Chapter 3: The Girl Without a Home

The night soon passed by and it was morning once more. Since it was quite some time since he had gotten some decent rest, he wanted to sleep in. However, as soon as he had that thought, Calvin barged his way into his room and forced him awake.

“Sun, wake up already!”

Calvin had grabbed onto Sun’s clothing and began to shake him around.

“Stop shaking me already, I’m awake!”

Sun yelled in protest so that Calvin would stop shaking him already. Calvin had known Sun for almost 2 years now. It was times like these that he knew that Sun would want to oversleep. Alveron had already woken up several hours before and had already eaten breakfast.

“Grisia, here’s your food.”

“Thanks a lot.”

Seeing that Sun would be hungry when he woke up and that he would not wake up in time for breakfast, Alveron was considerate enough to get a serving of food for Sun as well. Munching onto his breakfast, Sun asked Calvin about their plans for the day.

“So are we going to investigate that rumor?”

The rumor that he was referring to was about the strange appearance of undead in the city when the undead had previously left to the Plains of Despair.

“That’s right. As members of the Order of Freya, we can’t leave without investigating. Especially since it concerns the undead.”

The Order of Freya was a religious group that highly valued justice. Since it was a group that focused heavily on holy light, the undead were their natural enemies.

‘Sounds alot like the God of Light.’

It was very true that the two gods shared many similarities. That is always the case for gods that represented the same divinities and beliefs.

Scarfing down the rest of his breakfast, Sun got out of his bed and went downstairs. He had been sleeping for quite some time since the rest of the paladins were already ready and waiting at the town fountain.

With a final check on their supplies, the expedition departed from the village and into the mountains where the undead were said to have appeared.

“What other information did you manage to get from the locals?”

Information was vital to any hunt, especially when it concerned the undead. If they don’t have enough information then they could easily be heading into an unfavorable situation. He has asked Calvin since he was the leader of the expedition and the task of obtaining reliable information fell to him.

“I asked the adventurers and citizens in the city about the undead. For the most part, the adventurers didn’t know anything about the undead since they hardly ever fought against them.”

For most users, the undead were not creatures that they wanted to fight. Fear in real life and fear in virtual reality were not too far apart from each other. Horror movies have made that fact even more evident in recent years. Not many users would actually fight against monsters such as the undead or any other ferocious creatures. It was for this reason that many users fell behind when it came to leveling up.

“However, when I asked the villagers, there was a supple amount of information about the undead in the area.”

NPCs were highly reliable when it came to processing information. Even the most trivial fact would not be overlooked by an NPC and, since the NPCs had a close community, they were able to share information quickly and efficiently.

Calvin began to explain the information that he had managed to extract from his findings. Some of the undead were in their mid level 200s, which was quite impressive. This meant that all the undead were at their second advancement already, which could prove to be quite dangerous.

The undead were high in number, but the majority of the undead were around level 200 and below. The paladins were around around their level 270s and above, so they were much stronger than the average undead.

Sun had barely reached level 200 over the course of the trip, but his skills and stats had increased far greater than a normal priest since he was tasked with managing the healing and buffs of a large number of paladins. Taking his cumulative efforts into account, even though he was only level 200, he had the power and skills of an average level 300 priest.

Calvin was also an extremely strong priest since he had been working in the Order for several years now. Like the paladins, he was over level 270 but the growth of NPCs could not be compared to that of users.

Calvin, as well as the paladins, were over level 270 but their strength rivaled that of an ordinary user in the mid 300s. This difference is even more apparent when compared to users that did not bother to raise their skill levels. Since players of that level were rare, the power of the paladins was extraordinary.

Alveron, as the Pope Candidate, was extremely high level and could not compare to any ordinary priest. With his unique skills, class, and his extremely high level, it wouldn’t be too much to say that he was one of the strongest priests on the Continent of Versailles.

“Even so, that does sound like it might be a little difficult to deal with.”

A little was a bit too much of an understatement. Even if they had high holy affinity, the undead were not creatures that could be dealt with easily. Their group was relatively small and they only had three priests.

“You’re right, it is a bit much.”

Calvin knew how dangerous this mission was going to be and didn’t bother to pretend that it was otherwise.

“It does not matter how difficult it is. It is our beliefs that we are fighting for and that is reason enough for us to go.”

