Chapter 275 Growing

Just as she got down from the carriage, the night air hit her like a slap, cooler, cleaner, heavy with the scent of pine and disturbed earth. Liraya walked a few paces away from the carriage, far enough that the soft blue light no longer touched her. The western gate was visible as a broken shape against the village’s glow. Lantern light spilled through the jagged hole in uneven floods, and in that light she could finally see the movement of something clearly.

It was people.

Hundreds of people, in shining armor, walking rhythmically, following a woman dressed in dark clothing.

Even in the dark, Liraya clearly could recognize the woman leading these people toward the broken gate. It was Ines herself.

And just as she spotted her, suddenly, shocking her from behind, someone spoke behind Liraya.

“Oh, isn’t that mother? She must’ve come back from the forest.” Miriel said.

After registering who the owner of the question was, Liraya answered, “Yeah. But why did you come out too?”

“Heh, did you really think I would let you go outside without having an eye on you? Mother fancies you. It has been a while since she has finally fancied someone. If I lost you now, it is I who would have to face her wrath.”

Liraya didn’t know what to think of what she said. Being a goddess, she still didn’t know about the way human lust works, but she had a rough idea that she was better off not knowing about it.

“Let’s go to her. If we start the carriage now, we can still reach her before she enters the village.” Miriel suggested.

Both women turned around and got on the carriage, while the horseless manastone-fueled carriage got started when the mage woman got out of the carriage and sat in the driver’s seat.

***

Inside the village, the broken western gate had become a real problem for the fighters present there.

Monsters were continuously entering through the gate, following the light getting out through the open hole.

Lys moved through the chaos like he had finally stopped fighting the sword and his system and started paying attention to it instead. After killing so many creatures with it in just ten minutes till now, CorpseSlayer now sat in his grip with a weight that no longer felt foreign. The balance had settled into his wrist and forearm over the last couple of minutes of constant killing and swinging. Every swing carried a little less wasted motion than the one before it. The blue runes along the blade pulsed with each swing, alongside his heartbeat, drinking the thin streams of corrupted mana that leaked from every monster he cut down.

As he was swinging now, a low, multi-legged thing with a wet carapace scrambled over a toppled cart. He stepped in, let the first claw skitter off the edge of the blade, then rolled his shoulder and took its front legs at the joint. The creature collapsed forward. Seeing his chance, he finished it with a short downward cut through the soft seam behind its head. Blackish fluid sprayed across the packed dirt.

[EXP Gained: 28]

[CorpseSlayer: Level 3 – 180 / 800]

The numbers flickered at the edge of his vision with each kill and vanished almost instantly when he glanced at them. He didn’t have time to properly look at them. But he still noticed the rising number of exp with each monster he was killing.

While he was fighting and thinking about the ways to level up faster, Mira also fought just three paces to his left, red hair plastered to her neck with sweat, her lighter blade darting in short, precise arcs. She was faster than him, but the monsters kept coming in uneven waves at her, and her breathing had started to turn ragged after fighting for so long. She had been fighting even before Lys had stepped in here, so it was only natural she was exhausted by now. Plus not to mention it was her first real fight.

“Mira,” Lys called without looking away from the next shape lunging out of the dark at him. “Stop finishing them. Just cripple the legs or the joints. Leave the last cut to me.”

She shot him a look that was half glare, half exhaustion. “Are you serious right now? We’re drowning in these things, and you want me to play nice? Don’t you see how hard it is already getting for me, and on top of that you want me to go easy on them?”

“I’m serious. Trust me.”

She was about to curse under her breath with something sharp like ‘stupid brother’ or something, but the next moment a lanky, long-armed monster rushed her; she only took its knees and left it thrashing on the ground.

Finding his chance at earning more exp, Lys stepped in, CorpseSlayer rising and falling in one clean motion. The blade drank deeper into the flesh of the mini-boar-like creature. A warmer pulse ran up his arm.

