“Yae — it’s heading your way!”
“Acknowledged!”
Using a crumbling section of castle wall as cover, the thing dropped out of my line of sight.
A clash of metal rang through the wall. When I rounded it, Yae was already trading blows with it.
Pitch-black knight’s armor. An ill-omened greatsword. Its enormous frame practically oozed brute strength. The legs that supported all that gripped the ground and refused to budge; the arms swinging that greatsword carried not a shred of mercy.
Or maybe — mercy as an emotion was simply gone. Because the dark knight had no head.
Dullahan. A knight who’d died bitterly on the guillotine, wandering in search of a head that fit him, hunting human heads. The lore differs from the world I came from, but that was today’s target.
Yae and I closed in on the dullahan from both sides. I signaled with my eyes; once she saw light-element power gathering at my pointed index and middle fingers, she peeled off.
“Light, pierce — radiant holy spear — Shining Javelin.”
A spear of dazzling light shot straight from my fingertip toward the dullahan. It punched cleanly through the left shoulder; the black arm tore off and went flying.
But no human-style spray of blood from the wound. Instead, black miasma drifted out of it, while the right arm — still gripping the greatsword — swung down at me.
In that beat, a shadow leapt in from the side and drove a fist into the headless knight’s flank. Without breaking momentum, the shadow followed up with a sharp roundhouse kick that hit clean while the dullahan was off-balance.
“Elze! What about the Horn-Wolves!?”
“Cleaned ‘em up somehow! There were nearly twenty of them, geez!”
Linze was running over from a distance too. Right — now it’s the real fight.
The dullahan, briefly staggered by Elze’s surprise attack, swung that greatsword in a horizontal arc aimed at her neck. Elze ducked under it and tumbled into a roll, coming up beside me.
“Flame, come — fireball of inferno — Fire Ball.”
Linze’s fireball nailed the dullahan in the back. Yae’s blade flashed in to capitalize, but it was blocked by the raised greatsword.
“Tough one! A war of attrition would be bad.”
Unlike the other side, we take that greatsword head-on even once and it’s instant death — best case, we lose an arm.
The dullahan was already lifeless, dead, an undead by category. Undead are universally extremely weak to light-element magic. Linze can use light too, but it’s not her strong suit. So it falls to me. …I’ll go with that.
“Linze! Lock its feet down with ice. Just a few seconds.”
“Eh? Y-yes!”
At my call, Yae and Elze moved in. To draw the dullahan’s attention and pull it off Linze and me. Yeah — our teamwork’s pretty solid.
“Ice, bind — frozen shackles — Ice Bind.”
Linze’s spell triggered, ice racing up around the dullahan’s feet. The headless knight forced power into both legs to break free; cracks crawled across the ice and bits started to flake. Not so fast.
“Multiple!”
My Null spell triggered. Four magic circles floated into the air around me. I followed up with the light spell.
“Light, pierce — radiant holy spear — Shining Javelin.”
In the next instant, four light-spears burst from the four circles in unison. Every one of them flew straight for the dullahan. Cuts the chant-recital and lets you fire simultaneously — that’s [Multiple].
The headless knight tried to evade the incoming spears, but Linze’s ice didn’t let it.
Taking every spear of light through its body, the dullahan lost its right arm, then its flank, then its left leg, and finally its chest, and slowly collapsed.
From inside the ruined armor, jet-black miasma poured out and scattered on the wind.
The headless knight didn’t move again.
◇ ◇ ◇ ◇ ◇
“All cleaned up.”
“Tireeeeed it was.”
Elze let out a relieved sigh; Yae plopped down on the ground. No surprise — she’d been the one dodging most of its swings and tying it up the entire time.
“Having a Horn-Wolf pack along with it was a miscalculation. That was close…”
Linze, too, looked relieved.
Over the past few months, our guild rank had moved up to green. Black > purple > green > blue > red > silver > gold — third from the bottom. At green, you’re recognized as a full-fledged adventurer.
We’d been about to take a green job in Reflet when Elze suggested for a change, why not pick up a job at a different town’s guild?
So we’d picked from the green job postings at the capital’s guild headquarters, and chosen this one — exterminate the monsters nesting in these ruins.
