“Get up! Get up, get up, get up!” the mage roared.
However, they were a fraction too late.
The necromancer had reached a marker near the roots of one of the trees. She lunged to the ground and placed her hands on the ground before expelling some mana. In response to the spell, three coffins burst from the soil.
“Three as one, one as three... Three for one, one for three!”
The necromancer’s incantation echoed through the forest, and the coffins opened to reveal three pale figures. Their fighting clothes were old-fashioned; they had sabers in their hands (valued for their beauty but not their efficacy in the Empire), and strange tubelike things at their waists. They had white hair and smartly manicured beards, and their outfits indicated that this was the necromancer’s ace in the hole at this stage. They hadn’t been sent into battle earlier because the mage had thought them unnecessary.
However, these zombies, despite being powerful, were inefficient. While the necromancer had been able to control the zombie army with a few tricks, these zombies required direct mana input to be activated. That was why she’d had to hide them here.
“They’re just regular ol’ zombies!” Dietrich laughed.
She swung her halberd at one, but it moved with the grace of a ballet dancer to evade the strike.
“Huh?!”
Then it used its glinting saber to strike at Dietrich’s legs—a zentaur’s pride, their greatest source of strength, and also their biggest weakness. Dietrich lurched backward and only barely evaded the blow. If she had been any slower, she would have lost her legs at the knee. The attack wasn’t over. With the same effortless grace, the zombie readied the strange tubelike weapon in its left hand and pulled the trigger.
“Ngh!”
The rumble shook the forest and the sleeping birds scattered from their perches.
Gunpowder had been imported into Rhine from the east, and here and there individuals had managed the feat of scaling down the conventional cannon to something that could be carried in hand. Given that most folk felt magic was a far simpler solution to the problem of wanting someone dead without having to walk all the way up to them, firearms were not a well-known technology. This specimen was more powerful than an off-the-cuff combat spell, and could be deadly if used well in a close-quarters battle. To top it off, this wasn’t your average weapon—it had been boosted with incendiary magic.
“Dietrich!” Siegfried called.
The zentaur’s upper body balked at the shock of the lead bullet. Yet she did not collapse. She coughed up blood and recovered, moving out of sword range.
“Ugh! Took the breath outta me!” she moaned.
“You okay?” Siegfried said.
“Of course I’m not! Just how many ribs do you think I just broke?!”
From the volume she was speaking at, Dietrich didn’t seem like she’d broken any ribs, but she had grown up in nearly barbaric circumstances—she was used to a few broken bones.
“How are you alive?!” the necromancer wailed.
The mage herself was shocked to see Dietrich had got off so lightly. Her surprise was understandable. The power of such a musket could handily dismember nearly any mortal foe—barring the occasional ogre or one of her custom zombies that had been built specifically to endure spectacular punishment. The bullet should have bored a gaping hole in Dietrich’s stomach.
“Don’t you dare look down on the Hildebrand tribe’s runic blessing! I ain’t the sort of cavalry you can fell with a jumped-up sling stone!”
Dietrich’s scale armor, a mesh of small pieces of metal, was flexible. This made it weak against blunt force blows, and so the style had fallen out of favor in Rhine. However, each piece of Dietrich’s armor had been enchanted by the shamans of the Hildebrand tribe. As cavalry units were susceptible to sudden impacts, this armor had been laden with careful arrow-wards; projectile attacks lost much of their stopping power against her. Even a close-range missile like this was merely painful, rather than almost instantly lethal.
“H-Holy crap!”
Siegfried knew as much going in, and so he didn’t dare underestimate this weapon. He felt its lethargic aim on him and rolled quickly to the side. This wasn’t an unplanned evasive maneuver—with a short first step, a large second step, and a short third step, his unreadable movements confused the zombies.
“That almost took off my damn ear!”
The shot had gone off at extremely close range. It had made a terrible sound the likes of which he had never heard as it whistled past his ear, sending a shiver down the hero-hopeful’s spine. One hit and that would be it. This knowledge set alarm bells ringing in his head.
“Dammit!”
Siegfried had worked out that the weapon was similar to a crossbow in that it couldn’t be fired in rapid succession. He swung his heavy spear, certain that it would be enough to crush the enemy’s saber, building momentum to magnify its destructive power. After two warm-up swings, he delivered a mighty blow.
But the enemy hadn’t parried or evaded him—they had easily intercepted it.
“You’re kiddin’ me!”
Siegfried felt such an impact that it felt like his spear had warped, but the zombie stood there firm. Although its knees buckled to absorb the blow, its saber remained immaculate, and its arms held fast. This zombie had undergone physical reinforcements that no living person could endure; its sword had been specially forged using magical means. After receiving the hit, the zombie didn’t toss aside its firearm; it merely holstered at its waist.
“Ohh, crap...”
Although it may have looked like the zombie was merely putting away a weapon that had run out of bullets, Siegfried could sense something bad happening. He quickly tossed aside his spear and put everything he had into forcing his body to the left. It was an instinctive dodge, but it had been enough to get Siegfried out of the way of the zombie’s next shot. The weapon was anything but abandoned; rather, the holster had been gimmicked up to reload an empty fusil in the same motion that stowed it.
The leather pouch was a lot bigger than the firearm itself. By pushing the firearm into the pouch with some force, you could activate the ramrod at the base of the holster, which would push the bullet prepared there into the weapon. Manual reloading could take half a minute to complete, yet this could be done with incredible speed.
Even after the roaring bullet churned through the space where Siegfried had been, he was still on high alert. He didn’t stand up immediately and instead chose to roll and get some more distance. This decision had saved him. Right where his shoulder had been a second ago, an explosion bloomed. As a spray of soil caked him, Siegfried belatedly noticed that another zombie behind the one he’d engaged was also drawing a bead on him. Enough similar strategies in the past had honed his senses to alert him to the danger.