The next day in the Hero's Trial.
Ex began putting his plan into action in earnest.
“Are you really going through with that?”
“Do we have a better way?”
The first thing Circe did after hearing the plan was sigh.
It was a plan that could reasonably be described as a suicide mission.
Circe certainly wouldn't have recommended it, but….
“We'll make it work somehow.”
Faced with Ex's utterly shameless expression, she could only accept that this was how it was going to be.
“If you get me killed, I'll resent you for the rest of my life.”
“You worry too much. Now, could you hand over Paison's Leap?”
The place they had arrived at was the entrance to the guardian's chamber.
As expected, the guardian was standing in exactly the same spot.
It seemed to have retrieved the treasure chest as well; the chest was sitting behind it.
“We've already checked where the others are. Let's start.”
“I'm ready, too.”
As Ex took Paison's Leap, he activated Demonization. The power of a demon once again spread throughout his body.
No matter how many times he used it, that power never quite felt familiar. By the time he had adjusted to it again, he was ready.
“Here I go!”
Ex immersed his body in mana and cast Blink.
In an instant, he was standing in front of the treasure chest. The moment he laid a hand on it, a vicious light flashed in the statue's eyes.
The chest was still absurdly heavy, but with its contents gone, it was much lighter than it had been before.
Ex hoisted the chest at about the same moment the statue prepared to bring down its greatsword.
No—the statue might actually have been a little faster.
That would have been true, at least, if Circe's ice spear hadn't whistled through the air and smashed into the statue's face.
On impact, the spear blossomed into an enormous flower of ice, locking the statue's movements in place.
“Run! I'll keep covering you!”
Ice spears and a shower of arrows from the skeletons kept driving the guardian back.
Meanwhile, Ex slung the treasure chest onto his back and ran flat out. He knew where he needed to go. All he had to do was keep running.
With the treasure chest, he could use Blink twice. Without it, perhaps ten times. The spell consumed more mana than he had expected.
He didn't have as much mana as Circe, and he couldn't cast spells as efficiently as she could, either. For now, he needed to conserve it.
Keeping himself ready to activate Blink at any moment, he hurried away from the guardian.
As he raced through the labyrinth's empty corridors, heavy footsteps closed in from behind, pounding as though they would shatter the floor.
Was it following him?
He took a quick glance over his shoulder.
Then he realized he should never have looked back.
With a deep, rolling roar, the monstrous fiend of a statue twisted its entire body as it pursued Ex at full speed.
If that thing caught him, it wouldn't give him an easy death…!
He didn't know whether a simple creature made of mana could feel emotions. But however he looked at it, that thing was expressing rage taken to its absolute limit.
It fairly radiated the desire to tear apart the thieving little rat that had stolen its belongings.
Still, it was following him just as he had expected.
Luring the guardian away had been the first step of the plan from the outset.
While plundering the treasure chest yesterday, he had discovered something: the guardian always pursued only the treasure chest itself.
In the original story, the chest had only ever been obtained after the guardian was destroyed. As a result, this was information even Ex had never known before.
This was probably another gap in the story's plausibility.
Fortunately, that gap had given him a way to carry out this plan.
Of course, the instant the guardian caught him, he would become ground meat. This was hardly something he could try without considering the danger.
Its footsteps thundered one after another, accompanied by that terrible roar. Ex rounded a bend in the corridor and vaulted over the skeletons he encountered on the way. Behind him, the guardian swung its enormous stone sword and slaughtered everything that got in its path.
With a horrible crunch, ten skeletons were smashed to pieces by a single sweep of that stone blade. The sight was chilling beyond words.
Those skeleton soldiers appeared to have combat strength somewhere between 3-Star and 4-Star, but that made no difference whatsoever.
There it was…!
At last, Ex's intended destination began to come into view.
There was a mass of several hundred skeletons.
It was the skeleton company, a force every bit as threatening as the guardian itself.
Now he needed to use it again…!
He brought forth his demonic power once more.
The power of lies, strengthened by Demonization, blurred Ex's presence.
Even when he came right up to them, the company's scouts failed to notice him.
That was because something with a far stronger presence was coming after Ex.
The second step of the plan was now complete.
Now fight each other and die!
