Chapter 110 - Attack after Midnight (1/2)

Ch. 110: Attack after Midnight

Time passed, and when the moon was high up in the sky.

As Loren was keeping watch, fighting the urge to fall asleep, he noticed a smell that reached his nose in a night breeze, and slapped himself on the cheek to wake himself up completely.

He had meant to hold back, but his sleepiness caused him to fail, so along with a sharp pain that almost made his eyes tear up, a sharp clear sound rang out, and Lapis, who was crouched near him, trembled slightly and her head shot up and she looked around in a panic, while Dia, who was leaning against the dirt wall, rubbed her eyes and looked at Loren with an annoying gaze.

Loren was too busy dealing with his sleepiness that he didn’t notice the two of them, but it seemed like they were almost asleep.

Loren didn’t even try to scold them, but instead he looked past the dirt wall to see what the smell on the wind was, and his expression hardened, teeth grinding, at what he saw.

With his sight being linked to Shayna’s, it allowed him to see the sight before him, regardless of it being night time.

What he saw was dense crowd of corpses of rotten flesh and bones that he didn’t even want to attempt trying to count how many there were.

“They went down in rank, but increased in number.”

Lapis walked up beside him, hitting her cheeks to chase away her sleepiness and said in a bored voice as she saw the enemy in the distance, but when she saw Loren’s face, she knew that he was looking at something more, so she squinted and looked again into the approaching enemy, and pulled back in surprise at a shadow towards the back.

“What is it…?”

Dia knew from Loren and Lapis’ reaction that they weren’t looking at the herd of zombies and skeletons, so she looked in the same direction, saw the shadow in the back, and her eyes widened slightly.

It was the shadow of a giant dragon.

But the dragon’s eyes were dark and its body was in tatters with no webbing on its wings, holes all around its body, and some sort of liquid dripping from its body, smoke rising from where it hit the ground.

Usually where there would be sharp fangs lined up, more than half of them were missing, giving it a creepy feel.

“A dragon zombie…”

A monster that was born by turning a dead body of a dragon into an undead.

As a monster, it was no different than a normal zombie, which was the lowest rank undead, but since dragons were large and powerful to begin with, dragon zombies were a great threat.

Unlike normal dragons, dragon zombies lost the ability to use their breaths as well as their magic.

Although dragon corpses were very rare so they were barely seen, their size and strength, as well as their sturdiness on top of being undead, dragon zombies were monsters that could topple a whole nation.

“Seems like our opponents are quite serious.”

“Unfortunately…”

“You don’t seem so surprised Loren.”

Seeing a rotting dragon corpse should be quite shocking, so Lapis expected some sort of reaction.

But although Loren did look surprised that such a thing was their opponent, there was nothing than that, which confused her.

“It’s not the first time I’ve seen one. There was one that was buried beneath a battlefield that woke up during the night and it was a nightmare.”

It was hard to meet a living dragon, but Loren said that corpses were found quite often.

Although it was unknown if it died of age, fighting another dragon, or some other unknown reason, but every now and then there would be a corpse buried under the ground in plains, forests, and swamps that people wouldn’t step foot in.

They would usually return to dust, but rarely, due to a few bad conditions being met, it would become undead and crawl out of the ground.

“Those places usually become battlefields since there’s nothing around there to be damaged or destroyed. I have no idea if they become zombies since a lot of people die above it or it’s the land itself that’s like that though.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. Just wondering, how did you survive it?”

“I just held my head down and ran. I was lucky I didn’t die. It crumbled on its own when the sun came up.”

Since the dragon zombies that appeared on the battlefield had no master, after spreading death and destruction for the night, they normally burned away in the sun after.

If the body remained, they could sell the body for a high price, but since everything burned when the sun came out, nothing would remain of it.

Which meant it was nothing but an annoyance as well as a disaster.

“How about this time?”

“I don’t think I have the option of running this time.”

Even if he ran, since Loren and the party were the targets, it would continue to chase him down.

The reason why Loren escaped the dragon zombie on the battlefield was because its targets included his allies as well as his enemies.

Repeatedly taking care to not become a target and by running as far as he can while someone else was being attacked was the reason why he survived, so when it came to straight up running away by himself, he wasn’t confident if he could pull it off.

“How about fighting it full strength?”

“Are you telling me to die?”

“I think you’d do pretty well against it. You can use your self-enhancement as well so.”

“I don’t think it’s something you could go against with a bit of enhancement.”

“Hmm.”

Wondering if it was really impossible, Lapis threw the stone she was holding.