Barbarian's Adventure in a Fantasy World-Chapter 323: Ashen-Haired Barbarians of the White Snowfield (5)

Chapter 323: Ashen-Haired Barbarians of the White Snowfield (5)

“Blades of shadow surge forth and rend my foes,” Necrobix chanted.

Knives of death erupted from the ground and speared through the air, swallowing space as they came on in a black tide. This was different from before. Necrobix was no longer testing, no longer hedging. It was trying to kill the barbarians.

Which was why the barbarians smiled as if the world had finally become honest.

“That is more like it!” Greta shouted.

“Stop cowering and fight!” Thomas chimed in.

They drove power into their legs and charged. Axes met shadow.

The impact detonated. Fragments of night burst outward and shredded everything they touched. Slivers skated over flesh and parted muscle. Wounds opened like mouths across shoulders and ribs. In the beat of a heart, their bodies began to come apart.

There had always been a gap between the sides. The barbarians possessed the power of Heroes in their own right, but Necrobix was one of the Four Pillars of Hell. The demon had stood on the front line when the Oldest Ones were first sealed. It had been a principal in the Divine-Demonic War. If the fight had seemed even until now, it was only because Necrobix had been wary of the Abomination’s authority and had held something back. In an honest exchange, there was almost no path to victory for the barbarians.

And the barbarians knew this perfectly well, which was why they only laughed louder and ran faster. Darkness and iron crashed together once more, the ground heaving before it gave way and sank. A scar ripped across the plain so deep that mapmakers would have to redraw the land.

Power blew outward. Thomas, the keen-eyed barbarian, lost his left wrist in a spray of dark. Necrobix’s spells carried the authority of death. That authority erased what it touched. The barbarians were Anomalies who could resist, in part, the way that authority bit into them.

That did not change what happened when a limb was unmade. If the authority destroyed a part of the body, that part would never fully return. The loss was permanent. Even so, Thomas grinned through blood.

Darkness burst and scattered again. The barbarians’ bodies were torn and split, yet they did not fall. They forced themselves forward, step by step, pressing into Necrobix’s space as if pain were a rumor someone else had to deal with.

Necrobix’s brow creased. The picture was not the one it had chosen to see.

“Tougher than I expected,” Necrobix said. 𝙧𝙚𝙚𝔀𝒆𝓫𝓷𝙤𝓿𝒆𝙡.𝒄𝙤𝓶

It had thought that if it truly meant to kill them, it would be a matter of moments. Instead, the three twisted just enough at the last instant to spare the absolute vital points. The wounds they took would have killed ordinary Heroes ten times over, yet these three still moved hot and fast.

“Then I shall use more of my power,” it said.

The power it unleashed grew sharper, the arcs cutting harder and faster, but the barbarians kept advancing. Limbs spun away through the air, yet they still surged forward, clinging to Necrobix with whatever fragments of themselves remained.

At last, through the storm of blades, surging waves, and crushing fields, Thomas broke through and reached Necrobix. He planted his foot firmly and lifted his axe high.

“I am here. Die!” Thomas yelled.

“Congratulations,” Necrobix said.

The demon caught Thomas’s wrist a hair before the axe fell. The weapon stopped with a jar. Thomas’s eyes went wide with a kind of delighted surprise.

“Your personal strength is not the problem,” Necrobix said. “It is the alien thing inside you.”

Necrobix thrust out its free hand, and a blade of congealed night took shape in its palm, driving straight into Thomas’s chest. The strike pierced his heart, but Necrobix did not stop there.

“Burst,” it chanted.

Thomas’s stomach jolted as if a mine had gone off inside the ribcage. Necrobix had left the blade buried and exploded the heart in place. Even for a barbarian, that should have been the end.

However, Thomas just smiled, teeth red, and stepped in with the sword still lodged in his chest. He hooked an arm around Necrobix and dragged it into a clutch.

“Greta! Anna! Now!1”

Greta and Anna tore through the last tatters of the spellwork hemming them in and sprinted. They cocked their axes for the cut that would take Necrobix’s head off its shoulders while Thomas held the demon still.

