Chapter 231: 123. The Tomb’s Guardian -1 (Part One)
Queen Rox Aihrance disguised her true appearance with a type of magic called ‘illusion’ and stepped into Titalos along with Allen and his companions.
The identity of ‘Norman’ was, of course, a fake. In truth, there was no such magician employed by the royal court.
Queen Rox stepped on the soft blades of grass. The air containing divinity and Mana cleared up the inside of her head and refreshed her mind.
She stared at the large, lush trees ahead, and at the expansive lake that had completely covered the ceiling.
This place was like a fantasy world only found inside a fairytale.
However, staring at this place made her recall the events from the past, and along with this sense of wonderment, she also felt fear encroaching her heart.
While this place was certainly a world of mythical wonderment, it was also the domain of the unknown. Plus, the monsters found in this place were absurdly strong, as well.
Queen Rox shifted her gaze behind and looked at the gate. The royal court guard corps and magicians could be seen on standby within the gap, their faces visibly filled with worries.
Eventually, the steel gate closed shut with a thud.
‘I may have made them worry a little too much, it seems.’
Allen also turned his head and stared at the shut steel gate. It was surrounded by the kind of bedrock usually found within naturally-formed caverns. Judging from that, this place was definitely underground.
And then…
“Is that a monster?”
Allen muttered to no one in particular, but Queen Rox flinched nastily from that and hurriedly turned her head.
The direction she looked towards was somewhere within the forest with dense foliage and even denser fog. Some kind of a creature was hiding there, its eyes gleaming sharply at them.
“A monster?”
Alice asked back.
Hans stared into the forest with a pair of intrigued eyes as well.
As for Queen Rox, she grasped the edge of her conical mage’s hat and addressed the group. “It seems that we’ll have to start running from the get-go.”
Start running?
Everyone shifted their gazes over to Rox. Of course, they were looking at the visage of ‘Norman’, and not the queen of Aihrance.
She began rousing up her Mana and injected it into her legs, which made her robe flap about and her body float up in the air.
‘Even if this trio is strong, it’ll be too difficult to fight against that monster. For now, we must escape from…’
It was right at that moment that the monster revealed itself.
“…Huh?”
Alice and Hans raised up their frozen faces to look at the creature.
It was an ‘ancient dragon’ with hard scales covering its entire body, and boasting a powerful and large maw. It was walking on two absurdly-muscular hind legs.
Queen Rox instantly grew tense at this monster’s entrance.
However, it was also at that moment that she heard Allen’s intrigued-sounding voice, “Wow, it’s like I’m looking at a T-Rex.”
She stared at Allen, and discovered he had already summoned a musket and was in the middle of injecting divinity into it.
She did hear the rumours, but to think that he really was going to use a musket!
The other part of the rumour said that he was able to kill a count-class Vampire with such a weapon. And she did witness it herself, didn’t she? After all, the boy prince did shoot down a Vampire inside the audience chamber.
However, rumours were always destined to be embellished to some degree. It might not be difficult to deal with small-fry Vampires with a musket, but it’d be a tall order for him to fight off a real monster like that ancient dragon.
“We need to escape from here, your highness. The ancient dragon is no pushover.”
The scales of these creatures boasted magic resistance and they were so tough that breaking through them with regular weapons was incredibly difficult. The best way to stop an ancient dragon like that from chasing you was to trick it with illusion magic.
The ancient dragon suddenly roared out loudly enough to almost rupture their eardrums. The birds in the surroundings quickly flew away in fright, and the ground below them seemed to tremble quite noticeably.
Allen’s eyes opened wider at this development.
‘Was that Mana?’
He sensed Mana from that roar, that’s why.
That wasn’t all, however – the entire body of that large monster was rapidly being enveloped in Mana as well. Its body became reinforced, then it began charging at the quartet of humans.
This would be Allen’s first time seeing a monster capable of reinforcing its body through Mana.
Its resulting agility and speed were not something such a huge body should be able to produce. The ancient dragon opened its maw wide and pounced on Hans.
“Uwaaahk?!”
The sharp fangs at least thirty centimetres in length adorning the maw threatened to rip Hans into pieces, but right at that critical moment, Alice rapidly punched out. Her fist broke through the layers of air and directly slammed into the side of the ancient dragon’s face.
BANG-!
Alice heard the loud, refreshing sound of impact and formed a satisfied expression. She definitely felt the unmistakable weight from her fist.
She even confirmed the cheek flesh of the ancient dragon bursting open.
