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Chapter 1 – 16
The Horde from h.e.l.l
After his revenge on the soldiers, Tenma continued flying for around an hour. It gradually became more and more dark, and he noticed smoking rising from the village"s direction.
“What"s going on? That smoke…!”
He continued flying, now with an uneasy feeling about all the smoke. Before long something came into view, leaving Tenma in astonishment.
－－－Back in time, a few hours prior to Tenma"s return－－－
“Celia, Merlin! When I give the signal, blast the zombies near the gate with fire magic! Afterwards, the soldiers and swordsman will take out the ones that survived.”
I gave them their orders and gauged the timing.
“Now! Fire!”
” ” 『Firestorm!』 ” ” Both their voices shouted at once.
High level Fire Magic swept over the zombies. Zombies have no way to avoid Magic techniques so the majority of the group burned away.
From about 500 zombies only 20 or 30 remained, the rest burnt to ash.
As I watched, 30 soldiers and swordsmen leapt out all together,
“Good, strike them "till they can"t move! When it"s clear, withdraw immediately!”
As expected of those strong enough to be in the advance guard, they slaughtered them all using only single blows. Even if the enemies were only goblin and orc zombies, we had the favorable position.
The problem was that within the garrison weapons were scarce, especially arrows.
Normally if you put a force of over 50 soldiers together, you"d expect a stockpile of weapons and food supplies and such to match but there wasn"t even enough for 30 people here. Reducing costs to this degree is ridiculous!
The first year or so the garrison always had 50~60 soldiers, but it wasn"t rare to see over 100 during times when important members would rotate s.h.i.+fts. When entering the forest to search they would occasionally find goblins or at the worst orcs so, gradually the number of people had decreased. Most recently it felt like there was only 20~30 soldiers, maybe 40 at the most.
Furthermore, because the escaped soldiers had likely crammed the stolen carriages with food and weapons there was very little left in the stockpile. For that reason the villagers were fighting with the weapons that each of them had brought themselves.
“Now! Drive them back!”
YEAAAH! The villagers shouted in reply while rus.h.i.+ng to the gate.
If it continues on like this, I don"t think we can last until support arrives. This is the sixth wave attacking us since Tenma set off flying. We"ve probably defeated over 3,000 by now.
Those s.h.i.+t soldiers screwed us even down to the number of zombies they reported, this is clearly not the 1,000 they claimed. Maybe because of the stress, my way of speaking has gone back to like when I was an adventurer. I just can"t help it, I"m so worried.
“Oi, Ricardo!”
“What"s wrong, Mark?”
Mark, who had been keeping watch over everything, replied in a grave voice.
“This is really bad, this wave there"s Ogres! There"s gotta be at least 30 ogres, and maybe 1000 goblins and orcs right behind them!”
It really was bad.
Ogres, standing around 3 meters tall, are large scale B cla.s.s monsters. With that many of them, this makes.h.i.+ft stronghold we"ve built would hold maybe 5 minutes before they could break through.
“Celia, Merlin!
“Yes!”
“I"m leaving this to you!”
The two of them immediately understood what I meant and replied.
” ” 『Fire Arrow!』 ” “
From a little further back, the two of them shot off magic fire arrows continuously.
They aimed for the ogres, using only magic that consumed little mana but still flew far enough. Afterwards, if the ogres still hadn"t stop and got close enough then they would unleash fire storm, usually twice to attack the goblins as well.
I had antic.i.p.ated that taking all of them out with magic alone was impossible, but they had reduced them to less than a tenth of their previous amount, with only 5 ogres remaining.
“CHARGE!”
My shout urged the villagers to rush forward. The monsters were already heavily wounded so they finished them off with ease.
―~――~―――~―――~――~― This chapter was translated by Refulgent for [ FourSlimes . com ―~――~―――~―――~――~―
The wave had finished, and I stopped to catch my breath. In these small slivers of time you could finally get something to drink and rest a bit. Celia and Merlin seemed to still be calm with mana leftover, but were drinking a few mana potions just to be safe.
There had been several waves already, but this last one had finally been more than 1,000. If this is the enemy"s strategy, it"s a real nasty one. Starting with a small number of weak enemies at first, bit by bit their numbers increased and they started throwing in powerful monsters too. The one controlling all these zombies must be quite intelligent.
“Ricardo, the enemy seems to be pulling back.”
“Retreating?”
I asked Mark, while hopingfor it to be true.
“Unfortunately not. It seems like they"re only pulling back to just inside the forest.”
“I see… but it gives us time to take a rest.”
I thought it might not be the wisest thing to do, yet instructed everyone to take a break while still being ready to move at a moment"s notice.
I did small things like having a light meal and inspecting some of the armor while thinking. Best case scenario, Tenma will return. I don"t want Tenma to return to how things are going now if possible, but at least if he came back then we could probably fight together.
It"ll likely start to get dark in an hour. With that in mind I told some of the others to start lighting some fires. We had broken down some of the horse stables and other structures to use the wood as fuel.
Suddenly, the zombies moaned loudly, like a kind of battle roar from the direction of the forest.
“Things just got really, REALLY bad! RICARDO!”
I could hear Mark"s scream, together with the screams of those who had been standing by, as they swept over the wall. I rushed up to the wall and looked in the direction of the forest, and there I saw…
“WHAT!? This many, it has to be at least 5,000… no, even double that?!” I screamed, as I watched the zombies stream out from the forest, more and more and more of them.
There were all types of zombies: goblins, orcs, kobolds, ogres, dragon snakes and others gus.h.i.+ng forth from the forest.
This has turned into a zombie catastrophe.
There"s no way all of these can be from the forest. I can"t even count how many there could be total in this horde.
I can only see close to 10,000 near us. Thinking about how many could still be inside the forest, a feeling resembling despair came welling up from inside of me.
But, running isn"t an option. In order for us to survive, we have to buy some more time. We can only wait for the reinforcements.
“This has become a desperate fight for survival now…”
The number of zombies crowding in front was so high it was disgusting. They slowly spread out trying to surround our stronghold. And it"s almost night. Zombies can function equally well day or night, whereas us humans have difficulty moving about in the darkness. This is overwhelmingly not in our favor.
“Put everything into lighting those fires! Don"t waste even a tiny bit of light!”
Burning things at this rate, we"ll have none left for tomorrow night.
But if we can"t even survive tonight, the next one won"t matter. We can only increase our chances of survival right now, even if only by a little. Thoughts swirled around in my head as I watched the smoke rise.
[Author"s Note]
This time, it was almost entirely Ricardo"s point of view, next time it will return to Tenma.
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The first chapter is coming close to an end, but I haven"t decided how many chapters will follow.
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