“Ungh!”
I would be insulting a lot of people if I said this was typical of mages, but it seemed that Glydel wasn’t very good at close combat. He was unable to counter, and Cath’s strike hit him. That single blow knocked him unconscious, and he collapsed on the spot. I’d instructed Cath via eye contact to avoid killing him if possible, so I appreciated that she’d followed through.
It went without saying that this wasn’t out of mercy. It was just that if we killed Glydel now, we wouldn’t get any further answers.
“Now we can focus on this guy. Mataza, Liber!”
While Cath targeted Glydel, the rest of us had been dodging the skeleton king’s attacks. We hadn’t been able to take any risks when there was the threat of being blindsided by magic. We’d essentially been stuck in a deadlock.
But now...
In answer to my cry, the two of them spread out and closed the distance, attacking from different angles.
The skeleton king seemed to be at a loss over which one to go after. It seemed to have poorer decision-making than before, probably because Glydel had lost consciousness. That was another reason why taking him out first had been the right move.
The skeleton king ended up veering toward Liber first, but she was able to skillfully dodge its sword. She had evaded Aht’s strikes better than anyone during training. So even against this unique skeleton king, she was doing fine.
Meanwhile, Mataza waited for an opening and thrust his spear. Though it was a higher-ranked creature, its basic structure was the same as a normal skeleton. There had to be a solidified mana stone in its body somewhere. I couldn’t get a clear look because of the armor, but through the gaps I could just barely see that there was a mana stone in its torso. Mataza had noticed it as well. His spear pierced straight through to it.
All of a sudden, the skeleton king started to wobble, and its movements lost dynamism. It was as good as gone. Just for good measure, I came up to it and swung my sword. “This will finish you off!”
I forcefully brought it down upon its head. The skeleton king’s cranium was smashed open, exposing the mana stone inside. My sword kept going and broke the mana stone. The massive skeleton king’s body lost cohesion and scattered on the ground.
✦ ✦ ✦
∗ ∗ ∗
“This’ll do for now.”
I wiped the sweat from my brow after tightly tying up Glydel’s arms and legs. I wasn’t all that physically exhausted, but I was a little uneasy about what would happen if he suddenly woke up. In other words, it was a cold, nervous sweat. Regardless, he was tightly bound now. I called over to the pair who had been watching behind me.
“Katarina, Greg? You can come out now.”
The two of them crept out of the rustling bushes. Our fight had been intense enough that they’d retreated pretty far from the positions they were initially watching from, but fortunately they were still within hearing distance. If they had wandered too far away, they might have encountered some of the regular monsters around the area. That could have spelled trouble, since my attention had been completely drawn away.
Well, I hadn’t sensed an inordinate number of monsters like the skeleton horde. The regular forest monsters were spread out, so it should’ve been fine. But that was only in our cases. Greg and Katarina would’ve had a much tougher time.
“Are you sure? Glydel is a mage. Rope bindings won’t stop him from using magic, will they?” Katarina asked. She’d come pretty close despite that, but she was hesitating to take the last step. If Glydel used his magic like she feared, that slight distance wouldn’t mean much, but I suppose her keeping just a little ways away was to give herself some peace of mind.
I gave an explanation to assuage her apprehension. “That would usually be the case, but these ropes are imbued with magic. This is something called <Magic-Sealing White Rope>, and it absorbs the mana of whoever it binds. It’s got a lot of other properties that can render mages unable to use their magic.”
“Such a thing exists? But I’ve never seen any in magic tool shops. When mages are imprisoned, their magic is sealed by putting up a powerful magic circle barrier.”
Sealing a mage’s abilities was actually very difficult, and there were only a few methods of doing so. When mages committed crimes and were thrown in jail, the prisons themselves were often made of special materials so that barriers could be formed by large magic circles. When they needed to be moved, they would be knocked out or guarded by a stronger mage. However, this <Magic-Sealing White Rope> allowed one to achieve the same results just by tying them up. One might wonder why it wasn’t in common use, but there was an unavoidable reason why.
“It takes a lot of valuable materials to make this, and you need purification magic too. It’s tricky for the average magifacturer to make.”
“Huh? How is it that you have some, then?”
“Well...stuff happened.”
Basically, I’d gotten the materials in the Purgatory Forest and Aht had created it, since she had the right skills. She couldn’t hand over her magical pouch, but she had provided me with some good tools and weapons. This was one of them.
I wanted to become capable of crafting these myself eventually, but I could only dream of that at my current skill level. Well, I had the skill, so I’d just have to keep working at it bit by bit. Skills weren’t some kind of divine blessing from a generous god. They were just explicit quantifications of a person’s hard work. And they weren’t completely foolproof either—someone wasn’t guaranteed to be superior to another just because their numbers were higher. If you weren’t careful, you could easily end up dying, so it was important to pay heed.
Aht had also told me that I shouldn’t trust skill values too much. The numbers only represented one’s peak performance, which wasn’t always possible to achieve. That was why routine training was necessary to master a skill, and you just had to keep working at it. We were still alive because we’d followed those teachings. If we ever forgot them, we’d be doomed.
That was my line of thinking, but Katarina didn’t seem to agree one whit. She said with an astounded look, “People with talent for anything are really in a different class. I’m sure you made it yourself, didn’t you?”
She was wrong there, but I just gave an ambiguous laugh. “Well, maybe I did, maybe I didn’t,” I said, and left it at that. I then turned my gaze to Glydel. “Enough talk about the bindings. What do we do now? There’s stuff you have to ask him, right?”
Katarina nodded. “Yes, there’s much that we need to interrogate him about, like why he was making skeletons or who he was talking with earlier. But I’m not certain this is the place to ask. I think we should bring him back to town for now. Do you think that would work?”
I replied, “Yeah, the ropes should definitely stay effective that long. Although we should toss him into a magic-sealing prison as soon as we arrive... Ah!” I exclaimed after suddenly remembering something.
“I-Is something the matter?” Katarina asked me.
“Nah, I just forgot something important.”
“Which is?”
“Simple. We’ve gotta collect materials. Mataza, Liber, Cath! Let’s gather up all the usable parts of the skeleton king!”
Katarina looked at me in relief. “I almost thought something terrible had happened. If that’s all, we’ll help. Won’t we, Greg?”
“Indeed. We can certainly lend a hand with that,” he said.