Chapter 171 - Battle for the Holy Land (1)

1

Some people liken lives lost in war to “flowers falling in splendor.” I can say with certainty that those people have never been dropped into the middle of a battlefield.

“Raaaaah!”

“Push against the gate! Force it open!”

“Grrr, grrk!”

A head went flying right before my eyes. Then, beside me, an enormous axe crushed a soldier, armor and all.

CRUNCH!

The sound of flesh tearing. The roar of metal breaking. The groans of soldiers. On the battlefield, lives seethed like bubbles rising from a boiling swamp.

“Wait. What’s going on?”

The Black Dragon leader sounded bewildered. It wasn’t the horrors of combat that unsettled her, but being transported into the middle of a battlefield without warning.

“Princess, what’s going... She’s gone. Has anyone gotten a quest window?”

“No.”

“Nope!”

“How unhelpful.”

The Black Dragon leader clicked her tongue.

“Are we supposed to figure out the situation ourselves? The [Librarian] had a strange personality, but at least he was a helpful constellation... Sigh. Everyone, let’s fly up and survey the battle from the air. That should make things easier.”

The Black Dragon leader pushed off the ground.

“Huh?”

But her body didn’t rise into the air. She frowned in puzzlement.

“... What? I can’t fly?”

She was right. On the thirty-first and thirty-second floors, we had been able to fly freely. We could even observe things beyond the horizon. It had felt almost as if we had become transcendent beings.

‘So now the real thing begins.’

I understood the meaning behind this change.

‘This is actually better. Get too comfortable relying on skills or authorities, and your instincts as a hunter grow dull. Even if some freak accident happens, I can turn back time in the worst-case scenario.’

I surveyed our surroundings. Right now, we were essentially invisible and intangible. Heads flying through the air and spurts of blood passed freely through our bodies. Having someone’s internal organs sweep through me wasn’t a pleasant experience, but—

“There are several races fighting here, not just one or two.”

As long as I concentrated, it was easy to observe our surroundings.

“Conforming Humans, the fairy race, Demonfolk... It’s a multiracial coalition. They look like they’re fighting each other, but they’re on the same side. Each race is handling a different branch of the army. The Conforming Humans form shield walls and serve as infantry, the fairy race are archers... and the Demonfolk are cavalry.”

I narrowed my eyes.

“The Bloodsucking Race are flying overhead, too. Hmm. I don’t see any Gillfin Folk, but I think all the races that were enslaved in Slimepolis have formed a coalition.”

“Then their enemy is...”

“Yes.” I nodded. “Almost certainly the Mountain Snailfolk.”

“Raaaaaah!”

The coalition troops roared and gradually advanced their lines. Soldiers surrounded us, making it difficult to tell how the battle was unfolding, but I could at least sense that its course was changing.

“This won’t do. If we stay here, all we’ll accomplish is making friends with corpses.”

The Black Dragon leader took my hand.

“I’ll go scout with the Death King. It’ll be hard to regroup if we split up, so the rest of you wait here. Death King, is that all right?”

I realized what she intended: spatial teleportation. She planned to scout using her exclusive skill. It could transport another person along with her, but came with the restriction that [the other person must consent to the skill’s use].

“Yes.”

“Good.”

Black aura spilled from her body and wrapped around my wrist.

“Transfer!”

The next moment, we were in the air. Looking down, I saw thousands of soldiers swarming like insects. As gravity began pulling us downward, the Black Dragon leader used her skill again.

“Transfer.”

Our fall stopped for a moment.

“... Don’t tell me you’re going to stay in place by using Transfer every time we start falling?”

“I can’t fly. What else am I supposed to do? Transfer. What I’ve learned over my long career as a hunter—Transfer—is that the more you exploit a skill, the more useful it becomes. Transfer.”

“Wow. This really isn’t stylish...”

“Does style put food on the table? Transfer. I’m busy using my skill, so you look down at the ground.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Having cheated our way into mastering the art of walking on air, we carefully surveyed the battle.

“Huh.”

A strange sense of déjà vu immediately gripped me.

“This terrain looks familiar...”

“It does. For some reason, I feel like I’ve seen it before, too.”

“This isn’t a pitched battle. It’s a siege.”

