Barbarian's Adventure in a Fantasy World-Chapter 317: The Four Pillars of Hell—Necrobix (6)

The Dwarf King realized a heartbeat late who had stepped through the torn air, and nerves chased the iron from his voice.

“Ah. It has been a long time,” Grombir said, bowing more quickly than dignity advised.

“It has,” the Tower Master replied, the sockets of his skull glinting with thin amusement. “For a moment I feared you had forgotten me, and that would have been wounding.”

“There is no world in which I would forget you,” Grombir answered, and although he was the strongest of the dwarves, a smith blessed as a Hero by his god, he could not keep a note of fluster from creeping in.

In front of the Tower Master, very few kept their composure. This was the being who had been famous across the continent before Grombir had taken his first breath, the master of every mage, a monster born not of a species but of the continent itself.

He cleared his throat to break the mood. “Then, about what you said. Are you telling us the Necrobix Ketal fought was a clone?”

Ketal had already voiced doubt that he had truly defeated Necrobix. The Tower Master had called that doubt sensible. The Dwarf King could only interpret that as meaning a copy had been cut down.

“No,” the Tower Master said at once. “It was the original. I will explain, and you may listen as well if you wish.”

He flicked two fingers, and a chair of gathered mana unfolded behind him. He sat, tilted his head, and regarded Serena.

“And you,” he said. “What are you?”

“Greetings, Tower Master,” Serena said softly. “I have long known your name. They say you are a creature of the Mortal Realm who has touched the heavenly gate. I am Serena. Once they called me the Holy Sword.”

The light in the Tower Master’s sockets trembled.

“A change in nature,” he murmured. “The authorities of gods are stranger than I accounted for.”

The surprise passed quickly, as if the revelation still fell within his margin of expectation. He nodded once. “Very well. I may have questions for you later, then.”

He folded the matter away and turned back to the room. “Necrobix came here, did it not?”

“It did,” Ketal said.

“How did it end?” the Tower Master asked him.

“I won.”

“You defeated that monster,” the Tower Master said with a short, dry laugh. He himself had done no more than scorch the hem of Necrobix’s figurative robe. It was a being that, in truth, required a god to descend in person. Yet, Ketal had stood against it and taken the field. The strength required for that was beyond excessive. It invited disbelief and defeated it in the same breath.

“That is not bad for us,” the Tower Master continued. “To the point. You did not kill Necrobix.”

“Which would mean it was a copy,” Grombir said.

“I said it was not,” the Tower Master replied. “It was the true body.”

“My god...,” Grombir murmured.

A Pillar of Hell had come down in person. The thought made his head swim. Ketal, on the other hand, looked as if this matched what he had suspected. The thing he had fought had been too strong to be anything less. Even compared to Materia descending through Floris, the difference had been night and day.

He still didn’t understand the trick at the end—how the blade had severed the head so easily—but a being capable of rivaling a god was bound to have methods beyond his comprehension.

“You came to gather information on Necrobix,” the Dwarf King said, more to order his own thoughts than to instruct. “You sensed it quickly and arrived as fast.”

“That is not wrong,” the Tower Master said, “but it would mislead you if left there. Necrobix did not come only here.”

Ketal’s eyes sharpened. “What do you mean?”

“When you were fighting it,” the Tower Master said, “I was fighting it as well. It also appeared in the elven sacred ground, and the elves fought it there.”

“What...?” Grombir said, and the single word emerged half a shout.

The elves had been attacked, too? the Dwarf King thought as his heart jerked in his chest.

“Are they all right?” Ketal asked the Tower Master at once. Karin was there, and Arkemis, and if Ignisia had changed course, then she would have been there as well. He could not keep worry from brushing his voice.

“The damage was severe,” the Tower Master said. “But, they held. The ones you know were injured, but none died. You need not fear for their lives.”

Ketal let out a breath he had not realized he was holding. “Good.”

“So Necrobix struck in sequence,” Grombir said, trying to find an order to the chaos.

“No,” the Tower Master answered. “It appeared at the same time.”

Grombir stared. The words did not make sense on first hearing. The Tower Master clicked his tongue.

“Take the phenomena as they are first. Necrobix manifested in three places at once. It did not send an avatar or a shadow. Each one of those was the true body. Three originals stood at once upon the Mortal Realm,” the Tower Master explained.

“Then there are three Necrobixes,” Grombir said. “By the gods...”

The image felt like blasphemy, three gods occupying the same world as if it were ordinary. The Tower Master shook his head.

“That is not it,” he said. “It is a self-division concept. It shares power across the instances, and I suspect the consciousness is likewise distributed. There is a time limit. If it concentrates too heavily on one front, it cannot properly address the others. Even so, very few exist who could exploit that.”

He did not need to say what he had already inferred. While Necrobix concentrated on Ketal, it had failed to allocate perfectly elsewhere. That had been the only reason he had managed to delay it at the Mage Tower.

“At present,” he said, “the list of those who can even buy time against a divided Necrobix is very short. Myself, and perhaps the Sun God’s Saintess”

Even those called Heroes could not stand.

“You may be the only one who can win,” the Tower Master continued, looking at Ketal.

Grombir went a shade paler. The conclusion was simple. Necrobix could exist as three at once, and of those who could hold a line, only two could delay. Also, only Ketal could defeat. If Ketal departed and Necrobix came here again, the dwarves would have no path but ruin.

“Can you contact the gods?” the Tower Master asked without preamble.

“We cannot,” Grombir said. “Our prayers do not cross.”

“Then Hell sealed the route,” the Tower Master said. “They would spend everything to manage this descent.”

There would be no divine aid. The Mortal Realm had to solve this with what it had in its hands.

