Several hours later, we finally arrived at our destination.
Near the ruins connected to the dungeon named Crude Catacomb.
“…This is a bit different from what I heard.”
Gerda muttered, slightly furrowing her brow.
“I heard they were sealing off the dungeon entrance…”
“Looks like it’s been breached.”
Amy answered with a faint sigh. As she said, it seemed the paladins’ sealing of the entrance had undoubtedly failed.
“Grrrrrr…Dii Lokkar…”
“Unch…”
Even though we hadn’t even entered the ruins yet, we were able to reunite with such familiar faces as soon as we entered the forest.
“Hii…hieek! Adventurer ladies! Do something about this!!”
The coachman driving the carriage cried out, almost having a fit at the appearance of such horrifying undead monsters.
“Don’t worry. Things like that are nothing.”
I calmed the coachman in a confident tone, then drew my longsword and jumped down from the carriage.
“Gerda, please stay in the carriage with Amy and provide support. And Friede? Let’s see your skills. Take care of the one on the left.”
“Understood.”
“Got it.”
Gerda nodded and took out the bow she had been carrying on her back and drew the string, while Amy opened her spellbook and pointed her staff at the wight.
“Le-leave it to me!”
Lastly, Friede gripped the greatsword she had leaned against the carriage wall and leapt down like me.
“Kaaak! Diraan, keraak!”
Only then noticing our hostility, the three wights crawled towards us like starving fetuses, letting out sharp screeches.
When I first encountered them, they were enemies that were hard to relax around, but meeting them again like this, I couldn’t feel even a shred of tension.
Is it thanks to the experience of facing monsters like the vengeful spirit spider?
“Attack!”
“Ignis Sagitta!”
As soon as my signal fell, steel arrows and flame arrows cut through the air, shooting towards them.
“Haaap!”
“Ha!”
Friede and I also launched our bodies like arrows towards them.
* * *
“Kaaaaa…”
The battle ended in an instant.
It was only natural. Weren’t wights monsters that even I alone could somehow handle before obtaining the Iron Arm trait?
With the addition of forces like Amy, Gerda, and Friede, we were able to win surprisingly easily, unlike before.
Especially Friede’s skills were admirable.
She swung her greatsword, longer than her own height, in all directions while hopping around or spinning in circles, and her speed was astonishingly fast.
The way she spun with her greatsword and rammed into the wight’s side, grinding it, was almost like a human mixer… no, a murderous top blade.
“…Impressive.”
Even Gerda expressed admiration, so it seemed safe to say that Friede’s skills easily surpassed the average for copper token adventurers.
“Gaar…Liil, Lehu…”
As a result, the three wights couldn’t even hold out for three minutes properly before collapsing, looking like raw meat bibimbap thrown into a toilet.
A battle at the level of a warm-up exercise.
It wasn’t even necessary to activate Iron Arm.
* * *
After dealing with the three wights like that, we unloaded our luggage from the carriage, shouldered it, and walked towards the ruins.
Originally, we were supposed to take the carriage right up to the ruins, but the coachman whined that he absolutely couldn’t go any further.
Even returning six-tenths of the carriage fare.
So what could we do?
We couldn’t force an ordinary citizen like the coachman to enter the middle of a forest where undead were openly crawling around.
We had no choice but to send him back.
Thus, after walking for quite a while, turning the occasional undead we encountered into just dead, we finally met up with the subjugation force dispatched by the church.
“Ah, are you the adventurers who came in response to the request? Welcome. May the Goddess protect you.”
Seeing wights wandering around the forest, I thought the church’s subjugation force might have been completely wiped out, but surprisingly, they all looked fine.
It was clear they had been through fierce battles, as there were scratches here and there on the armor they were wearing.
“Thank you. I’m Hilde, a copper token adventurer who came after seeing the request form.”
I mumbled an appropriate greeting and showed the paladin my adventurer token hanging around my neck.
“But… the situation seems a bit different from what was written in the request form? There were undead scattered all over the place on our way here.”
I asked what exactly was going on here.
The groups of undead scattered throughout the forest. The church’s subjugation force setting up temporary tents a little away from the ruins.
No matter how you looked at it, it didn’t seem like they were sealing off the entrance.
“Ah, about that…”
The paladin let out a faint sigh and explained the detailed circumstances.
According to his explanation, the subjugation force’s strength was currently split into two.
The elite unit that had entered the dungeon interior and the rear unit that was now waiting here with tents set up.
Originally, the plan was for the elite unit to break through the enemies and then deploy the follow-up unit to annihilate the remnants one by one, but the plan had gone terribly wrong.
Undead hidden in the walls and floors suddenly burst out, cutting off the connection between the front-line unit and the follow-up unit, forcing the follow-up unit to retreat outside the dungeon.
The front-line unit was left isolated inside the dungeon.
