Inside the bag were five pegs. They were smaller than the ones they used for tents and bore strange engravings. Siegfried knew they were untrustworthy things—setting aside the thing Erich had in his other hand that was an order of magnitude less trustworthy—but he didn’t care at this point.
“Got it. At any distance?”
“Yeah!”
It would be a waste of time to argue at this stage. Siegfried handed out the pegs and dashed off to get them into position. Erich carefully closed the gap with the zombie, ready to engage with its attacks. In order to achieve his plan, he needed to make sure it didn’t move an inch.
The Fellows didn’t say a word to their leader as he flung himself into the jaws of death—they knew that this was where he made his home.
[Tips] Most zombies stop moving without their necromancer’s mana. However, it is possible to embed a mana stone into certain units so that they can operate independently. There are also some necromancers who have developed means to transmit their mana to their zombies from a distance.
Now, I confidently said I’d sort this out, but I was unsure how well this would actually go. I knew it wasn’t very cool to be thinking this stuff after talking such a big game, but this zombie really did look like something special, and this battle wasn’t going ideally.
The zombie’s bones were probably made of some kind of magical alloy. All the same, it was weird that the Craving Blade couldn’t cut through it. I’d traded enough blows with it now to have noticed that what I was striking stretched slightly with every blow. I wondered if it was actually some kind of malleable metal. Metal bones that were also relatively flexible could throw my cutting edge off by reacting with each slash, making it damn difficult to get a proper decent cut in. Flesh hardened when you struck it, so these bones were probably what was screwing things over.
Once I’d puzzled that out, I managed to find an opening. I threw any supplementary actions to the side and unleashed a Schism, but even though I managed to lop off the zombie’s right arm, I was met with an unpleasant surprise: a gush of acidic blood. Even the little splash I hadn’t been able to avoid had made my armor smoke and left a searing pain in my cheek. It was some powerful stuff. I’d scraped off the acid with an Unseen Hand and avoided lingering burns, but this was going to be tricky.
The Order would be useless against an enemy like this. Apart from the Craving Blade, all of the swords I used were just regular blades, well-made though they might have been—if they got soaked in that acid, then they’d melt away in no time. Even a little had damaged my breastplate, so cutting through flesh and blood would ruin the blade in no time.
I’d thought about using a spell to burn the sucker, but I realized that the acidic explosion afterward would asphyxiate anyone caught in the cloud.
My only option was to use the Craving Blade, seeing as it was basically indestructible, but being stuck with one attack vector at a time meant that against a foe this skilled, I didn’t have a lot of openings to work with. It used all four (three now, I guessed) of its arms well, sometimes to dodge, sometimes to attack, always with a killing intent. I had to sacrifice all my minor actions and reactions to use Schism, so it was pretty much impossible to exploit the few windows of opportunity he was giving me.
If I panicked, I’d lose. I was angry at myself for not pouring my experience into the near bottomless pit required to crank Schism up to Scale II: Novice, but to be honest, I wasn’t sure it would have made that big of a difference against an enemy who knew the limits of my reach and had my action economy this locked down.
To top it off, I was a fragile mensch, while it was still fine and dandy despite losing an arm. I was just a little fencer—if I forced in another clean hit, then it’d turn me to hamburger with its bare hands.
It was frustrating. Schism was a real OP move, and it paid for its preposterously unfair effects with one huge weakness: its dependence on a single moment of complete concentration. Moves as devastating as these had to be either a pain to initiate or a pain to execute. In much the same way that space-bending magic was more difficult to use in this age, distant from the Age of Gods, it took a lot of energy to overturn the rules of the world and cut something that a mere sword should not cut.
All the same, you could get through many problems with a simple Armor Piercing skill, so I kind of wished they hadn’t been doled out so sparingly in this system.
“Huuurgh... Raaaargh...”
Most of its eyes were shedding tears. As it wept, it kept me back with a wild assault with its remaining three arms. It seemed like it was trying to fling me aside, but at the same time it seemed like it was also calming itself down.
“You can cry...” I muttered.
I was pissed. What grown being in its position had any right to cry? I didn’t care one way or the other that the necromancer had outfitted it with working tear ducts, but their earnest use in this situation nauseated me.
“You have the gall to shed tears after the horrors you and yours have committed tonight, you monster?!”
If it had enough of a heart to shed tears at the death of its associate, then how the hell could it so callously attack a canton with a seemingly unending zombie army? I caught fire with rage as I swung my sword. It was unthinkable. Mottenheim was a canton of over four hundred people. I didn’t get what they hoped to achieve by wiping it off the map, but anything that could commit to such an unthinkable course didn’t deserve anything so human as tears!
“Eins!”
I had sensed that it was getting irritated with this furious hack and slash and was aiming to disengage, but I wouldn’t let it. I pulled out some swords from storage with some space-time magic. The zombie reacted furiously and resorted to a full-power blow of its own to smash through my midair slash. It was a smart move. It had sensed my overflowing mana and concluded that I had whipped out another Schism, powerful enough to wound it. Clever enemies were, in some ways, much more helpful opponents than stupid ones, because they understood my movements and reacted correctly—and a correct move could be predicted. However, the enemy must have known that using my Unseen Hands was a minor action in itself, so there was no way I could do a combo with them out.
“Hmph!”
“Grrrgh!”