Surprisingly enough, it was Alveron that had spoken up. It was not something that a priests that stood at the back of the battle would usually say but it rang true through the group of paladins.

Each of them had their own moral code that they followed throughout their lives. It was something that they lived by, a goal that they worked towards, and a belief that they would sacrifice their lives to protect.

‘He’ll make a hell of a pope one day.’

As the future candidate for the leader of their entire church, it would be unreasonable if he did not have the ability to move the hearts of his people and instill in them the courage to fight any foe.

“Graaaaaaah!”

A loud hideous roar echoed through the mountains.

“Filthy humans!”

There was nothing to be mistaken about. Their monster in question was the undead that they had been looking for. From the looks of it, this was only a small group that was patrolling the area since there were only about 200 or so undead.

From the information that they had gathered in town, they had guessed that there would be at least a couple thousand undead. Even so, undead were not creatures that hoarded together like this.

The undead were being led by a Death Knight, most likely around level 300 from the looks of its equipment. The rest of them were lesser rank undead, among which were Dullahans and Spectres. However there were a considerable number of them and their levels were all around the mid 200s.

“Let the divine power grant my allies the strength to overcome any obstacle!”

Sun, Alveron, and Calvin had no time to waste as they immediately began to cast buffing magic onto the paladins to counteract the enemy. Every second counted against such a large group of enemies. They also began to cast holy spells that would help them against the specific skills of the undead.

Dark Speculation was a skill that the Death Knights used to increase the damage dealt to living creatures several fold. It was a very strong skill and could potentially wipe them out if used correctly. But it was not impossible to deal with. Using holy magic, they were able to sanctify the ground and prevent the undead from using status effecting skills such as Dark Speculation.

“Holy Fire!”

The holy magic of a priest was extremely effective against the forces of darkness, and even more against the undead. The distance between the paladins and the undead was still considerable which is why Sun thought that it was best to thin the ranks of the undead as much as he could before they could get into range.

Burning through the undead, he was able to kill a few dozen of them. The spirits were difficult to deal with physical attacks but they could be burned very easily with his fire. He could not keep this up for long since many of the undead were very quick and were able to close the gap between them and the paladins, especially the undead that had horses.

The number of the undead had dropped to a little under 150 units, with most of the ghost units dead and a few of the other units on fire. Since the undead had no way of stopping the fire, they either had to wait for it to stop naturally with their magic resistance or die from damage over time.

“All units forwards! Defensive formation!”

Paladins were very well know for their tankiness. Knights were also quite durable but it was incomparable to a paladin. Knights were very strong because they could mount horses and increase their destructiveness several fold.

However, Paladins were the exact opposite and held their ground with their heavy armor, shields, and defensive skills. Though they had very strong defense, their attack power did not fall very far behind. Especially if it was in a fight against the undead, the Paladins were unmatched in their combat abilities.

“Die you scum!”

“Foul creatures return to you slumber!”

The Paladins shouted all sorts of curses at the undead as they brutally hacked away at the rotting flesh. Since their blades were imbued with holy light, they would cut through the undead and searing the wounds as the blade passes through. Once the sword entered into the core of the undead the paladins would use their skills to exterminate them from existence.

“Holy Burst!”

Even though it had the same name as one of Sun’s holy magic artes, it was a distinctly different ability. It was an application of the skill that was exclusive to the Paladin class. Holy Burst was a priest skill that focused on filling the entire surroundings with holy light to the point that it explodes and damages all nearby enemies, consuming all mana in the process and converting that into power.

The Holy Burst that paladins used was distinctly different. Unlike the priest version of the skill, the paladin version only required a fixed amount of mana that could be reduced through various means such as raising the skill level of sword mastery.

This skill had some limitations to it as well. It could only be used when properly wielding a sword and dealing a significant amount of damage to an enemy’s weak point, meaning a critical hit.

Once the sword makes contact with the enemy’s weak point, then the paladin can cause an instantaneous burst of holy light at the edge of the blade to increase its sharpness and destructive power. The skill could only be used single target and the damage could not compare to holy burst, but it was a skill that could tear through undead like a knife through butter.

The undead put up a strong resistance but they were no match for their obvious weakness. If they had much larger numbers then it would pose a greater threat, but this battle had only a small number of undead.

