Catacomb Pantheon, Part 2

Two days of rattling along by carriage from town.

Beyond the forest, a castle loomed.

Adventurers poured out of the convoy of carriages one after another.

With undead as the primary enemy, clerics stood out among the ranks.

Azu couldn't help but look up at the castle. It was the largest structure she'd ever seen, and it radiated a sinister aura.

A thick presence of death, perhaps. Every instinct screamed that she should not set foot inside.

As Azu stood there staring up, Elza gave her a light tap on the back with her left hand.

"It's okay. We're not going in there. Promise."

"R-Right. I don't know how to put it, but… it's really scary."

"Hold on to that feeling. When death comes, it comes in an instant."

Azu could only manage a dry laugh at Elza's smile. It was impossible to tell whether she was joking or dead serious.

The cleric-led parties naturally took command.

A short distance from the castle lay the entrance to the catacombs.

The gate was ancient. Vines had crept over it, draping across the surface, yet the structure showed no sign of crumbling.

The parties filed in one by one. The passage inside sloped downward, descending underground.

The corridors were brighter than expected.

Candles lined the walls at regular intervals, their flames burning steadily.

… The candles appeared to burn, yet not a drop of wax dripped from them.

They clearly weren't ordinary candles.

As Azu gazed around in fascination, a pale hand suddenly thrust out from the wall.

She was too shocked to even scream. While Azu stood frozen, Elza splashed holy water on the hand without missing a beat.

The pale hand vanished in a faint glow.

"See, Azu-chan? All gone. The hand's gone now."

"Hyai…"

Azu finally managed to move, though her arms and legs were swinging in sync.

The adventurers around her snickered behind their hands.

That only made her more embarrassed. Azu couldn't bring herself to look forward.

One glance from Elza silenced the laughter.

… Naturally, every cleric here besides Elza served the Sun God or an affiliated deity.

Elza had tucked away her Creator King rosary to avoid trouble.

"You need to watch where you're going. We're inside a labyrinth now."

At Elza's words, Azu hastily faced forward and took a deep breath in and out.

"What was that thing?"

"A half-formed ghost. It can't even touch a living person, so it's harmless. Just startling."

"Oh, is that so? What a relief…"

Azu let out a sigh.

Watching her, Elza stroked Azu's head. Such an honest child. Pitifully so.

She had absolutely no business being here on an undead-slaying mission in the catacombs.

Elza offered a silent prayer to the Creator King for Azu's safety.

When they emerged from the long corridor, they found themselves in an impossibly vast space.

Large enough, perhaps, to fit an entire town.

This was Ruined Heim Catacombs.

The resting place of the citizens who once lived under the Ash King's rule, and a labyrinth said to spawn undead endlessly.

The interior, built in the orderly architectural style of its era, was a breathtaking sight. But undead swarmed everywhere you looked.

For the initial phase, everyone agreed to fight as one group. Warriors received blessings and purification boons before advancing to the front.

"Azu-chan. If an undead bites you or scratches you with its claws, the poison will spread. Come back to me right away if that happens."

"Yes!"

Azu received a full set of boons from Elza and moved forward.

She was startled by how light her body felt.

The blessing had boosted all of Azu's stats.

Even the Sealed Sword Grungaus, which she'd always felt a certain heaviness from, posed no problem now.

She bisected the Skeletons and Zombies nearest to her.

With the blessing and purification power imbued in her blade, they went down easily.

Cut, cut, and cut again.

Azu had never studied any formal school of swordsmanship. She was building her style through trial and error in actual combat, testing what movements were efficient and what weren't.

Her swings had been visibly amateurish and dangerous at first, but they'd grown reasonably refined.

Formal swordsmanship was designed for fighting other humans, after all, making parts of it ill-suited for monsters with their varied forms and movements.

Azu's self-taught style was evolving to suit monster combat.

Skeletons were quick but easy to track thanks to the constant rattling. Zombies were slow.

She stayed away from the massive Zombies and otherwise moved as freely as she pleased.

When she started running out of breath, she'd return to Elza's side.

Elza, for her part, was swinging her mace to crush Zombie heads and shatter Skeletons.

Clerics were overwhelmingly strong against undead by their very nature.

From where Azu stood, Elza looked stronger than any of the other clerics here.

She seemed very accustomed to combat.

Judging by the Skeleton bones scattered around her, she'd already taken down about as many as Azu.

Azu had Elza reapply her blessing, then went back to slaying undead.

As she repeated this cycle, Azu became aware of her own power growing, little by little.

Probably because the sheer number of kills here far exceeded anything she'd gotten fighting other monsters.

She could see why clerics flocked to this place.

The other parties were suffering minimal casualties too.

Occasionally a warrior would charge into a cluster of undead and get injured, but with this many clerics present, it was never a problem.

The only real downside was that there was almost nothing to loot.

The bounty per kill on the quest was cheap, too.

The Adventurer's Proof tracked kill counts precisely, but even with this many defeats, the pay wouldn't amount to much.

Eventually, the undead numbers visibly thinned. To improve efficiency, the parties split up and spread out.

As Azu was considering which area to cover, Elza grabbed her hand and started walking without hesitation.

"Elza-san? Where are we going?"

"Don't worry about it. Just follow me."

Deeper and deeper they went.

The undead they encountered were largely unchanged.

Elza's mace (six gold coins) and Azu's Sealed Sword Grungaus (current market price: incalculable) racked up the kill count.

After a while, with no other adventurers in sight, they reached the far edge of the catacombs.

This section alone had decorations on the walls, and of three hollows carved into the stone, two held blue flames.

Elza sprinkled holy water on the ground and used a blue stone catalyst to erect a simple barrier.

The undead recoiled from it and kept their distance.

Elza beckoned Azu inside the barrier.

"Azu-chan. Let me tell you what this place really is."

"It's not just a graveyard?"

"It is a graveyard, yes. But it's more than that."

Elza placed her hand against the patterns etched into the wall.

The design depicted a sword-bearing king leading warriors into battle against a skeleton clad in sinister gear.

"This is the memorial of the warriors who fought alongside the Ash King. The undead that spawn here aren't those warriors. They're all being generated by the miasma of a single undead."

"Elza-san?"

"The Ash King can't leave the castle as long as that undead exists. He's been staying there to keep it in check this whole time."

Azu couldn't follow what Elza was saying.

Right now, Elza seemed eerier than the catacombs themselves.

"That undead, before it became what it is now, was…"

The third blue flame ignited in the final hollow.

"… an Apostle of the Sun God."

Ruined Heim Catacombs shuddered.