Chapter Two-Hundred-and-Sixteen

“Where is he?” Chien asked.

“I have no clue,” Adam replied, while absorbing the two sculpted mounts back into himself.

“I saw him,” Seo-Yoon said. “He was near the back of the settlement, by an old windmill.”

Adam swapped to his cowl and shot himself back up into the air quickly.

The moment he saw a dark stain in the distant part of the hamlet, another bolt was fired at him and he had to drop back down before it hit him. This time, he was able to see the projectile as it flew by. It was a condensed form of shadow magic, which likely meant it carried many of the Shadow’s nasty afflictions.

“He’s fast at reloading and his aim is freakishly accurate,” Adam told the others after he landed. He swapped back to his crown, since he needed the firepower for all of the wild animals that filled the buildings.

Natalia frowned. “I wish Diwa was here.”

Nobody responded to that, but instead Chien said, “I will lead the way and attempt to draw his attention.”

“You don’t have a shield,” Adam replied. “And the bolts penetrate armour. The marksman might kill any of us on the spot if we’re not careful. A bolt to the head is fatal, no matter how much health you have. We also need to be careful about how we approach, given that there are animals inside the houses that are primed to attack as soon as we get near.”

“We could go around the hamlet?” Seo-Yoon suggested.

“I could also charge through to draw all of their attention to me,” Natalia said. “If I use the Blue Vein necklace, then I could probably disable a lot of them, and then maybe Seo-Yoon could freeze them?”

“We don’t know how the necklace works yet,” Adam pointed out. “It’s possible the effect is something different than what you’re assuming. Testing it right now is a bad idea.”

“Will we avoid the animals if we go around the hamlet?” Chien asked.

“I don’t know,” Adam replied. “I know that when we get closer to the boss or enter the hamlet, he will start bombarding us with crossbow bolts. We’re only safe right now because we haven’t gone past the invisible threshold yet, although it’s not safe in the air. Whatever we come up with, we have to make sure our attack is quick and decisive.”

“Can he only target one of us or several at once?” Chien asked.

“All of us at once, from what I’ve been told.”

As they were talking, Adam started weaving another Shade Barrier spell for himself. They didn’t need to rush in, so they could take their time and plan.

Or so Adam thought, until a shadowy bolt slammed right down into where Seo-Yoon stood, triggering her barrier and teleporting her body out of the way as her clone exploded, spattering them all with blood.

“He isn’t letting us take it easy,” Adam said. “Seo-Yoon, go right around the hamlet with Natalia. Chien, go left and try to taunt him with your cape. I will go through the hamlet and deal with the animals.”

“How?” Natalia asked.

Adam instinctively summoned a bone barrier above Chien, just as another bolt dropped out of the sky, but it pierced through without even slowing down, triggering his Shade Barrier and shifting him out of the way of the attack.

“Go! We don’t have time to discuss!” Adam yelled. “Don’t stop moving and keep an eye on the sky!”

They didn’t need to be told twice and all split as they took off in separate directions.

Adam immediately felt a shift in the animal melodies around him as he ran down through the abandoned hamlet. All of them, from the furthest houses to the nearest ones, started moving towards the doorways and windows, somehow sniffing him out.

It was of course nothing of the sort, because it was really just the Forlorn Shadow guiding them to him. Perhaps Adam’s proximity to the forlorn knight made it able to spot him, or maybe it was the hamlet itself it kept an eye on. Regardless of the reason, the result was that wild dogs and wolves poured out of the buildings, moving towards him at speed.

Adam ran past vegetable gardens and quaint houses of wood and stone, moving faster than the animals pouring in from all around him, thanks to the boost from his raiment and the constant pull of his magical control. A few bolts rained down around him, but none were able to find their mark. The spell pattern he’d been in the middle of weaving was half-finished, and, instead of attempting to finish it, he absorbed it back into his raiment.

Once he reached the middle of the hamlet, he came to a halt and activated the Cleansing Beacon skill from his flame glove, surrounding its glowing pillar and five-metre aura with a barrier of bone. A few seconds later, the animals crashed against his hastily-erected defences, piling on top of each other in their frenzied attempts to reach him.

Here we go.

Although Adam couldn’t see the others, he could sense the way their melodies were moving, and knew they were fighting the marksman. They were far enough away that he’d be able to avoid harming them.

Adam sculpted spikes on his surrounding barriers and pushed them outwards, activating his mantle of atrophy at the exact moment that the first affliction took hold.

The animals were not protected like the knights, so they were quite susceptible to Adam’s afflictions, and given how closely they were stacked around his defences, all of them were caught in the ten-metre radius and afflicted with both bleed and venom.

Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

[146 Afflictions applied.]

Adam’s vision flickered dangerously, but he managed to stay on his feet. He reabsorbed the bone blockade back into his raiment and then quickly scooped up all the dead animals.

While they gave neither points nor trophies, their raw material was exactly what he needed.

With his raiment filled even more than before, Adam flew up into the air, his body like jelly within his armour, but his mind awake and sharp.

I think the reason I’m not passed out on the ground is because all of the animals died from the first tick of my bleed.

His affliction bonus had been around 900% at the moment of activation, and it had jumped to 1,202% following the 146 afflictions he’d applied. That meant that, with a bleed that did 130% damage, even a simple shove of his spike wall, which might only deal ten damage, would end up afflicting a bleed that dealt 117 damage per tick, perhaps even more if the bleed had stacked.

He had no idea what his actual damage numbers were, and it was likely that his spike wall had inflicted a lot more, given his many upgrades to invocation power and sigil damage.

