novelraw Chapter 167 : Chapter 167
Chapter 167 : Chapter 167
167
Rey, who lived in the capital of the Belmein Kingdom, felt a violent pounding in his chest.
Since last year, anxious and dreadful experiences like this had continued.
It was not just him — everyone around him said they had felt something similar, at similar times.
Whenever one of these tremors passed, children would burst into tears and have nightmares for the entire day.
There had been pregnant women who miscarried from the shock, and many elderly who died of heart failure.
Among the common folk, merchants spread rumors that demons had appeared.
Yet nothing about daily life actually changed.
The knights and nobles dismissed it all, insisting nothing would happen and that the rumors about demons were mere fabrication.
People had come to carry that anxiety as a part of their everyday lives.
They should have been able to go on living with it.
THUD!
A massive tremor shook the earth, and people screamed as they fled.
But there was nowhere to run.
Fire engulfed every direction.
"AAAH! AAAAARGH!"
Many people lay crawling on the ground, unable to move beneath the rubble of collapsed buildings.
The beast howled as it set ablaze everything that drew breath.
———!
The beast was a monster forged of dense, gray iron.
Its size was enormous enough to pierce the sky, and a single step was enough to make the earth tremble.
It looked as though a drake had taken to walking on two legs — or perhaps what a dragon might look like without wings.
"Kill it!"
"Fire!"
"Do not stop the arrows—!"
Countless knights and soldiers endlessly swung their weapons against the monster.
But the beast did not so much as flinch at any of their attacks.
It was not merely a matter of arrows or swords bouncing off.
The monster absorbed every weapon that flew at its body without the slightest resistance.
No — it did not simply absorb them. It grew larger with each one.
When it had first appeared, they said it had been barely over two meters tall.
After devouring every weapon in Belmain Royal Castle and growing without limit, the result was its current mass.
"We are running out of arrows!"
"If not arrows, find anything and shoot it! Throw rocks if you have to!"
The knights and soldiers were well aware of the monster's nature.
They were not swinging their weapons to kill it, but to lure it.
The monster showed great interest in weapons made of iron.
Most monsters were driven by the instinct to slaughter, but this creature's instinct appeared to be devouring iron.
So even if it meant increasing the monster's size, even if its path left countless casualties and destroyed property in its wake.
The priority was to redirect it elsewhere.
"We have to send it to the Empire!"
Nothing made of iron could harm it.
That left only one answer.
Magic.
And the greatest mages in the current world were all in the Empire.
The Magic Tower.
"Evacuate the people! Hurry!"
The knights and soldiers of the Belmein Kingdom staked everything on luring the beast there.
To attract its attention, they donned the heaviest and crudest iron plate armor and carried massive greatswords.
Since attacks were useless anyway, some knights had even strapped broken weapons all over their bodies.
The distance that took them several frantic minutes of sprinting, the creature closed in a mere two or three strides.
Even while desperately fleeing the thing, they could not turn away from those who had fallen.
The knight who approached Rey was one such person.
"Are you all right?!"
"Uh, um......"
"Your leg is hurt — damn it!"
Instead of saying anything more, the knight quickly hoisted Rey onto his back.
Scars covered every surface of his armor.
They were the marks of fighting countless monsters — the very battles that had ultimately led the creature to the royal underground armory.
Yet the knight himself looked far too young and boyish to be wearing such armor.
He was perhaps in his mid-twenties at most.
Someone who had graduated from an academy only a few years ago — still a mere Junior Knight.
Perhaps it was because he was young.
He gritted his teeth and ran without a word of complaint, carrying Rey on his back.
He did not compromise with the impossible, and for now, he still thought of the people before his own body.
"M-Mister."
"Mister? I am your big brother, not your mister."
And so, even in the depths of despair, he did not lose hope.
"O-over there!"
And so, at last, he was able to witness hope with his own eyes.
"There is someone!"
"Someone?"
Where he turned his head, a man stood.
He was a man who did not belong in a space where smoke billowed in every direction.
He looked like a frail scholar, and in his hand was a single slender sword.
His clothes were the kind of uniform one might see at any academy, and the necktie around his collar suggested he was a teacher.
The white uniform was one the knight recognized well.
And the man was someone he recognized too.
"......Teacher Cassian?"
Akarind Academy — the knight's alma mater.
And Cassian — the weakest, least skilled instructor there.
"Why?"
The worst possible combination he could have imagined in this situation stood right there.
But the reason he could not readily approach Cassian was that the scenery around him was far too alien.
Beside Cassian stood a single Griffon.
It was an Inquisitor's Griffon, its feathers dyed entirely black.
'Is Teacher...... a heretic?'
And behind him, an endless row of students in Akarind Academy uniforms stretched into the distance.
Every one of them exuded the same aura as Cassian.
It was the composure of veteran knights — those who knew the pain of war well but did not let it consume them.
'Could Teacher be a cult leader who has bewitched all the students into coming here for a mass suicide......?'
It was an absurd hypothesis, but nothing else could explain the current situation.
There was no way he could accept that they had come to save the Belmein Kingdom with the ability to match such a task.
But a miracle.
A miracle was called a miracle precisely because it could not be explained by common sense.
And those who witnessed a miracle became drunk on the miracle itself, swept away by it.
"Entity name: Iron Eater. The weakness is that you just have to attack it with something that is not iron."
Rozalin grinned like a mischievous child.
