight.
These were the bravest warriors of their clans who held no fear of death. At least, that’s what they had thought. But they never imagined facing something like this. The monster before them was more than enough to shatter their courage.
So why didn’t they run away?
The muscles in their legs wouldn’t cooperate. They knew instinctively that if they turned to run, they would be killed in a single swing from behind. Still, the glow in the black thing’s eyes reminded them of their thirst for life.
“Rrrrrrraaaaaaaaaagh!”
The kuagoa yelped at the earth-shaking roar and took a few steps back.
When the armored creature moved forward to close the space between them, another of the same type of being came into view. And then—
“Eeegh!”
One of the kuagoa screamed.
The ones who turned to look at what happened saw fellow soldiers with their heads missing.
They were definitely dead. But their hands groped for something to hold onto. It was clear these weren’t mere muscle spasms.
All they could think was that the corpses had begun to move.
It was as if they were trapped in a nightmare. The warriors felt as if they had been taken alive to the limbo all kuagoa feared.
Thomp, thomp. The two armored figures walked forward, their unusual swords—flamberges—held high.
•
“The strike team says they don’t know when they’ll be able to break through the gate?”
“That’s correct, sir!”
A kuagoa whose fur had a faint red tinge to it frowned at his subordinate’s report.
This was the commander of the vanguard, Yoozu, boasting fur as tough as orichalcum and superior resistance to metal weapons. He was a red kuagoa, an elite.
Yoozu looked past his subordinate’s bowed head to the fort across the bridge. Beyond that fort was a tunnel and beyond that tunnel was the dwarf city.
If they could take out that city, not only would they gain a better base, but they would be able to wipe out their ore rivals.
Expanding their territory could mean a chance to claim types of ore they had never seen before, which could lead to a new level of prosperity for the kuagoa.
Then, someday, the kuagoa could rule these mountains.
“If we could only defeat those dragons…” Yoozu accidentally let his inner desires slip out, and when he realized, he hurriedly glanced around.
No one seemed to have noticed.
He was a little relieved.
The kuagoa home base was a former dwarf city that they now occupied. In the center of that city was a palace, but it was ruled by frost dragons—white dragons that could spit out Chill Breath.
Ostensibly, the kuagoa and the dragons were in alliance, but anyone who was familiar with the reality of the situation would say the relationship was nothing that equal. The clan king may have sugarcoated it as coexistence and coprosperity, but even he probably didn’t believe those words.
The truth was the weak kuagoa served the strong dragons.
To the dragons, the kuagoa were surely an emergency food supply and convenient pawns in the meantime.
Yoozu had gone to meet them once, with the clan king, and that was the sense he got from every word that came out of those gigantic jaws. And the chief clan king had been surprisingly submissive.
He didn’t want to see their great hero act like that. But Yoozu wasn’t stupid. He knew what a huge power disparity separated the kuagoa and dragons.
Still, would they really tolerate being treated like such fools?
…At the moment, it’s still impossible. Even if we could defeat the dragonlord, victory would cost us so much that we wouldn’t be able to recover. But…someday…
He wasn’t the only one harboring this earnest wish. Anyone who had met the dragons—all the kuagoa in higher positions—felt the same way.
First, they needed to find a way to block the Chill Breath. If they couldn’t produce kuagoa with perfect resistance to that, they would never be able to minimize their casualties.
How long would that take?
Yoozu chased away his gloom. Before everything else came defeating the dwarves, and they hadn’t finished that yet. Looking too far ahead and ignoring what was right under one’s feet meant a great risk of tripping over.
Yoozu summoned a subordinate. “Hey, see if it’s possible to destroy the fort and widen the tunnel so we can attack in numbers. We need to prepare as much as possible before the main forces get h—”
There Yoozu abruptly stopped to listen. He thought he heard screams coming from somewhere.
No, it might not have been screams. It could have been a threatening monster call. One of the troublesome things about the subterranean world was that it was difficult to pinpoint where a particular sound originated.
But this time, he knew right away.
The strike team he had sent in came running back out of the fort.
That caused a commotion among the kuagoa around him.
The undisciplined way they ran away made their panic obvious. Some were even shoved off the bridge in the rush and fell into the Great Chasm.
“What? What’s going on?”
One of Yoozu’s subordinates answered his straightforward question. “I don’t know. Perhaps the dwarves counterattacked?”
That can’t be it. They had anticipated a dwarf counter. There was no way the strike team would flee in a panic just because of that.
Did they get hit with a special attack? For instance, he had heard once that boiling oil was quite painful.
