From those vampires’ point of view,

I was an enemy moving around inside their territory

with the sun—the very thing that might as well be their natural predator—hanging overhead.

‘And they probably don’t even know what my objective is.’

Maybe,

I might keep advancing like this all the way to the capital where that Grand Duke was staying.

From their perspective, I was something they had to stop no matter what.

And the result of that was exactly that.

‘The shadow wall.’

Makeshift structures with tall pillars and broad overhangs.

Calling it a wall of shadow made from something with no physical force to it was almost funny,

but the power of it was nothing to laugh off.

The vampires who ruled this land almost completely.

It meant that, at least inside there, their forces could fully exert their power.

Still.

If there was one fortunate thing—

‘the wall’s... thickness isn’t that great.’

They couldn’t have predicted my route in advance.

It was a wall spread as widely as possible across the path I was taking.

No matter how enormous their numbers and scale were,

it was still a wall spread this wide in that short amount of time.

There was no way it could be thick too.

‘The distance we have to punch through isn’t far.’

That whole shadowed zone was probably less than a kilometer.

An extremely thin region of shadow.

Inside it, they would throw everything they had into stopping us somehow.

Put another way—

since structures on this scale couldn’t keep stretching on behind it forever,

‘if we break through here,’

then we could reach my “destination”

safely.

The question was how to break through this place.

...And for that part, I already had something in mind.

[Elemental Cooking]

When I looked up into the sky,

the giant sun I had created was shining there.

A sun is ‘something that shines high in the sky.’

I couldn’t change that essential nature.

So even if I wanted to drag the sun closer to the ground, I couldn’t.

But fortunately,

it was still within a distance my ability could reach.

With my hand stretched toward the sun,

I looked at the outer corona at my fingertips, and then—

scritch...

I

‘scraped’

a part of it off.

***

[Ingredient Appraisal (Enhanced)]

[Artificial Sun]

[A pseudo-celestial body made up of hydrogen, helium, oxygen, carbon, and other elements.]

The elements that make up the sun are mostly things like hydrogen and helium.

Sad as it is to say—

‘they’re not exactly outstanding ingredients.’

And

the part I had scraped off was no different.

[The dish is complete!]

[Hero-Class Chef’s Fragment of an Artificial Sun]

Though calling it a fragment was putting it generously.

Maybe it would be more accurate to call it

a dish that was nothing more than extremely heated ‘gas.’

[This dish remains in a state extremely close to the raw ingredient!]

[This dish is at a level too embarrassing to call cooking!]

[A small blemish is etched into the reputation you have built up as a chef.]

[Many will be unable to hide their disappointment upon seeing your cooking.]

[Experience decreases slightly.]

It was, for all practical purposes, a dish still almost completely in its raw state.

There was no helping it.

[Elemental Cooking] wasn’t one of my main strengths in the first place,

and my understanding of the elements that made up that sun wasn’t especially impressive either.

‘This has to be one of the... trashiest dishes of my entire cooking career.’

But.

Even trash like this could become a great dish under the right conditions.

—...My lord, what are you doing?

According to Karhin,

the ‘hunting arts’ learned by the survivors of this land ranked on the lower end when it came to techniques for fighting vampires.

He’d said truly high-level techniques required faith in the sun.

At the time, I’d just taken that at face value and moved on.

But now I thought I understood.

‘The reason faith is required isn’t anything else.’

Like General Kaio.

By using one’s own life force as fuel,

it was necessary in order to call the sun’s power into one’s body.

In other words—

‘if that power itself were simply given to them,’

then even people without faith

could display similar abilities.

‘I don’t have enough mana. I can’t use [Feeding of the Five Thousand].’

But

that wasn’t a problem.

The sun floating in the sky was enormous.

[Force-Feeding]

Pwaaaaaaaaaang!

A little, I mean...

even if I shared its grace with hundreds of thousands of people, it wouldn’t show at all.

“...The light!”