"It is helpless against Teacher's Aura."
Cassian raised the hand that held his sword.
And the instant he brought it slashing downward.
CLAAAAAANG!
A sound like a blacksmith's hammer striking steel echoed across the capital of the Belmein Kingdom.
With a massive tremor, one of the beast's arms slid slowly downward and fell.
CRAAASH!
The moment the Iron Eater's arm hit the ground, it became an enormous mass of iron chunks that blanketed the surface.
The sudden deluge of iron should have been cause for alarm, but not a single student was swept up in the flow.
Each of them struck the iron chunks aside with their swords and dodged out of the way.
Many used the rubble of collapsed buildings as cover with practiced efficiency.
It was as though they were an army.
At the center of it all was Isadora.
"Formation C! Iron chunks are spreading outward from the point of impact! If chunks come near you, move them beyond your cover! Do not let it reabsorb them!"
Having lost one arm, the Iron Eater shrank to roughly nine-tenths of its original size.
The severed arm had already regenerated.
Displeased that its body had shrunk, the creature let out a shriek and spewed fire.
It tried to absorb iron from beneath the ground through its thundering footsteps.
"No, you don't."
None of it succeeded.
"Take this!"
Rozalin and Pan's swords, meticulously cloaked in Aura, carved away at the Iron Eater's body each time.
Because the Aura coating the outside of the sword made contact first, their blades were not absorbed by the Iron Eater.
"Whoa, this thing — it is pulling on the sword!"
"Hold on tight!"
A magnetic pull emanating from within the Iron Eater's body tried to wrench their swords away, but these were not people who could be thrown off by such a force.
Hati even picked up the heaviest-looking iron chunk from the ground, wrapped it in Aura, and swung it with both hands.
CRASH! CRASH!
Each impact rang out like a siege weapon battering a castle wall.
"What...... is this......"
It was not just the knight who had rescued Rey.
At the thunderous sound of hope, citizens who had been hiding, knights who had been fighting desperately, and soldiers all turned their gazes here.
And Isadora approached them.
"You there."
"Sir?"
"You. Rank and name."
"Ah, yes! Junior Knight Zeitra of the Belmein Kingdom!"
"Junior? Where are the Senior or Chief Knights?"
Zeitra shook his head.
The Iron Eater had appeared at the very heart of Belmain Royal Castle, just as they had been preparing to mobilize.
The capable knights and soldiers, the nobles and royals — most had failed to flee far and died on the spot.
The survivors consisted of a handful of personnel assigned to guard the Royal Court and raw recruits with barely any experience.
With Commander Palmer gone, along with the Vice Captain and every thousand-man-level officer, the mere fact that the strategy of redirecting the Iron Eater toward the Empire was still being maintained and executed at all was itself a miracle.
"I am Second Lieutenant Isadora Silvarena, formerly of the Imperial military. I currently serve as an instructor at Akarind Academy. I would like to assume command."
She was a soldier — and not from just anywhere, but the Empire. An officer who had been commissioned through a military academy.
That was a rank comparable to any respectable kingdom's nobility.
Zeitra's tense body went rigid.
"Currently, our knights and soldiers are operating on their own judgment without a command center."
"Is that so. Then, in accordance with military law governing the absence of a commanding officer, I will assume command through informal transfer to you, a knight. To take down that Iron Eater, we need people to clear the iron debris. Can you rally personnel and establish a chain of command?"
"I will do it!"
The one who answered was not Zeitra, but a boy named Rey.
Isadora's gaze moved to Rey's right leg.
It was drenched in blood.
Rey endured that gaze in silence and tried moving his limping leg.
"It still moves."
Isadora's field of vision did not show Rey alone — she could see other people as well.
In this ruined capital, people who could not even flee properly and had no choice but to cling to survival.
They looked no different from the slash-and-burn settlers she had seen in the Great Forest.
People who had struggled to survive even while starving for months.
People whose lives had been squandered, toyed with by their own superiors.
"......Then I am counting on you."
Isadora left those words and moved back to the students.
She had never once given up on people at the bottom.
"Hati!"
"Got it!"
The only difference from the past was that she now had comrades by her side to help her.
At Hati's direction, members of the Firestorm Mercenary Guild scattered in every direction.
They gathered the knights' attention and, in that brief window, established a communications network.
Civilians who could still move headed for the battlefield.
The iron chunks that the students had already extracted in the first wave were being transported endlessly outward.
It was not dangerous.
— ROOOAAARRR!
Because there were people facing the monster, now reduced to roughly the size of the Royal Castle.
Every time a blue flash of sword light streaked across the sky, the monster's body was carved away without end.
And at last.
— CRAAASH!
The Iron Eater evaporated into thin air with a short death cry.
What remained where it had vanished was a heap of iron.
And the people — those who had tried to survive, and those who had tried to save them.
And.
"Heh. You really picked up something amazing. Immune to magic! Immune to iron! Are you immortal now, Teacher?"
"Hardly."
"Come on! At this point, the only people among humanity who could kill you are the ones who try to beat you to death barehanded, right? Like the Wolf King, or the Wolf King, or the Wolf King! Want me to go kill that bastard first?"
Cassian had obtained the Iron Eater's Fantasy.
Giant-Block, Anti-Magic, General, Ocean Hall, Phantom Steed, and now Iron Eater.
It was his sixth Fantasy.