“Take some soldiers and find out what happened. If it was the dwarves striking back, keep pushing—don’t let them retake the fort.”
Following his orders, his subordinate assembled a group and set out across the bridge.
Meanwhile, the strike team was still routing, screaming.
What could have possibly made them so desperate to escape? Was it that mysterious power of magic or whatnot?
As Yoozu was racking his brain, something appeared at the entrance to the fort. Two somethings.
Large black creatures.
“Wh-what the heck is that? Giant dwarves? Dwarf kings?”
Yoozu had never seen anything like this before. They seemed to be wearing the armor dwarves used over their entire bodies, but there was definitely something different about them.
In their right hands, they carried wavy swords, and in their left, massive shields.
Maybe dwarf kings look different from normal dwarves in the same way the clan king looks different from other kuago
a?
Yoozu had no idea what the beings looming at the entrance to the fort were, but animal instinct informed him they were terribly dangerous.
And he understood very well that the strike team had been fleeing from none other than those monsters.
The kuagoa around him were all staring, frozen stiff—no one moved except for the strike team members. They continued running across the bridge without looking back.
The dark armored figures let out a battle cry.
Even at this distance, the rumbling in the air made Yoozu’s hairs stand on end and his blood run cold. It elicited the same feeling as a dragon’s roar.
As if that was a cue, some kuagoa appeared next to the black armored figures.
They’re escaping? No, they’re traitors? N-no, that’s not right, either!
Yoozu’s eyes widened.
One of the kuagoa was missing everything from the neck up.
When he squinted, he saw that some of them were dragging entrails behind them, and some seemed to have been sliced in half, the left side of their body moving separately from the right.
They shouldn’t have been able to move at all, yet here they were. That could only mean…
Magic! They’re using magic to control the dead!
“Could that be the dwarves’ trump card?”
His subordinate’s comment made sense.
They must have been preparing this other ultimate weapon while repelling them with the lightning one.
“…Golems?”
He remembered hearing that when the dragons took over the dwarf palace, they had fought monsters with that name. They were like armored statues.
“Those are what the dwarves call golems?” his subordinate asked.
Yoozu shook his head. “No, golems are monsters. The dwarves must have tamed them.”
“You mean like the Nuuk?”
The Nuuk were magical beasts.
Males grew to be about eleven and a half feet and well over two thousand five hundred pounds. They were longhaired quadruped herbivores that could survive on just a little moss. Since they were hardy enough to survive in heavy snow, they lived all over the Azerlisia Mountains, and many monsters preyed on them.
In any case, the exact combat prowess of the black-armored golems was unclear, but given the gap between the strike team’s head count and the ones who had made it back out, it wasn’t hard to imagine. Even with no information besides the way Yoozu’s hairs were standing on end, figuring it out was simple—they wouldn’t be easy to defeat.
Luckily, the enemy was apparently content to simply watch and wait, not crossing the bridge.
“I-it seems like they came to take back the fort.”
“Y-yes, it does. Okay. Let’s regroup, as long as they’re not moving. We’ll think of a plan while we do that— Agh, here they come!”
The armored figures were charging across the bridge.
“Who was it? Who was the one talking about retaking the fort?!”
“Commander! Now’s not the time! What should we do?”
The kuagoa he had sent onto the bridge raised their claws.
The figures carrying the giant shields rammed into them.
Flung away by the overpowering strength, a few of the kuagoa fell off the bridge. The armored figures didn’t stop. With their shields still up, they continued to barrel across the bridge only slightly slower than before. It was like a surging wall.
At this rate, it wouldn’t be long before they finished crossing the bridge and arrived on their side.
What will happen now? The threat to his life made him scream, “C-cut down the bridge!”
If they dropped the bridge, the main forces would have to take a tedious detour. Surely the dwarves would fortify their defenses during that time. Considering that taking the fort had been their primary objective, this operation was a failure.
The resources and personnel expended were such that Yoozu doubted he would get off with a mere reprimand. But it was more dangerous to let those armored figures cross the bridge.
If the enemy reached them, not a single kuagoa would survive. That was the kind of beings these were.
“Did I not just tell you to cut down the bridge?!”
The second time he gave the instruction, his subordinates peeled their eyes off the monsters sending other kuagoa flying and began to move. Most of their fellow soldiers on the bridge had been knocked away; only a few remained to face the enemy.
A handful of kuagoa bit and clawed the bridge’s ropes.
“Send in a unit to pin them on the bridge!”
Telling people to go fight the monsters on the bridge while they were trying to cut it down was tantamount to telling them to go die. Even so, a unit formed up and headed to their doom.