“It’s shining on us.”

The elements that made up the sun, now turned into [Cooking],

poured down toward the people on the ground.

After passing through my hands and becoming a dish, that scorching heat no longer threatened people.

Instead—

“It’s warm...”

in the form of warm light,

it wrapped itself around the bodies of those trembling in fear.

Sluuuurp...

The light that poured down onto them like that

naturally melted into their bodies.

—Do not fear the enemy.

Once I confirmed it,

I turned my head and stepped into the shadows as I spoke.

—For this light shall be with you.

I didn’t need to look back to know.

Because even while facing forward,

I could feel the tremendous amount of light

bursting out from behind me.

***

Krrroaaaaaaak!!!

The moment I stepped into the shadows,

the monsters that had been hiding themselves all over the place revealed their forms.

‘...There are a lot of them.’

And by “a lot,”

I didn’t mean just a lot.

‘There’s no end to them...’

There had already been countless monsters in this world to begin with.

Most of them had reduced their own numbers by fighting each other.

But the vampires had taken even those as their thralls, so their numbers had never dropped much.

Once it became known that they had left the island and advanced onto the continent,

it almost seemed as if they had brought every last force they could scrape together from the surrounding area.

The whole field of vision in front of us looked red from the glow of the monsters’ eyes.

‘Kgh...’

Several of the people who saw it bit down hard on their lips.

Not long ago,

it looked similar to the sight they had seen when vampires had poured out from their capital.

The very sight that had carved an unforgettable wound into their memories.

But

the reason they bit their lips wasn’t fear.

“At last!”

Their mouths began to tremble,

and whether it was because of the monsters’ eyes or something else,

their faces flushed red too.

“Revenge on those bastards!”

This wasn’t some kind of delirium

brought on by having death right in front of them.

Pwaaaaaang...

At some point, their weapons had become imbued with a brilliant gray-white light.

And when one of them swung that sword hard just once—

Pasaaaaaak!!!

With a single slash,

more than ten monsters turned to dust.

“It works. This power...”

Most of them were people who had learned the ‘hunter’s secret arts.’

When it came to combat methods specifically for fighting vampires, most of them were already highly skilled.

But the most important core of those secret arts—

the part about wielding power capable of dealing fatal blows to vampires—

had been limited to methods like using weapons consecrated by priests or coating weapons in holy water.

“This light!”

Not anymore.

“It works on those vampire bastards!”

Hundreds of thousands of warriors, each one radiating light from their own body,

bravely cutting down the enemy.

“Everyone, press the attack!”

“The time for revenge has come!”

No matter how impossible it was to count the number of enemies—

when you really thought about it,

the hundreds of thousands of survivors

weren’t a small force either.

“Fight by following this light!”

‘Ah...’

As they cut down the enemy, the awakened thought:

When those enemies first appeared,

and they found themselves in a position where they had to fight them,

there had been some—only a very few, but still some—who had felt dissatisfaction toward that guide.

After all the miracles he had shown them,

after floating the sun in the sky, healing hundreds of thousands of sick and wounded, and even splitting the sea,

couldn’t he just wipe out the enemies too?

That kind of doubt had crossed their minds.

But

now, no one thought that anymore.

‘Honey... and kids.’

These were people who had lost many precious things to those vampires.

The fear and resentment lodged deep inside them were not something anyone else could casually judge.

...They had just spent most of their time crushed under fear.

And now—

‘At last, I can finally avenge you.’

The fantasy they had long given up on as absolutely impossible—

taking revenge on the enemy with their own hands—

was coming true in reality.

[You have gained experience.]

[You have gained experien...]

[You have gained experi...]

On a dangerous battlefield, soldiers are bound to fear death.

But these warriors wrapped in light seemed incapable of feeling even an inch of fear as they drove the enemy back with terrifying momentum.

And then, at last—

“Bring it down!”

Kuuuuung...

One of those hastily built structures the vampires had thrown together.