With another rumbling roar, the guardian crushed, smashed, and slaughtered the company's soldiers standing in its way.
As that menacing stone sword shattered the soldiers, the entire company began to move.
“Kreeeeeeee!”
The skeleton commander at the very center of the formation opened its mouth and let out a hideous shriek through vocal cords that had no flesh.
At their commander's order, the soldiers rushed the invading enemy—the guardian—and began attacking it.
The guardian answered with a roar of its own, brutally clearing away the soldiers that blocked its path as it advanced.
And so a fierce battle began between the two forces.
It worked! Now he just needed to put down the chest and get out of there…!
The plan was simple.
He had never intended to fight the company himself, especially with elite skeletons having joined its ranks.
To take on a force of more than a hundred, he would need roughly equivalent strength on his own side. If he wanted to fight without suffering heavy losses, he would need twice as many troops.
He might starve to death before he finished gathering that many. At the very least, he needed the company's fighting strength to be lower than it was now.
That was why he had set it against the guardian.
He would use the treasure chest to lure the guardian into the company. The company would attack the guardian to eliminate an intruder, while the guardian would fight the company in order to recover the chest.
Then Ex would reap the benefit of their battle by claiming whichever enemies were left.
He hadn't realized Demonization would strengthen his ability this much.
With the guardian giving off such an overwhelming presence, the skeletons paid very little attention to Ex.
All he needed to do now was leave the chest in the middle of the company and escape.
If he waited until the guardian and the company destroyed each other, one major threat would be gone. That alone would count as a considerable gain.
Ex immediately used Blink to get out of the company's formation. Even with the clash of polearms and the noise of spells being cast ringing out behind him, he ignored it all and kept running.
Whew. He'd made it out alive.
His only small concern was that the guardian might be stronger than he had expected and destroy the entire company.
What Ex wanted was for the guardian to fall after taking out a reasonable number of skeletons. That way, he could claim the surviving troops for himself, just as they were.
It would be a shame if the company were wiped out after all the trouble he had gone to.
He was still entertaining those rather leisurely thoughts when something struck him.
…Was the battle over already?
The noise of clashing polearms had died down.
He hadn't gone far enough away for the sound to be out of earshot.
That meant either the fighting had ended or there was a lull in the battle.
Circe and the soldiers should be on their way. It wouldn't hurt to take a look at the situation while he waited.
He'd just check….
The instant he turned to walk back toward the company, goose bumps rose along Ex's back. He sensed danger.
The instincts he had developed through countless beatings from Roxwell ordered him to dodge. Ex immediately threw himself into a quick roll to the side.
Something hurtled into the spot where Ex had been standing and struck with an enormous crash.
“Ghh…!”
The impact was tremendous enough to split the ground in every direction.
Dust and fragments of stone flew up and battered Ex all over.
He felt as though he'd been hit by a claymore mine. His head reeled, but he managed to hold on.
…A stone sword?
Clinging to consciousness, he looked at what was in front of him.
An enormous stone sword was embedded in the ground.
The owner of that sword should not have been here.
A deep roar rolled out.
“What? Why are you here…?”
As the sword was pulled free and the dust cleared, what emerged in front of him was the savage, evil-looking statue that had been chasing Ex: the guardian.
“Oh, shi….”
Before the stone sword could descend again, he evaded it with Blink.
The spot where Ex had just been standing was reduced to a miserable wreck once more.
Ex quickly drew his sword and assessed the situation.
Why had it come here? Wasn't it supposed to pursue only the treasure chest? Was there some condition he didn't know about?
The guardian's exterior was badly damaged.
It had clearly taken considerable damage in its battle with the company.
Even so, its underlying strength seemed undiminished, because it swung its stone sword with ferocious force.
In the midst of that assault, Ex saw the guardian's expression and understood why it had come here.
It intended to kill him before going after the chest…!
Its expression was rage itself.
In those viciously glowing eyes, he could sense a fierce resolve never to forgive the rat that had stolen the chest twice.
As long as Ex remained alive, he would steal the chest again. The guardian had chased him all this way to make absolutely certain he died this time.
“This is seriously unfair…!”
In this dangerous state, he couldn't meet up with Circe.
Ex turned around again and ran toward the company this time.
