For a moment, Elijah couldn't understand what he was seeing. His mind kept trying to make sense of it.
Human? No. Animal? No. *Monster.* Even that was an understatement, but that was the only word his mind could bring itself to accept.
The creature stood several metres away, hunched beneath the trees as though its spine had forgotten what it was supposed to do. Its body carried a stench that reeked of sweat, blood, and excrement. It was horribly thin, almost skeletal, but there was nothing frail about the way it carried itself. Its arms hung far too low, low enough for its clawed fingers to nearly brush the ground. Its skin was a sickly, pale green.
Elijah stared at its face and immediately wished he hadn't.
Its eyes were enormous, bulging from their sockets as though something inside the creature was trying to push them out. They weren't looking at him together. One eye watched his face, the other watched Eric.
Elijah felt his stomach tighten.
Then the creature smiled. There was no reason for it to smile, but it did. Rows of irregular teeth filled its mouth, crowded together at impossible angles, some too long, some crooked, some grown wherever there happened to be space.
Then Elijah noticed the hair. Only a few strands, long, thin, and white, growing from the creature's scalp like dead threads caught in the wind.
On his back, Elijah crawled towards Eric, terrified. The creature's head tilted. Something moved beneath its cheek. Elijah froze, at first thinking it was a muscle twitching. Then the skin split, not like an injury, but like a mouth opening. A seam ran from the corner of the creature's cheek towards the side of its skull, and as the flesh parted, an extension of its mouth slowly revealed itself beneath. There were teeth inside that one too.
The creature opened it. A tongue slid out, long, far too long, moving slowly through the air, tasting it.
Elijah couldn't breathe. His eyes dropped, and that was when he saw its legs. They were wrong. The joints bent in a direction that made his stomach turn. The lower limbs resembled the powerful hind legs of some animal, while its feet ended in long, strangely separated toes that reminded him of a monkey's. Every part of it seemed to have been assembled from things that belonged to other creatures. Nothing matched. Nothing should exist like this. And yet it stood there, alive, watching him.
Elijah had seen monsters in movies, in games. He had seen drawings of demons. He had imagined what a creature from another world might look like. Yet none of them could have prepared him for this, because this thing wasn't frightening in the way a monster was supposed to be frightening. It was frightening because there was something almost human about it. Almost.
And Elijah's mind couldn't stop noticing the difference as the creature leaned forward, its arms dragging behind it, its eyes shifting independently, one fixed on him, the other on Eric behind him.
Elijah suddenly understood. It wasn't merely looking at him. It was assessing them like food.
His heart slammed against his ribs. The creature's second mouth slowly widened, and Elijah realized, with a coldness that seemed to spread through his entire body, that the horrific thing standing before him had probably been watching them long before he ever noticed it.
Eric gripped his sword and shouted, "Elijah! A knight doesn't cower in the face of monsters! Raise your sword and fight, or are you nothing but a coward?"
Neode's voice cut through his mind, calm and quick.
*Forgive me, Elijah. Activating skill archive. Current capabilities: one human, all physical and mental properties strengthened by one human.*
As Elijah stood gripping his sword, he asked Neode why it felt like he had always seen and fought goblins before.
*Your skill archive compiles the information of humanity, so when activated, the surrounding knights are used as reference. In addition to your own experience, you have theirs.*
*I apologize for losing myself like that,* Elijah thought back.
*Apologies are uncalled for. I am simply a guide to help you handle your skill more easily.*
Silence stretched. Elijah gripped his sword, not as taught but as experienced, and rushed towards the goblin. It was roughly sixteen metres away. With his running speed alone, he crossed the distance in 2.3 seconds. The goblin shifted to evade him, but it wasn't fast enough for an Elijah who was the accumulation of two humans, Elijah and one knight, rolled into one.
As Elijah beheaded the goblin, in that split second he thought to himself: *I feel afraid. I feel no pity. I feel sorry. I feel everything. Every hate the knights have for you, yet I still think you look too human to be killed. But I won't make the mistake of hesitating.*
From the moment he began to crawl, to the moment the goblin's head left its shoulders, only 18.4 seconds had passed.
As the head rolled on the ground, Elijah swung his sword to clear the blood, and as he walked towards Eric, all triumphant, he heard a sound. Not a howl, not a growl, but a clicking, choking screech, like a man with too much tongue screaming for help. Fear encroached on Elijah's heart, even the part of him that was knight now. He turned, only for his eyes to meet the goblin's severed head, the source of the sound, smiling, its eyes wandering in different directions until they stopped and fixed on Elijah. It stuck out its tongue with a grin and screeched.
Elijah turned and ran towards Eric as multiple goblins came at them.
—
Meanwhile, in the duke's territory, the knights stationed atop the city walls kept watch. The one still awake spotted movement. No, not quite spotted. He *felt* like something was off. He picked up a telescope and looked out, but all he saw was darkness and motion.
He woke the second knight. "I think there's something out there."
The second knight looked through the telescope and immediately picked up a bow and arrow, lit it on fire, and fired it as far as he could. It landed on the far grass. Then an orc picked it up, raised it to its face, and crushed it.
The knight screamed to his partner, "Run! To the duke!"
The other knight stammered, "What's going on?"
The bow knight grabbed his partner and said calmly, "Run to the duke and tell him they're coming. Don't worry, everything is all right."
The knight ran as fast as he could, and on his way to the duke, the wall bells rang. In that moment he understood what was happening, and he ran faster still. As he reached the duke's home, he met the duke carrying his wife, who was in labor. The duke ran towards the leech's home, the tallest house in the territory, built like a tower. Hemsworth didn't care. He ran so fast it looked like he flew up those stairs.