This place had originally been the royal capital, over a thousand years ago. The king at the time had abandoned this land and chosen to build a new capital. The whole capital-relocation thing.
What it looked like back then, I don’t know — but now it was a ring of ivy-wrapped, hole-pocked walls; cobblestones and buildings barely retaining the shape of a town; and the rubble of what looked like a completely collapsed royal castle. True to the word, ruins.
At some point, monsters and beasts began nesting here. Adventurers like us would take a job and clear them out, only for new monsters to move in after a while, requiring another extermination — apparently a steady cycle had developed.
If you let monsters keep moving in unchecked, eventually they form packs. Periodic culling makes sense.
“For an old royal capital — there’s nothing here, huh…”
Wherever I looked: collapsed walls, walls, walls. This hill, with its sweeping view, was supposedly where the royal castle once stood. Maybe the Duke’s and Sue’s ancestors lived here too.
But why this city decayed this far after the relocation, I had no idea. Was it like Dong Zhuo in Three Kingdoms — torching the castle and homes to force the move?
“Be fun if there were a hidden royal treasure or something.”
“Nay, that there would not be. A toppled kingdom, perhaps — but here it was merely a relocation, so any treasure they would have taken with them, indeed.”
“I know, I just said it.”
At Yae’s rebuttal, Elze pursed her lips. Hidden treasure, huh.
Even in my world there were the Tokugawa Buried Gold, the Takeda Buried Gold, that kind of thing — so this world has its own version too, naturally. Not that I’m against the idea myself. Treasure-hunting is a man’s romance, after all.
A thought struck me. That spell might work.
“Search: Treasure.”
Tried out the search spell. If anything I’d recognize as treasure was nearby, this’d find it. …Yeah, nothing. Of course.
“You used [Search]!? W-well? Anything?”
“There’s no treasure around here, at least.”
I answered Elze, who was leaning in excitedly, with a wry smile.
“Ahh… too bad.”
“B-but, just because Touya-san couldn’t recognize it as treasure doesn’t mean there’s nothing valuable, right?”
Oh — the little sister’s also part of the treasure-hunt-romance crowd, I see. Twins for you.
Linze had a point. Say, for example, there’s a painting by an incredibly valuable artist. But if I look at it and think that just looks like scribbles to me — searching for “valuables” wouldn’t catch it. The spell relies on the caster’s perception, which is what makes it both broad and limited. If I learned about the painting’s value first, then it might respond.
True enough. By “treasure” I’d been picturing jewels, golden crowns, holy swords, piles of koban and ōban… Hmm, in that case…
“Search: Historical Artifacts.”
Things of historical value should turn up. Ah — though if I lack the knowledge, this is wasted too… wait?
”…Got something.”
"""Eh!?"""
There it is — something of historical value. The ruins themselves are reacting too, but there’s something more than the ruins, somewhere close. I sharpened the sense. Yeah — definitely there.
“W-which way!?”
”…This way. I feel it from over there. It’s big — what is this?”
"""Big!?"""
Following the sense, I made my way through the ruins. Everyone trailed me; eventually we came to a stop just in front of a heap of fallen rubble. Hmm?
”…Below? Beneath this rubble?”
How are we supposed to deal with a pile of rubble that has to weigh tons? While I stood there at a loss, Linze stepped forward.
“Flame, burst — crimson detonation — Explosion.”
A tremendous boom — the rubble blasted apart into fragments. Whoa — isn’t that overkill, Linze!?
”…Cleared.”
Ignoring my stunned reaction, Linze briskly began searching the spot the rubble had occupied. What is with this enthusiasm.
I stepped onto the cleared ground myself, and felt it stronger. Below… here?
Nothing on the cobblestones at my feet… hm? What’s this?
A piece of the cobblestone was chipped away, and something was visible beneath. I called everyone over, and as we cleared the stones one after another, what emerged was a pair of iron doors, about two tatami mats wide. Out here, of all places…
Together we forced the iron doors open. Strangely, they weren’t rusted shut — opened smoothly. Maybe they aren’t iron after all.
And beneath them, a stone staircase descending into the underground waited there to ominously greet us…