The Hero's Trials.
They were dungeons that served as a device in the story for Leon to gain power.
Each trial was a dungeon that required a particular method to overcome it.
Clear a Hero's Trial, and it would grant power worthy of the accomplishment.
The plot was simple and straightforward. There were all sorts of ways to present the action, and the trials gave him plenty to write about.
It was the sort of device to bring out whenever the story seemed to have stalled.
But Ex had never expected to be the one who would have to do it…!
Of all the places he could have been sent flying, why had he crash-landed here?
Even Leon, at his current level, would have difficulty clearing this place.
And now Ex had found himself inside, even though he was weaker than Leon.
Clearing it through normal means would be almost impossible.
If there was anything to be grateful for, it was that this was the Trial of Strategy and Tactics.
Ex looked at the five skeleton soldiers kneeling before him. Perhaps because the skeleton officer had died, the soldiers were waiting for Ex's orders.
"First, repair yourselves with what you can find around here."
At Ex's command, the skeletons moved briskly, bones clattering as they removed the parts they needed from the skeleton wreckage around them. After repairing their damaged sections, the skeleton soldiers were soon whole again.
"They certainly do follow orders well…."
The Trial of Strategy and Tactics was a trial in which the challenger fought the skeleton soldiers wandering inside the dungeon and gradually expanded their own forces.
While planning it, Ex had probably gone on about how it would show the Hero's charisma and leadership while also letting Circe demonstrate her strategy and tactics, or something along those lines.
At the end of the dungeon, a large army occupied a fortress. He had to break through that army to clear the Hero's Trial.
"…It's impossible."
Unfortunately, Ex was no master of strategy and tactics.
Having served in the military, he did have some understanding of how to fight a battle. When it came to strategy and tactics in a medieval setting like this, though, he knew next to nothing.
In the original novel, Circe and Diana had played major roles in this trial.
Diana had sniped the officers. Circe had used strategy and tactics, while Leon had stood at the head of the advance and smashed the enemies before him.
But Ex couldn't do any of that!
His worries only deepened.
Fortunately, amid all this misfortune, time flowed differently inside and outside the Trial of Strategy and Tactics.
Twenty-four hours in here were roughly equivalent to one hour outside.
That made him less worried about the problems that would arise if this took too long.
If an Imperial Prince remained missing for an extended period, it would be devastating in all sorts of ways.
There was the matter of the Theocracy, and the anxiety of Darius and everyone around Ex would rise to an extreme as well.
The food problem was still critical, though.
Skeletons might need only mana, but people had to eat. In a place where obtaining food was impossible, the question of food supply was directly tied to staying alive.
So for now, he would look for food first.
"Lead the way. We're going to explore around here."
The five skeletons walked ahead of Ex without hesitation.
Watching them move in orderly formation in response to his movements brought home to Ex once again that this was the Trial of Strategy and Tactics.
Ordinarily, the proper way to start was to receive ten skeleton soldiers at the entrance….
Unluckily for him, he had landed in the middle of the dungeon rather than at its entrance. He hadn't even been given a full starting force.
He had to find some way to increase his troops before he could bring down the fortress.
As he walked along thinking that, the skeletons abruptly stopped moving.
Enemies?
Ex ordered the skeletons to keep watch and carefully hid himself. By concealing his presence with demonic power, he could hide to a certain extent.
There were ten of them, just as before. About a platoon's worth.
To add skeletons to his forces, he had to kill the skeleton officer commanding the soldiers. The problem was that the officer always stayed at the very rear, making it anything but easy to target one.
Recognizing an officer was easy enough. They carried flags, so he could identify them to some extent just by looking.
He didn't know how effective his concealment would be.
If he could take out only the officer, he could gain the soldiers without losing any of them.
Hadn't Diana's sniping allowed them to acquire entire platoons intact in the original novel, too?
Could Ex do it…?
First, he would test the limits of his ability.
If things went wrong, he would flee and order his soldiers to cover him.
Ex slowly closed the distance.
The corridor was about fifty meters long. The enemy was thirty meters away.
At that range, it would be difficult to miss with a bow.
And the skeleton soldiers were quite skilled on top of that.
If they discovered him, he wouldn't get away without consequences. Even so, he kept advancing.