Necrobix made no effort to block them. It moved lightly instead and put Thomas between itself and the blades.

If they wished to strike Necrobix, they would have to cut through their own ally. Even madmen carried bonds, and even savages felt the pull of comradeship. Necrobix assumed that line would hold. However, it was mistaken.

Greta and Anna did not slow. They accelerated, their axes descending in the same heartbeat—a pair of savage blows that cared nothing for what lay beneath the blades, so long as Necrobix’s neck was among them.

Necrobix’s eyes went flat, and darkness detonated. The air burst outward with a force that snapped trees miles away, while the ground surged and rolled like a ship struck by a massive wave.

“Urgh!”

“Kh!”

The barbarians went tumbling, thrown like dolls. They spat blood and stayed down for a count longer than usual.

Necrobix exhaled softly. Those two barbarians had meant to kill their companion without a blink. The demon had spent more power than it intended because the reflex to protect itself had answered faster than calculation.

“To push me this far with such a difference in power between us,” Necrobix said. “You are remark—”

The demon fell silent as its pupils narrowed. The land around it was torn wide open, and the three barbarians lay scattered among the shattered plates of earth. All three were ruined beyond recognition; if they had been ordinary humans, they would have died a dozen times over.

However, they did not die. They did not even lose consciousness. With broken fingers, they clawed for their axes and tried to lift themselves on splintered hafts. Thomas was no different. He coughed, spitting blood dense with fragments of his own flesh. He was dying, but he treated the fact as unimportant.

“I... can fight!” he said.

Thomas caught the haft with both hands and dragged himself over the ground, hauling himself across the rock to reach Necrobix and strike.

“You...!” Necrobix said. Its unsettled gaze steadied. It inclined its head very slightly. “I offer reverence.”

These were the ones who had forsaken the world and aligned themselves with the Oldest Ones. Their bodies and their values mirrored that choice perfectly. Necrobix gathered its strength once more. This time, it would kill them cleanly. Yet even with death staring them in the face, the barbarians’ resolve did not waver.

“Pierci—”

“That is far enough.”

A deep tone vibrated through the air as a vast spell circle unfurled across the sky, its lines and runes etching themselves in light before descending in full to bear down on Necrobix. The demon looked up, its eyes widening by a fraction.

“I have been waiting for this moment,” the Tower Master said.

Space cracked like sugar glass. He stepped out of the break, robes flaring. Necrobix threw darkness and shook the circle off.

“You think that will be enough?” Necrobix said.

A dozen more circles flared into being and layered over one another. They did not strike, nor did they bind. They pressed instead, weaving pressure into a vast net that drained its strength grain by grain.

Necrobix grimaced. No one could cast at that level without preparation.

“So you were watching,” the demon concluded. “You hid yourself well.”

The Tower Master had concealed himself so completely that even a Pillar of Hell had not marked him in the noise of the battle. He had watched, waited, and when the line arrived, he had dropped everything at once.

“You used them as bait,” Necrobix said, glancing at the barbarians.

“That was not my intention,” the Tower Master replied.

Before the invasion of Necrobix, they had gathered to think of ways to fight against the puppets of Necrobix. The first plan had been for the Tower Master and the barbarians to work together. The instant he suggested it, the three had roared as if insulted.

“How dare you?”

“You dare to defile our fight?!”

“Know your place!”

The barbarians had gone for the Tower Master with everything they had. If Ketal had not stopped them with a word, the Tower Master would have had to fight them to the death before he could even look for Necrobix. Ketal had clicked his tongue.

“Let them do as they please,” he had said.

“Is that wise?” the Tower Master had asked Ketal. “Necrobix is powerful. The barbarians are strong as well, but the risk is great. The chance they die is high.”

The worry had been natural, but Ketal had answered without much heat.

“If you die in this fight,” he had asked the three, “how do you feel about that?”

They had tilted their heads.

“What problem would that be?” Thomas had said.

At that, the Tower Master had lost his tongue for a moment.

