Chapter 23 (2/2)
Loren knew that it wasn’t going to last as long as his body.
He used the strength in his arms and the speed that he was swinging it around with to make up for the weakening blade, but it seemed to be at its limit.
As Loren cut off the head of a mock-goblin, not even sure how many he had killed up till now, it happened.
As the mock-goblin’s head hit the floor, a loud clang sounded from Loren’s great sword, and the blade broke off.
“Damn it!”
Loren cursed without thinking, but his broken sword didn’t mean that he couldn’t fight.
The great sword’s blade was originally quite long, so he was still able to fight with the bottom half that was still intact.
But a shorter blade meant less damage, and although he could swing it faster, each blow did less.
“Hey, this is bad! His weapon broke! Are you done yet!?”
Ritz, who watched as the wind flung the broken blade at the wall, asked Lapis, who was still working on the control panel.
She glanced up as she heard the blade crash into the wall, but immediately returned her eyes to the control panel in front of her.
“Hey, how is it?”
“I can’t finish immediately even if you rush me.”
“I can see that! But your partner is going to be in trouble soon!”
Along with Loren’s damage, his reach got shorter as well.
It meant engulfing less goblins in his attacks, and he couldn’t keep it up for long.
If there was no chance of the flow of goblins stopping, Lapis was their only hope.
“I know, I know! I put in the commands for shuting down and stopping the goblins! But the last one…The end code isn’t going through!”
Lapis’ voice got louder and rougher from her irritation.
Ritz, who couldn’t understand half the things she just said, softened his voice slightly and asked.
“What do you mean?”
“To put it simply, the controls won’t stop! If this would shut down, the other commands I put in would go into effect, and both the ruins and the goblins would stop and would start falling apart!”
“If it just needs to stop, can’t we just destroy it?”
“Please do it if you can! This is something that survived for hundreds of years, and still works like it’s supposed to! It will stop if you destroy it! Please try!”
Ritz told Lapis to back off a bit, and swung his sword down onto the control panel.
But he couldn’t even make a scratch on it.
His sword got deflected off the control panel.
“What the!?”
“There is a magic spell protecting the surface, it won’t break with normal attacks! We need something like a cursed sword to break it!”
Their conversation reached Loren’s ears.
He didn’t understand the technical parts, but he understood that in order to do something about this situation, they needed Lapis to stop the control panel or something to destroy it.
He also knew that Ritz had tried to destroy it, but a magic spell was protecting it and couldn’t do it.
After collecting all the information, he got an idea.
He had no idea if it would work, but he didn’t have anything to lose at this point.
“Lapis! Get away from there!”
He swung his sword in a wide arc and forced a bunch of goblins off of him, and shouted at her direction.
Without checking to see if Lapis did what he told her to, he plunged his hand into his pocket and found what he was looking for.
It was something that activated when the user willed it, but to make sure that it would activate for sure, he had to say he wanted to use it out loud.
Loren threw the object at the control panel and shouted at the top of his lungs.
“Activate!”
The object flying through the air was a pendant that was emitting gold light.
“The > pendant!?”
Lapis, who was hurrying away from the panel, saw what it was and started moving away even quicker.
When the pendant landed on the panel, it released the charged-up mana it had gathered since the goblin mage had used it, and from Loren’s shout, disabled the magic that was protecting it.
“Come on, break!”
Loren raised the remains of his great sword above his head, and heaved it at the panel with all his remaining strength.
It flew across the room and crashed straight into the panel.
Even without the spell, the panel was quite hard, but it still couldn’t handle Loren’s full strength and force, and the sword sunk deep into it.
“W-whoa, that was dangerous…”
Although some of the pendant’s mana had recharged, it seemed that there wasn’t too much, as the range of its magic didn’t reach Lapis.
Even so, Lapis was about to complain that Loren could’ve made her lose control of her limbs once again, when Loren suddenly collapsed right in front of her eyes.
‘Wha-!? Loren! Loren, are you okay!?”
Ritz and his party watched Lapis panic and run towards Loren.
Around them, the words on the control panel slowly disappeared, and all the goblins around them dropped down one by one, as if someone cut the strings of a puppet.
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