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Chapter 207: (4/5): The Key That Unlocks

Camilla had a unique advantage that no one else had except perhaps Ismelda. Her magic allowed her to destroy golems without knowing where the core was, as long as she got somewhere close. And when her strikes were always right through the center of the golem’s body, covering as much area as she could in one stroke, chances were good that she’d manage to corrode the core and render it useless.

Other people could do it as well if they expended a large amount of mana on destructive magic, but then they’d have trouble piercing through the heavy armor of the stone knights. Even if they manage to get through, they could only do it once or twice before their well of mana ran dry.

In short, Camilla was the only one who could consistently defeat golems in one blow… other than Ismelda.

When Camilla descended on the battlefield and unleashed her true power, Ismelda’s eyes lit up.  Without breaking pace in her easygoing dismantling of the golem in front of her, she found time to talk. “So you did get stronger. That height isn’t just for show. Victoria will be pleased, and proud.”

“I didn’t do it for her,” Camilla shot back as she split open a stone knight that had been about to chop at her with its sword. She kicked away the ruined golem into a wall where it exploded into halves from increasingly powerful chaos mana detonations. 

As Camilla moved on to her next target, she kept an eye on the halves for a few seconds longer. Only when she was sure that it would never move again did she focus her attention on her next target.

Ismelda frowned at her dismissive tone. Like Camilla toward Kagriss, she could not stand any slight, perceived or real, toward Victoria. “Hmph. Well, I can’t fall behind you then,” she said, and flared her mana, preparing to go all out. Waves of mana rolled from the body and washed over the other hunters around her.

The mood in the frontlines changed then, as if a mist of blood descended over everyone. No, on closer look, it really was blood mana. Ismelda had activated some kind of strange blood magic that Camilla had never seen before. However, she knew enough to make an educated guess.

Aura magic—a magic that only especially powerful and skilled archpriests could cast. It took skill and power in spades, so not many archpriests could manage it. Even in the army consisting of hundreds of templars and archpriests that invaded the vampire territory three years ago, there had only been two, but their bolstering aura magic made battles much easier… at least until they were both killed. 

So Ismelda could use such magic too. Camilla had no idea that she had it in her to do such a thing. After all, Ismelda always struck Camilla as a warrior type like herself, not a magus type like Kagriss.

A strange thirst for violence rose up in Camilla, but she held it back. She instinctively knew that if she accepted that feeling and embraced it, her strength and speed would increase. At the same time, it’ll be easy for her to lose control. It will turn her into a berserker, a warrior that knows only violence. 

For a troll-turned-vampire like Ismelda, it was a fitting spell.

Actually, will it even work on me? Camilla tilted her head. Such spells can not force her to do what she does not want, so if she is immune to the berserk effect, will she be immune to the strength boosting effect as well? Hopefully she’ll still get it.

Before she could even decide whether or not to take the bait and see if the spell would work on her, the blood mana disappeared, retreating back into Ismelda.

Confused, Camilla made her way over to Ismelda’s side, helping her dispatch a golem. “Did the spell fail?” 

The redness faded from the eyes of the hunters around them. They looked like they woke up from a trance, although none of them left themselves open to attack. It was a perfect shift from one mentality to another, and it didn’t even look like some of the weaker hunters even knew that something had affected their mind just now.

“No, I canceled it,” Ismelda said. “There’s no point to using this now.”

“Oh? What happened to not falling behind?” she asked as she detonated another golem as effortlessly as she did all the others. “Can you do this?”

She snorted. “I’ll admit that when it comes to smashing rocks, I’m no match for you, but when it comes to fighting beings of flesh and blood, I don’t believe I’ll lose.”

Even though Ismelda was admitting defeat, Camilla wasn’t happy at all. “What do you mean ‘smashing rocks?’ If you’re going to put it like that, then you’re just chopping meat. You should work as a chef for Victoria.”

“I already am. She likes the way I make breakfast.”

“Wait—huh? I didn’t know that!”

“We never did tell you.”

It seemed so unbelievable yet so right for Ismelda to be cooking for Victoria so Camilla swallowed her comments. Ismelda was the unofficial assistant for Victoria after all. However, she thought that vampires couldn’t eat regular food without throwing it all up afterwards, and she had been just joking…so what was Ismelda making Victoria for breakfast? 

If someone threw up the food she made, she’d be pretty offended, but if that someone was a vampire, then it wouldn’t be that bad… probably.

What a mystery.

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True to everyone’s predictions, more and more golems arrived at ever shorter intervals. Time was limited.

Not only were there more enemies, the enemies were getting stronger too. However, no one could prove it, until…

Camilla slashed open the chest of a golem and sent it stumbling back. Once it was far enough, Camilla snapped her fingers and the mana she left within the wound exploded, tearing the golem apart, leaving behind two pieces on the ground. As she went to destroy another golem, one of the two halves twitched.

