Valkyrie's Shadow

Chapter 9

“Ulbert, get off your lazy ass and help us out here!”

“The boss is activating soon and you’re making me go over there? Keeping those down is the sustained DPS’ job!”

“Argh, this again! How many times has the guild wiped on this bitch because you didn’t want to help out with the trash?”

“We’re already walking on a tightrope here. If I helped out with the trash, I’d have no mana to push through the next phase!”

“Then use wands?”

“Wands for raid mobs? I may as well be tickling them with a feather instead! Besides, you’re the one that had us take the ‘faster’ route and picked up four more of these damn things! We wouldn’t be behind if we didn’t have to keep these extras down…”

“Do you know what time it would be by the time we reached this boss if we went the other way? Some of us have to work early, you know.”

“Sure, now we’ll just wipe so you can go to bed early. What a waste of–”

“Waaaah!!! One’s loose!”

“Isn’t that one of yours, Vari?”

“No, I still got mine. One of the dead ones got up again. Our raid DPS is too low!”

“Someone stop it – it’s going for Nubo!”

“The fuck? How did Nubo get aggro?”

“I got this!”

“Yamaiko-san, that’s not a regular dungeon mob, you know…”

“Yamaiko down! Nubo down! Taunt it, sis!”

“I’m already tanking four of them – gah!!! …Chagama down~”

“Huh?”

“Huh?”

“Huh?”

“Yamaiko-chan was my healer, tehe~”

“Urgh…sorry.”

“Dammit, they’re everywhere! Someone do something!”

“Descend, oh eldritch energies from beyond the stars; visit upon this world your dark torrent of calamity and flames of despair!「 Grand Catastro–ghk!”

“LOL! Serves you right for spouting those never-ending chuuni-ass lines.”

“Fuck this raid, and fuck those shitty devs!!!”

“Fifteen seconds…”

“You can stop counting, Momonga-san: it’s a wipe.”

“…how much EXP is left in Greed and Generosity?”

“We’ve already sucked that thing dry.”

“Hah~ Well, let’s set up groups to grind back our levels tomorrow, I guess.”

“A Revenant?”

The crimson points of Ainz’s eyes lit up again, the voices of the past dispelled by one from the present. At the time, frustration was the only thing that filled his mind, but looking back, it was a cherished memory of his friends and Yggdrasil.

“Umu,” Ainz nodded. “That is my conclusion, based on what we’ve discovered so far. There are many variants, so continued investigation will be required to determine what sort you are, Zahradnik-dono.”

“I see…I will do my best to note anything new, Your Majesty.”

Baroness Zahradnik jogged ahead. When they had set off, she insisted on blazing their trail.

The idea that she was a Revenant sent their investigation into uncharted territory; it was good that she was so accommodating. Ainz wasn’t sure what he would have done if she had pressed him harder for answers.

Introduced with the Valkyrie’s Downfall expansion, Revenants were not a playable race, existing solely as Monsters. Though there were exceptions, as a basic rule of thumb, Humanoid races were the weakest stat-wise, followed by Demihumans, Hetermorphs, then Monsters. In addition, how strong a Monster was depended on what type of gameplay it was intended for. There were field mobs meant for solo play and mobs for groups and dungeons. Strongest amongst them were those designed for raids, of which World Class Enemies stood at the pinnacle.

Variants of the Revenant existed at all levels of play. The first thing one would note was that they weren’t inherently hostile, but would aggro you if you messed with something that was tied to them. If you killed it, it would get back up after a while. Some regular mobs became a type of Revenant that sought vengeance for their deaths.

Regardless of the type, they unerringly tracked down the subjects of their aggression as long as they were still in the same world. It didn’t matter if you were out farming materials, in a city, a dungeon or anywhere else. Even teleporting away did not matter: they would catch up to you, eventually.

It was a mob that added a distinct flavour to the game, but they became increasingly annoying. As one advanced up the quests and storylines associated with the areas where they existed, one could only let out a resigned sigh at their appearance. When players started to encounter them as raid mobs, they wept tears of blood and cursed the shitty devs.

Regeneration; rejuvenation; damage reduction; a solid array of immunities and resistances backed up by an Undead statblock – everything about them was designed to eat away at a Player’s resources and patience. They were so obnoxious that Players never called the raid dungeon featuring them by its proper name: they just called it the ‘Revenant Raid’. It was jokingly speculated that the raid’s final boss was also a Revenant, and she would get up after finally being defeated to start the fight all over again.

He would never know the answer. It was a raid that Ainz Ooal Gown had never conquered, as their membership declined to the point where they were no longer able to field a proper raid force during that time. After that, they could only grind group content and weaker bosses.