[EXP Gained: 34]

[CorpseSlayer: Level 3 – 214 / 800]

He felt the difference immediately. It was as if the sword was learning the shape of these particular monsters, and alongside it getting more sharper than before. Whatever was happening to the sword, it only ended up supporting him in slicing in a better way and fighting ruthlessly with each moment. As for getting exhausted, his basic regeneration, basic stamina skill was working passively all this time, making him fight without much worry about not being able to continue the fight.

He was learning how to cut the flesh of monsters better with each cut he made on these monsters. With his life on the line while fighting, he didn’t actually have time to think straight about if his sword was getting sharper or if it was just him getting better at cutting things.

While both siblings were busy slicing monster flesh, Selene held the center of their small pocket of resistance. Her hands moved in tight, practiced circles as she reinforced the barrier of pale light that kept the worst of the swarm from collapsing in on them from the side. The ward flickered every time something heavy slammed against it, but it held. She was still in her yellow-gray priestess dress, and sweat was darkening the collar of this very dress.

Her breathing stayed measured, following the rhythm of the mana-breathing technique she had learned from Lys.

After a while like this going on, a cluster of smaller monsters, some kind of scaled chicken-things with too many teeth, came boiling around a burning cart. Lys met them head-on, to let all of it slam into the ward of Selene. The first one he managed to cut cleanly through the middle. The second he kicked into Mira’s waiting blade so she could shear its legs before he finished it. The third he simply stepped past and let his CorpseSlayer take on the backswing.

[EXP Gained: 19]

[EXP Gained: 22]

[EXP Gained: 17]

[CorpseSlayer: Level 3 – 807/ 800]

Ding!

[Congratulations…LEVEL UP]

[Level 3 → Level 4]

[10 Skill Points Awarded]

—Cursed Sword of the Fallen Witch—

Level 4: 7/ 1600

Skill Points: 40

Skills:

Sword-Shield (Level 1 – Upgrade: 5 SP) – Passive defensive stance. Redirects a percentage of incoming physical damage back at the attacker when CorpseSlayer is held as a shield.

Sword Bash (Level 1 – Upgrade: 10 SP) – Strike with the edgeless part of the sword, dealing twice the damage of the user’s effort.

Sword Mark (Level 1 – Upgrade: 15 SP) – Mark a target the user has cut. The mark lingers, allowing the user to track the target’s position and sense their general condition.

Tainted Blade (Level 1 – Upgrade: 20 SP) – Each cut carries corrupt mana that festers in the wound. If the target escapes, the corruption spreads, weakening them over time. Stacks with each cut.

Cursed Object Attributes: Corrupt Mana Absorption, Experience Absorption

The notification of level up burned brighter than the others. Lys felt the change settle into the steel itself, a subtle tightening of the edge, as if the sword had finally decided it trusted the hand holding it.

Even while fighting with this new swarm of monsters, he risked a half-second glance at the skill list that hovered in the corner of his vision. Until now, every level had given him some sword-related skills: though the first level had options of choosing a skill out of three skills, from then on he got his level-up skill automatically, without getting to choose from a list of skills. And that still happened this time, too.

Sword Shield at one, Sword Bash at two, Sword Mark at three, and now something called Tainted Blade at four; no idea how he could use this last skill in the first place. Though there were explanations for using it, using it in real time to test it out right this moment was basically impossible.

The new point that came with this level up sat unused like others as he wondered if there was a skill that would let him clear space around him faster. The swarm wasn’t thinning; it was only getting bigger, even though he himself had managed to kill more than he could count.

After some consideration of this and that, he dumped the points into the most aggressive options available to him, which also suited this current situation: Sword Shield and Sword Bash.

The description was short and vicious for each skill, though he couldn’t get to read carefully any of the skills he got after level 2.

Just as he poured the points, the skill locked in. The next monster that came at him never even finished its lunge.