The finger on its hand curled and Camilla’s sharp eyes caught the movement without fail. Her guard rose instantly and she shoved the golem that she had just been about to engage away, making space so that she could react to any threats.

Equally observant, Ismelda stopped fighting as well. “Something wrong?” She followed Camilla’s gaze toward the twitching fingers of the halved golem. “You missed the core. Unlucky. Must’ve been in its arm, judging by how it’s moving.”

She swung her sword and sent a wave of raw mana toward the golem and crushed it into pieces. One of the broken pieces partially encased a shattered core. It had been in the golem’s left arm, far enough away from the cut that it survived.

That almost never happened since it made it too easy to disable the golem just by chopping off an arm.

However, instincts told Camilla that the core’s location wasn’t the problem. There was something else that bothered her about the core. However, she had no idea where to start identifying the source of that feeling, so she gave up and focused on her battle again.

Her next two golems fell as usual, but on the third, it happened again. She smashed open a golem and detonated it. Just as she turned away, one of the golem halves began to move. Camilla saw out of the corner of her eye and she whirred around to face the moving half-golem.

This time, she had kicked it back far enough that no one else saw the golem but her.

It shuddered and began to change, turning into a golem. It was not regenerating, but was changing shape until it resembled a simian with lanky limbs and brutally large jaws. It jumped toward Camilla who grabbed it out of the air and smashed it into the ground, her eyes wide with surprise.

“Damn. What the hell is that?” A hunter beside her swore when he saw it.

“Half a golem,” Camilla replied, still staring at the simian golem that was crushed under her palm. However, it was not yet defeated. After a brief moment to repair itself to minimum working capacity, it struggled against her strength, trying to get up to attack her.

Its flailing limbs were not only disturbing but also hazardous. It might grab onto a nearby hunter and make them trip. Camilla frowned. Obliterate.

A small orb of blood mana entered the simian golem and, from there, began to destroy it from the inside out. What started out small and frail grew bigger and bigger, forcibly taking control of the golem’s mana and turning it against the golem itself.

Earth mana turned to blood mana that fueled the utter destruction that chaos mana embodied. When the simian golem turned to dust before a number of hunter’s unbelieving, frightful eyes, it left behind only a single core that still pulsed with power. The core fit nicely in her palm and if she closed her hand, she’d be able to hide it completely.

She quickly realized what was wrong. Simply put, the core was too small to power a golem twice the size of a person. That simian golem should be its limits, yet Camilla clearly saw that it had once powered a whole stone knight.

There was only one explanation. She met Ismelda’s eyes and Ismelda spoke first.

“They adapted to you.”

Camilla half expected gloating from Ismelda, now that her one-hit-kill trick no longer worked as well, but there wasn’t a single hint of humor. She nodded. “They did…”

No longer was each stone knight powered by a single large core. Sure, such a setup might be more efficient, but at the same time, it was essentially putting all of the eggs in one basket, and the dungeon knew that.

Now, an increasingly large number of attacking golems were made up of two or more cores. Camilla even saw one with four. Two she destroyed in one blow, but the other two escaped destruction and turned into tiny mantis-like creatures that were armed with sharp scythes.

Before Camilla managed to catch it, it wove around the legs of the frontline hunters and wreaked havoc. It hamstrung one and opened an artery in another. Both had to be removed from the fighting for treatment.

Things were not going well at all, and at this time, the time for abandonment drew closer, way ahead of schedule.

“Kagriss, Cadaelia, how is it going on your side?” she shouted over the din of the fighting. They were close enough that Kagriss could hear her physically on top of mentally. Unlike her, Kagriss did not shout.

“Not great, not bad. From reversing the formations on the seal, we managed to figure out two ways. Unfortunately, Cadaelia said that we don’t have enough time for one of the methods, so now we’re searching for the other method.” 

Kagriss sounded annoyed. Just because she liked to study magic didn’t mean she liked to do it in a time crunch.

To her, magic was a hobby, and a hobby ceased being a hobby when it became a job. Camilla could sense her frustration through their bond, clearer than before. She wanted to go and hug Kagriss and comfort her, but unfortunately both of them had their own things to do.

“What are the methods?”

“One is the standard way, the one we’re working on, which is to manually undo the seal. It’s complicated, it’s risky, it’s time consuming, and I hate it,” Kagriss growled. “But it’s the only option we have.”

“What, why? You said that there were two methods.” Camilla ignored the strange glances that the hunters around her were giving her. “What happened to the other one?”

“It was deemed unrealistic,” Kagriss said. “Technically, it’s the correct way to unlock the seal. There’s an object somewhere in this dungeon and it holds the power to open the seal. However, Cadaelia said it would be too risky and too late to go look for it now.”

On the other side of the bond, Kagriss was sitting near a hunter, wringing her hands as she examined the seal for the hundredth time. She couldn’t afford to tease out the answer like she preferred—that’d take too long. Instead, they had to try and interpret these confusing interlocking formations by brute force.

