The Undead King of the Palace of Darkness

Blood Ruler left by the Lord is a wonderful machete. Its reach, strength and sharpness are just perfect.

Fulfilling my duty of stalling them, I destroy the Skeletons that are rushing in, while avoiding the arrows and sometimes slicing them apart. The Skeletons attacked like the waves. Even if they’re the bones of ordinary people without combat skills, the tombs are finite. The night is still young. Since they’re also undead, they surely don’t intend to fight until sunrise. Time is on my side.

I hear the sound of trampling the ground from countless sounds. I jump over the Skeletons and block the jet-black blade that was swung down, with the machete. After I force it back by pouring in more power, the Black Bone knight that launched the attack jumps far back and lands while trampling its allies.

“They’re really generous.”

I involuntarily stare in wonder. It’s a magnificent ‘Black Bone’, towering at 2 meters. It was undoubtedly a famous hero in its lifetime. Without saying anything, Black Bone raises the giant sword the same height as his body. It truly has a terrifying physical strength, the privilege belonging only to non-humans.

But, not as much as me. If they could open their mouths, they would surely exclaim ‘That’s impossible!’ in disbelief. The single slash that was most likely swung with its full power contained strong force that I wouldn’t be able to bear when I was a newly turned Lesser Vampire. Still, they’ve only evolved once. I have gone through a number of evolutions.

Before I knew it, the number of surging Skeletons had decreased. They were replaced by more powerful variants. Bone wolves, bone monkeys and bone bears. When I look at them like this, I end up thinking about strange things, like how different animal bone structures are. It’s very fresh for me, because the Lord used animals other than Skeletons as they were. In addition, before I knew it, countless semi-transparent humanoids started flying in sky and a large chorus that sounded like screams echoed at night.

It’s almost like the end of the world.

“It’s a full-course meal. Aren’t they going to great efforts?”

Taking all the killing intent and hatred around on me, I lick my lips and raise my machete high up.

☠☠☠

Dozens of kilometers away from the old castle. On top of a remote mountain, a man with a fiendish expression was looking into a crystal ball with eyes open wide. It was a man with dry ashen skin. He was around thirty years old. He wasn’t tall, but his stagnant eyes were so unhinged, any sane human that saw them would run away screaming. In fact, the man was an existence that despised the world and resented humanity. A Necromancer. A dark mage who freely manipulated the dead and disgraced the souls.

However, his expression that almost always remained unchanged, was now distorted in astonishment.

“I-I… Imposs,ible.”

A scene that seemed unearthly was unfolding inside the crystal ball.

Countless dead were flowing into the castle where nobody had reigned in a long while. Most of the undead were Skeletons, but among them were also evolved Skeletons – ‘Black Bones’ and ‘Skeleton Wilds’ that moved in shape-shifting ways that were structurally impossible for humans. There were also many spiritual type undead that couldn’t be damaged with ordinary weapons mixed in. They had enough military strength to destroy a small town overnight.

However, the army of the dead the man was proud of―― couldn’t even kill a single person.

“What’s with that human?――”

It was an unbelievable sight for the Necromancer, who had barely met any obstruction until now.

The target of the dead was a single young man. He was probably in his mid-teens. He was wearing sunglasses despite the fact that it was night and he was swinging an obviously unordinary big blade. But that was it. He was neither a Death Knight nor did he use combat magic. He didn’t have any allies nearby either. However, a single blow from his machete easily blew away the undead that were swarming around him. He repelled a hit from Black Bone Knight, who boasted of extraordinary strength, accurately cleared away the arrow from the archer that was hard to even perceive and top of that, even though he was fighting all this time, he showed no signs of exhaustion

“Is he really a human…? Or is it the power of some kind of a curse?”

The force dispatched by the man tonight was enormous. Unlike the Skeletons that he had sent to wait-and-see, the man had sent almost everything, ignoring the benefits, in order to eliminate everything that stood in the way of his domination.

Numbers are power. Even if the opponent was a mighty warrior, all he had to do was send in an army of 10 000. It would be one thing if the enemy was a part of the Order of Death Knights, but it was out of the man’s expectation that they couldn’t kill what looked like a single human.

The sight inside the crystal ball was always disadvantageous. Calmness came back little by little to the man’s excited thoughts.

“Neither poison nor miasma seem to be working at all… No, what’s up with his injuries? Damn it, I can’t see.”

He was extremely skilled. But that didn’t mean that no arrows hit him from the rain of the arrows. The Skeleton Archers the man had gathered were elites. He had used the bones of people who were excellent archers in their lives.

While neither of them seemed to have accurately wounded his body, several of them had grazed him. And those arrowheads were coated with powerful poison that would render any human unconscious just from a scratch. “How can he be okay? How?”

There were some other mysterious points too.

Due to dark magic, the undead were coated with powerful miasma. Miasma changed the air. Even if a single one had no effects, with all of them gathered together, any human would have problems even moving. Nevertheless, the young man didn’t even change his expression. Even the scream of ‘Banshee’ which shook the human hearts, or the sleep-inducing mist that he had used at the same time as the charge of the undead, didn’t seem to have any effects.

His treasured Skeleton Giant, made after hard effort, broke down the castle walls and attacked. However, Skeleton Giant was already defeated once. The man couldn’t imagine it defeating the young man without dealing any noticeable damage.

The man clenched his fists hard enough to draw blood and whispered with a trembling voice.

“Kuh!… You monster. I misjudged. Who could have imagines that ‘Dessend’ had left such a skilled fighter like that in the old castle――”

He should have prioritized the retrieval of Night Crystals instead of choosing to eliminate the foreign enemy. Even the Crystals, that the Necromancers wanted at any cost, couldn’t be weighted against the army that he had painstakingly created over many years. No matter how strong the enemy was, he was just a single person. All the man had to do was use a decoy and find the crystals during that time.

He still had another move. But, regardless of how annoying it was, he had to avoid more losses.

He had remembered the young man’s face. The next time they met, he’d definitely kill him. The man would make him forevermore regret that he had made the enemy of a Necromancer.

Using their connection, the man gave the order as if spitting it out. In that moment, a refreshing voice echoed inside the room where nobody else was supposed to be.

“Wait, Necromancer, Roman the ‘Butcher’.”

Black mist gathered and took the shape of a person. Appearing from the darkness was a woman wrapped in a black garments. She had a cold gaze, but her irises were red as blood and her skin was so translucent it was hard to imagine it belonged to a human.

A vampire. One of the most famous and feared species of the undead in this world.

The man called Roman frowned and shouted at the unexpected visitor.

“So it’s you! I don’t remember even welcoming you. How did you enter here?”

“That’s exactly why you’re third rate. There are a few secret paths. This mountain was already bought out by my Lord and bestowed to me. The trespassers have no rights.”

“Tsk… What does a single vampire need here?”

The retainer of the ‘Stake King’, Sable Bloodpain, smiled faintly at Roman, who, despite the fact that his army was on the brink of extinction, still maintained his arrogant attitude.

“My Lord is interested in him. I won’t let him get away anymore.”