The Death Knight leading the charge was now breathing heavily under the various wounds that it had taken during the battle. It could not fight back any longer now that all of its units were dead and it had depleted all of its strength.

“Kill me.”

The Death Knight refused to stay at their mercy any longer. However, as a knight he still had his honor and refused to kill himself.

“That can wait. Tell us, who is your master and what is his purpose in his place?”

Calvin didn’t waste any time and started interrogating the Death Knight immediately.

“Ha ha ha ha ha!”

The Death Knight only laughed, despite being at the end of his life.

“You come all this way and you know not what you fight?”

The Death Knight could only mock their ignorance.

Answer my question! What is your purpose in this land?!”

Calvin walked up to the half dead Death Knight and focused holy light into his hand as he slowly pressed the light into the Death Knight’s abdomen, slowly burning through the armor and into its body. As if it wasn’t enough already, Calvin clenched his other fist, which was encased in holy aura, and started to pummel the Death Knight in the face.

“Graaagh!”

“Answer me!”

There was no mercy for the undead. The Paladins of the Order of Freya were known to be unforgiving to those that were considered evil.

“It..gah! Matters not. Soon...he will return to us.”

“Who is he?!”

It was already no good. The Death Knight had already perish once it had finished its sentence. Calvin focused more holy light into his hand and tore through the Death Knight’s body. Immediately after its body began to burn with a faint holy light as it was purified. Once the undead was killed then its body needed to be purified.

Even if it was a corpse that was turned into a monster, it was originally a normal person’s body and they needed to give it proper respects. For this reason they burned the rest of the undead corpses with holy light to release the hatred from the souls of the owners of the bodies.

“So we got nothing out of him.”

Calvin felt a little disappointed with himself for not being able to get the location of the culprit.

“No, we did get some information out of him. He gave us more information that he had thought.”

Sun had watched the entire scene before him calmly. Though it was a bit cruel, it was within the realms of reason. He had no right to judge them when he himself used to have undead attack the city so that he could release his pent up frustration.

The Death Knight had yielded a considerable amount of information in his death. There were a few things that they could understand from the situation.

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Whoever the enemy was, they did not have any idea that the expedition was here.

This person that the Death Knight had said was returning was most likely the mastermind of the undead.

From this information they could tell that they were short on time, but they still had the element of surprise since the enemy did not know they were here.

“Yes, you’re right. Whatever it is, we still have enough time to resolve it.”

They did not suffer any casualties against the undead, but a number of them were injured from the fight. Using their holy magic, they healed the injured paladins and continued through the mountains.

Since the mountain was quite large and they were short on time, they decided to use Sun’s Elemental Perception to scout for the undead.

There was some sort of shrine that was filled with countless amounts of undead. From the concentration of dark matter and the corruption that it had on the surrounding elements it was probably the right place.

“How does it look?”

Though it was not accurate, his elemental perception allowed him to roughly gauge the number and strength of the target based on the shape of the elements. Since he was a priest that was filled with holy light, it made searching out dark element very easy.

“I think it’s about 3 thousand undead in total. Most of them are as strong as the ones that we killed here.”

It was very troubling news for them. With their small group of 100 paladins and 3 priests, despite their individual strength, could not take on a force that was 30 times their size. However, Sun thought about it from a different point of view.

If they were to fight the undead on an open field they would most surely perish. That was only if they were to fight in such one sided conditions. They could potentially force the undead to fight under conditions that would be advantageous for them. With a simple spell of shrouding they could mask their holy presence and raze the enemy headquarters to the ground, then picking off the remaining enemies with the paladins.

The paladins thought about what Sun had said for a moment before agreeing that it was a good idea.

Shwa shwash.

A strange rustling sound came from a moderate distance away.

“We’re surrounded.”

The paladins had were very adept combatants and could roughly estimate the size of the enemy force.

“How many are there?”

If there were enough enemies then they would surely be overpowered by them.

“Maybe around 3 hundred?”

If there were only 3 hundred then it was manageable since they would only need to murder 3 enemies apiece, a tough task but doable.

“Is it the undead?”

Alveron asked Sun about the identity of the enemy. Since he had performed Elemental Scouting beforehand, he would know whether or not these enemies were undead.