As we had expected, the race fighting the coalition was the Mountain Snailfolk. They had positioned themselves at the entrance to an enormous cave, which seemed to serve as their only wall and gate.

“... Isn’t that Slimepolis?”

The city steeped in the history of the slaves’ great escape was now under attack by those same races, who were slaves no longer.

2

“It seems the city has become a holy land,” the Sword Star said.

We had each gathered information and returned to share it.

“I overheard soldiers talking in the Conforming Humans’ barracks. They said they would surely reclaim the holy land on this expedition. Judging by their use of [this] expedition, this doesn’t seem to be their first attack on Slimepolis.”

“Oh, I heard about that. Apparently, this is the sixth expedition.”

Viper raised his hand.

“Over the past few centuries, coalitions have formed again and again to put pressure on the Slime Empire. The empire’s almost completely destroyed already. Slimepolis is supposedly its only stronghold that hasn’t fallen.”

“A holy land... There’s another headache of a word.”

The Black Dragon leader pressed a hand to her forehead, looking utterly repulsed.

“If I had to pick my three least favorite words in the world, they’d be terrorism, holy land, and heresy. Ah... When the Tower first appeared, all sorts of cultists flooded in, shouting, [“This is the holy land! A new Tower of Babel granted to us by God!”]...”

“That was the [Neo-Babylonian Church].”

The Paladin folded her arms.

“To be fair, they were relatively harmless. I remember the cultists who caused a scene shouting, [“This is R’lyeh!”]”

I tilted my head.

“R’lyeh? What’s that?”

“I don’t know the details either. It’s a city from a novel, apparently submerged in the deep sea.”

“But the Tower isn’t in the deep sea, is it?”

The Tower was everywhere and nowhere. If anything, the Tower seen from the outside world was closer to a “mirage.”

No matter where you stood, its silhouette was visible beyond the horizon. Whether you looked from Seoul or Busan, from Korea or Chile, the Tower was always visible, everywhere.

As if tempting you to escape here.

“They’re cultists who take fiction as fact. Don’t expect rational thought from them. Incidentally, some of them still operate under the Pantheon guild.”

“Huh? Is that really okay? They’re mentally ill.”

“Now you understand why we keep leaving the Pantheon to the Inquisitor. Death King, the only person who can control lunatics is someone even crazier than they are.”

“I see...”

The Pantheon was even more of a madhouse than I’d imagined.

The Black Dragon leader sighed and looked around.

“Leaving this kind of problem to the Inquisitor would be quickest... but of course he’s been eliminated. Honestly, he can be useful, yet he’s never around when we actually need him.”

The fighting had paused for a brief ceasefire. The battlefield, so fierce during the day, was quiet now beneath the sunset, like the early-summer air slowly cooling as night fell. The soldiers of the multiracial coalition were cooking dinner.

“Of all things, a holy land...”

“It makes sense that they’d consider Slimepolis holy,” I said. “It’s where all seven races’ guardian gods manifested. Telling them not to consider it sacred would be unreasonable. From the Mountain Snailfolk to the Conforming Humans, the Bloodsucking Race, the Gillfin Folk, the Demonfolk, and the fairy race, it must be holy to every race.”

The Sword Star nodded.

“So the Mountain Snailfolk want to defend it, while the other races want to reclaim it.”

“And it’s the empire’s last remaining city... Neither side can easily back down.”

The coalition races had a history of enslavement under the Mountain Snailfolk. Faith, resentment, and politics were all tangled together. This wouldn’t be easy to resolve.

“Ugh.”

The Black Dragon leader groaned.

“This is strange. I foresaw this, so before clearing the last stage, I made it very clear to the Bloodsucking Race’s children. There are no gods in this world, and even if there are, I’m not one of them. Could my teachings have been lost...?”

“Oh. I took similar precautions.”

Her words piqued my interest.

“What did you spend your points on?”

“[Race Evolution].”

Huh. I’d thought she had the personality of a thrifty hamster, saving and hoarding her points.

“That’s quite a big investment. I’m surprised.”

“...”

She stared at my face, then sighed in disbelief.

“... I secretly listened in on which item you picked.”

“What?”

