“…What…?!”
By the time Jade rushed over, a battle had already broken out.
A group of adventurers were being surrounded by black shadows.
The monsters had red eyes and were covered in jet-black fur. Their four legs ended in double claws for ripping prey to death, and large fangs and a long tongue protruded from their mouths. It was a pack of blackwolves.
“S-save us!” cried one of the adventurers, who’d noticed Silver Sword. The monsters had surrounded the party, preventing them from escaping.
A number of the adventurers had already fallen. The healer was helping them, but seeing as the treatment wasn’t getting them back to full shape, it seemed their wounds were severe.
“That’s a real big pack,” Lowe muttered.
Blackwolves weren’t a significant threat on their own, but in a pack, they were bound to kill even a first-class adventurer. When encountered in a dungeon, they had to be dealt with before they called for help, but it was too late for that.
Jade swiftly got a handle on the situation, drew his blade, and raised his greatshield. “Lowe, can you do it? We’re going to lump them up.”
“I’m good. Leave it to me.”
As soon as he’d heard Lowe’s response, Jade thrust his sword into the ground and cast his illusion spell. “Hastor!”
Magic light at maximum power emitted from the tip of his sword, enveloping the swarming blackwolves. This was the Hastor spell for tanks that manipulated a target’s senses to draw their aggro. Each and every blackwolf, without exception, turned their red eyes toward Jade.
“You’re taking all that aggro?!”
The tanks of the other party weren’t glad that Jade’s move had saved them—in fact, they went pale and cried out, “You’re attracting aggro from too wide a range! You’ve gathered too many, Jade Scrade!”
They were right to point that out.
Drawing a monster’s aggro via magic wasn’t all that difficult. That was precisely why tanks had to pay attention to Hastor’s range of activation—to not take too much aggro from the monsters.
Once their attention was captured, the monsters would charge at the tank all at once. So if a party’s attackers weren’t able to deal with the monsters, or if there were too many monsters for the tank to withstand, then using Hastor was nothing more than suicide.
“Even for Silver Sword, this is too reckless—”
Lowe’s chant cut off the pallid adventurer’s voice.
“Sphera!”
The concentrated ball of black magic fire zoomed over the heads of the blackwolves. Of course, the attack was not nearly enough to burn this pack to a crisp. But—
“Skill Activate: Sigurth Ashinu!”
Lowe activated his Sigurth skill on the Sphera that Lowe had thrown. The moment the red skill light hit the small ball of flame, it spread into an incredible sight.
The single orb of flame multiplied into more Spheras while maintaining the same speed. Eventually, what had been a little ball of flame swelled into a huge conflagration, becoming a pillar of flame that shot up to the heavens.
“What…is this…?!”
In the swirl of hot wind, the adventurers cried out in tandem—this massive phenomenon was clearly beyond what could be manifested with magic.
The pillar of flame made of overlapping Spheras swallowed the pack of blackwolves in the blink of an eye. The dazzling light and heat burned the monsters, preventing them from escaping.
“The pack is being swallowed up… Wait, h-hey!”
One of the adventurers who had been staring at the pillar of fire gradually grew panicked.
Even after swallowing up the pack of blackwolves, the pillar of flame showed no sign of calming, continuing to expand. The adventurers hastily retreated.
“It’s still getting bigger?! Are you trying to burn us up, too?!”
“I know, okay…?!” Lowe’s expression grew severe, and he clenched his rod tight and swung it. The flame pillar surged and blazed even higher, as if resisting Lowe’s attempt to calm it. The flames burned the blackwolves to ashes, and then burned even those, scorching the earth. When at last there were no more monsters, the pillar of fire vanished.
“Wh-what a skill…!”
“It’s like a stampede of horses came through here,” the tank from earlier muttered, while looking at the blackened earth. He was no longer on his feet, staring at Lowe like he couldn’t believe it.
“Lowe, are you all right?” asked Jade.
“Yeah. Man, Sigurth Ashinu’s always a wild one.”
Lowe’s Sigurth skill, Sigurth Ashinu, was a skill that duplicated certain phenomenon a thousand, if not ten thousand, times over.
It was ineffective on objects and other skills, but it was highly compatible with spells that artificially induced natural phenomena. Being endlessly amplified, the magic would balloon in firepower and swallow all enemies in an instant.
But on the other hand, once a skill had started to reduplicate, it was a struggle for even the caster to restrain it.
“If we could use your skill in a dungeon, too, I’d have no complaints,” Jade muttered earnestly.
