Chapter 187: How to fight this battle (1/2)

Layn rushed forward. He knew that if he stalled even for a moment, Irea would use her cuteness and charm to stop him from going.

But in the current situation, there was no way for Layn to hold back on fighting.

'They are bleeding for me,' he thought, squeezing between the mercenaries and Markus' sourced people alike. Even those that knew who he was were too busy fighting for their dear life to even notice the small disturbance, even less the Archmage himself.

'How do I deal with all those monsters in a quick fashion?' Layn asked himself, analyzing his options as he moved forward.

The magic from the artifacts he had on himself wasn't anywhere near sufficient for him to fight with the classical magic he was best versed with.

While it was only a rough estimate, for every spell Layn would cast in this fight, there would be one more person dying while the Archmage could do nothing but wait for his mana to regenerate.

'Maybe I should burn the powder again?' Layn thought, touching a small patch of specially prepared cloth of his robe, located right above his heart. Given how little stone-dust he managed to procure in the initial deal with the neighboring Overlord, there was only so much enchanted cloth that he could create.

Extracting the stone dust from the artifacts was out of the question. Keeping in mind how he used the very first artifact he created in this timeline to wreak havoc by manipulating others to try prying it open, Layn, this time, set his mind to make his new items safe in use as possible.

And while their rate of failure was nearing zero, it also meant that dismantling them to access the properly valuable parts would be a pain in the ass in a normal situation, not to say in the middle of a damned battle.

'No, the dust won't do,' Layn thought as he finally reached the front of the battle. He had to push his hand forward in an instant, using his small knife to parry a slashing attack of one of the monsters.

CLING!

The sound of the metal bending under pressure could be heard. With one look, Layn realized that his handy weapon could last a few hits at most.

”I should take better care of it,' Layn thought, using the little mana he had to cover the weapon with a small layer of magic. While on its own, it had no purpose at all, it was capable of absorbing the energy of the attacks rather than putting that burden on the metallic structure of the knife itself.

'I should've thought about getting some kind of weapon in advance,' Layn thought, sliding underneath the monster and pushing his knife straight into its guts.

A river of black blood gushed out of the monster's wound, instantly turning Layn's robes so dirty that they were unlikely to be ever fully cleaned again.

'The blood spell...' Layn thought when the hot liquid covered his face. But the potential way to solve the problem quickly evaporated from his brain when he felt a sting on his face.

And then another.

And then his entire head started to burn as if someone set it alight.

'Was that blood acidic or something?' Layn thought, crawling out of the corpse of the monster he slew. But just as he was about to make his way back to the open battlefield, something hard cut the skin on his back open.

'A magic stone?' Layn almost voiced his thoughts out loud. Only the repulsive stench of that black blood stopped him from opening his mouth in a fear that it could also turn poisonous.

As repulsive as it was to move his hands around in the still-warm flesh of the corpse with all that smelly and acidic blood around, Layn didn't hesitate to do so even for a second. Feeling the burn on his back and face alike where most of the monster's blood fell, Layn continued to move his hands around until he finally caught hold of the sharp element that prickled his back a moment ago.

'What's with this weird stone?' he thought once he brought the small item to his eyes. While it appeared like any other stone one could find across the entire wast continent, it also had one inherent trait that set it apart from others.