When the distance had closed to about twenty meters, he saw a movement.
The skeleton officer snapped its head around toward him.
It seemed better at keeping watch than the soldiers. It reacted sharply even to a small disturbance.
Ex wondered whether he should run, but for now, he held his breath and kept still.
"…"
Sure enough, the officer briefly surveyed the place where Ex was hiding, then turned its head away again. Fortunately, he hadn't been discovered.
Getting any closer than this would be difficult.
The officer could keep watch out to a distance of about twenty meters.
Ex committed that information to memory.
At this distance, Ex could carry out an ambush as well.
He carefully drew the Dragon Sword and sent hand signals to the soldiers under his command. Fortunately, they understood the signals.
Once the soldiers had hidden themselves and nocked their arrows, Ex created four Stealth Swords. If possible, he would have liked to create them behind the officer, but it was too far away.
So they would all strike at the officer from a distance at the same time and take it out.
Tense, Ex settled into position.
The moment the officer turned its gaze entirely away to look in the opposite direction, he gave the order.
"…Attack!"
He fired the four Stealth Swords, and the soldiers fired their arrows as well.
There weren't even any soldiers nearby to protect the officer.
And it had completely failed to notice the attack coming from this side.
The arrows aimed precisely for vulnerable points such as the skeleton officer's neck and spine. Every one hit, without even the slightest deviation.
The officer let out a harsh, piercing cry. Unfortunately, the attack hadn't carried enough force to kill the officer in a single blow. There was a limit to what the soldiers' arrows alone could do.
Even after being struck by the arrows, the officer had survived. It shrieked fiercely from a throat that had no vocal cords.
But Ex's Stealth Swords were still on their way.
At the officer's terrible cry, the enemy soldiers tried to form a protective formation. The Stealth Swords struck faster than they could do it.
With a sharp whoosh, the Stealth Swords severed the officer's neck and pierced its entire body.
The skeleton officer's head, now devoid of will, dropped and rolled across the floor until it lay at Ex's feet.
Without hesitation, Ex stepped on the skull and crushed it.
It had been a perfect ambush.
He still couldn't let his guard down.
Ex remained wary, wondering whether the enemy soldiers would counterattack.
Fortunately, there was no need for that.
The ten soldiers knelt before Ex.
Just as in the original novel, they had become his new soldiers.
"Whew…. So this is how to do it."
Fortunately, he had succeeded in increasing his forces without any losses.
The problem was that Ex himself had to take the risk and stand on the front line. Even so, he took comfort in the fact that he had succeeded.
With this method, he ought to be able to keep acquiring platoon-sized forces.
He needed at least a company's worth… a hundred-man unit.
There wasn't an unlimited supply of skeleton platoons, so he had to hurry. If they fought one another and were destroyed, that would be the same as a loss to the fighting strength Ex could obtain.
Ex immediately began running tirelessly from place to place.
For about an hour, he moved through the area in every direction, memorizing the layout in his head. If he had had paper, he could have made a map more easily. But he didn't have that luxury.
His head was going to burst…!
Every time he met enemies, he had to prepare an ambush. At every moment, he had to watch in all directions. As he moved around, he had to memorize the terrain, too. He scarcely had a moment to think.
Even so, he had to do it.
He stubbornly searched in every direction and kept carrying out ambushes. As a result, his forces grew.
"I've gathered about fifty of them, then."
Before he knew it, there were a great many soldiers following him around.
At this point, having to give orders to every single one of them had become an ordeal in itself.
It would be easier if he could make an officer one of his subordinates….
Creating a skeleton officer required a Command Flag. It was the same kind of flag that the other officers had been carrying.
But the flags behaved like consumable items bound to their owners. When an officer died, its flag broke with it and became unusable.
To obtain a Command Flag, he would have to search the treasure chests placed somewhere within this dungeon. And first, he would have to defeat the guardian protecting the chest.
He could probably take a guardian down if he was willing to sacrifice enough soldiers in the fight….
But that would waste far too much of his fighting strength.
He needed to have more troops if he wanted even a small advantage in the fortress battle at the end.
At the very least, he needed a small force of elite soldiers who could defeat a guardian.
There were elite individuals among the skeleton soldiers, too.