Lys swung his sword, pointing the dull side toward it. The creature just slammed into it and almost instantly dropped to the ground. Looking closely, Lys confirmed it was dead. Though the monster was small, it still died, just from slamming into his sword.

‘So this is the real effect of the sword bash skill, huh? Small monsters will die because of their own momentum if I just make them slam into the sword somehow? Good, now I can kill these annoying things without swinging the sword. Swinging after swinging is getting too much for my shoulder. Who knows how long I could continue like this!’

Getting him back to reality, Mira’s voice cut across the noise. “Lys! Quit staring at the damn air and help me with these two!”

He snapped back into the present, stepped into her flank, and took the larger of the two monsters she was holding off with a rising cut that nearly removed its head. The smaller one she left crippled for him. He finished it without breaking stride.

[EXP Gained: 41]

[EXP Gained: 29]

[CorpseSlayer: Level 4 – 134 / 1600]

The load on Mira’s side of the line eased immediately as he finished two monsters instantly. She gave him a sharp, grateful nod and turned to the next threat without wasting breath on thanks.

Lys turned to Selene, whose ward pulsed brighter for a moment as she reinforced a weak section around the other fighters of the village.

“Selene,” Lys called between cuts. “Take some rest. I’ll cover for you.”

“I’m fine,” she answered, voice tight but steady. “I just need to settle my rhythm again. The technique still works while I move around, but I just get exhausted fast. Maybe I’m not used to it yet.”

He watched her for a heartbeat longer after hearing that from her.

‘What the fuck? She can mana-breathe even while moving around? Even I can’t do that yet.’

She really was keeping the mana-breathing cycle going while maintaining her barrier to drive off monsters. His image of her got a little higher after hearing this. But as he had no time to waste on feeling proud of her, he pushed the thought away for now.

His system kept pushing notifications in his vision while he kept slicing, slamming, swinging his sword into the monster. He never finished reading any of it.

In this mess of fighting, suddenly a small, furious shape exploded out of the shadows at knee height, one of the chicken-things, all frantic wings and needle-sharp beak. It hit him before he could fully process the level-up window.

Instinct took over. His free hand snapped out and closed around its thrashing neck.

The creature went wild. Beak and claws hammered at his wrist and forearm in a frantic blur. Feathers and hot spittle flew. Lys felt the impacts, sharp, rapid, desperate, but nothing broke his skin. Nothing even left a mark. The Iron Skin skill he had almost forgotten about held like tempered plate against the small monster’s fury.

‘So it really does work against the weaker ones,’ he thought, almost absently. ‘The hobgoblin in the forest must have just been too far above me. Its strength punched straight through me. But these things don’t have that kind of weight behind them, I guess.’

He adjusted his grip, raised CorpseSlayer in his other hand, and drew the edge cleanly across the creature’s throat while it still struggled in his fist.

Just as he sliced the throat of it, the body went limp. Dark blood ran over his knuckles. Before more monsters got closer to him, he let the corpse drop to the ground.

As she was watching this scene, Mira made a wet, disgusted sound somewhere to his left. “God, Lys, warn me before you start doing something like that. I almost threw up.”

“What, what did he do?” Selene asked the question. Not seeing him do that.

Lys wiped the blade on his pants and glanced over at her. A small, tired smile pulled at the corner of his mouth.

“Sorry,” he said. “It jumped at me first. I had no choice but to kill like that.”

“Yeah, like hell you didn’t!” Mira said it.

In this chaos, there were not only these three fighting monsters, which were coming through the broken gate. Around them, the fight continued, the other villager women shouting while fighting in their own way, steel ringing, the wet sounds of monsters dying or being driven back with spears and shovels. The broken western gate still poured new threats into the village, but for the first time since the hobgoblin fight, Lys felt like he really was growing stronger in his own right.

And if this pace continued, he was confident he could really be someone worthy of protecting his family and the people around him by his own might.

He rolled his shoulders, felt the sword settle into his grip again like an extension of his own arm, and stepped forward to meet the next monster as one just lunged at him.

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