Chapter 192: 102. The Blackened Village -4 (Part Two)
-Ku-ooooooh!
Zombies, ghouls, and dullahans lacked intelligence, and as such, they simply approached the living as their instincts dictated.
Allen stood between the corpses of lycans and stared at his front. An army of undead several hundred strong was coming for him.
If the same thing happened in the past, he’d have been freaking out by now. But to the current him, this whole thing came across as laughably cute.
No, hang on – the truth was, he was actually getting excited.
Allen sniffed the air.
The bone-chillingly cold deluge was still coming down incessantly, yet the stench of the undead, the ashes from their death, and the acrid smoke from the musket’s muzzle, had still managed to stimulate his olfactory senses.
He shivered as heat suffused his skin. A powerful sense of excitement had begun intoxicating him.
Allen couldn’t help but feel this sense of defeat at his own emotions and closed his eyes.
‘So, it’s not possible to fool one’s bloodline, is that it?’
Even if this body wasn’t his, there was no denying the fact that the blood of the Imperial Family coursed through his veins.
The family of ‘clerics’ who ‘reveled’ in their own inhuman strengths while hunting down the ones living false lives; the instinct of such a bloodline began ruling over his rationale.
He didn’t want to admit it, but he was deriving too much pleasure from hunting the undead down.
The corners of his lips curled up in a smirk once more. He put away one musket in the item window and wielded the remaining one. He got ready to offer his prayer.
-Do not allow him to offer a prayer!
-Do whatever it takes to kill the bastard!
The lycans witnessing this sight urgently rushed towards him. Zombies, ghouls, and dullahans also pounced on him.
Allen stood there and watched them getting closer.
“Oh, Gaia…”
A group of ghouls arrived first and jumped on him. Their maws split open wide and their sharp claws were swung in the air.
However, Allen simply looked away while extending his hand out. Suddenly, golden-coloured runes engraved themselves on his entire figure.
The ghouls grabbed his head and crushed it. Everything above his neck seemed to disappear and his body fell to the ground.
But then…
“Allow this servant to be with your grace.”
The golden runes on his body radiated even more brilliantly.
The Aztal rune.
Normally, countless Priests had to offer their prayers and the ‘declaration of sanctuary’ must be made first, but when enhanced with Divine Aura, Allen could reinforce his entire body without going through all those steps thanks to the new options added on top of the rune’s effects.
Even if the Aztal rune was relatively unstable right now, it was still possible to utilise it in this situation.
Lycans opened their maws wide, and one of them succeeded in biting into the musket, yanking it out of the boy’s grasp.
Claws brushed past Allen’s cheeks and body. A sword strike from a dullahan sliced open a huge wound on his back.
Blood gushed out from all of his injuries. But that was only for a little while, as the Aztal rune simply healed them all.
“Please grant your…”
He used his bare hands to crush the limbs of the undead. After retrieving the musket, he used the bayonet to cut the undead down.
The bodies of the fallen undead that hadn’t died yet steadily accumulated on the ground.
Allen used the still-writhing undead as his stepping stones and climbed up to the peak of a hill made out of their almost-dead corpses.
He lowered the muzzle of the musket at the hill, and the gazes of the writhing, clamouring undead all focused on the weapon.
And then, from the quivering muzzle…
“…Love and mercy to these undead.”
A storm of divinity exploded out.
The blinding light pierced straight into the small hill of undead and spectacularly exploded.
Hundreds of mid- to high-tier undead monsters were extinguished along with this dazzling light, disappearing from existence in the blink of an eye.
“…!?!”
Barus, who was bearing witness to this sight, hurriedly clamped his slack mouth shut.
All those undead… even the lycanthropes that the knights feared so much, had failed to inflict a single grievous wound on the Seventh Imperial Prince.
Not only that, even after spending so much divinity until now, this young Imperial Prince of the Theocratic Empire was still perfectly fine.
All those injuries that used to pockmark him had disappeared, not even leaving behind a scar.
He was standing on top of a pile of ashes that used to belong to the corpses of the undead, a thick smile etched on his face.
Barus looked at that expression, and rather than the feelings of relief, terror washed over his emotions instead.
‘…Impossible.’
This… this was the Theocratic Empire.
A nation consisting solely of clerics who were all monsters, each and every single one of them.
Barus thought about the leader, the First Imperial Prince, of this empire of devout believers dispatched by the emperor to apprehend him all the while lending support to the Second Prince of Lome, Derian.