If Camilla could see her now, she’d be shocked by the stormy expression that Kagriss had on.

Even from so far away, however, Camilla could still feel the effects of Kagriss’s wrath. Unfortunately, she could do nothing to help except to think happy thoughts while thinking of Kagriss and hoped it helped with Kagriss’s emotions.

Now that she wasn’t frustrated herself.

She could no longer kill the golems in one strike. She usually had to do it two or three times, and she found herself fighting normally and without magic more and more. It was simply not worth the mana wasted. She had to cut the golems to pieces much like Ismelda has, but Ismelda was so much more efficient with her swordstrokes that Camilla felt a twinge of jealousy.

As much as the hunters did their best to destroy cores before they could transform into their smaller, quicker forms, a few always slipped through the net, and the effects were devastating. More and more hunters from the group were being sent to the back from leg injuries.

At this rate, the threshold where a single wave can overpower a group of hunters was coming soon. Abandonment was drawing near.

The smaller, the deadlier. More than one hunter had died outright when a simian golem managed to climb onto his neck and break it with a sharp twist. When a hunter fell, the golems would grab them and flee, not even leaving a body behind for the survivors to mourn.

Time grew short.

Camilla could not protect everyone at once, and the hunters fighting alongside her were becoming more of a liability than an asset for her if she had to help them. Even when Ismelda finally unleashed her berserker aura spell, the hunters merely broke even on the ‘helpful’ scale.

She gritted her teeth. “Kagriss, how is it going?”

“Not good,” Kagriss replied after a long pause. From the delay in answering, it was obvious how much stress Kagriss was in. “The seal is too complicated. If only we can find that damn key that we can use to unlock that seal.”

Camilla sighed and shook her head. “When push comes to shove, we can take Eva with us if you want.”

“… Wait.” The reply was terse.

“…? Kagriss?” Camilla asked. “Am I bothering you? If I—” 

A sudden spike in excitement from Kagriss’s side interrupted her and Camilla had no idea if that was good or bad. She was fully prepared to be chewed out by an angry and stressed Kagriss when Kagriss’s reply came in a quiet, strained voice.

“No. Not at all. I just found something. Buried behind all this useless junk was a hint about the key, Camilla!” Kagriss practically shouted, with emphasis on Camilla’s name. “It’s a feather! The key’s a feather! Come over here!”

A feather! The ornament that Camilla kept in her pouch rose to the forefront of her mind.

Without hesitation, she flared her mana and spread her arms. “I need to go for a bit. Everyone stand back!” she shouted. Boots thudded against the ground as everyone, even Ismelda, rushed to comply.

When she first joined the battle, she had been an unknown quantity that people mocked. However, after fighting side by side for so long, her status rose until she was put alongside the likes of Ismelda, over even Beitra.

When she spoke and flared her mana, her word was law, especially when she possessed a strange magic that could turn golems into dust. And turn to dust they will.

A red mist spread out in front of Camilla, filling the tunnels ahead of her. A few golems tried to run out at the retreating hunters, but they were quickly beaten back as the hunters worked together to keep the golems in the mist. 

Although they had no idea what the mist was for, the hunters had no doubt that it would not be good to stay inside.

Camilla spread her consciousness over the mist, locking onto each golem. There were fifteen now, almost double the number from when she first tested the spell.

It will be difficult to maintain control over fifteen targets and the results might be catastrophic if her concentration slipped.

She took a deep breath and activated her magic. Obliterate.

Before everyone’s eyes, the golems inside the mist began to disintegrate. The mist converged on the golems, wrapping them up in a corrosive shroud and eating them away. First, their legs went, so that they could not move. Then, their arms, so that they could not hold their weapons.

A piercing pain stabbed into Camilla’s head, but she managed to not lose control. 

The golems’ heads disintegrated, followed by the last parts, the torso. The golems did not even have a chance to transform their cores into a smaller form, and for the first time in over an hour, there was no sound of metal striking stone.

Camilla almost collapsed, but she forced herself to remain standing, even opening her wings for balance. Her mind spun and she might’ve thrown up if she still maintained that instinct.

“I’ve taken care of this wave,” she said, nodding to Ismelda. “But they’ll be back. I have to go to the back and rest for a while.’

Ismelda held her gaze and dipped her chin. There was new respect in her eyes. “Leave it to me.”

Satisfied with Ismelda’s promise, Camilla flapped her wings and flew unsteadily over to the back of the cave, collapsing into Kagriss’s arms when she landed. With shaking hands and a piercing headache, she dug out the feather and handed it over to Kagriss.

“Here.”

Ignoring the holy power that burnt her hand when she touched it, Kagriss accepted the feather stone gratefully, almost with reverence.

Camilla sensed that Kagriss wished to “study” the stone as well, but knew that now was not the time and was holding back.

When Kagriss pressed the stone over Eva’s forehead, she frowned.