The Unwanted Undead Adventurer: Volume 8 Page 5

  “Is something wrong?” Myullias asked for all of us. Nive nodded and pointed around the corner. Myullias peered in that direction. “I see, yes,” she said somberly and prompted me and Lorraine to look as well.

  “The missing adventurers?” Lorraine said when she looked.

  “Yes, looks like it,” I answered. “I know some of these people.”

  It was a large room where about ten people were standing as still as dolls. Off to the side, there were also some sickly people who were tied up and sitting on the floor. Two of them were adventurers I worked with during the Bronze-class Ascension Exam.

  “Raiz, Lola, why?”

  ◆◇◆◇◆

  “These are the two you told me about?” Lorraine asked. “But I thought they had formed a party with Rina too.”

  “I’m pretty sure they did, but I don’t see Rina anywhere,” I answered. “Maybe they were by themselves when they were captured.”

  I didn’t know the details, but they were childhood friends and clearly liked each other. Perhaps Rina had given them some space to be courteous. If they were captured at such a time, it would explain why Rina wasn’t present.

  “Were they turned into thralls?” I wondered aloud.

  This was my biggest concern at the moment. If they were thralls, then there was no way to turn them back as far as I knew. Nive probably didn’t know a way either, or she would have publicized it. Exterminating vampires was her whole ethos, after all. This meant if they had become thralls, even if they were people I knew, we would have to kill them.

  “Those people over there still seem to be human,” Nive said, noticing my concern. Maybe I just imagined it, but when she looked over at them, she seemed relieved. I wanted to believe she had some humanity in her, so maybe I was just seeing what I hoped to see. “But it looks like the ones standing lifelessly on the other side are beyond salvation. They’re probably still in the middle of transforming, but there’s no helping them now. Let’s send them to their graves.”

  A cold, somehow maniacal light shone in her eyes. Her hands moved restlessly, like she couldn’t wait to dig her claws into them. Never mind what I thought about her a moment ago; this was the real Nive.

  “Now then, everyone, let’s save the ones that are still human and exterminate the thralls. Sound good?” Nive asked, turning to look at each of us. The force of will in her eyes made it difficult to defy her. Her gaze was a threat in itself.

  She wasn’t wrong, but seeing as how they were still between human and thrall, it was only natural to hope they could still be saved. But Nive didn’t appear to care about that distinction. And seeing no other choice, I agreed with her. The prevailing theory was that thralls could never turn back into humans anyway. Nive could have just been cruel, but maybe she was only doing what she had to as an adventurer.

  “Now let’s go,” Nive said with a satisfied smile after we gave our approval. “Wait, one second.”

  I was about to get moving, but I came to a stop and wondered what the problem was. Nive pointed to the corner of the room.

  “I’m just saying, don’t think too hard about it,” somebody said. Two people were walking from the depths of the dungeon toward the large room. One looked to be a boy around the age of seventeen or eighteen, while the other was a girl who looked around fourteen or fifteen.

  “But should we really be doing this?” the girl asked. “This makes us no better than the humans.”

  “Do you realize how much they’ve made us suffer?” the boy said. “There are tons of them anyway. What difference does it make if something happens to a few of them?”

  “But—”

  “I get it, but you need to stop thinking about it. We have to do this. Besides, Mr. Shumini says this is necessary. He hasn’t said why yet, but he did awaken our power, right? So, y’know.”

  I didn’t quite know what they were talking about, but I kind of understood some parts. Shumini had to be their boss or something. They also seemed ambivalent to turning people into thralls, and they didn’t know the reason for it.

  “Looks like we’ve got vampires,” Nive said with amusement. “That’s what my nose tells me. Let’s kill them.”

  ◆◇◆◇◆

  “Here goes!” Nive said as she rushed into the large room. We followed. Myullias wasn’t a fighter, so she stayed back, but she had her duty as a saint to do. She had to purge the vampires and the air in this room. But it wasn’t time for that yet.

  “What?!”

  “Who’s there?!”