Barbarians from the North also treated death lightly and pursued glory, but this was something else entirely. These three regarded death as a thing without meaning—not good, not bad, simply nothing at all.

“You see?” Ketal had said, glancing at the Tower Master. “You do not need to worry.”

“I see,” the Tower Master had said.

Which was why he hid and watched and waited for the exact breath when he could act with profit.

“You filthy skull-face!” Greta shouted when they saw him again.

“Begone!” Anna said. “Do not pollute our battle!”

“Watch,” the Tower Master said now. “I saved their lives and they still scold me for it.”

“I see,” Necrobix replied, letting out a thin laugh. Its tone was light, but its mind had gone cold again.

I was deceived, Necrobix thought.

The demon had known that the Tower Master’s absence signaled the weaving of a stratagem. It had intended to end the exchange swiftly, even to abandon the puppet if necessary. Yet in the heat of the barbarians’ onslaught, it had forgotten that resolve.

The magic circles layered upon circles drained him. Under ordinary circumstances, Necrobix would have broken them without noticing. Now, too much had already been spent on the three who refused to stop moving. Maintaining the puppet became impossible, and Necrobix began to collapse.

The Tower Master waited for this.

“Let us play a game of tag,” he said.

The Tower Master followed the thread of Necrobix’s will as it streaked across the world toward its source. Necrobix did not remain still; it struck back with bursts of force meant to shake the pursuit loose. It cast out lures and folded traps so deftly that a lesser mage would have drowned in them while thanking it for the demonstration.

However, the Tower Master answered each in turn. He bled off force instead of taking it head on. He laughed at the bait and did not close until he had opened it. He broke the teeth from the traps with inevitability. Unlike before, he had prepared in full and arrived with the answers ready to lay down. And at the end of that chase, he arrived.

“It’s here,” he said.

The Tower Master stepped onto a ridge in the outlying mountains where Necrobix had descended.

“So that is your true body,” he said. “Charming.”

At this distance, he did not have to rely on instruments or inference. Necrobix was strong.

The demon was not merely strong—it was dreadful. The demonic energy radiating from it felt like a law of nature itself. The power within the puppet had been nothing more than a toy by comparison. The true body sat within the mountain like a thought capable of killing anything it fixed upon. That such power could be contained and governed by a single mind made the Tower Master’s skin prickle.

“Tower Master,” Necrobix said.

“I’m sorry, but I have no intention of giving you time to talk,” the Tower Master said.

He cut his hand sideways and triggered the first of the weavings he had set and stored for this one hour.

“Imperfect Detonation,” the Tower Master chanted.

A mushroom cloud rose over the ridge as the mountains groaned under the strain. The Tower Master unleashed the entire arsenal he had spent days preparing in secret.

Tenth-Class spells crashed into the valley one after another, each impact shaking the world apart. Space wrinkled, the very fabric of reality puckered, and time itself shuddered out of tune. Even Raphael, who had once devoured entire mines, would have faltered and perished beneath such power.

However, against a force that belonged on the far side of godhood, even this cascade broke. Rebound slammed the Tower Master and filled his bones with hairline fractures. He staggered back and hissed through his teeth.

“Even at full output,” the Tower Master murmured, “I can move only a few of your fingers. That is the limit.”

Everything he had unleashed had shattered under a few effortless gestures. There was not merely little chance of victory—there was none at all.

However, that did not matter. His goal had never been to kill the Pillar of Hell alone. He was here to keep Necrobix from fleeing while the rest of the board moved into position.

Just then, something fell at speed. The ground could not absorb the landing and rippled outward.

“You are here,” the Tower Master said.

“Apologies,” Ketal said. “You sent the location and I came at once, but it was the far side of the continent. It took a little time.”

“It was enough,” the Tower Master said, stepping back. “From here, I leave it to you.”

“Barbarian...,” Necrobix said, fixing its gaze on the newcomer.

“So, that is your true body?” Ketal said with a smile, lifting his axe. “The shape is the same as the puppets, but the power I feel is not. It’s completely different. Let’s do this properly this time—let’s truly kill and be killed.”

Killing intent broke like a storm.