“With my power alone, I cannot respond to Necrobix,” the Tower Master said. “So I am asking. Will you help me?”

The request did not ask for subordination. It asked for company on a road that very few could travel.

“I will,” Ketal said at once.

“Thank you,” the Tower Master replied, and this time the gratitude carried weight. “Come to the tower when this is done. I will be generous in my thanks.”

“Do not mind that,” Ketal said. “The world is in danger. Cooperation is a given.”

Inside him, the Abomination gave a small sound that might have been a laugh, but Ketal ignored it.

“How do we fight it?” Ketal asked the Tower Master. “Do we need to cut down all three at once?”

Like a hydra whose heads must be taken in a single breath, perhaps the divided Necrobix could only be ended if the three were severed together. The Tower Master winced.

“To be frank,” he said, “I have not yet grasped the exact specification. It is too high a form of dark magic to parse at a glance.”

“Serena,” Ketal asked her, “do you know anything?”

She shook her head. “There is information on Necrobix, but nothing about this ability.”

“Then it likely acquired this after the Divine-Demonic War,” the Tower Master said. “We have a tail to hold. If we analyze it properly, we will understand how to respond.”

“So we stall until the answer comes,” Ketal said. “A defense drawn across the whole continent.”

“Exactly,” the Tower Master said.

“How do we block it?” Ketal asked next. “We do not know the manner of its next descent. Without the gods, we cannot see in advance. We will always be a step late.”

“That part is handled,” the Tower Master said. “My magic wraps the continent.”

Ketal blinked. “What?”

“I have cast a Tenth-Class spell I devised,” the Tower Master said. “Omniscient Observer. It is active. Through concord with my dolls deployed across the lands, the magic girds the continent like the air itself. Wherever it appears, I will know at once.”

Ketal stared at him for a moment, then huffed a helpless laugh. “You are a monster.”

“Coming from you, that sounds like mockery,” the Tower Master said dryly. “In any case, we will perceive each descent immediately, and we must answer with spatial leaps.”

“So we wait,” Ketal said.

“There is no other choice,” the Tower Master replied. “We cannot move until it shows its face.”

“When do you expect the next strike?” Ketal asked him.

“I cannot be precise,” the Tower Master said. “If I consider ordinary constraints, it will not be immediate. At the earliest, a week.”

“Then we have a short safety.”

“Likely,” the Tower Master said. “Rest. I will call you when the time comes.”

“Understood.”

Ketal returned to his training. He tightened the weave of Aura around the axe until the presence within him sulked in silence and then sharpened his body until his breath moved like a bellows.

Two days passed. The Tower Master arrived without preamble and without ceremony. Alarm scorched his voice.

“This is madness,” he said. “It has only been three days.”

“So it is here,” Ketal said.

“It is,” the Tower Master said. “Please.”

Ketal nodded.

***

The East held many fronts. The Mortal Realm fought the evil in grinds measured not in hours but in lives, taking ground and losing it, biting and being bitten back. Among those fronts was one that mattered more than the rest. It was the hinge through which other regions turned, and the demons had recognized its importance and hammered at it. The Mortal Realm had poured everything it had there and barely held.

“A black tide covers the earth,” Necrobix chanted.

It was not a wave. It was a wall of ocean. A dark surge rose high enough to offend the sun and spilled forward across the defense line.

Men cried out, not with discipline but with the animal fear that arrived when a person understood that the thing before them did not have a shape they could resist. The tide swept them away. There were prodigies on that wall, Transcendents at the top of their tier who had been judged future Heroes. They vanished without effect. They were names on a list, and then they were not.

The line broke, another five minutes would finish it. There was nothing left to do, nowhere left to go, and no act that would change the end.

Then, someone came. Necrobix raised a defense as if this were a familiar dance. An axe met it and hammered a single note across a thousand hearts.

“We meet again, monster,” it said.

Ketal cut across its path, set his feet, and weighed it with a narrowed gaze.

“It is exactly the same as the one I fought,” Ketal said, almost to himself. The presence, the weight, and the smell of its power were identical. It felt like a perfect duplication.

“What are you?” he asked Necrobix, and the question was not curiosity so much as a demand for a rule.

“I have no reason to answer,” it said. “The Mortal Realm will burn. You may remain alone upon the ashes.”

Darkness surged, and Ketal drew upon his Aura. Power clashed against power as he held the line. The front split in two beneath the first crushing blow, but it did not collapse. The world tilted, then steadied.

Elsewhere, the Tower Master stood amid bones already cracked from the first exchange and held a different Necrobix in place by pure spite and genius.

However, the third instance had no check.

In a village that had existed for millennia, where all the Mysts of the world seemed to gather in sleep and waking, the fairies kept a sanctuary. They called it Pasarapia, and they said that if a person drank a single mouthful from its sacred spring, they would recover from every illness and grow young. The queen of the fairies was a Hero in her own right, bright and ancient. The sanctuary burned, the queen fell, and the sacred spring vanished, leaving no trace upon the land.

The Mortal Realm burned, broke, and shook. Ketal felt the ripples through the axis of things and wanted to run, but he could not be in three places. He pushed harder where he was and refused to let this front go as well. He carved space away from Necrobix’s feet when it tried to take one more step and smashed down another prison when it tried to close one around the defenders.

While the world fought against evil, laughter rose from near the eastern sea, where the Mortal Realm met the White Snowfield.

“At last!” a voice cried, bright with delight. “At last we have arrived!”

They were not creatures of the Mortal Realm, nor were they born of this world. They stepped onto the land with the carefree joy of travelers returning home and the eager impatience of hunters at the edge of a long-sought hunting ground.

The world had new arrivals.