The Strange Adventure of a Broke Mercenary

Proofreader: Xemul

Loren knew that on the battlefield, it was common to lose the ability to think normally. He himself had fallen into such a state on several occasions, and each time he was amazed at how he had managed to survive, and the state of the orcs looked like battle mania to him.

However, such a state would not last forever. If your army had the upper hand, it could last for a long time, but there was always a limit. And If your own army was outnumbered, it would cool down even more quickly.

“They are such a pain in the ass!”

Loren spat out while smashing the orcs with his greatsword. If the orcs failed to defend themselves, there would be flesh and bones flying around. And if they did not fail to defend themselves, there would be flesh and bones AND weapons flying around. The smell of blood filled the air, and orc corpses piled up on the ground in proportion.

Wiping the blood splattered on his face with the back of his hand, Loren glanced behind him and noticed Nim sneakily hiding there in addition to Lapis, who had been there for some time.

“What’s wrong?”

“I ran out of arrows.”

Replied Nim, who had drawn a dagger for protection. Her words did not carry much sentiment, though there was a somewhat irritated tone in her voice.

If their opponents were humans, even Nim might have been able to be a challenge in close-quarters combat by making use of her superior speed to stab or tear at a vital point. But their opponents were orcs, whose bodies were protected by a tough skin and a thick layer of fat underneath, making it difficult to inflict life-threatening damage; the most a dagger could inflict on them would be slight scratches.

“It must be troublesome, becoming unable to fight when you run out of arrows.”

Dia, who was still crushing orcs with her bare hands and feet, laughed in a tone that was somewhat mocking, though not to the point of ridicule. Nim was annoyed by those words, but what Dia said was actually true, and the difference in power between Nim, an Elf, and Dia, an Elder, is too obvious.

“There are too many orcs. If someone doesn’t work, even just a little, we’ll get tired soon.”

“That…”

“Ah, I know. I’ll give you some arrows.”

Dia said as she lightly swept off the legs of one of the orcs that attacked her. It was a light foot swipe that seemed to require little effort, but the orc’s legs were torn off and sent flying away from the knees down as easily as if they were attached to the upper thighs by glue. Dia grabbed the neck of the orc, which had lost its balance and was about to fall, her fingers embedded in the flesh, and chanted something in a whisper. With a light shock, the orc’s body disappeared, and about ten plain white arrows appeared in Dia’s hands instead.

“See, is this good?”

Nim was surprised to receive the white arrows that Dia had walked all the way to Loren’s side to give her.

The white arrows felt hard and smooth in Nim’s hand; just by touch alone, she could tell that they had no deformation or bends. Even the feathers were made of the same material; these arrows didn’t look like something you could get at a local market.

Nim put the dagger back in its sheath, took off the bow strapped to her back, and with the arrows she had just been given, she fired at a suitable orc from a position behind Loren.

“Eh?!”

It was Nim, the one who shot the arrow, who was surprised at the result of her own attack.

The arrow from the bow flew in a straight line to the targeted orc and pierced its head, but unlike her previous arrows, it went into the orc’s head, with the arrowhead coming out on the opposite side of the hit point.

If that were all, it would have been enough to say that the arrow was powerful, but the white arrow that pierced the orc’s head disappeared with the orc’s body. In the place where the orc had disappeared, about ten white arrows fell down as if to take its place.

“Be careful not to misfire those arrows.”

With a stifled laugh, Dia told Nim, who was staring at the newly-appeared arrows falling down in a daze without understanding what had happened.

“It is the work of alchemy. The original power of the arrowhead has been increased, but when the arrowhead penetrates, the alchemy enclosed in the arrow is activated and the prey is turned into the same arrow. As long as it doesn’t miss, the arrow will never run out, but if it accidentally gets stuck, the technique cannot be aborted.”

“What kind of principle is that…?”

Dia explained with a proud face to Loren, who had taken a break from cutting down the orc and unintentionally butted in:

“It is an alchemical technique that consumes the victim’s magical power, flesh and blood to create arrows from the penetration of the arrowhead. It is a relatively easy technique since neither the magic power nor the materials are altered.”

“Consuming flesh and blood and magic means…”

“The arrow is made of bones. Is it such a rare material?”

Nim slightly frowned when she realized that the arrow she had used was made from an orc’s bones, but quickly regained her composure and plucked another arrow. Orcs were basically known for their filthiness, but since bones were found inside the body, it was not a material that cannot be used as long as you can put up with a little bit of creepiness.

The morale of the orcs, which had been steadily decreasing in number in the meantime, soon reached its limit. Perhaps their battle mania had cooled down at the sight of their friends being so easily and cruelly slaughtered, and they began to flee in droves. Once that happened, it would not take long for their rank to collapse.

Fear was a contagious thing; the fear in the eyes of the orcs began to spread, and soon the orcs as a whole began to flee from Loren’s party.

“We’re going after them!”

“We should probably stop. It is now nighttime. It is the time of day when you can underestimate an easy opponent and get caught off guard.”

