Chapter 246 (1/2)
Su-hyeun nodded his head.
There was no point in saying anything else. That was his only reason for keeping the Lich King alive, after all.
“If you tell me that, then I might not kill you and even help you travel back to the other world.”
“Your attempt at lying is amateurish. You’re not as evil in nature to do something like that. And to put that other way around, you’re not the type to let a monster like me live on because of your personal desires.”
The Lich King sounded confident. And it was as exactly as he said.
Unlike what he said a second ago, Su-hyeun wasn’t planning to keep this undead alive. It was unknown just what kind of future troubles this creature would bring about if left alive, after all.
“Even then, I shall tell you. So, where should I start my tale from? Perhaps starting from when I became a Lich, and then—”
Just as the Lich King opened his mouth…
Giii-iiing—
[Third Eye – Neutralization]
Crack—!
The eye in Su-hyeun’s forehead split open, and at the same time, his foot stomped down on the Lich King’s chest.
“If you are thinking of doing something stupid, then why don’t you just die already?” he warned the undead.
The creature was planning to distract Su-hyeun with a useless tale and then use teleportation magic to escape from that place.
But Su-hyeun had been keeping his eyes firmly locked on the Lich King in case the undead wanted to sneakily use some sort of a magic spell.
If something like that really happened, then he planned to cancel the magic immediately and execute the Lich King right there and then.
His once-lowered sword was raised high again, but just before he could take a powerful downward slash—
“I do not know anything.”
An answer quite different from earlier, but also one that was honest, came out of the undead. It didn’t seem that he was preparing another spell at this point either.
Su-hyeun looked down at the Lich King, his sword still pointing at him.
“That is my reply. Well then, was that satisfactory enough for you?”
“If you don’t, then how do you know about me?”
“There could only be one human who possesses the same ability as I do without being the same creature as I am, you see.”
“Is that all?”
“No, of course not.”
“Okay, then what?”
“Unfortunately, I can’t mention it. Even though I want to.” The laughter mixing with the Lich King’s voice seemed to have thickened. “What a laughable situation this is. I’ve realized it only just now. When you asked me and when I was about to answer you, I finally noticed that I’ve been under a magic spell all along.”
“A magic spell?”
“Even I don’t know what magic this is. It is far more advanced than what I…I can’t fathom what kind of…” The Lich King’s voice began trembling softly. Then, he carried on speaking. “This is why I don’t know anything.”
“…”
Su-hyeun deeply furrowed his brows at that reply.
This strange response? It felt as if he had come across something similar to it before.
And he didn’t need long to remember just where he came across such a response.
“The heroes I met on the 43rd floor,” Su-hyeun thought.
There was a world that was created on a whim by the administrator of the 43rd floor.
After arriving in that artificial world where the heroes of many different worlds had been gathered, Su-hyeun tried to peer deeper into their individual lives.
Unfortunately, he couldn’t get any answers. The response he got whenever he asked was the same. They changed topics to something completely unrelated as if they couldn’t remember the conversation they were having up until that point.
“Could it be that the same type of restriction is placed on the creatures crossing over to this side?” he further guessed.
They all shared a similarity.
Once the conversation got to a specific topic, their memories would reset. With that, Su-hyeun confirmed the possibility of the answers being related to some kind of a secret.
The heroes found on the 43rd floor all reacted this way at the question of “why they were fighting in that place.”
The Lich King before him was similar in that manner.
The tape of his memories rewound the moment he tried to speak about these two things—why he was here and about the special magical restriction that he just realized he was currently placed under.
“I guess getting more out of this guy will be difficult now,” Su-hyeun thoughtfully concluded.
Su-hyeun raised his sword again.
The Lich King was a rare monster with intelligence and even had a thread of connection to the trials, so he wanted to exploit this opportunity to get several crucial information from the undead.
Unfortunately, his harvest didn’t meet his expectations. Of course, it wasn’t as if he didn’t get any, but still.
Swoosh—!
Split—
The sword swung down and sliced apart the Lich King’s head. At the same time, the Life Vessel hidden within his body was also sliced in half.
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The task needing his attention after the Lich King’s death was the subduing of the remaining Lichs.
The undead that obeyed the Lich King’s powers all disappeared, but that didn’t apply to the Lichs. Once the Lich King was dead, they scattered in all directions to escape.
Su-hyeun figured that the obedience magic cast on the Lichs coming undone could be the likely cause.
Half a day passed by since that huge commotion.
Su-hyeun was resting for a little while inside the Gordon Tower. The others were still moving diligently even as he took a break.
“Although it’s a bit tough to figure out their exact numbers, there aren’t that many of them, to begin with. Most died in the same place as their boss, after all,” said Lee Ju-ho while walking up to Su-hyeun to show the latter the screen of a tablet. It displayed red dots spreading to the rest of America with California as the starting point. “These dots are the Life Vessels inside the Lichs. Thankfully, they possess similar nature to Ether stones, so it’s not that hard to track their locations.”
“I can see about 20 of them.”
“You normally need at least an A-Rank in order to deal with a monster like a Lich. In other words, you’re not strictly needed when dealing with these creatures.”
“A few of them should still pose a great danger, though. For instance, this one over here…”
“You mean, this slightly larger red spot? Just like you told us, we’ve already labeled these ones as the apostle-rank Lichs, and S-Ranks are being dispatched to subdue them.”
“Well, in that case, that’s a relief.”
Su-hyeun was thinking of moving out right away after seeing the Lichs’ numbers, but now, he could relax a little better.
Since these undead all had brains, they surely wouldn’t make any careless moves. Not to forget, they were also virtually clueless about the science and technology of this world.
They probably wouldn’t have dreamed in a million years that the Life Vessels—basically their life itself—would actually expose their hidden locations.
“What about Adel Castle?”
“The autopsy results for the dungeon management agency folks came out not too long ago. We now know for sure that Adel Castle was behind it all.”