Chapter 73: Brandy Of The Ash Company
Theo slept four hours in the loft of an abandoned bakery with flour still in the boards, and woke up thinking about the Legatee of the Undead.
’I wonder if that is the Illbrec the Captain spoke about?’
There was no doubt about it. The creature had packed enough aura to go around the whole horde, so it had to be the one.
’How do I fight a spear with a sword... Uthed didn’t teach me that one.’
He turned it over while he ate, and while he cleaned his sword with a rag that came away grey, and while he sat in a dead bakery in a dead city with his boots off and old flour caked into his heels, and eventually he got the shape of an idea and he did not enjoy it.
He went back out at noon, which was stupid, and he knew it was stupid while he was doing it.
The reason was simple. He needed to find out how many Legatees there were, and he could not count them in the dark.
So Theo spent six hours on the rooftops of the eastern quarter with his eyes burning gold, moving three buildings at a time, lying flat on hot slate that cooked him through his shirt, looking down at a tide that did not look up.
He counted about nine of them.
’That’s... That’s the whole army.’
Theo felt himself tremble. Then his mind found something wonderful.
’Wait? That’s it! That has to be it.’
He traced his eyes across the quarter and searched for more Legatees, and eventually, he did.
He found the tenth, and the tenth was different. Different enough for Theo to tell who the champion was.
It was standing on the steps of a public bathhouse in the eastern quarter, four streets behind the front, where the water in the basins had gone green and unmoving, and it was not wearing Alderkeep armour. It was wearing gear.
Modern gear, layered and fitted, with a shoulder plate that had a crest cut into it, and a short sword slung at the hip in a way that no city guard in that world had ever slung anything.
Theo put the eye on it.
’Brandy?’
[Legatee]
[Classification: Undead / Assimilant - Bearer]
[Current Rank: Elite Realm - Peak Stage]
[Threat Level: A - Regional]
[Note: Origin - Trial Participant. Registered name on record: BRANDY OF THE ASH COMPANY]
[Note: This body was a Climber.]
Theo lay on the slate and did not move for a long time. The roof ticked under his ribs as it gave the day’s heat back, and he counted breaths until his hands came off the tiles clean.
’There’s no way... did it migrate after Brandy was killed?’
Another thing was the fact that Brandy had clearly been around A-rank or B-rank, but this was his first time entering the Tower.
Which most likely meant the monster had upgraded him.
’Damnit, wouldn’t it be nice if I could read its skills too? Come to think of it, I can’t read a monster’s skills but I can read a Hero’s...’
Theo sighed and continued to watch from afar, while the light went long and orange across the rooftops and the shadows of the chimneys leaned east.
Then eventually, evening came and night fell yet again.
Just as it did, something quickened in the pace at which the tide of the undead moved. Theo dove into the darkness.
And moved like one that was merged with it.
Since he had done most of his observation about his enemies, he used this time to do more observation about himself and his own skills.
Shadow Movement helped a lot. And it wasn’t a skill that Theo had planned to create. Well, none of them were.
It seemed the darkness had just received and transported him. But this time, with his mana, he tried to separate the shadows, to feel where one ended and the next began instead of falling through all of them at once.
And it worked, because Theo had a high affinity to shadows. Though there were some things he was lacking in. While he could sense things very much in the night, it was nothing compared to seeing in daylight.
So Theo wouldn’t say he had Dark Vision, but he did have a very useful pair of eyes. And they seemed to adapt pretty quickly to the darkness.
Especially this night.
Theo moved across the legion, tearing them down with his sword. It was like cutting through a line of walking puppets. None of them effectively fought back, and by the time forty of them turned to drown him he was gone and they were drowning themselves, shoulders jammed into shoulders in a street too narrow for forty of anything.
The Shadow Movement, when he consciously circulated his body with mana and stretched it out to form a relationship between himself and actual shadows, made things hurt less. The pull behind his eyes stayed a dull ache instead of climbing into his teeth, and he didn’t feel that awful sickness as he did before.
Which made Theo conclude that the boon of Circulation Art is how it makes things easy for its user. Perhaps this was why everyone had different Circulation Art, each designed to best utilize their skill without causing a drawback for their body.
All the while, the night before, he had been using it without applying a form and without actually circulating anything, and Theo suspected that even though he felt like he wasn’t doing any circulating, he was doing some circulating, just not the one he ought to have been doing.
Because circulating was something that happened always. It was like trying to dance, but not dancing the right way and instead dancing absolutely nonsense, whereas that nonsense could actually be a form of dance to some native culture somewhere.
’That’s a very strange way to put it... but yes.’
Theo did not dive through the shadows all the time, sometimes he ran through them. And now, that he knew how effective sound was, against these things, all he made sure to do was not make a sound. He kept off the loose slate, and he came down on the balls of his feet, and he took the corners wide.
Being supported by the shadows made that surprisingly easy.
And with every speed that pushed against his limit, he got faster. Like a tide, he swirled across the legion, an afterimage of dark and purple covering a part of the air, and in its wake, felling many of the puppets.
The frontline was greatly reducing in number, and because of the uniformity of movement, as many fell, others crumbled on them.
Theo did not really have to slaughter them all, this was what he felt like he needed to do. And after a few hours he had crumpled the frontline so completely that it was now a wall of corpses, arms and helmets and broken shafts packed waist high across the mouth of the street, making it difficult for the others to keep marching forward.
Theo now stood on the roof of one building, staring down and panting, with sweat cutting clean tracks through the grey on his face. He was staring directly at Brandy with a faint amber glow in his eyes that died down and transitioned to dark-purple as shadows gathered around his sword and ate the silver blade to obsidian.
At the same time, the spear-armed Legatee that he had unfinished business with the night before turned in his direction. And bolted.
Theo chuckled, raising his head.
"Oh, so you’re going to use your lackey..."
Another one, a soldier wielding an axe, with a large almost round body, also bolted, the ground trembling violently with every step.
Theo quickly re-thought his life choices.
’Oh oh...’