Loren thought that if it was the orcs who had attacked and destroyed the villages, they should go after them, find their base, and rescue any survivors left. However, Dia immediately dismissed his words.

Loren was about to argue with her, but then he looked around and realized that the sun was setting, and it was indeed getting dark.

“But you know what? It’d be a bore to let them go like this, wouldn’t it?”

“No problem. You can leave everything to me.”

Dia answered and approached one of the orc corpses lying all over the area. She crouched down beside the corpse, held her hands over it, and muttered a word or two. Then, the orc, which had been a corpse until then, stood up with its destroyed body.

“Is it necromancy?”

Lapis, who was still behind Loren, looked over his shoulder and watched Dia’s work with a curious look on her face.

Loren thought that since the orcs were gone, there was no point in continuing to hide behind him, but Lapis was still snuggling up against his back and showing no sign of leaving. He decided to let her do whatever she wanted to do, thinking it would probably be futile to tell her otherwise.

“It probably won’t work on the orcs that were cut up by Loren or butchered by Gula, but the orcs I beat to death can be reused as zombies.”

The places where the orc had been hit should have been crushed, and its body should have been broken in various places from rolling and crashing into the trees from the force of the blows. But such things no longer mattered to the dead orc; moving very slowly and strangely, the zombified orc slowly began to walk toward somewhere.

“Hey, where is it going?”

“Where it lives, of course.”

Dia answered. She had already turned another orc into a zombie, and it, too, began to walk away, dragging its damaged entrails behind it. Loren raised his eyebrows at the gruesome sight, but Dia seemed unbothered; she moved closer to the corpse of another orc and began to use her necromancy again.

“What are you making them do?”

“Even though orcs are not very intelligent, they can at least remember where they live. So I turn them into zombies and have them walk home.”

This orc, which had also wobbled to its feet, had no head. Loren feels that since the body was headless, high or low intelligence was not relevant, but the ghost that controlled the zombified corpse was, and the presence or absence of body parts was no longer relevant when it came to thoughts.

“The orcs I turned into zombies are under my control. I can keep track of everything, from how they walk to where they go.”

“Elders do have some useful powers, don’t they?”

Loren thought that it was just what to be expected from the strongest amongst Undead, and a high-ranking one at that.

Dia turned a suspicious eye on him as she created yet another zombie.

“When you say it, it sounds like you’re joking, or being sarcastic.”

“What do you mean?”

“No, well, it’s fine if you don’t understand.”

As Loren tilted his head and wondered what she wanted to say, he heard the thought of Shayna inside him.

[‘Onii-san, um, I was turned into it, but… I am the King of Death, the highest-ranking Undead…’]

Shayna sounded timid, but Loren wondered if she could do the same thing that Dia is currently doing, and she replied.

[‘I can. Is it alright for me to do it?’]

Thinking that it would be a great help if it could save Dia some work, Loren asked Shayna to use her ability. Having been asked, Shayna projected her own image into Loren’s mind for a moment, said she would do her best, and then began to exercise her power as the King of Death.

“Eh, wait? This… What is this?”

It was no wonder that Gula sounded upset.

Dia had been using necromancy to create zombies by selecting corpses with relatively few broken parts, but Shayna just turned any corpses into zombies almost randomly, and the result was a very creepy spectacle.

An upper body of an orc crawled with both arms and disappeared behind the trees while trailing various things from its cross section, while a lower body of an orc followed with wobbly steps. The left and right sides of an orc that had been split in half vertically supported each other as they slowly walked away into the line of trees. As they wondered how the orcs with only their heads left could do such a thing, one rolled its way through the trees. It was a sight beyond fear, and they could only watch on and laugh.

And like that, the orc corpses that had received Shayna’s power, regardless of the extent of their damages, walked towards the place where they had lived.

“What a bunch of nasty zombies they’ve become.”

“Those zombies, they weren’t Dia’s doing, right?”

“No, Elf, it was me. I didn’t expect it to become such bad taste.”

Dia shielded Shayna’s presence from Nim’s questioning, then looked over the mostly vanished corpses and performed some sort of necromancy to remove the traces of blood that had been splattered all over the place.

“We’ll take a good night’s rest tonight and go after them when it gets bright. Hopefully, there will be enough orcs to crush the zombies during the night, so we’ll have less work to do.”

Dia yawned, rubbed her eyes, and patted Loren on the hip as he watched over things.

“Now that the blood is gone, you should get ready for bed soon. Staying up late is your skin’s worst enemy.”

“Nah, you’re basically a creature of the night, aren’t you?”

It sounded to Loren like a very bad joke for an Undead to say that she did not want to stay up late.

“Vampires and Ancestors may be, but it has nothing to do with the Elders. Whatever, just get the bed ready now.”

“I understand. We’ll make preparations.”

Looking at Dia, who yawned again, Loren decided that it was probably no good to think too much about it. Putting away his greatsword, he began to resume his work on building a tent for the camp.