Chapter 63
Rescue Team (3)
Crunch!
“Skree! Skreeeeek—!”
Perhaps Helian wasn’t the only one who had turned into a monster.
Laia, who crushed a rat that had swollen to more than ten times its normal size, wore a dark expression the entire time we walked through the passage.
“To think things like these were breeding beneath the castle…”
“When you remember what happened to Helian’s knights, it’s not exactly impossible.”
Even as he said that, Gordon seemed deeply shaken as well.
“The nearest prison should be this way.”
I said that after unfolding the scroll and checking the soul map.
The sewers spread densely beneath Paul Wyvern Castle.
Unable to manage every part of the city, it seemed some of the old waterways had been abandoned while still connected to the prison.
“This must be your first time in a place like this, yet you’re quite skilled at finding your way.”
After figuring out the structure of the waterways, the butler Gordon watched me navigate through them and spoke.
“It’s almost as if you’ve spent years wandering places like this…”
“Well, maybe it’s just a talent.”
I brushed it off casually, but inwardly I flinched.
‘When you spend decades running away, places like these become second nature.’
Back when I had been declared an enemy of the continent and hunted by the Continental Allied Forces.
To avoid the assassins and knights trying to capture me, I had gone into every place imaginable.
Underground tunnels beneath castles, catacombs, damp caves, cliffs… there had even been swamps overflowing with corpses.
“I’m just talented in many ways.”
I smiled while hiding the truth, and Laia, who heard me, stuck out her tongue.
“Wooow~ Aren’t you amazing. Truly.”
As we continued walking, unfamiliar footsteps echoed above our heads.
Thud, thud.
“What’s that?”
“The footsteps of someone wearing armor. Judging by the sound, they’re heavily equipped.”
As one of the knights said that while examining the ceiling, Laia pointed to one corner.
“There’s a door over there!”
A barred metal hatch built into the ceiling.
Suppressing my footsteps, I approached it and placed a hand on the wall, activating the summoning gate.
[As your guide commands, split apart and gather together. Become my eyes.]
“Ooh…!”
“That’s necromancy…? One of those techniques the Empire bastards used?”
Gordon, Laia, and the knights all focused their attention on the unfamiliar sight.
The voice of the dead flowed from my throat.
Following my command, a skeleton’s head—
in other words, a skull—popped out from the summoning gate with a plop.
“Good. Success.”
Success was always satisfying.
While I looked proudly at the skeleton head in my hand—
“Ugh.”
Laia approached me with a displeased expression and asked,
“I thought you were using something incredible, but it’s just a skull?”
“Just? You say ‘just’ when you don’t even understand—?!”
Provoked by her blunt tone, I fired back like a machine gun.
“It’s not merely summoning a skeleton. I’m dismantling and reconstructing the existing skeleton’s soul-body structure and summoning formation, then constructing only a portion of it. You don’t know the first thing about necromancy, yet you make shallow judgments based solely on what you see in front of—”
Just as my heated explanation was about to continue—
“Aaaah! I get it already, so hurry up and do it!”
Covering her ears, Laia shuddered as if she couldn’t stand hearing any more.
‘Seriously, these knight types…’
I had just personally delivered a lecture that Imperial necromancers would faint from hearing, and this was the reaction I got.
‘Things are urgent, so I’ll let it slide.’
Thinking that, I pushed the skull through the bars in the ceiling.
“Ohh, now this is interesting.”
When I closed my left eye, which was linked to the skeleton, the view beyond the ceiling appeared.
A prison connected by corridors and the people locked inside.
The skeleton’s eyes, which saw souls rather than forms, detected the majestic mana contained within them.
Mana cores located in the lower abdomen, known as dantian.
Seeing them made me grin automatically.
“Bingo. It’s the prison where the knights are being held.”
At those words, Laia’s face immediately brightened.
“Really? Then those people are…!”
“The knights imprisoned for rebelling against Helian. For example…”
Your Blue Holy Spear Knights would be among them.
I said that while considering a method of infiltration.
“Guaaaaagh—!”
A scream filled with agony echoed throughout the prison, followed by the cackling laughter of men.
“Kuhahaha?! You bastards always looked down on us before!”
“Go on, try talking tough again, huh?! It’s not like some rescue team is coming for you!”
Smash—!
The sound of heavy military boots kicking something.
When I turned the skull toward the source of the sound, I could roughly grasp the situation.
‘The guards are all gathered in one place. Are they torturing the imprisoned knights?’
Torture.
More precisely, it seemed like they were venting their frustrations under the guise of torture.
‘If they’re distracted by that, this actually makes things easier.’
Instead of properly watching the prisoners, they had thrown away their vigilance over some petty desire for revenge.
Thinking that, I turned toward Laia.
“The security doesn’t seem particularly tight, so we should infiltrate quietly. First—”
I turned my head to explain the plan, but Laia was nowhere to be seen.
“…What? Where did she go?”
When I asked that while looking at Gordon and the knights, they simply sighed and shook their heads.
“Now that I think about it, I forgot to mention this, Young Master Klein.”
“You forgot what?”
When I asked back, Gordon drew the slender sword hanging at his waist and answered.
“The young lady… cannot tolerate injustice.”
“…Ah.”
The moment I finally realized what he meant—
KABOOOOOM—!