Lowe shifted his eyes. “…Strong skills always have limitations. I held it back quite a bit even today, y’know?”
Since Sigurth Ashinu was extremely difficult to control, it would affect your allies in a cramped dungeon setting. Because of that, Silver Sword limited it to outdoor use only.
“Well, leave any big cleanups out in open spaces to me. I’ll do the hard work this time.” Wiping the sweat dripping off his chin, Lowe took a breath.
Jade checked to see if there were any enemies left, then asked Lululee to heal the wounded.
“But anyway, a pack of that size—where did it come from? There aren’t any big dungeons nearby…” As Jade was saying that, something sparkled in the corner of his eye, and he trailed off.
“What’s up, leader?”
“Something’s there.”
The earth was nothing but sand and rock, so anything that reflected the light of the sun couldn’t be natural. Jade started searching the area, and eventually, behind a great boulder that had to be twice his height, he found a crystal.
“This is—”
It was a hexagonal prism crystal that sparkled green. It was like a palm-sized version of a crystal gate.
“Is that a crystal?”
“A crystal, out here?”
Lululee and Lowe tilted their heads, and right as they did, the crystal emitted a bit of light, accompanied by a low humming sound.
“!”
Jade immediately got in front of the other two and raised his greatshield. Before his eyes, the strange crystal emitted light, along with a single shadow.
It was the black four-legged beast they had just seen—a blackwolf.
“A blackwolf?!”
The monster rattled them only for a moment. Jade immediately drew the sword from his hip and drew the blackwolf’s aggro.
“Glassis!” Lowe fired off his ice spell at the same time, getting ahead of Jade to freeze the blackwolf in ice. There was no need to use his skill if he just had one to deal with, but the problem was that crystal.
“Is the crystal the source of the monsters?!” Jade cried.
“Leader, can I break it?!”
For an instant, Jade hesitated to answer. If they left it be, the next monster would appear from the crystal. But as far as he knew, no one had ever observed monsters emerging from a crystal before. If they wanted to actually figure out why monsters were generating here, then they ought to bring the crystal back without breaking it.
Do we seal it with an ice spell…? No, there’s no guarantee we can do that.
They didn’t know what this crystal really was, after all. Bringing something like that into the town or to guild headquarters would be too dangerous, and this section of the plains was too far from a crystal gate to bring a guild researcher to.
The green crystal hummed again, and the moment it started emitting light, Jade made the call. “Let’s break it here.”
The instant Lowe got permission, he waved his rod at the crystal. “Glassis!”
Chunks of ice flew at the green crystal, covering it. Eventually, the large hunk of ice creaked, shattering along with the crystal.
“…No monsters.” Jade made sure that there weren’t any monsters around, then returned his shield to his back. Picking up the scattered shards of the green crystal, he furrowed his brow.
“The way the monsters were appearing just now…”
“We’ve seen it somewhere before… Wait, I feel like we see it a lot, on a daily basis.” That must have been bothering Lowe, too, as he had a perplexed look on his face.
“Something we see on a daily basis?” Lululee tilted her head.
Jade answered, “It’s the same way things appear when using a crystal gate.”
With a gasp, Lululee made the connection, her eyes widening “Y-you’re right…”
The hexagonal green crystals were installed in major towns and buildings. They were created in imitation of the ancients’ relic technology, and when used with a crystal gate, they allowed you to warp anywhere in an instant. Gates were very important to adventurers, of course, since they were always going back and forth between dungeons and towns, but these days, regular people increasingly used gates as a form of transportation.
The slight vibrating noise that made the air hum, and that flash of light—those same things happened when people used a crystal gate to teleport.
“But the crystal gates that the guild made aren’t supposed to teleport monsters…”
Naturally, they had considered the possibility that monsters might accidentally wander into a crystal gate that had been placed near a dungeon and get teleported to a settled area. To prevent this, the guild adopted a system of screening subjects for teleportation via license cards.
There were no restrictions on crystal gates that connected towns, but the crystal gates that went to dungeons had been built to prevent anyone without a license from using them. That was how the guild guaranteed the safety of crystal gates.
“If this thing is a crystal gate, then it’s one I’ve never seen before. It’s different from the ones in the underground prison, too…,” said Lowe.
“…Whatever the case, now we know the source of the abnormal monster appearances on the plains.” Though things still weren’t quite adding up, Jade scooped up a number of crystal fragments. “Let’s leave the rest to the guild researchers. I bet Shelley would leap on this.”
“For sure. Though I just know she’s gonna get pissed that we broke it.”
While listening to Lowe’s grumbling, the party turned back along the old road.