The leech looked at Hemsworth and immediately directed him to a bed, his own bed.
Hemsworth asked, hands trembling, "W-why isn't she waking up?"
The leech looked him in the eye. "She's okay. She's fine. Don't worry, she and the baby are okay. Hemsworth, the bells are ringing. Go protect your wife's home."
Hemsworth wiped his tears, kissed his wife's forehead, and left. As soon as the door shut behind him, the look of calm dropped from the leech's face, worry and anxiety etching into his expression. He called for his assistants.
"She's in labor, and the baby is drawing an unusual amount of mystism. It's left her weak and unconscious. At this rate she could die." He pointed at one assistant. "You, find as many mystism crystals as you can. You, get me hot towels. You, cold towels."
The three answered as one, "Sir!" and hurried out.
The leech bit his lip, then muttered to himself, "I need to wake her up. How do I do that... oh, that might work." He pressed his palm to Lucy's forehead and, using his mystism, began passing his own energy into her as the baby absorbed it. But the intake and output of mystism sent her body's temperature climbing. Luckily, the assistant with the cold towels returned in time to cool her.
Hemsworth ran home with the knight sent to summon him, and as he pulled on his armour, he said to the knight, "Call the scout. Go!"
Hemsworth, in full plated armour, climbed the walls and there met the scout. "How many?" he asked.
The scout quivered, fear stealing the words from his mouth.
Hemsworth grabbed him and shouted, "Soldier, how many are they?"
The scout steeled himself. "My skill, 'Scout's Field,' lets me see and count everything in a fifteen-kilometre radius. Before I came here, I ran around the dukedom and counted the number of soldiers. There are 243 official knights, 179 apprentice knights, and 93 squires, a total of 515 soldiers, excluding you, and about 1,000 reserves with basic combat training."
The duke cut in. "Do you wish to remind me of my own subjects?"
"No, sir, I'm just making a report..."
Hemsworth's eyes narrowed. "How many?"
The scout's eyes were full of despair. "Fifteen hundred goblins."
Fifteen hundred. Hard, but manageable. For half a breath, the tension drained from Hemsworth's face, and the muscles around his mouth twitched as if to speak.
The scout continued. "Eighteen hundred orcs. Well, those are the ones I could count. There are still more beyond my range."
The relief died. Hemsworth stayed calm, though his soul was shaking. He turned and ordered, "Sound the evacuation bell now! Tell the reserves and the squires to help the people evacuate. They grab as little as they can and run." He turned to the knight who had called him. "You were the one who came to get me, right? My wife. Go."
Then, to the scout: "Gather all the knights and the apprentices. Tell them to prepare for war."
All 422 knights and apprentices assembled in full plate armour. Hemsworth stood before them.
"There are fifteen hundred goblins and eighteen hundred orcs marching towards our gates, and there may be more. I will give you two options. Go now, evacuate with your families, and protect them. Or fight with me and protect our land, our home. The choice is yours."
After a few moments, only fifty-seven remained: forty-eight official knights and nine apprentice knights.
Hemsworth looked at them. "We will protect our families, our home, our land. We only need to buy time for them to escape."
As the enemy drew close, Hemsworth ordered the apprentice knights to man the walls and the crossbows. He and the remaining knights would fight on the vanguard. They opened the gates, all fully armed and armoured, and followed him tightly as the first wave approached. Goblins.
"Those grotesque child-eaters," a knight muttered, and all of them gripped their swords, ready for what was coming.
—
Meanwhile, Elijah and Eric rode as fast as they could towards the dukedom, but the horde of abominations in their way slowed them. It also made Elijah stronger. The more he killed, the more his Mystism grew, and the stronger his skill and his body became. But every victory came with a loss. Back at the camp, they had found the soldiers who had accompanied them dead, killed by goblins. As Elijah passed the bodies, Archive, still running, registered each of them. The scholar had been nowhere to be found.
Then, as Elijah's eyes wandered across the fighting, they met the scholar's in the midst of a crowd of orcs. They weren't attacking. They simply stood there. Beside him, Eric was focused on the battle and saw nothing.
For the first time, Elijah asked Neode, *Why? How?*
Before he could finish, the scholar removed his robe, and his face was different. Dark blue skin. Pointed yet flat ears. Red and black pupils. Elijah didn't know what he was looking at, though he instinctively understood it through his skill.
*Confirmed. The entity known as the scholar is most likely a fiend of the demon race. Demons can influence monsters and beasts, driving them to berserk and charge through the chaos in their power.*
Elijah froze. In that moment it all made sense: the sudden expedition, the delayed reinforcements from the kingdom, the ambush. Had the knights even been ambushed, or simply killed in their sleep, unable to do anything?
Elijah gripped his sword. Mystism flowed through his veins, uncontrolled, unrefined, and a strength that wasn't his surged through his body, so much and so suddenly that his muscles shook.
*Archive has evolved alongside your Mystism. The deceased were registered as you passed them. Their pain and anger are reaching you.*
Pain that wasn't his tore through him, and anger that wasn't his, the pain and anger of the men who had ridden out with him and would never ride home. He couldn't tell where his own rage ended and theirs began, and he didn't care. He was channeling the dead, fighting for the home they would never see again. In that instant, Elijah was the accumulation of twelve humans in one.
Beside him, Eric felt it instinctively, the way a knight feels the air shift before a charge. He glanced sideways at Elijah. Something had changed.