All fear stems from insufficient firepower.
Perhaps that saying wasn't wrong after all?
"Isn't this a little too easy?"
Linie hefted her axe, only to find there was nowhere to put it to use.
As she walked across ground that had been washed clean by Holy Power, she felt the soil turn soft beneath her feet—while at the same time, the flow of her Mana seemed somewhat sluggish.
"This is only the first line of defense. Don't let your guard down."
"Mm, she's right."
Himmel nodded in agreement with Nanoda. That oppressive Mana that suffused the whole of Kinton still hadn't faded in the slightest.
His instincts told him there was something deeper in, something a hundred times more dangerous than this—something he might not be able to handle alone. But this time, he had companions.
"This undead seems weaker than I imagined?"
"Or maybe we're just too strong?"
"The two of you, that's quite enough. Didn't the Acting Bishop tell us not to let our guard down? And can't you feel it? That thing deeper in."
The crowd of believers chattered among themselves, their morale running high.
Passing several pillboxes and a few small stretches of withered field ridges, Kinton's former second line of defense came into view before them all.
Compared to before, however, this place was utterly deserted.
"Well? Have you sensed any enemies?"
The female monk, eyes closed, shook her head at Nanoda. "There seems to be nothing here. I can't see anything.
"It's strange—my Mana Perception picks up absolutely nothing. And yet—"
"My intuition is telling me there are many of them here."
As Himmel added those last words, he drew the Sword of the Hero from his waist. In that instant, his whole bearing transformed—sharp, upright, unstoppable.
The moment he took his first step, the soil beneath his foot shifted ever so slightly. A skeletal hand burst from the earth right beneath his sole and seized Himmel's shoe-clad foot.
"So that's where you were hiding."
Completely unfazed, he drove the tip of his sword downward in a single thrust, piercing through the bony hand. Using the leverage to free himself, Himmel briefly left the ground, gripped the hilt with both hands, and—borrowing his momentum in midair—drove a falling thrust down with all his strength.
"THUD!" The undead soldier, its skull only just emerging, was shattered from top to bottom.
Almost at the same moment, a ring of skeletal arms sprouted from the ground all around Himmel—
"Just how many are buried under here?"
Nanoda, for her part, gripped the hand-bones clutching her ankle in reverse. With a single forceful squeeze she snapped them, and in the same motion hauled the entire skeleton up out of the earth.
Several streaks of white light flashed out of thin air. Finely honed Severance Magic sliced her opponent into several broken pieces of bone. And the skull, having dropped to the ground and split evenly in half, still trembled back and forth, as if it could yet move.
"Now this is really something."
A single one-legged spinning kick in place—
together with that hand-bone still hooked onto her ankle, accompanied by a sharp "crack," Nanoda shattered the skeletal undead crawling out of the ground behind her. Its rusted blade sank back into the muddy earth.
"Hyah—! Hyah—! Hyah—!"
Yuna, brandishing her crimson, spear-shaped staff, jabbed it straight down. Once, twice, three times, four times… until there was no movement below, and only then did she let out a breath.
Linie, meanwhile, simply stomped straight down. The ground caved into a small crater, the skeletal undead crushed along with it.
In the past, she might have relied on mimicked martial techniques to free herself—but now, "Linie's already gotten stronger from all that training!"
As more and more skeletons erupted from the ground, the chaos kept escalating. Everyone was surrounded—surrounded by the unknown things buried beneath this land.
Some of the monks, careless and panicked, took minor injuries in that first wave.
The Thirteen Spears of the New God weren't suitable to use right now—those exploding holy spears might harm their own comrades. Everyone could only rely on the weapons at hand or targeted spells.
Nanoda casually yanked the female monk beside her over.
Useful as the Heavenly Eye was, aside from reconnaissance and healing it offered no combat ability whatsoever. Right now, she was the weakest one here.
"Thank you."
"Focus your mind."
Nanoda invoked the paradox of stillness and motion, and in the blink of an eye annihilated the entire ring of freshly emerged skeletons around her.
In the female monk's eyes, the Acting Bishop had instantly slain the surrounding monsters without so much as moving—and she couldn't help but worship her all the more.
Yuna watched the female monk pressed up close against Nanoda with a faintly resentful look.
Severance Magic kept lashing out, leaving scattered bone fragments flying wherever it passed.
It was all too familiar. What she was doing now—a ground strewn with corpses, the dead that moved, the faint stench of rot in the soil, and that Mana that was everywhere—
A moment's lapse in her thoughts, and Yuna, in mid-run, had her legs seized at once by several skeletal hands. It seemed those undead were trying to drag her down beneath the earth.
"I'm coming!"
Almost simultaneously, Yuna's staff and the axe in Linie's hands slammed into the ground. Several skeletons wedged together were instantly pulverized.
Even as the fighting continued, wounded believers were moved by their comrades to cleared, safe areas to be healed. For the time being, no serious casualties occurred.
No one knew how long it lasted—the cries of slaughter never ceased, the clash of weapons rang on without end, and from time to time the flashes of Scripture magecraft and Mana lit up as skeleton after skeleton was broken apart.
Since the battle had begun, the noonday sun had already sunk well past its peak.
The undead seemed incapable of tiring, crop after crop bursting endlessly from the earth, while many on Nanoda's side had begun to show signs of exhaustion.
There was no gap at all in which to rest.
And yet a human's stamina is finite, and there comes a time when magic and Holy Power, too, run dry.
"Since when?!"
One of the monks cried out in alarm.
Apart from the very soil underfoot, beyond the ground where the thousand-some people stood, moving corpses tore up out of the earth one after another, forming an enormous encirclement so vast that from inside to outside one could not even see where its edge ended.
"Hey, why don't we all put a little more muscle into it?"
Himmel's voice carried over from not far off. Nanoda knew it was time to get serious. The ranks had already fallen into a degree of disorder, and as more and more monsters appeared, the number of wounded kept climbing.
"Half each?"
"Sounds good!"
An answer echoed back from the opposite side, and Nanoda broke into a smile.
As an enemy he'd been quite the handful—but when the Hero was your ally, he was reliable beyond compare.
After a brief silence,
came two thunderous roars!
Himmel's full-force sword stroke split the ground open, the resulting shockwave stretching out unbroken. Every undead in its path was wiped away, and along the cracked-open ravine countless skeletons lost their footing and tumbled in.
On the other side, an enormous Severance Magic sheared every skeleton within sight clean across the middle. Having lost their spines and split into two halves, the undead could only flop up and down on the ground like dried fish.
Seeing this, Yuna and Linie refused to be outdone, seizing the moment to cut down the other scattered enemies.
At last, just as everyone began to feel somewhat worn out, the ground no longer spat up any moving corpses.
It was like the scene of a giant game of whack-a-mole—dark, deep hollows and white bones everywhere.
The Church of the New God's legion, so confident when they'd first set out, now looked rather bedraggled and weary as well.
"Should we let everyone take a little rest?"
Himmel, who had cleaved the encirclement open with a single stroke and roamed through the heap of corpses cutting them down with effortless ease, looked utterly unflushed and unfazed, without the slightest sign of fatigue.
Nanoda suspected that, were it not for his appearance, this was absolutely no Human pushing sixty years of age—sixteen would be more like it.
____
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