  The young vampires opened their eyes wide and shouted, but Nive just raised her claw.

  “What’s it to you?” she said before swinging her claw down.

  Her refusal to listen was the correct approach to humanoid monsters. Not necessarily in all cases, but their ability to speak human languages made most of them excellent at manipulating feelings. Listening to their excuses or circumstances would inevitably cause empathy, and countless humans had been slain for letting their guard down after hearing such pleas. Of course, monsters didn’t lie or deceive all the time, but we already knew about many victims, and there were people in the process of becoming thralls here to prove it. There was no reason to hold back and ask questions. Personally, I would have wanted to hear more about what these two were discussing a moment ago, but I didn’t know if Nive would reconsider killing vampires that were right in front of her. We had a job to do anyway.

  First, we had to save the novice adventurers. There were only six in total, Raiz and Lola included. Nive seemed confident that she could handle these vampires on her own, so she probably didn’t need help. Besides, she was Gold-class, and closer to Platinum-class than anyone else, no less. It was questionable as to how much Lorraine and I would even be helping.

  We could have let her just do this job on her own, then, but there were potential problems with that. Nive gave us a lot of information, and she was a competent adventurer, but she seemed secretive in some ways. She’d come across that way ever since I first met her. It was easy to feel like she might do something heinous, so Wolf wouldn’t have sent her on her own either.

  Or maybe I was looking at her through my own biases. Objectively speaking, she was fighting off monsters for us all by herself, and we got a lot of money from her too. Thinking about it again, she did a lot for us. I almost felt like I should at least buy her dinner or something. I also felt like that would just lead to trouble for me, though.

  “Hey, Raiz, Lola! You alive?!” I asked and shook Raiz by the shoulders. Their eyes were vacant, and it was hard to tell if they were conscious.

  “Ugh, where am I? Who are you?” Raiz responded. The life returned to his eyes.

  “Thank goodness. It’s me, Rentt. We took an exam together. Remember that?”

  “Rentt? Rentt?! Why are you here? Wait, never mind that, where’s Lola?”

  “Right here. Looks like she’s unconscious, but she’s fine. She’s alive,” I said as I healed her with some divinity.

  “Uh, huh? Where am I?” she asked as her eyes opened.

  “Lola?!” Raiz exclaimed and tried to stand up. “Ouch!” He fell over.

  From the look of it, his leg was wounded, maybe from when they were first attacked. On top of that, he had been enfeebled through some means and robbed of his faculties so he couldn’t even move. I couldn’t see the structure of the spell that was used, but it could have been a binding spell. They’d tried to be thorough, but the wound on his leg wasn’t serious. I could easily heal it. I wanted to conserve as much divinity as possible, but helping the adventurers was a top priority.

  “Thanks, Rentt,” Raiz said.

  “Don’t mention it. We’re party members, right? We help each other out,” I replied as I recalled what they’d told me after we took the exam.

  “Of course,” said Raiz.

  “You remembered?” asked Lola.

  They looked pleased, but of course I remembered. I wouldn’t say I was never invited to join a party over the last dec
ade, but it didn’t happen often. And of the invitations I did get, it wasn’t that they liked me so much as they wanted a jack-of-all-trades. A far smaller number sincerely wanted me as a partner. I could only remember Lorraine, Augurey, and maybe a handful of others.

  “Well, put that aside for now,” I said. “Prepare to get out of here. Can you stand?” They were both gradually regaining their clarity.

  “Yeah, I can stand,” Raiz said. “I felt like a sack of bricks a second ago, but now I’m fine. What’s up with that?”

  I didn’t do anything but heal him with divinity, but maybe he had some sort of spell on him after all. Binding spells could feel like everlasting paralysis, but many of them would disappear upon contact with divinity. That must have been why they felt lighter.

  I wondered if the same applied to the other four. I looked to the side and saw Lorraine wake them up with a curse-lifting spell, so it seemed it was something like what I expected. I couldn’t see spells in detail, so I didn’t know precisely, but they were freed in the end, and that was what mattered.

