Chapter 348 (2/2)
“So, these aren’t your regular zombies, is that it?”
He had already figured that out by himself.
Su-hyeun’s eyes that were glowing with a blue hue looked far beyond the horizon. A sea of zombies, seemingly with no visible end, was gathering here from beyond the edges of his vision.
“Looks like I’ll be sweating a bit today.”
Su-hyeun gripped his sword tightly again.
It seemed that this fight would drag on for longer than he initially thought.
* * *
Snap—
Rumbleeee—!
Gu-waaaaah—!
A gigantic flame exploded upward. The horde of zombies trying to pounce on Su-hyeun thrashed about in sheer torment before collapsing on the ground and melting away.
It wasn’t all that hard to figure out the weakness of these zombies: fire.
It happened to be a well-known weakness of the zombies already.
Ruuumble—
Shu-aaahk—
The heads of the zombies were cut off.
On the outside, their flesh looked rotten, and they seemed easy enough to defeat, but in reality, they were surprisingly sturdy.
Some of them even managed to withstand the Palm Leaf’s winds several times.
“If I raise the firepower, the range decreases, but if I increase the range, the firepower takes a hit. And to go for both…the magical energy consumption is too high.”
Without a doubt, the Palm Leaf was an incredible power.
The Palm Leaf could affect a far greater area out of all the skills Su-hyeun possessed—no, wait—than any other skills in existence that Su-hyeun knew of.
However, as that was the case, the Palm Leaf consumed a great deal of magical energy and his mental strength. Also, he could say that the match-up this time wasn’t all that favorable.
The Palm Leaf sliced apart the bodies of his opponents using wind, but zombies couldn’t be killed off unless you accurately cut off their heads.
Even if their limbs were severed or their lower torsos were gone, they could still move. Also, it was hard to argue that the magical energy consumed during the process of chopping them apart was an effective use of the energy in the first place.
So, the correct answer was “fire.”
“Burn them one by one and cut their heads off.”
Slice, rumbleee—
Ka-pow—!
Su-hyeun loaded his sword with the divine Flame and repeatedly cut down the zombies.
Zombies enveloped in flames couldn’t get back up nor pose any threat to Su-hyeun anymore.
Gu-waaaaah—
Zombies were still flooding in from all sides, and some of them managed to get to the ice wall Ellid had created, trying to break it down with their bare hands.
And toward such zombies…
Ruuuumble—
Kwa-boooom—!
Huge waves of crimson flames that shot out from Ellid’s hands mercilessly crashed on them.
Thousands upon thousands of zombie corpses began piling up everywhere.
At the same time, Ellid got ready to cast his next magic. While doing that, he glanced at Su-hyeun who was currently wielding his sword in the distance.
“Doesn’t he get tired?”
It had already been a day.
No, wait—it had been a little over a day now. He couldn’t even estimate how many zombies that man had killed already.
Ellid’s job was to defend, to stop the zombies Su-hyeun had missed, and to swap his role with Su-hyeun when he got too tired and ready to collapse to continue to stop the influx of zombies.
However, Ellid was thinking that his role had been largely pointless until now.
The thing was, a portion of zombies slipping past Su-hyeun’s attack range only happened because he trusted in Ellid’s ability and let them go past him.
Giii-iiing—
An eyeball as big as a person’s head floated up above Ellid.
“Now, let’s see…”
Far away. Even farther away…
Ellid closed his eyes and stared into the far-off distance beyond his normal range of vision through the power of magic. After taking a gander at a considerably far-off distance, Ellid finished confirming the situation.
“So, then, the remaining ones are about the same in number as the ones that got killed off so far.”
Su-hyeun had been enduring far longer than Ellid initially thought.
The period of one day for a dragon as mighty as Ellid would be fine, but a regular person would have lost much of their stamina after failing to get some rest. But then, Su-hyeun continued to fight for the whole day long.
In all honesty, Ellid didn’t expect such a feat from Su-hyeun despite knowing how incredible the latter was.
Also, Ellid’s body had almost fully recovered by now, so even if Su-hyeun withdrew from this moment on, the dragon would have no trouble stopping these zombies.
But then…
“What is it this time?”
Ellid narrowed his eyes into slits at the newly unfolding spectacle.
“It’s not something to be happy about, at least.”
* * *
Wriggle, wiggle, writhe—
The movements of the zombies seemed strange.
Su-hyeun stopped wielding his sword and observed for the time being. The horde of zombies rushing toward him had stopped and begun bunching up into one.
“What the…? Are they trying to combine into one?”
He muttered to no one in particular, wondering what these things were up to now, but that turned out to be a problem, it seemed.
Soon afterward, Su-hyeun groaned out in dismay.
“…Well, maybe I shouldn’t have said anything.”
Wriggle, crunch—
Flesh and bones had meshed into one; zombies rolled into several huge black masses.
Su-hyeun was about to make a move to stop them from combining but abruptly stopped himself. He pondered for a little while before standing still and waiting.
When he stood around doing nothing like that, the inside of his head reverberated, and a voice entered his mind.
“Why are you standing still and doing nothing?”
The voice belonged to Ellid.
Su-hyeun turned his head and stared at Ellid at a fair distance away. Unlike the dragon, though, he opened his mouth to audibly answer. “I don’t see a reason to stop it, actually.”
“You don’t see a reason? But when they finish combining, I think it’s going to be a lot more troublesome.”
“Does it look that way to you?” Su-hyeun asked back and turned his head toward the huge black masses still being created. “But to me, they look far easier to chop down?”
“Wha—?”
“Looks like it’s about to finish combining.”
A faint little smile was etched on Su-hyeun’s lips.
What appeared before him was many silhouettes of black giants at least several dozen meters tall.
The creatures enveloped in Death Aura turned their heads and stared at Su-hyeun with their empty eye sockets.
And right at that moment…
Shu-aaaahk—
Sliiiice—!
“See? I told you.”
Su-hyeun’s blade chopped a giant’s body in half as he dashed forward.
“It’s so much easier to slice them apart now.”