“No, there weren’t any other undead in the area when I checked. These enemies are...”

Sun performed a quick check of the enemy figure before responding.

“Most likely humans or humanoid.”

If these were a group of strong humanoids then the battle could be tricky. Even more so if they had strong classes within their ranks such as berserkers and elven mages.

“We know you’re there! Show yourselves!”

Calvin activated his Preach Skill, a skill that increases faith of allied units within range.

Since there was no longer any point in hiding, the enemy came out from behind their cover.

“Give us all of your items. After that, we’re going to take you and sell you off as slaves to the central kingdoms.”

“Haaaah...”

Sun gave a huge sigh at the recent turn of events. The enemy was nothing more than a lowly group of mountain bandits. It was true that the enemy bandits were all users that were part of a red guild, namely a guild that makes a living off of hunting down other users, but that only meant that these users were very weak.

From the looks of it, they were all around level 150 and their equipment was very cheap. Their skills levels could hardly be any better. Blinded by greed at the sight of a small number of enemies with good equipment, the bandits thought that it was a good catch and mobilized their group to attack them.

“Looks like we were worried for nothing.”

Alveron had long understood how to differentiate the strong from the weak. Calvin just shrugged his shoulders and motioned to the paladins with his hand.

“Kill them!”

The bandit leader shouted to the brigands to attack. The brigands began their charge.

Pew pew pew.

Quick and accurate bolts of light came flying towards the bandits. Sun had started sniping away with his arrows of light. Since these arrows of light were not bounded by the force of gravity, they could fly much farther and faster than normal arrows. The target of his arrows were the enemy archers. There was no need to look for any mages because bandits, for the most part, had no mages within their ranks. The main reason for this was because mages were the main target of bandits because they were so squishy.

Meanwhile, Alveron and Calvin busied themselves with buffing the troops. Since the bandits were so damn slow, they finished buffing with time to spare. Since they had plenty of time, they started using spells to weaken the enemy with Slows and Weakens.

Once the troops made contact with each other, the bandits were murdered almost instantaneously with only one or two hits.

The bandit leader was flabbergasted as the situation. They had three times the force and they had thought that the enemy was low level since not many users were past level 200, much less 300. Another problem was that they were stupid as hell and could not recognized that the people they were attacking were the paladins of the Order of Freya.

With almost no forces left, the bandit leader decided to abandon the rest of his men and run for his life. He ran with all his might but could not budge an inch from his position. When he looked down there were two shackles of light binding him to the ground.

“Please let me go. I don’t want to die!”

The bandit leader begged for his life, with no sense of dignity left in pitiful self. Feeling a great and unknown force compelling him that was otherwise known as sadism, Sun playfully walked up to the bandit leader and started kicking him around as hard as he could.

Ttiring!

A new skill 'Sadism' has been learned!

Sadism [1]

Passive

Increases the degree of pain towards target. Only works when torturing a target unnecessarily and with the sole intent of causing pain. Increases damage dealt by 25% toward target. Target will not die from attacks when sadism is active as long as there is no intent to kill.

Forcing the bandit to his feet, they followed the bandit back to his headquarters. As the bandit had explicitly stated before, they had attacked several villages in the surrounding area and captured NPCs to be sold as slaves.

They entered into the bandit camp and freed a couple dozens of NPCs from captivity.

“Can you return to your villages from here?”

Sun asked the released villagers since they did not have the capability to lead them to safety at this time.

“Yes, luckily we’re all from the same village.”

Since the bandits had only recently started their pillaging, they had only targeted a single weak village for slaves.

“Ah!”

As if he was remembering something important, the villager tried to explain to Sun.

“There is one thing that I forgot to mention. There’s this little girl that was brought in a few days ago but we have never seen her before in our village. So we don’t know where she’s from or if she has anyone to stay with.”

The villager motioned to a small girl, roughly 10 years of age, that was sitting down in the corner.

“So you sick bastard, where did you kidnap this girl from?”

Sun smashed his staff into the bandit’s head as he spoke. The bandit yelled out in pain before answering.

“We picked her up in the mountains.”

It hardly sounded believable since the mountains were quite dangerous and made no sense for a little girl to be wandering in them. Seeing as he couldn’t trust the bandit, he decided to ask the little girl himself.

