A grotesque abomination of a dragon emerged from the light. It had the winged body of a true dragon, from which seven different heads sprouted.
The first was the head of the original dragon. From its body sprouted the slender head of a hydra, the eyeless head of a wyrm, the triangular head of a wyvern, and the head of a sea serpent covered in fishlike scales. Those heads were at least somewhat ordinary. Of the remaining two heads, one was translucent and ghostly, while the other was a single, massive red eye at the end of a long neck.
It was a creature that shouldn’t exist. Even among hydras, there was no such species to be found. The weight of its heads seemed to cause its body to slump forward, and the patchwork scales on its body varied in color and shape.
“What do you think?” The necromancer sounded almost proud. “The base materials alone are worth enough to build a castle. This is the culmination of my research. I would’ve liked to hear your thoughts on it, but I suppose you must be speechless.”
The ghostly and eyeball heads of the cobbled-together dragon directed curses at me. The eyeball’s evil eye hindered my movement, while the spectral head caused wedge-shaped curse marks to begin appearing on my body. The ghostly head likely belonged to a type of dragonkin known as a curse dragon, and judging from the red optic’s size, I suspected it had been taken from a cyclops bearing the evil eye.
“It’s unfortunate, but I’ll have to give up on turning you into an undead. You don’t appear to be an opponent I can go easy on.” The remaining five heads reeled back, and energy began swirling around them. “Now, die without a trace,” the necromancer said, as composed as ever.
The patchwork dragon unleashed its breath. Fire spewed from the original dragon head, poison gas from the hydra’s, lava from the wyrm’s, a sharp gust of wind from the wyvern’s, and a torrent of water from the sea serpent’s head. The backlash from the tremendous force lifted the dragon’s upper body off the ground for a moment.
The corpses of the middle-aged men were caught in the aftermath—set ablaze, torn apart, swallowed up, and swept away. As the necromancer had said, any ordinary human who took a direct hit would have been annihilated without a trace. However, it never reached me.
“My thoughts, huh?” I said, safely inside a hitogata barrier. The breath’s immense power had fizzled out before any part of it reached me. “The way its seemingly unbalanced heads absorb the recoil from its breath is surprisingly functional, I’ll give you that.” Neither my mouth nor my body showed any sign of hindrance. The curse marks had vanished before I even put up my barrier. A curse of that level didn’t even need any countermeasures. “That said, your sense of aesthetics is dreadfully poor.”
“I’m surprised.” The necromancer’s smile stiffened from inside a pillar of light. At their side stood two undead clad in priestly robes that they had summoned without me noticing. They’d likely had the two of them create a barrier to shield them from the aftermath of the breath. “I’ve seen that barrier before, but I didn’t expect it to be able to defend against that breath attack. None of the talisman barriers I’m familiar with are that strong.”
“Guess you need to expand your knowledge,” I said, pulling more hitogata out of the alternate plane. “This is enough to silence even the most troublesome corpses.” I scattered the hitogata in every direction, surrounding the city.
I made a hand sign and poured cursed energy into the hitogata, enveloping the city in a massive barrier. If you didn’t care what became of the corpses, dealing with the undead was simple. You simply needed to dispel the magic and return them to being lifeless flesh, which was something exorcists excelled at.
As expected, the moment the barrier was completed, the remaining middle-aged men, the priestly undead soldiers, and even the patchwork dragon all slumped over.
“Heh heh.”
However, the undead that should have been dispelled by the barrier didn’t go down. They faltered momentarily, then immediately got back up.
“What’s going on?” I couldn’t understand what had just happened.
“I told you I’ve seen it before, didn’t I? Naturally, I came up with a countermeasure,” the necromancer said with a fearless smile. “That barrier is deployed as a three-dimensional field using talismans as its vertices. That means it has a blind spot—your talismans can’t pass through the ground, so the barrier doesn’t affect beneath the earth. By preparing a magic circle underground to maintain the spell, it’s possible to circumvent it. Whether or not your barrier would nullify the magical power coming from below ground was a gamble, but it appears I won that bet.”
I met the enemy sorcerer with silence as they demonstrated how to overcome my onmyoudou barrier. Their observation was spot-on. Though it depended on how the barrier was deployed, the type I often used didn’t extend underground. Still, I hadn’t expected someone who had only observed it once remotely to find a way to exploit that flaw. Both the idea itself and the mastery required to implement it were far beyond the capabilities of an ordinary individual.
I was dealing with more than a mere eccentric. This was a necromancer who had truly mastered the art, unlike any I had encountered in my previous life.
“Even so,” the necromancer said, looking at the priest undead, “it seems the spells my undead use are being nullified. I imagine that means the dragon’s breath won’t work either. No matter.”
Suddenly, the stone pavement of the square burst apart with a deafening crack.
“Oooh...” A figure emerged from below. It was a massive, humanoid corpse around six meters tall. It appeared to be a giant.
More and more undead poured out from underground. There was even a red-skinned ogre corpse, a black-furred bearfolk corpse, and a large, battle-axe-wielding devil corpse.
“I anticipated this, so I placed a summoning circle underground as well. This is my prized collection—demon undead. Most swords and spells will simply bounce right off them, and they can tear a human apart with their bare hands. How will you fight foes your barrier doesn’t affect?” The necromancer gave the order to attack. “If you would, please die beautifully for me.”