Adam was pulled back to the matter at hand when he saw a dark shape flickering into existence atop the windmill at the back of the hamlet, following a strike from Seo-Yoon’s sun flare spell. The forlorn marksman was like a larger version of the crossbow knight from stage four, wearing royal-blue cloth armour and a hood, with sparse bits of rusted plates here and there.

Without even pausing to consider, Adam fired a fusillade of finger bullets down at the boss, exploding the structure beneath the knight before he could take aim with his enormous shadow-coated ballista crossbow strapped to his right arm.

The knight fell down into the ruins of the building, and Chien and Natalia rushed in to deal with him. To help them out, Adam quickly wove Snare patterns and laid them on his regrown gauntlet fingers, before firing them down into the windmill ruin.

With the cloak of invisibility gone, Adam could sense the boss’ melody, but almost as soon as he was able to sense it, it winked out.

[Forlorn Knight defeated.]

< < Optional Stage Objective Complete > >

< Defeated the Forlorn Marksman >

Adam landed in front of the ruined windmill, settling down onto a knee.

“Nice assist,” Natalia said after she emerged from the ruins.

Seo-Yoon came in from Adam’s right, giving him a thumbs up.

Then Chien emerged, dragging the corpse of the marksman behind him. “Adam, would you mind…?”

“Popping him open?” Adam finished his sentence with a grin.

“Yes. That.”

Adam floated himself over to the marksman’s corpse and broke open his torso with brutal efficiency, extracting the core of darkness from within. They now had three of the cores. They would have had more if they hadn’t turned all the forlorn knights except the intruder and amalgamated to ash.

Seems this guy didn’t drop his weapon, Adam thought as he peeked into the ruins of the windmill.

“How did you deal with the animals?” Chien asked.

“I used the mantle and my cleansing beacon,” Adam replied.

“Clever,” Seo-Yoon remarked.

“We are fortunate that you had the ability to make us these protective spells,” Chien said. “If not for those, we may all have perished.”

“Mine is still intact,” Natalia pointed out.

“Yours is the only one,” Chien replied.

“Let’s take a quick break while I remake them,” Adam said.

Seo-Yoon sat down next to him as he started weaving the spell pattern.

Chien looked around at the hamlet and watched the sky. They still had about five hours before the sun would set.

“What do you think he was guarding?” Natalia suddenly asked.

“Guarding?” Adam replied.

“Yeah,” she said. “I mean, this place isn’t strategically important. The marksman could’ve been a formidable foe if he had joined the army sieging Gothershall, but clearly he was left here, alongside those animals you mentioned. Surely that means he was guarding something.”

I hadn’t considered that, but it actually makes a lot of sense.

Adam finished the first Shade Barrier and gave it to Seo-Yoon. Then he pulled out the compass and asked it to point him towards the nearest secret.

The needle snapped towards the windmill, and he got to his feet unsteadily, before floating to where it pointed. The others followed him on foot.

Although the compass pointed at the windmill, their actual destination was behind it.

“Why are you floating?” Natalia asked.

“My legs aren’t working so well after I used the mantle to take out the animals,” Adam replied dismissively. “It’s not an issue.”

She seemed to disagree, as did Chien, but before they could complain about it, Adam found what the compass was pointing them towards. It was a tombstone in front of an apple tree, situated in the garden of a little house. The tree was rotten and dead.

On the stone, in barely legible engravings, it read, ‘Here lies Alisé. Daughter and aspiring hero. She died for her beliefs and is dearly missed by all whose lives she graced.’

The golden needle pointed at the ground in front of the tombstone.

“You are not planning on doing what I think you are, are you?” Chien asked apprehensively.

“It’s a secret,” Adam replied. “It could be something useful.”

“What does it matter?” Natalia remarked to Chien. “It’s not like it’s a real person buried here.”

Before an argument could break out, Adam held up a hand and said, “Anyone who finds it distasteful can go somewhere else while I do it.”

Nobody moved.

In the end, greed is stronger than religious conviction it seems.

With a precise application of force, Adam was able to dig up the grave, revealing a sunken-in wooden box with a skeleton inside and the broken blade of a sword. The blade was in three pieces and coated in rust and strange darkness.

< < Secret Relic Obtained > >

< The Broken Blade (Common) — Alisé was a brave young woman. Mallo the blacksmith recognised her skill with the blade and gifted her this sword. But alas, she met her match when she challenged the Forlorn Prince, and now the erstwhile hero’s sword lies in ruin along with the peace she was trying to defend >

What the hell?

“Why is this a secret?” Natalia asked.

“It probably needs to be repaired to have an actual effect,” Adam guessed. “I’ve encountered secret relics like that before.”

“Do you think it’s related to this Mallo guy?” she replied.

“Possibly.”

“The skeleton and blade are glowing,” Seo-Yoon commented.

Adam swapped to his aspirant’s cowl, and sure enough, both the corpse and the blade fragments gave off very faint golden energy, like a true flame. It was faint enough that it wasn’t visible to the naked eye, but when Adam hovered his hand over the corpse and blade fragments, he could feel heat coming off of them.

Glad I didn’t just grab them with my hands.

“She must have been blessed by the First Light,” Chien said, stooping to pick up the fragments. “Perhaps she was a saint.”

With this new discovery, Chien insisted they seal the grave again and make it whole.

Adam consulted the compass in the meantime, asking about where to bring the fragments, and the arrow pointed towards the south-southwest part of the stage.

That must be near where the river splits.

Where the fishing village is located…

Adam had a bad feeling about their chances of making the blade whole again.

Regardless, it was worth checking out, especially since they had already planned to head that way before the discovery.

Adam finished making the shade barriers for himself and Chien, and then he sculpted two horses like before.

“Off we go,” he said as he lifted himself and Seo-Yoon into the air, and used his magical control to bring the mounts to life.