With an explosive roar, an entire section of the sewer ceiling collapsed.
Right where the voices had been coming from.
Directly in the center of the place where the guards had been torturing the knights.
“U-uaaagh?!”
“What the hell?! What suddenly happened—?!”
The guards, struck by disaster out of nowhere, hurriedly grabbed their weapons, but it was already too late.
Crunch—!
Laia’s mace, having already reached the prison above, smashed into their faces and completely caved them in.
“L-Lady Laia…?”
“Damn it, contact the surface! There are intruders in the prison—!”
The moment one of the guards tried to shout that—
Slash—!
The Death Knight I had manifested into the material world, Raven, sliced out his throat.
“U-undead!”
“A necromancer?! What the hell is this—?!”
While they panicked in confusion, unable to hide their shock, I quickly activated a summoning gate behind them.
[Bind them. Cover their mouths so none may escape!]
A simple command.
At those words, skeletons burst out behind them and grabbed the roughly ten guards.
“What the hell is this?!”
“There was nothing there, so why are there undead—?! Mmgh?!”
Three skeletons assigned per person.
The skeletons covering their mouths immediately slammed the guards into the floor.
Thud—!
“Kghk?!”
The ambush from the rear.
Finishing off the guards who had lost their balance and fallen was left to Gordon and the knights.
“Hup!”
We climbed up into the prison through the collapsed ceiling.
“Seriously. This is insane.”
In the end, things had worked out since all the guards were subdued, but it could have turned disastrous.
“No, do you always charge in without thinking things through like this?”
I snapped at Laia, who was holding a bloodstained mace.
“What would you have done if even one of the guards escaped?!”
“If the castle’s forces swarmed this place, the rescue operation would’ve been ruined!”
Seriously, what was she, some kind of Delline?
Who in the world smashes through the ceiling and charges in?
Especially during a covert infiltration!
While I was thinking that, she suddenly turned toward me.
“…!”
Her face was straining to suppress the emotions rising up to her throat.
“I’m sorry.”
“Huh?”
Unexpectedly, she bowed her head first and apologized.
‘Here I thought she’d start arguing back at me face-to-face.’
Maybe this was restraint in her own way.
After all, the hand gripping her mace was trembling faintly.
“I know I acted rashly. But those knights…”
“...Haa.”
Once she lowered her head first, I couldn’t really keep lashing out at her.
‘Thinking about it another way, the fact that she didn’t storm in head-on probably means she showed a lot of restraint.’
Judging by the atmosphere from Gordon and the knights watching her, I could roughly piece things together without asking.
Helian’s sudden uprising, followed by the ambush.
The knights imprisoned here were probably captured while helping Laia escape.
Their house collapsing, their fellow knights being slaughtered, and ending up monitored after falling into the Empire’s hands.
‘And in the middle of all that, seeing knights captured because of her being tortured…’
Knights were people who lived and died for honor and loyalty.
Not many could stay rational when faced with tragedies caused by themselves.
Of course, as a necromancer, it was an emotion I couldn’t truly understand.
“Forget it. Thanks to you, at least we didn’t have to bother with a sneak attack.”
As I said that, I handed Gordon the prison keys one of the skeletons had found.
Clank—!
The firmly sealed prison doors opened, and the knights imprisoned inside emerged one after another.
“Butler Gordon?! Then does that mean Lady Laia…!”
“You came to save us!”
The moment they saw Gordon’s face, they hurried out while shouting.
“Are you all alright? Are any of you hurt…?”
As Laia examined each of the knights anxiously, they rolled up their sleeves as if to reassure her.
“Don’t worry, my lady! We’re still kicking!”
“Monsters or undead, we can crush them all!”
Despite the traces of torture covering them, their expressions remained bright.
“That’s good, then. We’ve got a mountain of things to do.”
At my voice cutting into the emotional reunion, Gordon immediately began giving orders.
“Young Master Klein has informed us of the locations of the other prisons. Starting now, the knight order will infiltrate those prisons and rescue our imprisoned allies.”
They had come here for a counterattack.
At those words, fighting spirit filled the knights’ eyes.
“The wounded will escape through the underground passages, while those still capable of fighting will—”
As the knights seized the guards’ weapons and armed themselves under Gordon’s instructions—
“Hm?”
While checking the survivors’ positions on the scroll, I noticed something strange.
“What’s wrong?”
Laia, sensing that something was off with me, asked that question, and I answered with a frown.
“Some of the survivors… are gathering in one place and leaving the castle.”
“What?”
Laia looked down at the map I had unfolded.
White dots moving together in a cluster.
And the undead reactions surrounding them like an escort…
“Fuck.”
The curse slipped naturally from my twisted lips.
Only now did all the pieces finally fall into place.
Holy Blood created using living humans.
But there was no way a knightly house like Paul Wyvern possessed the technology to create something like that.
For them to take hostages and transport them meant…
‘They were exchanging people to be used as materials for Holy Blood.’
The moment I finished that thought, I immediately started walking toward the outside of the prison.
“Young Master Klein! Where are you suddenly—?!”
“There’s something urgent. You focus on rescuing the hostages.”
Now that the knight order had been rescued, they had enough strength.
From here on, they could handle things themselves.
My highest priority now was those moving prisoners.
If I followed them, it would become perfectly clear who was behind the creation of the Holy Blood.