1272  Chapter 1271: In The Thick Of It

    The lower the sun got, the more palpable this negative feeling was, forcing us to heighten our guard as we looked around for whatever was causing us to become so wary; it wasn''t just the carnage that we were standing in, nor was it the eery nature of such a place, but something else entirely.

    At first the cause was quite easy to miss; the twitching of one of the corpses fingers, the long, quiet inhale, the creaking of bones knitting back together or flesh growing back to recuperate the wounds they had sustained.

    We missed all of that at first, but when the first corpse let out a sharp gasp before jolting upwards, it was no longer something that we could miss; we also couldn''t miss how that person so easily stood up, scooped up their weapon and looked around before finding someone with the different heraldry to stab in the back of the skull.

    More and more of them were beginning to awaken, and that scene repeated itself each and every single time that these people jolted back to life, making it clear that the hatred they had for one another apparently surpassed death and reanimation.

    At first it just seemed like they weren''t aware that they had died, or that they had been reanimated in some hidden kind of way, but then they began to kick, growl or hiss at the bodies that they were stabbing in a way that could only be taken as them lording their earlier awakening over the others.

    They knew that they were being reanimated, and that was why they were so quick to begin stabbing whoever was on the other side that was still asleep; it took them a few moments to realize that we were standing in the middle of all of them, and when they did...

    A wide array of people were looking at us, ranging from dark skinned humans to pale, ethereal Elves, from muscular Orcs clad in heavy armor to Beastkin donning leathers; there were so many different people that were united in this hatred for one another staring straight at us, and that hatred took a momentary pause as they appraised this new addition to their war.

    Impaling a Dogkin with an icicle, I began to weave together some wider area of effect spells while Anput stabilized the ground we were on and raised battlements for us to shelter behind; Leone slung dozens of fireballs that exploded amongst the sea of soldiers while Mom kept them at bay with her Claymore, letting loose gouts of flame whenever she swung it.

    Whenever they witnessed either Anput or I utilizing combination magic before seeing Mom or Leone sling pure Fire Magic at them they got extremely angry, and that caused them to make many mistakes that we took advantage of.

    I began to make use of shattered ice to spread frost around as best I could, slowing them down so that whenever Mom swung at them they couldn''t avoid it, and soon after Anput resumed raining metal arrows down on everyone while also taking her metal rods and transforming them into a heavy spear, stabbing at anyone who looked too dangerous.

    Leone''s flames were even hotter than I remembered, with the Vampire keeping a curtain of them around our backside while slinging smaller, compact and explosive fireballs into the horde of soldiers with incredible speeds, melting anyone idiotic enough to continue rushing at us.

    Going from a still, putrid expanse of corpses to fighting for our lives against those corpses was certainly peculiar and not what I was expecting, but I had little time to think on it as we instead continued to cut down any who approached us while waiting to see if there really were tens of thousands of soldiers in this desert...

    Because if there were, we really needed to escape from here whenever we possibly could, especially if these soldiers were in a reanimation loop and fueled with a desire to murder each other for infinity.

    Whew~

    Ketsueki_Hasu