  ◆◇◆◇◆

  I just stood back and protected the newbie adventurers as I watched. The fight went surprisingly well, but that surprise came from the vampires, not Nive. It was two on one, so you’d think they’d have the advantage, but Nive was a Gold-class adventurer bordering on Platinum-class. She was a step or two above the average adventurer, and most lesser vampires would pose no threat to her. That said, they fought better than expected. Maybe Nive was holding back, though.

  Nive’s claw attacked the vampire boy from above, but he dodged to the side inhumanly fast and swiped at Nive’s neck with a red dagger. Nive saw this, laughed, and tilted her neck out of the way at the last second.

  As if she were waiting for this, the vampire girl swung a red scythe down at Nive’s neck. I thought that even Nive would have trouble getting out of this one, but the scythe stopped right in front of her face. She had caught the blade with her teeth. Nive shook her head and tossed the vampire girl away, then she followed her as she hurtled through the air. The girl crashed into the wall, and as she tried to recover, Nive sliced at her neck. The claw severed the girl’s head, and I thought even a vampire would have to die after that.

  But the moment the head hit the floor, both it and her body dissolved into a black mass that took the shape of bats. The bats flew far from Nive and merged together, becoming the girl once again. She was panting, but her body was intact. Nive didn’t look especially surprised.

  “Division, huh?” Nive said. “You must be some renowned vampires. You looked wimpy to me, but I guess you have more skills than I thought. You even seem to have San Arms. This is fun.”

  Division was a special ability generally associated with middle or greater vampires. It made it possible to split the body into shadowy bats or other animals. The amazing thing about it was that the vampire could recover from wounds completely unharmed. It was said that this made them impervious to physical attacks. This was one reason that slaying middle vampires could be difficult. This could have meant that these two were middle vampires, but I didn’t know for sure.

  I honestly didn’t know what San Arms were, but from what it sounded like, it was some other special ability vampires had. I didn’t have either of these, as far as I knew, but I never tried to use them. I knew Division was inaccessible to lesser vampires, so I never considered it before. Now I thought it might be worth attempting later.

  “I’m not having fun. Who the heck are you?!” the vampire girl shouted.

  “Can’t you tell?” Nive replied. “I’m an adventurer, and I’m here to slay you. You might as well surrender. If you tell me everything you know, I think they’ll at least let you stand outside the gates of Heaven.”

  She didn’t forget the part about gathering information, thankfully. She was a high-ranking adventurer, so it stood to reason that she’d be much more meticulous than me. She had also analyzed the behavior of vampires, and while she was typically hard to read, she did make logical decisions often enough.

  She stopped short of saying they could actually go to Heaven, though. She didn’t offer to let them live, either, but I guess that was obvious. They would still need human blood to survive.

  “Jiziu, don’t listen to her. Humans don’t know anything,” the vampire boy said to the girl.

  “Wugong, but I—”

  “Worry about it later!”

  The vampire boy leaped at Nive. The number of daggers increased to seven, and all but the one in his hand floated in the air. These must have been the San Arms. Their blades were red and seemed different from ordinary weapons. They flew at Nive, but she danced out of the way of them all. She must have been going easy before after all.

  “Is this all?” she said, looking unperturbed. “You’re not quite comparable to middle vampires, but you can use Division and San Arms. Very interesting. However, your skills are fatally unpolished.”

  Nive began to move more nimbly. She shattered all the daggers with one swipe of her claws, closed in on the vampire boy in an instant, and sliced off his head. She cleaved the vampire girl down the middle at about the same time. Of course, this went the same way as before. They both turned into bats and then returned to their original states, as if they were never harmed at all.

  “Don’t waste your time; we won’t die,” the vampire boy said, his voice echoing throughout the dungeon.

  “You won’t?” Nive asked.

  “Nope, we were granted power. Normally we would have to be middle vampires to use Division, or greater vampires to wield San Arms. You saw, didn’t you? No matter how much you cut or stab us, we’ll come back in one piece.”