The shields kept many at bay, but a few managed to circle around to the monsters’ backs and attack. But they were ignored. Kuagoa bites did nothing to slow their advance.
The bridge isn’t collapsing.
At this rate, the monsters are going to make it across.
The minute Yoozu realized that, his body moved on its own. With zero hesitation, he leaped from the higher ground from where he had been issuing orders and used the momentum of his fall to land a powerful slash with his claws on the bridge’s ropes.
There was a sound like the air was ripping.
A huge wave rippled through the bridge, and it collapsed.
Unable to withstand the wild motion of the bridge, which was like a giant snake in its death throes, Yoozu was hurled off. But before he was swallowed up by the darkness below, he grabbed a rope dangling into the void. It was pure luck that he was able to do that in midair despite having no way to adjust his orientation.
He managed to haul himself up the rope, his body twisting this way and that, and reach the edge of the cliff.
But without even a moment to sigh in relief, he responded to a chill that made him shudder by instinctively throwing himself on the ground.
And in that instant, the object that had been thrown with a grunt skimmed the hairs of Yoozu’s back. As unlikely as it was, the object had been a kuagoa. Enraged, one of the black-armored figures had hurled one of the suicide fighters it had latched onto earlier with its outrageous strength.
The flying kuagoa crashed into Yoozu’s frozen subordinates. Leaving behind truncated screams—“Pgyah!”—they were turned into chunks of flesh.
But that was the end of it. The monsters disappeared into the Great Chasm along with the rest of the warriors who had resigned to die.
Silence fell over the area.
Yoozu staggered over to the edge and peered into the darkness. It wasn’t only him. All the survivors were staring into the blackness that had swallowed everything up. Though they knew there was no saving anyone who fell into that hole, they couldn’t shake the fear that one of the armored figures would come climbing up the side of the cliff.
How much time had passed? Yoozu finally breathed a sigh of relief.
It seemed like they truly weren’t coming back.
He surveyed the area and saw how few of his soldiers remained.
But up against those black suits of armor, having this many survive was surely a job well done.
“Fall back!”
They needed to report the golems to their superiors as soon as possible.
If those things were mass-produced, the kuagoa would be driven to extinction. And Yoozu was sure the enemy had more than just those two.
“…Dwarves are terrifying.”
He regretted taking them lightly. The fact that they possessed the technology to create such monsters was a complete shock.
“First, we need to tell the main forces about what just happened. I need messengers!”
The ones who responded to Yoozu’s call were kuagoa riders, who could travel much faster than ordinary kuagoa. They had a skill that allowed them to run at full speed without tiring at all.
The reason they traveled in a group was so that if they were attacked
by monsters, there was less of a chance of them getting completely wiped out. It wasn’t that they would be safe traveling with this number but that even if some of them died, others would survive and reach the main forces.
“Okay! Now, go! Don’t forget how critical your role is!”
Yoozu watched them race away and then announced his next orders.
It went without saying that everyone would withdraw so he could discuss the situation with the clan king.
Chapter 4 | A Crafter and Negotiations
1
As the two death knights he created disappeared through the gate, cries of joyful slaughter and shrieks of violent death went up again and again. When he finished slowly closing the doors, perhaps because they were so thick, the massacre on the other side only rang ever so slightly in everyone’s eardrums.
“Now, we should be fine for a while.”
Since Ainz hadn’t used corpses to create them, these death knights came with a time limit, but judging from the prisoners they had taken, the kuagoa weren’t terribly strong. Even without knowing how many were attacking, he was sure those two would be enough to repel quite a lot. Unless the enemy was completely inept, they would probably back down and set up camp after taking too many losses.
Don’t withdraw completely. If you build a camp, then the dwarves will know the danger is still right there. That’ll force them to make a deal with me. I ordered the death knights to take it easy, but…keeping yourself from winning too thoroughly is hard.
With those things somewhat on his mind as he performed various calculations, Ainz examined the supreme commander, who was staring at him with a twitching smile plastered across his face.
He couldn’t think of any reason the dwarf should still be regarding him with a smile that could have been born only from fear, but—at that moment, the light bulb in Ainz’s mind turned on.
He’s used to my face now, so it must be from the screams of the kuagoa on the other side of the door, right? True, the voices of things being killed are unpleasant.
That said, it was the screams of their enemies, so Ainz didn’t think it should be that much of an issue, but maybe it was because the commander was human—because he was dwarven—that he couldn’t agree.
The Dwarven Crafter Page 16