A giant canopy woven from all kinds of junk and bound together with monster muscle.

Kwaaaaaaang!!!

As it crashed to the ground,

it crushed the vampires standing there beneath it.

—No.

The vampires who saw that

lifted their eyes to the sky in terror.

—The light...

As one of the structures blocking out the sky collapsed,

light poured down across that area,

and the vampires in that broad region—

at the very least tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of monsters—

[You gain experience.......]

in the time it took to blink once,

vanished without leaving a trace.

“...H-ha, haha!”

“There were so many of them, and in a single blow!”

And what remained there

were the figures of strong warriors

standing tall under the bright light.

‘...Right. I had forgotten.’

Watching that sight,

Karhin remembered something from a very distant past,

an old memory he had already begun to forget.

‘That, more than anything...’

The physical abilities of the awakened far surpass those of ordinary humans.

And on top of that, these were people who had learned secret arts for fighting vampires.

When such people radiated light from their own bodies,

that was truly—

‘what I admired as a child...’

What he had dreamed of when he was young,

but as an adult had dismissed as nothing more than a fairy tale—

‘the image of paladins.’

The image of great heroes.

***

Kwaang.

Puh-uh-uh-ung.

Krrroaaak...

“We brought another one down!”

“Next, to the right!”

“The large monsters are swarming to protect the canopy! Break through somehow!”

The awakened were butchering the enemy while radiating light from their bodies.

And that sight was, well—

‘I didn’t think it would be this much.’

I was the one who had done it,

but even I couldn’t help being stunned by it.

Kwaaaaaang...

The vampires must have been fighting with everything they had to hold the line.

Even the canopy that had been guarded by dozens of large monsters was collapsing.

Countless vampires, and hundreds of thousands of awakened.

Even if things might be different in a long, drawn-out battle,

at this moment, it was obvious to anyone which side had the upper hand.

Pwaaaak...

“Ah, the light has reached here too!”

When one of the canopies collapsed,

light poured down over my head again as I walked through the shadows.

Then—

“Thank you, Guide.”

Those fighting enemies near me

bowed their heads toward /N_o_v_e_l_i_g_h_t/ me as they spoke.

“At first, we were dissatisfied that someone we didn’t even know was leading us, but...”

“Thanks to you, we’ve been able to fight like this.”

“...I only just realized it myself, how badly I wanted to fight those bastards like this.”

They treated me with extreme respect,

as if they were sincerely grateful.

“We don’t know where it is you’re trying to go.”

“But leave breaking open that path to us!”

With those words,

they threw themselves forward again and headed for the areas where shadows still remained.

‘...Amazing.’

Looking at the ones fighting in those shadows while radiating light,

it was enough to make it seem like breaking through this wall of shadow and escaping was now only a matter of time.

As if they wanted to fight even a little more,

even the ones who had just finished a major battle went out to support the next battlefield without pausing.

The pace was so fast that my own tired steps could hardly keep up.

Trudge...

Yeah.

My exhausted steps were bound to be slow compared to the other awakened, who were fighting with overwhelming momentum.

And since the awakened who finished one battlefield immediately headed for the next,

the places where the fighting had mostly ended—

that is,

under the sun—

actually had very few people left.

Naturally.

Under this sun, vampires couldn’t survive.

There was no reason for forces to remain in a place with no enemies.

In a place where there were neither enemies nor allies,

only I was walking with slow steps.

Sliiide...

And then—

“Some time ago, I happened to get a chance to learn about the nobles’ tactics.”

“......”

“Since they’re clearly a different species, there were quite a lot of ideas I found rather fresh.”

Someone

spoke to me.

“For example.”

Under the brilliantly shining sun.

Inside that safe zone

where everyone had been certain no vampire could possibly exist.

“Even if you lose hundreds of millions, even billions of troops...”

Shhk!

“the side that ultimately hunts down the [Head of House] is the one that wins the war.”

A sharp killing intent

came pouring toward me.