  “I see, oh really?!”

  Nive jumped at the vampire boy and diced him to bits, only for the same thing to happen again. The same for the vampire girl.

  “Enough! It’s hopeless!” said the boy.

  “Give up already!” said the girl.

  They kept attacking Nive, but she remained completely composed. In fact, she even grinned.

  “Give up?” she asked. “Ridiculous. There are only two reasons I would stop hunting vampires: if I die, or if every last one of you dies!”

  I didn’t know if that was insanity or conviction. I had no idea why she was so obsessed with vampires, but it was a maddening fixation. The look in her eyes said she would always pursue vampires, to the ends of the world even.

  Nive fought the vampires for a while until they suddenly went wide-eyed and looked at themselves. It was after several dozen rounds of Nive slicing them and forcing them to revive.

  “Knew it,” Nive said with a chuckle. I looked where she was looking and saw what she was talking about. The vampires’ fingers were disintegrating.

  “What the hell?!” said the boy.

  “Why? Heal, heal!” said the girl.

  They repeatedly used Division to restore their arms, but their fingers kept crumbling into sand.

  “You’re too ignorant,” Nive said. “Division makes it possible to shapeshift as well as restore to your original state, but you can’t keep using it forever.”

  “What are you talking about?” the vampire boy asked shakily.

  “Everything has its limitations, you know, no matter what you are. Surprisingly, not even monsters can escape their limits. The gods made it so, but even their power only goes so far. That means Division has its drawbacks too. This is what happens when you overuse it. Every middle vampire knows that, but I guess you didn’t.”

  “But Mr. Shumini didn’t say anything about that,” the vampire girl said.

  “Is that your leader? Well, I’ll be destroying him later. I’m sure he didn’t tell you on purpose. If you knew the drawbacks, you would’ve been more hesitant to use it. You were unwilling to risk your lives and he needed a way to make you fight, I take it. You were to be used and disposed of. How sad.”

  “That’s not true! He’s not like that!” the boy cried, unwilling to accept the harsh truth.

&
nbsp; “He said we’d be able to make a country for ourselves one day! He said we’d get to live happy lives there!” the girl moaned.

  “Sounds like a nice dream,” Nive said. “Like a fairy tale a mother would tell her young child. Sweet, kind, loving, and all a lie. Now let me send you to your deaths. At least you’ll get to rest in peace.”

  Nive took one step toward them, then another. Her words and their own decaying bodies left them in a confused state. Unable to move or speak, they just watched her come closer.

  “Sweet dreams. I’m sure the darkness will welcome you with open arms,” Nive said and severed the immobilized boy’s head. He didn’t turn into bats this time. His head and body turned to sand until that was all that remained. Then she walked up to the girl a short distance away.

  “Oh, oh, I—” the girl stammered and stared at Nive’s claw.

  “Did you listen to the pleas of the humans you killed? I doubt it,” Nive said. Then she cut the girl in half. She disintegrated too, and the particles of what had been her body dispersed through the air.

  Now that the two vampires were gone, Nive walked up to the half-formed thralls and stared at them pensively. “Myullias, it’s your turn,” she said. “Come over here. Rentt, could you help too?”

  It was time for Myullias and I to purify them with our divinity. Nive could use divinity too, but she wasn’t good at purification. Nobody’s good at everything, I guess.

  “Are you sure?” I asked her. “They’re not fully formed yet, but they’re still thralls. Don’t you want to do it yourself?” I saw Nive as someone who would never turn down the chance to kill a vampire, so I didn’t think she’d be willing to pass that duty onto others.

  Nive shook her head, an uncharacteristically vague expression on her face. “No, I’d rather not precisely because they’re not fully thralls. Their bodies and souls still differ from those monsters. Yet there’s no way to save them now. They have to be destroyed. It’s sad that they were forced to become monsters against their will, and I do pity them. They at least deserve a painless, peaceful death. Am I strange for feeling that way?”