Looking ahead to where the Baroness had vanished, Ainz wondered how similar she was to the Revenants in Yggdrasil. Of particular interest to him was the possibility that she might also keep getting up after being killed. Would she lose levels? How long would it take between ‘respawns’? What would happen to her equipment? At the least, it would save money.

After following her lead southeast for a few hours, Baroness Zahradnik came back to speak to them. The ever-present mists of the Katze Plains swirled around her as she approached.

“Your Majesty, the ruined tower that was spotted when we flew over the Katze River is about thirty minutes away.”

“Was there anything out of the ordinary?”

“I didn’t try to look inside,” the Baroness replied. “The Undead along the way are loosely uniform to the ones around us in strength. There are no tracks or any other signs of something passing through the area recently. One has to wonder how long these Undead have been standing here for.”

All around them, low-level Undead stood perfectly still. Ainz thought it likely that, without anything to attract their attention, they had been standing there since they had spawned. Most were Skeletons and Zombies, with a sprinkling of Ghouls and Wights. He had hoped that, as they moved further into the area or approached notable landmarks, the strength and variety of the Undead would change. So far, it didn’t seem to be the case.

Before long, the silhouette of a ruined stone tower could be seen rising above the mists. The building had half collapsed on itself and fragments of its battlements lay strewn around its base. Surrounding it was a cluster of crumbled buildings.

They stopped at the edge of the ruins, and Ainz looked around for anything interesting.

“Hmm…an old settlement?”

“It looks like an old castle, Your Majesty,” the Baroness said. “The tower is actually its keep, and you can see where the walls once stood. These other ruins are probably the shops and facilities that serviced the castle and its inhabitants.”

“Is this architecture familiar to you?”

“Not particularly, but certain shops have common features wherever you go. There’s something strange about this place, though…I can’t quite put my finger on it.”

Baroness Zahradnik advanced to walk ahead of them again, carefully examining the way. The wooden frames of many of the buildings had disintegrated, leaving dried piles where homes and shops once stood. The noblewoman knelt to pick up a fist-sized fragment, rubbing her thumb against it.

“This building didn’t fall apart with the passing of years,” she said, “it was burned down.”

“Is that what bothered you about this place?”

“I’m not sure. Our histories say that incessant warfare resulted in this entire region becoming a cursed wasteland, so this location might be a remnant of those conflicts.”

She set the piece of wood down and moved on. The next building over, she made her way around a group of Zombies to look around.

“This one was burned down too.”

“Perhaps the castle was razed?”

“It’s possible. I don’t see the remains of any belongings, so it might have been pillaged and destroyed by some raid.”

As they made their way closer to the ruined keep, the burned wooden buildings were replaced by the remnants of stone structures. Baroness Zahradnik stopped to look for a way into a partially intact shop along a length of half-destroyed wall.

“This looks like a smithy,” she said. “Something in here might have survived the fire.”

Ainz wasn’t sure how it looked like a smithy. The roof and part of the wall had fallen into the building, and its entrance was filled with piles of stone. Unable to find a way in, the Baroness activated her hairpin and floated down through its caved-in ceiling. Several minutes later, she floated back out again to land before them.

“What did you find?” Ainz asked.

She withdrew a number of twisted metal objects from her Infinite Haversack, laying them out on the ground.

“I don’t think this place was pillaged,” she said. “These are melted weapons and tools. Anyone looting the place would have taken them away as valuables. There are plenty more inside in the same condition. Even the anvil is a blob on its stand. If this is anything to go by, this castle wasn’t simply razed…it’s more like everything was incinerated. Also…”

The Baroness looked back up at them hesitantly, then scanned their surroundings.

“There’s nothing in this place so far that identifies anything. No old signs, no letters carved in stone or etched into metal plates. I thought I might find something like that in the smithy, but there’s nothing. It’s as if someone went out of the way to erase the identity of this castle.”

“This location isn’t marked on any map?”

“It is on every version, but none have a name for it.”

“Every version?”

“Re-Estize, Baharuth and the Slane Theocracy all have their own map of the Katze Plains,” she explained. “Each is made in such a way that this region belongs to the country that made the map. The only common thing between them is that the landmarks have no names – not even the abandoned city further down the river.”

Ainz stroked his chin in thought. Did some ancient power seek to erase any record of what was once here? Maybe the cursed wasteland was one of the outcomes of that effort.

“How reliable are these maps?”

The Baroness pulled out several large rolls of paper, unfurling them to reveal maps of the Katze Plains. Ainz and Shalltear leaned in to look down at them. Each one was nearly identical, save for what she had described. Ainz possessed the same maps, but he had simply dismissed their incompleteness as something common to the maps that they had procured for the region.

