Bertrand grinned, announcing Iron’s new name. His charge nodded firmly, acknowledging it.
And so Iron, the tragic summon that had killed its master, was history. In its place now stood Beorite, a formidable, proud knight.
Invaders have entered the dungeon.
Deploy traps and minions to defeat them!
A new system message popped up in Shuutarou’s UI. The enemy was nowhere to be seen yet, but they had apparently gotten inside.
“Can you protect this castle?” Shuutarou asked Beorite, who nodded.
Shuutarou made a new party and added Beorite to it.
“Punio, please assist Beorite! I’m counting on you.”
They were the two monsters Shuutarou deployed to deal with the invaders. As Beorite was a defense-oriented monster, the boy figured the tank should be paired up with a damage dealer.
A few minutes later, Beorite and Punio clashed with the intruders.
✦ ✦ ✦
Their numbers were dropping fast…
Even as Lao Fan had his hands full fighting, he registered that his allies were being decimated.
How many have we got left? Forty or so between the humans and monsters? No, even fewer than that…
Was it the knight that got them? Or did they drop off into the abyss? Lao Fan thought it must’ve been one or the other. He focused his attention on the knight again.
The monster’s attacks were by no means weak, but the damage was easily healed by the clerics, so Lao Fan felt that they should have everything under control. It vexed him, though, that even when they had sixty squad members attacking at once, they didn’t manage to make any headway.
He may be impossible for us to defeat…
The change of plan to defeating the dungeon master instead of destroying the core had turned out to be a big mistake. The defensive ability of the knight made a mockery of the invaders, who weren’t prepared for a drawn-out battle. Dungeon raids were meant to be swift and as efficient as possible.
They’d have to abort the plan to defeat the dungeon master, then find the core after all, as per their original strategy. But the scouts couldn’t go on ahead with the knight blocking the way. They had the lowest stamina, and one of them had gotten killed by the knight’s first counterattack. As the battle went on, Lao Fan suddenly noticed he was the last remaining scout. The Midnight Luffas were nowhere to be seen, either. Kellton’s minions couldn’t run away from battle, which meant they’d been killed. If the fiendishly strong monsters from Ross Maora, the Den of Demons, had been killed, it seemed to spell defeat for all of them.
Kellton waved his magic rod, muttering something. Lao Fan strained his ears.
“I never wanted it to come to this…but it must be done if any of us are to survive.”
Lao Fan felt beads of cold sweat roll down his back as a four-meter-wide magic circle appeared around Kellton. The monsters and adventurers within it were raised off the ground by some force and stayed suspended in the air.
“Ungh…!”
“Wh-what’s happening?!”
“I can’t… I can’t move!”
They were helplessly trapped.
I’m going to die at the hand of an ally…?
Lao Fan was among the floating adventurers. He could sense imminent death.
The next moment, sharp blades pierced him and the others from within, cutting their stomachs open. As they writhed in agony, a grotesque creature began to rise up from underground. It was a demon with twin heads. Its disproportional body was bulging with muscle. It had four arms and was holding a sword in each hand.
This monster spawned in the Hellvas Underground Prison area, where a group of heretics committed countless murders as they sought the secret of immortality. The grudge of the dead caused two monsters to fuse together into one cursed entity. Feeding on death, the monster could be summoned through live sacrifice.
This twisted creature, the personification of despair, lacked intelligence but had a strong drive to kill and destroy. It had neither eyes nor a nose, instead relying on its acute hearing to find prey. Any sound that didn’t come from Kellton triggered the monster to attack.
The remaining adventurers and their ally monsters were thus attacked from behind by Samunokan, cut clean in half by its swords or pushed off into the abyss. Next, it rushed at the knight with the fury of a hurricane.
Destroy that knight, thought Holivay, who had hidden from the summoned monster. The dungeon had to be destroyed so that his companions’ deaths would not be in vain.
Samunokan brought down its four swords on the knight’s shoulders, as if to crush the opponent into the ground. The clang of metal on metal was deafening, but the knight held on tight to its sword, shifting to a different stance. A yellow aura appeared around it, gradually increasing in intensity. Suddenly, the aura burst, and the Mutant Samunokan turned to dust.
“No, impossible… The knight’s an acolyte?!”
Kellton was flabbergasted.
Beorite didn’t only boast insanely high defense. A lot of his stat points were invested in physical and magic defense, as well as holy magic. While he was in Sylvia’s unforgiving realm of trials, as Iron, he couldn’t stop blaming himself for having killed his original summoner. He yearned for the strength to protect others. For the power to heal them.
It’d taken Kellton that long to understand Beorite was instantly healing the damage that his squad of adventurers had been dealing. When it finally sank in that Beorite was a cleric-type monster and that nothing Kellton could throw at him would have any effect, he was aghast to realize defeat was certain.
“A—a monstrosity like that shouldn’t exist…!”
Kellton saw an Abyss Slime approaching him, but he couldn’t find the will to try to dodge. His body began to turn to vapor, and soon, all that was left of him was a stain on the floor.
“Damn…,” Holivay spat.
He dropped to his knees and waited for death.