If those people decided to earnestly step forward, then the concept of an ‘army’ would lose all meaning.
The ‘revolutionary army’ that Balus was leading would ruthlessly be crushed without being able to offer up any resistance.
“There’s…”
Allen suddenly said something.
Barus flinched nastily in surprise and stared at him.
“…Still one more remaining, eh?”
Allen’s gaze shifted towards the forest. He strengthened his eyesight with the aid of divinity. He spotted a maggot-like Vampire escaping in the distance.
That thing was clearly in a hurry.
From the looks of things, it must be trying to escape from Charlotte.
Allen summoned a musket with a long barrel. He activated Divine Aura and added the ‘Snipe’ skill to the weapon.
Both its penetrative power and accuracy significantly went up.
He then took aim at the escaping Vampire.
“I still have one more round remaining in the chamber, you see.”
Indeed, the hunt wasn’t over yet.
**
Baron Lava was hurriedly running away. He didn’t even bother to look behind him.
‘I need to get out of here! Forget about my duties or whatever, my survival comes first!’
Who would’ve imagined that a cleric of such calibre decided to show up out of nowhere in a small village out in the sticks?
Something was definitely wrong here.
Could it be that the Theocratic Empire knew something about the Vampires’ plan? Was that why they came here to find him?
‘It can’t be…’
Baron Lava gritted his fangs.
That ‘woman’ accompanying the marquis… The Second Crown Princess Consort of the Theocratic Empire, Rose Darina!
What if that woman had lied to them?
‘It’s possible that she did!’
She was the second wife of the Crown Imperial Prince, White Olfolse, who was infamous for his hobby of collecting severed Vampire heads. Yet, such a woman was collaborating with the Vampires?
Since Baron Lava wasn’t privy to the details of the arrangement, he couldn’t help but suspect that woman.
‘Whatever it is, I still need to get out of…?!’
It was at that moment that he instinctively turned his head. Something in the far off distance flashed brightly.
And ‘it’ came flying in.
‘Death.’
That word got engraved in his head.
“Uwaaaahk?!”
Baron Lava instinctively constructed a magical barrier around him in order to survive. However, the barrier he built with all of his strength shattered into bits so, so easily.
The holy bullet pierced straight through his chest. And one third of his body simply blew apart in a spiral-like shape.
Baron Lava couldn’t even scream properly as he collapsed face-first into the dirt below.
“Keo… eurk. Uh… uhk…”
He extended his hands and grasped at the soil below. But the downpour had transformed the dirt into damp, slippery mud, making it impossible to even crawl away.
Something emitting bright light suddenly stood tall behind Baron Lava. He flinched in surprise as cold sweat drenched his whole body.
The unmistakable divinity could be sensed coming from somewhere behind him.
Like a broken doll, Baron Lava’s head creaked and stuttered as he looked back.
A pure-white undead with divinity gushing out from its whole body – a single skeleton was standing tall right behind him.
Baron Lava had to doubt his own eyes at this surreal sight.
“H-holy undead…?”
He flinched and hurriedly dug inside his robe, eventually pulling out a blood-stained parchment. It was the ‘watch list of dangerous individuals’ distributed among the Vampires.
The Vampires participating in this task were the only ones in possession of this list, which denoted the ‘dangerous individuals’ they needed to look out for.
The ‘marquis’ said these words while handing this list over to Lava back then.
-You must avoid the one who commands the holy undead at all cost.
At first, he took that as some kind of a joke.
The Vampires had been stuck living inside the dark, dank caves for too long, so he thought that they had developed a weird sense of humour only they could understand.
But he had been wrong. A real holy undead was standing right before his eyes.
Baron Lava hurriedly opened the list and looked at the descriptions of the boy Priest’s facial features and comments contained within.
‘Allen Olfolse, the Seventh Imperial Prince of the Theocratic Empire who has hunted down a Vampire Count with a musket.’
His saw-toothed wheel-like fangs went slack from shock.
That boy had hunted down a count?
And Baron Lava had provoked such a monster?
“…”
Baron Lava froze up on the spot and slowly shifted his gaze back again. The glowing lights in the eye sockets of the holy undead arched like a pair of new moons.
While smiling, the creature reached down and grabbed Baron Lava’s leg.
“W-wait! S-spare me…!”
Only two things awaited for him now.
And those were torture and death.
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