“What’s your name? Do you know where you live?”

Sun sat down and asked the little girl that was sitting on the floor.

“It’s no good. She hasn’t spoken a word since I saw her come here.”

The villager tried to explain that the young girl hadn’t responded to anyone for the last few days.

“..ena.”

The girl had said something that was a little inaudible since the villager’s previous words had masked over it.

“My name is Alena.”

Sun looked over at the villager as if he was stupid or something. The villager could only avert his eyes from his gaze.

“So Alena, do you know where you parents are?”

The girl shook her head to show that she didn’t.

“This makes things difficult. Can you take her back with you to your village?”

Calvin asked one of the villagers.

“Well, its possible...”

“No.”

Before he could finish his sentence, the little girl cut off his sentence. From the sounds of it, she didn’t want to go with them.

“So what should we do?”

Sun thought aloud to the group. Nobody could come up with a good enough solution to their problem.

“How about we take her along?”

Alveron asked since it seemed like it was an answer that would solve their current dilemma.

“It would be a lot easier for the church to locate her parents or if necessary she could be adopted into the church.”

Calvin began to evaluate whether or not it was a viable option.

“It would be quite dangerous for her to come with us wouldn’t it?”

Sun could not help but feel that taking a little girl into a den of undead was the best plan to do. However it seemed that the girl was unwilling to go to the nearby village and looking for her parents through the church was easier than leaving her to a small town.

“I want to go with.”

Alenal plainly voiced her opinion to the group.

“It’s going to be very dangerous.”

Sun tried to dissuade her from coming along. There was no knowing what kind of trauma she could experience along the way that he would responsible for indirectly.

“I don’t mind.”

Alena had already made up her mind to come along with them for whatever reasons that were going through her head. Sun looked over to Calvin for some help with the situation.

“If all goes according to plan then there is nothing to be worried about right?”

From the looks of it, no help was coming his way from Calvin and Alveron was hardly any help either since he had been the one that had suggested bringing her along in the first place.

“Haaaah.”

Sun could only sigh in defeat.

“You have to promise that you listen to what I have to say and that you will stay somewhere that you are safe. Okay?”

“I promise.”

Since they had decided to bring Alena along, they put her in the back of one of the wagons. However, Sun had one thing left to do before they could move onto the undead lair.

“Please, I beg of you, let me go!”

Sun had tied the bandit up to a tree and left him there. After a few hours wild beasts would surely show up to rip him apart and feast on his innards. Of course before leaving him there, Sun made sure to take away the bandit’s items.

Heading back to the location where they had murdered the bandits, Sun noticed something quite strange ahead. Noticing this anomaly, Sun motioned to the rest of the units to stop so that he could investigate more clearly.

‘This is...’

Sun could not believe what he was seeing with his elemental perception. There were a number of undead ahead where the battle had been fought earlier. They quickened their pace to investigate the undead and launch an offensive. Under the protection of the spell of shrouding, they slowly investigated the undead’s actions.

The undead had been picking up the corpses of the dead bandits of throwing them onto a wagon. Close to about 200 undead were lurking around and picking through the corpses.

“Looks like they’re gathering bodies for the necromancers.”

Calvin made a quick gesture with his hand and the paladins rushed out to fight against the undead. Hacking apart the undead with their divine blades, the undead slowly began to notice that they were under attack. However this group of undead was only filled with lowly undeads in their level 200s for the purpose of grunt work. Without a strong leader like a Death Knight leading them, they were decimated quickly.

Sun looked around the site and put together what he could understand from the situation.

“So this must be the explanation for the growing number of undead.”

The undead had been gathering the nearby corpses of monsters and humans so increase their ranks. It was quite difficult for a necromancer to raise undead without corpses. Thankfully they had caught this dispatchment of undead and were able to wipe them out, thinning out the number of enemies by quite a bit.

With the number of undead they had killed before and the number that they had killed now, there should be roughly 2.5 thousand or so undead left in the den. With less undead to deal with later, the probability of his plan succeeding increased quite a bit. So that the undead would not be able to use the corpses, they decided to burn the rest of the corpses with holy fire to make sure that both the bodies and souls would not fall to dark purposes. Now that it was done with, they continued on to the shrine.