Sacrifice (3)

Raindrops, descending from the heavens, arced through the air towards the monsters, each one piercing their lives with deadly precision.

Khryselakatos aimed for the enemy's vital points, meticulously avoiding the black substance that the dark monsters had spread. The divine arrows pierced through the weakest parts of the monsters' bodies, bypassing the areas tainted by the black matter.

As long as the monsters hadn't completely covered their vital points with the black substance, it posed no obstacle to Khryselakatos.

‘Look straight, look...!’

Frondier forced his twitching eyes open, tracking the trajectory of the arrows. He paid no attention to the other monsters; his focus was solely on the dark ones.

Khryselakatos targeted their weaknesses. Unlike the other monsters that avoided the black substance, these creatures were entirely black, rendering the substance irrelevant.

Therefore, observing where the arrows landed revealed the dark monsters' vulnerabilities.

In this moment, it was more efficient than analysis.

‘...The back, the spine, I see.’

The arrows aimed at the dark monsters didn't strike their heads or hearts, but their backs. While some pierced their heads, the majority targeted the center of their spines.

After firmly imprinting this information in his mind,

“Kaaagh!! Huff, ugh...!”

Frondier screamed, dropping both hands. The bow lost its form, dissolving into a stream of black water.

Frondier, who had incorporated Mana depletion into his training, no longer succumbed to unconsciousness from it.

He had grown accustomed to depletion itself and understood how to draw out Mana beyond that point. His experience of forcefully swallowing the Dragon Heart before Fabric of Penelope aided him as well.

...However, there was a reason why humans fainted upon reaching Mana depletion.

“Ugh, huff...!”

His breathing wouldn't settle down. Saliva dripped messily from his lips. An unknown substance, perhaps cold sweat, blurred his vision, trickled down his nose, and fell in droplets. Some landed on the ground, others on his helmet.

Using magic with a Mana-depleted body meant converting something else into Mana. Blood and sweat, and if that wasn't enough, something even more vital.

Originally, even this method wasn't permissible for humans, but Frondier's body, having consumed the Dragon Heart and returned from the brink of death, ‘remembered’ it. However, it was undoubtedly not the right way.

“Hey, are you alright...?”

The soldier who had been barking orders moments ago scurried over, examining Frondier's complexion.

Unless he had vision problems, it was obvious that Frondier was the one who had just fired the arrows.

He had thought Frondier was just an ordinary soldier wearing a helmet, but he was wrong. The commanding man looked at Frondier nervously.

“Aim for the back.”

“Wh, what?”

“The back. The center of the spine is their weak point. You don't need to be precise; just a rough hit will be fatal.”

Indeed, the arrows hadn't precisely pierced the exact center of the spine. Perhaps the entire area around it was vulnerable. While they were difficult to deal with when the head or chest was assumed to be the weak point, now that the vital point was revealed, killing them would be much easier.

“Hey, who do you think you are...?”

The man finally came to his senses and was about to yell at Frondier when he shut his mouth.

Frondier's gaze, visible through the gap in his helmet, instantly intimidated the man.

“...Hey! The black ones' weakness is their back! Aim for the center of the back!”

The man discreetly moved away and grabbed a soldier who looked easy to handle, shouting the information. The information was so crucial and urgent that it spread rapidly by word of mouth.

‘We've managed to hold them off for now, but...’

The monsters swept away by the ‘fireworks’. However, even after their elimination, the monster horde continued to advance. They had only gained a temporary respite.

It was a truly endless legion of monsters. At this point, rather than worrying about the barrier being breached, the concern was whether the soldiers and knights would have enough strength left to wield their swords until they had defeated them all.

Then, Frondier inadvertently glanced at the black water flowing on the ground. The necklace with the restoration magic embedded in it would soon draw up all the black water, but until then, the Obsidian simply flowed in all directions as black water.

And that Obsidian came into contact with the black substance that the dark monsters had spread, the substance that had bound the corpses of the monsters together.

It was a trivial consequence of gravity and the flow of liquids, but.

‘...Just a test.’

Frondier reached out his hand. Towards the black substance spread by the dark monsters, towards the Obsidian that had touched it.

Originally, Obsidian wasn't a substance that Frondier could manipulate in mid-air. It wasn't a weapon made from Menosorpo. Once it left Frondier's hand, it was just a simple liquid.

However, when Frondier reached out to the flowing Obsidian, grasped it in his hand, and pulled it back.

Kugugu-

“Wh, what? Look at that!”

“The mountain of corpses is collapsing!”

The soldier who spotted it first shouted.

The incline of corpses that had allowed the monsters to climb over the barrier, a single mass of bodies, lost its strength and scattered like swept-away garbage.

It had lost the force that had bound it together, dispersing naturally under the influence of gravity.

And the black substance that had bound those monsters together, the Obsidian, was.

“...Indeed.”

Now, held within Frondier's hand.

He was holding a greater quantity than the Obsidian he originally possessed.

‘Obsidian was in the form of Khryselakatos until just now, so a considerable amount of my Mana remains in it.’

He knew that much. Of course, that Mana would dissipate over time, but he believed that for a brief moment, he would be able to control even the Obsidian that had fallen into his hand.

But the black substance that had touched that Obsidian, the substance originally spread by the dark monsters, had also returned to his hand.

In other words.

‘...There's Mana remaining in this black substance too.’

It definitely wasn't Frondier's Mana.

It was the Mana of the dark monsters, or rather, the fragments of Helheim themselves. But the moment it touched Frondier's Obsidian, all of that Mana returned to his hand as if he were its owner.

As if the ownership of the Mana had transferred to Frondier.

As if to prove it, Frondier hadn't used any Mana when he ‘retrieved’ the Obsidian just now.

“... “

With a strange expression, Frondier clenched and unclenched the Obsidian in his hand. Hardening into metal whenever he exerted force, the Obsidian displayed dazzling movements, remaining within his grasp.

And.

Krurrk?

One of the dark monsters met Frondier's gaze.