“I used your choice as a reference. I don’t know much about it, but you chose it. I figured it had to be a good item, so I picked the same one.”

“What? Aren’t you copying me a little too closely?”

“Oh, be quiet. What’s wrong with taking cues from someone successful?”

“Wow, absolutely shameless... The Bloodsucking Race are intelligent bats, right? I am curious about what they’ll become after evolving.”

“I don’t know. Vampires, perhaps?”

“Shh.”

The Paladin raised a hand and pointed toward one side of the military camp.

“There’s a commotion.”

We immediately fell silent. As she said, a disturbance had broken out in the coalition camp. The soldiers eating dinner hurriedly gulped down their naan, then assembled somewhere.

“Let’s go take a look, too.”

We crowded close to the Black Dragon leader and teleported. “I feel like a mother pig. I don’t like it...” she grumbled, but it was the fastest way.

At the entrance to the camp, hundreds of warriors stood in formation. They belonged to a different race—not the Gillfin Folk, the Bloodsucking Race, the Conforming Humans, the Demonfolk, or the fairy race.

A Conforming Human commander addressed them.

“Warriors of the Wet Land. What brings you here? We are allies joined by a sacred pact to avenge ancient wrongs. Do not trespass here bearing swords and spears.”

“Ugor.”

The warriors’ leader dipped his head slightly.

“I am Gerkesa, a great warrior ranked seventy-third in the Fire River Council, and commander of the vanguard of this expeditionary army. My distant ancestors mined rock salt in Slimepolis. Our blades are not yet turned toward you, so rest assured.”

They were the Earth Spiritfolk. The race I guided sat astride lions, gazing down imperiously upon the coalition camp.

“An expeditionary army? Did the people of the Wet Land not declare that they would take no part in this war?”

“We merely said we would not accompany your expedition,” the Earth Spiritfolk warrior replied calmly. “The council has resolved to enter this war, albeit belatedly.”

“What? Enter the war?”

“Ugor. As one of the nobles representing the council, I have come to notify you of this decision. Know that we have no intention of ambushing or betraying you.”

Huh. It really brought home the fact that six hundred years had passed.

‘Their speech has become incredibly old-fashioned.’

Until the previous stage, the Earth Spiritfolk’s distinctive pronunciation had remained pronounced. A “goreuk” would pop out at the end of every sentence, for instance. But almost no trace of that remained in this warrior’s speech. Their pronunciation had also become rounder, turning “gor” into something closer to “ugoh.”

“Wait... Isn’t their speech the least of our concerns...?”

The attendant spirit muttered uneasily.

“These guys have gotten huge!”

He was right. The Earth Spiritfolk, once no taller than dwarfs, had nearly doubled in size. They now rivaled the Conforming Humans, or were even bigger.

‘[Race Evolution] worked properly.’

Bigger than humans, but smaller than orcs.

GRRR.

They were even riding lions as large as themselves. One lion sniffed and glared at the Conforming Human commander, who flinched and stepped back.

“This one does not bite.”

The Earth Spiritfolk warrior patted the lion’s mane.

“This child is a kind friend. Do not worry.”

“No... What do you mean, you will enter the war? If you intend to intervene without joining our expeditionary army, does that not mean you will side with the Mountain Snailfolk? Make yourself clear. Are you an envoy here to deliver a declaration of war?”

“I swear by the names of Kekereukker and Gorke that I am not.”

Kekereukker was one thing, but swearing by Gorke’s name?

That little kid. He’d really made something of himself.

“We have marched only to prevent atrocities from being committed in the name of the gods.”

“Atrocities...? You call this atrocities?”

“Indeed. You are committing a wrong. The guardian gods do not wish for us to destroy the Mountain Snailfolk. In the age of the Great Escape, when we sought revenge against them, the guardian gods turned away. Their intent is clear and unmistakable.”

The Earth Spiritfolk warrior bared his molars.

“Further war is neither honorable nor sacred. Just as the Mountain Snailfolk’s whipping of us was cruel, taking their final refuge is also merciless.”

“What...?”

“I am saying that we have taken revenge enough, you who once wore the same chains.”

The Earth Spiritfolk great warrior spoke.

“Stop fighting. We have come to end this ancient war.”