An elite skeleton was several times stronger than an ordinary soldier. It didn't simply shoot arrows and swing a sword. It possessed a wider range of abilities than that.
Some could use magic. Some had bodies like steel, while others moved with extraordinary speed and agility. A small, select force made up of elites like those would be an important source of fighting strength as well.
Unfortunately, there wasn't a single elite among Ex's troops.
It was elites he had been wandering around searching for all this time, too. They hadn't shown themselves easily.
Even so, Ex thought it was strange that they were proving this hard to find.
Did he need to look around a little more?
Having made up his mind, Ex began exploring the area again.
But his steps soon had to come to a halt.
He could see a unit of skeletons in the distance.
He intended to use the same strategy as before: ambush the officer and absorb the unit into his own force. But he couldn't do it.
A hundred-man unit was already moving around…?
Even from a distance, he could see that their numbers approached a hundred.
Unlike Ex's forces, they had officers for each ten-man unit. He could see those officers controlling the soldiers with orderly precision.
It seemed strange that a hundred-man force had already formed, but Ex had no time to study it calmly.
The hundred-man unit was approaching the exact place where Ex was standing.
Had he been discovered…!
Once a unit reached a hundred soldiers, it also operated scouting groups. It looked as though one of those groups had caught sight of him.
The command structure of a hundred-man unit wouldn't collapse just because he eliminated a single junior officer. He had to eliminate its highest commander, and that would be almost impossible in practice.
Moreover, he could see differently shaped skeleton soldiers scattered through the hundred-man unit. Those had to be the elites he'd been searching so hard for.
If he fought, he would lose. There was no question of it.
Ex hurriedly ordered his soldiers to retreat.
First, he had to gather a force that could surpass that group.
An ordinary battle would be difficult enough with elites on the other side. But with too few soldiers and no officers of his own, he had no chance of winning.
Ex quickly fled from the hundred-man unit pursuing him. Fortunately, its larger size meant that it was less mobile.
Once he had secured his safety, Ex began considering the problem at a more measured pace.
He would prefer to avoid a head-on confrontation.
The best method available was to establish a defensive position and hold off the enemies' attacks. Even that would cost him an enormous number of soldiers, but he had no better way of doing it.
Was there some better way of doing this…?
As he continued increasing his forces a few soldiers at a time, unknown explosions thundered in the distance, one after another.
The blasts were loud enough to resound through the entire dungeon. They kept echoing through it at intervals, again and again.
Was someone fighting over there?
Among the elite individuals were skeleton mages who could use magic. So Ex had thought it was perfectly possible for him to hear explosions, but….
…He would take a look.
The fact that the explosions were still continuing bothered him.
Taking his soldiers with him, Ex slowly headed toward the place the blasts were coming from.
It was in a different direction from the hundred-man unit's location, so there was no fighting along the way.
Perhaps all the soldiers around here had already headed toward the source of the explosions.
Was that why the fighting was still going on?
If he could make that mage elite his subordinate, it would add a great deal to his fighting strength. Leaving aside whether he could get past the mage and defeat the officer, this was worth risking some losses to attempt.
At last, he reached a place where the explosions sounded very close.
Ex ordered his soldiers to wait, then concealed himself and crept forward a little at a time. As he approached, the source of the explosions became clearer.
"…away! …skull… ah…!"
…Huh?
The figure he had thought was an elite skeleton was far smaller than he had expected. Unlike a skeleton, it was moving furiously, hurling magic in every direction.
Many skeletons were rushing at the figure to take it down, but it wasn't going to be defeated easily. The spells it used were varied, and each was cast exactly where it was needed.
More than anything, it was speaking in human language.
That was something a skeleton couldn't do.
"No way…. Huh?"
As he watched closely, the mage turned its magic toward Ex. Spears of ice, giving off an icy chill, came flying at him one after another.
Ex had seen this way of using magic before.
"Miss Circe! It's me! Don't shoot!!"
"What…? Is this another hallucination? I'll take care of it first…!"
"I'm not a hallucination! It's really me! It's Ex!"
Ex screamed as the ice spears passed by him, narrowly missing.
"Y-you really are Ex?"
"What, would I be a fake…!"
The mage fighting in the middle of all those skeletons was Circe, just as he had thought.
–TL Notes–
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