He glared at us through his mask before continuing with his rant. “I will prove that the human race has unlimited potential, and that love, hope, and courage will never succumb in the face of anything! You will soon realize just how great and powerful humans can be!”
Doc then activated something that looked like an Item Box behind him, and tumbling out of the spatial distortion came an avalanche of human cadavers. The sight was so gross, I had to cover my mouth with my hand. I’d fought in a lot of gore-filled battles since being betrayed by my adventuring party in the Abyss, and I prided myself on being immune to all kinds of shocking things, but I frankly wasn’t prepared for this. It was like he’d emptied out a garbage pit full of dead bodies right in front of us. Some of the corpses were half decomposed, while others were no more than bleached, desiccated bones. The pile of bodies was made up of young and old, male and female, and far too many belonged to small children and infants. There were even some that looked like they were still alive, if only barely. This order of killing was truly indiscriminate, to say the least.
“We are not done yet, my dear boy!” Doc said, looking on as the bodies continued to pile up behind him. “Combine and take shape! Created Golem!”
The bodies began to accumulate around Doc before unmistakably forming arms, legs, a trunk, and finally, a head. During the process, one of the arms grabbed hold of my brother and started to integrate him into the mass as well.
“Nrrrow?!” Aoyuki yelped, struggling to pull him away from the mass of dead bodies with her Beast Chain.
“Debuff! Boost! Debuff!” Doc countered, weakening Aoyuki while buffing his golem. This series of spells finally caught the Genius Monster Tamer completely off-balance, and the golem was on the verge of pulling her in too.
“Aoyuki!” I yelled. “Release him from your chain! It’s not worth it!”
“Mrrew...” After a slight pause, Aoyuki sadly relented and released my brother from the Beast Chain collar. Throughout it all, dead bodies continued pouring out of Doc’s wormhole, as if he had an endless supply of corpses. These bodies kept amassing around Doc until they eventually formed a colossus dozens of meters high.
Mei reported that her team had discovered a huge pit piled sky-high with dead bodies in Doc’s lab, I thought. Was that only a fraction of his collection? I’d never seen so many corpses in my life, and the sheer volume of them was making me dizzy.
“Behold, my boy!” Doc said from inside his newly formed flesh golem. “This body represents the bonds of the devotees who have gladly sacrificed themselves to realize a new future for the human race! Will you and your friends be able to break these bonds?”
Mei, Aoyuki, and I could only look on, completely dumbstruck. We had never encountered someone with such a huge lack of regard for human lives and a willingness to go this far to massacre and trample on the dignity of so many innocent people. Even the most prejudiced of the nonhuman races weren’t this callous.
“D-Do you...” I spluttered. “Do you have any compassion for humans?”
“What in the world are you implying, my boy?” Doc replied. “I would say there is no one in this whole world with more compassion for humans than me. Ever since I was young, I felt in my heart that there was no other being weaker than our kind, since we tend to die for the slightest of reasons. I simply believe that all of humanity should become just like me.”
This maniac wasn’t putting on an act. He really did believe he was doing all of us humans a favor, judging from the tone of his voice.
“This is why I took action to save the human race!” Doc continued ranting. “In order to save the humans, I must transform their bodies and change them from what they once were! In fact, I am the savior of the humans on a sacred mission! And these are the bodies of martyrs who have proudly sacrificed themselves to my holy cause!”
That last bit of totally oblivious insanity made my head spin like a loose wagon wheel. He seriously thought he was doing good. But while I was busy trying to cope with the whiplash I was feeling, Doc was concentrating entirely on buffing his corpse golem.
“Boost! Boost! Boost!” he yelled. “Multilayered Boost!”
By this point, the number of dead bodies that had fused with the Created Golem had easily passed the ten thousand mark. And what was worse, Doc’s buffs were amplifying the energy of the souls attached to those corpses, causing their dying laments to become audible to our ears.
“It hurts.”
“Help me.”
“The agony...”
“Kill me.”
“Please spare me.”
The anguished energy produced by the souls intensified to form a thick, dark fog around the corpse golem. It was only at that point that Doc decided he had finished constructing his sickening monstrosity.
“Behold!” Doc gloated. “I will now destroy you with the ties that bind us humans together!”
The corpse golem shuffled forward on its makeshift feet in preparation for taking its first swing at us. I listened to my instincts and backed away from the monstrosity, which was just as well because the cursed dark energy surrounding the golem appeared to be killing everything in the air around it, while the grass and plant life the golem stepped on also withered away and turned to dust. In other words, Doc had managed to create a living weapon that killed everything it touched, and if that wasn’t enough, the golem also seemed to suck the life force out of all of the organisms it killed to add to its own dark energy. The black mist kept expanding and eventually reached the demonkin raiders who were milling about nearby. As soon as the mist touched them, they dropped to the ground and writhed around in the throes of death, as if a plague had suddenly struck them down.
“S-Someone help!” one of the demons cried out, quickly followed by a scream of pain from one of his comrades.
“Mr. Doc! Why!” another soldier lamented.
The corpse golem noticed the dead raiders and extended its arms to grab and absorb them, making its dark energy grow stronger still.
“It appears the necro energy surrounding you grows stronger with each life that is absorbed,” Mei deduced of the golem. “In that case, allow me to cut you up into pieces!”
Mei dismantled the Magistring wall she had constructed to contain Doc and instead pulled her threads this way and that in an attempt to slice and dice the golem. Since the lumbering mass clearly derived its power from dead organisms, it made sense to strip lifeless bodies away from it and whittle it down to size. But Mei didn’t get very far into her barrage of attacks before running into an unexpected setback.
“You’re corrupting my Magistrings?!” she cried out.
“Indeed I am!” Doc confirmed. “This trifling manner of attack will never so much as scratch the strengthened bonds that tie humanity together!”
In other words, the golem’s dark energy that had been boosted by Doc was strong enough to keep Mei’s Magistrings from interfering with the living weapon, and any thread attempting to cut it down turned black and disintegrated before it could do so. True, Mei was the weakest fighter out of my Level 9999 warriors, but I never imagined her Magistrings could be rendered useless in battle. Exactly how many humans had Doc tortured to death to gain all this cursed, ghostly energy? Once again, the sheer evilness of the guy was making my head spin.
“Once we get all the information we need out of you, I’ll make you pay for all your crimes with your body, mind, and soul!” I yelled at him.