“That’s not all. After we retreated above the dungeon, while we were reorganizing our forces to rescue the advance party…”
Apparently, over a hundred undead crawled out from the forest, surrounded them, and launched a fierce attack.
It’s said that even someone presumed to be an Abyss Priest was among them.
They managed to repel them after a hard fight, but they didn’t annihilate the enemy, only chased them back into the forest.
That’s why they were in this stalemate now.
“If we enter the dungeon interior while ignoring them… in the worst case, we could be surrounded from front and back and annihilated.”
Until they find and chop up all the undead spread throughout the forest, they can’t rashly enter the dungeon.
“Fortunately, thanks to the active support of adventurers like yourselves, it seems we can now consider a counterattack.”
“I see. Then our job is…”
“Assault, defense, or search. You can choose one of the three and join.”
The paladin explained the revised content of the request.
An assault unit to enter the dungeon to rescue the advance party.
A defense unit to protect this temporary camp in the meantime.
And a search unit to find the Abyss Priest hiding somewhere nearby.
We just need to choose one of the three and add our strength to it.
* * *
“You said your name was Hilde… right? So, which unit will you choose?”
“Hmm. Just a moment, I think we need to discuss this first.”
I shook my head slightly to end the conversation, then turned to look at my party members and asked for their opinions.
“Hmm… the assault unit seems a bit dangerous.”
Gerda pointed out the danger of the assault unit.
“It’s rare to fall for the same tactic three times, but that means falling for it twice is commonplace. If the undead launch another surprise attack from front and back in a confined space like a dungeon… retreat won’t be easy.”
If undead flood in from both ends of a corridor, there would be nowhere to dodge, forcing us into a fierce battle.
“On the other hand, if we choose the defense or search unit, even if we’re surrounded, the density would be lower, making it easier to secure an escape route. We could also expect support from other parties or paladins.”
It was a reasonable point.
Even if we were in danger during search or defense, if we just set off the flare that the paladins said they would distribute, all the forces in the vicinity would gather to support us.
“So, the safest choice would be to join the defense unit… but that’s safe at the cost of no opportunity to achieve merit. If the undead don’t attack the camp, we might end up not swinging our swords even once before it’s all over.”
Is she suggesting we choose the search unit because the safe option has the risk of being a wasted trip, though it’s safe?
It was an opinion befitting a ranger. Rangers who weren’t adventurers usually served in the military and acted as search parties.
Or they completely changed their profession to thieves, using their honed scouting abilities to rob passersby.
“Is that okay…? I think the search party might be more dangerous. Undead are one thing, but what if we actually encounter the Abyss Priest?”
Amy’s opinion was that the assault unit would be better than the search unit.
“Even if we fire a flare as soon as we discover them, we’d have to hold out with just our own strength until the paladins arrive.”
Her words had a point too.
We could probably repel ordinary undead without much problem, but an Abyss Priest would be an incomparably formidable enemy compared to the likes of wight groups.
Unlike magicians who have many constraints in using magic through the power of spellbooks, they could shoot magic just by opening their mouths.
Just like priests manifest holy miracles while muttering prayers. That’s why they’re called Abyss ‘Priests’, not Abyss Mages.
Moreover, most of them use strange, unheard-of magic that’s not easy to deal with.
Things like necromancy, summoning, curses. Curses were especially dangerous.
Most general attack magic could be dealt with by dodging or blocking the incoming projectiles, but curse magic often takes effect immediately upon activation, making it difficult to counter.
Moreover, high-level curses all had terribly vicious effects. To the point where you’d think it would be a hundred, a thousand times better to just get hit by a fireball.
For example, there’s a curse called petrification.
A terrible high-level curse that turns the flesh of anyone who makes eye contact into stone.
It’s a curse favored by Abyss Priests with abnormal sexual preferences who get excited by certain monsters or statues, and if you fall victim to it, you’d have no choice but to live as a human statue forever.
Until you naturally weather away and crumble, or shatter into stone fragments from some external impact.
Moreover, they say that even in that state, the soul remains intact, so consciousness itself is still alive?
It’s no different from being trapped inside a hard stone statue that can’t even breathe. It was truly a horrifying curse.
The luckier victims are discovered by adventurers and rescued before being shattered… but that’s not much consolation.
Unless the curse is lifted before complete petrification, it’s not easy to break the curse once it’s petrified to the bone.
The only future awaiting such victims was to be secretly sold to nobles or wealthy merchants, becoming decorative statues adorning their mansions or gardens.
Although buying, selling, or decorating with petrification victims was clearly illegal, well, they could just deny it with a straight face.
If the buyer insists that this is just a simple statue, not a cursed person, there’s no legal way to punish them.
There’s no way to distinguish between a completely petrified human and a stone statue unless you completely shatter it.
…I’ve gone on a bit long, but anyway, that’s how terrifying curse magic is.
Well, you wouldn’t encounter those who shoot deadly curses like petrification unless you go deep into the depths of a dungeon.