“Unless each nation used the same map at one point, there’s no reason to suspect any physical inaccuracies with their being so similar,” she tapped a diamond marker on the map. “This is the castle we’re in right now – it’s just downriver from southern Corelyn County. The next should be around sixty kilometres to the southeast.”

“We’ll get there soon enough,” Ainz said, “but we should finish looking around this ruin, first.”

He glanced back down at the map, then ordered the distant Death Warrior Captain to sail their vessel further downstream. The Baroness rolled up the maps and put them away before turning to continue leading the way to the keep. Like the smithy, every way inside was similarly blocked, so she flew up to peek down over the edge of the collapsed tower. After a moment, she came back to them with a tentative look.

“There’s a Wyvern in the keep,” she told them. “I think it’s Undead: the Skeletons and Zombies around it aren’t attacking, at any rate.”

“Have you encountered a Wyvern before?”

Wyverns existed in Yggdrasil, and the reports of the region claimed that there were Wyvern-riding tribes that occupied the mountainous region east of the Katze Plains. The closest he had personally seen of one, however, were some bones that were used in a piece of furniture fashioned by Demiurge.

As with many mobs in Yggdrasil, Wyverns occupied a wide range of levels with their many variants. Larger Wyverns were usually designed for group content. They were something like cousins of Dragons, possessing Dragon-like features with a few differences.

They lacked forearms, using their wings in their place when they were moving around on the ground. They had no breath weapons but possessed a scorpion-like stinger on the end of their tail. Broadly speaking, they were powerful melee combatants with the large health pools, toughness and physical strength associated with Dragon-type creatures. Their size gave them substantial reach, and they could snatch up victims to fly off with them or sting them repeatedly as they struggled to break free.

The earliest a Player fought them was somewhere in the mid-teens. Since there were many parallels between this world and Yggdrasil, he guessed that a plain Wyvern should be much the same here. Any differences would stem from mechanics that did not exist in Yggdrasil and the experiences that the creature had accumulated in its existence. Since Wyverns possessed about the same level of intelligence as a Goblin, it might be possible for one to develop Skills or Martial Arts or be trained in them as pets and mounts.

“I’ve only heard accounts of them,” Baroness Zahradnik said. “The last time a Wyvern was encountered and killed was in my lord father’s time by one of our patrols.”

“Hoh…”

From what he had seen of Re-Estize’s rural populations, even the weakest Wyverns should have wreaked havoc on a territory. Most villagers possessed production-type classes with poor combat potential. While it was true that Rangers were fairly common, they were mostly woodsmen who used their skills to hunt and trap beasts for meat, pelts and various materials. They also foraged for food, alchemical herbs and other useful things that could be harvested from nature. Few focused on combat, and their equipment was, unsurprisingly, not suited for battle.

“In my time here,” he said, “I’ve never seen any villagers in Re-Estize or Baharuth who could face a Wyvern. The only fighting nobles that I’ve met are Baharuth’s Great Imperial Knights and a single Adventurer Cleric in Re-Estize who attained the rank of Adamantite. Admittedly, they are all extraordinarily strong by the standards of the region, but at the same time, aristocrats like that are extremely rare.”

“The Adamantite Cleric should be Lakyus Alvein Dale Aindra,” the Baroness said. “Leader of the famed Blue Rose. Her uncle, Azuth, is also an Adamantite Adventurer, so House Aindra must possess a very strong bloodline. As for the Great Imperial Knights, I’ve heard that they receive titles upon appointment, so I’m uncertain whether it is any sort of noble lineage or tradition that serves as the root of their achievements.”

“In that case, was it your father that killed the Wyvern? Or did he lead this patrol to defeat it through a concerted effort? In Adventurer terms, what rank were they?”

“My lord father was registered as a Gold-rank Adventurer. Our villagers from back then were trained as Rangers and Fighters out of necessity to protect our territory from frontier threats. They were anywhere from Iron to Silver – some of those dedicated to patrolling were probably Gold. As for who killed the Wyvern, it was my lady mother. When she first came from the south to raise a family, she was registered as a Gold-rank Adventurer like my lord father. All of her time was dedicated to raising us and defending the border, however. According to those who knew her, she was much stronger than that.”

“I see…it seems that you’ve come from a distinguished lineage as well.”

The Baroness drew herself up, and a hint of pride traced over her features.

“I have much to thank for the careful cultivation of my family’s bloodlines, as well as the culture and traditions that have been handed down to me. The first Lord Zahradnik was an Adamantite Adventurer, and while his descendants have so far not been able to match him, it appears that I may.”

“Well, Zahradnik-dono,” Ainz smiled, “in that case, how would you like to replicate your mother’s achievement? There’s a Wyvern in there waiting to be defeated.”

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