Meaning, this one punch should be more than enough to…!
Unfortunately for her…
The ancient dragon’s eye shifted over and began glaring at her. The direction of its open maw suddenly changed and all those sharp fangs rapidly chomped down on her.
Chomp-!
She got trapped within the maw.
“Euh-euhk…”
Her gauntlet-wearing hands managed to somehow prop up the ancient dragon’s maw in an open position and prevented it from closing shut.
Queen Rox could only freak out inwardly while witnessing this scene.
‘She managed to stop the ancient dragon’s fangs?!’
The creature’s jaw strength was strong enough to crush boulders. Not only that, this particular ancient dragon had even strengthened itself with Mana, so there was no point in even mentioning how strong it had become right now.
Yet, Alice still managed to prevent those fangs from closing in on her.
Queen Rox couldn’t hide her astonishment anymore at this development. But her current state could last only for a short moment and she had to open her eyes even wider. Her lips clamped shut as she hurriedly looked to her side.
Divinity was crazily swirling there.
“Oh, dear Gaia…”
Allen was offering a prayer. A blue-coloured rune letter floated above the musket gripped in his hands while golden-hued rune letters materialised on his skin.
The former was [Divine Aura], the power that could be wielded by only those chosen by the gods, while the latter was the [Aztal Rune], the word of the gods itself.
His divinity was rapidly amplified through those two.
A holy bullet materialised within the musket, and he took aim at the ancient dragon.
‘Those are ancient rune letters!’
Just as Rox gasped out in more shock…
He pulled the trigger, and almost instantly, the skull of the ancient dragon was cleanly pierced through by the holy bullet. And right after that, the monster’s entire head exploded to gory bits.
Rox had been feeling deeply tense and was getting ready to flee at a moment’s notice, so this spectacle came across as just too unbelievable to behold.
“He really used a musket…”
It wasn’t a magic staff like in the play?!
Rox heard about the Seventh Imperial Prince’s tales only through her retainers, so this scene was just too flabbergasting to her.
Meanwhile, the ancient dragon’s huge body crumbled to the ground. This creature boasted fairly strong magic resistance, yet its skull had been blown to bits until it couldn’t even be recognised anymore.
Alice crawled out from the still-open maw of the ancient dragon.
“…It’s stinky inside.”
She was making a tearful, depressed face, which was understandable considering how her whole figure was drenched in the monster’s saliva and blood.
However, her expression didn’t have one trace of tension in it.
‘…I see.’
It seemed that Allen’s declaration of only three of them raiding this labyrinth wasn’t an empty boast, after all.
“You said your name is Norman, yes?”
Rox looked back at Allen when he asked her.
“How much do you know about me?”
“…I’ve heard plenty of rumours regarding your exploits, your highness.”
If she was being honest here, almost all of those rumours were too ridiculous to take at face value.
One said that he used muskets. Another one said that he could create holy water out of nothing, and the hardest one to believe of them all was his ability to summon ‘holy undead’.
The contents of those rumours distorted the common sense held by everyone in the world.
Sure, it’d be possible to use muskets if he relied on ‘Divine Aura’ and the ancient rune letters. However, it should be utterly, completely impossible to materialise holy water or summon the holy undead.
That’s what Rox believed until now.
“Since we are now in a land where even an army of three thousand found it difficult to traverse…” Allen muttered while nonchalantly striding forward.
More rune letters were engraved in the surroundings. Soon, ‘hands’ began breaking through the surface of the soil covered in various vegetation.
Rox, who was bearing witness to this spectacle, forgot to breathe just then.
She focused her attention at the undead beings crawling out from the ground. Those things were made out of divinity. However, the equipment surrounding their exteriors were not created purely out of divinity like their bodies, but things that actually existed in the material plane.
This meant that the summoned creatures were being equipped with real armaments stored away in an unknown space as they manifested into this world.
“…Oh my goodness.”
Rox’s whole body swayed from the powerful mental shock. She barely managed to prop herself up using the crystal staff.
‘It was all real!’
This was the moment when she saw the law of this world breaking down with her very eyes. She even felt that all the knowledge she had acquired up until this moment began shaking precariously in their foundations.
A legion of holy undead about three hundred strong had been summoned.
They quickly spread out into a formation, and Allen summoned four more skeleton horses before climbing onto one.
“Well, then. Norman, please take care of guiding us.”
Rox’s eyes muscles were twitching slightly as she stared at the boy prince. She was beginning to think that Kelt’s grandson wouldn’t be an easy person to deal with.