Without the treasure chest, his body felt light. But now he had nothing to fall back on. As he felt the real danger to his life, his mouth went dry.
Still, he only needed to set it fighting the company again…!
It took almost no time to find the company once more.
The company was tidying up the battlefield left in ruins by its fight with the guardian. Its numbers appeared to have dropped by about twenty percent.
The treasure chest was still in the center of the formation. The skeleton soldiers had no interest in such a thing.
Instead, they looked at Ex, who had once again come barging into their midst.
“…Don't tell me.”
“Kreeeeeeeeeeee!”
This time, he seemed to have been discovered. The skeleton commander pointed at Ex and let out a piercing shriek.
Apparently it had realized that Ex was the cause of all this trouble.
The skeleton soldiers, elites, and officers took up battle positions and aimed their weapons at Ex.
At the same moment, the enraged guardian pursuing him gripped its stone sword firmly behind his back.
He had gone to all that trouble to get the company and the guardian fighting each other.
And now he had become the common enemy of both forces.
His Luck might be zero, but wasn't this taking things too far?
Ex let out a long, heavy sigh and muttered to himself.
“Fine. Now that it's come to this, what have I got to lose?”
Ex poured divine power into the Dragon Sword and brought forth four Golden Form Swords: golden versions of his white-light swords, formed from divine power.
He had already checked during the night how effective divine power was against the skeleton soldiers.
“Come on, you bony bastards. I'll send you back to your graves.”
There was no way back now, in any case.
The final stage of his plan hadn't gone smoothly, but that was all right.
He only needed to hold out until Circe and the soldiers arrived.
If he committed himself to the fight, he could survive even the attacks of both the guardian and the company. With that thought in mind, Ex's very first move was, of all things, Blink.
The skeletons located Ex after his abrupt disappearance. Just then, one of the officers let out a shriek; golden cracks spread over its entire body before it exploded.
It had been pierced clean through by an aura made of divine power.
Somehow, he just needed to disable their chain of command…!
From the beginning, Ex's targets when he used Blink had been the officers. Now he intended to kill only the officers and take control of the soldiers.
The commotion quickly drew the soldiers' attention. Those nearby immediately swung their swords at Ex.
Ex hurriedly caught and deflected the blades. For swords and arrows he couldn't immediately parry, he created a shield of divine power and blocked them.
Even as he did so, he glanced past the skeleton soldiers.
“I'm not the only one you've got to deal with.”
The guardian roared in fury.
Apparently seeing Ex vanish before its eyes again had sent it completely over the edge. It charged without hesitation now, heedless of everything in its way.
Soldiers in its path were trampled into little more than handfuls of dust. Even those that resisted had their entire bodies crushed and scattered by a swing of its stone sword.
When the guardian came close, Ex used Blink again and picked off another officer far away.
The guardian raced toward Ex's new position, trampling and slaughtering soldiers as it went. The battle had become complete chaos.
If he could keep them all caught up in that chaos, he could make this work somehow…!
Just as Ex had expected, the skeleton commander failed to make a quick decision in this situation.
Should it deal with Ex first, since he was hunting down its officers?
Or should it take care of the guardian, which was slaughtering its soldiers?
“Kreeee!”
The commander chose the former.
The surviving elites rushed toward Ex.
They lived up to their elite status: their movements were far quicker and more agile than those of the ordinary soldiers. A single look was enough to tell him that their fighting strength was nothing to take lightly.
Four elites. One mage, two swordsmen, and one spearman.
That was a combination he would struggle to face alone.
On top of that, the guardian was still coming after him with ferocious determination.
He had no time to take on the elites at his leisure.
But he had bought enough time.
From the darkness in the distance came a mass of arrows, accompanied by spells scattering bitter cold through the air.
They were aimed at the company, not Ex. Caught by the surprise attack, the soldiers began falling helplessly.
“Ex! Why are you still in there? What are you doing? Get out!”
It was the support he had been waiting for: Circe.
Judging by how hard she was breathing, she had sensed that something was wrong and come running as fast as she could. Her ability to pick up on a situation was truly remarkable.
That left only one thing to do.
“Circe, since things have turned out this way, let's finish them off right here.”
Ex gave her a crooked smile.
“We can do it now.”
–TL Notes–
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